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Former New York Rep. Michael Grimm (R) is gearing up to retake his old congressional seat with the help of an “excited” Stephen Bannon, according to a new report.
Newsweek reported Thursday that the former Republican congressman, who served seven months in prison after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud in 2015, says he and the former White House chief strategist will be working together to retake his former congressional seat in 2018.
“We’re definitely going to work together. … And I can say that Steve Bannon was very excited about it,” Grimm told Newsweek. Asked what made him convinced that Bannon would be on his side, Grimm replied: “His reaction!”
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“I mean, he’s not the type of guy that shows emotion easily, but I could tell he was definitely excited,” Grimm added.
Last month, Bannon campaigned for conservative firebrand Roy Moore, who defeated incumbent Sen. Luther StrangeLuther Johnson StrangeThe biggest political upsets of the decade State ‘certificate of need’ laws need to go GOP frets over nightmare scenario for Senate primaries MORE (R-Ala.) in a GOP Senate special election primary.
Bannon, who left the White House earlier this year and returned to Breitbart News, has pointed to Sen. Bob CorkerRobert (Bob) Phillips CorkerGOP lawmakers stick to Trump amid new criticism Trump asserts his power over Republicans Romney is only GOP senator not on new White House coronavirus task force MORE’s (R-Tenn.) announcement that he will not seek reelection in 2018 as a sign of the GOP establishment’s weakened strength.
“Last night we talked about starting a revolution with Judge Moore’s victory. Well, Sen. Corker stepped down today, he’s not going to run for reelection,” Bannon said at Moore’s victory speech.
“You are going to see, in state after state after state, people that follow the model of Judge Moore, that do not have to raise money from the elites, the crony capitalists, from the fat cats in Washington, D.C., New York City and Silicon Valley.”
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Grimm’s former seat is currently held by fellow Republican Rep. Dan Donovan, who in 2010 unsuccessfully ran for New York attorney general against Democrat Eric Schneiderman.
Update:
Residents of Shishmaref voted reportedly voted 89 to 78 to leave.
Earlier:
Residents of a remote Alaskan village will find out Wednesday if they are to become the first American community to become climate refugees.
Rapidly rising sea levels are forcing the 650-person village of Shishmaref, which lies just north of the Bering Strait, to consider relocating. Residents voted Tuesday and the city clerk said that results will be announced Wednesday.
As for where they will go, the community will decide later at a town meeting. The move is estimated to cost $180 million.
“The sea ice used to protect Shishmaref, which is built on a barrier island and largely inhabited by members of the Inupiat Inuit tribe,” wrote the Guardian. “But now that the ice is melting, the village is in peril from encroaching waves, especially as the permafrost on which it is built is thawing, and crumbling beneath the mostly prefabricated houses. Barricades and sea walls have had little effect.”
Shishmaref is just one of four Alaskan villages identified by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2003 of being in “imminent danger from flooding and erosion and…planning to relocate.” Since then, dozens more communities have been added to the list.
But as Robin Bronen, a senior research scientist with The Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, recently explained to Yale 360, there is currently no funding or government institution set up to help facilitate such relocations.
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Bronon explained:
“If we don’t figure out how to create this relocation institutional framework,” she added, “we’re talking about humanitarian crises for millions of people living in the United States.”
Another Alaskan village facing imminent relocation, Kivalina, had no potable water for several months in 2014 because erosion was affecting the infiltration of their water system. That community, too, is stuck in limbo.
The Obama administration had proposed $50.4 billion to help with Alaska Native Village relocation efforts, but that only covers a portion of the estimated cost of one community’s move.
Esau Sinnok, a Shishmaref native and Arctic Youth Ambassador, penned an essay in 2015 for the Department of the Interior explaining how this is not the first time the community has voted to relocate. He wrote:
“Once you see how vulnerable my community is to sea-level rise and erosion,” concluded Sinnok, who spoke about the challenges facing his community at the COP21 meeting in Paris last year, “you won’t be able to deny that Arctic communities are already feeling the impacts of climate change.”
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More than a hundred U.S. troops were sent to Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on Monday to continue fighting the Taliban, in the first deployment of forces to the area since the drawdown in 2014—offering another signal that the U.S. military presence there is expanding, not decreasing, as President Barack Obama has promised.
The Guardian reports:
Brigadier General Charles Cleveland told reporters on Monday that the deployment would be “temporary,” but would not say how long it would last, citing “security reasons.”
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Sources in Helmand say about 130 U.S. troops have arrived to their base in the region, the Guardian writes. Cleveland said they would act as a “new presence to assist the police zone.”
In July, the government watchdog group Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported that the Afghan government had lost five percent of its territory to the Taliban, meaning it had less than two-thirds of the country’s districts—and that Taliban fighters now claim more ground than at any time since 2001.
That’s despite more than $68 billion in U.S. funding to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.
Omer Zwak, spokesperson for the provincial governor in Helmand, said there were also plans for yet more U.S. troops to assist Afghan soldiers in Lashkar Gah.
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U.S. Special Operations Forces training missions to Latin America tripled between 2007 and 2014, newly obtained documents by a human rights advocacy organization reveal, offering further evidence that it is “the golden age” of secret operations by these elite fighters.
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) says the uptick happened during “a period when overall military aid to the region was decreasing” and as overall transparency about these forces, which include the Green Berets, the Navy SEALs, and Rangers, is waning.
Many of the missions these forces took part in, WOLA’s Sarah Kinosian and Adam Isacson explain, were trainings called Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET). While 12 JCETs trained 560 foreign personnel in 2007, the number zoomed up to 36 JCETs training 2,300 personnel in 2014.
Kinosian and Isacson write:
The highest number of missions—21—took place in Honduras. Most of those occurred from 2011 to 2014, a period when “when serious allegations levied against Honduran security forces—murder, torture, rape and extortion—went uninvestigated and unpunished,” Kinosian and Isacson write.
Nearly as many—19—missions took place in El Salvador, where the trainings may have been for a group of units ostensibly taking to the streets to fight that country’s war on gangs, and who have “been credibly accused of extrajudicial executions, crime scene manipulation, and enforced disappearances, among other crimes.”
Kinosian and Isacson write: “Over the past eight years, nearly 4,000 U.S. Special Forces personnel have trained nearly 13,000 Latin American security force personnel at a cost of $73 million.”
All this means, they add, that the public needs to ask some questions about the missions, namely, who exactly is the U.S. training? Are they implicated in human rights abuses? Is it now the U.S. military crafting U.S. foreign policy? And where is the public oversight?
Some of those concerns are ones previously underscored by author Nick Turse, who’s written about how the public is largely unaware of what these forces are doing, and how the number of these operations is exploding. He wrote in 2014:
Further speaking to the secrecy, he wrote last year:
Upon taking the helm of the U.S. Special Operations Command in 2014, Army Gen. Joe Votel said, “The command is at its absolute zenith,” adding “I believe over the past several years, without even knowing it, we have been, and we are in, the golden age of special operations.”
Unfortunately, Kinosian and Isacson write, “as Special Operations Forces activity grows, the already low amount of transparency and available information about their actions is shrinking.”
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United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein condemned Western “demagogues” like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders and urged people to “draw the line” against their far-right rhetoric before it leads to “colossal violence.”
Zeid spoke at the Hague in the Netherlands on Monday, about a week after Wilders, founder of the increasingly popular Dutch right-wing Party for Freedom, released an 11-point plan to ban the Koran, close Muslim schools and mosques, and shutter asylum centers around the country. And while polls show Wilders is poised to do well in the Netherlands’ elections in March, Zeid said, his incendiary tactics are similar to those used by the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh).
“All seek in varying degrees to recover a past, halcyon and so pure in form, where sunlit fields are settled by peoples united by ethnicity or religion—living peacefully in isolation, pilots of their fate, free of crime, foreign influence, and war,” Zeid said. “A past that most certainly, in reality, did not exist anywhere, ever.”
“The formula is therefore simple: make people, already nervous, feel terrible, and then emphasize it’s all because of a group, lying within, foreign and menacing,” he said.
“History has perhaps taught Mr. Wilders and his ilk how effectively xenophobia and bigotry can be weaponized.”
—Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein
“Then make your target audience feel good by offering up what is a fantasy to them, but a horrendous injustice to others. Inflame and quench, repeat many times over, until anxiety has been hardened into hatred.”
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In addition to Wilders, Trump, and Farage, Zeid criticized Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Czech Republic President Miloš Zeman, Wilders’ Party for Freedom colleague Norbert Hofer, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and conservative French politician Marine Le Pen.
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Zeid described ISIS as “monstrous and sickening,” and clarified that he was not comparing the actions of the far-right leaders to the militant group, but added, “in its mode of communication, its use of half-truths and oversimplification, the propaganda of Daesh uses tactics similar to those of the populists.”
Promises to return to that non-existent utopian past “is fiction; its merchants are cheats,” he said. “Clever cheats.”
He concluded his speech with a call to action, stating, “History has perhaps taught Mr. Wilders and his ilk how effectively xenophobia and bigotry can be weaponized. Communities will barricade themselves into fearful, hostile camps, with populists like them, and the extremists, as the commandants. The atmosphere will become thick with hate; at this point it can descend rapidly into colossal violence. We must pull back from this trajectory.”
“We must guard [human rights] law passionately, and be guided by it,” he said. “Speak out and up, speak the truth and do so compassionately, speak for your children, for those you care about, for the rights of all, and be sure to say clearly: stop! We will not be bullied by you the bully, nor fooled by you the deceiver, not again, no more; because we, not you, will steer our collective fate. And we, not you, will write and sculpt this coming century. Draw the line!”
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A coalition of labor, environmental, civil rights groups and other progressive organizations with millions of members around the country united on Wednesday for a national call-in day to Congress to stop a potential lame-duck vote on the unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.
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“Despite widespread public opposition to the TPP, the big business interests that helped write the TPP are now pushing extremely hard to have a vote on it during the ‘lame duck’ session of Congress after the election,” said (pdf) the Communications Workers of America.
“That’s why it’s critical that our Members of Congress hear from us loud and clear—that they must oppose TPP during the lame duck session,” the union added.
“We must not make it easier for corporate America to ship jobs to countries where desperate workers make pennies an hour,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a Tuesday news conference regarding the national day of action. “We feel confident that we speak for a strong majority of the people in this country who are urging Congress to say ‘no’ to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) joined Sanders Tuesday for the news conference against the notorious trade deal.
“Make no mistake: the TPP is not dead,” wrote the privacy watchdog Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF). “On Friday, August 5, the Obama administration sent Congress the last official document required before TPP implementing legislation can go for a vote. This means we need to unite with others nationwide to act now to Stop the TPP. We must force every member of Congress to state his or her position on the TPP before the election.”
And Dave Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future noted: “We want to fill the call logs that congressional offices maintain with a stream of demands that members publicly oppose the TPP. Your voice will be united with the biggest, most diverse coalition ever assembled to fight corporate-rigged ‘trade’ deals. This coalition includes labor, environmental, consumer, faith, health, family farm, civil rights, senior citizen, youth, LGBT and other organizations and activists.”
“Keep jamming the phone lines,” tweeted the Teamsters. “Tell your representatives in Congress to oppose the job-killing TPP.”
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Shocked by the “towering cowardice” of the Washington Post’s Sunday editorial calling for Edward Snowden to be prosecuted, journalist Glenn Greenwald led the charge against the prominent newspaper for achieving what he described as an “ignoble feat” in American history: being “the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own paper’s source – one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.”
Published just two days after Oliver Stone’s biopic on the NSA whistleblower, ‘Snowden,’ premiered in U.S. theaters and following the launch of a national campaign by human rights groups and privacy advocates calling for him to be pardoned, the timing of the WaPo editorial—simply titled “No pardon for Edward Snowden”—emerged as an unexpected (and unwelcome) salvo from a paper whose news editors and journalists played a central and early role in reporting on the information provided.
Greenwald, who along with the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and filmmaker Laura Poitras, was among the first journalists to engage with Snowden and report on key NSA mass spying programs previously kept secret from the U.S. and global public, responded to the editorial in scathing fashion. According to Greenwald:
On Twitter, Snowden chimed in on his own behalf:
Last week, various groups launched the #PardonSnowden campaign which include a petition for people who want to add their support for the call.
“Snowden’s actions, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that followed,” the petition reads, “set in motion the most important debate about government surveillance in decades, and brought about reforms that continue to benefit our security and democracy.”
That argument, however, appears inadequate for the Washington Post editorial board, which argued that Snowden’s “revelations about the agency’s international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly ‘tremendous damage’ to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?”
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In addition to Greenwald’s detailed take-down of the Post’s argument, critics of the newspaper were unsparing on social media:
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Following the passing of Shimon Peres—who died early Wednesday morning at the age of 93 after a recent stroke—much of the global mainstream press responded with adulation and mourning. At the same time, however, informed critics took the news as an opportunity to remind the world of the troubling and oppressive legacy of the former Israeli prime minister.
Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, wrote in his column Wednesday: “When the world heard that Shimon Peres had died, it shouted ‘Peacemaker!’ But when I heard that Peres was dead, I thought of blood and fire and slaughter.”
“This was a man who from the very beginning [of his political career] was a war criminal. This was somebody who believed in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
—Diana Buttu, former Palestinian negotiator
Though Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in brokering the Oslo peace accords, Fisk and others dispute the idea he should be upheld in such regard.
In the wake of his death, as Ma’an News Agency reports:
“His image as a man of peace and his image as a man who went from a ‘hawk’ to a ‘dove’ betrays a fundamental blind spot with regards to the experience of the Palestinians and others in the region under Israeli colonialism and the policies of displacement, exile, and occupation that Shimon Peres and others were instrumental in implementing.”
—Ben White, journalistIn his column, Fisk says he remembers the Qana massacre—and the role Prime Minister Peres played in executing and defending it—quite well. A Palestinian refugee facility run by the United Nations inside Lebanon, Qana was shelled mercilessly by the Israeli military following claims of nearby rocket fire. An estimated 106 civilians were killed and more than 100 others wounded in the attack. After defending the attack and then losing a subsequent re-election bid, Fisk assumes that Peres “probably never thought much more about Qana,” but admitted that as a journalist on the ground, he “never forgot” what he saw when he entered the compound:
Speaking on Al-Jazeera English, former Palestinian peace negotiator Diana Buttu said Peres should “absolutely not” be remembered as a man of peace. “This was a man who from the very beginning [of his political career] was a war criminal. This was somebody who believed in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and was somebody—when he was in a position of power—made sure that Palestinian land—land that was occupied, not captured—was then turned over and made into Jewish-Israeli settlements, which are war crimes under international law.”
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Separately on Al-Jazeera, Ben White, a journalist who has written several books on Israel/Palestine, also discussed the dark and troubling legacy of Peres’ leadership as he questioned the dominant media and historical narrative emerging in the wake of his death.
“His image as a man of peace and his image as a man who went from a ‘hawk’ to a ‘dove’ betrays a fundamental blind spot with regards to the experience of the Palestinians and others in the region under Israeli colonialism and the policies of displacement, exile, and occupation that Shimon Peres and others were instrumental in implementing,” White explained. “Those policies have been omitted and dismissed from the historical record today and on other occasions as well when other Israeli figures have passed away.”
Yehia Ghanem, an Egyptian journalist and international war correspondent, said it’s no surprise that Peres is receiving praise despite his deplorable record when it comes to human rights and the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Those people who “are praising him,” said Ghanem, are the same people who have “supported Israel and all of its crimes throughout its history.”
And while Fisk predicted the word “peace” will be used numerously in the various obituaries and tributes written in the next few days, he asked his readers to pay attention and also “count how many times the word Qana appears.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal to re-launch a John Doe investigation into Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and conservative organizations in the state.
Wisconsin Public Radio writes that the order, quietly issued without explanation, “would seem to mark the end of the road for the case known in Wisconsin as John Doe 2,” which came about after Walker won a recall campaign in 2012 and prosecutors began investigating whether he’d colluded with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups on advertising without disclosing their donations to his campaign.
“The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied,” the court wrote in its brief decision.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, which WPR explains is controlled by “conservative-leaning justices,” halted the investigation last year, ruling that the secret coordination amounts to free speech.
According to the appeal, filed by three Democratic district attorneys, two of the Wisconsin justices in the 4-2 ruling had ties to those being investigated. As the Wisconsin State Journal reports, “Records revealed Walker telling Republican operative Karl Rove that R.J. Johnson and the Wisconsin Club for Growth were instrumental in electing Michael Gableman and re-electing David Prosser to the state court.”
In September, the Guardian published 1,500 pages of the prosecutors’ compiled evidence against Walker that details how modern elections work in a post-Citizens United landscape. The Journal continues:
Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Wisconsin-based watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, told Common Dreams in response to the order, “The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling in the Walker John Doe [case] overturned almost 40 years of transparency in campaigns and elections in our state. Today’s decision means that, for now, the people of Wisconsin will not know what special interests are secretly bankrolling their politicians or calling in the special favors.”
However, as government transparency expert Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center also explained, “It is important to recognize that a denial of cert does not mean the U.S. Supreme Court endorses or sanctions the actions of Governor Walker, his dark money group, or the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given the split on the U.S. Supreme Court, it is perhaps not surprising that the justices declined to wade into this politically-charged, highly complex case that raises difficult legal issues that would divide the 4-4 court in half.”
Nonetheless, Fischer continued, “Governor Walker’s dark money scheme intentionally shut the public out of the political process, depriving Wisconsinites of the basic information necessary to meaningfully participate in our democracy. This cannot become politics as usual; we should expect more from our elected officials. What this tells us is that we need a functioning Supreme Court that can clarify and improve its current jurisprudence on the role of money in politics. And we need stronger laws in place to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.”
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Two prominent human and civil rights organizations are calling on the U.S. government to decriminalize all drug use and possession in a new report which finds that the so-called war on drugs has caused “devastating harm.”
The joint report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that there were 574,640 arrests for marijuana possession nationwide in 2015, outnumbering arrests for all violent crimes combined, and that the massive enforcement of drug laws takes a toll at every level, from the individual to the institutional—ruining lives and pulling families apart, discriminating against people of color, and undermining public health.
In fact, the groups found, in the U.S., someone is arrested for low-level drug offenses every 25 seconds.
“Every 25 seconds someone is funneled into the criminal justice system, accused of nothing more than possessing drugs for personal use,” said the report’s author and HRW/ACLU Aryeh Neier fellow Tess Borden. “These wide-scale arrests have destroyed countless lives while doing nothing to help people who struggle with dependence.”
The long-term impacts of drug law enforcement range from the separation of families to lifelong discrimination, the report states. People arrested for drug use can be excluded from employment opportunities, housing and welfare assistance, and the right to vote, among other things. The organizations interviewed hundreds of drug users, family members of those prosecuted, government officials, defense attorneys, activists, and service providers, and analyzed data from Texas, Florida, New York, and the FBI.
One woman interviewed in the report, “Nicole,” whose name was changed for privacy, was held pretrial for months in Houston, Texas away from her three children and eventually pled guilty to her first felony—possessing an empty baggie with heroin residue. The conviction cost her student financial aid, employment opportunities, and the food stamps she used to feed her children.
“The felony conviction is going to ruin my life…I’ll pay for it for[ever]. Because of my record, I don’t know how or where I’ll start rebuilding my life: school, job, government benefits are now all off the table for me,” she states in the report. “Besides the punishment even [of prison]…It’s my whole future.”
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The report also found that while black adults do not use drugs more than white adults, they are over two-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested for possession. When looking just at marijuana possession, they are almost four times as likely to be arrested.
“Under international human rights law, prohibited racial discrimination occurs where there is an unjustifiable disparate impact on a racial or ethnic group, regardless of whether there is any intent to discriminate against that group,” the report states. “Enforcement of drug possession laws in the U.S. reveals stark racial disparities that cannot be justified by disparities in rates of use.”
As the organizations point out, since the war on drugs was formally declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, use has not significantly declined—and criminalization, coupled with a lack of treatment for addicts, forces users to go “underground,” exposing them to increased risk of disease, overdoses, and other dangers, while making it less likely that they will recover.
“While families, friends, and neighbors understandably want government to take action to prevent the potential harm caused by drug use, criminalization is not the answer,” Borden continued. “Locking people up for using drugs causes tremendous harm, while doing nothing to help those who need and want treatment.”
The report concludes by calling on state legislatures and U.S. Congress to decriminalize personal use and possession of all drugs, and invest in risk reduction and voluntary treatment programs.
“Criminalizing personal drug use is a colossal waste of lives and resources,” Borden said. “If governments are serious about addressing problematic drug use, they need to end the current revolving door of drug possession arrests, and focus on effective health strategies instead.”
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