Sunday, September 30, 2018

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

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Message to the troops: Do not collaborate with the illegal immigrant detention camps
Dear Friend.
In our new October PDF newsletter, we're again talking about the massive military-hosted immigrant detention camps decreed this summer by the Trump Administration. Just the idea of these concentration camps brings back memories of the forced relocation and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. While resistance has slowed them down, they are moving forward. Many of us thought something like that could never happen again, and yet, here we are.
We need to reach the troops with this simple challenge: Do not collaborate with the illegal immigrant detention camps. With your help, we'll spend one penny per military service member--$20,000--on a strategic outreach campaign. Our stretch goal is two cents.
Along with everything else you can do to resist this affront to humanity, please support our campaign to challenge military personnel to refuse these illegal orders. Your tax-deductible donation of $50 or $100 will make a huge difference.
Also in this issue: Army Capt. Brittany DeBarros / Shutting down recruiting center; Hoisting peace flag / Presidio 27 "mutiny" 50th anniversary events / Whistleblower Reality Winner update--"So unfair" says Trump



Upcoming Events
presidio mutiny50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny
San Francisco, California
Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13
Commemoration on Sunday, October 14
At the former Presidio Army Base
More info

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist



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"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime." —Honoré de Balzac

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A soldier’s tale of bravery and morality





Chris Hedges interviews former combat veteran and US Army officer Spenser Rapone about bravery and morality. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers,” and thereby engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.”


https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/439962-combat-veteran-bravery-morality/

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URGENT: Demand safety for South Carolina prisoners during Hurricane Florence
ANSWER Coalition
ANSWER Coalition · United States
This email was sent to caroleseligman@sbcglobal.net.
To stop receiving emails, click here.
You can also keep up with ANSWER Coalition on Facebook.

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Pardon Whistleblower Reality Winner
Hi Bonnie.
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI's then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) "eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message." Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner's treatment as "so unfair," to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.

D O N A T E


towards a world without war
Upcoming Events
troopsFeds holding last public hearing on draft registration
Los Angeles, California
Thursday, September 20
At California State University Los Angeles
More info
presidio mutiny50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny
San Francisco, California
Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13
Commemoration on Sunday, October 14
At the former Presidio Army Base
More info
D O N A T E

to support resistance
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Transform the Justice System

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We are off to a terrible start. Today President Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He praised Saudi Arabia, doubled down on his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and went on theattack against Iran. Tomorrow we expect it to get even worse when he chairs the United Nations Security Council. We expect he will continue to lambast Iran, using the same rhetoric that may well lead to war.
What we need now is an educated public who will stand up the to absurd claims by the Trump administration that Iran poses a threat to the United States. In the lead up to the war in Iraq 15 years ago, the press failed us by spreading President Bush's lies about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. Are they going to do it again with Iran? Add your name to our letter to the New York Times and Washington Post demanding they debunk Trump as he beats the drums of war. 
We see what is happening. Trump is trying to take us into war. He tore up the Iran deal, despite the fact that Iran was adhering to it and despite the wishes of the other countries that were signatories to it. Now he is imposing draconian sanctions that are hurting the Iranian people.
Did you see my disruption of US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook? It is part of our new campaign to send social media messages of friendship and support to the people of Iran. Join us by creating a video of yourself telling the people of Iran that you want to be friends and spread a message of peace. You can even try to do it in Persian. Go to our page to learn how to say "I want to be friends" in Persian. Then send us the video by email or post it on social media with the hashtag #PeaceWithIran.
So much is at stake if we let Trump take us into war with Iran. Iraq is still suffering from the death, destruction and destabilization we caused there over a decade ago. We must act now to stop the next war!   
Towards peace and diplomacy,
Medea and the entire CODEPINK team

Donate Now!
    
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  NUCLEAR WAR
   How can it be prevented?

        Forum, free of charge, with

Ray McGOVERN
CIA analyst 27 years, 
now a peace activist,
and two nuclear experts: 

With nuclear experts Jacqueline Cabasso and Marylia Kelley
  plus musical entertainment by Chris Weber

1:00 pm Sunday, September 30, 2018, San Francisco Public Library, 
100 Larkin St. (at Grove), San Francisco 94102, Koret Auditorium at lower level
(near the Civic Center BART and Muni station)
Observing the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
first anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,
and 20th anniversary of the War and Law League (WALL). 
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 Cosponsored by SF Public Library and Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament.
   More info at http://www.warandlaw.org or warandlaw@yahoo.com. Donations welcome:
    Check to "WALL"; mail to Coalition, c/o WALL, POB 42-7237, San Francisco, CA 94142.
                 

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URGENT:  Calling all boat and kayak owners to join the PEACE FLEET!
Please share this with all boat and kayak owners…..

Hi Peacemakers!

Image result for peace boat
The Golden Rule

Do you or someone you know own a sailboat, kayak or some other floating vehicle?
Want to join our "Peace Fleet" or "Peace Navy" on October 7, Sunday?

We are getting together as many boats as we can to create an alternative to war image during Fleet Week.
We want to sail our beautiful and colorful Peace Fleet around the S.F. bay on Sunday, October 7, the last day of the SF annual Fleet Week.
We'll be offering colorful sails and banners with beautiful messages of PEACE to bay visitors who come to admire those big, powerful, noisy, and very DEADLY war toys that our military displays during fleet week.

We say: THERE IS NO GLORY IN WAR! and REAL ANGELS DON'T DROP BOMBS!

Help us create a big colorful response to the U.S. military's annual effort to market war and global domination to the public.
Please pass the word around: We need boats, the more the merrier!

Contact Toby Blomé if you can supply a boat:

Unfortunately the "Golden Rule" boat, pictured above, will not be able to join us, because she will be on her global journey soon to educate people on the dangers of the nuclear world that we live in.

Please contact me asap. Preferably by Sept. 15 re: the Peace Navy.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Toby Blomé
Bay Area CODEPINK
510-215-5974
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I've Been Away Now for a Full Year
By Rasmea Odeh


Today is the one-year anniversary of my deportation, and I miss you all very much. I miss the colorfulness of my life with you, and the value that you added to it! My life now is as grey as everything else in Jordan, but it would be worse without the legacy of struggle that we built together. Our wonderful, strong relationships have deep roots that continue to grow, and these lovely memories accompany me every day, especially on the difficult ones.

This summer was busy and full, despite the fact that I did not have a regular work schedule. When people ask me how my day looks, I do not have an answer! Each day is different than the previous one, and it is extremely difficult to retain my commitment to order. I have never lived a life of such spontaneity. Others cannot understand this! To release this pressure, I go to the gym at least twice a week. Caring for my health and body reenergizes me!
Jordan links Palestine with all the other countries in the region, which causes a buzz here, especially during the summer, so on many days, I received visitors who were in transit to or from Palestine, as well as many from the U.S.

Some of these were already in my schedule, but I enjoyed offering space to those who were not, especially the young people, the oxygen of life and the instrument of change! I am eager to communicate with them and give them some of my time. (Coincidentally, I will be hanging out with two wonderful young Palestinian women from the U.S. today!)

Additionally, I am attempting to build a wide network of relationships with different segments of the citizenry, and restoring connections with old friends. Building and maintaining these relationships takes time and continuous effort, while I also keep up my activism through my travels and my writing.

My dear friends and supporters, I have already told you that you are my chosen family. This is not meant as a courtesy; it is a fact. You are an inseparable part of me—the blood that ran through my veins and the oxygen that kept me alive while the U.S. government tried to suffocate me! You embraced me and stood by my side at the toughest of times.

I spent more time with you than with my family. We combined joy with sadness, laughter and cheer with crying, precautions with courage, marches and demonstrations with strategic planning—all on the path to freedom, justice, and equality!

Lately, I have been pausing to recall the memories, both sweet and bitter, of my case, which persist in my heart and soul. They mean so much to me. I continue to follow your struggle in the U.S., as you, no doubt, follow my Palestinian people's struggle here in the Arab World; and I continue to see the blossoming of our collective uprising against racism, exploitation, and injustice in the U.S., Palestine, and all across the world!

Our challenges are difficult, but we must elevate our will to struggle, and our determination to succeed, so that our tree of resistance is better able to withstand the storms that we face these days!

Before I close, I want to let you know that you are all, as individuals and collectively, valued treasures in my life; you are like bright full moons illuminating my darkest nights in the desert!
The power of your support flows in me despite my exile and deportation. I know that we will continue to make new memories together while accomplishing the goal of making life better for us all. I met you along my Palestinian life's journey on the path of social, political and national resistance, and you have helped me appreciate and value it.

Our future will be full of sunshine, happiness, and love. We will draw strength from each other, because "that which does not kill me will strengthen me," and I add, "…will also provide me with courage, confidence, and steadfastness.

Even with the pain that was inflicted on me by the unjust deportation that turned my life upside down and forced me to re-arrange my entire life, I will never be discouraged or disillusioned! As I have already said so many times, I will continue my organizing wherever I land!

And so on this occasion, I want to repeat a piece of the poem I read in Arabic at my farewell event last year:

لن أدع الابعاد يكسرني
 ولا المسافات تعزلني
دروس الثورة علمتني
بأن حبوب القمح
إذا جفت
تملأ سنابلها الوديان

I will not let the deportation break me

Nor distance isolate me

The lessons of the revolution taught me

That if wheat grain dries

It fills the valleys with stalks
   

I miss and love you all very much.


Rasmea Odeh


September 19, 2018


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Court: Evidence To Free Mumia, To Be Continued...
Rachel Wolkenstein, lawyer for Mumia, reports on the August 30th hearing, 2018
  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
District Attorney Larry Krasner Opposes Mumia Abu-Jamal's Petition for New Rights of Appeal – Despite Clear Evidence of Ronald Castille's Bias and Conflict of Interest When He Participated As a PA Supreme Court Justice Denying Abu-Jamal's Post-Conviction Appeals from 1998-2012
Next Court Date: October 29, 2018

September 1—Additional demands for discovery made by Mumia's lawyers at the August 30 court proceeding led to Judge Tucker granting a 60-day continuance. The new date for oral argument that Mumia's appeal denial should be vacated and new appeal rights granted is now scheduled for October 29, 2018.  

Two weeks ago, Mumia's lawyers were told by the DA's office that they discovered close to 200 boxes of capital case files that had not been reviewed. A half-dozen were still not found. Last Monday, just days before the scheduled final arguments, a May 25, 1988 letter from DA Castille's office to PA State Senator Fisher (a virulent proponent of expediting executions) naming Mumia Abu-Jamal and 8 other capital defendants was turned over to the defense. 

Krasner's assistant DA Tracey Kavanaugh said the letter was meaningless and opposed the postponement, insisting there is no evidence that Castille had anything to do with Mumia's appeals. Mumia's lawyers argued that finding the background to this communication would likely support their central argument that DA Ronald Castille actively and personally was developing policy to speed up executions, and that he was particularly focused on convicted "police killers." Mumia Abu-Jamal was unquestionably the capital prisoner who was most zealously targeted for execution by the Fraternal Order of Police. 

Judge Tucker agreed with Mumia's lawyers that a search is needed to establish whether Castille was personally involved in this communication. Additional discovery was ordered with Judge Tucker's rhetorical question, "What else hasn't been disclosed?" But the Judge narrowed the required search to particulars around the May 25, 1988 letter.

Not brought out in court is the fact that Mumia's appeal of his trial conviction and death sentence was still pending in May 1988. The PA Supreme Court didn't issue its denial of this first appeal of Mumia until March 1989. This makes any reference of Mumia's case as a subject of an execution warrant highly suspect and extraordinary, because his death sentence was not "final" unless and until the PA Supreme Court affirmed. [The lawyers have not publicly released a copy of the May 25, 1988 letter, so analysis is limited.]

Mumia's lawyers said they would discuss discovery issues with the prosecution and might file a further amended petition with the intention of proceeding to oral argument on the next court date, October 29. 

On Judge Tucker—He is the chief administrative judge overseeing post-conviction proceedings. On August 30 and previously on April 30 opened his courtroom early to for Maureen Faulkner and the Fraternal Order of Police to occupy half of the small courtroom. Not surprising, no consideration was given to Mumia's family including his brother Keith Cook, international supporters from France and the dozens of other supporters who had lined up before 8AM to get into the courtroom. Even press reps suggested that the press be given seats in the jury box to open up space for even lawyers working with Mumia. Even that small consideration was rejected by Judge Tucker.

A more in-depth piece on DA Larry Krasner's opposition to Mumia's petition will be sent out soon. In the meantime, go to: www.RachelWolkenstein.net.


Free Mumia Now!
Mumia's freedom is at stake in a court hearing on August 30th. 
With your help, we just might free him!
Check out this video:

This video includes photo of 1996 news report refuting Judge Castille's present assertion that he had not been requested at that time to recuse himself from this case, on which he had previously worked as a Prosecutor:
A Philadelphia court now has before it the evidence which could lead to Mumia's freedom. The evidence shows that Ronald Castille, of the District Attorney's office in 1982, intervened in the prosecution of Mumia for a crime he did not commit. Years later, Castille was a judge on the PA Supreme Court, where he sat in judgement over Mumia's case, and ruled against Mumia in every appeal! 
According to the US Supreme Court in the Williams ruling, this corrupt behavior was illegal!
But will the court rule to overturn all of Mumia's negative appeals rulings by the PA Supreme Court? If it does, Mumia would be free to appeal once again against his unfair conviction. If it does not, Mumia could remain imprisoned for life, without the possibility for parole, for a crime he did not commit.
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and framed!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist censored off the airwaves!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is victimized by cops, courts and politicians!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal stands for all prisoners treated unjustly!
• Courts have never treated Mumia fairly!
Will You Help Free Mumia?
Call DA Larry Krasner at (215) 686-8000
Tell him former DA Ron Castille violated Mumia's constitutional rights and 
Krasner should cease opposing Mumia's legal petition.
Tell the DA to release Mumia because he's factually innocent.

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Usher in the "Age of the Healer," and Abolish the "Age of the Warrior."

4th Annual SHUT DOWN CREECH,
September 30 - October 6, 2018

Come for all or part of the week!
DSC03990.jpeg
Shut Down Creech 2016


This summer 2,500 peace activistsconverged at U.S. Air Base Ramstein, in Germany, in their first courageous mass civil resistance to Stopp Ramstein!. Ramstein, the largest foreign U.S. military base, plays a critical role in the U.S. Drone Killing Program by acting as THE KEY RELAY STATIONin the U.S. global drone assassination program. Without a relay base like Ramstein, the U.S. could not successfully kill remotely from the other side of the planet. German activists demand an end to Germany's complicity in the illegal and immoral U.S. remote killing apparatus. As one German activist shouted out passionately and movingly in this video: "Stop the Murder!"At least 5 American citizens participated in the protest, including CODEPINK members Ann Wright, Toby Blomé and Elsa Rassbach. Dozens of us blocked two merging roads into one gate for nearly an hour, and ultimately about 15 people were arrested, including 2 Americans. It was an amazing collective stance for peace & justice, and the German police were remarkably humane and civil in how they responded. Fortunately all were released after being detained briefly.

Ramstein's "partner drone base," CREECH AFB, plays an equally important role as a CENTRAL DRONE COMMAND CENTERin the U.S. 
Learn more about Ramstein and Creech in this important Intercept investigative report.

SF Bay Area CODEPINKcalls on activists from across the country to converge this fall at Creech AFB for our 4th annual nonviolent, peaceful, mass mobilization to SHUT DOWN CREECH, and help us put an end to the barbarism of drone murder. Per a NY Times articleover 900 drone pilots/operators are actively working at Creech, remotely murdering people in foreign lands, often away from any battlefield, while victims are going about their daily lives: driving on the highway, praying at a mosque, attending schools, funerals and wedding parties, eating dinner with their family or sleeping in their beds. 
WE MUST STOP THESE RACIST KILLINGS NOW! 

Shockingly, one recent report indicated that about 80% of all drone strikes go totally unreported.We must stand up for the right of all people around the planet to be safe from the terror of remote controlled slaughter from abroad. Drone killing is spreading like wildfirewith at least 10 countries now who have used drones to kill. The U.S is fully responsible for this uncontrolled Pandora's box, by developing and proliferating these horrendous weapons without giving concern to the long term consequences. 

WE MUST STOP THE MURDER!


Last April our protestat Creech was reported in over 20 states across the country by mainstream media, including TV, radio, print and military media, thus reaching tens of thousands of Americans about our resistance to these covert and brutal practices. It is remarkable the impact a small handful of peacemakers can have with a well planned action. We need you to help us educate the public and awaken the consciousness of U.S. military personnel. Drone operators themselvesare victims of this inhumanity by bearing deep psychic wounds within. Through our twice daily vigils, we call them over to the side of peace, and encourage them to assess the consequences and reality of having a daily job of remote-control murdering. U.S. drones are the main tool used to terrorize and dominate the planet. We must stand up to these barbaric policies and the system that gives little thought to the world our children's grandchildren will be living in, and the harm it is doing now to our young men and women in uniform. 
RISE AND BE A VOICE AGAINST THE MADNESS!


JOIN CODE PINK and FRIENDS AT CREECH THIS FALL,September 30 - October 6.

Check out our updated website for details on the 4TH Annual SHUT DOWN CREECH.


Let's show the Germans that we have a thriving U.S. resistance to U.S. Global Militarism and Drone Killing too!

We hope to see you there,

Eleanor, Maggie, Toby, Ann, Mary and Tim

Sponsored by S.F. Bay Area CODEPINK

Check out these inspiring videos of this summer's 2018 drone protest at Ramstein, Germany:

Great Overview of Stopp Ramstein(13.5 min - watch the first and last 2-3 minutes)




In Closing: Inspiring words
from Rafael Jesús González, Poet Laureate of Berkeley, Xochipilli Men's Circle

"We cannot say the purpose these millenniums of the Patriarchy have served, but their lopsided reign is toxic and has maimed and sickened men and women and greatly harmed the Earth. It must come to an end. Women, our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters must now take the reins for we men have made a botch of things. Women must take their power and men must step aside, follow, and support them even as we heal and liberate ourselves by freeing and honoring that which is feminine in our nature: loving, caring, nurturing. We must all free ourselves or none will. The long, long Age of the Warrior must come to an end and we must usher in the Age of the Healer.
Please lead us, our sisters. Together we must heal and heal the Earth or court the demise of all that lives."
Ometeo.
Quilticoyotzin


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presidio 27
Presidio 27 "Mutiny" 50 years later
Podcast with Keith Mather
During the Vietnam War era, the Presidio Stockade was a military prison notorious for its poor conditions and overcrowding with many troops imprisoned for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. When Richard Bunch, a mentally disturbed prisoner, was shot and killed on October 11th, 1968, Presidio inmates began organizing. Three days later, 27 Stockade prisoners broke formation and walked over to a corner of the lawn, where they read a list of grievances about their prison conditions and the larger war effort and sang "We Shall Overcome." The prisoners were charged and tried for "mutiny," and several got 14 to 16 years of confinement. Meanwhile, disillusionment about the Vietnam War continued to grow inside and outside of the military.
"This was for real. We laid it down, and the response by the commanding general changed our lives," recalls Keith Mather, Presidio "mutineer" who escaped to Canada before his trial came up and lived there for 11 years, only to be arrested upon his return to the United States. Mather is currently a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Veterans for Peace. Listen to the Courage to Resist podcast with Keith.



50th anniversary events at the former Presidio Army Base
October 13th and 14th, 2018
keith matherPANEL DISCUSSION
Saturday, October 13, 7 to 9 pm
Presidio Officers' Club
50 Moraga Ave, San Francisco
Featuring panelists: David Cortright (peace scholar), Brendan Sullivan (attorney for mutineers), Randy Rowland (mutiny participant), Keith Mather (mutiny participant), and Jeff Paterson (Courage to Resist).
presidio 27ON SITE COMMEMORATION
Sunday, October 14, 1 to 3 pm
Fort Scott Stockade
1213 Ralston (near Storey), San Francisco
The events are sponsored by the Presidio Land Trust in collaboration with Veterans For Peace Chapter 69-San Francisco with support from Courage to Resist.


COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

By Whitney Webb

  WASHINGTON—In the last few years, arguably the most visible and well-publicized march on the U.S. capital has been the "Women's March," a movement aimed at advocating for legislation and policies promoting women's rights as well as a protest against the misogynistic actions and statements of high-profile U.S. politicians. The second Women's March, which took place this past year, attracted over a million protesters nationwide, with 500,000 estimated to have participated in Los Angeles alone.

  However, absent from this women's movement has been a public antiwar voice, as its stated goal of "ending violence" does not include violence produced by the state. The absence of this voice seemed both odd and troubling to legendary peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose iconic protest against the invasion and occupation of Iraq made her a household name for many.

  Sheehan was taken aback by how some prominent organizers of this year's Women's March were unwilling to express antiwar positions and argued for excluding the issue of peace entirely from the event and movement as a whole. In an interview with MintPress, Sheehan recounted how a prominent leader of the march had told her, "I appreciate that war is your issue Cindy, but the Women's March will never address the war issue as long as women aren't free."

  War is indeed Sheehan's issue and she has been fighting against the U.S.' penchant for war for nearly 13 years. After her son Casey was killed in action while serving in Iraq in 2004, Sheehan drew international media attention for her extended protest in front of the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas, which later served as the launching point for many protests against U.S. military action in Iraq.

  Sheehan rejected the notion that women could be "free" without addressing war and empire. She countered the dismissive comment of the march organizer by stating that divorcing peace activism from women's issues "ignored the voices of the women of the world who are being bombed and oppressed by U.S. military occupation."

  Indeed, women are directly impacted by war—whether through displacement, the destruction of their homes, kidnapping, or torture. Women also suffer uniquely and differently from men in war as armed conflicts often result in an increase in sexual violence against women.

  For example, of the estimated half-a-million civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of them were women and children. In the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the number of female casualties has been rising on average over 20 percent every year since 2015. In 2014 alone when Israel attacked Gaza in "Operation Protective Edge," Israeli forces, which receives $10 million in U.S. military aid every day, killed over two thousand Palestinians—half of them were women and children. Many of the casualties were pregnant women, who had been deliberately targeted.

  Given the Women's March's apparent rejection of peace activism in its official platform, Sheehan was inspired to organize another Women's March that would address what many women's rights advocates, including Sheehan, believe to be an issue central to promoting women's rights.

  Dubbed the "Women's March on the Pentagon," the event is scheduled to take place on October 21—the same date as an iconic antiwar march of the Vietnam era—with a mission aimed at countering the "bipartisan war machine." Though men, women and children are encouraged to attend, the march seeks to highlight women's issues as they relate to the disastrous consequences of war.

  The effort of women in confronting the "war machine" will be highlighted at the event, as Sheehan remarked that "women have always tried to confront the war-makers," as the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the men and women in the military, as well as those innocent civilians killed in the U.S.' foreign wars. As a result, the push for change needs to come from women, according to Sheehan, because "we [women] are the only ones that can affect [the situation] in a positive way." All that's missing is an organized, antiwar women's movement.

  Sheehan noted the march will seek to highlight the direct relationship between peace activism and women's rights, since "no woman is free until all women are free" and such "freedom also includes the freedom from U.S. imperial plunder, murder and aggression"that is part of the daily lives of women living both within and beyond the United States. Raising awareness of how the military-industrial complex negatively affects women everywhere is key, says Sheehan, as "unless there is a sense of international solidarity and a broader base for feminism, then there aren't going to be any solutions to any problems, [certainly not] if we don't stop giving trillions of dollars to the Pentagon."

  Sheehan also urged that, even though U.S. military adventurism has long been an issue and the subject of protests, a march to confront the military-industrial complex is more important now than ever: "I'm not alarmist by nature but I feel like the threat of nuclear annihilation is much closer than it has been for a long time," adding that, despite the assertion of some in the current administration and U.S. military, "there is no such thing as 'limited' nuclear war." This makes "the need to get out in massive numbers" and march against this more imperative than ever.

  Sheehan also noted that Trump's presidency has helped to make the Pentagon's influence on U.S. politics more obvious by bringing it to the forefront: "Even though militarism had been under wraps [under previous presidents], Trump has made very obvious the fact that he has given control of foreign policy to the 'generals.'"

  Indeed, as MintPress has reported on several occasions, the Pentagon—beginning in March of last year—has been given the freedom to "engage the enemy" at will, without the oversight of the executive branch or Congress. As a result, the deaths of innocent civilians abroad as a consequence of U.S. military action has spiked. While opposing Trump is not the focus of the march, Sheehan opined that Trump's war-powers giveaway to the Pentagon, as well as his unpopularity, have helped to spark widespread interest in the event.

Different wings of the same warbird

  Sheehan has rejected accusations that the march is partisan, as it is, by nature, focused on confronting the bipartisan nature of the military-industrial complex. She told MintPress that she has recently come under pressure owing to the march's proximity to the 2018 midterm elections—as some have ironically accused the march's bipartisan focus as "trying to harm the chances of the Democrats" in the ensuing electoral contest.

  In response, Sheehan stated that: 

   "Democrats and Republicans are different wings of the same warbird. We are protesting militarism and imperialism. The march is nonpartisan in nature because both parties are equally complicit. We have to end wars for the planet and for the future. I could really care less who wins in November."

  She also noted that even when the Democrats were in power under Obama, nothing was done to change the government's militarism nor to address the host of issues that events like the Women's March have claimed to champion.

  "We just got finished with eight years of a Democratic regime," Sheehan told MintPress. "For two of those years, they had complete control of Congress and the presidency and a [filibuster-proof] majority in the Senate and they did nothing" productive except to help "expand the war machine." She also emphasized that this march is in no way a "get out the vote" march for any political party.

  Even though planning began less than a month ago, support has been pouring in for the march since it was first announced on Sheehan's website, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox. Encouraged by the amount of interest already received, Sheehan is busy working with activists to organize the events and will be taking her first organizing trip to the east coast in April of this year. 

  In addition, those who are unable to travel to Washington are encouraged to participate in any number of solidarity protests that will be planned to take place around the world or to plan and attend rallies in front of U.S. embassies, military installations, and the corporate headquarters of war profiteers.

  Early endorsers of the event include journalists Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh and Margaret Kimberley; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly; FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and U.S. politicians like former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Activist groups that have pledged their support include CodePink, United National Antiwar Coalition, Answer Coalition, Women's EcoPeace and World Beyond War.

  Though October is eight months away, Sheehan has high hopes for the march. More than anything else, though, she hopes that the event will give birth to a "real revolutionary women's movement that recognizes the emancipation and liberation of all peoples—and that means [freeing] all people from war and empire, which is the biggest crime against humanity and against this planet." By building "a movement and not just a protest," the event's impact will not only be long-lasting, but grow into a force that could meaningfully challenge the U.S. military-industrial complex that threatens us all. God knows the world needs it.

  For those eager to help the march, you can help spread the word through social media by joining the march's Facebook page or following the march'sTwitter account, as well as by word of mouth. In addition, supporting independent media outlets—such as MintPress, which will be reporting on the march—can help keep you and others informed as October approaches.

  Whitney Webb is a staff writer forMintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, theAnti-Media, and21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.

  —MPN News, February 20, 2018

  https://www.mintpressnews.com/cindy-sheehan-and-the-womens-march-on-the-pentagon-a-movement-not-just-a-protest/237835/

  


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[HS-Support] @GovernorVA: Don't transfer activist inmate Kevin #Rashid Johnson again

Please sign and share. 

If you are not familiar with the brilliant, compassionate, and courageous imprisoned activist, writer, artist, Kevin Rashid Johnson, check out rashidmod.com
He is not in the federal prison system, he is in the Virginia state system.  However, due to his persistence and depth in exposing the horrific conditions and treatment inside the prisons, he has been locked in solitary confinement and moved around to prisons in Florida, Virginia, and Texas! Please support Rashid with this simple petition
and make a call if you can. It looks like you can also tweet @GovernorVA!
~Verbena

Rashid Threatened with Transfer — Hearing on Sept 10th — BLOCK THE PHONES! We have learned that the Virginia Department of Corrections is planning to hold a hearing Monday September 10th, to have R…

All,

I just got a phone call from Rashid. He's been told that he will have a
hearing on Monday to process him for an Interstate Transfer. He's not
being told where he's going.

We need to get this news out as broadly as possible, and to state that
this is retaliation for his recent publications and interviews. Please
share the news on all your social media accounts, you might do it while
also sharing his Guardian article or other recent works.

Can anyone organize protest? Perhaps an action alert to have people
flood VADOC with complaints, and/or we could prepare to flood wherever
he goes with complaints. If we could organize a street protest of VADOC
HQ before or after the transfer, that would be amazing.

Dustin McDaniel

To: Virginia Department of Corrections; Chief of VA Corrections Operations David Robinson

Release Kevin "Rashid" Johnson From Solitary Confinement Immediately

We call on the Virginia Department of Corrections to immediately release Kevin "Rashid" Johnson from solitary confinement and not to transfer him again out of state.
Why is this important? 

After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.

This work is only possible with your financial support. Please chip in $3 now. 

-- The RootsAction.org Team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Background:



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All Hands on Deck:  Get Malik Washington out of Ad-Seg!


Several weeks ago, friends and supporters of incarcerated freedom fighter Comrade Malik Washington were overjoyed to hear that he was getting released, finally, from Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at Eastham Unit in Texas--until TDCJ pulled a fast one, falsely claiming that he refused to participate in the Ad-Seg Transition Program to get him released back to general population.  
This is a complete lie:  Malik has been fighting to get out of Ad-Seg from the moment he was thrown in there two years ago on a bogus riot charge (which was, itself, retaliation for prison strike organizing and agitating against inhumane, discriminatory conditions).  
Here's what actually happened:  when Malik arrived at Ramsey Unit on June 21, he was assigned to a top bunk, which is prohibited by his medical restrictions as a seizure patient.  TDCJ had failed to transfer his medical restrictions records, or had erased them, and are now claiming no record of these restrictions, which have been on file and in place for the past ten years.  Malik wrote a detailed statement requesting to be placed on a lower bunk in order to avoid injury; later that night, he was abruptly transferred back to Ad-Seg at a new Unit (McConnell).  
Malik was told that Ramsey staff claimed he refused to participate in the Ad-Seg Transition program--this is NOT true, and he needs to be re-instated to the program immediately!  He also urgently needs his medical restrictions put back into his records!
-----
We are extremely concerned for Malik's safety, and urgently need the help of everyone reading this. Please take one or more of the following actions, and get a couple friends to do the same!
1. Call Senior Warden Phillip Sifuentes at Malik's current facility (McConnell) and tell them Keith Washington (#1487958) must be transferred out of McConnell and re-admitted to the Ad-Seg Transition Program!
Phone #: (361) 362-2300 (**048) 00 --  ask to be connected to the senior warden's office/receptionist--try to talk to someone, but also can leave a message. 
Sample Script: "Hello, I'm calling because I'm concerned about Keith H. Washington (#1487958) who was recently transferred to your facility.  I understand he was transferred there from Ramsey Unit, because he supposedly refused to participate in the Ad-Seg transition program there, but this is not true; Malik never refused to participate, and he needs to be re-admitted to the transition program immediately!  I am also concerned that his heat restrictions seem to have been removed from his records.  He is a seizure patient and has been on heat and work restriction for years, and these restrictions must be reinstated immediately."
Please let us know how your call goes at blueridgeABC@riseup.net
2. Flood TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier with calls/emails!  You can use the above phone script as a guide for emails.  
(936) 437-2101 / (936) 437-2123

3. Flood TDCJ with emails demanding that Malik's health restrictions and work restrictions be restored: Health.services@tdcj.texas.gov

You can use the call script above as a guide; you don't need to mention the Ad-Seg situation, but just focus on the need to restore his heat and work restrictions!

4. File a complaint with the Ombudsman's Office (the office in charge of investigating departmental misconduct); you can use the above phone script as a guide for emails.
Ombudsman@tdcj.texas.gov 

5. Write to Malik!  Every letter he receives lifts his spirit and PROTECTS him, because prison officials know he has people around him, watching for what happens to him.

Keith H. Washington
#1487958
McConnell Unit
3100 South Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78103







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Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

By Michael Barbaro, May 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/podcasts/the-daily/kevin-cooper-death-row.html?emc=edit_ca_20180530&nl=california-today&nlid=2181592020180530&te=1




Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

On today's episode:
• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.



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Last week I met with fellow organizers and members of Mijente to take joint action at the Tornillo Port of Entry, where detention camps have been built and where children and adults are currently being imprisoned. 

I oppose the hyper-criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. Migration is a human right and every person is worthy of dignity and respect irrespective of whether they have "papers" or not. You shouldn't have to prove "extreme and unusual hardship" to avoid being separated from your family. We, as a country, have a moral responsibility to support and uplift those adversely affected by the US's decades-long role in the economic and military destabilization of the home countries these migrants and asylum seekers have been forced to leave.

While we expected to face resistance and potential trouble from the multiple law enforcement agencies represented at the border, we didn't expect to have a local farm hand pull a pistol on us to demand we deflate our giant balloon banner. Its message to those in detention:

NO ESTÁN SOLOS (You are not alone).

Despite the slight disruption to our plan we were able to support Mijente and United We Dream in blocking the main entrance to the detention camp and letting those locked inside know that there are people here who care for them and want to see them free and reunited with their families. 


We are continuing to stand in solidarity with Mijente as they fight back against unjust immigration practices.Yesterday they took action in San Diego, continuing to lead and escalate resistance to unjust detention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to ICE. 

While we were honored to offer on-the-ground support we see the potential to focus the energy of our Drop the MIC campaign into fighting against this injustice, to have an even greater impact. Here's how:
  1. Call out General Dynamics for profiteering of War, Militarization of the Border and Child and Family Detention (look for our social media toolkit this week);
  2. Create speaking forums and produce media that challenges the narrative of ICE and Jeff Sessions, encouraging troops who have served in the borderlands to speak out about that experience;
  3. Continue to show up and demand we demilitarize the border and abolish ICE.

Thank you for your vision and understanding of how militarism, racism, and capitalism are coming together in the most destructive ways. Help keep us in this fight by continuing to support our work.


In Solidarity,
Ramon Mejia
Field Organizer, About Face: Veterans Against the War


P.O. Box 3565, New York, NY 10008. All Right Reserved. | Unsubscribe
To ensure delivery of About Face emails please add webmaster@ivaw.org to your address book.


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It is so beautiful to see young people in this country rising up to demand an end to gun violence. But what is Donald Trump's response? Instead of banning assault weapons, he wants to give guns to teachers and militarize our schools. But one of the reasons for mass school shootings is precisely because our schools are already militarized. Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was trained by U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program while he was in high school.
Yesterday, Divest from the War Machine coalition member, Pat Elder, was featured on Democracy Now discussing his recent article about the JROTC in our schools. The JROTC teaches children how to shoot weapons. It is often taught by retired soldiers who have no background in teaching. They are allowed to teach classes that are given at least equal weight as classes taught by certified and trained teachers. We are pulling our children away from classes that expand their minds and putting them in classes that teach them how to be killing machines. The JROTC program costs our schools money. It sends equipment. But, the instructors and facilities must be constructed and paid for by the school.
The JROTC puts our children's futures at risk. Children who participate in JROTC shooting programs are exposed to lead bullets from guns. They are at an increased risk when the shooting ranges are inside. The JROTC program is designed to "put a jump start on your military career." Children are funneled into JROTC to make them compliant and to feed the military with young bodies which are prepared to be assimilated into the war machine. Instead of funneling children into the military, we should be channeling them into jobs that support peace and sustainable development. 
Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry to take the war machine out of our schools! The JROTC program must end immediately. The money should be directed back into classrooms that educate our children.
The Divest from the War Machine campaign is working to remove our money from the hands of companies that make a killing on killing. We must take on the systems that keep fueling war, death, and destruction around the globe. AND, we must take on the systems that are creating an endless cycle of children who are being indoctrinated at vulnerable ages to become the next killing machine.  Don't forget to post this message on Facebook and Twitter.
Onward in divestment,
Ann, Ariel, Brienne, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Natasha, Paki, Sarah, Sophia and Tighe
P.S. Do you want to do more? Start a campaign to get the JROTC out of your school district or state. Email divest@codepink.org and we'll get you started!

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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.
In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.
Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.
The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.
Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new  "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.
Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years
The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.
During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.
Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying."  For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.
Major Tillery Needs Your Help:
Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.
Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.
Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.

Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP
    Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
    Go to JPay.com;
    code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

    Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
    The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
    Call: 215-686-8000 or

    Write to:
    Major Tillery AM 9786
    SCI Frackville
    1111 Altamont Blvd.
    Frackville, PA 17931
    For More Information, Go To: 
    Call/Write:
    Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, 
    Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, 


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    Free Leonard Peltier!

    On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

    By Leonard Peltier


    Art by Leonard Peltier

    Write to:
    Leonard Peltier 89637-132 
    USP Coleman I 
    P.O. Box 1033 
    Coleman, FL 33521
    Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603


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    1) [GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE...BW]
    As Economy Roars, Army Falls Thousands Short of Recruiting Goals
    BY DAVE PHILLPPS, SEPTEMBER 21, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/army-recruiting-shortage.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront
    An Army recruiting station in Frankfort, Ky. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goal this year.

    COLORADO SPRINGS — The Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals this year, the first time it has done so since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago.
    The shortfall is due in part to a hot job market that has lured away many recruits at a time that President Trump and Congress seek to expand the military, and have raised the number the Army needs to meet.
    The Army hoped to bring in about 76,500 new soldiers this year. But with the fiscal year ending this month, it is still 6,500 troops short, even after spending an extra $200 million on bonuses and lowering standards to let in more troops with conduct or health issues.
    On top of having to compete with a robust economy, with an unemployment rate below 4 percent, the Army must pick from what it says is a shrinking pool of eligible recruits. More than two-thirds of young adults do not qualify for military service because of poor physical fitness or other issues such as drug use, according to the Army.

    "You have fewer people who can serve, they have more opportunities in the job market, that makes it very hard on the Army," said Beth Asch, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation who studies military recruiting.
    The shortfall will not leave the Army paralyzed, representing only about 1 percent of the force. But it is a sign of growing cultural and economic changes that, if not addressed, could hollow out the Army from within.
    The Army has invested in more recruiters and advertising, Dr. Asch said, and sweetened the deal for perspective soldiers with bonuses and other benefits. It has also had to soften admissions. This year it gave hundreds more waivers for past drug use than it did a few years ago.
    In a statement, the Army said the shortfall was evidence that it was not settling for lower-quality recruits, but was instead trying to "raise the quality of our recruits despite the tough recruiting environment."
    "As we look to 2019 and beyond, we have laid the foundation to improve recruiting for the Army while maintaining an emphasis on quality over quantity," Lt. Col. Emanuel L. Ortiz said. "Our leaders remain confident we will achieve the Army Vision of growing the regular Army above 500,000 soldiers."

    For years, the military had been heading the other way. Mandatory budget cuts caused the Army to shed more than 100,000 troops from 2010 to 2016. The Army was not only recruiting fewer soldiers, but was forcing troops out. It was on course to shrink to 450,000 soldiers in 2017 when Mr. Trump did an about-face. Fulfilling a campaign promise to stop the drawdown, he signed a bill that expanded the Army to 476,000. This year it was supposed to grow to 483,500, but actual numbers remained flat.
    The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps met their recruiting goals for 2018, but the Army, which is by far the biggest branch of the military, had to recruit more than twice as many troops as other branches. Initially, the Army planned to recruit 80,000 soldiers in 2018, but lowered its goal to 76,500 in April because it was able to retain more soldiers already in the force. That still left a much larger-than-normal task for Army recruiters amid a roaring economy.
    At an urgent care center in the suburbs of Denver on Friday, Josh Griffin, a high school senior, had just finished taking a drug test for a new job at a discount tire company down the road. He said that recruiters had talked to him in high school, and that the military sounded appealing at first: money for college, a steady job and a way to give back to his country.
    But now he sees better options, he said, adding, "I don't have any doubt in my mind about finding a job."
    The military's promise of college tuition and other benefits has less of a draw, said Sgt. First Class Michael T. Peppers, the commander of a strip mall recruiting station next to a Subway and a Tasty Tacos in Urbandale, Iowa.
    "We're competing with other businesses offering the same things," he said, noting that even McDonald's has a program to help employees pay tuition.
    The military also says it has to pick from young adults who are increasingly unqualified to serve because of mental health issues, criminal convictions or obesity.

    "That's our biggest obstacle," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow, who until recently was the head of Army recruiting, said in November. He said natural disasters that led to the closing of several recruiting stations, including in the reliably rich recruiting ground of Puerto Rico, also contributed to shortfalls.
    The Army faced a similar predicament in 1999, during the dot-com boom. That year, according to a Government Accountability Office report, the Army fell short by about 6,000 recruits. It responded by doubling its recruiting budget, adding enlistment bonuses up to $20,000, and allowing enlistees it would have turned away in the past, such as those who had no high school diploma, but still scored well on Army aptitude tests.
    Similar measures are in effect today, Dr. Asch, the RAND economist, said. Troops who cannot pass a body-mass test may still get in on a strength test. Troops without a diploma are more likely to get a second chance if they do well on an Army aptitude test. And those with criminal convictions or other misconduct in their past can get waivers if they can show they have overcome past troubles.
    Dr. Asch said the Army was still well within Defense Department benchmarks, and nowhere near the dismal levels reached in the years after the Vietnam War, when recruiting collapsed. In 1979, six of 10 Army divisions stationed in the United States were considered "not combat ready." In 1980, only half of recruits had graduated from high school (it is now 90 percent), and drug use, crime and unauthorized absences were so rampant that 40 percent of new recruits were expelled.
    The Army's shortfall this year comes as it has sidelined more than 1,100 high-quality recruits, many with graduate degrees and top-tier physical fitness scores, because they are legal immigrants but lack green cards. These recruits were part of a special program called Military Accessions Vital to National Interests, or Mavni, but have been in limbo for years because they have not passed strict security vetting imposed after they enlisted. The Army is now trying to discharge them.

    Jackson Barnett contributed reporting from Westminster, Colo., and Ann Klein from Urbandale, Iowa.

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    2) City Officials Fear Mass Bailout at Rikers Could Endanger Crime Victims
    By Jeffery C. Mays, September 21, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/nyregion/mass-bailout-rikers.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

    City officials and prosecutors have raised objections to a plan to bail out 500 women and teenagers from Rikers Island, suggesting that it could endanger crime victims and witnesses.
    City officials are scrambling to prepare for a human rights organization's mass effort to bail out 500 women and teenagers from the Rikers Island jail complex, despite strong resistance from the police and prosecutors.
    Across the city, prosecutors are identifying cases that might be affected by the bailout, and calling hundreds of crime victims and witnesses in those cases to let them know that defendants who they thought were in custody might soon be released on bail.
    Prosecutors in the Bronx said they were working to safeguard as many people who might be vulnerable through measures like orders of protection.
    "We are doing all we can to protect our victims and witnesses in the event the defendants accused of violence against them are released from jail," Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said in a statement.

    The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group is raising up to $5 million for the bailout, and will enlist 200 volunteers to help identify and free female prisoners at the Rose M. Singer Center, and 16- and 17-year-olds at the Robert N. Davoren Complex, starting Oct. 1.
    Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, says the plan, which organizers believe could be one of the largest so-called mass bailouts in the country, will move forward despite the city's concerns.
    The bailout is designed to support an end to cash bail, which activists say discriminates against minorities and the poor, and to push the city to close the dangerous Rikers jail complex more quickly than the current 10-year timeline. Approximately 87 percent of the jail population is black and Latino.
    "What they're really saying is they are concerned about poor people accused of crimes because there are no rich people currently accused of crimes caged on Rikers Island," Ms. Kennedy said in an interview. "Just look how the system treats people like Harvey Weinstein. Eighty women said they were attacked by one guy, and he got bail and he never spent a second on Rikers."
    The plan may expand to include prisoners who turned 18 while on Rikers, according to the group. The organization will also connect those who are bailed out with appropriate social services.

    The purpose of bail, according to New York State law, is to ensure a defendant's return to court. Judges can, under limited circumstances, remand defendants without bail. Judges are supposed to consider a defendant's ability to pay bail in their decision but that seldom happens, according to criminal defense lawyers.
    Roughly 80 percent of the Rikers population is awaiting trial; more than 75 percent of them are eventually released without being sentenced to prison.
    "I don't think anyone should be locked up solely because they can't afford to buy their freedom but that's what happens to blacks and Latinos living in certain communities while the privileged, often charged with far worse crimes, are walking free," said Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and the director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, which represents more than 30,000 people arrested each year in Brooklyn.
    Mr. Hechinger cited a client represented by Brooklyn Defender Services who has been held since June on $750 bail for allegedly stealing multiple pairs of shoes. Because the woman was accused of entering the vestibule of an apartment building to steal the shoes, the crime she is charged with is technically considered a violent felony.
    A 2017 study from the Vera Institute of Justice tracked 99 cases in which unsecured bail or partially secured bond was granted, and 54 percent of cases included defendants charged with a felony. The study found that 88 percent of defendants returned to court; only 8 percent were arrested pretrial on another felony charge.
    "There is this misconception that people who are on Rikers need to be there because if they are let out, the streets will run with blood," Mr. Hechinger said.
    Mayor Bill de Blasio and some district attorneys say they favor bail reform, but believe the mass bailout should only be for people charged with low-level offenses. Kennedy officials said they will consider all bail-eligible women and teenagers regardless of the crime they are charged with.

    Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney of Manhattan, said "there are certain individuals detained on Manhattan cases who, if released without a court-reviewed, predetermined supervised release and safety plan, are flight risks and may pose a public safety risk to the community."
    Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill said he was concerned about witness intimidation and retaliation.
    Some City Council members called the positions of Mr. de Blasio and the city's law enforcement officials hypocritical. Rory I. Lancman, a Queens councilman, said because there are protocols in place that allow judges to keep those who are a danger to others in custody, the bailout "is brilliantly exposing the fallacy of our bail system."
    Ritchie Torres, a Bronx councilman, said the debate reminds him of the fear of a crime wave that took place when activists began calling for an end to the police practice of stop and frisk.
    "Allowing people who have neither been tried or convicted to languish in jail violates the spirit of the Constitution," Mr. Torres said. "Pretrial incarceration has become the penalty for poverty, for mental illness and for blackness."

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    3) A multiple-choice test by the New York Times, answer correctly and you are DSA material
    By Louis Proyect, September 22, 2018
    https://louisproyect.org/2018/09/22/a-multiple-choice-test-by-the-new-york-times-answer-correctly-and-you-are-dsa-material/
    As part of its continuing PR effort on behalf of the DSA, the New York Times has a multiple choice/interactive feature titled "What is Democratic Socialism". With this article reaching nearly 2.2 million readers, you can just see the membership figures for the DSA topping 100,000 before long. That's the same number the CP reached in the 30s and was, like with the DSA, partly a result of its cachet among liberal elites.
    Let's take the multiple choice test together:
    (1) Let's start with the big question. In an ideal world, who would control the means of production?
    a. Private Owners
    b. The Government
    c. Workers
    For some reason, each of the questions includes one that is a giveaway. As if anybody who favors "private owners" is trying to make up their mind whether they are socialists or not.
    It's sort of a trick question since socialism, whether you identify it with Cuba or Sweden, does involve government control. If you chose b, however, you are not a democratic socialist since only "Leninist" governments are control freaks. If you chose c, you are in good company since that means workers will be in charge and who can oppose that? The DSA does allow that key industries like steel and energy would be "administered" by the government but everything else would be those apple-cheeked cooperatives that Richard Wolff is so gung-ho on. This begs the question whether steel and energy would be state-owned or not. After all, administration could also mean riding herd in the way that Cuba deals with foreign-owned hotels. As for cooperatives, what prevents them from becoming like Mondragon? A company making pressure cookers, as Mondragon does through its Fabor subsidiary, has to compete with other pressure cooker manufacturers in a market economy. Since there are always winners and losers, it always helps a firm be a winner if it pays attention to the bottom line. In a Fortune Magazine article titled "Defiant Spanish workers stage lock-in, resist layoffs", we can see that cooperatives obey the same economic dictates as conventional firms do:
    Almost 28,000 companies have declared bankruptcy during Spain's five-year economic crisis, hitting a peak of 2,854 during the first three months of 2013. But Fagor Electrodomésticos is not just any business. Launched in 1956 by a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta and five students from a technical college he started in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Fagor is the foundational unit of Mondragón, the world's biggest conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives.
    With 80,000 employees and operations in 18 countries outside Spain, Mondragón became a symbol of what a worker-owned cooperative model could achieve. In the late 1980s, Pedro Nueno, a professor of entrepreneurship at the IESE Business School, consulted with Fagor on ways to innovate for the "kitchen of the future." He says he was struck by the leaders' long-term vision and by how committed they were considering their low salaries (top executives at Mondragón make less than 10 times the lowest paid worker's salary).
     "A person with the same responsibilities would be getting five times that in another company," he says.
    Similarly, when Richard Wolff, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visited Fagor two years ago, he was impressed by the seriousness with which management handled buying assembly line equipment, which came from outside the Mondragón family of industrial companies. "They gave me a lecture on policy: You buy within Mondragón if quality or price was competitive. If not, you go outside," he says.
    But such commitment and seriousness has done little to help Fagor recently. Revenues fell from €1.75 billion in 2007 (about $2.58 billion at the time) to €1.28 billion in 2011, and the company has lost money for the last five years, racking up debts of €859 million. During that time, Mondragón lent it some €300 million.
    (2) In a capitalist system, do you believe government regulations are helpful or harmful?
    a. Helpful
    b. Harmful
    A giveaway.
    (3) Do you believe that everyone is entitled to a certain minimum standard of living?
    a. Yes
    b. No
    Another giveaway.
    (4) Do you believe labor unions are a positive force?
    a. Yes
    b. No
    Another giveaway. As you can see, questions 2 through 4 are set up to make people like Cynthia Nixon decide to declare that she is a socialist. In fact, probably 90 percent of the audience watching Rachel Maddow would choose the "correct" answers. The truth is that anybody who voted for Obama would be a "democratic socialist" on the basis of how they reply to those questions. Maybe the whole thing is calculated to make "democratic socialism" such an acceptable choice in order for the Democratic Party to regain the hegemonic status it possessed from FDR to LBJ. American capitalism has a rocky road in front of it and it requires adroit statesmanship to avoid a collision. Clearly, the new generation of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Andrew Gillum, who eschews the label of socialist, are waiting in the wings to displace Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
    (5) Which of these best matches your views on health care?
    a. The government should have minimal or no involvement in providing or funding health care.
    b. The government should subsidize the cost of private insurance for people who can't afford it, through a system more or less like the Affordable Care Act.
    c. We should have a single-payer system, like "Medicare for all."
    d. The whole health care industry should be socialized. Health care would be funded through a single-payer government system, and doctors would be public employees, like in Britain.
    If you chose c, you are partly a democratic socialist but if you want to be included in the inner circle that will save humanity from Armageddon, the right choice would have been d since that's the most socialistic. Unfortunately, the health care system in Britain is being undermined by a thousand cuts, just like the shitty Obamacare is in the USA. Unless the political power of the bourgeoisie is ended, health care is subject to its whims. That political power rests on its economic power, of course, something that will resist relinquishing in the same way that the southern bourgeoisie resisted Lincoln's abolitionist agenda: violence. This leads me to the final question that really needs to be sorted out since it is basically a trick question.
    (6) Ideally, how should major social or political changes be achieved?
    a. Through the traditional democratic process: elections, legislation and popular lobbying.
    b. Through grass-roots organizing.
    c. By any means necessary, including violence and/or revolution.
    If you chose a, you'd be partially democratic socialist even though there's not much to differentiate you from an ordinary Democratic Party ward-heeler. If you chose grass-roots organizing, what are you waiting for? Go to the DSA website, enter your name, address, etc. and click "submit". That's all there is to it. After all, being in favor of grass-roots organizing doesn't actually obligate you to do anything. That would be so Leninist, after all.
    Choosing c condemns you as a "communist":
    You disagree with democratic socialists. This is a common point of misunderstanding for people who conflate democratic socialism with communism. Democratic socialists don't support a revolution to overthrow capitalism; they believe change should happen, well, democratically. "Any possible transition to socialism would necessitate mass mobilization and the democratic legitimacy garnered by having demonstrated majority support," Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Schulman wrote.
    Democratic socialists support and participate in the electoral process, but they believe that ideally, workers should achieve changes for themselves — for instance, through unions and tenant organizations — rather than relying on people in traditional positions of authority.
    "We would prefer, for example, for us to win universal rent control in New York through organizing millions of New Yorkers," Ms. Svart said. "We believe that it's through the process of pushing for these changes that people empower themselves."
    The Schwartz and Schulman referred to above are Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman who co-wrote "Toward Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice" on December 21, 2012. They see themselves as more advanced than Karl Marx since, unlike them, "Marx did not make clear his commitment to political democracy". Poor Karl Marx did not understand the need for "political pluralism" that obviously means having free elections that include parties arguing for the overthrow of socialism. Leaving aside whether Chile or Nicaragua were socialist, Salvador Allende and Daniel Ortega tried that. Look how far it got them. Nasty old Cuba did not permit that. Yeah, it meant that you were living under authoritarian rule but given Cuba's proximity to the USA, it is doubtful that anything else would have allowed the socialized medicine DSA supports to be possible.
    This business about "violence" is the stock-in-trade of sleazy liberal journalists going back for a century. I used to hear it all the time when Malcolm X was alive. This is how he used to handle it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=kXo0lgcOHhg

    Malcolm X was sympathetic to the Socialist Workers Party and for good reasons. He and the party understood this question of violence to the marrow of their bones. When James P. Cannon and other party leaders were on trial for violating the Smith Act in 1941, he spoke about the SWP's position on violence. I recommend reading his entire "Socialism on Trial" but will conclude with the section dealing with question of violence:
    Q: Now, what is the opinion of Marxists with reference to the change in the social order, as far as its being accompanied or not accompanied by violence?
    A: It is the opinion of all Marxists that it will be accompanied by violence.
    Q: Why?
    A: That is based, like all Marxist doctrine, on a study of history, the historical experiences of mankind in the numerous changes of society from one form to another, the revolutions which accompanied it, and the resistance which the outlived classes invariably put up against the new order. Their attempt to defend themselves against the new order, or to suppress by violence the movement for the new order, has resulted in every important social transformation up to now being accompanied by violence.
    Q: Who, in the opinion of Marxists, initiated that violence?
    A: Always the ruling class; always the outlived class that doesn't want to leave the stage when the time has come. They want to hang on to their privileges, to reinforce them by violent measures, against the rising majority and they run up against the mass violence of the new class, which history has ordained shall come to power.
    Q: What is the opinion of Marxists, as far as winning a majority of the people to socialist ideas?
    A: Yes, that certainly is the aim of the party. That is the aim of the Marxist movement, has been from its inception.
    Marx said the social revolution of the proletariat—I think I can quote his exact words from memory—"is a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority"[2] He said this in distinguishing it from previous revolutions which had been made in the interest of minorities, as was the case in France in 1789.
    Q: What would you say is the opinion of Marxists as far as the desirability of a peaceful transition is concerned?
    A: The position of the Marxists is that the most economical and preferable, the most desirable method of social transformation, by all means, is to have it done peacefully.
    Q: And in the opinion of the Marxists, is that absolutely excluded?
    A: Well, I wouldn't say absolutely excluded. We say that the lessons of history don't show any important examples in favor of the idea so that you can count upon it.
    Q: Can you give us examples in American history of a minority refusing to submit to a majority?
    A: I can give you a very important one. The conception of the Marxists is that even if the transfer of political power from the capitalists to the proletariat is accomplished peacefully—then the minority, the exploiting capitalist class, will revolt against the new regime, no matter how legally it is established.
    I can give you an example in American history. The American Civil War resulted from the fact that the Southern slaveholders couldn't reconcile themselves to the legal parliamentary victory of Northern capitalism, the election of President Lincoln.
    Q: Can you give us an example outside of America where a reactionary minority revolted against a majority in office?
    A: Yes, in Spain—the coalition of workers' and liberal parties in Spain got an absolute majority in the elections and established the People's Front government. This government was no sooner installed than it was confronted with an armed rebellion, led by the reactionary capitalists of Spain.
    Q: Then the theory of Marxists and the theory of the Socialist Workers Party, as far as violence is concerned, is a prediction based upon a study of history, is that right?
    A: Well, that is part of it. It is a prediction that the outlived class, which is put in a minority by the revolutionary growth in the country, will try by violent means to hold on to its privileges against the will of the majority. That is what we predict.
    Of course, we don't limit ourselves simply to that prediction. We go further, and advise the workers to bear this in mind and prepare themselves not to permit the reactionary outlived minority to frustrate the will of the majority.
    Q: What role does the rise and existence of fascism play with reference to the possibility of violence?
    A: That is really the nub of the whole question, because the reactionary violence of the capitalist class, expressed through fascism, is invoked against the workers. Long before the revolutionary movement of the workers gains the majority, fascist gangs are organised and subsidised by millions in funds from the biggest industrialists and financiers, as the example of Germany showed—and these fascist gangs undertake to break up the labor movement by force. They raid the halls, assassinate the leaders, break up the meetings, burn the printing plants, and destroy the possibility of functioning long before the labor movement has taken the road of revolution.
    I say that is the nub of the whole question of violence. If the workers don't recognise that, and do not begin to defend themselves against the fascists, they will never be given the possibility of voting on the question of revolution. They will face the fate of the German and Italian proletariat and they will be in the chains of fascist slavery before they have a chance of any kind of a fair vote on whether they want socialism or not.
    It is a life and death question for the workers that they organise themselves to prevent fascism, the fascist gangs, from breaking up the workers' organisations, and not to wait until it is too late. That is in the program of our party.

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    4) 'Evil': Worst Fears Realized as ICE Arrests Dozens of Family or Guardians Attempting to Retrieve Children From Detention
    "If they can't separate families, then lock them up, gut asylum standards, and, now, arrest family members who come forward to sponsor loved ones."
    By Julia Conley, September 20, 2018
    https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/09/20/evil-worst-fears-realized-ice-arrests-dozens-family-or-guardians-attempting-retrieve?cd-

    An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer frisks an immigrant at a processing center after arresting him in New York City. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
    Confirming the fears of many immigrant families who have declined to step forward and claim children who are being held in detention facilities, a new report shows that more than 40 people have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after doing just that.

    CNN reported Thursday that between July and early September, at least 41 people have been detained after attempting to retrieve their young family members from government-run detention facilities, which are now at 92 percent capacity with more than 13,000 children in custody.

    Just 12 of the arrests were of people with criminal records, while 70 percent of those detained were accused only of being undocumented immigrants.
    The report comes just after the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) revealed a proposal to reallocate agency funds so that more children can be held in detention centers—as fewer children are being released due to their families' fears of arrest.

    This past summer, after being forced to end its practice of separating undocumented children from their parents following international outcry, the Trump administration revealed a new tactic for cracking down on immigrant communities: requiring family members to submit to background checks and finger-printing before detained children could be released into their care.
    The new system is a transparent method to find and detain as many undocumented immigrants as possible, critics say—and one that forces HHS to operate as a federal law enforcement agency.

    HHS "has a hard enough job to do when they can be focused on being a family-serving organization charged with reuniting children with their family, and when that mission is compromised by making them collect information for the purposes of immigration enforcement, that runs contrary to their primary mission and it's contrary to the best interests of children," Maria Cancian, a former HHS deputy assistant secretary, told CNN.

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    5)  Russia's Secret Plan to Help Julian Assange Escape From UK
    By Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Dan Collyns and Luke Harding, Guardian UK, September 22, 2018
    https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/52425-russias-secret-plan-to-help-julian-assange-escape-from-uk

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
    Tentative plot to whisk fugitive from London embassy on Christmas Eve was considered too risky 

    ussian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned.
    A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador's London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country.
    One ultimate destination, multiple sources have said, was Russia, where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US. The plan was abandoned after it was deemed too risky.
    The operation to extract Assange was provisionally scheduled for Christmas Eve in 2017, one source claimed, and was linked to an unsuccessful attempt by Ecuador to give Assange formal diplomatic status.
    The involvement of Russian officials in hatching what was described as a "basic" plan raises new questions about Assange's ties to the Kremlin. The WikiLeaks editor is a key figure in the ongoing US criminal investigation into Russia's attempts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
    Robert Mueller, the special counsel conducting the investigation, filed criminal charges in July against a dozen Russian GRU military intelligence officers who allegedly hacked Democratic party servers during the presidential campaign. The indictment claims the hackers sent emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton to WikiLeaks. The circumstances of the handover are still under investigation.
    According to Mueller, WikiLeaks published "over 50,000 documents" stolen by Russian spies. The first tranche arrived on 14 July 2016 as an encrypted attachment.
    Assange has denied receiving the stolen emails from Russia.
    Details of the Assange escape plan are sketchy. Two sources familiar with the inner workings of the Ecuadorian embassy said that Fidel Narváez, a close confidant of Assange who until recently served as Ecuador's London consul, served as a point of contact with Moscow.
    In an interview with the Guardian, Narváez denied having been involved in discussions with Russia about extracting Assange from the embassy.
    Narváez said he visited Russia's embassy in Kensington twice this year as part of a group of "20-30 more diplomats from different countries". These were "open-public meetings", he said, that took place during the "UK-Russian crisis" – a reference to the aftermath of the novichok poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March.
    Sources said the escape plot involved giving Assange diplomatic documents so that Ecuador would be able to claim he enjoyed diplomatic immunity. As part of the operation, Assange was to be collected from the embassy in a diplomatic vehicle.
    Four separate sources said the Kremlin was willing to offer support for the plan – including the possibility of allowing Assange to travel to Russia and live there. One of them said that an unidentified Russian businessman served as an intermediary in these discussions.
    The possibility that Assange could travel to Ecuador by boat was also considered.
    Narváez previously played a role in trying to secure Edward Snowden's safe passage following his leak of secret NSA material in 2013. Narváez gave the former NSA contractor a so-called safe-conduct pass when he left Hong Kong for Moscow, where Snowden eventually found asylum. At the time, the then president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, said Narváez had issued the pass without the government's knowledge. The Spanish-language broadcaster Univision reported that Narváez travelled to Moscow the same day that he issued the safe passage document to Snowden; other sources have corroborated this report.
    Assange's Christmas Eve escape was aborted with just days to go, one source claimed. Rommy Vallejo, the head of Ecuador's intelligence agency, allegedly travelled to the UK on or around 15 December 2017 to oversee the operation and left London when it was called off.
    In February Vallejo quit his job and is believed to be in Nicaragua. He is under investigation for the alleged kidnapping in 2012 of a political rival to Correa.
    Ecuador's new president, Lenín Moreno, has said he wants Assange to quit the embassy. In March the government in Quito cut off his internet access and restricted his visitors.
    Melinda Taylor, a lawyer specialising in human rights and international criminal law who represents Assange, has denounced his confinement in the embassy.
    "I think it is shocking that Assange has been detained arbitrarily for approximately eight years for publishing evidence of war crimes and human rights violations. The UK could end this situation today, by providing assurances that Assange will not be extradited to the United States."
    Sources offered conflicting accounts of who cancelled the Assange operation, but all agreed it was deemed to be too risky. The stumbling block was the UK's refusal to grant Assange diplomatic protection.
    Under UK law, diplomats are immune from criminal prosecution if their diplomatic credentials have been accepted by the British government, and if the Foreign Office has been alerted to the diplomat's status.
    This is not the first time Assange has apparently considered seeking refuge in Russia. The Associated Press reported this week that the WikiLeaks founder tried to obtain a Russian visa. He signed a letter in November 2010 granting power of attorney to "my friend" Israel Shamir – a controversial supporter who passed leaked US state department cables from Assange to journalists in Moscow. Shamir would deliver Assange's passport to the Russian consulate, and collect it afterwards, Assange wrote.
    At the time Assange was facing allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. In 2012 he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy after he lost a battle against extradition in the supreme court. Assange denies the women's claims. Swedish authorities eventually dropped both cases after the statute of limitations expired. Assange faces arrest for breaching his bail conditions.
    During the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump praised WikiLeaks for releasing the emails that damaged Clinton. Confidential visitor logs obtained by the Guardian reveal that Assange received several Russian nationals during the summer of 2016, including senior figures from RT, the Kremlin's international propaganda channel.
    In March 2017 WikiLeaks published confidential CIA documents. Assange believes a grand jury indicted him over this and other leaks, with the charges filed under seal. Were he to leave the embassy the US would seek his extradition, his lawyers say.
    The Ecuadorian government declined to comment. The Russian embassy in London tweeted on Fridaythat the Guardian story was "another example of disinformation and fake news from the British media".

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    6)  Trump Administration Aims to Sharply Restrict New Green Cards for Those on Public Aid
    By Michael D. Shear and Emily Baumgaertner, September 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/22/us/politics/immigrants-green-card-public-aid.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

    A naturalization ceremony last month in Miami. Immigration caseworkers will now consider immigrants' use of public benefits to determine if green card candidates are likely to become dependent on government assistance.
    WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials announced Saturday that immigrants who legally use public benefits like food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers could be denied green cards under new rules aimed at keeping out people the administration deems a drain on the country.
    The move could force millions of poor immigrants who rely on public assistance for food and shelter to make a difficult choice between accepting financial help and seeking a green card to live and work legally in the United States.
    Older immigrants, many of whom get low-cost prescription drugs through the Medicare Part D program, could also be forced to stop participating in the popular benefits program or risk being deemed a "public charge" who is ineligible for legal resident status.
    The move is not intended to affect most immigrants who have already been granted green cards, but advocates have said they fear that those with legal resident status will stop using public benefits to protect their status. The regulation, which the administration said would affect about 382,000 people a year, is the latest in a series of aggressive crackdowns by President Trump and his hard-line aides on legal and illegal immigration.

    Federal law has always required those seeking green cards to prove they will not be a burden and has taken into consideration the acceptance of cash benefits. But the government has never before considered the use of other public benefits, like assistance for food.
    Now, the new regulation — announced on the Department of Homeland Security website — will require that immigration caseworkers consider the use of public benefits to be "heavily weighed negative factors" for those who are applying to remain legally in the country on a permanent basis. Those who are deemed likely to become dependent on government assistance will probably be denied.
    The rule would affect people seeking to immigrate to the United States permanently and others who are in the country on temporary visas — including students and workers — who seek to stay permanently.
    Immigrants could be asked in limited cases to post cash bonds of at least $10,000 to avoid being denied green cards under the new regulation, which does not need congressional approval but must still go through a public review process before it becomes final. Officials said they expected the regulation to become final after being posted to the Federal Register in the coming weeks and undergoing the 60-day review period.
    In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security said the new rule would "ensure that those seeking to enter and remain in the United States either temporarily or permanently can support themselves financially and will not be reliant on public benefits."

    The 447-page rule, titled "Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds," will not apply to families making less than 15 percent of the official poverty designation, officials said.
    Pro-immigrant activists predict that poor immigrants will immediately begin withdrawing from public assistance programs — even at the risk of losing needed assistance for food, shelter and medicine — out of a fear that they will be denied green cards and will be deported.
    "This is an attack on immigrant families and an attempt to make our immigration system a pay-to-play system where only the wealthy need apply," said Jackie Vimo, a policy analyst with the National Immigration Law Center, a Washington-based group that defends low-income immigrants. "This is a radical transformation of our immigration, and does a runaround on Congress."
    There are political implications to the move, which comes less than two months before the midterm elections, which will determine who controls the House and the Senate for the next two years of Mr. Trump's tenure.
    Focusing on the use of public benefits is often an effective way to galvanize conservative supporters. Drawing attention to the use of those benefits by immigrants could be especially persuasive in turning out Mr. Trump's supporters across the country.
    Stephen Miller, the president's top immigration adviser, has long believed that being tough on immigrants is a winning tactic for Republican candidates who too often — in Mr. Miller's view — have compromised with Democrats on the issue. He has pushed hard for the new rule during the past several months.
    But the breadth of the effect on immigrants could also energize liberal voters to support Democratic candidates. In New York, for example, city officials estimated that under an earlier draft of the regulation, which was leaked to the news media, nearly one million people could be hurt.

    They said the children of immigrants who are in the United States legally could be the most vulnerable. Indeed, immigrant parents who work low-wage jobs and rely on assistance may need to remove their children from the programs to keep their families together in the United States. Unauthorized immigrants are ineligible for nearly all public benefits.
    Trump administration officials say the rule is intended to promote fiscal responsibility.
    "Self-sufficiency has been a basic principle of United States immigration law since this country's earliest immigration statutes," the proposal says. It remains United States policy that "the availability of public benefits not constitute an incentive for immigration to the United States."
    The government has traditionally considered someone who relies on government cash assistance for more than half of his or her income a public charge. Now, however, officials will take into account whether an individual or a family has received any of an assortment of noncash public benefits, such as aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps; the Section 8 program, which provides housing assistance; or the Medicare prescription drug program for older adults.
    "This is long overdue," said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, whose research supports decreased immigration. "This country has defined public charge in a fictional way in order to facilitate high levels of low-skilled immigration. But this is simply a 21st-century definition of what public charge is."
    Officials said that the new rule did not apply to refugees or asylum seekers who enter the country, or to legal immigrants who serve in the military. Cash or other assistance given to the immigrant victims of natural disasters would not be counted against them.
    Critics of the new rule argue that it deviates from longstanding precedent and from Congress's original intent for the public-charge statute. They also say it violates states' rights to provide benefits to children and immigrants experiencing short-term crises.
    Nearly 20 million children in immigrant families could be affected by the policy changes, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation that examined a draft of the new rule that was even broader than the one announced on Saturday. Almost nine in 10 of those children are United States citizens.

    "The proposal is clearly intended to deny basic supports like food, health care and housing to lawfully present immigrants and their families — including millions of children and U.S. citizens — who pay taxes, work, go to school and contribute to our country's economy," Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington wrote in April in a letter to Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the agency that reviews proposed rules before they are published. The mayor of Seattle wrote a similar letterexpressing concerns.
    In addition to the use of public benefits, the proposed rule also deems certain health conditions — like mental health disorders, heart disease and cancer — to be among the heavily weighed factors. The proposal states that "an alien is at high risk of becoming a public charge if he or she has a medical condition and is unable to show evidence of unsubsidized health insurance."
    It is a Catch-22, said Shawn Fremstad, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Poor immigrants with health conditions must prove that they are insured, but they cannot use the available benefits to enroll.
    "It's a bit like the creation of a castelike system," Mr. Fremstad said. "Unless you've had an 'American dream' going for you in your home country, you're going to have a hard time earning it here. It's really screening those people."
    Mr. Krikorian does not contest that view.
    "This isn't a moral issue," he said. "A Honduran with a sixth-grade education level isn't morally flawed, but he works three jobs and still can't feed his family. Immigrants with low levels of skill are a mismatch for a modern society like ours."
    The complex web of technicalities surrounding the new rule are difficult to understand, said Charles Wheeler, a legal expert at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, so the number of immigrants who withdraw from programs could exceed even the number who are subject to the rule.

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    7)  Trump Is Giving Palestinians a Choice. We'll Choose Dignity.
    The crisis between the United States and the Palestinians is taking a toll on my family. But as a diplomat, I can see the upside.
    By Husam Zomlot, September 25, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/opinion/trump-palestinians-ambassador-aid.html

    The Trump administration announced this month that it would close the P.L.O.'s office in Washington.
    RAMALLAH, West Bank — My family and I moved to Washington in April 2017, just a few months after President Trump took office. I'd been sent as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization's general delegation to the United States — effectively the Palestinian ambassador in Washington.
    At the time, the new administration said it wanted to forge a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East. This seemed like a long shot given Mr. Trump's positions and his close association with some of Israel's most extreme American supporters. Still, we Palestinians wanted to give this effort a chance.
    One of my first tasks was preparing for a visit in May by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. My team and I began to meet with officials at the White House, the State Department and Congress. We also held encouraging meetings with universities, churches, think tanks and the news media, in which I saw how American opinions are changing on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence.
    At the same time, my family began to get used to our new home. My son, Saeed, then 6, and my 5-year-old daughter, Alma, began school. My wife, Suzan, who trained as a biomedical scientist, took time off as our children adjusted to their new life and I started my demanding job. In no time, we all made many wonderful American friends. It was a hopeful new beginning.

    A few months later, things changed radically. Although our relationships with the American people — including the American Jewish communities — were growing, political ties with the Trump administration deteriorated. In December, President Trump announced the United States' recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and his intention to move the American Embassy in Israel there. By that point, it had become clear that the White House was fully embracing the right-wing Israeli agenda.
    The situation has gotten even worse since. In May, the United States officially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, at which point I was recalled by Mr. Abbas to the occupied West Bank, where I remain. More recently, the Trump administration has taken even more pointless and vindictive steps toward the Palestinian people. In August, the White House decided to defund the United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees. The effort to punish the Palestinians continues. The administration appears intent on cutting off all aid, even to hospitals.
    I haven't been spared this vindictiveness. This month, the administration ordered the closing of the Palestinian mission in Washington, my office. And it has announced that it plans to revoke my family's visas by Oct. 10.
    We are in the middle of a political and diplomatic crisis. I resent, of course, the toll this is taking on my family. But as a diplomat, I can see the upside. This situation presents three strategic opportunities.
    First, it frees the Palestinians from the shackles of a failed 27-year-old, American-led peace process, unleashing more of our energy to work with the international community. At our invitation, dozens of countries will attend a meeting in New York this week to discuss restarting international peace efforts.

    Second, it provides an opportunity to correct the American-Palestinian bilateral relationship. In 1987, Congress designated the P.L.O. as a terrorist organization. This law, among others, contributed to the United States' failure as a mediator. Despite the American-sponsored Madrid peace conference in 1991, the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in 1993, the numerous bilateral agreements and generous American aid program, this label was never removed. We know this process drags on — Nelson Mandela was officially classified as a terrorist by the United States until 2008 — but it's time to do so. Our diplomatic mission in Washington must be reopened only once this law is repealed.
    Third, this crisis will help redirect Palestinian attention away from just high-level American officials and toward an equally, if not more, important investment: long-term engagement directly with the American people. American public opinion, especially among young people, is shifting toward supporting peace and Palestinian rights.
    My family left the United States a few days ago. While as a father I am dismayed that my children had to change schools three times in one year, as an ambassador I feel a sense of national fulfillment. The Trump administration has given us a choice: Either we lose our rights or we lose our relationship with this administration. We took the choice that any dignified people would have taken.
    Peace is never about extortion, coercion or blackmail. It is about vision, leadership, trust and investment. The Trump administration lacks all of those. In seeking liberation from the Israeli occupation, which steals our land and denies us our most basic human rights, we are demanding no more than what Americans would demand for themselves: freedom, liberty and equality.
    I'm not sure when I will be back in the United States. I'll miss all of the great people I met there. But even in my short time there, it was clear that there is much hope for peace and justice. I am confident the United States will one day restore commitment to the legitimate rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people. I hope that day will come soon.
    Husam Zomlot (@hzomlot) is the strategic affairs adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas.

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    8)  Decent Men Don't Do These Things
    Sexual assault is excused as normal and forgivable. It's not. Ask the women who've experienced it.
    By Theresa Brown, September 24, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/opinion/kavanaugh-sexual-assault-blasey-testimony.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    I have a story. So many women do. Mine took place when I was 6 or 7 years old, I think. I wasn't raped. People seem to always want to parse the details, so I'll be clear about that. Two older boys, sons of friends of my parents, coerced me into letting them touch my genitals with theirs. They said they would give me money if I let them. When I balked, they called me chicken.
    What's disturbing is that it happened, and then I forgot it happened until I was 23 years old and remembered. I was living in New York at the time, lying on my bed, and the memory came into my mind, unbidden. I wish it had stayed away, because now I remember it all the time and don't want to.
    Some people will dismiss my story with one word: "Kids." Others will say that I wasn't violently assaulted, so no harm was done. And still others will question the reliability of a memory that left me for about 17 years and then came back and settled in, leaving a permanent scar on my peace of mind.
    There are so many other stories, though. A girl I knew — I need to keep it vague — was raped by her boyfriend. She was 16, I think, and I was 15. She told me afterward that she told him to stop, but he wouldn't stop. She said, "Theresa, it felt like he was raping me." And here's my failing. I didn't know what to say. I thought strangers in dark alleys raped women, not men whom women actually knew.

    Then there was my friend in college, who called out a guy in our dorm who was drunk and being loud. He responded by calling her a bitch and spraying her in the face with a fire extinguisher. She called the campus police and I watched as over the following few days the entire dorm turned against her. People said he was a good guy; he just got ugly when he drank.
    And when I later argued that my friend's assailant should be removed as a peer counselor since he had an obvious tendency toward violence, the student director of the program said nothing while studiously cleaning his fingernails.
    Then there was the winter night when, as I rode my bike home from the hospital after a 12-hour nursing shift, a man standing by the curb exposed himself to me. It was dark out and cold, making the experience surreal. I wondered if it really happened, but I knew it did.
    This is the world that women live in. A world where some men think it is O.K. to humiliate women, threaten women, assault women. A world where apologists for these men blame the women themselves for any sexual harms that befall them, and where the behavior of such men is even excused as normal. Except it isn't normal.
    How in the world would two boys, around 10 years old, get the idea to ensnare an even younger girl into a forced mock-up of prostitution? Who, when a woman says to stop during sex, instead hears "go?" What kind of person uses a fire extinguisher to silence another human being? Why would a man, on a cold winter's night, display his penis to a tired nurse just wanting to get home?

    The world will parse our different experiences into categories: Was it harassment or assault? Was the perpetrator in his teens? Was it a long time ago? Did she report it right away? None of this changes the impact of what happened to us — or what it says about the men involved.
    And now I come to Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court hopeful. Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, has accused him of attempting to rape her when they were teenagers. He has also been accused by a Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, of forcing his penis into her face when they were in college and both very drunk. He has denied both allegations. Some of Kavanaugh's defenders deflect these accusations by insisting that he is a decent man.

    But that is my point — decent men do not behave this way. 
    In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Mark Antony's funeral oration for Caesar turns the public against Brutus, leader of the cabal that murdered Caesar, by repeating "Brutus is an honorable man." Antony juxtaposes that phrase with muted praise of Caesar, until the meaning of the phrase slowly changes from descriptive to ironic, revealing in the end that Brutus, and the murder of Caesar, were both dishonorable.
    If, despite Ms. Blasey's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, I hope someone in the Senate will use the word "decency" similarly, in a way that makes plain what he or she believes a man can do to a woman without damaging his reputation: "Brett Kavanaugh may have held down a 15-year-old girl and made her fear she was going to die, but Brett Kavanaugh is a decent man. Brett Kavanaugh may have humiliated a woman by forcing his penis into her face, but Brett Kavanaugh is a decent man."
    Because "the evil that men do lives after them," and I have twin daughters. I don't want them to have any stories. I don't want them to have any stories like these at all.
    Theresa Brown, a hospice nurse, is the author of "The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives."
    My NYT Comment:
    I couldn't have been more than eleven-years-old. My chest was still flat, and I was wearing a typical cotton summer dress with short, puffy sleeves and a tie-back belt. I had just finished the sixth grade and had to go to summer school for Spanish. Not many kids had to go, so there wasn't the usual parade of students walking together to and from school. Summer school got out at noon. And one day, walking home alone with my books in my arms, there was a car driving very slowly along side of me. I was nervous, but I glanced over at the car and there was a grown man, alone, driving with one hand and wagging his penis at me with the other. I ran as fast as I could home. He didn't follow me. When I think back on it, I think he got his thrill when I looked in his car. My reaction of fear and horror was what he was after. And yes, I'm 73-years-old now and I remember it clearly.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/opinion/kavanaugh-sexual-assault-blasey-testimony.html?comments#permid=28743518

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    9) Ten Years After Not One High-Level Banker Sent to Jail for Tanking Global Economy, This Man Gets 20 Years in Prison for Stealing Cigarettes
    By Jon Queally, September 24, 2018
    https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/09/24/ten-years-after-not-one-high-level-banker-sent-jail-tanking-global-economy-man-gets?cd-

    Robert Spellman was sentence last week to 20 years in prison for stealing ten cartons of cigarettes from a local convenience store. (Photo: Escambia County Jail)
    Ten years after the behavior of over-leveraged and fraudulent banks created a global financial disaster that resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in losses; a multi-trillion bailout using public money; and millions of people losing their homes to foreclosure, but saw not one high-level financial executive go to jail, a man in Florida has been sentenced to a 20-year prison term for stealing $600 worth of cigarettes from a local convenience store.
    According to the Associated Press, "Robert Spellman, 48, received the lengthy sentence after a jury in Pensacola convicted him of burglary and grand theft last month." As the Pensacola News Journal reports:
    He went into the Circle K in the 200 block of West Cervantes Street and took 10 cartons of cigarettes from a locked manager's office in the stock room.
    He was found nearby, matched a description of the suspect, was wearing the same clothing and had the cigarettes, according to the State Attorney's Office.
    Spellman had 14 felony and 31 misdemeanor convictions prior to this charge, so his 20-year sentence qualifies him as a habitual felony offender.
    While the average carton contains 200 cigarettes, that means Spellman will now serve approximately 3.65 days in prison for each of the 2,000 cigarettes he allegedly stole.
    Asked in 2016 about why no high-level bankers went to jail after the 2008 crash, former Attorney General Eric Holder lamented that reality by claiming the DOJ just coudn't make the cases stick, though said he wished it had been possible:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=b3dW7UY9a7k

    Writing about the tenth anniversary of the 2008 crash last month in Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi noted that while "everyone in the upper echelon of the finance community got Paid In Full in the bailout, even the exact people who screwed up the worst," those whose suffered most of the "miserable story turned out to be poor, nonwhite, and elderly."
    Though it's likely that most poor, nonwhite, and elderly Americans didn't need to be told that.

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    10) Padma Lakshmi: I was Raped at 16 and I Kept Silent
    I understand why a woman would wait years to disclose a sexual assault.
    By By Padma Lakshmi
    Ms. Lakshmi is an A.C.L.U. ambassador for immigration and women's rights.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/opinion/padma-lakshmi-sexual-assault-rape.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
    Padma Lakshmi

    When I was 16 years old, I started dating a guy I met at the Puente Hills Mall in a Los Angeles suburb. I worked there after school at the accessories counter at Robinsons-May. He worked at a high-end men's store. He would come in wearing a gray silk suit and flirt with me. He was in college, and I thought he was charming and handsome. He was 23.
    When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couchand talk to my mother. He never brought me home late on a school night.We were intimate to a point, but he knew that I was a virgin and that I was unsure of when I would be ready to have sex.
    On New Year's Eve, just a few months after we first started dating, he raped me.
    I have been turning that incident over in my head throughout the past week, as two women have come forward to detail accusations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford said he climbed on her and covered her mouth during an attempted rape when they were both in high school, and Deborah Ramirez said he exposed himself to her when they were in college.
    On Friday, President Trump tweeted that if what Dr. Blasey said was true, she would have filed a police report years ago. But I understand why both women would keep this information to themselves for so many years, without involving the police. For years, I did the same thing. On Friday, I tweeted about what had happened to me so many years ago.
    You may want to know if I had been drinking on the night of my rape. It doesn't matter, but I was not drunk. Maybe you will want to know what I was wearing or if I had been ambiguous about my desires. It still doesn't matter, but I was wearing a long-sleeved, black Betsey Johnson maxi dress that revealed only my shoulders.
    The two of us had gone to a couple of parties. Afterward, we went to his apartment. While we were talking, I was so tired that I lay on the bed and fell asleep.
    The next thing I remember is waking up to a very sharp stabbing pain like a knife blade between my legs. He was on top of me. I asked, "What are you doing?" He said, "It will only hurt for a while." "Please don't do this," I screamed.
    The pain was excruciating, and as he continued, my tears felt like fear.
    Afterward, he said, "I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep." Then he drove me home.
    I didn't report it. Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police. At first I was in shock. That evening, I let my mother know when I was home, then went to sleep, hoping to forget that night.

    Soon I began to feel that it was my fault. We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: "What the hell were you doing in his apartment? Why were you dating someone so much older?"
    I don't think I classified it as rape — or even sex — in my head. I'd always thought that when I lost my virginity, it would be a big deal — or at least a conscious decision. The loss of control was disorienting. In my mind, when I one day had intercourse, it would be to express love, to share pleasure or to have a baby. This was clearly none of those things.
    Later, when I had other boyfriends my senior year of high school and in my first year of college, I lied to them — I said I was still a virgin. Emotionally, I still was.
    When I think about it now, I realize that by the time of this rape, I had already absorbed certain lessons. When I was 7 years old, my stepfather's relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out.
    These experiences have affected me and my ability to trust. It took me decades to talk about this with intimate partners and a therapist.
    Some say a man shouldn't pay a price for an act he committed as a teenager. But the woman pays the price for the rest of her life, and so do the people who love her.
    I think if I had at the time named what happened to me as rape — and told others — I might have suffered less. Looking back, I now think I let my rapist off the hook and I let my 16-year-old self down.

    I have a daughter now. She's 8. For years I've been telling her the simplest and most obvious words that it took me much of my life to understand: "If anybody touches you in your privates or makes you feel uncomfortable, you yell loud. You get out of there and tell somebody. Nobody is allowed to put their hands on you. Your body is yours."
    Now, 32 years after my rape, I am stating publicly what happened. I have nothing to gain by talking about this. But we all have a lot to lose if we put a time limit on telling the truth about sexual assault and if we hold on to the codes of silence that for generations have allowed men to hurt women with impunity.
    One in four girls and one in six boys today will be sexually abused before the age of 18. I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls' bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences.
    Those messages should be very clear as we consider whom we appoint to make decisions on the highest court of our land.

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    11)  E.P.A. Places the Head of Its Office of Children's Health on Leave
    By Coral Davenport and Roni Caryn Rabin, September 26, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/climate/epa-etzel-children-health-program.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

    The Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in Washington in July. On Tuesday, the E.P.A. placed Dr. Ruth Etzel, the head of its Office of Children's Health Protection, on administrative leave.
    WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday placed the head of its Office of Children's Health Protection on administrative leave, in an unusual move that several observers said appeared to reflect an effort to minimize the role of the office.
    Dr. Ruth Etzel, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who has been a leader in children's environmental health for 30 years, joined the E.P.A. in 2015, after having served as a senior officer for environmental health research at the World Health Organization. She was placed on administrative leave late Tuesday and asked to hand over her badge, keys and cellphone, according to an E.P.A. official familiar with the decision who was not authorized to discuss the move and asked not to be identified.
    An E.P.A. spokesman, John Konkus, declined to give a reason for the administrative leave.
    The E.P.A.'s Office of Children's Health Protection, created by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is tasked with seeing that agency regulations and programs take into account the particular vulnerabilities of children, babies and fetuses. Children are more vulnerable than adults to pollution and other potential exposure because their bodies are still developing and because they eat, drink and breathe more in proportion to their size. In addition, some of their behaviors, such as crawling or putting things in their mouths, potentially expose them to chemicals or toxins.
    Several people within the E.P.A. or who work closely with the agency said that Dr. Etzel's dismissal is one of several recent developments that have slowed the work of the children's health office. One person cited a proposal outlining a strategy for reducing childhood lead exposure, which had been in development for over a year with the involvement of 17 federal agencies, and which has been stalled since early July.

    The Office of Children's Health Protection is technically housed in the office of the E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, who has served as the agency's acting administrator since July.
    Under Mr. Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, who left the position earlier this year amid investigations into his oversight of the agency, the E.P.A. has aggressively pursued an agenda of rolling back environmental restrictions on numerous pollutants, arguing that the regulations are overly strict or that they burden industry. 
    "This seems like a sneaky way for the E.P.A. to get rid of this program and not be upfront about it," said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital affiliated with Michigan State University, whose analysis of blood tests in Flint, Mich. — a community that became caught up in a lead crisis affecting its drinking water — played a key role in showing that residents were being poisoned by the lead. Dr. Hanna-Atisha called Dr. Etzel "an international leader in children's health."
    The decision to put the department head on administrative leave "is highly unusual," said Joseph Goffman, a former senior counsel for the E.P.A. during the Obama administration. 
    The office Dr. Etzel oversees is small, with a budget of about $2 million and 15 full-time employees in Washington and 10 regional children's health coordinators, some of whom have other responsibilities in addition to children's health.

    Mr. Konkus, the E.P.A. spokesman, said the Trump administration had no intention to diminish or eliminate an office designed to protect children's health. "Children's health is and has always been a top priority for the Trump administration and the E.P.A. in particular is focused on reducing lead exposure in schools, providing funds for a cleaner school bus fleet and cleaning up toxic sites so that children have safe environments to learn and play," he said in an emailed statement.

    Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal.

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     12)  Hundreds of Migrant Children Quietly Moved to a Tent Camp on the Texas Border
    By Caitlin Dickerson, September 30, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html

    Migrant children at a detention facility in Tornillo, Tex.
    n shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.
    Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.
    But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.
    These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

    The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.
    To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to South Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.
    The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.
    “It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.
    Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.
    “The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”

    But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.
    The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.
    The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.
    Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”
    Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.
    At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.
    The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worked replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

    Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.
    The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.
    Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.
    Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.
    The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.
    “Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.
    “This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”

    The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.
    Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.
    Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.
    “Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.
    Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.
    The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.
    Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.

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     13)  Kavanaugh and the Blackout Theory
    By Sarah Hepola, September 29, 2018
    “When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/brett-kavanaugh-drinking-blackouts.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    College students drinking at a tailgate party before a Indiana University football game.
    One of the trickiest things about blackouts is that you don’t necessarily know you’re having one. I wrote a memoir, so centered around the slips of memory caused by heavy drinking that it is actually called “Blackout,” and in the years since its 2015 release, I’ve heard from thousands of people who experienced them. No small number of those notes contain some version of this: “For years, I was having blackouts without knowing what they were.” Blackouts are like a philosophical riddle inside a legal conundrum: If you can’t remember a thing, how do you know it happened?
    In the days leading up to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a theory arose that he might have drunk so much as a teenager that he did not remember his alleged misdeeds. The blackout theory was a way to reconcile two competing narratives. It meant that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth but so was Brett Kavanaugh. He simply did not remember what happened that night and therefore believed himself falsely accused. Several questions at the hearing were designed to get at this theory, but it gained little ground.
    I want to be clear, up front, that I cannot know whether Judge Kavanaugh experienced a blackout. But what I do know is that blackouts are both common and tragically misunderstood.
    Before the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was mysteriously dispatched, she was aiming toward the above line of inquiry.

    “Have you ever passed out from drinking?” she asked.
    Kavanaugh’s answer was dismissive but slightly confusing: “I’ve gone to sleep, but I’ve never blacked out. That’s the allegation? That’s wrong.”
    A few clarifications. First, I dare you to find the heavy drinker who hasn’t passed out from too much booze. To say you were just sleeping is like my dad saying he’s resting his eyes when he’s napping. It’s a semantic dodge.
    Second, and more crucially, this answer tips toward a common conflation of the act of passing out — sliding into unconsciousness, eyes closed, being what drinkers often call “dead to the world” — and the act of blacking out, a temporary, alcohol-induced state in which you can remain functional and conversational, but later you will have no memory of what you did, almost as though your brain failed to hit the “record” button. This phenomenon remains unknown to many, even experts who ought to know better — doctors, journalists, judges.
    Blackouts are caused by a spike in the blood-alcohol level. Crucial is not only how much you drink or what you drink but also how fast. People who don’t eat before drinking are at higher risk for blackout. Shot contests, beer-chugging competitions, keg stands — the macho pre-gaming world of intercollegiate boozing is a perfect setup for blackouts, part of why they’re so rampant at universities — a 2002 survey conducted by researchers at Duke University found that approximately 50 percent of college drinkers reported having at least one blackout — though adults are no less prone.
    There are two kinds of blackouts. The more common is fragmentary, where slivers of the night are missing. The more extreme version is “en bloc,” where several hours can be wiped from the memory drive. Fragmentary blackouts start at a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.2, though they’ve been found at lower levels; everyone’s brain is different. En bloc blackouts happen closer to 0.3, and it’s worth noting that at 0.35, it is estimated that about half of drinkers will die, so blackout drinkers are getting up there.

    A common bonding experience in drinking circles is “piecing the night together”— friends sitting around the next day, laughing as they scroll through text messages and camera rolls, trying to fill in the gaps in one another’s memories. Some of the missing dots are easy to connect: Oh, that’s right, we went to the bar! Others might be confounding: Wait, we went to a BAR? 
    “Piecing things together” is a phrase that jumped out at me when I read Judge Kavanaugh’s 2014 speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society,in which he describes drunken heroics as a routine part of campus life; Senator Richard Blumenthal also leapt on this at the hearing, although Judge Kavanaugh deflected the inquiry, as he did every question about any possible dark side to his consumption.
    One particularly dastardly aspect of blackouts is that other people don’t necessarily know you’re having one. Some people in a blackout stagger around in a zombie state; others quote Shakespeare. I had friends who told me I got this zombie look in my eyes, like a person who was unplugged, but others friends told me, on different occasions, that I’d seemed fine.
    It wasn’t until this century that scientists really understood blackouts. For generations, experts thought they were the exclusive realm of alcoholics, a sign of troubled late-stage drinking. But non-problem drinkers black out all the time. In fact, that kind of drinker would be a good candidate for someone who might remain ignorant of their blackouts. You see this in sexual assault cases: A woman believes she passed out the night before, but she actually blacked out, leaving untold minutes or hours unaccounted for in her memory bank. This is hellishly confusing — because to the person who wakes up not remembering what happened, it feels like you must have been asleep. Disrupting that assumption requires some contrary piece of evidence: Cuts and bruises, strange clothes you don’t recall putting on, a friend’s testimony, surveillance footage. Today’s young people are more aware of their own blackouts — in part because scientists have gained insight about them, allowing media stories to spread, but also because those kids carry around phones that record everything they do, making them much more likely to have that jarring moment of cognitive disconnect. Wait, when did I type THAT? Wait, when was THAT picture taken? Previous generations simply did not carry such handy data collection services in their pockets.
    I suspect Mark Judge — if he were ever able to speak from the heart and not through sworn statements vetted by his lawyer and dispatched from aBethany Beach house — would be able to speak powerfully on this topic. As a recovering alcoholic, Mr. Judge has gotten real about his drinking, something that can be tough for the people around you, who are not nearly so invested in staring down their high school keggers. I believe Mr. Judge when he swears he doesn’t remember the incident that Christine Blasey Ford described. I also think that absence of information might have been why, assuming Dr. Blasey’s recollection is correct, he had such a queasy reaction when he ran into her at a grocery store. I used to get a hideous gnawing sensation when I stumbled across people I’d blacked out around, because I did not know. What had I said? What had I done? The sheer unknowing rattled me.
    Mr. Judge describes this terror in his memoir “Wasted,” where he tells the story of a wedding rehearsal dinner where he got so blasted he doesn’t remember the evening’s end. A friend informs him the next day that he tried to take off his clothes and “make it” with a bridesmaid. Mr. Judge’s response cuts me. “Please tell me I didn’t hurt her,” he said.
    Inside those haunted words I see a life and a trail of damage that could have been my own. I consider it nothing but a gift of biology, or temperament, or sexual dynamics that I never had to worry I had physically or sexually assaulted anyone in a blackout. I worried I was rude. I worried I was weird, dumb, deathly unsexy. As I grew older, and more risk-taking, I worried I’d had sex with someone I didn’t know, a not-uncommon experience in my own daily calendar. But I have known men who drank too much, and I have loved them, and this is a fear that beats in their private hearts. I hope I didn’t hurt her. I interviewed a blackout expert for my book, and he told me something I’ve never forgotten: “When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them.”

    One of the most unforgettable moments in an unforgettable hearing came when Senator Patrick Leahy asked Dr. Blasey about her strongest memory of that night. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The word Dr. Blasey used, hippocampus, is significant. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that plays a central role in memory formation. And damned if it isn’t a part of the brain disrupted by a blackout. The hippocampus stops placing information in long-term storage, which means what happened, what you did, what you said, what hurt you might have caused another human — all of it turns to a stream of unremembered words and images that pour forever into the dark night. 
    So while Dr. Blasey’s brain was pumping the epinephrine and norepinephrine that would etch the moment on her brain, it is quite possible that one if not both of those men were experiencing something like the opposite: A mechanical failure of the brain to record anything. Such a dynamic is breathtaking in its cruelty, which makes it no less common.
    I suspect we’ll never know whether Brett Kavanaugh experienced blackouts as a young drinker. I suspect he’ll never know, because what I took from the man at his hearing was that he was not interested in going there. Those days are gone; he has closed the door on that era. But as a wise man once said, just because we are done with the past doesn’t mean the past is done with us. You can ask Christine Blasey Ford about that. You can ask Mark Judge. I bet both of them would have a few things to say about the way memories splinter and implant in the body. How the past lives inside us, guides us, owns us. I have often wondered what the body remembers even as the mind forgets. And then there are other things. The ones that will and never can be forgotten.

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     14) Seven Palestinians Killed in Gaza Border Clash
    By Reuters, September 28, 2018
    "Gaza health officials said 505 people were wounded. They identified the dead as males, two of them ages 12 and 14."
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/middleeast/gaza-palestinians-border.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

    Palestinian protesters reacting to tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers during a protest at Gaza’s border with Israel.
    GAZA — Israeli soldiers fatally shot seven Palestinians, including two boys, who were among thousands of people who thronged to the fortified Gaza border on Friday as part of weekly protests begun six months ago, Gaza health officials said.
    Israel’s military said its troops resorted to live fire and an airstrike in response to explosive devices and rocks launched at them and to prevent breaches of the border fence from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled enclave.
    Gaza health officials said 505 people were wounded. They identified the dead as males, two of them ages 12 and 14.
    About 200 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza protests began on March 30 to demand the right of return to lands that Palestinian families fled or were driven from on Israel’s founding in 1948, and the easing of an Israeli-Egyptian economic blockade.

    Hamas said Friday’s protest also marked the 18th anniversary of the last Palestinian revolt against Israel.
    A Gaza sniper killed an Israeli soldier in an earlier protest, and Palestinians have used kites and helium balloons to fly incendiary devices over the border fence, destroying tracts of forest and farmland in Israel.
    Israel accuses Hamas, against which it has fought three wars in the last decade, of having deliberately provoked violence in the protests, a charge Hamas denies.


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     15) The Most Important Least-Noticed Economic Event of the Decade
    A localized recession in manufacturing-heavy areas can explain a lot of things.
    By Neil Irwin, September 29, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/upshot/mini-recession-2016-little-known-big-impact.html?rref=collection%2Fissuecollection%2Ftodays-new-york-times


    Sometimes the most important economic events announce themselves with huge front-page headlines, stock market collapses and frantic intervention by government officials.
    Other times, a hard-to-explain confluence of forces has enormous economic implications, yet comes and goes without most people even being aware of it.
    In 2015 and 2016, the United States experienced the second type of event.
    There was a sharp slowdown in business investment, caused by an interrelated weakening in emerging markets, a drop in the price of oil and other commodities, and a run-up in the value of the dollar.

    The pain was confined mostly to the energy and agricultural sectors and to the portions of the manufacturing economy that supply them with equipment. Overall economic growth slowed but remained in positive territory. The national unemployment rate kept falling. Anyone who didn’t work in energy, agriculture or manufacturing could be forgiven for not noticing it at all.

    Yet understanding this slump — think of it as a mini-recession — is important in many ways. 
    It helps explains the economic growth spurt of the last two years. The end of the mini-recession in the spring of 2016 created a capital spending rebound that began in mid-2016, and it has contributed to speedier growth since. Oil prices have reached four-year highs, a major factor in a surge in business investment this year.
    It helps explain some of the economic discontent evident in manufacturing-heavy areas during the 2016 elections. It offers warnings for where the next downturn might come from, and shows how important it is for policymakers to remain watchful and flexible about unpredictable shifts in the global economy.
    Most important, the mini-recession of 2015-16 offers a cautionary tale for any policymaker who might want to think of the United States as an economic island.
    The episode is stark evidence of the risk the Trump administration faces in threatening economic damage to negotiate leverage with other nations on trade and security. What happens overseas can return to American shores faster and more powerfully than once seemed possible.

    The mini-recession defies neatness. It’s a story of spillovers and feedback loops and unintended consequences. But here’s a summary:
    In 2015, Chinese leaders were concerned that their economy was experiencing a credit bubble, and they began imposing policies to restrain growth. These worked too well and caused a steep slowdown. That in turn caused troubles in other emerging nations for whom China was a major customer.
    Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, finally growing confident that the United States economy was returning to health, made plans to end its era of ultra-easy monetary policy.
    As the Fed moved toward tighter money, its counterparts at the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan were going in the opposite direction. The prospect of higher interest rates in the United States and lower rates in the eurozone and Japan fueled a steep rise in the value of the dollar on global currency markets.
    That in turn made China’s problems worse. China had long pegged the value of its currency to the dollar, so a stronger dollar was also making Chinese companies less competitive globally. When China attempted to reduce this burden by loosening the peg in August 2015, it faced capital outflows, making the economic situation worse.
    Moreover, across major emerging markets, many companies and banks had borrowed money in dollars, so a stronger dollar made their debt burdens more onerous.
    Put it all together, and when the Fed moved toward raising interest rates — as it eventually did in December 2015 — it was essentially making financial conditions tighter and therefore slowing growth across big swaths of the world.

    The slowdown across emerging markets, in turn, meant less demand for oil and many other commodities. That helped cause their prices to fall. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell to under $30 in February 2016 from around $106 in June 2014. The drops in the prices of metals like copper and aluminum, and agricultural products like corn and soybeans, were also steep.
    That only heightened the economic pain for the many emerging economies that are major commodity producers, such as Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia.
    Given falling prices and high debt loads among energy producers in the United States, the markets for stocks and riskier corporate bonds came under stress, especially in early 2016. That generated losses for investors and fears about the overall stability of the financial system.
    Each of these forces has connections to the others. It wasn’t one problem, but an intersection of a bunch of them. That made it devilishly hard to diagnose, let alone to fix, even for the people whose job was to do just that.

    When Federal Reserve officials meet eight times a year to set interest rate policy, their job, assigned by Congress, is to figure out what is best for the United States economy. Their job isn’t to set a policy that will be best for China or Brazil or Indonesia.
    Entering 2015, things were looking pretty good for the United States.
    Inflation was below the 2 percent level the Fed aims for, but the traditional economic models on which the central bankers had long relied predicted that it would start to rise thanks to a rapidly falling unemployment rate.
    Even when prices for oil and other commodities started falling in the middle of the year, the Fed’s models viewed it as a positive for the overall economy. Sure, some oil drillers and farmers might experience lower incomes, but consumers everywhere would enjoy cheaper gasoline and grocery bills.

    Although officials spent a lot of time monitoring the global economy, the fact remained that the United States wasn’t as dependent on exports as many smaller countries. The 2008 financial crisis had shown how the American and European banking systems were deeply intertwined, but the same couldn’t be said of the ties with Chinese banks.
    In other words, through the summer of 2015 it sure looked to many Fed officials as if the sound move was to start raising interest rates.
    At the Treasury Department, which is responsible for the United States’ currency policies, it seemed well into 2015 that the strengthening dollar was mostly benign.
    “There was a sense that the U.S. was doing well and the rest of the world was not doing very well,” said Nathan Sheets, a Treasury under secretary at the time and now chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income. “It was driven by strong U.S. fundamentals.”
    But in late summer 2015, financial markets started to react more violently to the feedback loop of global currencies and commodities. It started to seem as if some of the old rules of thumb — about how a rising dollar or falling oil prices might affect the economy — might not apply.
    Perhaps the economics models used by forecasters had become outdated, failing to fully account for the ways surging energy production had become more intertwined with the manufacturing sector and the financial markets.
    “These things were all interconnected in different ways, and they all cycled back on the same industries and parts of the economy,” said Jay Shambaugh, a member of the Obama White House Council of Economic Advisers at the time. Still, distilling that complex story into crisp memos for senior officials was no easy task.

    “You have to make memos short and to the point in the White House, and it was hard to say what exactly we thought was happening,” he said.
    Behind closed doors at the Fed, officials started debating whether this outburst of volatility in markets really posed a risk to the overall economy. Should they stick to their plans to raise interest rates steadily, or slow down?
    Over two days in October, the debate played out publicly.
    Stan Fischer, the vice chairman of the Fed, was reluctant to adjust the planned rate increases, not wishing to let swings in financial markets dictate policy.
    “We do not currently anticipate that the effects of these recent developments on the U.S. economy will prove to be large enough to have a significant effect on the path for policy,” he said in a speech in Lima, Peru, on Oct. 11, 2015.
    Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who had worked on international issues at the Treasury, was quite a bit more worried.
    “There is a risk that the intensification of international cross currents could weigh more heavily on U.S. demand directly, or that the anticipation of a sharper divergence in U.S. policy could impose restraint through additional tightening of financial conditions,” she said on Oct. 12 in Washington.
    Ms. Brainard was right.

    The vicious circle of a stronger dollar, weaker emerging market growth and lower commodity prices caused spending on certain types of capital goods to plummet starting in mid-2015.
    Spending on agricultural machinery in 2016 fell 38 percent from 2014 levels; for petroleum and natural gas structures — think oil drilling rigs — the number was down a whopping 60 percent.
    The oil and gas exploration boom tied to fracking technology came to a halt with energy prices at rock-bottom levels, and with it sales of equipment tied to that boom. 
    With the fall in domestic capital investment in those industries and with weakness overseas, companies in related industries took it on the chin. Caterpillar, the maker of heavy equipment, had 30 percent lower revenue in 2016 than 2014.
    In large segments of the economy, by contrast, it was business as usual. Business spending on investments like computers and office buildings kept rising, as did consumer spending.

    Still, the industrial sector downturn was powerful enough to turn a strong expansion into a weak one. Overall growth fell to 1.3 percent in the four quarters ended in mid-2016, from 3.4 percent in the preceding year.

    The national economy kept adding jobs. But Harris County, Tex., which encompasses energy-centric Houston and its near suburbs, shed 0.8 percent of its jobs in that span. In Peoria, Ill., hometown of Caterpillar, employment fell 3.2 percent.
    In effect, this was a localized recession — severe in certain places, but concentrated enough that it did not throw the overall United States economy into contraction.
    In Williston, N.D., where the economy had been booming for years because of a surge in oil and natural gas drilling on the Bakken oil patch, businesses of all types closed or slashed wages.
    “It varies week to week, but every week keeps getting worse,” Marcus Jundt, owner of a restaurant, the Williston Brewing Company, told CNBC in March 2016. “We don’t know where the bottom is, but we’re not there yet.”
    But it could have been worse.

    When Janet Yellen assumed leadership of the Federal Reserve in early 2014, she inherited an economy that had been expanding steadily for years, with a great deal of help from the Fed’s interest rate policies.
    Deciding how and when to pull that support — when to raise interest rates, which had been near zero for more than six years — was set to be the defining choice of her tenure.
    In 2015, with signs that the United States economy was returning to health, she and her colleagues believed it was time to begin raising interest rates. She is a leading labor market scholar who spent a career studying, among other things, how a tight labor market can eventually feed through to inflation.
    In July of that year, with stirrings of the emerging markets disruption, the unemployment rate was 5.2 percent, not much above the level Fed officials believed was consistent with a fully healthy labor market. Then the turmoil of August began.
    Ms. Yellen elected not to raise rates in September, waiting for more evidence that the economy was truly on track and that the emerging market troubles wouldn’t do too much damage to the domestic economy. But by December she judged that the situation had stabilized enough to raise rates.
    At the same time, the Fed revealed forecasts indicating that its senior officials expected to raise interest rates four more times in 2016. Within weeks, global markets were sending a message: Not so fast.
    The dollar kept strengthening, the price of commodities kept falling, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 dropped about 9 percent over three weeks in late January and early February. Bond yields plummeted, suggesting that the United States was at risk of recession.
    In mid-February 2016, the financial leaders of the world’s most powerful nations were set to convene in a Shanghai for the periodic G20 summit. With global markets in turmoil, the great question was: Can the officials rein in these forces?
    The official statement released by the participants in the summit contained multiple nods to the turbulence, acknowledging risks from “volatile capital flows” and falling commodity prices. But more important than any words was what followed in the following weeks.

    Two days after the summit, China lowered its reserve requirement on banks, essentially opening the spigot for more lending. In the months that followed, it would put in tighter controls on the movement of capital outside the country, and seek to tie the value of the yuan less closely to the dollar.
    Three weeks after the summit, the Fed had another policy meeting. Rather than raise interest rates further as had been envisioned in December, Fed officials declined to raise rates — and steeply reduced their expectations of how much further they would raise rates over the remainder of 2016.
    Together, these steps were enough to end the vicious cycle. The dollar stopped appreciating and started dropping. Oil prices bottomed out and began a recovery. In the United States, capital spending was growing again by the summer of 2016.

    Some analysts of financial markets have put a conspiratorial bent on the concerted action from the two sides of the Pacific, speculating that leaders had made a secret deal at the G20 meeting in February 2016. They call it the “Shanghai Accord”— essentially, that the Fed would hold off on rate increases if the Chinese also took actions of their own.
    Ms. Yellen said it’s not so. She said in an interview that there was an extensive exchange of views and information with the Chinese delegation in Shanghai, but that there were no promises or explicit agreements.

    “I realize it looked to much of the world like some kind of secret handshake deal,” she said. “This wasn’t a deal. This was the global economy and capital markets affecting the U.S. outlook, and the Fed being sensitive to that, taking that into account and its influencing policy appropriately.”

    The Fed, she said, did what it thought was best for the United States economy without knowing exactly what the Chinese would do.
    Mr. Sheets, the former Treasury official, also dismissed the idea of some secret agreement.
    “It’s just not how it works,” he said. “There were a lot of meetings. A lot of bilaterals and quadrilaterals. You meet with your counterparts and talk about the global economy and think about the challenges and what might be done. But there was nothing agreed behind closed doors that was not part of the formal statement.”
    Even if there was no formal secret agreement, the result — leaders of the world’s two biggest economies squarely focused on the risks that the situation presented — turned out to be enough.

    The impact of the global commodity-currency spiral of 2015-16 is evident from a glance at the economic statistics. It is less so in the economic debates of 2018.
    First, while the Trump administration has claimed full credit for a surge in business investment, the bounce-back from the mini-recession is a major factor.
    White House economists have presented charts showing a surge starting in the fourth quarter of 2016, when the election took place. But that turnaround began in mid-2016 by most measures, not late 2016 as suggested by the White House’s “six quarter compound annual growth rate” measure.
    Second, the mini-recession might well have affected some political attitudes during the 2016 election. While the economy was in pretty good shape for people in large cities on the coasts, 2016 was rough for a lot of people in local economies heavily reliant on drilling, mining, farming or making the machines that support those industries.

    A poll in October 2016 by an agriculture trade publication, Agri-Pulse, found that 86 percent of farmers were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the United States. 
    Third, economic policymakers need to display the flexibility to respond to incoming information, even when it doesn’t fit their own forecasts or preconceptions.
    If Ms. Yellen had been more stubborn about sticking to the plan to keep raising rates through 2016 because of her training as a labor market economist, the result might well have been an actual recession. “She’s always learning,” said Julia Coronado, president of MacroPolicy Perspectives, “and not so egotistical that she’s wedded to one view of the world.”
    Finally, it shows the global economy is so interconnected that events in Shanghai or São Paulo can cause unpredictable effects in faraway places.
    In the last year, the Trump administration has been lobbing tariffs at China and other major economic partners to extract more advantageous terms for trade. But the mini-recession warns of the risk of ricochet.
    Like it or not, the complexity of our global connections means that policy can’t just focus on the home front. In 2016, we learned that lesson the hard way, even if not everybody was paying attention.

    Neil Irwin is a senior economics correspondent for The Upshot. He previously wrote for The Washington Post and is the author of “The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire.”

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     16) Under the Fog of Kavanaugh, House Passes $3.8 Trillion More in Tax Cuts
    By Glen Fleishman, September 28, 2018
    http://fortune.com/2018/09/28/house-3-8-trillion-tax-cut-passes/
    With attention fixed on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new $3.1 trillion tax cut on Friday. The vote was 220 to 191, including three Democrats.
    The down-to-the-wire 2017 tax act passed in late December contained a mix of permanent and temporary changes that had to result in a net increased cost that fell within a structural limit of $1.5 trillion that allowed the Senate to approve the bill with a simple majority.
    The House’s new bill takes effect starting in 2025, and would add $600 billion to the national debt within the next decade, and then $3.2 trillion in the 10 years after that, according to Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center.
    Despite the House vote, it is unlikely the Senate will take up the legislation. The first round of tax cuts landed with a thud, with even a leaked Republican National Committee poll—reported on by Bloomberg News—showing American voters thought it benefited “large corporations and rich Americans” by an overall 2-to-1 margin and the same margin among independent voters.
    Without special rules in place, the Senate would vote under normal procedures, which can require 60 senators’ votes to pass a bill that is heavily opposed.

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