Michael Cohen Cited Multiple Racist Comments by Trump - The Atlantic
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Trump Ordered Officials to Give Jared Kushner a Security Clearance - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.
The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.
The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told The New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.
Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, also said that at the time the clearance was granted last year that his client went through a standard process. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and Mr. Kushner’s wife, said the same thing three weeks ago.
Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Lowell, said on Thursday: “In 2018, White House and security clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone. That was conveyed to the media at the time, and new stories, if accurate, do not change what was affirmed at the time.”
The decision last year to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance upgraded him from earlier temporary and interim status. He never received a higher-level designation that would have given him access to need-to-know intelligence known as sensitive compartmented information.
It is not known precisely what factors led to the problems with Mr. Kushner’s security clearance. Officials had raised questions about his own and his family’s real estate business’s ties to foreign governments and investors, and about initially unreported contacts he had with foreigners. The issue also generated criticism of Mr. Trump for having two family members serve in official capacities in the West Wing.
Mr. Kushner has spent this week abroad working on a Middle East peace plan. Among his meetings was one with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
While the president has the legal authority to grant a clearance, in most cases, the White House’s personnel security office makes a determination about whether to grant one after the F.B.I. has conducted a background check. If there is a dispute in the personnel security office about how to move forward — a rare occurrence — the White House counsel makes the decision. In highly unusual cases, the president weighs in and grants one himself.
In Mr. Kushner’s case, personnel division officials were divided about whether to grant him a top-secret clearance.
In May 2018, the White House Counsel’s Office, which at the time was led by Mr. McGahn, recommended to Mr. Trump that Mr. Kushner not be given a clearance at that level. But the next day, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Kelly to grant it to Mr. Kushner anyway, the people familiar with the events said.
The question of Mr. Kushner’s access to intelligence was a flash point almost from the beginning of the administration. The initial background check into Mr. Kushner dragged on for more than a year, creating a distraction for the White House, which struggled to explain why one of the people closest to the president had yet to be given the proper approval to be trusted with the country’s most sensitive information.
The full scope of intelligence officials’ concerns about Mr. Kushner is not known. But the clearance had been held up in part over questions from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. about his foreign and business contacts, including those related to Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, according to multiple people familiar with the events.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Kushner was part of a group that met with a Russian lawyer who went to Trump Tower claiming to have political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. And during the presidential transition, Mr. Kushner had a meeting with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, and the head of a Russian state-owned bank. When he applied for a security clearance, he did not reveal those meetings.
He later made several amendments to that section of his application, known as an SF86. His aides at the time insisted he had omitted those meetings inadvertently.
Mr. Kushner initially operated with a provisional clearance as his background check proceeded.
In an entry to Mr. Kushner’s personnel file on Sept. 15, 2017, the head of the personnel security division, Carl Kline, wrote, “Per conversation with WH Counsel the clearance was changed to interim Top Secret until we can confirm that the DOJ or someone else actually granted a final clearance. This action is out of an abundance of caution because the background investigation has not been completed.”
In a statement to The Times when Mr. Kushner received the clearance last year, Mr. Lowell said that “his application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process.”
During a review of security clearances in February 2018 that was prompted by the controversy surrounding Rob Porter, then the White House staff secretary, who had been accused of domestic abuse, Mr. Kushner’s clearance was downgraded from interim top secret to secret, limiting his access to classified information. At the time, Mr. Kelly wrote a five-page memo, revoking temporary clearances that had been in place since June 1, 2017.
That affected both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, who told friends and advisers that they believed that Mr. Kelly and Mr. McGahn were targeting them for petty reasons instead of legitimate concerns flagged by officials.
Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump both complained to the president about the situation, current and former administration officials said. In Mr. Kushner’s case, Mr. Trump would often turn to other aides and say in frustration, “Why isn’t this getting done?” according to a former administration official. On at least one occasion, the president asked another senior official if the person could sort out the issue. That official said no, according to this account.
Mr. Kelly did not believe it was appropriate to overrule the security clearance process and had brushed aside or avoided dealing with Mr. Kushner’s requests, a former administration official said. Mr. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment.
House Democrats are in the early stages of an investigation into how several Trump administration officials obtained clearances, including Mr. Kushner.
Mr. Trump’s precise language to Mr. Kelly about Mr. Kushner’s clearance in their direct conversation remains unclear. Two of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s discussions with Mr. Kelly said that there might be different interpretations of what the president said. But Mr. Kelly believed it was an order, according to two people familiar with his thinking.
And Mr. Trump was definitive in his statements to The Times in the January interview.
“I was never involved with the security” clearances for Mr. Kushner, the president said. “I know that there was issues back and forth about security for numerous people, actually. But I don’t want to get involved in that stuff.”
A recent report by NBC revealed that Mr. Kline had overruled two career security specialists who had rejected Mr. Kushner’s application based on the F.B.I.’s concerns. A senior administration official confirmed the details laid out in the NBC report.
Mr. Kline was acting on the directive sent down by the president, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
The day that Mr. Lowell described Mr. Kushner’s process as having gone through normal routes, aides to Mr. Kushner had asked White House officials to deliver a statement from Mr. Kelly supporting what Mr. Lowell had said. But Mr. Kelly refused to do so, according to a person with knowledge of the events."
Trump Ordered Officials to Give Jared Kushner a Security Clearance - The New York Times
Opinion | How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won the Cohen Hearing - The New York Times
"Too many representatives chose to bloviate instead of interrogate — except for one.
Ms. Fredrickson is the president of the American Constitution Society.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acted like a good prosecutor while questioning Michael Cohen, establishing the factual basis for further committee investigation.
Photo by: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
On Wednesday, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s one-time personal lawyer and “fixer,” testified in front of the House Oversight and Reform Committee about what he says are a variety of shady practices he participated in when working for the president. People around the country awaited riveting testimony, some going so far as to join “watch parties” in bars.
But like so many congressional hearings, the fireworks were quick to flame out. Even with the tantalizing opportunity to grill Mr. Cohen on the myriad ways his former boss most likely sought to evade the law and avoid his creditors, many members of the committee, from both parties, could not resist their usual grandstanding.
Consider the line of questioning from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. She asked Mr. Cohen a series of specific questions about how Mr. Trump had handled insurance claims and whether he had provided accurate information to various companies. “To your knowledge,” she asked, “did Donald Trump ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?” He had.
She asked whether Mr. Trump had tried to reduce his local taxes by undervaluing his assets. Mr. Cohen confirmed that the president had also done that. “You deflate the value of the asset and then you put in a request to the tax department for a deduction,” Mr. Cohen said, explaining the practice. These were the sort of questions, and answers, the committee was supposed to elicit. Somehow, only the newer members got the memo.
[Get a more personal, less conventional take on political developments, newsmakers, cultural milestones and more with Frank Bruni’s weekly newsletter.]
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez continued, asking, “Do you think we need to review financial statements and tax returns in order to compare them?” She pressed Mr. Cohen for the names of others who would be able to corroborate the testimony or provide documents to support the charges. In response, Mr. Cohen listed the executives Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari — names that, thanks in part to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, we will probably hear more about in the coming months.
These questions were not random, but, rather, well thought out. Like a good prosecutor, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was establishing the factual basis for further committee investigation. She asked one question at a time, avoided long-winded speeches on why she was asking the question, and listened carefully to his answer, which gave her the basis for a follow-up inquiry. As a result, Mr. Cohen gave specific answers about Mr. Trump’s shady practices, along with a road map for how to find out more. Mr. Cohen began his testimony calling Mr. Trump a “con man and a cheat”; In just five minutes, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez actually helped him lay out the facts to substantiate those charges.
Unfortunately, too few of her colleagues followed suit. In his testimony, Mr. Cohen claimed numerous ethical breaches and criminal acts on the part of the president, many for which Mr. Cohen himself apparently served as main actor. He spoke of illegal campaign payoffs, rigging of electoral polls, threatening people who had crossed the president, possible witness tampering, and even falsifying financial records. He spoke of conduct in and out of office that would cross even the most generous reading of ethical and legal boundaries.
All of these areas offered fruitful avenues for exploration. But instead of asking probing questions and eliciting damning evidence from Mr. Cohen, too many committee members chose to make a speech. Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker tweeted in frustration, “Bipartisan incompetence in the questioning at #cohen hearing. All they do is make speeches, and fail to listen to answers or follow up.” He then tweeted sample follow-up questions, hoping desperately that someone might just try. He did give credit to several members who understand the art of questioning, including Representatives Katie Hill and Jackie Speier. But it is shocking how few members actually understand the basic function of a hearing — or chose to ignore collective goals in favor of showboating.
As someone who has worked on the Hill and as a nonprofit advocate, I am accustomed to the frustration of opportunities lost, of questions not asked, or of witnesses who are allowed to get away without really answering a question. Often the stakes are low and so the cost is not so great.
But as Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings’s outstanding closing remarks made clear, what we face now as a nation is so consequential, as the president faces multiple inquiries about possible collusion with a foreign power, that we need more from members of Congress. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has many followers on social media. I hope her colleagues will start to follow her example in the hearing room."
Opinion | How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won the Cohen Hearing - The New York Times
Michael Cohen Depicts a Life More Like ‘The Sopranos’ Than ‘The Apprentice’ - The New York Times
"For 14 seasons, on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump presented a gilded image of the Trump Organization, which the reality show depicted as a hard-charging, happy, successful business.
On Wednesday, before the House oversight committee and a nationwide TV audience, Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, told America that it had been watching a different story all along: less “The Apprentice” and more “The Sopranos.”
Mr. Cohen described a business, and a campaign, in which lies and threats were routine and embarrassing stories were bought and buried, all in service of a boss who dropped Tony Sopranoesque hints about how best to make his problems go away.
Mr. Cohen, who had already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, brought documentation to back up some of his charges. Besides addressing his credibility issues, it was a Trumpian visual gesture, providing the TV networks dramatic images to splash onscreen alongside his testimony — checks, letters, financial statements, a portrait of himself that Mr. Trump bought using funds from his charitable foundation, according to Mr. Cohen…"
Michael Cohen Depicts a Life More Like ‘The Sopranos’ Than ‘The Apprentice’ - The New York Times:
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos? - The New York Times
"There was, you might say, a disturbance in the Force.
Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.
Then, after another 100,000 years or so, the new field simply winked off, leaving no trace other than a speeded-up universe.
So goes the strange-sounding story being promulgated by a handful of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In a bold and speculative leap into the past, the team has posited the existence of this field to explain an astronomical puzzle: the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should be.
The cosmos is expanding only about 9 percent more quickly than theory prescribes. But this slight-sounding discrepancy has intrigued astronomers, who think it might be revealing something new about the universe.
And so, for the last couple of years, they have been gathering in workshops and conferences to search for a mistake or loophole in their previous measurements and calculations, so far to no avail.
“If we’re going to be serious about cosmology, this is the kind of thing we have to be able to take seriously,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard theorist who has been pondering the problem.
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At a recent meeting in Chicago, Josh Frieman, a theorist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., asked: “At what point do we claim the discovery of new physics?”
Now ideas are popping up. Some researchers say the problem could be solved by inferring the existence of previously unknown subatomic particles. Others, such as the Johns Hopkins group, are invoking new kinds of energy fields.
Adding to the confusion, there already is a force field — called dark energy — making the universe expand faster. And a new, controversial report suggests that this dark energy might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are ripped apart and time ends.
Thus far, there is no evidence for most of these ideas. If any turn out to be right, scientists may have to rewrite the story of the origin, history and, perhaps, fate of the universe.
Or it could all be a mistake. Astronomers have rigorous methods to estimate the effects of statistical noise and other random errors on their results; not so for the unexamined biases called systematic errors.
As Wendy L. Freedman, of the University of Chicago, said at the Chicago meeting, “The unknown systematic is what gets you in the end.”
Hubble trouble
Generations of great astronomers have come to grief trying to measure the universe. At issue is a number called the Hubble constant, named after Edwin Hubble, the Mount Wilson astronomer who in 1929 discovered that the universe is expanding.
As space expands, it carries galaxies away from each other like the raisins in a rising cake. The farther apart two galaxies are, the faster they will fly away from each other. The Hubble constant simply says by how much.
But to calibrate the Hubble constant, astronomers depend on so-called standard candles: objects, such as supernova explosions and certain variable stars, whose distances can be estimated by luminosity or some other feature. This is where the arguing begins.
Until a few decades ago, astronomers could not agree on the value of the Hubble constant within a factor of two: either 50 or 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec. (A megaparsec is 3.26 million light years.)
But in 2001, a team using the Hubble Space Telescope, and led by Dr. Freedman, reported a value of 72. For every megaparsec farther away from us that a galaxy is, it is moving 72 kilometers per second faster.
More recent efforts by Adam G. Riess, of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, and others have obtained similar numbers, and astronomers now say they have narrowed the uncertainty in the Hubble constant to just 2.4 percent.
But new precision has brought new trouble. These results are so good that they now disagree with results from the European Planck spacecraft, which predict a Hubble constant of 67.
The discrepancy — 9 percent — sounds fatal but may not be, astronomers contend, because Planck and human astronomers do very different kinds of observations.
Planck is considered the gold standard of cosmology. It spent four years studying the cosmic bath of microwaves left over from the end of the Big Bang, when the universe was just 380,000 years old. But it did not measure the Hubble constant directly. Rather, the Planck group derived the value of the constant, and other cosmic parameters, from a mathematical model largely based on those microwaves.
In short, Planck’s Hubble constant is based on a cosmic baby picture. In contrast, the classical astronomical value is derived from what cosmologists modestly call “local measurements,” a few billion light-years deep into a middle-aged universe.
What if that baby picture left out or obscured some important feature of the universe?
‘Cosmological Whac-a-Mole’
And so cosmologists are off to the game that Lloyd Knox, an astrophysicist from the University of California, Davis, called “cosmological Whac-a-Mole” at the recent Chicago meeting: attempting to fix the model of the early universe, to make it expand a little faster without breaking what the model already does well.
One approach, some astrophysicists suggest, is to add more species of lightweight subatomic particles, such as the ghostlike neutrinos, to the early universe. (Physicists already recognize three kinds of neutrinos, and argue whether there is evidence for a fourth variety.) These would give the universe more room to stash energy, in the same way that more drawers in your dresser allow you to own more pairs of socks. Thus invigorated, the universe would expand faster, according to the Big Bang math, and hopefully not mess up the microwave baby picture.
A more drastic approach, from the Johns Hopkins group, invokes fields of exotic anti-gravitational energy. The idea exploits an aspect of string theory, the putative but unproven “theory of everything” that posits that the elementary constituents of reality are very tiny, wriggling strings.
String theory suggests that space could be laced with exotic energy fields associated with lightweight particles or forces yet undiscovered. Those fields, collectively called quintessence, could act in opposition to gravity, and could change over time — popping up, decaying or altering their effect, switching from repulsive to attractive.
The team focused in particular on the effects of fields associated with hypothetical particles called axions. Had one such field arisen when the universe was about 100,000 years old, it could have produced just the right amount of energy to fix the Hubble discrepancy, the team reported in a paper late last year. They refer to this theoretical force as “early dark energy.”
“I was surprised how it came out,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a Johns Hopkins cosmologist who was part of the study. “This works.”
The jury is still out. Dr. Riess said that the idea seems to work, which is not to say that he agrees with it, or that it is right. Nature, manifest in future observations, will have the final say.
Dr. Knox called the Johns Hopkins paper “an existence proof” that the Hubble problem could be solved. “I think that’s new,” he said.
Dr. Randall, however, has taken issue with aspects of the Johns Hopkins calculations. She and a trio of Harvard postdocs are working on a similar idea that she says works as well and is mathematically consistent. “It’s novel and very cool,” Dr. Randall said.
So far, the smart money is still on cosmic confusion. Michael Turner, a veteran cosmologist at the University of Chicago and the organizer of a recent airing of the Hubble tensions, said, “Indeed, all of this is going over all of our heads. We are confused and hoping that the confusion will lead to something good!”
Doomsday? Nah, nevermind
Early dark energy appeals to some cosmologists because it hints at a link to, or between, two mysterious episodes in the history of the universe. As Dr. Riess said, “This is not the first time the universe has been expanding too fast.”
The first episode occurred when the universe was less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. At that moment, cosmologists surmise, a violent ballooning propelled the Big Bang; in a fraction of a trillionth of a second, this event — named “inflation” by the cosmologist Alan Guth, of M.I.T. — smoothed and flattened the initial chaos into the more orderly universe observed today. Nobody knows what drove inflation.
The second episode is unfolding today: cosmic expansion is speeding up. But why? The issue came to light in 1998, when two competing teams of astronomers asked whether the collective gravity of the galaxies might be slowing the expansion enough to one day drag everything together into a Big Crunch.
To great surprise, they discovered the opposite: the expansion was accelerating under the influence of an anti-gravitational force later called dark energy. The two teams won a Nobel Prize.
Dark energy comprises 70 percent of the mass-energy of the universe. And, spookily, it behaves very much like a fudge factor known as the cosmological constant, a cosmic repulsive force that Einstein inserted in his equations a century ago thinking it would keep the universe from collapsing under its own weight. He later abandoned the idea, perhaps too soon.
Under the influence of dark energy, the cosmos is now doubling in size every 10 billion years — to what end, nobody knows.
Early dark energy, the force invoked by the Johns Hopkins group, might represent a third episode of antigravity taking over the universe and speeding it up. Perhaps all three episodes are different manifestations of the same underlying tendency of the universe to go rogue and speed up occasionally. In an email, Dr. Riess said, “Maybe the universe does this from time-to-time?”
If so, it would mean that the current manifestation of dark energy is not Einstein’s constant after all. It might wink off one day. That would relieve astronomers, and everybody else, of an existential nightmare regarding the future of the universe. If dark energy remains constant, everything outside our galaxy eventually will be moving away from us faster than the speed of light, and will no longer be visible. The universe will become lifeless and utterly dark.
But if dark energy is temporary — if one day it switches off — cosmologists and metaphysicians can all go back to contemplating a sensible tomorrow.
“An appealing feature of this is that there might be a future for humanity,” said Scott Dodelson, a theorist at Carnegie Mellon who has explored similar scenarios.
The phantom cosmos
But the future is still up for grabs.
Far from switching off, the dark energy currently in the universe actually has increased over cosmic time, according to a recent report in Nature Astronomy. If this keeps up, the universe could end one day in what astronomers call the Big Rip, with atoms and elementary particles torn asunder — perhaps the ultimate cosmic catastrophe.
This dire scenario emerges from the work of Guido Risaliti, of the University of Florence in Italy, and Elisabeta Lusso, of Durham University in England. For the last four years, they have plumbed the deep history of the universe, using violent, faraway cataclysms called quasars as distance markers.
Quasars arise from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies; they are the brightest objects in nature, and can be seen clear across the universe. As standard candles, quasars aren’t ideal because their masses vary widely. Nevertheless, the researchers identified some regularities in the emissions from quasars, allowing the history of the cosmos to be traced back nearly 12 billion years. The team found that the rate of cosmic expansion deviated from expectations over that time span.
One interpretation of the results is that dark energy is not constant after all, but is changing, growing denser and thus stronger over cosmic time. It so happens that this increase in dark energy also would be just enough to resolve the discrepancy in measurements of the Hubble constant.
The bad news is that, if this model is right, dark energy may be in a particularly virulent and — most physicists say — implausible form called phantom energy. Its existence would imply that things can lose energy by speeding up, for instance. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist, has referred to it as “bad news stuff.”
As the universe expands, the push from phantom energy would grow without bounds, eventually overcoming gravity and tearing apart first Earth, then atoms.
The Hubble-constant community responded to the new report with caution. “If it holds up, this is a very interesting result,” said Dr. Freedman.
Astronomers have been trying to take the measure of this dark energy for two decades. Two space missions — the European Space Agency’s Euclid and NASA’s Wfirst — have been designed to study dark energy and hopefully deliver definitive answers in the coming decade. The fate of the universe is at stake.
In the meantime, everything, including phantom energy, is up for consideration, according to Dr. Riess.
“In a list of possible solutions to the tension via new physics, mentioning weird dark energy like this would seem appropriate,” he wrote in an email. “Heck, at least their dark energy goes in the right direction to solve the tension. It could have gone the other way and made it worse!”
Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos? - The New York Times
Monday, February 25, 2019
Why Are Democrats Trying to Torpedo the Korea Peace Talks? | The Nation
"South Koreans are learning the hard truths expressed in the protest music of Phil Ochs from the darkest days of the Cold War. “When it comes to times like Korea, there’s no one more red, white, and blue” than the American liberal, he sang in one of his most biting verses.
Decades later, with the two Koreas on the brink of ending a war that ripped their country apart and triggered the massive US military intervention of 1950, the liberals and Democrats who earned Ochs’s derision may be undermining the best chance for peace on the peninsula in a generation.
As US diplomats prepare for the second summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un next week in Hanoi, senior Democrats in the House and Senate, joined by a few Republicans, have been sounding alarm bells, warning that South Korean President Moon Jae-in is moving too fast in reconciling with North Korea by seeking a premature lifting of sanctions on the nuclear-armed state.
They are also expressing strong reservations about the US and South Korean negotiations with Kim and warning Trump not to budge on his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign until Kim has completely dismantled North Korea’s nuclear-weapons and missile program. Kim temporarily halted the program nearly 500 days ago by suspending all testing of his “nuclear force.”
The congressional actions have been fueled by a steady stream of pessimistic and often misleading studies from Washington think tanks, eagerly embraced by US media hostile to the peace process, alleging that Kim is “playing” Trump and that both Moon and Trump may stop short of demanding North Korea’s immediate denuclearization by embracing a more incremental approach.
In recent days, word has been circulating in Washington that Trump’s team in Hanoi, led by State Department special envoy Stephen Biegun, may loosen some US sanctions in return for North Korea’s closing down of its huge nuclear complex at Yongbyon, which South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper describes as “the center and symbol of North Korea’s nuclear development program.”
Other reports claim that the two countries may set up liaison offices in their respective capitals as the bilateral talks move forward. Those attempts at a compromise, in turn, have set up an internecine battle inside the Trump administration, with hard-liners like John Bolton, who is visiting South Korea this weekend, trying to head off Biegun’s diplomacy.
But Trump is sticking to his guns. “I’m in no particular rush” as long as the North’s test suspension remains in place, Trump told reporters at the White House on February 19. That same day, President Moon told Trump in a 35-minute phone call that South Korea was ready to use economic incentives, including connecting inter-Korean roads and railroads and other projects, to “reduce the burden” on the United States in forging an agreement with North Korea. “Seoul is ready to reboot inter-Korean exchanges with an early resumption of joint economic projects,” a presidential official at the Blue House told reporters.
Top Democrats, however, oppose such moves. Last week, Senator Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, joined Republican Ted Cruz in sending a strongly worded letter to Trump that directly attacked President Moon’s push for closer economic ties with North Korea. They urged the White House to rein in the US ally by committing “the full weight of the U.S. government to ensuring the integrity of the sanctions regime.”
Senator Menendez is also the author of a resolution, now under consideration in the Senate and House, promoting the trilateral military alliance between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, which is highly unpopular among Koreans. It comes as Tokyo and Seoul are locked in a bitter dispute over Japan’s use of “comfort women” as sex slaves during World War II and its refusal to provide restitution to thousands of Koreans forced to labor in Japanese mines and factories during that time. The resolution, which was introduced in the House by Democratic Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is widely seen in Seoul as a way to pressure President Moon to back off and settle the dispute.
The most dramatic moment of congressional impatience with South Korea came last week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with a high-level delegation of South Korean lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties.
The group, which was led by Representative Moon Hee-sang, the speaker of South Korea’s National Assembly, came to Washington to seek support for the inter-Korean peace process started by President Moon during the “Olympic Truce” of January 2018. According to Korean reporters who were briefed on the meeting, the session was uncomfortable from the start and had to be extended “as the talks grew intense.”
Pelosi, citing her own visit to Pyongyang in 1997, reportedly told her visitors not to trust the North and asserted (apparently with prodding from Representative Na Kyung-won, the floor leader of the right-wing opposition Liberty Korea Party) that North Korea’s “real goal isn’t its own denuclearization but South Korea’s demilitarization.” At one point, Pelosi insisted that last June’s summit in Singapore—the first-ever meeting between a US president and a North Korean leader—was “nothing but show.”
The implication was that the South Koreans, who have had extensive discussions on economic, political, and military issues with their Northern counterparts over the past year, are naive and don’t understand the threat to their own country. Representative Moon, in an interview with Fox 11 in Los Angeles, said he responded to Pelosi that the second summit in Hanoi “is of great importance to the Korean people and it will determine the fate of our country. That’s how important it is.”
The US congressional pressure on South Korea to end its dispute with Japan also contributed to the tension. The issue of Japan’s wartime crimes is particularly sensitive for Representative Moon, who recently suggested that the Japanese emperor apologize to his country for its war crimes against Koreans. Later, he called Japan a “brazen thief” for demanding that he retract his comments.
After hearing Pelosi express her concern about the dispute between South Korea and Japan, Speaker Moon told Korean reporters that the House speaker was essentially lobbying for Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party government in Tokyo. “I think Japan told her to have a word with [us] before the meeting, or in other words, scold us,” he said, according to the Joongang Daily. Pelosi’s press office did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment and clarification.
Still, Pelosi’s comments rattled many Koreans, who are hoping for a successful summit so they can proceed with their plans to eliminate tensions with the North. “Reconciliation and peace between North and South Korea is a gravely historic matter that should be for the Korean people to decide,” Simone Chun, a Korean scholar and activist who has spoken to congressional staffers about the peace process, told The Nation. “It cannot be allowed to be reduced to a bargaining chip in the struggle for one-upmanship between Republicans and Democrats.”
Chun was also critical of Representative Na of the Korean opposition party for raising fears during her visit to Washington about a North Korean nuclear attack and opposing an end-of-war declaration at the upcoming summit. “What Pelosi did was to legitimize the ultra-right-wing views expressed by Na,” she said.
Hwang Joon-bum, the Washington correspondent for Hankyoreh, South Korea’s largest progressive daily, wrote an op-ed about the House speaker’s remarks. “Pelosi is just one person who reflects the dominant viewpoint in the American political establishment, the mainstream media and think tanks,” he said. “There was never any chance” that the lawmakers’ tour “would reverse the deep-rooted distrust of North Korea and the antipathy to Trump both inside and outside of the US political establishment.”
The US critics, he added, “aren’t impressed by North Korea’s suspension of nuclear and missile testing since Nov. 2017, its willingness to demolish its Yongbyon nuclear facility and [Kim Jong-un’s] focus on an economic line.”
Daniel Jasper, the public-education-and-advocacy coordinator for Asia of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), said in an interview that he hoped Democrats would start seeing the Trump-Kim talks through Korean eyes.
“We are urging Democratic leadership to see the peace process for what it is—a Korean-led effort to end a 70-year-old war,” Jasper told The Nation. “Changing from the view that the current situation is a nuclear standoff to the view that this situation is the result of an un-ended war is essential to understanding what types of reciprocal actions are pragmatic and necessary, as well as why diplomacy is needed in the first place. We remain hopeful that the Democrats will rise above partisanship and political calculations to support the overall goal of peace.” AFSC, which established its first operations in North Korea in 1980, works with four cooperative farms in the country to raise productivity and implement sustainable agricultural practices, Jasper said.
But the Menendez letter showed little appreciation for South Korea’s efforts to help the North improve its economy. Menendez and Cruz listed a series of South Korean actions they consider troublesome, including moves by Korean banks to “pursue investments and operations” in the North and the participation of “multiple business executives” in President Moon’s summit in Pyongyang last September to discuss reopening the Kaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ and tours of Mount Kumgang, a tourist site beloved by South Koreans.
They also complained about President Moon’s recent calls to lift sanctions on the North “as soon as possible” and plans by both Koreas to break ground on a new cross-border rail project “within this year.” They added that North Korea’s “opacity” and its “well-documented efforts of evading sanctions” makes it impossible to ensure “that economic engagement with the North—regardless of intent to contribute to positive diplomatic progress on denuclearization—would not violate U.N. Security Council resolutions or be used for illicit activities prohibited by U.S. sanctions.”
Meanwhile, in another move that could constrain both South Korea and the United States in their negotiations with the North, Representative Tom Malinowski, a newly elected Democratic congressman from New Jersey, joined Republican Representative Mike Gallagher in introducing a bill that would restrict the US government and the Pentagon from reducing US troops in South Korea from their current level of about 28,000 to 22,000 or less unless the secretary of defense could assure Congress it would not have an “adverse” impact on US security.
The bill, H.R. 889, states that a “withdrawal or significant reduction” of US forces, which could happen eventually if a peace deal is reached, “may risk upsetting the military balance” in the Asia region. It also uses language similar to the Menendez letter concerning the US alliance with Japan, saying that the trilateral ties between the United States, Japan, and South Korea “form the bedrock of regional stability.”
Malinowski, a former director of Human Rights Watch, was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor during the Obama administration. In 2017, he wrote an article for Politico titled “How to Take Down Kim Jong Un” that essentially called for a campaign that would “lead to the end” of the North Korean regime “and its reason to exist as a country.”
The Democratic Party’s current approach was established last June, one week before the Singapore summit, in a letter to Trump from Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and signed by Senators Menendez, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Sherrod Brown, Mark Warner, and Patrick Leahy. It laid out a series of demands, including North Korea’s “dismantlement and removal” of its chemical and biological weapons, which are not currently part of the talks, and urged the White House to “maintain a tough approach to China” throughout the peace process. The Schumer letter also rejected any incremental steps by the US government in its dealings with Kim.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” the Democratic senators declared.
Chun, the scholar-activist, said in a recent e-mail to peace activists that the Schumer letter “completely overlooked the recent progress toward peace evinced by the inter-Korean summit and the Panmunjom Declaration and discounted the overwhelming support for the peace process by Koreans. It also offers no alternative vision for peace on the Korean Peninsula and considers Korean interests only insofar as they serve the narrow political agenda of the Democratic Party.”
After the Schumer letter went out, according to activists who spend time on Capitol Hill, Representative Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders told their caucus “not to speak supportively” of the Singapore summit, which happened to coincide with a week of advocacy on Korea by peace groups. “Many of our folks lobbying on the Hill were stunned at how hostile many Dems were,” one activist told The Nation.
But now, with the Trump-Kim negotiations in full swing, a few Democrats are ready to take a new approach. A group of lawmakers from the Congressional Progressive Caucus plan to announce an action next week to express support for the Korea peace process and call on the United States to finally end the Korean War through a peace agreement. That would be most welcome, said Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action and national coordinator of the Korea Peace Network.
“Democrats should support diplomacy, and remember the most important president in this process is Moon Jae-in, not Donald Trump,” Martin said. “Moon’s persistent leadership toward reconciliation and diplomacy with North Korea represents the fervent desire of the Korean and Korean-American people for peace. Members of Congress from both parties should understand that and support it, skepticism about Trump and Kim notwithstanding.”
Why Are Democrats Trying to Torpedo the Korea Peace Talks? | The Nation
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Opinion | Michelle Obama’s Rules of Assimilation - The New York Times
"Why do black people still feel we have to retain white empathy at the expense of being truly empathetic to ourselves?
Michelle Obama was the highest-profile black American woman in the world for eight years. A poster advertising her memoir, “Becoming,” is seen in Warsaw earlier this month.
Photo by: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto, via Getty Images
I happened to be finishing Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” during her recent surprise appearance at the Grammys. She gave a short speech about music bringing people together — “whether we like country, or rap or rock, music helps us share ourselves,” she said. The timing felt appropriate — it’s Black History Month, and although the Obamas are now ensconced in that history, we are only beginning to truly examine their legacy.
Let me stress that I like Mrs. Obama. I very much identify with her. I, too, was born in the ’60s and grew up working class in a black family that saw higher education as the way forward. What’s always interested me about Mrs. Obama is how she created a modern narrative of black womanhood just by being herself. The most notable accomplishment of her memoir is that she shows how being consciously black and being an individual are not incompatible, but an ordinary state of being.
She is a soldier in the racial struggles that engage all black folks, but at the same time she is human — vulnerable, uncertain, thrilled to be in love, anxious to be liked. She is, for a time, comfortably middle class, too, which may be the most radical part of this narrative, because black folks who acquire money and prestige are assumed not to have any problems worth serious consideration (they are not, in other words, authentically black). Not so.
And yet reading “Becoming” made me realize, with a sinking heart, how much further we have to go before we routinely hear the whole story about black people's experience.
This becomes clear in those brief parts of the book that address two of the most controversial moments of the 2008 presidential campaign: Mrs. Obama’s remark on the campaign trail that “for the first time in my adult life I’m really proud of my country,” and the sermon by the Obamas’ longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., that the media boiled down to the epithet “God damn America.”
In the first case, Mrs. Obama maintains that she meant nothing racial, that she was not being unpatriotic, merely expressing gratitude for the volunteers and good energy of the campaign. In the second case, she condemns Mr. Wright as expressing a racial paranoia that exists on both sides of the color line — “the suspicion and stereotyping ran both ways,” is how she puts it — implying a kind of false equivalency that permeates our politics, especially around race. She dismisses such suspicion in her own relatives, who have lived through segregation and Jim Crow, as so much “cranky mistrust.”
That’s it? After giving the story of black people such loving examination, Mrs. Obama strategically shuts it down. She cannot or will not acknowledge how any black person voicing pride in country for the first time makes perfect sense. She cannot or will not acknowledge that Mr. Wright’s critique of America was part of the liberation theology tradition that includes Martin Luther King Jr., a great patriot.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. speaking to his congregation at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in 2006.
Photo by: Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press
More important, these are critiques I’ve heard in many forms from ordinary black people. I can’t imagine Mrs. Obama hasn’t heard them, too, and doesn’t understand exactly where they come from.
The point is not that she has to completely agree with Mr. Wright. But in her disavowals, she’s making a political choice — not surprising, given the book and other projects that hinge on her popularity and “relatability.” That’s what’s so dismaying. As the highest-profile black American woman in the world for eight years, as a towering first, she has a rare chance — an obligation, in my mind — to broaden the national narrative of exclusion from a story of black striving and overcoming to a story of black discontent. That would be much more meaningful than any feel-good awards-show speech about the “unifying power of music.”
She could at least give our discontent the same consideration she gives to Iowa voters and military families and other groups whom she describes as having opened her eyes to the deepest meanings of being American. But we don’t get that here. Once again we are denied our fullness because of a (justified) fear it will be interpreted as anti-American. Mrs. Obama still follows the rule of assimilation: It’s more important to retain white empathy than to be truly empathetic to ourselves.
Mrs. Obama writes at one point that as a black first lady, her “grace would need to be earned.” She’s talking again about those rules of assimilation, of that familiar burden of having to be three times as good to even be given a chance. (This, of course, is a truth built into the whole phenomena of Black History Month.) Too bad she doesn’t add that, in their incredible forbearance, black Americans earned their grace long ago, as well as their residual resentments and frustrations built up over 400 years, which are dismissed by the mainstream as anger or crankiness.
Mrs. Obama does get it right in the title: More of the story of black Americans is being told than ever before, but there is still so much left out, often deliberately. It — and we — are still becoming."
Opinion | Michelle Obama’s Rules of Assimilation - The New York Times
Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump? - The New York Times
"Twelve years ago, social scientists cracked the code on how to get Americans to vote. Before a special election in Michigan, 100,000 households received slightly different mailers: One reminded them that voting was their civic duty. Another applied gentle social pressure by including the voting history of everyone in that particular household (“Who votes is public information!” it reminded them). The final flier — and by far the most powerful — revealed the voting history of the recipients’ neighbors.
“What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” it asked, along with a warning that after the election, researchers would “publicize who does and does not vote.”
“It proved to be the most effective intervention ever uncovered by an order of magnitude,” said Todd Rogers, a professor of public policy at Harvard who specializes in education and voting behavior.
The findings had the power to transform political organizing, especially for Democratic candidates who rely on high voter turnout. There was just one problem.
“It made people crazy and super irritated and offended,” Dr. Rogers said. “The underlying psychology is that when people feel like they’re going to be held accountable, they’re more likely to do it, but they also get really mad about it.”
So political groups backed away from the idea. For the next decade, even as we abandoned our privacy with a swipe of the opt-in button and as apps that rely on social pressure proved effective in dieting, parenting and saving for retirement, political organizers largely ignored the power of peer pressure. Then came 2016 and the election of Donald Trump.
“Not only did progressives lose, they were surprised they lost,” said Sangeeth Peruri, the founder and chief executive of VoterCircle, a platform that allows users to tap into their address books and easily identify and encourage (that is, nag) eligible voters. Users have the option to see whether their contacts voted in past elections and whether they are registered Republicans or Democrats.
“Losing is one thing, but being surprised you lost is a failing of the system,” Mr. Peruri said. His platform, one of the first, started in 2015. But others soon followed.
The shock of Mr. Trump’s election galvanized several developers who had worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Steeped in Silicon Valley debates about privacy, they wondered if they’d been too timid about harnessing the enormous trove of publicly available voter data. After all, party affiliation and voting history had long been used internally by campaigns. Maybe political groups needed to stop caring about people’s feelings if it helped get them out to vote.
Mikey Dickerson, the executive director of the New Data Project and a former Google engineer who was the chief of the United States Digital Service in the Obama administration, had learned about the Michigan survey in 2008, but he didn’t come up with his VoteWithMe app until 2017. The app outs anyone who didn’t vote in previous elections. (Alyssa Milano and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, looks like you both sat out the 2014 midterms.)
It identifies friends in competitive districts (with a fire emoji) and provides handy text-message reminder templates (“You gonna vote?”). “We looked around and didn’t think it had ever been done before — putting voter-file data directly in front of you as the end user,” Mr. Dickerson said.
Many in the technology industry initially scoffed at his idea. (“VoteWithMe is a creepy new app that checks your contacts’ voting history,” one article declared.) But several hundred thousand users downloaded VoteWithMe before the midterms, and Mr. Dickerson, who plans to step back and hand the technology over to like-minded groups, said lots of similar apps are springing up ahead of 2020.
“I am worried about the foundations of the systems of government surviving and an administration that puts kids in cages and separates families,” he said. “I’m not going to feel bad that some of my friends, unaffected by any of this, have a mild amount of discomfort because some jerk — probably me — can see whether or not they voted.”
The weight of peer pressure has a particular pull on millennials. They represent more than 30 percent of eligible voters, about on a par with baby boomers, but have the lowest voter turnout of any age group. Only 49 percent of voters ages 18 to 35 voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Pew Research Center. Democratic pollsters predict that increasing turnout among millennials by 10 percentage points would all but guarantee they defeat Mr. Trump in 2020.
In an era when privacy feels like a nostalgic notion and our political leanings can be more or less gleaned from where we live, how we dress and what we watch, is there even such a thing as the sanctity of the voting booth? After several celebrities learned the hard way that most states don’t permit photos inside the voting booth, last year California legalized “ballot selfies” (thank you, Kim Kardashian). The day of the midterm elections, 1,000 people a minute were posting Instagram stories with “I Voted” stickers, according to the company.
Developers said these turnout apps aren’t intended to shame anyone. As Debra Cleaver, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based Vote.org, a nonprofit group that works to increase voter participation, put it: “We call it social pressure or social validation. ‘Vote shaming’ sounds like it was coined by a reporter because it makes you want to click.” (Fair.)
They say their primary purpose is “relational organizing,” or tapping into your social network to tell contacts about a candidate or election (as opposed to the old-fashioned and less effective “operational organizing” that involves dispatching volunteers to cold-call strangers). In other words, coastal liberals can make a difference while fiddling with an app on their sofas (“I know you’re going to vote on Nov. 6, duh, but make sure to remind your friends!” one text template reads), rather than flying to Iowa to knock on strangers’ doors. “I haven’t knocked on a door since 2014,” Ms. Cleaver said.
Buffy Wicks, a community organizer and former Obama campaign aide who was recently elected to the California State Assembly, said it doesn’t have to be “an either/or.” She hosted 239 house parties at which she encouraged supporters to download VoterCircle, but she also knocked on 115,559 doors. More than 100,000 people voted for her.
The rush to design apps to increase voter turnout is part of a wider push in Silicon Valley — trying to shake the taint of peddling fake news and Russian propaganda — toward “civic tech,” or innovations designed in the public interest. “There’s obviously a P.R. aspect,” Ms. Cleaver said. “But there is no way relational organizing apps can undo the damage that Facebook and Twitter have done.”
Nevertheless, the apps are gaining traction. Revolution Messaging and Phone2Action and other liberal websites allow users to pressure their representatives, raise money and support candidates. Republicans have developed apps to, for instance, bolster the National Rifle Association or donate to Mr. Trump’s re-election.
All of these, plus the individual apps that the armada of Democratic candidates running for president will soon offer, are enough to give anyone app fatigue. That’s why, in the coming months, Mr. Peruri of VoterCircle plans to rebrand his platform as OutreachCircle, making it a liberal one-stop shop to plan house parties, call your representative, advocate for a cause, give money to a candidate … and, if you’re so inclined, snoop on your friends’ voting history.
The goal is to eventually build habits so that rather than just ranting on Twitter, people can use OutreachCircle to keep their communities engaged, essentially performing the function of an old-fashioned neighborhood precinct captain or PTA president. “Our influencers aren’t Katy Perry. It’s your church leader or your high school coach,” Mr. Peruri said.
The apps are limited by often incomplete voter data (not even Silicon Valley can make the Board of Elections efficient). But Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of Outvote, an app that worked with MoveOn.org and Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, said preliminary results show that a single text from a friend makes people roughly 10.2 percent more likely to vote. Other developers said peer-to-peer messaging led to a two to three percentage point increase in turnout last November — enough to swing races in tight districts.
Robin Wolaner, a 64-year-old retired executive in San Francisco, used VoteWithMe to identify friends and family in competitive districts in Pennsylvania. “Frankly, most of my friends don’t need a reminder to go vote for Nancy Pelosi,” Ms. Wolaner said. As for vote shaming (sorry, I mean social validation), she tried to gingerly remind contacts that their voting history was public.
“In some cases I sent messages saying: ‘Can this be right? Did you really skip the last midterm election?’” Ms. Wolaner said. “My kids would tell you I am a natural born nag, so it sort of fit my personality.”
Natasha Baker, a 30-year-old lawyer in Washington, said she used VoteWithMe to encourage distant friends and family in Indiana and Virginia to vote. “It’s kind of creepy, I have to admit,” she said. But, she added, “If you have a friend who you can see voted in every election, you don’t have to spend your afternoon on that.”
Then there is the voyeuristic urge to snoop. Mr. Dickerson was surprised to see that the VoteWithMe app was trending in the Apple store days after the midterm elections. “It doesn’t make a ton of sense — we’ve had no ads or promotions since voting,” Mr. Dickerson said.
But to behavioral scientists, the downloads made perfect sense. “We are intensely social creatures and need to situate ourselves inside the collective,” said Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University and the author of several books on peer influence.
He cited a study he did at a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Ariz. His team compared the usual cards requesting that guests reuse their towels to protect the environment with several alternatives: One added that most guests of the hotel had reused their towels; another said that most guests “who stayed in this room” had reused their towels.
The last spurred a compliance rate of 49 percent, the largest spike in towel recycling the hotel had ever seen. “We think we’re free-standing individuals,” Dr. Cialdini said. But we “believe that the choice of our peers will work well for us, too.”
Maybe that was why I felt compelled one Sunday afternoon to sit in a coffee shop with a friend and scroll through VoteWithMe with the giddy enthusiasm of a sample sale. I learned that one friend who lives in the West Village, owns a Beto T-shirt and has been known to insufferably quote the Pod Save America bros didn’t vote in the past midterm elections. (You know who you are.) My uncle in Texas who watches Fox News, however, was designated a “strong voter.”
There may, however, be a fundamental flaw in the theory driving the apps. As developers work to expand them from hundreds of thousands of downloads during the midterms to mainstream use by millions ahead of the 2020 election, they could be leaving out the very voters Democrats most need to reach.
The tendency of people to mimic their social networks — what behavioral scientists call homophily — could backfire in this case. Politically engaged people who download voting apps, and the friends they nag, will probably show up at the polls in greater numbers. But the opposite could be true for those in poor and disenfranchised communities where voting isn’t the norm.
Dr. Rogers, the Harvard public policy professor, pointed to a 2015 study that observed social pressure on students by making an SAT prep session sign-up sheet public. Students in the A.P. class signed up in greater numbers when they knew their friends would see the list. Sign-ups in the remedial class, however, where studying wasn’t as socially accepted, decreased. “The increased transparency could have unintended consequences,” Dr. Rogers said, “if you look at your network and see no one votes.”
Ms. Cleaver of Vote.org said she worried that this was a blind spot typical of Silicon Valley, an industry dominated by male engineers who are generally from privileged backgrounds. “Everyone wants the solution to increasing voter turnout to be an app, but turnout is low in this country because of decades of racism, sexism and voter suppression,” she said.
Ms. Cleaver, a self-described “tech person” who is backed by the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, urged me to write about anything other than these apps. She proposed an article about the perils of voter registration still being tied to the Department of Motor Vehicles when a growing number of young people don’t have driver’s licenses. Or what about the problem with mail-in ballots that require a signature when young people don’t know cursive? Don’t even get her started on new voters being required to print forms. (“I mean, who owns a printer?”)
She said that the tech industry, once hailed as a savior, is undergoing an identity crisis for good reason. “The logical conclusion of technology is that it all goes terribly awry,” she said. For the 2020 election, her group, Vote.org, plans to spend millions of dollars on billboards.
Amy Chozick is a writer at large for The Times covering business, politics and media, and the author of “Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn’t.”
Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump? - The New York Times
Opinion | The Green New Deal Is Better Than Our Climate Nightmare - The New York Times
It was also long before anyone had seen a nonbinding congressional resolution calling for something called the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to tackle climate change (and a lot else, too) that earlier this month burst like a shooting star upon the Washington political and legislative scene. The resolution — introduced by Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly elected Democratic representative whose district covers parts of the Bronx and Queens — calls for a “10-year national mobilization” through giant investments in infrastructure and carbon-free energy. It has since won the full or partial allegiance of a half-dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls who pray that town hall participants or debate moderators will ask them what they think about global warming. Which in turn means that, whatever becomes of the plan, it will have moved climate change — a serious issue that has had serious trouble gaining traction — to a commanding position in the national conversation. That alone is reason to applaud it.It was also long before anyone had seen a nonbinding congressional resolution calling for something called the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to tackle climate change (and a lot else, too) that earlier this month burst like a shooting star upon the Washington political and legislative scene. The resolution — introduced by Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly elected Democratic representative whose district covers parts of the Bronx and Queens — calls for a “10-year national mobilization” through giant investments in infrastructure and carbon-free energy. It has since won the full or partial allegiance of a half-dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls who pray that town hall participants or debate moderators will ask them what they think about global warming. Which in turn means that, whatever becomes of the plan, it will have moved climate change — a serious issue that has had serious trouble gaining traction — to a commanding position in the national conversation. That alone is reason to applaud it.
"It’s hard to believe, but worth recalling, that during the presidential debates in 2016, not a single question about climate change was put to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. That, of course, was before a plague of hurricanes, droughts and savage forest fires in California and around the world captured the public’s attention; before Mr. Trump brought renewed focus to the very issue he had dismissed as a hoax by fecklessly rolling back nearly every positive policy thing President Barack Obama had done to address it; before a series of frightening scientific reports appeared last year, warning that the window of opportunity to ward off the worst consequences of a warming globe was quickly closing.
In name and concept, the plan is not new. The term Green New Deal appeared in a column in The Times by Thomas Friedman in January 2007, in which he called for a vast public and private investment program that would throw everything under the sun (including, actually, the sun itself) — wind, solar, nuclear power, energy efficiency, advanced research, tax incentives and a price on carbon — into a massive effort to build a more climate-friendly energy system while also revitalizing the American economy.
This is essentially what the Mr. Markey and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had in mind when they rolled out their resolution on Feb. 7. Unfortunately, that rollout was anything but smooth, due largely to the bungling of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, which posted on her website a set of pugnacious and poorly written talking points (later disavowed) that scared even moderate Democrats. Apart from bold if probably unattainable objectives (a total transformation to renewable energy in 10 years), the talking points dismissed as unacceptable three strategies that many experts say are necessary to any solution: nuclear power, technology that allows fossil fuel plants to capture and store their own emissions, and market-based solutions like a carbon tax or the kind of cap and trade bill that Mr. Markey worked valiantly and unsuccessfully to get Congress to approve 10 years ago. The talking points made other dubious promises, including jobs even for Americans “unwilling” to work. The immediate result of this amateurish mess was to hand Mr. Trump and other climate deniers irresistible political talking points. ADVERTISEMENT
The actual resolution seems more measured. It speaks only of a 10-year mobilization effort to reduce carbon emissions, without giving an explicit deadline, and it is silent as to particular strategies, leaving nuclear, carbon capture and price signals very much on the table. It does not mention costs. Some experts believe that fully remaking the energy delivery system could run into the trillions of dollars; proponents argue that spending trillions now could save much more in damages later.
The idea of decarbonizing the economy is ambitious, commendable and urgent. In early January, for instance, came three hugely dispiriting reports. The Rhodium Group, a research firm, estimated that America’s carbon dioxide emissions, after a period of decline, had risen by 3.4 percent in 2018, even as a near-record number of coal plants around the country were retired. The main culprits were economic growth and rising emissions from factories, putting America’s vow to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 further out of reach, absent bold new policies or technological breakthroughs.
This bad news was followed by a study in Science finding that the oceans are warming at an alarming pace, 40 to 50 percent faster than the United Nations had estimated, putting corals and fisheries at even greater risk. If that were not enough, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences followed with a study predicting faster melting of Antarctica’s huge ice reserves.
These are not good signs, but Mr. Markey, ever the optimist, thinks there is no better time to put forth aggressive ambitions and solutions. Obviously, nothing will happen legislatively as long as the Republicans control the Senate and Mr. Trump sits in the White House. But the stars are aligned, Mr. Markey thinks, for a robust debate about a climate strategy that his party can take to the voters in 2020. The steady drumbeat of alarming reports, plus one climate-related multibillion dollar disaster after another, has raised public consciousness, which in turn increases public pressure on Congress to do something. In an exchange that went viral on Friday, a group of children pressed Democractic Senator Dianne Feinstein over her refusal to support the plan. “We’re the ones who are going to be impacted,” one of the children lamented.
Meanwhile, technological progress toward clean-energy solutions has been nothing short of remarkable, giving the lie to the old denier argument that clean energy inevitably means fewer jobs. Wind capacity has increased more than fourfold in the last decade. Solar power, while still a very small part of the total energy mix, has increased at an even faster rate. And prices for both have dropped to the point where they are increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Ten years ago, an electric car was a curiosity; now more than a million have been sold in the United States. ADVERTISEMENT
For now, the nation must endure Mr. Trump’s boneheaded policies. The president has rejected the Paris agreement on climate change and rolled back Obama-era limits on carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, while doing all he can to open more lands and waters to oil and gas exploration.
Last week, his administration made clear that it would proceed with plans to weaken fuel economy standards, despite strong objections from California and other states. In addition, The Times reported, he will soon form a special committee whose main purpose, it appears, is to challenge warnings from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that global warming poses a threat to national security.
The immediate task facing the Democrats in 2021 — if they win control of the White House and Congress — will be to reverse Mr. Trump’s reversals. But even now, there are familiar policies that the Democrats, who control the House, can pass through key committees and the full House to force the Senate, and the nation, to debate them. These policies could go a long way toward meeting a goal of net zero emissions by midcentury, less than what the Green New Deal calls for but consistent with the recommendations of the United Nations. They could include a national electricity standard utilizing nuclear and carbon capture along with wind and solar; larger (and more consistent) tax incentives for electric vehicles; an infrastructure program that brings serious federal dollars to bear on improving efficiency in buildings and the electrical grid; major efforts to promote the sequestration of carbon in forests, farms and public lands — a critical component, which the Green New Deal recognizes, in any effort to pull carbon from the atmosphere. Credit Lily Padula
Image CreditLily Padula Step-by-step measures like these will suit the political temperature of most House Democrats (only about 70 of whom have endorsed the Green New Deal), including the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who gave even the toned-down resolution the back of her hand — “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
Whether such measures will satisfy the activists who have gathered around Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is another matter. After all, her talking points, as well as the resolution itself, speak also of providing higher education for all Americans; universal health care; affordable housing; remedies for “systemic injustices” among the poor, the elderly and people of color; and a federal job guarantee insuring “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security.”
Which raises this question: Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely a cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the left? At least some candidates — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota among them — seem to think so.
Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past experience, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tackling climate change in a big way is in itself likely to be transformative. We should get on with it."
"It’s hard to believe, but worth recalling, that during the presidential debates in 2016, not a single question about climate change was put to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. That, of course, was before a plague of hurricanes, droughts and savage forest fires in California and around the world captured the public’s attention; before Mr. Trump brought renewed focus to the very issue he had dismissed as a hoax by fecklessly rolling back nearly every positive policy thing President Barack Obama had done to address it; before a series of frightening scientific reports appeared last year, warning that the window of opportunity to ward off the worst consequences of a warming globe was quickly closing.
In name and concept, the plan is not new. The term Green New Deal appeared in a column in The Times by Thomas Friedman in January 2007, in which he called for a vast public and private investment program that would throw everything under the sun (including, actually, the sun itself) — wind, solar, nuclear power, energy efficiency, advanced research, tax incentives and a price on carbon — into a massive effort to build a more climate-friendly energy system while also revitalizing the American economy.
This is essentially what the Mr. Markey and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had in mind when they rolled out their resolution on Feb. 7. Unfortunately, that rollout was anything but smooth, due largely to the bungling of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, which posted on her website a set of pugnacious and poorly written talking points (later disavowed) that scared even moderate Democrats. Apart from bold if probably unattainable objectives (a total transformation to renewable energy in 10 years), the talking points dismissed as unacceptable three strategies that many experts say are necessary to any solution: nuclear power, technology that allows fossil fuel plants to capture and store their own emissions, and market-based solutions like a carbon tax or the kind of cap and trade bill that Mr. Markey worked valiantly and unsuccessfully to get Congress to approve 10 years ago. The talking points made other dubious promises, including jobs even for Americans “unwilling” to work. The immediate result of this amateurish mess was to hand Mr. Trump and other climate deniers irresistible political talking points. ADVERTISEMENT
The actual resolution seems more measured. It speaks only of a 10-year mobilization effort to reduce carbon emissions, without giving an explicit deadline, and it is silent as to particular strategies, leaving nuclear, carbon capture and price signals very much on the table. It does not mention costs. Some experts believe that fully remaking the energy delivery system could run into the trillions of dollars; proponents argue that spending trillions now could save much more in damages later.
The idea of decarbonizing the economy is ambitious, commendable and urgent. In early January, for instance, came three hugely dispiriting reports. The Rhodium Group, a research firm, estimated that America’s carbon dioxide emissions, after a period of decline, had risen by 3.4 percent in 2018, even as a near-record number of coal plants around the country were retired. The main culprits were economic growth and rising emissions from factories, putting America’s vow to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 further out of reach, absent bold new policies or technological breakthroughs.
This bad news was followed by a study in Science finding that the oceans are warming at an alarming pace, 40 to 50 percent faster than the United Nations had estimated, putting corals and fisheries at even greater risk. If that were not enough, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences followed with a study predicting faster melting of Antarctica’s huge ice reserves.
These are not good signs, but Mr. Markey, ever the optimist, thinks there is no better time to put forth aggressive ambitions and solutions. Obviously, nothing will happen legislatively as long as the Republicans control the Senate and Mr. Trump sits in the White House. But the stars are aligned, Mr. Markey thinks, for a robust debate about a climate strategy that his party can take to the voters in 2020. The steady drumbeat of alarming reports, plus one climate-related multibillion dollar disaster after another, has raised public consciousness, which in turn increases public pressure on Congress to do something. In an exchange that went viral on Friday, a group of children pressed Democractic Senator Dianne Feinstein over her refusal to support the plan. “We’re the ones who are going to be impacted,” one of the children lamented.
Meanwhile, technological progress toward clean-energy solutions has been nothing short of remarkable, giving the lie to the old denier argument that clean energy inevitably means fewer jobs. Wind capacity has increased more than fourfold in the last decade. Solar power, while still a very small part of the total energy mix, has increased at an even faster rate. And prices for both have dropped to the point where they are increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Ten years ago, an electric car was a curiosity; now more than a million have been sold in the United States. ADVERTISEMENT
For now, the nation must endure Mr. Trump’s boneheaded policies. The president has rejected the Paris agreement on climate change and rolled back Obama-era limits on carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, while doing all he can to open more lands and waters to oil and gas exploration.
Last week, his administration made clear that it would proceed with plans to weaken fuel economy standards, despite strong objections from California and other states. In addition, The Times reported, he will soon form a special committee whose main purpose, it appears, is to challenge warnings from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that global warming poses a threat to national security.
The immediate task facing the Democrats in 2021 — if they win control of the White House and Congress — will be to reverse Mr. Trump’s reversals. But even now, there are familiar policies that the Democrats, who control the House, can pass through key committees and the full House to force the Senate, and the nation, to debate them. These policies could go a long way toward meeting a goal of net zero emissions by midcentury, less than what the Green New Deal calls for but consistent with the recommendations of the United Nations. They could include a national electricity standard utilizing nuclear and carbon capture along with wind and solar; larger (and more consistent) tax incentives for electric vehicles; an infrastructure program that brings serious federal dollars to bear on improving efficiency in buildings and the electrical grid; major efforts to promote the sequestration of carbon in forests, farms and public lands — a critical component, which the Green New Deal recognizes, in any effort to pull carbon from the atmosphere. Credit Lily Padula
Image CreditLily Padula Step-by-step measures like these will suit the political temperature of most House Democrats (only about 70 of whom have endorsed the Green New Deal), including the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who gave even the toned-down resolution the back of her hand — “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
Whether such measures will satisfy the activists who have gathered around Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is another matter. After all, her talking points, as well as the resolution itself, speak also of providing higher education for all Americans; universal health care; affordable housing; remedies for “systemic injustices” among the poor, the elderly and people of color; and a federal job guarantee insuring “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security.”
Which raises this question: Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely a cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the left? At least some candidates — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota among them — seem to think so.
Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past experience, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tackling climate change in a big way is in itself likely to be transformative. We should get on with it."
Opinion | The Green New Deal Is Better Than Our Climate Nightmare - The New York Times
Saturday, February 23, 2019
Friday, February 22, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Opinion | Election Fraud the G.O.P. Won’t Stress About - The New York Times
"Memo to President Trump and the Republican Party: This is what actual voting fraud looks like.
North Carolina election officials are detailing how a longtime political operative, working for a Republican candidate, conspired to steal last year’s election for the state’s Ninth Congressional District.
L. McCrae Dowless Jr. dispatched minions to collect absentee ballots from voters, fill them in, forge signatures and mail small batches from post offices near voters’ homes to avoid suspicion. Mr. Dowless’s effort is thought to have involved upward of 1,000 absentee ballots or request forms. The candidate he was serving, Mark Harris, has a 905-vote margin over the Democratic contender, Dan McCready.
At a hearing Monday of the state’s election board, its executive director shared the results of an investigation into how Mr. Dowless put together a “coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced” effort to tamper with absentee ballots.
Witnesses involved in the fraud said Mr. Dowless encouraged them to give false testimony to obstruct the board’s investigation. One, Lisa Britt, who is Mr. Dowless’s former stepdaughter, provided investigators with a script she said Mr. Dowless gave her, which read: “I can tell you that I haven’t done anything wrong in the election, and McCrae Dowless has never told me to do anything wrong, and to my knowledge he has never done anything wrong. But I am taking the Fifth Amendment because I don’t have an attorney, and I feel like you will try to trip me up.”
Ms. Britt and other witnesses are painting a devastating portrait of a political schemer intent on undermining the electoral system.
This alarming situation in North Carolina should prove instructive for Mr. Trump and his party. For years, Republicans have been in a tizzy over voter fraud by noncitizens, which they claim is eating away at American democracy and helping Democrats. But, for some reason, they have been unable to scare up compelling evidence that such fraud exists beyond a handful of cases sprinkled here and there.
Take the recent hullabaloo in Texas. On Jan. 25, the Texas secretary of state sent out a list of 95,000 registered voters who had reportedly been identified as noncitizens. The methodology used to compile the list was opaque, and critics immediately questioned its accuracy. No matter. Republican officials went wild. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, a fierce champion of voting restrictions, tweeted a “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” claiming that about 95,000 people whom state law enforcement officials have identified “as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.”
Not to be outdone, Mr. Trump flogged the list with characteristic finesse: “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!”
But, like so many Republican tales of mass fraud, the claims soon crumbled. Within days, the secretary of state acknowledged that his list was chock-full of names improperly flagged for a variety of reasons. Of those people whose names were correctly flagged, it was unclear whether any had voted in a state election.
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The whole Texas tempest brings to mind the Kansas kerfuffle in which that state’s secretary of state, Kris Kobach, claimed mass fraud as justification for a strict voter ID law that went into effect in 2013. The law was challenged in court, and, last June, was struck down by a federal judge (appointed by President George W. Bush) who ruled that Mr. Kobach had provided “no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote,” and noted that “the court draws the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
Outside his home state, Mr. Kobach is best known for having led Mr. Trump’s preposterous voting “integrity” commission, which disbanded after eight months of scrounging, unsuccessfully, for any evidence of widespread fraud.
The current case in North Carolina should be of great interest to Republicans, who have spent much of the last decade dreaming up ways to restrict voting there. Just last year, state Republicans realized their longstanding goal of imposing a photo ID requirement for voting. That law immediately drew multiple lawsuits.
Once the election board wraps up its investigation, its five members — three Democrats and two Republicans — will vote on whether Mr. Harris should be allowed to take his seat or if a new election should be held. Their concern is not whether the candidate had knowledge of what Mr. Dowless was up to, but whether the election was sufficiently tainted to merit a new one. After just the opening day of testimony, the evidence certainly suggests the need for a revote, possibly along with a separate inquiry to determine how much Mr. Harris knew and when he knew it.
Even if the board upholds the election results, the House of Representatives then gets to have its say in the matter, possibly refusing to seat Mr. Harris.
Turns out, voting fraud is as real as Russia’s crusade to put Mr. Trump in the White House. It just looks nothing like what Republicans keep hitting the panic button over. Which tells you even more about Mr. Trump and his party than it does about the so-called perils of voter fraud.
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A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 20, 2019, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Election Fraud the G.O.P. Won’t Stress About. Order "
Opinion | Election Fraud the G.O.P. Won’t Stress About - The New York Times
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