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By Justin Laurence, Chicago Book Club.
June 9, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/chicago-freedom-school-offered-food-water-and-rest-to-weary-protesters-trapped-downtown/
The City Cited Them For It.
The school, which ordered pizzas and gave out granola bars, was cited for “preparing and serving large quantities of food without the proper retail food establishment license.”
Last weekend, as thousands of protesters gathered Downtown, the Chicago Freedom School sprung into action, working to feed and transport those stuck in the Loop — but a surprise inspection by the city has the nonprofit worried about its future.
The Chicago Freedom School, 719 S. State St., provides training to primarily Black and Brown youth to learn the fundamentals of community organizing. School leaders knew their members were out on the front lines, confronted with pepper spray and potentially trapped Downtown as curfew approached, bridges were lifted and CTA service halted May 30.
The school offered a refuge. Two aldermen and other frontline organizers tweeted to let protesters know to head to the Freedom School if they needed free food, or just to charge their phones and drink some water.
The school was also organizing rides home for protesters stranded due to the curfew and CTA stoppage.
Chicago Freedom School.
But just before 11 p.m. May 30, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection “demanded entry” to the school, staffers said, and issued a cease and desist order for “preparing and serving large quantities of food without the proper retail food establishment license” after an “investigative walkthrough” accompanied by police officers.
Executive Director Keisha Farmer-Smith said the citation is bogus: The school had ordered pizzas from a place nearby and was giving it away.
“They did come up to the space, and even though the space is very small, they walked through the space … for at least 30 minutes taking pictures and looking through areas,” Farmer-Smith said. “My staff were never given a warrant, and when they asked if there was a warrant they were told ‘this is an inspector, that’s not a requirement.’”
The cease and desist order doesn’t carry a fine, but Farmer-Smith said, “We have been threatened with arrest and immediate shutdown should they return and find food on the premises … at any time.”
The school’s staff are consulting with attorneys to learn their rights and clear their name, she said.
Farmer-Smith said responding officers and city officials would only say “they received a complaint” about the school.
Over the course of May 30, 50-60 young protesters were in the building to grab a snack, charge their phones or wait for a ride out of the Loop, Farmer-Smith said. But she said there were never that many people in the building at one time and strict safety measures were taken to combat the spread of coronavirus.
“Every effort was taken to be safe, including masks, hand sanitizer, gloves … you had to get a glove if you were getting a piece of pizza,” she said. “You know, I don’t know what else we could have done differently.”
By the time the inspection began, Farmer-Smith said no youth were in the building after adult staff were able to coordinate rides home for everyone who needed one.
Luis Agostini, assistant director of communications for the Police Department, told Block Club an officer patrolling the area Saturday made the observation there was a “large congregation” of people at the school and initiated a “premise check” at 10:55 p.m.
“CPD did not and does not target individual businesses when it comes to enforcement and safety of city residents,” Agostini said.
Isaac Reichman, a spokesman for the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, said the “cease and desist” was given but no fine was associated with the order.
“On Saturday, [Business Affairs] was notified by the Chicago Police Department of an establishment that was preparing and serving large quantities of food without the proper retail food establishment license,” Reichman said in a statement. “This license is required as a public health measure to ensure that any establishment that prepares or serves food does so in a safe manner, and [Business Affairs] conducts thousands of these types of investigations each year. As is standard protocol, the Department took appropriate action by issuing them a Cease and Desist Order for this activity.”
Farmer-Smith said the citation doesn’t match reality.
“We do not serve food commercially. We never have,” she said. “The closest thing we come to cooking food is giving out fruits and vegetables.”
As the hours-long protest gave way to confrontations between protesters and police, the Freedom School offered a safe respite to youth protesters and funds were raised to provide trips home via ride-share. Many on social-media, including aldermen, encouraged protesters to retreat to the building.
Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez for the 25th Ward@SigchoFor25
For people downtown, Chicago Freedom School, 719 S State St. has food, water, chargers & will let protesters in. Please pass this info on.
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10:32 PM - May 30, 2020
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Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez 
@RossanaFor33
Here are two amazing organizations offering a safe place to stay tonight in case you couldn’t make it home. Chicago Freedom School at 719 s state St. and Grace Place at 637 S Dearborn St.
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10:47 PM - May 30, 2020
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The group is worried because they were not given a chance to challenge the citation, their landlord was given notice and they fear another inspection.
“I just want the Freedom School’s good name,” Farmer-Smith said. “We have worked hard to build a positive track record in our community. We stand with Black and Brown youth and we want to remain in good [standing]. We don’t want any problems with our 501(c)(3) status.”
Since the incident, donations have flowed in to the school to coordinate ride shares and support protesters. Farmer-Smith said she’s “thankful” to everyone who donated.
“Once we filled up with our supplies, we started sharing them with some other organizations,” including Brave Space Alliance and Assata’s Daughters, she said.
As they consult with attorneys to learn their legal options, the school will continue to work with youth activists.
“Unless the state or municipal government tells us otherwise, the Freedom School is open and we will serve young people during the hours that are allowed by law. If it’s 9 [p.m.], if it’s 8 [p.m.], whatever the curfew is, we will be serving young people,” Farmer-Smith said. “That’s what we do. We’ve done it since 2007.”
The city’s 9 p.m. curfew was lifted Sunday.
An insight into the history and present of Christian nationalism, the movement behind Donald Trump's religious support.
by Paul Rosenberg
2 Jun 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/power-worshippers-american-religious-200422144158404.html
For 40 years now, the religious right has been a fixture in American politics and for all that time it has befuddled observers who continually misunderstand it, beginning with its support for Ronald Reagan, a divorced Hollywood actor, against Jimmy Carter. Reagan was the first US president to describe himself as a "born-again Christian".
But Reagan - whose wife consulted an astrologer for guidance as first lady - was a virtual saint compared to Donald Trump, the most recent presidential beneficiary of their enthusiastic support, and someone that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical protestants rewarded with their votes.
The secret to making sense of them is simply stated in the title of Katherine Stewart's new book: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. It draws on more than a decade of first-hand experience and front-line reporting that began when her daughter's public elementary school was targeted to house a fundamentalist Bible club.
"The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith," she recalls.
The struggle to stop them, and what she learned in the process about the broader plan to undermine public education and make way for sectarian religious education, led to her 2012 book, The Good News Club.
But that was only one facet of the larger Christian nationalist movement The Power Worshippers explores, complimenting her own up-to-the-minute reporting with vital historical backstories that contradict and correct much of what most Americans think they know.
She argues - echoing Karen Armstrong's argument about the nature of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam - that it is not premodern, as both adherents and critics commonly assume.
It is, in fact, modern in its methods and doctrines, which "notwithstanding their purported origins in ancient texts have been carefully shaped to serve the emotional needs of its adherents, the organisational needs of its clerical leaders, and the political needs and ambitions of its funders".
Stewart is hardly alone in writing about Christian nationalism, but this formulation of how it fits together as a powerful power-seeking movement is uniquely clarifying, and provided the starting point for this interview with her.
Al Jazeera: In your introduction, you write that the Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated, that: "It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement and its ultimate goal is power." Can you explain that distinction?
Katherine Stewart: We are kidding ourselves if we just look at this through a "culture war" framework.
It is helpful, in understanding this movement, to distinguish between the leaders and the followers. The foot soldiers of the movement - the many millions who dutifully cast their votes for the movement's favoured politicians, who populate its marches and flood its coffers with small-dollar donations - are the root source of its political strength. But they are not the source of its ideas. They may believe that they're fighting for things like traditional marriage and a ban on abortion.
But over time, the movement's leaders and strategists have consciously reframed these culture war issues in order to capture and control the votes of a large subsection of the American public. They understand if you can get people to vote on just one or two issues, you can control their vote.
So they use these issues to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction and to enact economic policies that are favourable to their most well-resourced funders.
Al Jazeera: As your reporting shows, conservative-leaning churches are targeting voters with messages about how they need to vote with so-called "biblical" values. How does this fit in with the movement?
Stewart: A lot of people attending conservative churches would not characterise themselves as members of the movement but large numbers of them have nevertheless allowed their voting habits to be shaped by its leaders.
Generalising about what draws people to the movement is difficult because people come for a wide variety of reasons. These reasons include questions about life's deeper meaning, a love and appreciation of God and scripture, ethnic and family solidarity, the hope of community and friendship, and a desire to mark life's most significant passages or express feelings of joy and sorrow.
People also come with a longing for certainty in an uncertain world. Against a backdrop of escalating economic inequality, deindustrialisation, rapid technological change and climate instability, many people, on all points of the economic and political spectrum, feel that the world has entered a state of disorder.
The movement gives them confidence, an identity and the feeling that their position in the world is safe. Yet the price of certainty or belonging is often the surrendering of one's political will to those who claim to offer refuge from the tempest of modern life.
Al Jazeera: What are some of the ways in which the emotional needs of adherents are exploited by movement leaders?
Stewart: Among the emotional needs of some adherents is a desire for a certain empowerment as members of a special or uniquely virtuous group of people. So religious nationalism goes overboard in insisting on the unique virtues of the religion and culture with which its followers identify.
An additional emotional need of some adherents, exploited by leaders of the movement, is to validate feelings of grievance and resentment, and to focus them on some imagined impure "other," a scapegoat.
Christian nationalism, like other forms of religious nationalism around the world and throughout history, delivers a set of persecution narratives that represent the "good" religious people as under threat and as victims of an evil "other".
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: Fundamentally the doctrines of religious nationalism reinforce authority - of scripture, of course, but also the authority of religious and political leaders.
This is what religious nationalism does around the world. Their doctrines make an absolute virtue out of obedience to a literalist or strict interpretation of their religion.
This is very handy both for the clerics and the politicians and elites that they serve, as it reinforces their authority, power and privilege.
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: The movement has multiple sources of funding, including small-dollar donors, various types of public subsidy and funding, and affluent donors.
Many of those affluent donors belong to super-wealthy hyperextended families. So it is not surprising that many of the doctrines the movement favours are about money. They say the Bible and God oppose progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes and minimum wage laws. That the Bible favours low taxes for the rich and minimal rights for the workforce. They argue that environmental regulation, regulation of businesses, and public funding of the social safety net are "unbiblical" or "against the biblical model".
In this way, I think, Christian nationalists have betrayed what might have been their strongest suit. Christianity, as most people understand it, has something to do with loving our neighbours. But leaders of this movement have thrown in their lot with a bunch of selfish economic reactionaries who tell us we don't owe anybody anything.
These doctrines, of course, preserve plutocratic, often nepotistic fortunes. This is why religious nationalism often goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, which around the world frequently exploits religious nationalism to suppress dissent and keep the disempowered members of their societies in a subordinate position.
Al Jazeera: The third chapter of your book is titled, "Inventing Abortion". Christian nationalists did not invent abortion itself, but they did invent it as a defining political framework. How did that come about?
Stewart: When Roe v Wade was passed, an editorial in a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention hailed the decision.
Most Republican Protestants at the time supported liberalisation of abortion law.
Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967. Billy Graham himself echoed widely shared Protestant sentiments when he said in 1968, "In general I would disagree with [the Catholic stance]," and added, "I believe in Planned Parenthood".
Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. That process, which I cover in detail in my book, took several decades.
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: The theological defence went in both directions. In my book, I discuss the contributions of maybe a dozen abolitionist theologians, including Charles Grandison Finney, William Wilberforce and Adin Ballou. It is important to note, however, that at the time of the Civil War, most of the powerful denominations in the South had either promoted slavery or had at least made their peace with it, and many conservative theologians of the North concurred.
Pro-slavery theologians consciously refrained from making any judgement to upset the established order or else they supported it outright. For instance, the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church said that slavery, as it existed in the United States, was not a moral evil. Episcopalians of South Carolina found slavery to be "marked by every evidence of divine approval". The Charleston Union Presbytery resolved that "the holding of slaves, so far from being a sin in the sight of God, is nowhere condemned in his holy word".
Yes, folks like Wilberforce and Ballou argued for abolitionism, and they did so in the name of religion. But Frederick Douglass observed at the time that these religious abolitionists tended to be a distinctly disempowered minority in their own denominations.
Furthermore, abolitionist theologians also tended to support women's equality, while pro-slavery theologians were unabashedly patriarchal, arguing that the subordination of women, like subordination of Black people, was a part of God's plan. Some abolitionist church services, at which women were allowed to speak with authority, were attacked by pro-slavery theologians as "promiscuous assemblies".
James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina, a pro-slavery theologian, described the conflict this way: "The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders - they are atheists, socialists, communists, red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other." Here, he is identifying "order" and "regulated freedom" with the enslavers, and "atheists" with the abolitionists.
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: Pro-slavery theologians, like Christian nationalist thought leaders today, were intensely hostile to the principle of equality, plurality and critical thinking. They endorsed an austere biblical literalism and rigid hierarchies, which they asserted were ordained by God.
The idea the US is a Christian nation, chosen by God; that it should be an orthodox Christian republic; that women should be subordinate to men; that at some point America deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of atheist and/or liberal elites - these ideas are still at the heart of Christian nationalism today.
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: Movement leaders may have sold us this idea their movement was a grassroots reaction to abortion. But one of the key issues that animated the movement in its earlier days was the fear that racially segregated academies might be deprived of their lucrative tax exemptions.
Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow Southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities. The influential pastor Bob Jones Sr went so far as to call segregation "God's established order" and referred to desegregationists as "Satanic propagandists" who were "leading colored Christians astray".
As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people based on their skin colour but to also receive federal money for the purpose. So they coalesced around the fear that the Supreme Court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools.
They knew, however, that "Stop the tax on segregation!" wasn't going to be an effective rallying cry to inspire a broad-based hyperconservative counterrevolution. There is a fascinating episode where they got together and basically wrote down a laundry list of issues that they thought might unite their new movement. I'm talking 1979 or so, about six years after Roe v. Wade. Number one was what they viewed as a threat to the tax privileges of racist academies. The women's rights movement was another. There were several others on the list, and they crossed one after the other. Then they came down to abortion and basically said, wow, that could work.
Al Jazeera:
Stewart: The basic question we are still struggling with is whether we can build a republic based on a universal idea, or whether we have to fall back on some kind of petty ethnic and religious nationalism. The idea of the American republic is that we can find unity on the basis of being human and thus deserving of dignity.
Can we find unity in this principle of humanity and equality, or are we compelled to coalesce around mythological ideas about ethnic and religious greatness - an impossibility in a society as inherently pluralistic as ours?
What ails us is not something specific to the United States, but rather a condition that plagues many parts of the modern world. The lesson from history we haven't yet learned is that whenever we try the latter, we spread injustice. And whenever we hold true to the former, we reach for justice.
– El Pais
by Yanis Varoufakis
Before capitalism, debt appeared at the very end of the economic cycle; a mere reflection of the power to accumulate already produced surpluses. Under feudalism, production came first with the peasants working the land to plant and harvest crops. Distribution followed the harvest, as the sheriff collected the lord’s share. Part of this share was later monetised when the lord’s men sold it at some market. Debt only emerged at the very last stage of the cycle when the lord would lend his money to debtors, the King often amongst them.
Capitalism reversed the order. Once labour and land had been commodified, debt was necessary before production even began. Landless capitalists had to borrow to lease workers, land and machines. Only then could production begin, yielding revenues whose residual claimant were the capitalists. Thus, debt powered capitalism’s oeuvre.
After 2008, capitalism changed drastically. In their attempt to re-float the crashed financial system, central banks channelled rivers of cheap debt-money to the financial sector while fiscal austerity limited the public’s demand for goods and services. Unable to profit from austerity-hit consumers, corporations and financiers were hooked up to the central banks’ constant drip-feed of fictitious debt.
Covid-19 found capitalism in this zombified state. With consumption and production hit at once, governments must now replace all incomes to a gargantuan extent. Thus, a mindless virus has forced us into a simple dilemma: Either the post-2008 zombification of banks and corporations will engulf the rest of the economy. Or we shall pursue a massive restructuring of public and private debts. This is the pivotal political decision for our times. Unfortunately, our pseudo-democracies are ducking it.
The last two weeks have made crystal clear the need for leaders that will fight for a world where Black Lives Matter. That’s why we’ve been throwing down so hard for candidates like Jamaal Bowman for NY-16 and Charles Booker for KY.
Today, they received two endorsements that could completely change the game: from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Can you help us get the word out to voters in these communities by signing up to phone bank? People need to know about the growing support for Jamaal and Charles, and that there’s a real chance they can win.
These major endorsements are just the latest in a surge of momentum.
Recently, Booker has been endorsed by over 20 Kentucky legislators across the House and Senate, major Kentucky newspaper Lexington Herald, and Matt Jones of KY Sports Radio. If that isn’t enough, former backers of his Trump-supporting opponent are looking to Booker instead for a true progressive leader.
Voters and elected officials in New York are flocking to Bowman as outrage grows around the district’s abandonment by opponent Rep. Engel during COVID and during the protests. The only other major candidate besides Engel dropped out and endorsed Bowman, along with NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer and State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, who’d endorsed Engel earlier in the campaign.
This swell of support could be the turning point in these races, which are now closer than anyone could have imagined.
It will come down to how many people know they have a better option than the absent Engel or the Trump-supporting McGrath. The more people we talk to about Green New Deal champions Bowman and Booker, the better chance they’ll have at securing enough votes to win.
We have only two weeks left until the next election and voters are starting to mail in ballots this weekend—we have to catch them before they do. Can you sign up for a phone bank shift to get the word out? We’re halfway to our goal of making 250,000 calls and need 500 more people to sign up to get there.
We will give you everything you need, from a quick training on how to use our dialer, to a sample script you can use to guide the conversation. You’ll have the support of fellow Sunrisers on the calls with you and your two hours could help us move dozens of voters.
We can’t let this momentum stop,
Sophia, Sunrise Electoral Coordinator
Gulf state lobbying efforts show that US foreign policy for the Middle East is driven more by special than national interests
By MORGAN PALUMBO And JESSICA DRAPER
JUNE 10, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/how-saudis-qataris-and-emiratis-took-washington/
It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, DC, and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The loser? The United States. And, odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened.
Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.
The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch.
On the morning of June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain announced they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.
The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic – by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out.
Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come, one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of the US secretary of state at the time, Rex Tillerson.
To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which made political footballs out of aspects of US policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis and Qataris ran there.
That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began.
Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the US capital that would have made Rocky envious.
The Saudis come out swinging
The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard.
In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress.
The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reported spending a little more than US$10 million on FARA-registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudis’ had soared to $27.3 million.
In the months following Donald Trump’s November election triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests.
For example, they brought on the CGCN Group, whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration.
To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican congressman Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader.
Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar.
One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think-tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Republican congressman Ed Royce a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives only two days after the conference ended.
Qatar, mind you, had been a US ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.
The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill.
For example, Qorvis Communications, a longtime public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar’s History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted: “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!”
A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.
However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.
Qatar strikes back
Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates.
The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally.
They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Only two days after the blockade began, for instance, they signed a deal with the law firm of former US attorney general John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.
They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of the Wall Street Journal reported.
Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.
In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major US news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media.
Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism.
Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the UN General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign “to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump” to gain support on that most global of stages.
Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.
Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted: “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.”
Finally, at that UN meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir Tamim of Qatar and said: “We’ve been friends a long time … I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.
The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.
In November 2017, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national-security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.
Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country.
All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House majority leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill’s passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where the writers of this article work.
Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.
The Saudi war in Yemen
Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a joint resolution to withdraw US support for that war.
According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.
That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress, inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner,” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’ bill.
Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef Al Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”
When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war.
In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network’s closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)
From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of the US Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain.
In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-attorney general Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.”
According to FARA filings, all but one of those congressional representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi
Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10, Trump again described Tamim as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked Trump for “supporting us during this blockade.”
If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The US Central Intelligence Agency later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen.
Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).
Given Trump’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for America’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook.
In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work co-opting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.
And the winners are …
Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. The Qataris have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic and military relations between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the US as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever US military support for the kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).
In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it has been the United States. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of US foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of the US played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots.
Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.
None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that US foreign policy should be driven by national – not special – interests.
Debt risks stalk ‘new infrastructure’ push costing trillions of dollars and linked to Made in China 2025
By GORDON WATTS
JUNE 10, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/chinas-high-tech-dream-could-come-at-a-price/
There was a time in 2017 when news of President Xi Jinping’s high-tech policy used to be just a smartphone alert away.
Nearly three years later, Made in China 2025 has become the program “that must not be named.”
In 2019, it barely received a mention in Premier Li Keqiang’s state-of-the-union style address to the National People’s Congress apart from a throwaway line about “smart plus” technology.
Last month, “new infrastructure” was the buzz phrase at the annual NPC gathering of China’s rubber-stamp parliament.
“Chinese officials, wary of international blowback, have increasingly framed the plan as aspirational and unofficial. They have begun to reduce their allusions to it as Western leaders have voiced concerns,” James McBride and Andrew Chatzky, of the Council on Foreign Relations, said.
“In the opening session of the 2019 National People’s Congress, Premier Li did not mention [Made in] China 2025 at all; it was the first time he left the program out of his annual report to the Congress since it was first introduced,” they wrote in a commentary on the New York-based think tank’s website.
Breathtaking in scale, the plan was conceived in 2015, four years after Germany’s Industrie 4.0 initiative, which was launched at the influential Hanover Fair.
The blueprint encompasses an array of industries, from chips, computers and the cloud to smart cars and smart cookers. In fact, hardly a single sector in China’s economy will escape the effects of this multi-trillion-dollar project.
Renewables, railways and robotics are other vital areas earmarked, along with the Internet of Things, and interconnected smart technology linked through artificial intelligence, or AI, for the biopharmaceutical and manufacturing sectors.
“Although the goal of MIC 2025 is to upgrade industry writ large, the plan targets 10 strategic industries in which China intends to foster the development of not only national champions but global champions,” Bonnie S Glaser, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a statement to a United States Senate Committee last year.
Trade tensions
Rising trade tensions between the US and China in 2018 have since morphed into a technological arms race and the early stages of a New Cold War.
The diplomatic discourse between Beijing and Washington now resembles Stone Age grunts.
But the Made in China 2025 dream still exists. It has simply had a makeover after a host of Chinese high-tech companies, such as telecom giant Huawei, AI-backed surveillance leader NetPosa and cybersecurity firm Qihoo360, were placed on a US blacklist.
Indeed, the program has accelerated under the guise of “new infrastructure” after the economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis.
“Discussions among China’s technology industry and policymakers have been awash since the beginning of March with mentions of one buzzword: Beijing has positioned ‘new infrastructure’ construction as a key policy pillar of its post-pandemic economic recovery,” Caroline Meinhardt, of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said last month.
“Beijing wants to see big investments in the building blocks of China’s digital future – everything from 5G and data centers to artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations,” she wrote in a commentary.
Up to 17.5 trillion yuan, or US$2.47 trillion, will be pumped into ramping up infrastructure spending in the high-tech sector during the next six years, the Shanghai Securities News reported in May.
A research note by Haitong Securities revealed that 3 trillion yuan, or $423 billion, has been designated for this year alone. Priority funding will go to 5G base stations, EV charging outlets, big data centers, artificial intelligence and the industrial internet, such as robotics.
Also, unlike previous rounds of traditional infrastructure spending on roads, bridges and high-speed rail networks, private companies will be heavily involved in the mix.
“This new economic stimulus will rely on a more diverse set of players. Whereas state-owned enterprises (SOEs) play the predominant role in bridge or railway construction projects, the construction of digital infrastructure will, at least in part, have to be driven by private Chinese technology companies,” Meinhardt, of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said.
“Premier Li Keqiang has insisted that private investment will be key and that the market will have the biggest say in creating new digital applications. Success will, therefore, depend to a large extent on the willingness of private technology companies to align their goals with government directives,” she added.
In part, this is already starting to happen. The BAT grouping of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have invested heavily in AI and Big Data. That will continue in the years ahead.
But, of course, the private sector will “only jump on the bandwagon” if there are long-term financial benefits. On top of that, is the sheer cost of this “digital future.”
The last time Beijing unveiled wide-ranging infrastructure projects during the height of the global financial crisis in 2008, it left a trail of local government debt.
“It remains to be seen whether China’s ‘new infrastructure’ push can avoid the mistakes of its infrastructure spending spree following the global financial crisis, which landed local governments and state-owned enterprises in massive debt for projects with minimal or negative returns,” Meinhardt said.
“Hundreds of thousands of new 5G base stations or EV charging points will bring minimal returns if 5G phone and EV demand do not increase at the same rate. Second-guessing future demand is always a high-risk venture, and nowhere more so than in the area of new technology,” she added.
If that worst-case scenario materialized, it would at least be Made in China debt.
