A Great Danger to Our Country
The twisted art of intimidating with slander to help build “a new political order.”
BY TODD GITLIN
"FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn't tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!"
So blared the tweeter-in-Chief at 10:09 p.m. Friday, rounding out a full day spent ranting against The Enemy Within. Orangutan, whose prime rhetorical instrument is percussion, used the word “dishonest” seven times to describe journalists — not all journalists, mind, only the ones who “knowingly [don’t] tell the truth.” Earlier that day, Orangutan strutted into the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and repeated his charge that what he calls “FAKE NEWS” is “the enemy of the people,” meaning that “they have no sources, they just make it up” — a practice with which he has some familiarity, having sourcelessly cast aspersions on Barack Obama’s birthplace; and invoked “thousands and thousands” of New Jersey Muslims who cheered after Sept. 11 ("It was on television. I saw it"); and made up a Swedish riot; and declared that a grieving mother must have stood mute while her husband memorialized their fallen son because she was under her husband’s thumb; and….oh, never mind.
Orangutan went on to denounce “large media corporations that have their own agenda. And it’s not your agenda and it’s not the country’s agenda, it’s their own agenda.” Agendas, like bad breath, are something only other people have. He was probably not thinking of Rupert Murdoch’s obvious agenda, either the overt political one (Lewinsky! Whitewater! Kenya! Benghazi! Hillary Clinton’s emails!) or the one pursued in-house by the Fox News chief who got away with serial sexual harassment for years as he presided over what Gabriel Sherman, the biographer of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, called “a culture where this type of behavior was encouraged and protected….[W]omen routinely had to sleep with or be propositioned by their manager, in many cases Roger Ailes…if they wanted to advance inside the company.”
Orangutan knows something about beauty-contest culture, but this was not his subject as he preened before CPAC. No, Feb. 24 was his day for cutting an honest, displeasing press down to size. The same day, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, barred reporters from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, BBC, Politico and BuzzFeed from a briefing, while taking pains to include representatives of three low-circulation right-wing outfits: Breitbart, The Washington Times, and the One America News Network. Spicer told the approved reporters that the goal was to “push aggressively back.”
Make no mistake: such remarks from Spicer and Kellyanne Conway as well as the Bully-in-Chief are not throwaway lines. This crowd means to intimidate dissenters and to exhibit them as bogeymen. They mean to stick it to truth-tellers. They may not mean to directly incite legions of trolls, but they have that effect.
Aggressively messing with journalists’ minds is a key component of what Orangutan’s Grand Vizier Steve Bannon, in his own appearance before CPAC, called the creation of a “new political order,” which is to consist of “three verticals of three buckets”: (1) “national security and sovereignty” (a slightly fancier way of saying “America First”); (2) “economic nationalism” (raising tariffs); and (3) “deconstruction of the administrative state” (gutting the civil service so as to permit the deregulation of everything under the sun). Bannon was clear that the “corporatist, globalist media” stand in the way of this titanic project.
Perhaps because, unlike his boss, he is known to read books, Bannon is credited here and there as “Orangutan’s brain.” The conservative writer Christopher Caldwell considers him to have “a gift for thinking systematically,” as if slopping together a number of general propositions and a wish list for an authoritarian government constituted systematic thought. The most systematic element of Bannonism would seem to be the heralding of a global clash of civilizations that collide as if they were firm, unchanging, impermeable tectonic plates. In the canon according to Bannon, something called “Judeo-Christian” culture (it’s hard to know which is more thinly defined, the “Judeo” or the “Christian” part) is deep into a “global war,” a “war of immense proportions” against an enemy that, in a sketchy, helter-skelter 2014 speech that passes for his magnum opus, Bannon referred to as “jihadist Islamic fascism,” “Islamic fascism,” “radical Islam” and “Islam” (buttressed by secularization).
Caldwell writes euphemistically: “Mr. Bannon does not often go into detail about what Judeo-Christian culture is.” No, he doesn’t. But Bannon is clear that the eye he casts on this world-historical clash is a belligerent one: “If you think they’re [the “they” is unspecified] going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day — every day — it is going to be a fight.” The fight is not in behalf of democracy, or liberty, or enlightenment, or justice, or the survival of humanity, but in behalf of what Bannon called “a nation with a culture and a — and a reason for being.” This is the culture war to end all culture wars.
So what’s new in a presidential crusade against the mainstream press? Didn’t Richard Nixon and his attack-dog vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, indulge in accusations of liberal bias? It’s true that on Nov. 13, 1969, Agnew chastised the TV networks at length for failing to “represent the views of America,” as if the purpose of the First Amendment was to guarantee that the public not be bothered with views it did not already hold. Agnew complained about the “concentration” of the means of manufacturing public opinion “in the hands of a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.” News broadcasters, he said, constituted “a small and unelected elite. The great networks have dominated America’s airwaves for decades. The people are entitled to a full accounting of their stewardship.” What he meant by a “full accounting” was left menacingly unclear, though the immediate object of his wrath was the network practice of giving voice to on-air “instant analysis” of the president’s speeches. “The president had a right to communicate directly with the people,” Agnew said, without having his words “characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics….”
As for Nixon himself, he kept his own diatribes within closed doors. The difference today is that Orangutan is his own attack dog. It’s essential to understand that Orangutan is speaking publicly — in the manner of “dictators and authoritarians,” as Carl Bernstein has pointed out. “Nixon attacked his enemies in private.”
Here was Nixon speaking in private in 1971:
The press is your enemy. Enemies. Understand that? … Now, never act that way … give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.
As Avi Selk and Kristine Phillips pointed out in The Post,
Nixon was talking to one person when he made those remarks in February 1971: Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. His comments wouldn’t be made public until later.
Orangutan is a verbal knife-fighter more exhibitionist than Nixon. Where Nixon kept his snarls private, Orangutan rails against leakers. He sees enemies lurking everywhere and wants everyone to know it. He fears not only sticks and stones but any loss of control over the image — the brand — that is his proudest achievement. The con man has conned himself. The would-be strongman quivers lest he be unmasked as a ‘pitiful, helpless giant.” The ultra-sensitivity of such men is the flip side of their ultra-narcissistic needs for endless applause.
Or is it that, of these two greatly damaged men, Orangutan is the more strategically minded? Whereas Orangutan used to suck up to his critics in order to bend them to his will, does he go nasty so often now to pump up an audience for his kept corps of obliging propagandists, the Breitbarts, Gateway Pundits, Infowars, Hannitys, Carlsons and Limbaughs? Does he step up his attacks in order to demoralize journalists, humiliate them, weaken their resolve? Does Orangutan have it in mind to incite his legions of trolls to unload hell on dissenters? To distract from the fact that he won’t keep his promises?
Over the long, long weeks to come, evidence will accrue as to the name of the game Orangutan is playing — or the game that is playing him. If I may hazard a psychological hunch: Whether or not Orangutan’s skin is really as paper thin as it appears, a man who delights in nonstop combat is a man who lives in fear that, underneath, he is nothing but a bombastic weakling who has weaponized his bottomless hunger for a power that will always, always, elude him.
February 28, 2017
Nuclear Arms Race
Sleepwalking Into a Nuclear Arms Race with Russia
The nuclear issue boils down to a question of understanding how America’s spending decisions and actions impact patriotic Russians.
BY CHUCK SPINNEY AND PIERRE SPREY
The nuclear question is becoming increasingly obfuscated by spin and lobbying as the West sleepwalks into Cold War II — a walk made all the more dangerous when the loose lips of the US tweeter-in-chief announced that another nuclear arms race is a great idea (see link, link, link). Two Cold War II issues are central and almost never addressed: What will be the Russians’ understanding of all the propaganda surrounding the nuclear question and the looming American defense spend-up? And how might they act on this understanding?
Background
Barack Obama first outlined his vision for nuclear disarmament in a speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, less than three months after becoming president. This speech became the basis for what eventually became the New Start nuclear arms limitation treaty. But Mr. Obama also opened the door for the modernization of our nuclear forces with this pregnant statement:
To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies — including the Czech Republic.
Why call for nuclear disarmament while opening the door to nuclear rearmament?
Obama’s speech paved the way to his Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009, but he was also trying to manipulate the domestic politics of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC). By Dec. 15, 2009, 41 senators sent a letter to President Obama saying that further reductions of the nuclear arsenal would be acceptable only if accompanied by “a significant program to modernize our nuclear deterrent.”
Viewed in retrospect, it is clear that the new president — either naively or cynically — acquiesced to that senatorial spending demand in order to keep the powerful nuclear laboratories and their allies in the defense industry and Congress from lobbying against his new arms limitation treaty. In April 2009 Obama took the first steps that launched a huge spending plan to modernize US nuclear forces across the board. Eight years later, during his first call to President Putin on Jan. 28, 2017, President Orangutan locked that program in place by denouncing Obama’s New START as a “bad deal,” saying it favored Russia.
A particularly dangerous component of the Obama nuclear spending plan is the acquisition of low-yield precision-guided nuclear bombs/warheads. These weapons only make sense within a radical strategy for actually fighting a nuclear war — as opposed to the almost universally accepted idea that our nuclear arsenal exists only to deter any thought of using these weapons — since actual use is unthinkable, with profoundly unknowable consequences. Last December, the prestigious Defense Science Board — an organization replete with members closely connected to the nuclear labs and their defense industry allies — added its imprimatur to this radical strategy by resurrecting the old and discredited ideas of limited nuclear options (LNOs). LNOs are based on the unproven — and unprovable — hypothesis that a president could actually detonate a few nukes to control a gradually escalating nuclear bombing campaign, or perhaps to implement a psychological tactic of encouraging deterrence with a few small “preventative” nuclear explosions.
Adding to Obama’s expansion of our nuclear posture is President Orangutan’s intention to fulfill his campaign promises to strengthen all nuclear offensive and defensive forces, with particular emphasis on spending a lot more for the ballistic missile defense (BMD) program — which implies expanding the current deployments of BMD weapons in eastern Europe within a few hundred miles of the Russian border.
Early cost estimates — really guesses — for Obama’s entire nuclear modernization program are for $1 trillion over the next 30 years. No missile defense costs are included in this estimate — nor are the costs of Orangutan’s promised expansions.
The components of the currently authorized program — e.g., a new bomber, a new ballistic missile carrying submarine, a new ICBM, a new air-launched cruise missile, a complete remanufacturing upgrade of the existing B-61 dial-a-yield tactical nuclear bomb that also adds a precision guidance kit, a new family of missile warheads, new nuclear warhead production facilities and a massive array of new large-scale intelligence, surveillance, command and control systems to manage these forces — are all in the early stages of development. Assuming business as usual continues in the Pentagon, the $1 trillion estimate is really a typical front-loaded or “buy-in” estimate intended to stick the camel’s nose in the acquisition tent by deliberately understating future costs while over-promising future benefits.
The money for all of these programs is just beginning to flow into hundreds of congressional districts. As the torrent of money builds up over the next decade, the flood of subcontracting money and jobs in hundreds of congressional districts guarantees the entire nuclear spend-up will acquire a political life of its own — and the taxpayer will be burdened with yet another unstoppable behemoth.
Readers who doubt this outcome need only look at how the problem-plagued F-35 Strike Fighter lives on, resisting reductions in money flows and even receiving congressional add-ons, despite mind-numbing effectiveness shortfalls, technical failures and unending schedule delays (e.g., see this recent 60-page report by the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation).
Locking hundreds of congressmen and senators into this nuclear modernization program guarantees that the money flow and cost overruns will increase without interference for the next 30 to 50 years. Our many years of observing and analyzing DoD’s largest politically engineered acquisitions makes it obvious that the initial buy-in guess of a trillion-dollar total will turn into at least a $3 trillion price tag by the end of three decades. In short, the Pentagon is planting the seed money for another F-35-like disaster, only this time on steroids.
But there is more. Once this multitrillion-dollar, self-sustaining money gusher is sluicing steadily into the boiler rooms of the MICC, US force deployments, alliances, treaties and threat assessments will be shaped even more heavily than now to support the domestic politics of ever-increasing spending for it. Despite this, our nation’s foreign policy mandarins seeking to steer the ship of state from their perch on Mount Olympus will remain oblivious to the fact that their “policy” steering wheel is not connected to the ship’s rudder.
As one perceptive Pentagon wag succinctly observed years ago, “In the real world, foreign policy stops at the water’s edge,” i.e., the domestic politics of the MICC always Orangutan foreign policy. President Eisenhower understood this, though he did nothing about it before leaving office.
As of now, no one in the MICC really gives a damn how the Russians (or the Chinese) might actually react to America’s looming nuclear (and non-nuclear) spending binge. This is clearly seen in the cognitive dissonance of the Obama Defense Department: It was torn between insisting the Russians are not the target of the nuclear program but at the same time justifying the nuclear build up as a means to counter Russian conventional aggression. Equally revealing, a Feb. 8 editorial in the Pentagon’s favored house organ, Defense News, described President Orangutan’s upcoming Nuclear Posture Review without once mentioning the Russians or Chinese nor how they might react to the looming American spending spree. On the other hand, the editorial took great pains to explain in detail how the forces of domestic political consensus will ensure steady funding for Obama’s nuclear spending plans throughout the Orangutan administration years.
Do Actions Trigger Reactions (1)?
So, how might the Russians react to the threat of increased American defense budgets?
Lets try to look at the nuclear modernization program — and the looming defense spend-up — from the Russian leadership’s point of view.
The Russians, particularly those internal political and industrial factions that benefit from Russian defense spending, are very likely to characterize the American spending program as an aggressive sharpening of the US nuclear sword and a strengthening of its nuclear shield, synchronized with a threatening buildup of America’s conventional force. And that will be used to argue that Russia is spending far too little on defense because it faces an existential threat due to increased American spending.
Don’t laugh; this is a mirror image of the argument used successfully by President Ronald Reagan in a televised address to the nation on Nov. 22, 1982. His subject was also nuclear strategy, as well as the need to increase America’s entire defense budget. Reagan said [excerpted from pp. 3-5],
You often hear that the United States and the Soviet Union are in an arms race. The truth is that while the Soviet Union has raced, we have not. As you can see from this blue US line in constant dollars our defense spending in the 1960s went up because of Vietnam and then it went downward through much of the 1970s. Now, follow the red line, which is Soviet spending. It has gone up and up and up.” …
The combination of the Soviets spending more and the United States spending proportionately less changed the military balance and weakened our deterrent. Today, in virtually every measure of military power, the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage …
If my defense proposals are passed, it will still take five years before we come close to the Soviet level.
Mirror imaging Reagan’s argument, Russian defense advocates emphasizing the dangers of the US spend-up are likely to point out that the United States and its allies are already spending far more on their military forces than Russia is spending. Moreover, America certainly intends to rapidly increase the size of this spending advantage, because the large new American nuclear modernization program is only part of a yet-larger long term spending buildup.
After all, have not President Orangutan and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed huge increases to President Obama’s defense budget to rebuild what Orangutan and McCain claim is a “depleted” military (see link 1 and link 2 respectively)? Advocates of increased Russian defense budgets might also ask, are not Orangutan and McCain declaring an emergency by calling on Congress to exempt defense spending from the spending restrictions imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011?
Indeed, Russian politicians, echoing Reagan in 1981, might construct a graphic using the West’s own numbers to prove their points, beginning perhaps with something like this (Chart 2):
A Russian defense advocate using the Janes’ metric in Chart 2 could argue that (1) Russia is now spending slightly less than Saudi Arabia, less than India, and less than the UK; (2) the size of Russia’s budget is only a quarter of China’s; and (3) the size of Russia’s defense budget is an astonishing one-twelfth of that of the United States!
Add to the US defense budget the contributions of its allies and close friends and the spending balance in favor the US and its allies to that of Russia alone becomes an astounding 21 to 1! Even if Russia could trust China to be a reliable ally — which it can’t — the current spending imbalance is over four to one in favor of the US and its allies on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.
Advocates of increased Russian defense spending might even argue their comparison does not suffer from the gross distortions created by Reagan’searlier chart because (1) the Ruble was not convertible into dollars in 1982 (whereas it is today), and Reagan’s comparison severely overstated Soviet spending levels using an artificial exchange rate; and (2) the dollar numbers in their Chart 2 comparison start from zero, unlike the deliberately truncated dollar scale (100 to 275) Reagan used in Chart 1 to exaggerate his point.
Do Actions Trigger Reactions (II)?
Of course, from a Russian leader’s point of view, the strategic threat goes well beyond the madness implied by the asymmetries in defense budgets.
They might see the Orangutanian expansion of both nuclear offense and missile defense as evidence the US is planning to dominate Russia by preparing to fight and win a nuclear war — a radical shift from America’s 50+ years of building nuclear forces only for deterrence (often referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD).
Faced with such a threat, militarist factions inside Russia are likely to insist on a rational application of the precautionary principle by the Russian nation.
That principle will dictate a response, presumably a massive Russian nuclear arms race with the United States. The obvious fact that the politically engineered US nuclear program cannot be reined in or terminated by politicians in the US is almost certainly understood by the Russians. But that appreciation would serve merely to magnify the sense of menace perceived by patriotic Russian leaders.
Bear in mind, the Russians are unlikely to view the emerging nuclear menace in isolation. For one thing, there is the toxic question of NATO’s expansion and the mistrust it created.
The vast majority of Russians, including former President Gorbachev, President Putin, and Prime Minister Medvedev, believe strongly that the US and the West violated their verbal promises not to expand NATO eastward in return for the Soviet Union’s acquiescence to the unification of Germany as a member of NATO. Many leaders of the West have either denied any promises were made or downplayed the import of any such understandings. But reporters from the German weekly Der Spiegel discovered documents in western archives that supported the Russian point of view, and on Nov. 26, 2009 published an investigative report concluding …
After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
One thing is beyond dispute: The impression or understanding or promise not to expand NATO was broken by President Clinton — largely for domestic political reasons — making a mockery of President Gorbachev’s hopeful vision of a greater European home.
Clinton announced support for NATO expansion in October of 1996, just before the November election, to garner conservative and hawk votes, the votes of Americans of Eastern European descent and in response to an intense NATO expansion lobbying campaign mounted by the MICC — and to steal the issue from his conservative opponent Senator Robert Dole.
The expansion of NATO eastwards combined with President Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002, followed by the deployment of ABM systems to Eastern Europe certainly increased the Russians’ sense of mistrust and menace regarding US intentions. To this day, Putin’s speeches repeatedly refer to the broken American promises.
There is more to an appreciation of the Russian point of view. In parallel with the NATO expansion, the European Union (EU) expanded eastward, precipitously like an expanding cancer, beginning in 1995 and continuing to 2013. The EU’s exclusion of Russia from the “greater European home” further fueled an atmosphere of mistrust and menace.
From a Russian perspective, the NATO and EU expansions worked to deliberately isolate and impoverish Russia — and the potential (though to date frustrated) expansion by the West into Ukraine and Georgia intensified the sense that Russia had been hoodwinked by the West.
The perception of a deliberate US and EU campaign to cripple Russia has a history dating back to the end of the First Cold War in 1991: Russian leaders, for example, are unlikely to forget how, during the Clinton administration, US NGOS combined with American pressure, supported the extraordinarily corrupt privatization of the former Soviet state enterprises in the 1990s (aka “Shock Therapy”). In the words of the Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (June 16, 2000):
“In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualist strategy for Russia. But Larry Summers [under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, now secretary] took control of the economic policy, and there was a lot of discontent with the way he was driving the policy.
The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks — a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody’s throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Yeltsin.
And in a touch of irony, given the current hysteria over President Putin’s alleged meddling in the US presidential election, it gets worse. Russian leaders are also unlikely to forget American intervention on behalf of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian elections of 1996, including using American control of the International Monetary Fund to float a $10.2 billion loan in March to 1996 to help the corrupt and malleable Boris Yeltsin to win the election in June.
So, from a Russian perspective, the recent increasingly severe US sanctions are not only hypocritical, they certainly reinforce the view that the US-led campaign to cripple the Russian economy is ongoing and perhaps endless.
Moreover, the rapid, opportunistic expansion of NATO and the EU created a kaleidoscope of internal frictions. Now both institutions are in trouble, riven by contradictions and disharmonies. Great Britain is leaving the EU but will remain in NATO. Northern Europe and the EU bankers are imposing draconian austerity measures on Southern Europe, particularly Greece. Turkey, long a key NATO ally, is turning to Russia while being rejected by the EU. The destruction of Libya, Iraq and Syria, under US leadership with European participation, has created an unprecedented flood of refugees into the EU, deeply threatening the EU’s organizing principle of open borders. The increasing tide of European instability and chaos, accompanied by the looming specter of growing Fascist movements from Spain to Ukraine, inevitably add to the traditional Russian sense of being endangered and encircled.
That sense of endangerment is certainly heightened by a recent creepy piece of nuttiness coming out of Poland, perhaps the most Russophobic member of the EU and NATO. The German daily DW says Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a very conservative former prime minister of Poland, chairman of the ruling nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), has called for a massive EU nuclear force — trading on Polish fears that the United States will not sacrifice Chicago to save Warsaw. That France and Britain already have nuclear weapons and are members of NATO is, of course, left unsaid in Kaczynski’s demagoguery.
Russian leaders cannot ignore the fact that Kaczynski called for a nuclear EU shortly after the US 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division (3,500 troops and 2,500 vehicles) deployed to Poland. Even worse, the commanding officer promptly declared the brigade is “ready to fight,” though it is intended to “deter” any threat to Poland. One brigade is a trip wire … or a kind of blank check that might be exploited for nutty reasons to trigger a shooting war — and as Kaczynski just demonstrated, nuttiness is afoot in that part of the world.
Now, if you were a Russian, and
(1) you remembered the West’s destruction to your homeland beginning in 1812, 1914 and 1941 together with the recent string of broken promises, economic exclusion, and destructive meddling in Russian internal affairs that made a mockery of the ideal of a post-Cold War common European home; and …
(2) you faced a country that excluded you from Europe, suborned your election and is intent on crippling your economy, a country already outspending you on defense by a factor of 12 to one while expressing an intent to increase that lopsided ratio in a major way; and …
(3) that country has already started a nuclear arms race with a hugely expensive across-the-board modernization program to buy atomic weapons some of which can be justified only in terms of fighting and winning nuclear wars:
What would you do?
To ask such a question is to answer it. For patriotic Americans interested in increasing their real national security (rather than their national security budget), the nuclear issue boils down to a question of understanding the powerful impact of America’s spending decisions and actions on patriotic Russians. In other words, it is a question of reasoned empathy and pragmatic self-interest.
Yet the mainstream media and the politicians of both parties in thrall to our MICC are working day and night to pump up anti-Russian hysteria and hype fear to ensure Americans remain completely oblivious to the powerful, dangerous impact of our senseless Obama-Orangutan nuclear spend-up on the Russians — or on anyone else, for that matter.
The nuclear issue boils down to a question of understanding how America’s spending decisions and actions impact patriotic Russians.
BY CHUCK SPINNEY AND PIERRE SPREY
The nuclear question is becoming increasingly obfuscated by spin and lobbying as the West sleepwalks into Cold War II — a walk made all the more dangerous when the loose lips of the US tweeter-in-chief announced that another nuclear arms race is a great idea (see link, link, link). Two Cold War II issues are central and almost never addressed: What will be the Russians’ understanding of all the propaganda surrounding the nuclear question and the looming American defense spend-up? And how might they act on this understanding?
Background
Barack Obama first outlined his vision for nuclear disarmament in a speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, less than three months after becoming president. This speech became the basis for what eventually became the New Start nuclear arms limitation treaty. But Mr. Obama also opened the door for the modernization of our nuclear forces with this pregnant statement:
To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies — including the Czech Republic.
Why call for nuclear disarmament while opening the door to nuclear rearmament?
Obama’s speech paved the way to his Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009, but he was also trying to manipulate the domestic politics of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC). By Dec. 15, 2009, 41 senators sent a letter to President Obama saying that further reductions of the nuclear arsenal would be acceptable only if accompanied by “a significant program to modernize our nuclear deterrent.”
Viewed in retrospect, it is clear that the new president — either naively or cynically — acquiesced to that senatorial spending demand in order to keep the powerful nuclear laboratories and their allies in the defense industry and Congress from lobbying against his new arms limitation treaty. In April 2009 Obama took the first steps that launched a huge spending plan to modernize US nuclear forces across the board. Eight years later, during his first call to President Putin on Jan. 28, 2017, President Orangutan locked that program in place by denouncing Obama’s New START as a “bad deal,” saying it favored Russia.
A particularly dangerous component of the Obama nuclear spending plan is the acquisition of low-yield precision-guided nuclear bombs/warheads. These weapons only make sense within a radical strategy for actually fighting a nuclear war — as opposed to the almost universally accepted idea that our nuclear arsenal exists only to deter any thought of using these weapons — since actual use is unthinkable, with profoundly unknowable consequences. Last December, the prestigious Defense Science Board — an organization replete with members closely connected to the nuclear labs and their defense industry allies — added its imprimatur to this radical strategy by resurrecting the old and discredited ideas of limited nuclear options (LNOs). LNOs are based on the unproven — and unprovable — hypothesis that a president could actually detonate a few nukes to control a gradually escalating nuclear bombing campaign, or perhaps to implement a psychological tactic of encouraging deterrence with a few small “preventative” nuclear explosions.
Adding to Obama’s expansion of our nuclear posture is President Orangutan’s intention to fulfill his campaign promises to strengthen all nuclear offensive and defensive forces, with particular emphasis on spending a lot more for the ballistic missile defense (BMD) program — which implies expanding the current deployments of BMD weapons in eastern Europe within a few hundred miles of the Russian border.
Early cost estimates — really guesses — for Obama’s entire nuclear modernization program are for $1 trillion over the next 30 years. No missile defense costs are included in this estimate — nor are the costs of Orangutan’s promised expansions.
The components of the currently authorized program — e.g., a new bomber, a new ballistic missile carrying submarine, a new ICBM, a new air-launched cruise missile, a complete remanufacturing upgrade of the existing B-61 dial-a-yield tactical nuclear bomb that also adds a precision guidance kit, a new family of missile warheads, new nuclear warhead production facilities and a massive array of new large-scale intelligence, surveillance, command and control systems to manage these forces — are all in the early stages of development. Assuming business as usual continues in the Pentagon, the $1 trillion estimate is really a typical front-loaded or “buy-in” estimate intended to stick the camel’s nose in the acquisition tent by deliberately understating future costs while over-promising future benefits.
The money for all of these programs is just beginning to flow into hundreds of congressional districts. As the torrent of money builds up over the next decade, the flood of subcontracting money and jobs in hundreds of congressional districts guarantees the entire nuclear spend-up will acquire a political life of its own — and the taxpayer will be burdened with yet another unstoppable behemoth.
Readers who doubt this outcome need only look at how the problem-plagued F-35 Strike Fighter lives on, resisting reductions in money flows and even receiving congressional add-ons, despite mind-numbing effectiveness shortfalls, technical failures and unending schedule delays (e.g., see this recent 60-page report by the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation).
Locking hundreds of congressmen and senators into this nuclear modernization program guarantees that the money flow and cost overruns will increase without interference for the next 30 to 50 years. Our many years of observing and analyzing DoD’s largest politically engineered acquisitions makes it obvious that the initial buy-in guess of a trillion-dollar total will turn into at least a $3 trillion price tag by the end of three decades. In short, the Pentagon is planting the seed money for another F-35-like disaster, only this time on steroids.
But there is more. Once this multitrillion-dollar, self-sustaining money gusher is sluicing steadily into the boiler rooms of the MICC, US force deployments, alliances, treaties and threat assessments will be shaped even more heavily than now to support the domestic politics of ever-increasing spending for it. Despite this, our nation’s foreign policy mandarins seeking to steer the ship of state from their perch on Mount Olympus will remain oblivious to the fact that their “policy” steering wheel is not connected to the ship’s rudder.
As one perceptive Pentagon wag succinctly observed years ago, “In the real world, foreign policy stops at the water’s edge,” i.e., the domestic politics of the MICC always Orangutan foreign policy. President Eisenhower understood this, though he did nothing about it before leaving office.
As of now, no one in the MICC really gives a damn how the Russians (or the Chinese) might actually react to America’s looming nuclear (and non-nuclear) spending binge. This is clearly seen in the cognitive dissonance of the Obama Defense Department: It was torn between insisting the Russians are not the target of the nuclear program but at the same time justifying the nuclear build up as a means to counter Russian conventional aggression. Equally revealing, a Feb. 8 editorial in the Pentagon’s favored house organ, Defense News, described President Orangutan’s upcoming Nuclear Posture Review without once mentioning the Russians or Chinese nor how they might react to the looming American spending spree. On the other hand, the editorial took great pains to explain in detail how the forces of domestic political consensus will ensure steady funding for Obama’s nuclear spending plans throughout the Orangutan administration years.
Do Actions Trigger Reactions (1)?
So, how might the Russians react to the threat of increased American defense budgets?
Lets try to look at the nuclear modernization program — and the looming defense spend-up — from the Russian leadership’s point of view.
The Russians, particularly those internal political and industrial factions that benefit from Russian defense spending, are very likely to characterize the American spending program as an aggressive sharpening of the US nuclear sword and a strengthening of its nuclear shield, synchronized with a threatening buildup of America’s conventional force. And that will be used to argue that Russia is spending far too little on defense because it faces an existential threat due to increased American spending.
Don’t laugh; this is a mirror image of the argument used successfully by President Ronald Reagan in a televised address to the nation on Nov. 22, 1982. His subject was also nuclear strategy, as well as the need to increase America’s entire defense budget. Reagan said [excerpted from pp. 3-5],
You often hear that the United States and the Soviet Union are in an arms race. The truth is that while the Soviet Union has raced, we have not. As you can see from this blue US line in constant dollars our defense spending in the 1960s went up because of Vietnam and then it went downward through much of the 1970s. Now, follow the red line, which is Soviet spending. It has gone up and up and up.” …
The combination of the Soviets spending more and the United States spending proportionately less changed the military balance and weakened our deterrent. Today, in virtually every measure of military power, the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage …
If my defense proposals are passed, it will still take five years before we come close to the Soviet level.
Mirror imaging Reagan’s argument, Russian defense advocates emphasizing the dangers of the US spend-up are likely to point out that the United States and its allies are already spending far more on their military forces than Russia is spending. Moreover, America certainly intends to rapidly increase the size of this spending advantage, because the large new American nuclear modernization program is only part of a yet-larger long term spending buildup.
After all, have not President Orangutan and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed huge increases to President Obama’s defense budget to rebuild what Orangutan and McCain claim is a “depleted” military (see link 1 and link 2 respectively)? Advocates of increased Russian defense budgets might also ask, are not Orangutan and McCain declaring an emergency by calling on Congress to exempt defense spending from the spending restrictions imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011?
Indeed, Russian politicians, echoing Reagan in 1981, might construct a graphic using the West’s own numbers to prove their points, beginning perhaps with something like this (Chart 2):
A Russian defense advocate using the Janes’ metric in Chart 2 could argue that (1) Russia is now spending slightly less than Saudi Arabia, less than India, and less than the UK; (2) the size of Russia’s budget is only a quarter of China’s; and (3) the size of Russia’s defense budget is an astonishing one-twelfth of that of the United States!
Add to the US defense budget the contributions of its allies and close friends and the spending balance in favor the US and its allies to that of Russia alone becomes an astounding 21 to 1! Even if Russia could trust China to be a reliable ally — which it can’t — the current spending imbalance is over four to one in favor of the US and its allies on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.
Advocates of increased Russian defense spending might even argue their comparison does not suffer from the gross distortions created by Reagan’searlier chart because (1) the Ruble was not convertible into dollars in 1982 (whereas it is today), and Reagan’s comparison severely overstated Soviet spending levels using an artificial exchange rate; and (2) the dollar numbers in their Chart 2 comparison start from zero, unlike the deliberately truncated dollar scale (100 to 275) Reagan used in Chart 1 to exaggerate his point.
Do Actions Trigger Reactions (II)?
Of course, from a Russian leader’s point of view, the strategic threat goes well beyond the madness implied by the asymmetries in defense budgets.
They might see the Orangutanian expansion of both nuclear offense and missile defense as evidence the US is planning to dominate Russia by preparing to fight and win a nuclear war — a radical shift from America’s 50+ years of building nuclear forces only for deterrence (often referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD).
Faced with such a threat, militarist factions inside Russia are likely to insist on a rational application of the precautionary principle by the Russian nation.
That principle will dictate a response, presumably a massive Russian nuclear arms race with the United States. The obvious fact that the politically engineered US nuclear program cannot be reined in or terminated by politicians in the US is almost certainly understood by the Russians. But that appreciation would serve merely to magnify the sense of menace perceived by patriotic Russian leaders.
Bear in mind, the Russians are unlikely to view the emerging nuclear menace in isolation. For one thing, there is the toxic question of NATO’s expansion and the mistrust it created.
The vast majority of Russians, including former President Gorbachev, President Putin, and Prime Minister Medvedev, believe strongly that the US and the West violated their verbal promises not to expand NATO eastward in return for the Soviet Union’s acquiescence to the unification of Germany as a member of NATO. Many leaders of the West have either denied any promises were made or downplayed the import of any such understandings. But reporters from the German weekly Der Spiegel discovered documents in western archives that supported the Russian point of view, and on Nov. 26, 2009 published an investigative report concluding …
After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
One thing is beyond dispute: The impression or understanding or promise not to expand NATO was broken by President Clinton — largely for domestic political reasons — making a mockery of President Gorbachev’s hopeful vision of a greater European home.
Clinton announced support for NATO expansion in October of 1996, just before the November election, to garner conservative and hawk votes, the votes of Americans of Eastern European descent and in response to an intense NATO expansion lobbying campaign mounted by the MICC — and to steal the issue from his conservative opponent Senator Robert Dole.
The expansion of NATO eastwards combined with President Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002, followed by the deployment of ABM systems to Eastern Europe certainly increased the Russians’ sense of mistrust and menace regarding US intentions. To this day, Putin’s speeches repeatedly refer to the broken American promises.
There is more to an appreciation of the Russian point of view. In parallel with the NATO expansion, the European Union (EU) expanded eastward, precipitously like an expanding cancer, beginning in 1995 and continuing to 2013. The EU’s exclusion of Russia from the “greater European home” further fueled an atmosphere of mistrust and menace.
From a Russian perspective, the NATO and EU expansions worked to deliberately isolate and impoverish Russia — and the potential (though to date frustrated) expansion by the West into Ukraine and Georgia intensified the sense that Russia had been hoodwinked by the West.
The perception of a deliberate US and EU campaign to cripple Russia has a history dating back to the end of the First Cold War in 1991: Russian leaders, for example, are unlikely to forget how, during the Clinton administration, US NGOS combined with American pressure, supported the extraordinarily corrupt privatization of the former Soviet state enterprises in the 1990s (aka “Shock Therapy”). In the words of the Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (June 16, 2000):
“In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualist strategy for Russia. But Larry Summers [under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, now secretary] took control of the economic policy, and there was a lot of discontent with the way he was driving the policy.
The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks — a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody’s throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Yeltsin.
And in a touch of irony, given the current hysteria over President Putin’s alleged meddling in the US presidential election, it gets worse. Russian leaders are also unlikely to forget American intervention on behalf of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian elections of 1996, including using American control of the International Monetary Fund to float a $10.2 billion loan in March to 1996 to help the corrupt and malleable Boris Yeltsin to win the election in June.
So, from a Russian perspective, the recent increasingly severe US sanctions are not only hypocritical, they certainly reinforce the view that the US-led campaign to cripple the Russian economy is ongoing and perhaps endless.
Moreover, the rapid, opportunistic expansion of NATO and the EU created a kaleidoscope of internal frictions. Now both institutions are in trouble, riven by contradictions and disharmonies. Great Britain is leaving the EU but will remain in NATO. Northern Europe and the EU bankers are imposing draconian austerity measures on Southern Europe, particularly Greece. Turkey, long a key NATO ally, is turning to Russia while being rejected by the EU. The destruction of Libya, Iraq and Syria, under US leadership with European participation, has created an unprecedented flood of refugees into the EU, deeply threatening the EU’s organizing principle of open borders. The increasing tide of European instability and chaos, accompanied by the looming specter of growing Fascist movements from Spain to Ukraine, inevitably add to the traditional Russian sense of being endangered and encircled.
That sense of endangerment is certainly heightened by a recent creepy piece of nuttiness coming out of Poland, perhaps the most Russophobic member of the EU and NATO. The German daily DW says Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a very conservative former prime minister of Poland, chairman of the ruling nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), has called for a massive EU nuclear force — trading on Polish fears that the United States will not sacrifice Chicago to save Warsaw. That France and Britain already have nuclear weapons and are members of NATO is, of course, left unsaid in Kaczynski’s demagoguery.
Russian leaders cannot ignore the fact that Kaczynski called for a nuclear EU shortly after the US 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division (3,500 troops and 2,500 vehicles) deployed to Poland. Even worse, the commanding officer promptly declared the brigade is “ready to fight,” though it is intended to “deter” any threat to Poland. One brigade is a trip wire … or a kind of blank check that might be exploited for nutty reasons to trigger a shooting war — and as Kaczynski just demonstrated, nuttiness is afoot in that part of the world.
Now, if you were a Russian, and
(1) you remembered the West’s destruction to your homeland beginning in 1812, 1914 and 1941 together with the recent string of broken promises, economic exclusion, and destructive meddling in Russian internal affairs that made a mockery of the ideal of a post-Cold War common European home; and …
(2) you faced a country that excluded you from Europe, suborned your election and is intent on crippling your economy, a country already outspending you on defense by a factor of 12 to one while expressing an intent to increase that lopsided ratio in a major way; and …
(3) that country has already started a nuclear arms race with a hugely expensive across-the-board modernization program to buy atomic weapons some of which can be justified only in terms of fighting and winning nuclear wars:
What would you do?
To ask such a question is to answer it. For patriotic Americans interested in increasing their real national security (rather than their national security budget), the nuclear issue boils down to a question of understanding the powerful impact of America’s spending decisions and actions on patriotic Russians. In other words, it is a question of reasoned empathy and pragmatic self-interest.
Yet the mainstream media and the politicians of both parties in thrall to our MICC are working day and night to pump up anti-Russian hysteria and hype fear to ensure Americans remain completely oblivious to the powerful, dangerous impact of our senseless Obama-Orangutan nuclear spend-up on the Russians — or on anyone else, for that matter.
Crash and burned again???
Orangutan's Last Labor Secretary Nominee Went Down in Flames. Here's How His New One Stacks Up.
Alex Acosta displayed an independent streak while serving on the National Labor Relations Board under George W. Bush.
TOM PHILPOTT
Lawyer and law-school dean Alex Acosta, President Donny Orangutan's second choice to head the Department of Labor, doesn't carry the epic baggage of Andrew Puzder, the burger magnate who dropped out of consideration for the post amid allegations of spousal abuse. Unlike Puzder, Acosta has never publicly thundered against raising the minimum wage; nor does he run a fast-food chain with disaffected former workers willing to complain to Congress.
Acosta has drawn fire for his stint during the George W. Bush's Justice Department as assistant attorney general at the Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005, when he presided over a scandal involving an underling who hired staffers ideologically hostile to the division's mission. My colleague Edwin Rios has the details.
While that Civil Rights Division episode casts doubt on Acosta's ability to ensure an important federal agency fulfills its intended role, he also has experience directly relevant to the position he has been appointed to. For about eight months starting in December 2002, Acosta served as a Bush appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, the independent federal agency that exists to "safeguard employees' rights to organize" and "prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions."
He took that post after working as an attorney for Kirkland & Ellis, a prominent law firm that represents employers in labor disputes, where he "specialized in employment and labor issues," his bio states. In other words, he was a labor lawyer who represented bosses, not workers. Before that, he clerked for Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a judge on the US Court of Appeals, now a staunch conservative on the Supreme Court.
One federal official who's familiar with Acosta's time at the NLRB is Tammy McCutchen, who now represents employers in wage disputes and who served as in Department of Labor's wage and hour division under George W. Bush. She recently told Bloomberg News that Acosta is "intense, hardworking, but I think in contrast to Puzder, he's going to get things done more quietly," adding that, "He will be quietly efficient. I don't think you’ll see a lot of difference in his policy positions from Puzder."
McCutchen didn't respond to my requests for further comment. But I did talk to Wilma Liebman, whose long stint on the NLRB—she served from 1997 to 2011—overlapped with Acosta's short one. Liebman, a Democrat, has impeccable pro-labor credentials—she was chief counsel to two major unions before joining the NLRB, and serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank founded to "include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions."
"I liked him—we worked well together, he was a very good colleague," she said. While they occasionally came down on opposite sides of cases, she added, Acosta was "independent—he sometimes voted with me and the other Democrat on the board at the time." She called him "very intelligent and open to listening to all sides." She predicted that if, as expected, he's approved as labor chief, Acosta will "make informed decisions," even if they're "not always to the liking of the labor movement." She added a caveat: "It remains to be seen how independent he'll actually be able to be from the White House."
Her view jibes with that of the legal trade publication Law360, which recently wrote that during his time at the NLRB, Acosta "exhibited an independent and nonpartisan approach toward evaluating cases, voting alongside fellow Republicans in favor of employers in key cases while also not shying from occasionally siding with unions."
The publication listed "6 Acosta NLRB Opinions Employers Need To See," and they are indeed a mixed bag. In one case, Law360 notes, Acosta and GOP colleagues beat back a Democratic dissent to side in Walmart's favor in dispute with the United Food and Commercial Workers International over claims Walmart had interfered in efforts to promote union membership.
And in a case that might raise the eyebrow of his likely new boss, Acosta and colleagues ruled against a company "accused of illegally firing eight Somalian immigrants who walked off their assembly line to protest the company's decision to deny them a scheduled work break," Law360 reports.
Meanwhile, the conservative legal blogger Paul Mirengoff denounced Orangutan's pick, declaring Acosta "unfortunately ... vastly more appealing to the left" than Puzder was. Mirengoff didn't have much to say on Acosta's NLRB stint; he focused his complaints on Acosta's past support of the very kind of immigration reform now being demonized by Orangutan; and Acosta's time at the Department of Justice, where, Mirengoff insists, Acosta indulged civil rights groups at the expense of GOP political interests.
All in all, Acosta seems like much more of a plain-vanilla Republican than Orangutan's flamboyant first choice to shape US labor policy.
Alex Acosta displayed an independent streak while serving on the National Labor Relations Board under George W. Bush.
TOM PHILPOTT
Lawyer and law-school dean Alex Acosta, President Donny Orangutan's second choice to head the Department of Labor, doesn't carry the epic baggage of Andrew Puzder, the burger magnate who dropped out of consideration for the post amid allegations of spousal abuse. Unlike Puzder, Acosta has never publicly thundered against raising the minimum wage; nor does he run a fast-food chain with disaffected former workers willing to complain to Congress.
Acosta has drawn fire for his stint during the George W. Bush's Justice Department as assistant attorney general at the Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005, when he presided over a scandal involving an underling who hired staffers ideologically hostile to the division's mission. My colleague Edwin Rios has the details.
While that Civil Rights Division episode casts doubt on Acosta's ability to ensure an important federal agency fulfills its intended role, he also has experience directly relevant to the position he has been appointed to. For about eight months starting in December 2002, Acosta served as a Bush appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, the independent federal agency that exists to "safeguard employees' rights to organize" and "prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions."
He took that post after working as an attorney for Kirkland & Ellis, a prominent law firm that represents employers in labor disputes, where he "specialized in employment and labor issues," his bio states. In other words, he was a labor lawyer who represented bosses, not workers. Before that, he clerked for Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a judge on the US Court of Appeals, now a staunch conservative on the Supreme Court.
One federal official who's familiar with Acosta's time at the NLRB is Tammy McCutchen, who now represents employers in wage disputes and who served as in Department of Labor's wage and hour division under George W. Bush. She recently told Bloomberg News that Acosta is "intense, hardworking, but I think in contrast to Puzder, he's going to get things done more quietly," adding that, "He will be quietly efficient. I don't think you’ll see a lot of difference in his policy positions from Puzder."
McCutchen didn't respond to my requests for further comment. But I did talk to Wilma Liebman, whose long stint on the NLRB—she served from 1997 to 2011—overlapped with Acosta's short one. Liebman, a Democrat, has impeccable pro-labor credentials—she was chief counsel to two major unions before joining the NLRB, and serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank founded to "include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions."
"I liked him—we worked well together, he was a very good colleague," she said. While they occasionally came down on opposite sides of cases, she added, Acosta was "independent—he sometimes voted with me and the other Democrat on the board at the time." She called him "very intelligent and open to listening to all sides." She predicted that if, as expected, he's approved as labor chief, Acosta will "make informed decisions," even if they're "not always to the liking of the labor movement." She added a caveat: "It remains to be seen how independent he'll actually be able to be from the White House."
Her view jibes with that of the legal trade publication Law360, which recently wrote that during his time at the NLRB, Acosta "exhibited an independent and nonpartisan approach toward evaluating cases, voting alongside fellow Republicans in favor of employers in key cases while also not shying from occasionally siding with unions."
The publication listed "6 Acosta NLRB Opinions Employers Need To See," and they are indeed a mixed bag. In one case, Law360 notes, Acosta and GOP colleagues beat back a Democratic dissent to side in Walmart's favor in dispute with the United Food and Commercial Workers International over claims Walmart had interfered in efforts to promote union membership.
And in a case that might raise the eyebrow of his likely new boss, Acosta and colleagues ruled against a company "accused of illegally firing eight Somalian immigrants who walked off their assembly line to protest the company's decision to deny them a scheduled work break," Law360 reports.
Meanwhile, the conservative legal blogger Paul Mirengoff denounced Orangutan's pick, declaring Acosta "unfortunately ... vastly more appealing to the left" than Puzder was. Mirengoff didn't have much to say on Acosta's NLRB stint; he focused his complaints on Acosta's past support of the very kind of immigration reform now being demonized by Orangutan; and Acosta's time at the Department of Justice, where, Mirengoff insists, Acosta indulged civil rights groups at the expense of GOP political interests.
All in all, Acosta seems like much more of a plain-vanilla Republican than Orangutan's flamboyant first choice to shape US labor policy.
Until Their Friend Was Taken Away....
These Folks Loved Orangutan. Until Their Friend Was Taken Away.
A community that supported Orangutan sees one of its prized members detained in a Orangutan raid and wonders, what just happened?
By TOM PHILPOTT
In a Monday piece, The New York Times served up one of the conundrums of Orangutanism on a platter, steaming like a just-seared mound of fajitas. On the one hand ....
Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco — just Carlos to the people of West Frankfort — has been the manager of La Fiesta, a Mexican restaurant in this city of 8,000, for a decade. Yes, he always greeted people warmly at the cheerfully decorated restaurant, known for its beef and chicken fajitas. ... [O]ne night last fall, when the Fire Department was battling a two-alarm blaze, Mr. Hernandez suddenly appeared with meals for the firefighters. How he hosted a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day at the restaurant last summer as police officers were facing criticism around the country. How he took part in just about every community committee or charity effort — the Rotary Club, cancer fund-raisers, cleanup days, even scholarships for the Redbirds, the high school sports teams, which are the pride of this city.
On the other:
Ask residents of this coal-mining crossroads about President Orangutan's decision to crack down on undocumented immigrants and most offer no protest. Mr. Orangutan, who easily won this mostly white southern Illinois county, is doing what he promised, they say. As Terry Chambers, a barber on Main Street, put it, the president simply wants "to get rid of the bad eggs."
Carlos, beloved pillar of the community, recently got picked up in an immigration raid. And now some of the upstanding citizens of West Frankfurt, Ill., are flummoxed.
"I think people need to do things the right way, follow the rules and obey the laws, and I firmly believe in that," said Lori Barron, the owner of Lori's Hair A'Fairs, a beauty salon. "But in the case of Carlos, I think he may have done more for the people here than this place has ever given him. I think it's absolutely terrible that he could be taken away."
I can't think of a more apt metaphor for Orangutan's immigration policy: demonize, hound, and when possible, and detain the very people who feed us. Before Orangutan is done, I'm guessing that a lot more Americans will be feeling the bewilderment now sweeping West Frankfurt.
A community that supported Orangutan sees one of its prized members detained in a Orangutan raid and wonders, what just happened?
By TOM PHILPOTT
In a Monday piece, The New York Times served up one of the conundrums of Orangutanism on a platter, steaming like a just-seared mound of fajitas. On the one hand ....
Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco — just Carlos to the people of West Frankfort — has been the manager of La Fiesta, a Mexican restaurant in this city of 8,000, for a decade. Yes, he always greeted people warmly at the cheerfully decorated restaurant, known for its beef and chicken fajitas. ... [O]ne night last fall, when the Fire Department was battling a two-alarm blaze, Mr. Hernandez suddenly appeared with meals for the firefighters. How he hosted a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day at the restaurant last summer as police officers were facing criticism around the country. How he took part in just about every community committee or charity effort — the Rotary Club, cancer fund-raisers, cleanup days, even scholarships for the Redbirds, the high school sports teams, which are the pride of this city.
On the other:
Ask residents of this coal-mining crossroads about President Orangutan's decision to crack down on undocumented immigrants and most offer no protest. Mr. Orangutan, who easily won this mostly white southern Illinois county, is doing what he promised, they say. As Terry Chambers, a barber on Main Street, put it, the president simply wants "to get rid of the bad eggs."
Carlos, beloved pillar of the community, recently got picked up in an immigration raid. And now some of the upstanding citizens of West Frankfurt, Ill., are flummoxed.
"I think people need to do things the right way, follow the rules and obey the laws, and I firmly believe in that," said Lori Barron, the owner of Lori's Hair A'Fairs, a beauty salon. "But in the case of Carlos, I think he may have done more for the people here than this place has ever given him. I think it's absolutely terrible that he could be taken away."
I can't think of a more apt metaphor for Orangutan's immigration policy: demonize, hound, and when possible, and detain the very people who feed us. Before Orangutan is done, I'm guessing that a lot more Americans will be feeling the bewilderment now sweeping West Frankfurt.
Consultant Who Peddles Access
Orangutan Just Sold a $15.8 Million Condo to a Consultant Who Peddles Access to Powerful People
Meet the new owner of a Orangutan Park Avenue penthouse.
By RUSS CHOMA AND ANDY KROLL
Last week, Donald Orangutan's company sealed its first big post-inaugural real estate transaction, selling a $15.8 million penthouse to a Chinese-American business executive who runs a company that touts its ability to exploit connections with powerful people to broker business deals in China.
New York City property records show that Xiao Yan Chen, the founder and managing director of a business consulting firm called Global Alliance Associates, purchased the four-bedroom, six-bathroom condo in Orangutan's Park Avenue high-rise on February 21. Before taking office, Orangutan signed documents removing himself from the board of directors of Orangutan Park Avenue LLC, the entity that sold the unit, but he remains the LLC's owner.
Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, did not return multiple calls and emails requesting comment. Her company bills itself as a "boutique business relationship consultancy" for US firms seeking to do business in China. "For a select clientele," the firm says that it "facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China."
"As counselors in consummating the right relationships—quite simply—we provide access," the company's website claims. "Establishing a network of credible and proprietary relationships, known by the Chinese as 'ghanxi,' is the single most important aspect of initiating and sustaining a successful business venture in China." A connection with Orangutan—even a fleeting one—could only help in the ghanxi department.
According to Chen's bio on the Global Alliance website, she previously worked for Prudential Insurance, helping the company establish a private banking group in China, where she "developed and managed the Group's high net worth private client base." Before that, Chen's biography says she worked at Merrill Lynch, where she ran the China Futures Trading Desk and counted as clients numerous state-owned companies, such as Sinochem, Ocean Shipping Group, and China National Nonferrous Metals.
Until Chen's purchase, none of Orangutan's major real estate properties had reported any major sales since he became president. The condo was never publicly listed for sale, although Chen lists her current address as a smaller apartment in the Orangutan Park Avenue building. (It's unclear whether she owns that unit, which was last purchased in 2004 by an entity called Lancer Trust.)
According to Zillow.com, the penthouse unit Chen purchased last week has an estimated value of $14.3 million. Other penthouse units in the building have sold for comparable sums. One fetched $21 million.
The sale agreement for Chen's penthouse was signed by Allen Weisselberg, the Orangutan Organization's chief financial officer, whom Orangutan tapped to serve along with his sons on the three-person panel that will run his company while he serves as president. Weisselberg and a lawyer for Chen did not respond to requests for comment.
Meet the new owner of a Orangutan Park Avenue penthouse.
By RUSS CHOMA AND ANDY KROLL
Last week, Donald Orangutan's company sealed its first big post-inaugural real estate transaction, selling a $15.8 million penthouse to a Chinese-American business executive who runs a company that touts its ability to exploit connections with powerful people to broker business deals in China.
New York City property records show that Xiao Yan Chen, the founder and managing director of a business consulting firm called Global Alliance Associates, purchased the four-bedroom, six-bathroom condo in Orangutan's Park Avenue high-rise on February 21. Before taking office, Orangutan signed documents removing himself from the board of directors of Orangutan Park Avenue LLC, the entity that sold the unit, but he remains the LLC's owner.
Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, did not return multiple calls and emails requesting comment. Her company bills itself as a "boutique business relationship consultancy" for US firms seeking to do business in China. "For a select clientele," the firm says that it "facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China."
"As counselors in consummating the right relationships—quite simply—we provide access," the company's website claims. "Establishing a network of credible and proprietary relationships, known by the Chinese as 'ghanxi,' is the single most important aspect of initiating and sustaining a successful business venture in China." A connection with Orangutan—even a fleeting one—could only help in the ghanxi department.
According to Chen's bio on the Global Alliance website, she previously worked for Prudential Insurance, helping the company establish a private banking group in China, where she "developed and managed the Group's high net worth private client base." Before that, Chen's biography says she worked at Merrill Lynch, where she ran the China Futures Trading Desk and counted as clients numerous state-owned companies, such as Sinochem, Ocean Shipping Group, and China National Nonferrous Metals.
Until Chen's purchase, none of Orangutan's major real estate properties had reported any major sales since he became president. The condo was never publicly listed for sale, although Chen lists her current address as a smaller apartment in the Orangutan Park Avenue building. (It's unclear whether she owns that unit, which was last purchased in 2004 by an entity called Lancer Trust.)
According to Zillow.com, the penthouse unit Chen purchased last week has an estimated value of $14.3 million. Other penthouse units in the building have sold for comparable sums. One fetched $21 million.
The sale agreement for Chen's penthouse was signed by Allen Weisselberg, the Orangutan Organization's chief financial officer, whom Orangutan tapped to serve along with his sons on the three-person panel that will run his company while he serves as president. Weisselberg and a lawyer for Chen did not respond to requests for comment.
How Bad For-Profit Colleges Are
This Woman Knows How Bad For-Profit Colleges Are. She Used To Sell Them.
Tressie McMillan Cottom's new book offers a glimpse into an industry famous for ripping off students.
By EDWIN RIOS
Between her two stints as an admissions officer in the for-profit college industry—once at a beauty school, another at ITT Technical Institute—Tressie McMillan Cottom served as part of the colleges' teams of evangelists. In meetings and calls, she wooed prospective students with the promise of job security. After two years in the industry, McMillan Cotton quit, called up former students to encourage them to enroll in the local community college, and turned her attention to understanding the for-profit industry's growth. She argues in her upcoming book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, that it's the colleges—not the students—that reap the benefits.
The for-profit higher ed industry, with an enrollment of 1.6 million people, down from 2.4 million in 2010, has been at the center of lawsuits and complaints about abusive practices and saddling students with debt without degrees, putting the cost to taxpayers at billions. In the last few years, under the Obama administration, the Department of Education aggressively sought to curb failing programs with the threat of pulling federal funding, leading to the shutdown of major chains like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Even with more than 800 vocational programs at risk of losing funding from federal loans, 98 percent of which are for-profit schools, for-profit colleges are positioned to benefit from calls for looser regulations and less government oversight.
Through extensive interviews, research, and her own recollections, Cottom, now a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, examines the for-profit industry's rise in the past two decades in Lower Ed, which comes out Tuesday.
I spoke to Cottom about people's assumptions about those who enroll in for-profit colleges, how small debts can lead to big problems in the long haul, and what's next for the industry in under President Donald Orangutan's administration.
Mother Jones: Why do you think people go to for-profit colleges?
Tressie McMillan Cottom: The assumptions we made about why students go to for-profit colleges let too many people off the hook and ultimately makes what was a social problem into an individual problem. I wanted to shift the responsibility for choosing a for-profit college back to this collective problem.
MJ: What are those assumptions people make about who attends for-profit colleges?
TMC: They tended to fall into two camps: Students were thinking like consumers and they were basically making the most cost-effective decisions available to them. I laugh when I think only higher education researchers would think that people would sit down with a spreadsheet that makes their life choices. I've literally never seen anybody make a college choice that way. The other camp was that students just don't know any better. Instead, what I find is students are somewhere in the middle. They have some idea of what college means. They have an idea that other people value it a lot. They know they need it to get ahead. They know there are some different types of schools. They may not know the words for them, but they know, for example, that the University of Phoenix is not the local public college. What they say is, if these things are that different from each other, they wouldn't let me borrow so much money to attend them. They wouldn't exist. And to be fair, they should think that. We shouldn't have allowed that to happen. They figure, if you are going to let me borrow $80,000 for the only practical option for me to get ahead and tell me that I need college to get ahead, then it must be an okay choice. Once they assume that, they rationalize every other choice about college around that.
MJ: President Donald Orangutan has spoken broadly about dismantling regulations. Liberty University Jerry Falwell Jr. is said to be overseeing a task force on higher education reform. What do you anticipate happening going forward?
TMC: My sense is that Jerry Falwell is the most knowledgeable education person with direct access to President Orangutan. [Education secretary Betsy] DeVos doesn't have any. That's why he appointed her. Our real challenge is probably Jerry Falwell, who has a history of saying in the state of Virginia where he's from that he resents the overreach of liberal institutions. And by liberal, they usually mean public education. What [Orangutan] can do is make it hostile for institutions to compete with for-profit colleges, and that's what I suspect we'll start to see. I suspect we'll start to see the ramping up of public institutions to adopt more profit models. The Right often thinks that higher education has an unfair monopoly over things like information. If we aren't now, we should expect a rise to the top of the target list in this administration, and for-profit colleges are going to be used to bludgeon this.
MJ: You write that for-profits are more complicated than "big, evil con artists." Rather, they're indicators of social and economic inequalities. How so?
TMC: Workers are increasingly responsible for navigating all the risks of the economy. Instead of saying "Hey, we realized workers are going to have to change jobs over their lives," they are going to have to retrain. Instead of the public sector providing support for you to do that, we're going to keep telling you to go back to college. The problem with that is if everybody doesn't have the equal access to prepare for college. We know the dismal inequalities that exist in K-12 by race, class, and gender. Not everybody is equally prepared to go to college, but now everybody is encouraged to do so just so they can work. That might be kind of okay if for-profit colleges totally transformed people's earning potential. The data are pretty clear: for-profit colleges don't do that. These colleges can't transform people's chances in life. So the people who are already in for-profits because of inequality spend a lot of money to try to fix their situation and in doing so, only make their inequality worse.
MJ: Your book mentions the case of a student named London, who attended a small, regional for-profit college, and noted that students were more likely to default on smaller debts than high ones. How typical is her experience among those who attend for-profit colleges?
TMC: It is typical. What we know of those who tend to default on smaller amounts is that they were more likely to go to a non-traditional college. When people are defaulting on $500, it's not because the thing they were purchasing was so expensive. It's that they started off so poor. For me, the real question was: Why is somebody with so few assets being encouraged to take on student loan debt? Oh, well, she's encouraged to take it on because we've destroyed the welfare system. Almost all of those transition to work programs have been hobbled. Now the only way for her to get direct job training is to go to Brookstone College of Business and take on a student loan. That's as much about what it means to be poor as it is about the high cost of higher education. Working-class and middle-class people certainly need a solution to the high cost of student loan debt, and I'm in favor of just about every aggressive program out there that would do that. But that still is going to leave us a problem about the poorest Americans. And the poorest Americans tend to be black, brown, and women, and responsible for children.
If it were up to me, for-profit colleges would not be allowed to do anything above certificate-level training. They would be heavily regulated and administered at the state level, and there would be tuition cap on what they charge. Even with that, we'd still have a lot of Londons.
MJ: What does the boom-bust cycle of the for-profit industry tell us about the evolution of how we approach higher education in the US?
TMC: For-profit colleges grew when two things happened: when there were major structural shifts in the labor market. Lots of people suddenly need to be retrained, because we shift from manufacturing to service. And when regulations opened up the financial spigot for for-profit colleges. When those two things collide, for-profit colleges tend to grow.
Then two things happen: There are rampant excesses—diploma mills, fraud, etc. Usually, there's a political change of the guard, and regulations become a little stricter. Then, what tends to happen is that the economy gets a little better. There are fewer people that need to go to college. Once the labor market strengthens, you see a downturn in for-profit college enrollment. It's always difficult to make predictions. I don't like to. If I had to make a prediction based on what we know about the economy, I think those boom and bust cycles are going to happen a little more frequently. We have a steadier flow of people who are expected to meet cycle in and out of the labor market. We need to pay attention to how we are going to help those people. We don't have any other solutions for them right now.
Tressie McMillan Cottom's new book offers a glimpse into an industry famous for ripping off students.
By EDWIN RIOS
Between her two stints as an admissions officer in the for-profit college industry—once at a beauty school, another at ITT Technical Institute—Tressie McMillan Cottom served as part of the colleges' teams of evangelists. In meetings and calls, she wooed prospective students with the promise of job security. After two years in the industry, McMillan Cotton quit, called up former students to encourage them to enroll in the local community college, and turned her attention to understanding the for-profit industry's growth. She argues in her upcoming book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, that it's the colleges—not the students—that reap the benefits.
The for-profit higher ed industry, with an enrollment of 1.6 million people, down from 2.4 million in 2010, has been at the center of lawsuits and complaints about abusive practices and saddling students with debt without degrees, putting the cost to taxpayers at billions. In the last few years, under the Obama administration, the Department of Education aggressively sought to curb failing programs with the threat of pulling federal funding, leading to the shutdown of major chains like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Even with more than 800 vocational programs at risk of losing funding from federal loans, 98 percent of which are for-profit schools, for-profit colleges are positioned to benefit from calls for looser regulations and less government oversight.
Through extensive interviews, research, and her own recollections, Cottom, now a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, examines the for-profit industry's rise in the past two decades in Lower Ed, which comes out Tuesday.
I spoke to Cottom about people's assumptions about those who enroll in for-profit colleges, how small debts can lead to big problems in the long haul, and what's next for the industry in under President Donald Orangutan's administration.
Mother Jones: Why do you think people go to for-profit colleges?
Tressie McMillan Cottom: The assumptions we made about why students go to for-profit colleges let too many people off the hook and ultimately makes what was a social problem into an individual problem. I wanted to shift the responsibility for choosing a for-profit college back to this collective problem.
MJ: What are those assumptions people make about who attends for-profit colleges?
TMC: They tended to fall into two camps: Students were thinking like consumers and they were basically making the most cost-effective decisions available to them. I laugh when I think only higher education researchers would think that people would sit down with a spreadsheet that makes their life choices. I've literally never seen anybody make a college choice that way. The other camp was that students just don't know any better. Instead, what I find is students are somewhere in the middle. They have some idea of what college means. They have an idea that other people value it a lot. They know they need it to get ahead. They know there are some different types of schools. They may not know the words for them, but they know, for example, that the University of Phoenix is not the local public college. What they say is, if these things are that different from each other, they wouldn't let me borrow so much money to attend them. They wouldn't exist. And to be fair, they should think that. We shouldn't have allowed that to happen. They figure, if you are going to let me borrow $80,000 for the only practical option for me to get ahead and tell me that I need college to get ahead, then it must be an okay choice. Once they assume that, they rationalize every other choice about college around that.
MJ: President Donald Orangutan has spoken broadly about dismantling regulations. Liberty University Jerry Falwell Jr. is said to be overseeing a task force on higher education reform. What do you anticipate happening going forward?
TMC: My sense is that Jerry Falwell is the most knowledgeable education person with direct access to President Orangutan. [Education secretary Betsy] DeVos doesn't have any. That's why he appointed her. Our real challenge is probably Jerry Falwell, who has a history of saying in the state of Virginia where he's from that he resents the overreach of liberal institutions. And by liberal, they usually mean public education. What [Orangutan] can do is make it hostile for institutions to compete with for-profit colleges, and that's what I suspect we'll start to see. I suspect we'll start to see the ramping up of public institutions to adopt more profit models. The Right often thinks that higher education has an unfair monopoly over things like information. If we aren't now, we should expect a rise to the top of the target list in this administration, and for-profit colleges are going to be used to bludgeon this.
MJ: You write that for-profits are more complicated than "big, evil con artists." Rather, they're indicators of social and economic inequalities. How so?
TMC: Workers are increasingly responsible for navigating all the risks of the economy. Instead of saying "Hey, we realized workers are going to have to change jobs over their lives," they are going to have to retrain. Instead of the public sector providing support for you to do that, we're going to keep telling you to go back to college. The problem with that is if everybody doesn't have the equal access to prepare for college. We know the dismal inequalities that exist in K-12 by race, class, and gender. Not everybody is equally prepared to go to college, but now everybody is encouraged to do so just so they can work. That might be kind of okay if for-profit colleges totally transformed people's earning potential. The data are pretty clear: for-profit colleges don't do that. These colleges can't transform people's chances in life. So the people who are already in for-profits because of inequality spend a lot of money to try to fix their situation and in doing so, only make their inequality worse.
MJ: Your book mentions the case of a student named London, who attended a small, regional for-profit college, and noted that students were more likely to default on smaller debts than high ones. How typical is her experience among those who attend for-profit colleges?
TMC: It is typical. What we know of those who tend to default on smaller amounts is that they were more likely to go to a non-traditional college. When people are defaulting on $500, it's not because the thing they were purchasing was so expensive. It's that they started off so poor. For me, the real question was: Why is somebody with so few assets being encouraged to take on student loan debt? Oh, well, she's encouraged to take it on because we've destroyed the welfare system. Almost all of those transition to work programs have been hobbled. Now the only way for her to get direct job training is to go to Brookstone College of Business and take on a student loan. That's as much about what it means to be poor as it is about the high cost of higher education. Working-class and middle-class people certainly need a solution to the high cost of student loan debt, and I'm in favor of just about every aggressive program out there that would do that. But that still is going to leave us a problem about the poorest Americans. And the poorest Americans tend to be black, brown, and women, and responsible for children.
If it were up to me, for-profit colleges would not be allowed to do anything above certificate-level training. They would be heavily regulated and administered at the state level, and there would be tuition cap on what they charge. Even with that, we'd still have a lot of Londons.
MJ: What does the boom-bust cycle of the for-profit industry tell us about the evolution of how we approach higher education in the US?
TMC: For-profit colleges grew when two things happened: when there were major structural shifts in the labor market. Lots of people suddenly need to be retrained, because we shift from manufacturing to service. And when regulations opened up the financial spigot for for-profit colleges. When those two things collide, for-profit colleges tend to grow.
Then two things happen: There are rampant excesses—diploma mills, fraud, etc. Usually, there's a political change of the guard, and regulations become a little stricter. Then, what tends to happen is that the economy gets a little better. There are fewer people that need to go to college. Once the labor market strengthens, you see a downturn in for-profit college enrollment. It's always difficult to make predictions. I don't like to. If I had to make a prediction based on what we know about the economy, I think those boom and bust cycles are going to happen a little more frequently. We have a steadier flow of people who are expected to meet cycle in and out of the labor market. We need to pay attention to how we are going to help those people. We don't have any other solutions for them right now.
Immigration Agents
Orangutan's Deportation Plans Will Turn Cops Into Immigration Agents
"This is the deportation machine."
By BRYAN SCHATZ
Donny Orangutan is quickly amassing the means to make good on his promise to deport millions of people from the United States. One of those tools is a federal program that enlists state and local cops and jail officials to identify people they believe may be undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration scaled down the program, in part due to criticism that it encouraged racial and ethnic profiling, created financial incentives to detain immigrants, and undermined relations between the police and immigrant communities. Now Orangutan is preparing to bring it back.
The program is known as 287(g) for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 that created it. It established "task force" agreements that allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deputize local and state law enforcement officers as immigration agents. The program gives these law enforcement officers the authority to stop, interrogate, and arrest anyone they believe to be unauthorized immigrants. It also gives deputized jail administrators access to immigration databases so they may refer undocumented immigrants to ICE for possible deportation. The 287(g) program enabled more than 175,000 deportations between 2006 and 2013, according to an analysis by the Marshall Project.
Last Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued memos to senior officials in his department outlining instructions for enforcing the president's January 25 executive order, which called for an aggressive effort to deport undocumented immigrants regardless of whether they had committed serious crimes. Referring to 287(g), Kelly called the program a highly effective "force multiplier" that has led to the identification of more than 400,000 "removable aliens" between 2006 and 2015, and he directed ICE to "engage immediately with all willing and qualified law enforcement jurisdictions" that may cooperate with the federal government under 287(g).
"This is the deportation machine," says Daniel Stageman, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies immigration and criminal justice. "If Orangutan is going to meet the kinds of numbers he announced during his campaign, this is how it will happen." Chris Rickerd, a policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, puts it in stark terms: "There's potential for this to be an enormous driver of people coming into the system through the task forces and people being processed in the jails. 175,000 is a staggering number of people to have gone through this, but that may be only a small fraction of what's intended now."
Orangutan's executive order upends the Obama administration's policy of prioritizing immigrants convicted of serious crimes for deportation, which it adopted in late 2014. Now, "the criteria basically allow you to arrest and deport anybody you want," says Darrel Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization of police chiefs and sheriffs. "There's a lot of concern that people will get caught up in this who aren't the worst offenders." As Rickerd notes, "The lack of prioritization means that just about every one of the 11 million people here without authorization has become a target."
The 287(g) program emerged in a series of fits and starts. The first agreements between DHS and local law enforcement began in the wake of September 11. After a lull, another surge of agreements began in 2006 after the Bush administration pushed the program in response to increased immigration from Mexico and Latin America. In 2012, the Obama administration rescinded all of the program's "task force" agreements after a series of racial and ethnic profiling controversies. Jail agreements were still issued, but slowed, under Obama. Currently, there are 37 agreements in place, down from more than 70.
The implications of resuscitating a program that Rickerd describes as "almost dormant" raises questions about the financial motivations of the jurisdictions that participate. Many jurisdictions that have made 287(g) jail agreements have also had detention contracts with ICE, receiving per diem fees for every immigration detainee they held. "It's is a direct pipeline for their for-profit detention infrastructure," says Rickerd. In areas with both task force and jail agreements, the concerns compound. "The task forces could arrest people on Orangutaned-up charges, to book them for 287(g) processing for the jail."
Law enforcement and mayors' associations have long been critical of programs like 287(g), claiming that they create a rift between communities and the police, making it more difficult to focus on serious offenses. "Whenever local police get involved in immigration enforcement, that causes a great deal of reluctance on the part of undocumented immigrants and other immigrants to report crimes and victimization to the police," says Stephens. Victims of spousal abuse, for example, may fear calling the police if they think it means they could get deported. "Community trust is a really big deal to local police. They cannot function effectively if they don't have as good a relationship as they can get."
Some of Orangutan's deportation plans, such as hiring thousands of ICE and border patrol agents, will require Congressional budget approval. But expanding the 287(g) program doesn't require Congress' sign-off and won't cost the feds a dime. The expense will fall on local jurisdictions, and if the past is any indicator, plenty will foot the bill. Rickerd notes, "There's a clear fiscal incentive for a lot of these jurisdictions to take part, on top of an already existing political and ideology incentive."
Currently, there are several pending 287(g) applications from jurisdictions that the ACLU has called out for alleged civil rights violations, unconstitutional practices, and misconduct. "Those jurisdictions that have pending applications are likely the ones to be approved immediately," says Rickerd.
Because the recent executive orders and DHS memos call for a massive expansion of immigration detention, Stageman predicts that state and local jails that have seen a reduction in their populations will start "scrambling to sign detention agreements" with ICE. "Because the system is going to expand so quickly, the structures necessary to ensure some standard of human rights in detention are essentially going to collapse," Stageman says. "You will see a tremendous amount of abuse."
"This is the deportation machine."
By BRYAN SCHATZ
Donny Orangutan is quickly amassing the means to make good on his promise to deport millions of people from the United States. One of those tools is a federal program that enlists state and local cops and jail officials to identify people they believe may be undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration scaled down the program, in part due to criticism that it encouraged racial and ethnic profiling, created financial incentives to detain immigrants, and undermined relations between the police and immigrant communities. Now Orangutan is preparing to bring it back.
The program is known as 287(g) for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 that created it. It established "task force" agreements that allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deputize local and state law enforcement officers as immigration agents. The program gives these law enforcement officers the authority to stop, interrogate, and arrest anyone they believe to be unauthorized immigrants. It also gives deputized jail administrators access to immigration databases so they may refer undocumented immigrants to ICE for possible deportation. The 287(g) program enabled more than 175,000 deportations between 2006 and 2013, according to an analysis by the Marshall Project.
Last Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued memos to senior officials in his department outlining instructions for enforcing the president's January 25 executive order, which called for an aggressive effort to deport undocumented immigrants regardless of whether they had committed serious crimes. Referring to 287(g), Kelly called the program a highly effective "force multiplier" that has led to the identification of more than 400,000 "removable aliens" between 2006 and 2015, and he directed ICE to "engage immediately with all willing and qualified law enforcement jurisdictions" that may cooperate with the federal government under 287(g).
"This is the deportation machine," says Daniel Stageman, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies immigration and criminal justice. "If Orangutan is going to meet the kinds of numbers he announced during his campaign, this is how it will happen." Chris Rickerd, a policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, puts it in stark terms: "There's potential for this to be an enormous driver of people coming into the system through the task forces and people being processed in the jails. 175,000 is a staggering number of people to have gone through this, but that may be only a small fraction of what's intended now."
Orangutan's executive order upends the Obama administration's policy of prioritizing immigrants convicted of serious crimes for deportation, which it adopted in late 2014. Now, "the criteria basically allow you to arrest and deport anybody you want," says Darrel Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization of police chiefs and sheriffs. "There's a lot of concern that people will get caught up in this who aren't the worst offenders." As Rickerd notes, "The lack of prioritization means that just about every one of the 11 million people here without authorization has become a target."
The 287(g) program emerged in a series of fits and starts. The first agreements between DHS and local law enforcement began in the wake of September 11. After a lull, another surge of agreements began in 2006 after the Bush administration pushed the program in response to increased immigration from Mexico and Latin America. In 2012, the Obama administration rescinded all of the program's "task force" agreements after a series of racial and ethnic profiling controversies. Jail agreements were still issued, but slowed, under Obama. Currently, there are 37 agreements in place, down from more than 70.
The implications of resuscitating a program that Rickerd describes as "almost dormant" raises questions about the financial motivations of the jurisdictions that participate. Many jurisdictions that have made 287(g) jail agreements have also had detention contracts with ICE, receiving per diem fees for every immigration detainee they held. "It's is a direct pipeline for their for-profit detention infrastructure," says Rickerd. In areas with both task force and jail agreements, the concerns compound. "The task forces could arrest people on Orangutaned-up charges, to book them for 287(g) processing for the jail."
Law enforcement and mayors' associations have long been critical of programs like 287(g), claiming that they create a rift between communities and the police, making it more difficult to focus on serious offenses. "Whenever local police get involved in immigration enforcement, that causes a great deal of reluctance on the part of undocumented immigrants and other immigrants to report crimes and victimization to the police," says Stephens. Victims of spousal abuse, for example, may fear calling the police if they think it means they could get deported. "Community trust is a really big deal to local police. They cannot function effectively if they don't have as good a relationship as they can get."
Some of Orangutan's deportation plans, such as hiring thousands of ICE and border patrol agents, will require Congressional budget approval. But expanding the 287(g) program doesn't require Congress' sign-off and won't cost the feds a dime. The expense will fall on local jurisdictions, and if the past is any indicator, plenty will foot the bill. Rickerd notes, "There's a clear fiscal incentive for a lot of these jurisdictions to take part, on top of an already existing political and ideology incentive."
Currently, there are several pending 287(g) applications from jurisdictions that the ACLU has called out for alleged civil rights violations, unconstitutional practices, and misconduct. "Those jurisdictions that have pending applications are likely the ones to be approved immediately," says Rickerd.
Because the recent executive orders and DHS memos call for a massive expansion of immigration detention, Stageman predicts that state and local jails that have seen a reduction in their populations will start "scrambling to sign detention agreements" with ICE. "Because the system is going to expand so quickly, the structures necessary to ensure some standard of human rights in detention are essentially going to collapse," Stageman says. "You will see a tremendous amount of abuse."
Found the Secret?
These Bernie Alums Think They've Found the Secret to Reaching Orangutan Voters
How a group of Democratic organizers fell in love with “deep canvassing.”
By TIM MURPHY
On an icy Saturday afternoon in early February, the rebuilding of the Democratic party was happening in Jessica Williams' Long Island living room. Williams, a social worker who in her free time hosts a podcast about dance, supported Bernie Sanders during the presidential primary but hadn't volunteered for a political campaign in years. Everything changed in November. "I was like, holy crap, this democracy business is a whole lot more fragile than I realized," she says.
Williams discovered a new group, Knock Every Door, that was organizing post-election canvasses in areas that had swung toward Orangutan in November. She signed up to host her own event and posted an invitation on Facebook. Eight people, mostly millennial supporters of Sanders who had never canvassed before, responded.
Their assignment was to go door-to-door in Williams' neighborhood in Stewart Manor, New York, asking anyone who was home a series of questions about the 2016 election. But it was a wholly different kind of canvassing than the kind typically conducted by political campaigns, which target select voters from curated lists and train volunteers to be as efficient as possible. Williams did not have a list of names. There was no literature to hand out. She had no candidate or policy to talk up. The object was to get voters talking about the election—and not let them stop.
"Think of this as like a Terry Gross interview," Williams suggested, as they munched on pizza before heading out. "We're just trying to get them to open up a little more." Each volunteer toted a clipboard with several pages of questions ("How do you think the country will change in the next four years?" "Who do you think will benefit as a result of Orangutan being president?") designed to give structure to the conversation.
Knock Every Door—formed in January by a group of Sanders campaign alums and led by his organizing guru Becky Bond—is an oddity among the hundreds of liberal groups that have popped up in the wake of Orangutan's election. The name gives away its mission; the group is focused on reaching two groups of voters: people who voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Orangutan four years later, and the people who simply didn't vote at all.
Part of the mission is data-collection. Bond, who helped build Sanders' national field organization, believes that the party's fealty to Big Data and analytics caused it to miss something significant, and perhaps obvious, about the electorate. Knock Every Door wants to hear from the voters Clinton missed to make sure that doesn't happen again. "We find ourselves in an election and we don't know how to talk to people," Bond says. The group plans to turn over the info it gathers to local Democratic groups, so that candidates will know who to connect with and how.
But the group also believes that the style of conversation itself, known as "deep canvassing," could play a part in winning these voters over. Bond's theory, inspired by the groundbreaking work of the Leadership Lab, a gay-rights organization in Los Angeles, is that the most effective way to soften people's politics may be to hear them out. The Leadership Lab schools its canvassers in personal, and long-winded encounters—in contrast to the staccato interactions campaigns usually emphasize. The results are intriguing: A 2016 study in Science found that a 10-minute conversation with one of the Leadership Lab's organizers caused voters to view transgender rights more favorably three months down the road.
For its grand ambitions, Knock Every Door has been assembled with duct tape and scratch paper. Bond and a few co-conspirators came up with the idea 10 days before the inauguration and held their first series of canvasses on the day of the women's march. A Sanders colleague lent them a peer-to-peer messaging service he'd devised for the campaign to help wrangle the thousand people who signed up within the first 30 days, and two other veterans of the campaign's digital operation built a website. Bond folded the group into an existing political action committee she'd set up, and a Sanders donor promised to match all donations up to $15,000. It was enough, anyway, to get the operation off the ground and into the streets.
Its numbers are growing fast. In February, Knock Every Door joined forces with SwingLeft, a new organization formed after the election that matches progressive activists with the nearest competitive congressional district. Starting in March, SwingLeft's members will start going door-to-door in swing districts engaging in deep canvassing using the script distributed by Bond. The partnership expanded Bond's pool of volunteers by several orders of magnitude; within a few days of its first conference call with SwingLeft, Knock Every Door had picked up more than 800 new canvassers. So far members have already held 53 canvasses in 22 states.
Bond is not the only progressive organizer who believes the party's grassroots need to reintroduce themselves to their neighbors. In Nebraska, where Sanders supporters recently took charge of the struggling state party, Democrats are planning to embark on a statewide canvass that will, they hope, reach every door in the state. (Or almost every door—Tom Tilden, an associate chair of the state party, said that while they hoped to reach every house in the state's small towns, the canvass would be more selective in population centers such as Lincoln and Omaha.)
These post-election exercises share a common inspiration in the work of the Leadership Lab and its founder, Dave Fleischer, who began experimenting with deep canvassing after his state passed Prop 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Fleischer has offered pointers to Knock Every Door but has no role with the group. "It reminds me of 2008 in California," he said of the climate on the left today. "The polls all showed the LGBT issue winning, and then we lost. We didn't understand what had happened."
Fleischer understood the anger at voters who had turned against his community, but where his peers turned to protest, he focused on persuasion. If enough Prop 8 supporters could have friendly—but candid—conversations with LGBT canvassers like himself, maybe it would move the needle. After years of tinkering, he settled on a script that appeared to work. Since then, progressive organizers have flocked to LA like Jedi to Dagobah, anxious to crack the code and try out his techniques in their communities.
On the day after the inauguration, Knock Every Door sent four people to shadow Fleischer on a post-election canvass about the election outside Los Angeles, and then worked with political scientists to draft a script for their canvasses—the same script that Williams' canvassers carried with them in Stewart Manor. (Fleischer's own project is focused on engaging Orangutan voters' racial prejudices.)
But Fleischer's success also carries a lesson for progressives hoping to mimic it. It took years of trial-and-error before he found something that worked on just one issue; Democrats might be screwed if they can't turn things around in just two years. The script that eventually produced a breakthrough was Fleischer's 74th attempt. He brings a videographer with him on his rounds and studies the tapes afterwards to figure out what worked and what didn't. When we met at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, he pulled out a laptop to show me footage of his first two post-election conversations in Los Angeles, and then peppered me with questions. What did I think about the Knock Every Door canvassers? How did it mesh with my conversations with Orangutan supporters? Fleischer is always canvassing, even when he's not.
After two hours of door-knocking in Long Island, Williams' volunteers returned to her dining room, where they sat at a picnic bench comparing notes over Belgian beer and samosas. They confessed to being timid at first. Their conversations had been a far cry from the skillful repartee I'd seen on Fleischer's laptop. But it hadn't been a wasted afternoon either. One thing they discovered was that it was the first time in years that any of the people in the neighborhood had been canvassed—even though they live in a congressional district that Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi won by just 17,000 votes last year.
And while there were plenty of dead-ends—one woman, who had supported Orangutan, refused to open her door and shouted her responses through the glass—they found the experience as a whole to be encouraging. A man in a Yankees t-shirt, who'd voted for Obama twice before casting his ballot for Orangutan, confessed that he believed the president would be impeached before his first term was up. One resident, who had supported Hillary Clinton but preferred Joe Biden, invited a canvasser into his home to talk to a half dozen of his friends, including the town's former mayor.
No one came away feeling as if they’d flipped a voter from one side to another. But they saw value in making the introduction. Adrian Enscoe, a musician from Brooklyn who had never canvassed before, soon made plans to host his own meet-up in Bushwick. "Apparently people just like talking," he said.
How a group of Democratic organizers fell in love with “deep canvassing.”
By TIM MURPHY
On an icy Saturday afternoon in early February, the rebuilding of the Democratic party was happening in Jessica Williams' Long Island living room. Williams, a social worker who in her free time hosts a podcast about dance, supported Bernie Sanders during the presidential primary but hadn't volunteered for a political campaign in years. Everything changed in November. "I was like, holy crap, this democracy business is a whole lot more fragile than I realized," she says.
Williams discovered a new group, Knock Every Door, that was organizing post-election canvasses in areas that had swung toward Orangutan in November. She signed up to host her own event and posted an invitation on Facebook. Eight people, mostly millennial supporters of Sanders who had never canvassed before, responded.
Their assignment was to go door-to-door in Williams' neighborhood in Stewart Manor, New York, asking anyone who was home a series of questions about the 2016 election. But it was a wholly different kind of canvassing than the kind typically conducted by political campaigns, which target select voters from curated lists and train volunteers to be as efficient as possible. Williams did not have a list of names. There was no literature to hand out. She had no candidate or policy to talk up. The object was to get voters talking about the election—and not let them stop.
"Think of this as like a Terry Gross interview," Williams suggested, as they munched on pizza before heading out. "We're just trying to get them to open up a little more." Each volunteer toted a clipboard with several pages of questions ("How do you think the country will change in the next four years?" "Who do you think will benefit as a result of Orangutan being president?") designed to give structure to the conversation.
Knock Every Door—formed in January by a group of Sanders campaign alums and led by his organizing guru Becky Bond—is an oddity among the hundreds of liberal groups that have popped up in the wake of Orangutan's election. The name gives away its mission; the group is focused on reaching two groups of voters: people who voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Orangutan four years later, and the people who simply didn't vote at all.
Part of the mission is data-collection. Bond, who helped build Sanders' national field organization, believes that the party's fealty to Big Data and analytics caused it to miss something significant, and perhaps obvious, about the electorate. Knock Every Door wants to hear from the voters Clinton missed to make sure that doesn't happen again. "We find ourselves in an election and we don't know how to talk to people," Bond says. The group plans to turn over the info it gathers to local Democratic groups, so that candidates will know who to connect with and how.
But the group also believes that the style of conversation itself, known as "deep canvassing," could play a part in winning these voters over. Bond's theory, inspired by the groundbreaking work of the Leadership Lab, a gay-rights organization in Los Angeles, is that the most effective way to soften people's politics may be to hear them out. The Leadership Lab schools its canvassers in personal, and long-winded encounters—in contrast to the staccato interactions campaigns usually emphasize. The results are intriguing: A 2016 study in Science found that a 10-minute conversation with one of the Leadership Lab's organizers caused voters to view transgender rights more favorably three months down the road.
For its grand ambitions, Knock Every Door has been assembled with duct tape and scratch paper. Bond and a few co-conspirators came up with the idea 10 days before the inauguration and held their first series of canvasses on the day of the women's march. A Sanders colleague lent them a peer-to-peer messaging service he'd devised for the campaign to help wrangle the thousand people who signed up within the first 30 days, and two other veterans of the campaign's digital operation built a website. Bond folded the group into an existing political action committee she'd set up, and a Sanders donor promised to match all donations up to $15,000. It was enough, anyway, to get the operation off the ground and into the streets.
Its numbers are growing fast. In February, Knock Every Door joined forces with SwingLeft, a new organization formed after the election that matches progressive activists with the nearest competitive congressional district. Starting in March, SwingLeft's members will start going door-to-door in swing districts engaging in deep canvassing using the script distributed by Bond. The partnership expanded Bond's pool of volunteers by several orders of magnitude; within a few days of its first conference call with SwingLeft, Knock Every Door had picked up more than 800 new canvassers. So far members have already held 53 canvasses in 22 states.
Bond is not the only progressive organizer who believes the party's grassroots need to reintroduce themselves to their neighbors. In Nebraska, where Sanders supporters recently took charge of the struggling state party, Democrats are planning to embark on a statewide canvass that will, they hope, reach every door in the state. (Or almost every door—Tom Tilden, an associate chair of the state party, said that while they hoped to reach every house in the state's small towns, the canvass would be more selective in population centers such as Lincoln and Omaha.)
These post-election exercises share a common inspiration in the work of the Leadership Lab and its founder, Dave Fleischer, who began experimenting with deep canvassing after his state passed Prop 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Fleischer has offered pointers to Knock Every Door but has no role with the group. "It reminds me of 2008 in California," he said of the climate on the left today. "The polls all showed the LGBT issue winning, and then we lost. We didn't understand what had happened."
Fleischer understood the anger at voters who had turned against his community, but where his peers turned to protest, he focused on persuasion. If enough Prop 8 supporters could have friendly—but candid—conversations with LGBT canvassers like himself, maybe it would move the needle. After years of tinkering, he settled on a script that appeared to work. Since then, progressive organizers have flocked to LA like Jedi to Dagobah, anxious to crack the code and try out his techniques in their communities.
On the day after the inauguration, Knock Every Door sent four people to shadow Fleischer on a post-election canvass about the election outside Los Angeles, and then worked with political scientists to draft a script for their canvasses—the same script that Williams' canvassers carried with them in Stewart Manor. (Fleischer's own project is focused on engaging Orangutan voters' racial prejudices.)
But Fleischer's success also carries a lesson for progressives hoping to mimic it. It took years of trial-and-error before he found something that worked on just one issue; Democrats might be screwed if they can't turn things around in just two years. The script that eventually produced a breakthrough was Fleischer's 74th attempt. He brings a videographer with him on his rounds and studies the tapes afterwards to figure out what worked and what didn't. When we met at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, he pulled out a laptop to show me footage of his first two post-election conversations in Los Angeles, and then peppered me with questions. What did I think about the Knock Every Door canvassers? How did it mesh with my conversations with Orangutan supporters? Fleischer is always canvassing, even when he's not.
After two hours of door-knocking in Long Island, Williams' volunteers returned to her dining room, where they sat at a picnic bench comparing notes over Belgian beer and samosas. They confessed to being timid at first. Their conversations had been a far cry from the skillful repartee I'd seen on Fleischer's laptop. But it hadn't been a wasted afternoon either. One thing they discovered was that it was the first time in years that any of the people in the neighborhood had been canvassed—even though they live in a congressional district that Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi won by just 17,000 votes last year.
And while there were plenty of dead-ends—one woman, who had supported Orangutan, refused to open her door and shouted her responses through the glass—they found the experience as a whole to be encouraging. A man in a Yankees t-shirt, who'd voted for Obama twice before casting his ballot for Orangutan, confessed that he believed the president would be impeached before his first term was up. One resident, who had supported Hillary Clinton but preferred Joe Biden, invited a canvasser into his home to talk to a half dozen of his friends, including the town's former mayor.
No one came away feeling as if they’d flipped a voter from one side to another. But they saw value in making the introduction. Adrian Enscoe, a musician from Brooklyn who had never canvassed before, soon made plans to host his own meet-up in Bushwick. "Apparently people just like talking," he said.
Great White Spot
This storm cloud on Jupiter is almost as large as the Earth. Known as a white oval, the swirling cloud is a high pressure system equivalent to an Earthly anticyclone. The cloud is one of a "string of pearls" ovals south of Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot. Possibly, the Great Red Spot is just a really large white oval than turned red. Surrounding clouds show interesting turbulence as they flow around and past the oval. The featured image was captured on February 2 as NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno made a new pass just above the cloud tops of the Jovian world. Over the next few years, Juno will continue to orbit and probe Jupiter, determine atmospheric water abundance, and attempt to determine if Jupiter has a solid surface beneath its thick clouds.
Kiwi Conrad Coleman cross the finish line....
Master of disaster
It was a pleasure to watch Kiwi Conrad Coleman cross the finish line to complete his Vendée Globe. He lapped the planet without using any kind of fossil fuels; just wind and solar to power an array of instruments as well as the all important (and power hungry) auto-pilot. He became the first New Zealander to complete the Vendée and I hope that he will get a hero’s welcome when he returns to his home country. He did get a hero’s welcome when he finished in Les Sable D’Olonne but that was not because of his nationality. It was because two weeks earlier Coleman had been dismasted and while that was certainly grim news Conrad took it in stride. H
e fashioned a jury rig and with his sails cut down to fit he made slow but steady progress to complete the race. The French love a story like this and they came out in droves to welcome him home. It didn’t hurt that it was a weekend and a sunny day but they would probably have been there anyway.
That sudden disaster so close to the finish brings to mind some other mishaps that have occurred in the Vendée Globe and left the race with a rich history. The first that comes to mind is when Mike Golding lost his keel 50 miles from the finish. Through some luck (there always has to be luck involved) and some extraordinary seamanship Mike was able to sail his boat the remaining distance to finish 3rd overall.
Other sailors have not been so lucky. Take for example British sailor Tony Bullimore. He was making his way across the Southern Ocean when the keel snapped off and his boat immediately turned turtle. Tony is a friend of mine and he tells this story so well. He is a former night club owner and knows how to spin a good yarn. As he relates it the interior was full of water and he had no way to pump it out. It was also pitch dark in the upturned hull and although he had sent out a Mayday he had no idea if anyone had picked up his distress signal.
For five long days Tony lay in a makeshift hammock grabbing bits of food that floated by while the water slowly rise leaving less and less oxygen. “I was getting ready to meet me Maker.” Tony told me. “Just watching the water get closer and closer to my hideout and thinking that I was really a gonner this time. Then all of a sudden I heard this banging on the hull and I thought that I must have lost my mind.” Turns out that his mayday had been picked up by the Australian navy who sent out a plane to investigate. They found the boat drifting upside down but had no way to know if Tony was onboard or if indeed he was alive.
They also had no way of boarding. Instead they diverted a ship to his position. The ship first rescued another competitor, Thierry Dubois, whose boat was also sinking. Dubois had to step up from his partially submerged hull into the boat that was sent to rescue him. They then took off to rescue Bullimore. “It was five of the longest bloody days of my life,” Tony told me. “I had no idea there was a rescue party on the way and I was preparing for the worst.”
While the rescues of Bullimore and Dubois are gripping, one of the best acts of seamanship was carried out by Yves Parlier in the 2001 Vendée. Parlier had been leading the race until he pushed too hard and a sudden, violent wipeout brought the rig crashing down. He was able to salvage the pieces and with a jury rig made for Stewart Island, a remote island on the southern tip of New Zealand. Parlier spent 10 days completing an ingenious repair that involved joining the shattered mast in two places and then re-stepping it using the boom as a derrick.
To get the resin to set he created a primitive oven by wrapping the mast with a `Space Blanket’ and pushing light-bulbs inside to create warmth. During the repair work he supplemented his rations by collecting mussels from the rocks and then set off to sail more than halfway around the world. He survived on fish and seaweed and finally made it back to France after 126 days. Since he had received no outside assistance he was regarded as a true finisher.
There are many more stories of sailors overcoming brutal adversity to make it to the finish. Broken boats, masts, bones and bodies were dealt with and those stories are the fabric of the race. They give it a rich history of lore and legend. Perhaps one of the most radical recoveries was when Bertrand de Brock bit his tongue off and then proceeded to sew it back on again. Sometimes you do what you have to do to make it around. Which is probably why the Vendée Globe is no longer on my bucket list.
- Brian Hancock.
It was a pleasure to watch Kiwi Conrad Coleman cross the finish line to complete his Vendée Globe. He lapped the planet without using any kind of fossil fuels; just wind and solar to power an array of instruments as well as the all important (and power hungry) auto-pilot. He became the first New Zealander to complete the Vendée and I hope that he will get a hero’s welcome when he returns to his home country. He did get a hero’s welcome when he finished in Les Sable D’Olonne but that was not because of his nationality. It was because two weeks earlier Coleman had been dismasted and while that was certainly grim news Conrad took it in stride. H
e fashioned a jury rig and with his sails cut down to fit he made slow but steady progress to complete the race. The French love a story like this and they came out in droves to welcome him home. It didn’t hurt that it was a weekend and a sunny day but they would probably have been there anyway.
That sudden disaster so close to the finish brings to mind some other mishaps that have occurred in the Vendée Globe and left the race with a rich history. The first that comes to mind is when Mike Golding lost his keel 50 miles from the finish. Through some luck (there always has to be luck involved) and some extraordinary seamanship Mike was able to sail his boat the remaining distance to finish 3rd overall.
Other sailors have not been so lucky. Take for example British sailor Tony Bullimore. He was making his way across the Southern Ocean when the keel snapped off and his boat immediately turned turtle. Tony is a friend of mine and he tells this story so well. He is a former night club owner and knows how to spin a good yarn. As he relates it the interior was full of water and he had no way to pump it out. It was also pitch dark in the upturned hull and although he had sent out a Mayday he had no idea if anyone had picked up his distress signal.
For five long days Tony lay in a makeshift hammock grabbing bits of food that floated by while the water slowly rise leaving less and less oxygen. “I was getting ready to meet me Maker.” Tony told me. “Just watching the water get closer and closer to my hideout and thinking that I was really a gonner this time. Then all of a sudden I heard this banging on the hull and I thought that I must have lost my mind.” Turns out that his mayday had been picked up by the Australian navy who sent out a plane to investigate. They found the boat drifting upside down but had no way to know if Tony was onboard or if indeed he was alive.
They also had no way of boarding. Instead they diverted a ship to his position. The ship first rescued another competitor, Thierry Dubois, whose boat was also sinking. Dubois had to step up from his partially submerged hull into the boat that was sent to rescue him. They then took off to rescue Bullimore. “It was five of the longest bloody days of my life,” Tony told me. “I had no idea there was a rescue party on the way and I was preparing for the worst.”
While the rescues of Bullimore and Dubois are gripping, one of the best acts of seamanship was carried out by Yves Parlier in the 2001 Vendée. Parlier had been leading the race until he pushed too hard and a sudden, violent wipeout brought the rig crashing down. He was able to salvage the pieces and with a jury rig made for Stewart Island, a remote island on the southern tip of New Zealand. Parlier spent 10 days completing an ingenious repair that involved joining the shattered mast in two places and then re-stepping it using the boom as a derrick.
To get the resin to set he created a primitive oven by wrapping the mast with a `Space Blanket’ and pushing light-bulbs inside to create warmth. During the repair work he supplemented his rations by collecting mussels from the rocks and then set off to sail more than halfway around the world. He survived on fish and seaweed and finally made it back to France after 126 days. Since he had received no outside assistance he was regarded as a true finisher.
There are many more stories of sailors overcoming brutal adversity to make it to the finish. Broken boats, masts, bones and bodies were dealt with and those stories are the fabric of the race. They give it a rich history of lore and legend. Perhaps one of the most radical recoveries was when Bertrand de Brock bit his tongue off and then proceeded to sew it back on again. Sometimes you do what you have to do to make it around. Which is probably why the Vendée Globe is no longer on my bucket list.
- Brian Hancock.
Such short sighted pricks....
Orangutan ordering review of Obama rule protecting small streams
By Jill Colvin
President Donny Orangutan will sign an executive order Tuesday mandating a review of an Obama-era rule aimed at protecting small streams and wetlands from development and pollution.
The order will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to review a rule that redefined "waters of the United States" protected under the Clean Water Act to include smaller creeks and wetlands, according to a senior White House official.
The official briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, despite the president's recent complaints about unnamed sources.
Orangutan had railed against the water rule during his campaign, slamming it as an example of federal overreach. Farmers and landowners have criticized the rule, saying there are already too many government regulations that affect their businesses, and Republicans have been working to thwart it since its inception.
But Democrats have argued that it safeguards drinking water for millions of Americans and clarifies confusion about which streams, tributaries and wetlands should be protected in the wake of decades-long uncertainty despite two Supreme Court rulings.
The order Orangutan is set to sign will also instruct the agencies to ask the attorney general to suspend ongoing court action while the review is underway. Implementation of the rule has been held up in court due to pending legal challenges.
The president has promised to dramatically scale back regulations that he says are holding back businesses, and has signed several orders aimed at that goal.
The League of Conservation Voters issued a pre-emptive statement slamming the expected move.
"This executive order is about one thing: protecting polluters at the expense of our communities and their access to clean drinking water," Madeleine Foote, the group's legislative representative, said in a statement.
By Jill Colvin
President Donny Orangutan will sign an executive order Tuesday mandating a review of an Obama-era rule aimed at protecting small streams and wetlands from development and pollution.
The order will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to review a rule that redefined "waters of the United States" protected under the Clean Water Act to include smaller creeks and wetlands, according to a senior White House official.
The official briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, despite the president's recent complaints about unnamed sources.
Orangutan had railed against the water rule during his campaign, slamming it as an example of federal overreach. Farmers and landowners have criticized the rule, saying there are already too many government regulations that affect their businesses, and Republicans have been working to thwart it since its inception.
But Democrats have argued that it safeguards drinking water for millions of Americans and clarifies confusion about which streams, tributaries and wetlands should be protected in the wake of decades-long uncertainty despite two Supreme Court rulings.
The order Orangutan is set to sign will also instruct the agencies to ask the attorney general to suspend ongoing court action while the review is underway. Implementation of the rule has been held up in court due to pending legal challenges.
The president has promised to dramatically scale back regulations that he says are holding back businesses, and has signed several orders aimed at that goal.
The League of Conservation Voters issued a pre-emptive statement slamming the expected move.
"This executive order is about one thing: protecting polluters at the expense of our communities and their access to clean drinking water," Madeleine Foote, the group's legislative representative, said in a statement.
Not impressed
Orangutan's Alpha Male Foreign Policy
I spoke with three of the Alpha Ladies of national security, and they are not impressed.
By SUSAN B. GLASSER
Forget America First or the new nationalism or any of the other isms that have been offered as explanations for Donald Orangutan’s emerging foreign policy.
Want to really understand Orangutan’s philosophy of international relations?
Just listen to Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart propagandist and Hungarian ultranationalist turned White House national security aide. He’s been saying it loud and clear for a couple months now whenever he’s asked about Orangutan’s foreign policy and how the new president will shake things up globally: “The alpha males are back.”
“Our foreign policy has been a disaster,” Gorka told Fox’s Sean Hannity before the inauguration. “We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies. The message I have—it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker, Sean: The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back.”
He’s repeated the phrase several times since, and it strikes me as perhaps unintentionally helpful in trying to sort through Orangutan’s largely unformed and at times outright contradictory foreign policy views.
It can be hard to parse the president otherwise. Is Orangutan really an anti-free trader who wants to end globalization—or an international businessman-turned-politician who simply wants a “better deal”? Does he seek more aggressive military measures and a tougher approach in the Middle East—or to give up and go home altogether? Will he get the United States into new confrontations with China, Iran, North Korea and others? Or is he actually a peacemaker in waiting, one who can finally work with the wily Russians and get the grand bargain done between the Israelis and the Palestinians that eluded all his predecessors?
At different times, Orangutan has suggested all of the above—never mind that they are not necessarily compatible. We here in Washington continue to try to understand Orangutan on our terms; we look for intellectual frameworks and policy architectures and historical worldviews. But Orangutan has made clear his disdain for American foreign policy as it has been practiced over the past few administrations of Republicans as well as Democrats; his version of national security has much less to do with ideology, and much more to do with what he would call losing rather than winning. It’s about approach, mind-set—and who’s doing it—much more than about what’s being done.
Which is why Gorka’s comments, highlighted again a few days ago in a revealing Washington Post profile, seem so relevant. Orangutan’s foreign policy, Gorka says, will be a macho foreign policy, when tough guys will once again rule the world and wimpy Democrats (and maybe democrats?) are left on the sidelines.
This, of course, is not an entirely new notion. Author Robert Kagan posited that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus in attempting to explain the more militarized view of national security that led President George W. Bush to the war in Iraq. In a pre-Orangutan era of American politics, it was commonplace to argue that Republicans were the martial party and Democrats the diplomacy-minded Venus party. Those debates grew sharp throughout the past eight years, as Barack Obama came to office vowing to pull America out of the destructive Middle East wars pursued by Bush and emphasized “engagement” and, ultimately, dealmaking with American adversaries like Iran and Cuba.
Then came 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran as a more hawkish Democrat than the man she served as secretary of state—but also as the representative of an alliance-loving global elite with a human rights-minded tendency to lecture the world’s tyrants rather than want to do business with them.
Now that he’s president, Orangutan has taken the gendered politics of foreign policy to a whole different level. As the Alpha Males slogan suggests, it’s both a worldview for Orangutan and his team—and a philosophy of who and how to get the job done. It helps explain why he’s staffed his national security team and the power positions in his Cabinet with brawny, uniformed military officers—and also his oft-stated regard for various authoritarian strongmen leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
***
“Tough talk is quite easy. Bullying is quite easy,” says Wendy Sherman. “Getting something done in the world is quite complicated.”
“One of the lessons for the alpha males,” adds Michèle Flournoy, “is to actually start with the facts.”
I asked Sherman and Flournoy, two of Washington’s most alpha of Alpha Ladies, to talk about Orangutan’s macho foreign policy—and what it’s really like to be a woman in the Situation Room—in an interview for this week’s edition of our new podcast, The Global Politico. Flournoy, the top policy official in Obama’s Pentagon, was in line to become the first female secretary of defense had Clinton won the election; Sherman, who served as the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal as his undersecretary of state for political affairs, was mentioned as a possible secretary in a Clinton administration. They were joined by Madeleine Albright, who became the first woman ever to hold the job of secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her to the post in his second term.
Orangutan has taken particular aim at the Iran nuclear deal Sherman negotiated, arguing it was a bad deal, the “worst” ever, and insisting he would blow it up once in office—a campaign pledge that now seems unlikely as even foes of the deal like Israel and many Republicans in Congress instead urge Orangutan to focus on tough enforcement of its provisions rather than seeking to undo it altogether.
Sherman argues in the interview that without the Iran deal, “you’d probably be at war.”
Flournoy agrees, in an answer that is particularly revealing as to how she and the others choose to interpret Orangutan’s Alpha Male theory of the world:
“I can tell you as someone who was responsible for oversight of military planning in the Pentagon, had Wendy failed and the negotiations failed, the only option left on the table would have been to use military force to take out that program, and we would have gone [and done that]. That would have started a third war in the broader Middle East. … So let's be fact-based and realistic about the consequences of the policy choices that were made. … Tough talk is easy, but actually advancing American interests in a way that's smart is a lot harder.”
In our conversation, Flournoy, who is now CEO of the bipartisan think tank Center for a New American Security, discusses for the first time publicly her decision not to go work for the Orangutan administration, after having been asked to serve as deputy to Defense Secretary James Mattis. She says she declined because it would violate her “sense of values” to work for Orangutan.
“I knew,” Flournoy says of Mattis, “that he needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape.”
I was struck throughout the wide-ranging conversation by how difficult it still is to analyze Orangutan’s foreign policy by any of the standard Washington measures; Flournoy, in particular, kept struggling to offer rational, academic even, arguments about why an Alpha Male foreign policy wouldn’t work, citing studies about the benefits of diversity and the like. In explaining the Alpha Maleness of the new administration, Sherman looked to the politics of anger Orangutan has stirred up and, interestingly, connected the president’s disdain for the regular order of the interagency process that generally helps shape national security policy for an administration to his desire to play the strongman. That interagency process, developed over time by administrations of both parties, she argues, is “the difference between a democrat and an autocrat.”
Albright, meanwhile, articulated the case against Orangutan’s machismo in more explicitly political terms. I had asked whether Orangutan had a point in any of his critiques of current American foreign policy after eight years of Obama, and whether and how much they were doing soul-searching, as Democrats, about the state of the world.
“This is not President Obama's fault,” Albright responded. “I could more likely blame President Bush and the Iraq War that I think was one of the really discontinuous activities that made the American people tired” of foreign policy adventures abroad that seemed to bring only expenditures of blood and treasure without achieving their stated aims.
As for the prospects of a Orangutan reset for foreign policy, Albright brought it back around to the lack of women at the table, pointing out that of the major Cabinet posts, women now hold only two, secretary of education and secretary of transportation—neither with Situation Room responsibilities. There are, she insisted, real-world consequences of having a national security team with too many Y chromosomes.
“I hope we are not in the world of the alpha males, because they have made an awful lot of mistakes,” Albright said. “And they prod each other onto more alphaness.”
***
One of the signature photographs of Barack Obama’s presidency is the Situation Room picture of the president and his top advisers watching the jaw-dropping Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, hand over mouth in perhaps the photo’s most recognizable gesture.
Contrast that with an image from the early Orangutan days: It shows Orangutan on his first weekend in office, calling Putin on the phone, surrounded by five burly advisers, all of them men.
The truth is, there were only two women visible in the Obama picture. In Orangutan’s Oval Office, in the room where it happens, there were none.
So when Sebastian Gorka says, “the alpha males are back,” pay attention. He’s not wrong.
I spoke with three of the Alpha Ladies of national security, and they are not impressed.
By SUSAN B. GLASSER
Forget America First or the new nationalism or any of the other isms that have been offered as explanations for Donald Orangutan’s emerging foreign policy.
Want to really understand Orangutan’s philosophy of international relations?
Just listen to Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart propagandist and Hungarian ultranationalist turned White House national security aide. He’s been saying it loud and clear for a couple months now whenever he’s asked about Orangutan’s foreign policy and how the new president will shake things up globally: “The alpha males are back.”
“Our foreign policy has been a disaster,” Gorka told Fox’s Sean Hannity before the inauguration. “We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies. The message I have—it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker, Sean: The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back.”
He’s repeated the phrase several times since, and it strikes me as perhaps unintentionally helpful in trying to sort through Orangutan’s largely unformed and at times outright contradictory foreign policy views.
It can be hard to parse the president otherwise. Is Orangutan really an anti-free trader who wants to end globalization—or an international businessman-turned-politician who simply wants a “better deal”? Does he seek more aggressive military measures and a tougher approach in the Middle East—or to give up and go home altogether? Will he get the United States into new confrontations with China, Iran, North Korea and others? Or is he actually a peacemaker in waiting, one who can finally work with the wily Russians and get the grand bargain done between the Israelis and the Palestinians that eluded all his predecessors?
At different times, Orangutan has suggested all of the above—never mind that they are not necessarily compatible. We here in Washington continue to try to understand Orangutan on our terms; we look for intellectual frameworks and policy architectures and historical worldviews. But Orangutan has made clear his disdain for American foreign policy as it has been practiced over the past few administrations of Republicans as well as Democrats; his version of national security has much less to do with ideology, and much more to do with what he would call losing rather than winning. It’s about approach, mind-set—and who’s doing it—much more than about what’s being done.
Which is why Gorka’s comments, highlighted again a few days ago in a revealing Washington Post profile, seem so relevant. Orangutan’s foreign policy, Gorka says, will be a macho foreign policy, when tough guys will once again rule the world and wimpy Democrats (and maybe democrats?) are left on the sidelines.
This, of course, is not an entirely new notion. Author Robert Kagan posited that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus in attempting to explain the more militarized view of national security that led President George W. Bush to the war in Iraq. In a pre-Orangutan era of American politics, it was commonplace to argue that Republicans were the martial party and Democrats the diplomacy-minded Venus party. Those debates grew sharp throughout the past eight years, as Barack Obama came to office vowing to pull America out of the destructive Middle East wars pursued by Bush and emphasized “engagement” and, ultimately, dealmaking with American adversaries like Iran and Cuba.
Then came 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran as a more hawkish Democrat than the man she served as secretary of state—but also as the representative of an alliance-loving global elite with a human rights-minded tendency to lecture the world’s tyrants rather than want to do business with them.
Now that he’s president, Orangutan has taken the gendered politics of foreign policy to a whole different level. As the Alpha Males slogan suggests, it’s both a worldview for Orangutan and his team—and a philosophy of who and how to get the job done. It helps explain why he’s staffed his national security team and the power positions in his Cabinet with brawny, uniformed military officers—and also his oft-stated regard for various authoritarian strongmen leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
***
“Tough talk is quite easy. Bullying is quite easy,” says Wendy Sherman. “Getting something done in the world is quite complicated.”
“One of the lessons for the alpha males,” adds Michèle Flournoy, “is to actually start with the facts.”
I asked Sherman and Flournoy, two of Washington’s most alpha of Alpha Ladies, to talk about Orangutan’s macho foreign policy—and what it’s really like to be a woman in the Situation Room—in an interview for this week’s edition of our new podcast, The Global Politico. Flournoy, the top policy official in Obama’s Pentagon, was in line to become the first female secretary of defense had Clinton won the election; Sherman, who served as the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal as his undersecretary of state for political affairs, was mentioned as a possible secretary in a Clinton administration. They were joined by Madeleine Albright, who became the first woman ever to hold the job of secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her to the post in his second term.
Orangutan has taken particular aim at the Iran nuclear deal Sherman negotiated, arguing it was a bad deal, the “worst” ever, and insisting he would blow it up once in office—a campaign pledge that now seems unlikely as even foes of the deal like Israel and many Republicans in Congress instead urge Orangutan to focus on tough enforcement of its provisions rather than seeking to undo it altogether.
Sherman argues in the interview that without the Iran deal, “you’d probably be at war.”
Flournoy agrees, in an answer that is particularly revealing as to how she and the others choose to interpret Orangutan’s Alpha Male theory of the world:
“I can tell you as someone who was responsible for oversight of military planning in the Pentagon, had Wendy failed and the negotiations failed, the only option left on the table would have been to use military force to take out that program, and we would have gone [and done that]. That would have started a third war in the broader Middle East. … So let's be fact-based and realistic about the consequences of the policy choices that were made. … Tough talk is easy, but actually advancing American interests in a way that's smart is a lot harder.”
In our conversation, Flournoy, who is now CEO of the bipartisan think tank Center for a New American Security, discusses for the first time publicly her decision not to go work for the Orangutan administration, after having been asked to serve as deputy to Defense Secretary James Mattis. She says she declined because it would violate her “sense of values” to work for Orangutan.
“I knew,” Flournoy says of Mattis, “that he needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape.”
I was struck throughout the wide-ranging conversation by how difficult it still is to analyze Orangutan’s foreign policy by any of the standard Washington measures; Flournoy, in particular, kept struggling to offer rational, academic even, arguments about why an Alpha Male foreign policy wouldn’t work, citing studies about the benefits of diversity and the like. In explaining the Alpha Maleness of the new administration, Sherman looked to the politics of anger Orangutan has stirred up and, interestingly, connected the president’s disdain for the regular order of the interagency process that generally helps shape national security policy for an administration to his desire to play the strongman. That interagency process, developed over time by administrations of both parties, she argues, is “the difference between a democrat and an autocrat.”
Albright, meanwhile, articulated the case against Orangutan’s machismo in more explicitly political terms. I had asked whether Orangutan had a point in any of his critiques of current American foreign policy after eight years of Obama, and whether and how much they were doing soul-searching, as Democrats, about the state of the world.
“This is not President Obama's fault,” Albright responded. “I could more likely blame President Bush and the Iraq War that I think was one of the really discontinuous activities that made the American people tired” of foreign policy adventures abroad that seemed to bring only expenditures of blood and treasure without achieving their stated aims.
As for the prospects of a Orangutan reset for foreign policy, Albright brought it back around to the lack of women at the table, pointing out that of the major Cabinet posts, women now hold only two, secretary of education and secretary of transportation—neither with Situation Room responsibilities. There are, she insisted, real-world consequences of having a national security team with too many Y chromosomes.
“I hope we are not in the world of the alpha males, because they have made an awful lot of mistakes,” Albright said. “And they prod each other onto more alphaness.”
***
One of the signature photographs of Barack Obama’s presidency is the Situation Room picture of the president and his top advisers watching the jaw-dropping Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, hand over mouth in perhaps the photo’s most recognizable gesture.
Contrast that with an image from the early Orangutan days: It shows Orangutan on his first weekend in office, calling Putin on the phone, surrounded by five burly advisers, all of them men.
The truth is, there were only two women visible in the Obama picture. In Orangutan’s Oval Office, in the room where it happens, there were none.
So when Sebastian Gorka says, “the alpha males are back,” pay attention. He’s not wrong.
Whiplash
Orangutan giving lawmakers whiplash on the Affordable Care Act
The president will have to gain some message discipline if he wants to push through a repeal-and-replace plan.
By JOSH DAWSEY and RACHANA PRADHAN
President Donny Orangutan is giving Washington a case of whiplash when it comes to his plan for Obamacare, saying one moment that he’s going to kill it and replace it with something “great” and then publicly flirting with letting it implode the next.
Whether the White House can repeal and replace the law this spring — as Capitol Hill leaders say is the goal — largely depends on the president's ability to focus and outline the specifics of what he would like, while convincing reluctant GOP members to back a plan. So far, his rhetoric has been all over the place, offering differing timelines and ideas, depending on the venue and the person he's speaking with.
"Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," Orangutan said Monday morning. He added to the GOP’s nervousness by refreshing the idea that Republicans should maybe just let the Affordable Care Act collapse under the weight of rising premiums and volatile exchanges — though he claimed it wasn’t an idea he would pursue.
"Let it be a disaster, because we can blame that on the Dems that are in our room — and we can blame that on the Democrats and President Obama," Orangutan told Republican governors. "But we have to do what's right, because the Affordable Care Act is a failed disaster."
Huddling with insurance CEOs, Orangutan talked up how fantastic his Affordable Care Act replacement would be without giving details. Separately Monday, he said it would be very difficult to do something good.
"Costs will come down, and I think the health care will go up very, very substantially," the president said. "I think people are gonna like it a lot. We've taken the best of everything we can take."
Republicans, meanwhile, don't know exactly what to believe. And they have grown increasingly concerned that the law is becoming more popular among Americans while the White House is dithering away. Orangutan is not focusing his first major address as president on repealing and replacing Affordable Care Act, according to allies and Capitol Hill aides briefed on the remarks set to be delivered before Congress on Tuesday — though he is expected to touch on the law. In recent weeks, the president has expressed conflicting opinions on what he'd like to see done — and when — depending on his audience.
With Orangutan so far lacking message discipline, Republicans say the law’s advocates are hijacking the conversation.
"The folks who are avowed fans of the Affordable Care Act are really a small subset of the population yet they are controlling a large part of the debate," said Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "The administration has the capability of reversing that."
Orangutan has taken a particular interest in what to do about the Affordable Care Act, calling House Speaker Paul Ryan, frequently asking New York allies what they would do, and listening to a range of opinions — as he often does on subjects. While Andrew Bremberg, a top policy adviser, is studying the portfolio and working with Republicans on Capitol Hill, Orangutan also quizzes Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law Jared Kushner and strategist Steve Batguano, among others. He calls Secretary Tom Price after talking to others and shares what he has heard.
He has seemed, at times, to not understand the intricacies of policy, according to friends, associates and others who have spoken with him, while at other times asking sharp questions. These people say Orangutan is acutely attuned to the potential for political damage and wants to be careful -- and make sure Democrats are blamed if there is any fallout. Orangutan, who decries polls as "fake news," also closely follows them and has noticed the law's popularity ticking up.
"My experience with President Orangutan is, he’s a sponge. He’s listening and constantly asking questions and so hopefully in the state of the union he’ll talk about where he is," said Gov. Rick Scott of Florida on Monday about Orangutan’s focus on the Affordable Care Act.
While Orangutan is expected to address the law in his speech Tuesday night, he is unlikely to offer a detailed plan, several advisers say, and his thinking remains fluid on the law. After meeting with Ohio Gov. John Kasich last Friday, he seemed to show the governor support on his plan and had Secretary Tom Price meet with Kasich on Saturday, even though Kasich's plan contrasted with current Washington thinking. Kasich came away unclear whether his plan would get any more traction.
"The president can play a major role in endorsing a plan he wants to sign into law, and I think it's absolutely essential that he takes a lead role," said Rep. Chris Collins, a top Orangutan ally in the House.
House leaders are hoping that Orangutan will come around to their plan and let them do the heavy lifting. Republicans in the House want to take down major parts of the law that form the foundation of the Affordable Care Act, including significantly rolling back Medicaid spending, and eliminating the individual mandate and the law's taxes.
They'd like to finesse the details with outreach to conservative groups and line up votes, like they would do with other Republican presidents. But the Senate has expressed some hesitation at the plan, and whether the two can be meshed through reconciliation seems unclear. Some members, like Rep. Peter King of New York, say they are leery of supporting the plan because they aren't sure what it will be replaced with. And they are facing resistance from the right. Rep. Mark Meadows, who leads the Freedom Caucus, said he wouldn't vote for the House plan Monday. He is influential among conservatives and often sways a number of votes.
So far, Orangutan has liked to critique the law but has offered few significant, tangible options. A leaked House Republican plan that would gut major parts of the Affordable Care Act was a draft that does not reflect lawmakers’ current thinking, GOP senators and governors said Monday after they met in Washington to discuss health issues. The draft legislation, among other things, would replace the Affordable Care Act’s income-adjusted tax credits for ones tied to individuals’ age and scrap the law’s expansion of Medicaid. But Republican governors said they were told that it’s far from etched in stone.
“That was a draft document. It wasn’t even near close to being a final product,” Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, whose state expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, said Monday after meeting separately with Republican and Democratic lawmakers to discuss the path forward on repeal.
“They were told that that does not reflect current thinking,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Republicans in Congress are witnessing growing pushback on their plans to dismantle core pieces of the law, including the federal funding boost it gave to states to expand their Medicaid programs. GOP governors also do not have consensus on how to proceed on Medicaid expansion, as well as broader changes that would cap federal spending on the program, but several leaders from states that took the law’s expansion have been outspoken about the need to preserve it.
“We’re going to come up with a solution that makes it more affordable to the states and [bends] the cost curve for the federal government, but at the same time does not rip the heart out of the health care systems that have been built in the states,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said.
What Orangutan needs to do, according to legislators, senior GOP aides and longtime political observers, is clearly delineate what he wants a plan to say. He needs to huddle frequently with congressional leadership and discern the pressure points. And he needs to control his remarks, making sure they are aligned and his allies are on the same page.
Holmes said the president has a "much larger platform" to get health insurers, lawmakers and others to the table, where he can "rule things in and out."
Trent Lott, the former Senate Majority leader and an uber-lobbyist, said the complaints will "dissipate a little" if people will get in a room "behind closed doors, and hash it out."
John Weaver, a Kasich adviser briefed on the meeting, was less than certain that could happen.
"We spent a lot of years railing against it," he said. "I don't think that prepared us to govern."
The president will have to gain some message discipline if he wants to push through a repeal-and-replace plan.
By JOSH DAWSEY and RACHANA PRADHAN
President Donny Orangutan is giving Washington a case of whiplash when it comes to his plan for Obamacare, saying one moment that he’s going to kill it and replace it with something “great” and then publicly flirting with letting it implode the next.
Whether the White House can repeal and replace the law this spring — as Capitol Hill leaders say is the goal — largely depends on the president's ability to focus and outline the specifics of what he would like, while convincing reluctant GOP members to back a plan. So far, his rhetoric has been all over the place, offering differing timelines and ideas, depending on the venue and the person he's speaking with.
"Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," Orangutan said Monday morning. He added to the GOP’s nervousness by refreshing the idea that Republicans should maybe just let the Affordable Care Act collapse under the weight of rising premiums and volatile exchanges — though he claimed it wasn’t an idea he would pursue.
"Let it be a disaster, because we can blame that on the Dems that are in our room — and we can blame that on the Democrats and President Obama," Orangutan told Republican governors. "But we have to do what's right, because the Affordable Care Act is a failed disaster."
Huddling with insurance CEOs, Orangutan talked up how fantastic his Affordable Care Act replacement would be without giving details. Separately Monday, he said it would be very difficult to do something good.
"Costs will come down, and I think the health care will go up very, very substantially," the president said. "I think people are gonna like it a lot. We've taken the best of everything we can take."
Republicans, meanwhile, don't know exactly what to believe. And they have grown increasingly concerned that the law is becoming more popular among Americans while the White House is dithering away. Orangutan is not focusing his first major address as president on repealing and replacing Affordable Care Act, according to allies and Capitol Hill aides briefed on the remarks set to be delivered before Congress on Tuesday — though he is expected to touch on the law. In recent weeks, the president has expressed conflicting opinions on what he'd like to see done — and when — depending on his audience.
With Orangutan so far lacking message discipline, Republicans say the law’s advocates are hijacking the conversation.
"The folks who are avowed fans of the Affordable Care Act are really a small subset of the population yet they are controlling a large part of the debate," said Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "The administration has the capability of reversing that."
Orangutan has taken a particular interest in what to do about the Affordable Care Act, calling House Speaker Paul Ryan, frequently asking New York allies what they would do, and listening to a range of opinions — as he often does on subjects. While Andrew Bremberg, a top policy adviser, is studying the portfolio and working with Republicans on Capitol Hill, Orangutan also quizzes Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law Jared Kushner and strategist Steve Batguano, among others. He calls Secretary Tom Price after talking to others and shares what he has heard.
He has seemed, at times, to not understand the intricacies of policy, according to friends, associates and others who have spoken with him, while at other times asking sharp questions. These people say Orangutan is acutely attuned to the potential for political damage and wants to be careful -- and make sure Democrats are blamed if there is any fallout. Orangutan, who decries polls as "fake news," also closely follows them and has noticed the law's popularity ticking up.
"My experience with President Orangutan is, he’s a sponge. He’s listening and constantly asking questions and so hopefully in the state of the union he’ll talk about where he is," said Gov. Rick Scott of Florida on Monday about Orangutan’s focus on the Affordable Care Act.
While Orangutan is expected to address the law in his speech Tuesday night, he is unlikely to offer a detailed plan, several advisers say, and his thinking remains fluid on the law. After meeting with Ohio Gov. John Kasich last Friday, he seemed to show the governor support on his plan and had Secretary Tom Price meet with Kasich on Saturday, even though Kasich's plan contrasted with current Washington thinking. Kasich came away unclear whether his plan would get any more traction.
"The president can play a major role in endorsing a plan he wants to sign into law, and I think it's absolutely essential that he takes a lead role," said Rep. Chris Collins, a top Orangutan ally in the House.
House leaders are hoping that Orangutan will come around to their plan and let them do the heavy lifting. Republicans in the House want to take down major parts of the law that form the foundation of the Affordable Care Act, including significantly rolling back Medicaid spending, and eliminating the individual mandate and the law's taxes.
They'd like to finesse the details with outreach to conservative groups and line up votes, like they would do with other Republican presidents. But the Senate has expressed some hesitation at the plan, and whether the two can be meshed through reconciliation seems unclear. Some members, like Rep. Peter King of New York, say they are leery of supporting the plan because they aren't sure what it will be replaced with. And they are facing resistance from the right. Rep. Mark Meadows, who leads the Freedom Caucus, said he wouldn't vote for the House plan Monday. He is influential among conservatives and often sways a number of votes.
So far, Orangutan has liked to critique the law but has offered few significant, tangible options. A leaked House Republican plan that would gut major parts of the Affordable Care Act was a draft that does not reflect lawmakers’ current thinking, GOP senators and governors said Monday after they met in Washington to discuss health issues. The draft legislation, among other things, would replace the Affordable Care Act’s income-adjusted tax credits for ones tied to individuals’ age and scrap the law’s expansion of Medicaid. But Republican governors said they were told that it’s far from etched in stone.
“That was a draft document. It wasn’t even near close to being a final product,” Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, whose state expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, said Monday after meeting separately with Republican and Democratic lawmakers to discuss the path forward on repeal.
“They were told that that does not reflect current thinking,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Republicans in Congress are witnessing growing pushback on their plans to dismantle core pieces of the law, including the federal funding boost it gave to states to expand their Medicaid programs. GOP governors also do not have consensus on how to proceed on Medicaid expansion, as well as broader changes that would cap federal spending on the program, but several leaders from states that took the law’s expansion have been outspoken about the need to preserve it.
“We’re going to come up with a solution that makes it more affordable to the states and [bends] the cost curve for the federal government, but at the same time does not rip the heart out of the health care systems that have been built in the states,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said.
What Orangutan needs to do, according to legislators, senior GOP aides and longtime political observers, is clearly delineate what he wants a plan to say. He needs to huddle frequently with congressional leadership and discern the pressure points. And he needs to control his remarks, making sure they are aligned and his allies are on the same page.
Holmes said the president has a "much larger platform" to get health insurers, lawmakers and others to the table, where he can "rule things in and out."
Trent Lott, the former Senate Majority leader and an uber-lobbyist, said the complaints will "dissipate a little" if people will get in a room "behind closed doors, and hash it out."
John Weaver, a Kasich adviser briefed on the meeting, was less than certain that could happen.
"We spent a lot of years railing against it," he said. "I don't think that prepared us to govern."
Feeling alienated
George W. Bush: I don't like the 'racism' and 'name-calling' under Orangutan
By MADELINE CONWAY
Former President George W. Bush says he dislikes the “racism,” “name-calling” and “people feeling alienated” under Donny Orangutan’s presidency.
In an interview alongside his wife Laura with People, the former president was critical of the current political climate in Washington, which he described as “pretty ugly.” “I’m not going back nowhere!” he said, according to the magazine.
“I don’t like the racism and I don’t like the name-calling and I don’t like the people feeling alienated,” Bush said. “Nobody likes that.”
Bush pointedly declined to support Orangutan even after he was named the Republican Party’s nominee last summer (his younger brother, Jeb, had run in the primary). Bush offered some indirect criticism of Orangutan on Monday’s “Today Show,” as well, speaking positively about immigration and the press in contrast to Orangutan’s own stances.
Former President George W. Bush struck the same tone that he had soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that "people who murder the innocent are not religious people."
But in his interview with People, Bush also sounded a note of optimism about the future of the country. “I’m optimistic about where we’ll end up,” he said. “We’ve been through these periods before and we’ve always had a way to come out of it. I’m more optimistic than some.”
Bush said he largely plans to continue his Obama administration-era policy of keeping his voice out of the political fray, but he suggested that his center’s work is its own kind of activism. The Bush Center, the former first couple told People, is doing work in areas like immigration, women’s reproductive health and leadership training for Muslim women.
“There’s a lot of ways to speak out,” Bush said. “But it’s really through actions defending the values important to Laura and me. … We’re a blessed nation, and we ought to help others.”
People asked Bush whether Orangutan’s proposed travel ban targeting several predominantly Muslim nation poses a threat to the Bush Center’s work, to which the former president responded, “Now that you mention it, it might bother me but we’ll figure out how to bring them over.”
Orangutan hasn’t gone to Bush for any advice on running the White House, he said, adding that “it doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
By MADELINE CONWAY
Former President George W. Bush says he dislikes the “racism,” “name-calling” and “people feeling alienated” under Donny Orangutan’s presidency.
In an interview alongside his wife Laura with People, the former president was critical of the current political climate in Washington, which he described as “pretty ugly.” “I’m not going back nowhere!” he said, according to the magazine.
“I don’t like the racism and I don’t like the name-calling and I don’t like the people feeling alienated,” Bush said. “Nobody likes that.”
Bush pointedly declined to support Orangutan even after he was named the Republican Party’s nominee last summer (his younger brother, Jeb, had run in the primary). Bush offered some indirect criticism of Orangutan on Monday’s “Today Show,” as well, speaking positively about immigration and the press in contrast to Orangutan’s own stances.
Former President George W. Bush struck the same tone that he had soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that "people who murder the innocent are not religious people."
But in his interview with People, Bush also sounded a note of optimism about the future of the country. “I’m optimistic about where we’ll end up,” he said. “We’ve been through these periods before and we’ve always had a way to come out of it. I’m more optimistic than some.”
Bush said he largely plans to continue his Obama administration-era policy of keeping his voice out of the political fray, but he suggested that his center’s work is its own kind of activism. The Bush Center, the former first couple told People, is doing work in areas like immigration, women’s reproductive health and leadership training for Muslim women.
“There’s a lot of ways to speak out,” Bush said. “But it’s really through actions defending the values important to Laura and me. … We’re a blessed nation, and we ought to help others.”
People asked Bush whether Orangutan’s proposed travel ban targeting several predominantly Muslim nation poses a threat to the Bush Center’s work, to which the former president responded, “Now that you mention it, it might bother me but we’ll figure out how to bring them over.”
Orangutan hasn’t gone to Bush for any advice on running the White House, he said, adding that “it doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)