‘They’re just trying to live’: Denver clears homeless camp despite controversy

A large homeless encampment was cleared in Denver today amid temperatures of -5C(23F), risking further controversy over the city’s approach to homeless people struggling with winter weather.

As in other western cities, activists are up in arms over rules that they say criminalize homelessness. Denver, whose homeless population is estimated at 3,700, banned “urban camping” in 2012. But in November, police faced intense criticism after a video that showed them them confiscating people’s blankets and other outdoors gear, with bad weather eminent, went viral.

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Amber Miller, spokesperson for the city, said that today’s clean-up took place because the camp was on private property. “The concern that we carry is that it is unhealthy, unsanitary, and unsafe,” she added. Residents were encouraged to move into city shelters.

Around 150 people had been living at the site, according to one resident, although the majority moved on when the city erected signs two weeks ago warning that anybody who remained there risked a year in jail or a fine of $999.

Cory Donaheu, a man in his 40s who had a star-shaped scar on his left check and was wearing a gray overcoat, was sat on a bike next to a cart containing all his belongings. He had lived at the camp for four-and-and-a-half months. Asked where he was going to go next, he said he had “no idea”.

US could face human rights crisis after Trump’s xenophobic immigration orders

Attention focused upon Trump’s banner promise to erect a wall across an additional 1,200 miles of the US southern border – an order that will undoubtedly meet with stiff opposition when Congress is lobbied into funding the multibillion-dollar construction project that has, by Trump’s homeland security secretary’s own admission, limited effectiveness in deterring entry. There was also coverage of the aggressive declaration of intent to withdraw some funding to hundreds of sanctuary cities – those jurisdictions which offer protection to undocumented migrants – which will probably meet with vigorous legal opposition. However, Wednesday’s orders went further and carried instantaneous repercussions through dramatic immigration policy reversals that have been somewhat overlooked in the flurry of executive action.

The US will now mandatorily detain any migrant that is caught crossing the border without documentation. Doing away with the era of so-called catch and release that allowed immigration authorities greater freedom to release those claiming asylum ahead of proceedings in immigration court, the order paves the way for a huge expansion of detention facilities at the southern border and is likely to have devastating humanitarian effects.

Nearly 60,000 unaccompanied minors and close to 80,000 families were apprehended at the border in 2016, the vast majority of whom came from countries in Central America plagued by violence.

Now these groups of migrants, who received a degree of flexibility under the Obama administration, will be kept in detention by order.

Advocates routinely report substandard medical care and poorly managed basic facilities in these centres, many of which are operated by for-profit security companies. Coupled with this, the order instructs the US justice department to assign immigration judges, who are already in short supply and heavily overburdened, to these centres.

Netanyahu interviewed by anti-corruption police for third time

Israeli detectives have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for a third time as part of a series of investigations into his conduct in office.

Amid reports in the Israeli media that police are close to deciding whether to indict the prime minister, in a post on Facebook he accused his perceived enemies in the media and politics “of an attempted coup by undemocratic means”.

Israeli media showed images of officers from the Lahav 433 anti-corruption unit arriving at Netanyahu’s official residence just before 10am on Friday.

His remarks on social media came a day after he used an appearance before the country’s parliament to defend himself against the accusations. The sometimes overlapping investigations into Netanyahu and his circle – including his wife, Sara, and son Yair – have centred largely on two cases.

The first, known as Case 1000, is investigating gifts from businessmen. They include expensive cigars and pink champagne given over the years by Arnon Milchan, the wealthy producer behind the films Fight Club and Pretty Woman who also owns shares in the Israeli television company Channel 10

A second investigation, known as Case 2000, is focused on whether the Israeli prime minister behaved properly in negotiating changes to the country’s media market, including offering to lower the circulation of a strongly pro-Netanyahu title in exchange for improved coverage in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth in conversations caught on tape.

‘Over my dead body’: tribe aims to block Trump’s border wall on Arizona land

Donald Trump’s proposed border wall could face a major obstacle in Arizona, where an indigenous tribe has vowed to oppose construction on its land, paving the way for potential mass resistance following the model of Standing Rock.

The Tohono O’odham Nation, a federally recognized tribe with a reservation that spans 75 miles of the US-Mexico border, announced on Thursday that it does not support the wall and criticized the White House for signing an executive order without consulting the tribe.

The Tohono O’odham’s statement calls for a meeting with the president and comes after a tribal vice-chairman declared the government would build the wall “over my dead body”. Earlier in his first week in office, Trump also promised to push forward with the the Dakota Access pipeline, which last year attracted an unprecedented gathering of indigenous groups to back the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in its fight against the oil project.

The Tohono O’odham tribe, which has roughly 28,000 members and controls 2.8m acres of a reservation in south-western Arizona, has long struggled with the militarized international border that was drawn through the middle of its traditional lands.

The O’odham people historically inhabited lands that stretched south to Sonora, Mexico, and just north of Phoenix, Arizona, and there are tribe members who still live in Mexico. The tribe today has the second largest Native American land base in the country, and indigenous people say the US Border Patrol has for decades significantly disrupted tribal communities and their day-to-day life.

Tulsi Gabbard reveals she met Assad in Syria, without informing top Democrats

Democrats were silent on Thursday as Tulsi Gabbard, one of the party’s sitting lawmakers in Congress, announced that she had met with Bashar al-Assad during a trip to war-torn Syria and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists”.

Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, disclosed her meeting with the Syrian president on Wednesday, during what her office called a “fact-finding” mission in the region.

“Initially I hadn’t planned on meeting him,” Gabbard told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Democratic leaders were mum on the decision by one of their sitting lawmakers to meet with a dictator whom the US government has dubbed
a war criminal for his use of chemical weapons against civilians.

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Gabbard was joined on the trip by former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has made prior trips to meet Assad that were also funded by Aaccess. Kucinich, who interviewed the Syrian president as a contributor for Fox News in 2013, has also defended Assad’s intentions in Syria.

Gabbard framed her sit-down meeting with Assad as part of a necessary dialogue in order to resolve the Syrian conflict. The war began after a series of pro-democracy protests in March 2011 were swiftly and brutally put down by the Assad regime. The war has since devolved into a brutal and complex war, fuelled by sectarian, political and international divisions.

Canadian scientists lend support to muzzled US counterparts

Canadian scientists – who were muzzled for nearly a decade by the country’s previous Conservative government – have been making contact with their counterparts in the US to offer their support and solidarity amid mounting fears that Donald Trump’s presidency will seek to suppress climate science.

For nine years, scientists with Canada’s federal government grappled with what many described as an all out assault on science.

Scientific libraries were closed, programmes suffered drastic cutbacks while federal scientists were banned from talking to media on topics that ranged from snowflakes to salmon and even a 13,000-year-old flood.

“It was a dramatic departure from past practices,” said Robert MacDonald, who has worked as a federal government scientist for nearly 30 years.

 Trump’s Crony Cabinet May Look Strong, but They Are Scared by Naomi Klein

Let’s zoom out and recognize what is happening in Washington right now. The people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—at last count, eight men own as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more. The key figures populating Trump’s cabinet are not only ultra-rich—they are individuals who made their money knowingly causing harm to the most vulnerable people on this planet, and to the planet itself. It appears to be some sort of job requirement.

 Let us be clear: This is not a peaceful transition of power. It’s a corporate takeover. The interests that have long-since paid off both major parties to do their bidding have decided they are tired of playing the game. Apparently, all that wining and dining of politicians, all that cajoling and legalized bribery, insulted their sense of divine entitlement.

So now they are cutting out the middleman and doing what every top dog does when they want something done right—they are doing it themselves. Exxon for secretary of state. Hardee’s for secretary of labor. General Dynamics for secretary of defense. And the Goldman guys for pretty much everything that’s left. After decades of privatizing the state in bits and pieces, they decided to just go for the government itself. Neoliberalism’s final frontier. That’s why Trump and his appointees are laughing at the feeble objections over conflicts of interest—the whole thing is a conflict of interest, that’s the whole point.

So what do we do about it? First, we always remember their weaknesses, even as they exercise raw power. The reason the mask has fallen off, and we now are witnessing undisguised corporate rule is not because these corporations felt all-powerful; it’s because they were panicked

Moreover, a majority of Americans did not vote for Trump. Forty percent stayed home, and of the people who voted a clear majority voted for Clinton. He won within a very rigged system. Even within this system, he didn’t win it, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment lost it. Trump didn’t win with overwhelming excitement and big numbers. He won because Hillary had depressed numbers and a lack of enthusiasm. The Democratic Party establishment did not think campaigning on tangible improvements to people’s lives was important. They had virtually nothing to offer to people whose lives have been decimated by neoliberal attacks. They thought they could run on fear of Trump, and it didn’t work.

Here’s the good news: All this makes Donald Trump incredibly vulnerable. This is the guy who came to power telling the boldest and brashest of lies, selling himself as a champion of the working man who would finally stand up to corporate power and influence in Washington. A portion of his base already has buyer’s remorse, and that portion is just going to grow.

‘The Economist’ Just Downgraded the US From a ‘Full Democracy’ to a ‘Flawed Democracy’ by John Nichols

T he United States is no longer a full democracy, according to the highly regarded Economist Intelligence Unit, which each year compiles a Democracy Index that “provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories.”

“The US, a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a ‘flawed democracy,’ as popular confidence in the functioning of public institutions has declined,” explains the introduction to the freshly released Democracy Index.

That would be a troubling announcement in any week.

But coming in the first week of the presidency of Donald Trump, a man who has claimed that election systems are “rigged,” who lies about supposed “voter fraud” and who attacks the media outlets who call him out for those lies, the announcement is all the more unsettling.

For those of us who have for many years worried about the vulnerable state of democracy in America, the news is even more troubling because the Democracy Index analysis reminds us that this is about a lot more than Donald Trump.

“Popular trust in government, elected representatives and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the US. This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of Mr Trump as US president in November 2016,” explains the analysis. “By tapping a deep strain of political disaffection with the functioning of democracy, Mr Trump became a beneficiary of the low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives and political parties, but he was not responsible for a problem that has had a long gestation. The US has been teetering on the brink of becoming a ‘flawed democracy’ for several years, and even if there had been no presidential election in 2016, its score would have slipped below 8.00.”

Trump Vows to Make Paul Ryan’s Nightmarish Budget Vision a Reality

In Philadelphia on Thursday, President Donald Trump seemed to reassure his party that he supports right-wing budget priorities like those embraced by House Speaker Paul Ryan—whose past budget plans have been denounced as “cruel,” “draconian,” “a massive cut-off of state funds to the most vulnerable population in the country,” “going after what Americans want, on issue after issue,” and “a Koch brothers’ dream and the American peoples’ nightmare.”

“He’s writing his heart out,” Trump said, looking over at Ryan during his address at the Republican congressional retreat. “And we’re actually gonna sign the stuff that you’re writing—you’re not wasting your time.” To the room of GOP lawmakers, who erupted in whistles and applause, Trump continued: “He would write and send it up—and nothing would happen. But now it’s gonna happen.”

This should strike fear into progressives across the country.

Since Ryan assumed control of the Budget Committee in 2011, his budget proposals have been met with howls of alarm, described as dangerous for women; “the most extreme version” of austerity economics; and a “path to more adversity.”

“It calls itself a ‘blueprint for American renewal’ while systematically trampling the American dream,” Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future wrote of the 2012 version.

Following Trump’s “Utterly Alarming” DAPL Order Would Violate Law, Tribe Warns

The Standing Rock Sioux has responded to President Donald Trump’s executive order to push through the long-contested Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), calling the memorandum “utterly alarming” and warning that following through with it would violate federal law.

In a letter to President Donald Trump on Thursday, Standing Rock Sioux chairman David Archambault III noted that Trump did not accept a request to meet with him, and issued the order “without any consultation.”

Trump’s memorandum, issued January 24, instructs the Secretary of the Army to order the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite a review of “requests for approvals to construct and operate the DAPL,” including easements.

The memo also calls for the agency to reconsider conducting a full environmental assessment of the pipeline, an instruction Archambault calls “astonishing.”

Withdrawing from the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is “arbitrary and without justification,” Archambault wrote. “[T]he law requires that changes in agency positions be backed by new circumstances or new evidence, not simply by the president’s whim.”

“It makes it even more difficult when one considers the close personal ties you and your associates have had with Energy Transfer Partners [EPT] and Sunoco,” he said, referring to the pipeline’s parent company and future operator, respectively.

Workers File Over 30 Complaints Against Labor Pick Puzder, Protest Nationwide

U.S. Labor Secretary nominee and billionaire fast food chain owner Andy Puzder has been slapped with 33 labor complaints—about wage theft, sexual harassment, and unfair labor practices—from cooks and cashiers at his own fast food chains, all filed on Thursday at state and federal agencies.

Cooks and cashiers who work for CKE Restaurants, Puzder’s fast food conglomerate that includes the chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., filed the complaints along with labor advocacy groups exactly one week before Puzder’s confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate.

“The filings reveal a restaurant chain rife with labor violations,” wrote the Fight for $15 campaign in a press statement. “In Whittier, California, a worker went a full month without a paycheck. In Durham, N.C., workers were paid via debit card that included transaction fees that took hourly wages below the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In Oakland, California, a gay Carl’s Jr. worker was repeatedly harassed by his manager, who told customers and co-workers that he ‘likes boys’ and used a feminized version of his name.”

“Recently the restaurant I worked at went an entire month without paying me a dime, and they only agreed to pay me after I stopped coming to work in protest,” said Angel Gallegos, a Carl’s Jr. cook in Los Angeles, in a statement. “If Andy Puzder can’t be trusted to pay his workers what they’ve earned, why should we expect him to enforce laws meant to protect working Americans?”

Orwell’s Lessons for the Era of Trump

George Orwell is best known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Both were written toward the end of a life cut short by tuberculosis. But they came after a long period of reflection, activism, and engagement, through what one writer has called the “dark valley” of the 1920s and 30s and the death and destruction of the Second World War. 1984, we are told, is now at the top of the charts at Amazon.

Orwell’s insights into politics, propaganda, and the uses and abuses of power have never seemed so apt as they are today. He would have had a field day parsing the speeches and performances of the last few days. Were the possible consequences not so serious, one could enjoy a good laugh. But the ugly face of European populism after the First World War did too much irreparable damage for anyone to just walk away from the conceits and exaggerations that dot the landscape of presidential utterances.

The underlying premise of Trump’s rhetoric is that he alone understands the interests of The People, and that The People are a single unit to which he has a unique pipeline. As The Leader, he alone knows how to communicate with The People. For example, The People don’t want to see his tax returns. Only The Elites want to see them. A government which (allegedly for the first time in decades) has been returned to The People will actually be run by a cabinet dominated by millionaire businessmen. He sees nothing ironic or even ridiculous in that, because the only humour he understands is sarcasm and character assassination.

The dark, grim nature of his views can be found in his book Crippled America, and in that extraordinarily dark riff in his inaugural address where he described the “carnage” that had come to America, and which single-handedly he would bring to an end. The threats to The People become the threats to The Nation, which leads to the Mexican wall and the anti-Muslim policies, as well as the appeal to protectionism.

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The central experience in Orwell’s life was his experience in the Spanish Civil War. He learned that the propaganda and lies of the Stalinists could only be countered by the bitter tonic of reality. All courageous people could do in the face of the totalitarian lie was to tell the truth.

How Trump’s wall could beckon a global trade war

President Donald Trump’s plans to pay for a Mexican border wall could trigger the global trade war he has long threatened.

A House Republican plan he embraced Thursday as a means of paying for the barrier would slap imported goods with a 20 percent tax — a levy aimed at boosting consumption of domestic products that could backfire by angering allies and upending the entire global trading system.

Longtime trading partners — and not just Mexico — could retaliate, making American consumers pay more for everything from food to electronics and putting U.S. companies out of business. The so-called border adjustment tax could trigger cases before the World Trade Organization, spur other countries to slap levies on American products and put some U.S. companies at a disadvantage with international competitors.

Trump’s embrace of the tax proposal comes as he moves forward with plans to shake up decades of carefully negotiated agreements that bind the global economy together. On Monday, he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a sweeping trade deal among Pacific Rim nations — and reaffirmed his intention to reopen NAFTA. Then, a spat on Thursday with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto over who would pay for the border wall escalated to the point that Pena Nieto canceled a trip to the U.S. to meet with Trump next week.

“Would they retaliate immediately?” asked Dan Ikenson, director of the trade policy center at the free-market Cato Institute, referring to the response of trading partners to the border tax plan. “In the age of Trump, governments may not have the manners that they once had and may just unilaterally go after U.S. products. That’s quite possible.”

Major newspaper editorial boards blast Trump’s border ‘war’

A triumvirate of editorial boards from some of the country’s largest newspapers made it unanimous Thursday evening, each one panning the suggestion from the administration of President Donald Trump that the U.S. might pay for his promised border wall by imposing a 20 percent tariff on imports from Mexico.

The plan amounts to a “tariff tantrum,” The New York Times wrote in its editorial, while The Wall Street Journal labeled the week-old administration’s efforts at international negotiations “amateur hour.” Trump’s rhetoric, wrote the Washington Post, is “a stick of dynamite” inserted into mutually-beneficial relationship that politicians from both countries have worked years to build.