Democrats combine impeachment and collaboration with Trump

16 December 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/16/pers-d16.html

Donald Trump with Nancy Pelosi, Credit: WikiMedia

On Tuesday, December 10, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood side-by-side with six Democratic committee chairmen as the House Judiciary Committee released the text of two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. One hour later, Pelosi stood in front of a different group of House Democrats to announce agreement with the Trump administration on the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Trump’s replacement for NAFTA.

On Wednesday, as the Judiciary Committee began its debate over the articles of impeachment, the full House voted by a massive bipartisan margin, 377–48, to approve the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides the Trump administration with record funding for the military, some $738 billion. The legislation removes most provisions to which the White House objected, including barring US military assistance to the Saudi war in Yemen and the deployment of a submarine-launched medium-range missile that would violate the INF treaty. It strips out a requirement for Trump to get congressional approval for military strikes on Iran. It also removes language that would have barred Trump from transferring funds from the Pentagon budget to build his border wall, as he did earlier this year.

On Thursday, as the Judiciary Committee debate over impeachment continued during the day, culminating in a party-line vote the next morning, a bipartisan group of House and Senate negotiators announced agreement on a $1.37 trillion measure to fund all 12 federal departments for the rest of the fiscal year—through September 30, 2020. On the key issue of the border wall, Democrats again caved, dropping any effort to use must-pass spending authorization legislation to block Trump’s orders to shift funding from the Pentagon budget to build the wall.

Next week will bring this extraordinary juxtaposition of impeachment and political collaboration to its climax. On Tuesday, the House and Senate are to take up and pass the omnibus spending package, perhaps in a series of smaller bills, after details are finalized over the weekend. On Wednesday, the House will vote to impeach Trump. On Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote its approval for the USMCA trade pact, Trump’s main legislative priority for this session of Congress.

What is one to make of the Democrats’ combination of threatening to remove the president from office and collaborating with him on his key political priorities, including trade war, attacks on immigrants, and a massive military build-up? At the very moment when they are impeaching Trump, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are in fundamental agreement with him.

The congressional collaboration with Trump makes nonsense of the apocalyptic rhetoric employed by the Democratic architects of impeachment. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, appearing on the ABC program “This Week” on Sunday morning, declared that impeachment was necessary because Trump poses a threat “to our democratic system itself. We cannot permit that to continue.”

“This is a crime in progress against the Constitution and against the American democracy,” he added. “We cannot take the risk that the next election will be corrupted through foreign interference solicited by the president, which he is clearly trying to do. It goes to the heart of our democracy.”

It is perfectly true that the Trump administration is engaged in a war against the democratic rights of the American people. But that is not what the Democrats are impeaching him for. There is no mention in their articles of impeachment of the separation of immigrant children and parents, or the unconstitutional building of a border wall, or Trump’s illegal ban on Muslim visitors, or his whipping up of racist and fascist forces to be used against immigrants and the working class as a whole.

The sole content of the impeachment campaign is that Trump has allegedly undermined the “national security” interests of American imperialism by withholding military aid that is being used to arm Ukraine to fight against Russia. His actions threatened to disrupt a longstanding CIA and State Department operation which led to the overthrow of an elected pro-Russian president and the installation of the current regime, which is backed by fascist and neo-Nazi elements.

The Democrats claim that Trump’s pressuring the Ukraine government to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden, son of the former vice president and current candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a grave attack on the 2020 elections. This only represents an escalation, in a particularly hysterical form, of the “big lie” that Russia intervened massively into the 2016 elections and assured Trump’s election victory.

The truth is that it was the record of the Obama administration—the assault on living standards and jobs and the continuation of imperialist wars—and Hillary Clinton’s pledge to continue these policies that led millions of working people either to vote for Trump or stay away from the polls. If Trump wins again in 2020, it will not be because of Russia, Ukraine or any other foreign actor, but because the Democratic Party is just as committed to the defense of Wall Street and American imperialism as the Republican Party, while its emphasis on the politics of racial and gender identity alienates rather that attracts the support of the working class.

Moreover, as the inspector general’s report on the FBI released last week makes clear, the Democratic Party is allied with forces in the military-intelligence apparatus which are no less dangerous to the democratic rights of the American people than Trump.

It is no accident that one of the principal conclusions of the Democrats is the need for censorship of the internet and suppression of “fake news,” by which they mean any left-wing critique of American capitalism. The Democrats are peddling the McCarthy-style claim that anyone who points out the dire socioeconomic divisions and class injustices in America is doing the bidding of Moscow.

There is and can be no genuinely democratic content in a conflict between the CIA-backed Democrats and the fascistic Trump. The working class must reject both sides in this conflict within the ruling elite and intervene independently into the political crisis, advancing its own class interests through the building a new mass political party of the working class, based on a socialist and antiwar program.

Patrick Martin

Hot Mic Moment Exposes Insane Sleaziness Of British Political/Media Class

Caitlin Johnstone




https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/12/16/hot-mic-moment-exposes-insane-sleaziness-of-british-politicalmedia-class/

















There’s a wildly under-appreciated clip of news footage from Thursday’s general election in the UK that, now that everyone’s had some time to emotionally process the emotional fallout from that depressing night, needs more attention.







Labour MP and chronic left-puncher Jess Phillips appeared on Channel 4 to talk about how devastated she was about the news of exit polls showing her party’s crushing defeat, except the cameras switched on before she was prepared and caught her in the middle of a joyful chuckle. It took several seconds and the overt reminders from the show’s hosts to put on a “straight face” and act emotional before she could conceal her cheery mood as Corbyn’s Labour leadership was trampled underfoot by odious empire lackey Boris Johnson.


“Good evening Jess,” said the program’s host Krishnan Guru-Murthy. “How are you feeling as these results unfold?”


Watching the stumbling improvisation that came next feels like walking into a room full of awkward silence when your supposed friends had just been saying mean things about you, or seeing your spouse conspicuously jump away from an attractive coworker when you drop by the office.





Phillips, still unaware that the cameras were now rolling, did not interrupt the delighted guffaw she’d been enjoying.


“Can you hear me Jess Phillips?” the host asked over nervous tittering from the audience. “It’s Krishnan.”


“I can hear you, sorry,” Phillips said after a moment, literally putting her hand over her mouth for a few seconds to hide her giant shit-eating grin.


“Straight face,” said Guru-Murthy, who then apparently realized that this was a bizarre thing to say and added “Actually you don’t have to have a straight face, umm, on this show. Umm… what are you thinking?”


“Oh are you talking to me now? Sorry that wasn’t clear,” said Phillips after a pause, her face now finally somewhat straightened out. “Sorry, I’m really tired. What I’m thinking is… it’s, it’s just totally devastating isn’t it? It’s totally devastating that all the people that I see every day, they’re gonna have nowhere to turn. I mean, I should probably do that thing where we all pretend that we’re gonna wait and see if the results are better than we thought, but it feels like a kick in the stomach.”


Jess Phillips had not been acting like a woman who felt devastated, and she had certainly not been acting like a woman who felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. Jess Phillips had been acting like a woman on her third strawberry daiquiri down at the pub with a couple of hilarious mates.


“I’m just waiting actually, I mean, for your thoughts,” Guru-Murthy said after an awkward pause. “I mean, you look emotional, and upset, and that’s understandable.”


Guru-Murthy was lying. At no time did Phillips look either emotional or upset.


“Jess it’s just that you look very emotional, and we know you, we know you’re a normal, sane person, so it’s very confusing,” host Katherine Ryan bullshitted when Phillips struggled to hear what Guru-Murthy had said.


“I am very emotional,” Phillips lied. “But not just for me or for the Labour Party. I’m emotional for the people that the Labour Party was invented to help.”


The audience, probably relieved to have a taste of something that isn’t intensely awkward and disturbing, erupted in applause.


"Enter Jess Phillips. She backs Trident, austerity and Israel. She hates Corbyn, Williamson and Leftists in general. She doesn’t believe in class politics or ideology, but she does talk about gender all the time, and says 'fuck' a lot..." https://t.co/oSj7kNytVm via @offguardian0


— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) March 16, 2019


For months the imperial media have been loudly anointing Phillips as the establishment choice to replace the unabashedly socialism-minded Corbyn, as Kit Knightly described for Off-Guardian back in March. This coronation-by-media continues today with outlets ranging from The Guardian to Daily Mail to Telegraph placing her on the short list to assume leadership of the Labour Party over the last couple of days.


After an anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian socialist was magically thrown into role of Opposition leader by an extraordinary accident in 2015, Phillips leapt into her role as outspoken Corbyn critic by publicly telling him “I won’t knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front.” Despite this vow, Phillips proceeded to steadfastly knife Corbyn in the back by fanning the flames of incredibly disingenuous smears against his leadership, elevating the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis to such a cartoonish extent that earlier this year she proclaimed that a tweet saying “Palestine Lives” from Young Labour “is antisemitic and it has to stop.” This malicious termiting continued into the final days before the general election, with Phillips criticizing Corbyn for not responding adequately to claims about antisemitism in the Labour Party by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.


Phillips’ hot mic moment, and the mad scramble of the show’s perception-managing pundits to clean it up, provides us with a brief glimpse behind the phony persona that the empire’s political/media class put on for us. Should Bernie Sanders by some Corbyn-like miracle overcome the rigged primaries and receive the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, we may be absolutely certain we’ll see a campaign to sabotage his run and force a loss to Trump in the US elections next year. And we may be absolutely certain they’ll cackle about it just as Jess Phillips did when she thought the cameras were off.


These people aren’t like you and me. They don’t care about truth, and they don’t care about human beings. They rose to the positions they occupy within media and politics by consistently demonstrating that they’ll do whatever it takes to advance the interests of the oligarchic empire while giving the people the bare minimum possible to prevent an insurrection. They’re where they’re at precisely because they don’t care about truth or people. They care about their own dominance within our sick dominator culture, and when they achieve it, they smile, and they celebrate, and they laugh.


Sometimes the guardians of empire make little mistakes. Sometimes they accidentally allow an anti-imperialist to lead one of their major parties. Sometimes they accidentally get caught in mid-guffaw when they’re meant to be pretending to be heartbroken. Whenever those holes appear it’s important to pay attention to them, and to shove as many rays of light through them as possible before they are closed.

Food at risk as third of plants face extinction

December 17th, 2019, by Tim Radford

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/food-at-risk-as-third-of-plants-face-extinction/

More than a third of the world’s plants are so rare they face extinction. In a warmer world, that would leave supplies of food at risk.

LONDON, 17 December, 2019 – Botanists have made a new census of terrestrial plants – only to find that with nearly 40% of them rare, or extremely rare, this may put food at risk.

And a second team of researchers, in a separate study, has established that some of these rare or vanishing species could include the wild relatives of some of the planet’s most popular vegetables.

The two studies matter. The first underlines yet another reason for new and determined conservation strategies to preserve the extraordinary natural variety and richness of life – the shorthand word that scientists use is biodiversity – already under pressure from the explosion in human numbers, the destruction of natural habitats and the looming catastrophe of climate change driven by rapidly rising global temperatures.

And the second study is simply a matter of the next lunch or dinner: many rare plants are survivors with the resources to adapt to change. In a fast-changing world, crop breeders may need to go back to the wild relatives to look for the genes that will keep the commercial carrots, courgettes, pumpkins and chilli peppers on the grocery shelves.

US scientists and international colleagues report in the journal Science Advances that they worked for 10 years and compiled 20 million observational records to establish a simple plant census: the forests, grasslands, scrublands, tundra and swamps of the wild world are home to about 435,000 unique plant species.

“The wild relatives of crops are one of the key tools used to breed crops adapted to difficult conditions. Some of them are sure to disappear from their natural habitats without urgent action”

And of this huge number, a surprising 36.5% are “exceedingly rare.” By this, researchers mean that these species have been observed and recorded no more than five times in the last 300 years of systematic botanical research.

“According to ecological and evolutionary theory, we’d expect many species to be rare, but the actual observed number we found was pretty startling,” said Brian Enquist of the University of Arizona, who led the consortium. “There are many more rare species than we expected.”

The rare species were most likely to be clustered in what ecologists call hotspots: the northern Andes in South America, Costa Rica, South Africa, Madagascar and south-east Asia.

What these places have in common is that, over millions of years, they have maintained stable climates, and as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, these tropical mountains and valleys provided refuge for life’s variety.

But these survivors may not enjoy a stable future, as ever higher levels of greenhouse gases are spilled into the atmosphere from human use of fossil fuels, and global temperatures continue to rise, and as human communities expand into what was once wilderness.

Significant loss ahead

“In many of these regions, there’s increasing human activity such as agriculture, cities and towns, land use and clearing,” said Professor Enquist.

“So that’s not exactly the best of news. If nothing is done, this all indicates that there will be a significant reduction in biodiversity – mainly in rare species – because their low numbers makes them more prone to extinction.”

Humans depend on the natural world for survival: biodiversity – plants, fungi, mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and so on – provides all human nourishment, most of the medicines, fuels, fabrics and textiles that warm and shelter 7.7bn people, and at the same time maintains supplies of water, air, crop pollinators and so on.

But new research in the journal Plants, People, Planet confirms once again that many of the wild ancestors and cousins of the crops that nourish billions could be at risk.

And these wild relatives – which have survived climate shifts over millions of years – represent a vital resource for plant breeders anxious to cope with rapid global heating.

Unpreserved

The latest study confirms that 65% of wild pumpkins and more than 95% of wild chilli peppers are not formally preserved in any gene banks protected by conservation scientists.

“The wild relatives of crops are one of the key tools used to breed crops adapted to hotter, colder, drier, wetter, saltier and other difficult conditions,” said Colin Khoury of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.

“But they are impacted by habitat destruction, over-harvesting, climate change, pollution, invasive species and more. Some of them are sure to disappear from their natural habitats without urgent action.”

Dr Khoury and his colleagues have prepared a series of detailed maps of the range and distribution of the wild relatives of a range of important food species: the aim is to focus on the most effective kinds of protection for what, literally, could become tomorrow’s lunch in a world of rapid change.

“If they disappear, they are gone,” said Dr Khoury. “Extinction is forever, which is a loss not only in terms of their evolution and persistence on the planet, but also a loss to the future of our food.” 

– Climate News Network

How Antarctica Froze Over

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r-IjEPojkw&feature

Glenn Greenwald Interviews Evo Morales

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/16/evo-morales-interview-glenn-greenwald/


How do you interview an ousted president? You meet him where he’s in exile.

Before receiving official refugee status in Argentina this past weekend, Evo Morales met with The Intercept in Mexico City, with Glenn Greenwald flying in from Brazil. In this 50-minute video interview, the Indigenous leader — Bolivia’s longest-serving president — recalls his final days in the country fighting an opposition that demanded his resignation: “They made the leaders of the Movement for Socialism renounce their positions by burning their homes and threatening their families. They pushed out the national leaders, the progressives, the leftists, and anti-imperialists.”

“It is not just an internal coup d’état, orchestrated by Bolivians, the Bolivian oligarchy, and some of the members of the armed forces and the police. It is also an external conspiracy. My crime, my sin, is to be an Indian," Morales tells Greenwald. “And to have nationalized our natural resources, removed the transnational corporations out of the hydrocarbon sector and out of mining. But also the fact that I reduced extreme poverty with social programs.”

Following our interviews with former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and now Morales, we aim to continue this series with other leftist leaders in Latin America. Stay tuned for more coverage of the “pink tide.”

And if you value The Intercept’s challenge to the official lies — in Latin America and across the globe — please consider becoming a member to help reach our year-end fundraising goal.




Lauren Feeney
Director, Video Production











Watch: Glenn Greenwald Interviews Evo Morales in Mexico

The ousted Bolivian president spoke about the events that led to his removal and exile as well as broader trends in regional and global politics.

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