TRUMP FAKES MEDIA, SCREWS YOU

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration 1: Trump in a Fake News version of Time magazine cover that he had hanging of the wall of at least five of his gold courses.  Fake news is ok so long as it makes him look good.

Illustration 2: This is Mika, recent target of Trump attacks.  He co-host, the right-wing Joe Scarborough have found Trump "strange" lately and said so.  So Trump attacked her (she was bleeding – women Trump dislikes tend to be bleeding) and tried to blackmail the show with a National Enquirer story. 

The coverage recently has been all about Trump's Tweets, and frankly this is what he wants and it also distracts from what is really going on.   His talk about "fake news" become rampant and his followers, like zombies, attack any and all of his "enemies" on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and so on.  The knuckle-draggers still think that Trump speaks for them.  Meanwhile, his proposals to cut Medicaid and other services will hit them the hardest, but "there are none so blind as those who will not see". 

This is much like the campaign when all that was followed was the "horse-race" or polls showing who was ahead or not.  Nothing much was said about news with the exception of murders, rapes, or terrorist attacks.  Now the focus is on Trump's Tweets (WHICH ARE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENTS that will be stored in the Library of Congress).  People need to look back a bit and know that Jimmie Carter (not a great President, but at least sane) wrote his White House Diary entirely in the East wing of the White House so there would be no question as to the publication rights and censorship of the diary.  The world now sees us spur of the moment tweets of Trump.

International trust and positive attitude towards the United States has dropped in EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY IN THE WORLD except for Russia and Israel.  Putin's attitude towards Trump is quite straightforward: Trump is an illiterate or at least unknowledgeable person who can easily be manipulated or outmaneuvered.   The one positive development of Trump's idiocy is to finally bring Germany and France together, unified against a common enemy: Trump. 

While all the stupidity is going on and covered in great detail by the corporate and profit driven Main Stream Media which gets called "fake news" for its trouble, little attention is given to the real issues that affect the lives of over 280 Million Americans in favor of the interests of the remainder.

Author Naomi Klein (since she is female, Trump will hate that and since her name sounds Jewish (the word is German) many of the knuckle-dragging white nationalist Trumpians will also hate her), and that is one reason I reprint her analysis of the situation.  Trump hardly knows enough to devise such a clever scheme, but his wealthy backers do.

I reprint it in its entirety, and then hope to focus on more important issues once I deal with a great deal of crap elsewhere in other venues:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we wrap up today's show with Part 2 of our conversation with best-selling author and journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Her new book is called No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To accompany the book, The Intercept recently made this video.

NAOMI KLEIN: Shock.

MEGYN KELLY: Shocking.

STEPHEN COLBERT: I don't think I could sit down right now.

ALISYN CAMEROTA: You mean—

WILLIE GEIST: Historic, astounding, shocking.

NAOMI KLEIN: It's a word that's come up a lot since November, for obvious reasons.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: He's going to inject a shock to the system.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, I've spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine, an investigation that spanned four decades, from Pinochet's U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments. After a shocking event—a war, a coup, a terrorist attack, market crash or natural disaster—exploit the public's disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is a repeal and a replace of Obamacare.

GARY COHN: We're going to cut taxes and simplify the tax code.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, some people have said that's exactly what Trump has been trying to do. Is it true? Well, sort of. But in all likelihood, the worst is yet to come, and we better be ready. The administration is creating chaos, daily.

JUJU CHANG: Breaking news: Donald Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has resigned tonight.

ANDERSON COOPER: All of a sudden, the White House is concerned about James Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton's email?

CBS NEWS ANCHOR: A Senate committee will question President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner about his meeting with officials from a Russian bank.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, of course many of the scandals are the result of the president's ignorance and blunders, not some nefarious strategy. But there's also no doubt that some savvy people around Trump are using the daily shocks as cover to advance wildly pro-corporate policies that bear little resemblance to what Trump pledged on the campaign trail.

DONALD TRUMP: Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

MSNBC ANCHOR: The White House released its budget for 2018, and among the $4 trillion in cuts it proposes are billions upon billions of dollars slashed from both Medicaid and Social Security.

NAOMI KLEIN: And the worst part, this is likely just the warm-up. We need to focus on what this administration will do when it has a major external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like 2008, maybe a natural disaster like Sandy, or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist event like Manchester or Paris in 2015. Any one such crisis could redraw the political map overnight. And it could give Trump and his crew free rein to ram through their most extreme ideas.

But here is one thing I've learned over two decades of reporting from dozens of crises around the world: These tactics can be resisted. And, for your convenience, I've tried to boil it down to a five-step plan.

Step one: Know what's coming. What would happen if a horror like the one in Manchester took place on U.S. soil? Based on Trump's obvious fondness for authoritarianism, we can expect him to impose some sort of state of exception or emergency where the usual rules of democracy no longer apply. Protests and strikes that block roads and airports, like the ones that sprung up to resist the Muslim travel ban, would likely be declared a threat to national security. Protest organizers would be targeted under anti-terror legislation, with surveillance, arrests and imprisonment. With public signs of dissent suppressed, the truly toxic to-do list would quickly bubble up: bring in the feds to pacify the streets, muzzle investigative journalism—you know he's itching to.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You weren't called. Sit down!

NAOMI KLEIN: The courts, who Trump would inevitably blame for the attacks, might well lose their courage. And the most lethal shock we need to prepare for: a push for a full-blown foreign war. And, no, it won't matter if the target has no connection to the attacks used to justify it.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

REPORTER: The attack on the World Trade Center.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Nothing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Preparing for all this is crucial. If we know what to expect, we won't be that shocked. We'll just be pissed.

And that's important for step two: Get out of your home and defy the bans. When governments tell people to stay in their homes or show their patriotism by going shopping, they inevitably claim it's for public safety, that protests and rallies could become targets for more attacks. What we know from other countries is that there is only one way to respond.

EURONEWS ANCHOR: Hundreds of Tunisians have been defying the curfew in the capital, Tunis.

NAOMI KLEIN: Disobey en masse. That's what happened in Argentina in 2001. With the country in economic free fall, the president at the time declared a state of siege, giving himself the power to suspend the constitution.

FERNANDO DE LA RÚA: [translated] I declared a state of siege across the entire country.

NAOMI KLEIN: He told the public to stay in their houses. Here's what they did instead.

PROTESTER: Argentina!

NAOMI KLEIN: The president resigned that night. And eventually new elections were held.

Three years later, in Madrid, a horrifying series of coordinated attacks on trains killed more than 200 people. The prime minister, José María Aznar, falsely pointed the finger at Basque separatists and also used the attacks to justify his decision to send troops to Iraq. His rhetoric was classic shock doctrine: division, war, fear—Daddy will protect you. This is how Spaniards responded.

PROTESTERS: [translated] Resignation! Resignation!

NAOMI KLEIN: They voted out Aznar a few days later. Many people said they did it because he reminded them of Franco, Spain's former dictator.

Which brings us to step three: Know your history. Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day. And the good folks of Manchester recently showed us how to respond to that.

PROTESTER: The people of Manchester don't stand with your xenophobia and racism!

NAOMI KLEIN: Something else we know from history, step four: Always follow the money. While everyone is focused on security and civil liberties, Trump's Cabinet of billionaires will try to quietly push through even more extreme measures to enrich themselves and their class, like dismantling Social Security or auctioning off major pieces of government for profit.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Today we're proposing to take American air travel into the future.

NAOMI KLEIN: It's in those moments when fear and chaos are sucking up all the oxygen when we most have to ask: Whose interests are being served by the chaos? What is being slipped through while we're distracted? Who's getting richer, and who's getting even poorer?

WENDELL PIERCE: When the floodwaters were still rising in New Orleans, one of the first official acts that the governor did was to fire all the teachers. What's happening is a raid of the money set aside for public education to be given to private companies. It wasn't by happenstance. It was by design. You saw the political manipulations and taking advantage of the crisis.

NAOMI KLEIN: But if we learn from this history, we could actually make history, with step five: Advance a bold counterplan. At their best, all the previous steps can only slow down attempts to exploit crisis. If we actually want to defeat this tactic, opponents of the shock doctrine need to move quickly to put forward a credible alternate plan. It needs to get at the root of why these sorts of crises are hitting us with ever greater frequency. And that means we have to talk about militarism, climate change and deregulated markets. More than that, we need to advance and fight for different models, ones grounded in racial, economic and gender justice, ones that hold out the credible promise of a tangibly better and fairer life in the here and now and a safer planet for all of us in the long term. Defensive actions alone won't cut it. There has to be a different vision, and it needs to be bold. Saying no to the shock doctrine is vitally important. But when the [bleep] hits the fan, no is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: That video, produced by The Intercept. Their senior correspondent, Naomi Klein, author of the new book, released this week, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Yes, a shock. You're a specialist in analyzing what happens next, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And, you know, the reason why I wrote this book very quickly, for me—you know, it usually takes me five years to write a book; I did this in less than five months—is because I really wanted it to come out before any kind of major crisis hits the United States. I mean, lots of people out there see Trump himself as a crisis, and, you know, I would tend to agree, but what really has me scared is what this configuration of characters in the Trump administration—Pence, Bannon, Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, all these Goldman Sachs alum who are in the Cabinet—how they would respond to a large-scale crisis that they themselves are not creating. I mean, the chaos is chaos they're generating themselves, either deliberately or out of incompetence and avarice, but what happens if there's a 2008-like financial crisis? What happens, you know, heaven forbid, if there is a Manchester-like attack in the United States?

The actions of this administration make these types of shocks more likely, not less, right? They're deregulating the banks, creating the conditions for another crash. They are antagonizing the world, particularly the Muslim world. You know, ISISapparently called Trump's Muslim travel ban a "blessed ban," because it was so good for recruitment. They are—you know, they are making climate disasters more likely with everything they're doing to deregulate industry, deregulate for polluters. You know, there's a lag time between that and when the climate shocks hit, but the truth is, we've already warmed the planet enough that no U.S. president can get through a year, let alone a term, without some sort of major climate-related disaster.

So, how does this group of—this Cabinet of disaster capitalists, is what I call them, Amy, because there is such a track record of taking advantage of crisis, whether we're looking at the Goldman Sachs—former Goldman Sachs executives and the way they profited from the subprime mortgage crisis to increase their own personal wealth, whether it's Mike Pence and the central role he played when New Orleans was still underwater to come up with a corporate wish list to push through. So, you know, as disastrous as Trump's policies have been so far, there's actually long, toxic to-do lists, things that people around Trump and Trump himself have been—have very openly said they would like to do, but they have actually not been able either to get through without a crisis or they haven't even tried, right? Think about Trump's threats to bring back torture. Think about his threats to bring the feds into Chicago. Think about his threats not just to have a Muslim travel ban from specific countries, but not to let Muslims into the country, period.

So I think we do need to prepare for this. And what I tried to do with this video is create a little toolkit of, you know, what I have seen work in other countries, because I have been reporting on shocks and large-scale disasters and how societies respond now for a couple of decades, and I've seen some amazing acts of resistance, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about those. We saw some images of them here.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. So, one of the things I think we could really count on Trump to do, particularly if there is any kind of terrorism-related shock—and let's be clear: There have been terrorism events, white supremacist terrorism, in the United States during the Trump era, but of course he doesn't treat those as a crisis. So, an event that they decided was a large-scale crisis, we already know from the way Trump responded to the London Bridge attacks—he immediately said, "This is why we need to bring back my travel ban." After the Manchester attacks, he immediately said, "This is about immigrants flooding across our borders." In fact, the person responsible for those attacks was born in the U.K. It doesn't matter. You know, we know this from 9/11, that the way—these crises are used as opportunities to push through policies that actually have very little to do with getting at root causes, and, in many cases, exacerbate—most notably, the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was just that sheer opportunism.

So, you know, what I've seen is, I think, in all likelihood, they would declare a state of emergency, some sort of state of exception, where they're able to ban protests, like the protests we saw, the very inspiring protests in the face of the Muslim travel ban. They would say, "No, you can't block a road. You can't block an airport. This is—you could be a target of terrorism yourself. Stay in your homes."

So, you know, I give a few examples, like Argentina in 2001, when, as the president was declaring a state of siege and telling people to stay in their homes, people described not being able to hear him because the sound from the streets was so loud, the roar of pots and pans, and neighbors flooding out of their homes and going to the Plaza de Mayo and refusing this state of siege, was—that they drowned him out. They literally couldn't hear him. So other people left their houses. And, you know, in that moment, that's the moment to resist. You know, that is the moment to just not accept it. And it's really a question of strength in numbers, because if it is only the kind of hardcore activists that are out on the streets, it's really easy to crush small protests. It's harder to do it when it is hundreds of thousands of people. So I wanted to share some of these stories of societies that have just said, "We will not let you do it." Right?

I was in France, as were you, Amy, a week after the horrific terrorist attacks in 2015. We were there for the Paris climate summit. A week before, 200 people had been killed in Paris in coordinated attacks. The French government, under François Hollande, a Socialist government—Socialist in name only, but, you know, a left government—declared a state of emergency and banned political gatherings of more than five people. You know, if that can happen in France under a Socialist government, in a country with a very deep history of disruptive strikes, what do we expect Trump and Bannon and Pence to do at the earliest opportunity? So, I think it's important to strategize.

It's important to know the history in the United States. You know, in all these countries, the examples I give—Argentina, why did they flood out of their houses? You ask people. They said, "It reminded us of the beginning of the dictatorship in 1976. That's how it started. They told us that we weren't safe and that it was going to be a temporary state of emergency. And it ended up turning into a dictatorship." So they saw the early signs, and they said, "No, not again. Nunca más." Right? You know, we talked to Americans about this. They say, "Well, we don't have that history." Really? What about the Japanese internment, you know? What about, as you've written, Amy, what about what happened to Mexican—Mexican Americans in the United States during the Great Depression and during that crisis and the mass deportations? There is this history in many communities, and those communities keep that history alive. You know, during Hurricane Katrina, so many African Americans talked about the history of how crises had been used to further oppress black people in this country. But these stories are offloaded into those communities, who hold them and keep that history alive. It isn't nationally metabolized, right? And so we have to share these stories. And I do think there is a memory now of what happened after September 11th and the rights that were lost and the ways in which people's grief was exploited by men in power who said, "Trust me." Don't make that mistake again.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the connection to war? I mean, you have what happened in Manchester, the horror there. You have the continued deaths in Yemen, the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing. Now the U.S. has expanded both in Somalia and in the Philippines with U.S. forces.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You have this horrific attack that took place in Kabul, where over 150 Afghans died. It hardly got any attention. But the rage that must be brewing at the grassroots when they don't get any media attention from the West?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, right, right. You know, people are being erased, you know, and this is a very, very old story. No, they're already expanding the battlefields, escalating on multiple, multiple fronts. And, you know, this is the most dangerous, most lethal way that shocking events are exploited, people's fear exploited.

And, you know, let's remember that this administration will have various motivations for changing the subject away from their domestic scandals. And Trump has never gotten better media coverage than in the wake of the—his Syrian missile strike, you know, called "beautiful" by Brian Williams. And it's—you know, suddenly, he was presidential—right?—ordering cruise missiles over delicious chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, we have to be very, very vigilant about this.

And, you know, the U.S. has had a strong antiwar movement in the past, but that antiwar movement hasn't been in the streets in the same way. And, you know, I think that this—these resistance movements are going to have to get ready for that kind of a shock, because once the wars begin, you know, it's very hard to stop them.

Another example, I think, of shock resistance, we just saw in the U.K. during Jeremy Corbyn's—during Jeremy Corbyn's campaign, where Theresa May was exploiting the Manchester attacks, the London Bridge attacks, to say, "We are going to, you know, have to get rid of your online privacy. You know, we need backdoors into all of your communication apps. We may need to suspend human rights law." And Jeremy Corbyn was talking about root causes, the failure of the war-on-terror paradigm and how this is leading to an increase in these types of attacks. And, you know, I think that a lot of people decided that that made more sense after these many years, like not to double down and give up rights in these moments, but to try to understand why this is happening and to do something about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Theresa May lost her Conservative majority in the Parliament. On Saudi Arabia, the first country President Trump went to, the first foreign country, was Saudi Arabia. He does the orb with the Saudi Arabians. He does the sword dances, or tries, with the Saudi Arabians.

NAOMI KLEIN: The sword stumble.

AMY GOODMAN: He seals these deals, well over $110 billion, leaves there extolling the Saudi leadership and attacks the European leaders, and then comes home, and, despite the almost begging of the European leaders on the issue of the climate accord, he not only attacks them, but then comes home to the United States and announces he's withdrawing from the very accord they're pleading with him to remain in. What about this primacy of Saudi Arabia right now, both its connection to war, with the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen, which is leading to a horrific cholera epidemic, not to mention just the number of deaths, and climate change?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, one of the things that really worries me is how motivated these petrostates are to have more instability, because that sends the price of oil up, and, you know, their profits flow even more. It's something that the Saudis have in common with the Russians, have in common with Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon. You know, the way I think we should see that foreign trip of Trump's is basically as traveling weapons salesman, right? And he's sending this message: You buy enough American weapons, you're our friend. You know? Like this is the price. So he heaps praise on Saudi Arabia for, you know, having done that, having made that deal, and he goes to Europe, and he screams at them, you know, NATO members, for not pulling their weight, right? Which means not buying enough weapons. You know, I'm Canadian. I'm Canadian-American, dual citizen. But my government shamefully came home and announced a massive—sorry, a massive increase in weapons spending. So, you know, this is—this is Trump's foreign policy, is traveling weapons salesman.

AMY GOODMAN: Best-selling author Naomi Klein, senior correspondent for The Intercept. Her new book is titled No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To see Part 1 of the interview, you can go to democracynow.org.

The End of Hypocrisy?

 

 

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

[Editor's introduction]  Since the article below was written, the specifics seem to obscure the universal or general meaning (as is the case in most analysis of contemporary events).  For example, the 9/11 fiasco of the Bush Cheney era received stark resurrection in the recent mugging and beating of a United Airlines passenger who was about to "fly the friendly skies".  Corporate forces took such advantage of the situation that freedom on the airplanes has been reduced to a strictly regimented and more importantly profitable system of "passenger control."  Protection is the lowest interest involved and profit the overwhelming one. As it turns out, with the losses incurred by United so far, it would have been far cheaper to buy Dr. Dao a private jet of his own and supply him with a pilot. 

 

Despite all the attempts to discredit him, all of which would be inadmissible in court, he remains with his present attorney a possibility of generalizing this experience to reflect on the entire domination of the individual by corporatism.  For example, one lame attempt to discredit him with a segment of the population was to claim that he said he was being discriminated against because he was Chinese.  In fact, he is Vietnamese and one of the "boat people" who fled Vietnam.  He also said that the experience was more terrifying than being lost in the ocean on a boat.  Furthermore, the discussions that he returned to the plane become simply an affirmation of the damage done by concussions, as he has no memory of that particular part of the event.  Other characterizations of Dr. Dao going back as far as ten years were publicized within two hours of the event being broadcast.

The same obtains in relations with Russia.  Although it makes sense to have good relations with Russian authorities, we first have to decide how good it is for business and profit.  Indeed, that is the only reason the presence of Rex Tillerson in Moscow may have prevented nuclear confrontation, at least costly changes in our economy. 

Recent activities in Northern Korea, while presenting a universally acceptable villain, also forced a reassessment of the Chinese manipulation of currency.  When Trump stated that perhaps the dollar was valued to high, it's value on the exchange declined steeply, almost in a perpendicular line.  The remarks have since been retracted and thus the dollar recovered somewhat, along with recent and unexpected praise of Yellen. 

The language used in our media demands careful attention.  For example, a headline announces the dropping of the largest "Non-Nuclear" bomb on Afghanistan, leaving open a plausible question: so there were larger nuclear bombs dropped on Afghanistan?  The target was given as tunnels, although about 36 terrorists were killed (fortunately no people were hurt?)  The activity will now lend credibility to ISIS or Isilanity and increase recruitment and imitation.

There was considerable amusement when the "President" said "Nobody ever knew how complicated this health care stuff was."  We are now ready for him to say "Nobody knows how complicated this foreign stuff is."]

 

The Elimination of Hypocrisy?

By

BORIS BADENOV

Trump's rule has freed us from hypocrisy.  Although the illustration above indicates the similarities of justification for the killings and attacks, and both justifications and attacks were hypocritical, to a much greater extent Trump's administration has carefully managed to emerge as the eventual triumph of the Corporate State without any moral cover.  A recent blunder by Sean Spicer comparing Assad to Hitler merely illustrated the public relations or advertising truism that any comparison to Hitler to anyone else's disadvantage is doomed to failure. 

There are, in fact, many similarities extant in the present administration, but they all seem doomed to failure as a condemnation.  All that is obvious is that the same policies continue with the exception of providing moral justification for them – they are simply good for profit and, you should believe, therefore good for the people.  That is what democracy is all about.

There is sufficient reason for this right-wing administration to eliminate the hypocrisy: the base is too stupid an uneducated to see though it.  In other words, the policies are not only intensified, but approved.  The U.S. has been bombing hospitals, apartments, and civilians for some time now.  This did not start with Trump.  However, the general base does not approve of killing civilians.  The right-wing base does.  The electoral college that was first instituted to prevent this sort of take-over was eliminated by reducing its role to that of a stamp of approval. 

The Senate filibuster that was once the refuge of racism eventually became a hindrance to ruthless corporatism and capture of the legislative branch and hence was eliminated.  The court is now firmly corporate centered.  There is a danger that some elements of the Democratic party with rise up through the electoral process despite legislative construction of voting districts, but that will eventually be addressed.  A recent election in Kansas almost had a democrat elected to the House, for example.

On the other hand, Trump may be adapting to professional politics and learning hypocrisy.  He claims, for example, that he sent those missals to attack an airbase because he felt so angry at seeing the "beautiful, itty bitty, babies" or words to that effect.  He has said that yes, he did say that NATO was outdated, but now it isn't.  Additionally, Russia originally knew about the chemicals, to it is possible that Russia might have known. 

Furthermore, as the missals landed, corporate media was exuberant, saying that "this day, Donald Trump finally became Presidential."  In other words, more of the same.  Well, further analysis of this possibility is either boring to those who get the point or useless to those who do not, and will not, so we will abandon it.

It is difficult to explicate in just so many words, but here is a longish interview that explains the key points:

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Russia to talk about the war in Syria and other issues, we spend the hour with the longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn. For decades, Nairn has covered the impact of U.S. foreign policy across the globe in East Timor, Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia and other countries. Democracy Now! spoke to Nairn on Monday, discussing the escalation of U.S. military operations across the Middle East, as well as the unique danger Trump poses both abroad and at home. We began by asking Allan Nairn about last week's U.S. attack on a Syrian air base.

---

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Russia to talk about the war in Syria and other issues, we spend the hour with the longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn. For decades, Allan has covered the impact of U.S. foreign policy across the globe—in East Timor, Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, as well as other countries. I spoke to Allan Nairn Monday, and we discussed the escalation of U.S. military operations across the Middle East, as well as the unique danger Trump poses both abroad and at home. I began by asking Allan Nairn about last week's U.S. attack on a Syrian air base.

ALLAN NAIRN: It was an attack on an old U.S. partner, old U.S. torture partner, Assad. The chemical attack was a monstrous atrocity, but it wasn't the most monstrous atrocity that was done in Syria probably that week or that month. The Assad regime routinely massacres civilians using conventional weapons. And also, the forces backed by the Gulf states and Turkey—Turkey of NATO, the Gulf States, U.S. allies—for a number of years were also using tactics that involved attacks on civilians. And some of them ended up morphing into ISIS.

This particular attack on the Syrian airfield, I don't think, is going to save any lives in Syria, in terms of its effect on the conflict. It may save Trump, to a certain extent, politically. It was mainly an act of political theater. The U.S. establishment is an organism. And that organism, in an important respect, has a temperament that is similar to that of Trump. It gets satisfaction from displays of aggression. And if you look at the press coverage, you see that this attack has made them feel good, has made them feel better about themselves as leaders of the United States establishment. But it's not saving lives in Syria. In fact, this particular U.S. attack was—was probably far—not the most deadly attack in Syria that the U.S. staged that week, that the U.S. staged last week. Although many people were calling for the U.S. to do this air attack on Syria, many apparently didn't realize that the U.S. was already bombing Syria. In Syria and in Iraq, just over the recent weeks and months, U.S. air attacks have hit mosques, schools, apartment complexes, and killed many, many hundreds of civilians, so much so that the people who monitor this, like the Airwars group, have estimated that the U.S. has now surpassed Russia in its killing of civilians by bombing raids. So, this was—this was more of a symbolic strike.

As to the deeper issue of what can be done to stop this carnage, I'm not a pacifist. I think sometimes, unfortunately, tragically, force is necessary. Even violence is necessary to prevent more violence. If there were a military action that could stop this mass slaughter in Syria, I would support it. But there isn't. Contrary to myth, most decisions regarding foreign policy are not hard. They're easy. They're easy. Don't support the murderers. Don't create a bureaucracy that, in order to survive, has to keep on killing in order to justify its own existence. But occasionally, now and then, you will get a situation where the choices are hard. And that is Syria today, because—in important part because of the inexcusable actions of various outside forces, including the U.S., Russia, Iran, the Gulf states, Turkey. Syria has reached a state of such collapse that there really is no clear, immediate way to stop, or at the moment even mitigate, the mass civilian killing. But, although it would be extremely difficult, you can imagine some steps that could be constructive—for example, getting all these various foreign powers out, stopping the influx of arms—even, on the dealmaking level, which the U.S. establishment likes and which Trump likes, even a deal between the U.S. and Russia, where, on the one hand, the U.S. agrees to stop the NATO expansion and the pressure on Russia, which is a violation of the agreement that Bush Sr. made with the Russians, in exchange for Russia cutting loose the Assad regime. Things like this could at least, perhaps, edge things in the right direction. But more airstrikes will not.

The fact that the U.S. bombed—U.S. bombs hit mosques, hit schools, hit apartment complexes, even, in some cases, hit wedding parties, such as in one famous massacre carried out by the forces of General Mattis, the Mukaradeeb wedding massacre, who's now the defense secretary, within the U.S. system—

AMY GOODMAN: In?

ALLAN NAIRN: That was in Iraq, on the border near Syria. Within the U.S. system, those killings of civilians are excused, because the U.S. was not targeting those civilians per se. They just happened to be next to the targets, so they died in the explosion. So the U.S. system says it's OK. That makes us morally different from Assad, from ISIS, from the Russians, etc. The Pentagon uses calculations, algorithms, before they make these airstrikes. They calculate how many civilians they predict will die by accident. So, in a certain sense, it's an accident. But in another sense, if you were applying domestic criminal law standards, it wouldn't be considered an accident. They could be charged with criminally negligent homicide. They could be charged with various kinds of manslaughter. And they make these calculations, and they say, "OK, if we drop this bomb, X number of people will die." It used to be, during the attack on—the Bush attack on Iraq, that the standard was somewhere in the mid-twenties. Roughly 25 civilians could be—it would be OK to do an airstrike if it would only kill roughly 25 civilians. Now the calculations have changed. One thing that Trump, with the support of General Mattis, has done is he's encouraged the Pentagon to say, "Oh, well, even if it's more than 25, no problem. We will still go ahead with this—with this airstrike." So, with those standards, some of which, by the way, were inspired by the Russian example, what the Russians call Grozny rules, just unrestrained bombing.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative journalist Allan Nairn. We'll be back with him in a minute to talk about Iraq, Yemen, the Trump administration and more. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "Andar Conmigo," "Walk with Me," by Raza Obrera. The group's singer, Juan Manuel, is currently imprisoned and on hunger strike with hundreds of others at the GEO Group-owned Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

The death toll from a recent U.S. airstrike in the Iraqi city of Mosul has risen to nearly 300 civilians, including many children. The Los Angeles Times has described the March 17th strike as among the deadliest incidents in decades of modern warfare. I asked investigative journalist Allan Nairn to talk about the airstrike in Mosul.

ALLAN NAIRN: Various U.S. defenses after that mass killing of civilians by the U.S. was reported were things like "It was an accident" or "We were targeting ISIS" or "ISIS was using civilians as human shields" or "We meant"—maybe most revealingly, "Yes, we meant to bomb the apartments, but we didn't realize that ISIS had rigged them with explosions—with explosives. So when we deliberately bombed the apartment, that touched off the explosives, and that made the killing of the residents of the apartment complex even more extensive than we had—than we had planned on." So, all those—all those defensive defenses turn on the idea that as long as you're not targeting the civilians per se, it's still permissible to kill civilians in mass.

And these are—if you go back in history, you find these justifications repeatedly. These are the same justifications that Israel used during their various assaults on Gaza, as they were bombing apartment buildings deliberately in Gaza, because, they would say, "Oh, well, yeah, we bombed that apartment building. But there was a Hamas guy in apartment 3B. Therefore it's justified." The human shield concept. Well, think of domestic police procedure. Let's say there's a hostage situation, there's a criminal. They've just robbed a store, and they've grabbed the store clerk, and they're holding them, and they're holding a gun to the clerk's head. Well, what do the police do? They don't—they're not supposed to throw a grenade and kill both the criminal and the hostage. They're supposed to seek a way that will allow the hostage to go free. But what the U.S. military doctrine does is precisely the opposite. They say, "Oh, well, yeah, all these civilians died, but it wasn't our fault, because they were being used as human shields by by our targets."

Now, these standards I just described are long-standing U.S. standards. These standards were under effect under Obama, under Bush, all the way back. But with Trump—and this is the thing to be clear about—we've entered a new era, because now those kinds of rather intricate rationales no longer—no longer really apply. Under Trump, the military and the CIA are being encouraged, first, to make their own decisions on the ground as to where and when to bomb and drone, because, under Obama, many of these decisions were run through the White House bureaucracy, and there were lawyers, Obama lawyers, actually sitting there evaluating these various bombing plans, applying the criteria I just described, the criteria that, yes, allowed the killing of civilians, but that placed certain limits on it. Now, under Trump, they're saying, "Don't worry about the limits. Don't worry about the lawyers. If you feel you need to bomb somewhere, go for it." And therefore, the only constraint on these bombings is the feelings and the doctrine of the military commanders.

And it so happens that the man at the top of the Pentagon pyramid is General Mattis, who is famous for, among other reasons, one, doing the wedding massacre I just mentioned and, two, constantly articulating a doctrine that when you're going after the bad guys, it's fun to kill. You should kill with zest. If you go online, you can see a list of famous quotes from Mattis, that, it's said, have endeared him to much of the military—and to both the Democrats and Republicans, by the way. In fact, it's interesting. During the presidential election, Mattis was invited to speak at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, and he was, for a while, the preferred presidential candidate of the "Never Trump" people, the Bill Kristol anti-Trump Republicans. So he's a consensus man of the establishment.

And Trump takes an approach that is even more unconstrained than that of Mattis. And—but we should say, in fairness, that it's not just Trump who takes that approach. During the campaign, the Republican candidates were competing with each other to see who could sound more bloodthirsty. You know, Trump was always talking about bombing the hell out of them, but it was Ted Cruz who said he was going to make the desert glow with his bombings. And, you know, each one would try to top the other. And that's where we are now.

So, this is going to give a license both to the U.S. military, also to law enforcement personnel within the United States, local police, people within ICE, people from the various police and Border Patrol unions, who in their public and political statements clearly represent, among law enforcement, the most racist, the most prone to violence, of these—of the law—the various law enforcement communities. They, plus U.S. clients overseas, in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in country after country after country after country around the world, because the U.S. has military and client relationships with more than a hundred countries around the world, depending on how you calculate it. Some could argue up to 170 countries around the world. The new message, the new U.S. guideline, is kill more, and don't worry about criticism or occasional cutbacks in your aid from the U.S., because, as the press people ecstatically said after the Syria bombing run, there's a new sheriff in town in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: When you look at Syria, in response to what he saw on the ground in Syria, still he stands by his ban, his executive order, though judges have stopped it, that would not allow one Syrian refugee into the United States.

ALLAN NAIRN: I think it may well be true that in terms of Trump's own emotional wiring, his mental wiring, maybe, you know, he did see those disgusting, gruesome videos of the tear gas attack, and maybe he said, "OK, we've got to attack Syria." I can believe that. But I'm sure Trump also saw some other very famous images, like the one of the little boy, the refugee from the Mediterranean, face down on the shore as he had just drowned to death because the boat he was riding failed to reach shore in Europe, and countless, countless other images. And the policy response—I don't know about the emotional response of Trump, but the policy response of Trump to that drowned boy on the shores, to say, "Screw the refugees"—in fact, to make that hatred toward the refugees one of the very pillars of, A, his presidential campaign and, B, his new government.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Since taking office, Trump has rapidly expanded U.S. military operations in Yemen. Last month, the U.S. reportedly launched more than 49 strikes across the country—more strikes than the U.S. has ever carried out in a single year in Yemen. The U.S. has also resumed some weapons sales to the Saudis, after the transfers were frozen by President Obama amid concerns about mounting civilian casualties in Yemen. For more, we speak with longtime investigative reporter Allan Nairn.

---

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: With the attacks, from Syria to Mosul in Iraq to Yemen, it wasn't—what?—eight days before—after Donald Trump was inaugurated that the U.S. Navy SEAL strike happened in Yemen. Something like 25 civilians were killed, many of them children. And perhaps the reason we know about it is because a U.S. Navy SEAL was killed. That U.S. Navy SEAL's father, William Owens, refused to meet President Trump, who surprised Owens when he came to Dover Air Base with his daughter Ivanka, his son's body brought to the base. He was harshly critical of the raid. Mr. Owens said, "Why did he have to do this now, to move so quickly in his administration?" Can you talk about that first attack, if it was the first attack, and what it means to talk about these attacks as presidential initiation rites?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, first, the particulars of that attack, that attack was aimed to be targeting al-Qaeda, a local al-Qaeda affiliate. It's worth noting that in Syria many of the rebels, who the U.S. has been backing and arming and training, often conduct joint operations with al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. And, indeed, a good number of them have joined up with al-Nusra. But on this raid, it took place in a context of a broader war and a broader assault, which on—on Yemen, on the Houthi armed rebel movement in Yemen, by Saudi Arabia. And in these raids, the Saudis are using U.S. planes. They're using U.S. bombs. There are actually U.S. personnel sitting in the Saudi Air Force headquarters, helping them with targeting. And the Saudis are systematically targeting Yemeni civilians. After one particularly egregious and especially widely reported massacre on a funeral gathering, the U.S. admonished the Saudis. They criticized them. They temporarily froze and pulled back a bit of their aid. But now, under Trump, again, it's full speed ahead with assaults on civilian targets by the Saudis in—in Yemen.

And if you look at the press, including outlets like MSNBC, various press outlets that are considered to be liberal, one of the main arguments they make is that a U.S. action is good when it pleases the Saudis. They always—there's this constant line of criticism, which has been going on for decades, criticism against U.S. presidents who are considered to be too soft at a given moment. And that criticism is: You're letting down our Middle Eastern allies, i.e. you're letting down the Saudis. The journalists will say, "I've just been in the Middle East, and I've been talking to our allies there," i.e. the Saudis, the Gulf states, "and they're very unhappy, because they think the U.S. is not showing enough credibility. We're letting them down"—i.e. the U.S. isn't being violent enough. And that's the context in which this attack on Yemen by the Special Forces took place.

As to why Trump authorized it in that way, I think a very important motivating factor, that is really underestimated by people, especially scholars, is the extent to which, when you have power, when you're the king, a lot of the motivation for violence, for war, it's not just interest. A lot of the motivation is fun, is thrill, is getting a charge out of ordering violence, and thrilling the public, exciting the courtiers around you, exciting the press around you. The recent reaction to the Syria attack is a very good example of that. I think to really understand how big powers operate, when it comes to going out and killing people, I mean, don't just study their concrete interests, like, you know, mineral exports and geopolitics. Also study Shakespeare. Study the the whims of kings, because that's what a lot of it is about. And if you look back at the debates in the campaign between Clinton and Trump, when they were talking about the violent system, they they did not disagree at all about the U.S. right to commit aggression, about the U.S. right to kill civilians. What they did disagree about was how those decisions would be made. Clinton invoked the traditional establishment criteria that I discussed before of, yes, you can bomb, but you can only kill up to 25 civilians with your bombing run. Trump invoked a different standard, saying, "I'll attack whenever the hell I feel like it." Both of them allow the killing of civilians, which is a crime.

AMY GOODMAN: And Trump saying, "I was just continuing what President Obama started"?

ALLAN NAIRN: In that sense, Trump does have a point, because it was Obama who started the support of the Saudi attack on—in Yemen and the general policy of U.S. sending—doing its own military-CIA strikes in Yemen. And, of course, U.S. support for the Saudi order and dominance in the region and for their violence goes back for many decades. And it's also the case that Clinton would probably have done this strike on the Syria airfield, just as Trump did. In fact, a day or so before, she gave an interview to The New York Times where she was recommending strikes on the Syrian airfields.

AMY GOODMAN: No, actually, the interview that Hillary Clinton did was with Nicholas Kristof, and it was in the Women in the World conference. It was several hours before the attack took place.

ALLAN NAIRN: Just hours, uh-huh.

AMY GOODMAN: And that video clip of her saying, "Why doesn't he bomb an airfield?" or "I would bomb an airfield," was played before the attack took place.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. In fact, come to think of it, the way Trump operates, maybe Trump saw that—if that was publicly available—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

ALLAN NAIRN: —maybe Trump saw that clip. That's exactly the kind of thing that would set him off, say, "Oh, my god. I've got to at least match her, and maybe top her." But this gets back to the more fundamental point that it's really important to understand, which is, U.S. has this violent system, which is criminal, and it has had it for decades. It is willing to commit aggression and kill civilians in country after country after country. And all of those responsible for it should be judged by the same standards that we judge domestic killers. And by those standards, they should all be in prison, including the living U.S. presidents, including Hillary Clinton.

But Trump—now, that all said, Trump makes it even worse. Trump is bringing in a doctrine and a group of people who are in the process of and are definitely going to commit even more killings of civilians, even more aggression. And that's why it was such—one of many reasons why it was such a catastrophe that Trump and the radical-right Republicans won, because it will make it even worse. And the argument which you hear going around, especially in some circles on the left, that, "Oh, they're all bad. They're equally bad," it's insane, and it's irresponsible, given that now even more people are going to suffer as a result.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn. We'll be back with him in a minute, as he talks more about his assessment of the Trump presidency. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn. I asked him to talk more about his assessment of the opening months of the Trump presidency.

ALLAN NAIRN: It's not just the Trump presidency. It's a right-wing revolution, which has captured control, up to this moment, of the presidency, the House, part of the Senate and now the Supreme Court. And if they abolish the legislative filibuster in the Senate, which they may, then they will have total, absolute control of all branches of government and will enter a radically new phase beyond anything that's happened so far, because there will be absolutely no constraints on what they can do. The only constraints could be if they trip over themselves, as they have on some occasions up to now.

Trump brought in a collection, a coalition, of broadly rightist elements—racists, neofascists, the Republican establishment, the Koch brothers, oligarchs, all sorts of elements with their own very well-defined agendas for radical change in the U.S. Now, some points of those agendas clash, so that's caused some of the problems—for example, on the repeal of Obamacare. But on 80 percent of things they agree, and they're moving forward. They've already systematically started repealing constraints on pollution, constraints on police forces, that have been—had previously been placed under federal supervision because their involvement in killing of civilians, often with racist motivations. They are moving to give Wall Street and corporations complete license to commit crimes. Under the Obama-Clinton establishment, these corporate figures, when they committed crimes, would often end up having to pay a big settlement. They'd have to pay some billions of dollars to the Justice Department. Under Trump, not only will they not be criminally prosecuted, they won't have to pay civil settlements, and they'll be encouraged to do their worst. A very effective part of Trump's campaign was saying—linking Clinton to Goldman Sachs. The Trump White House and government is stocked with Goldman Sachs people as no government ever before, even exceeding the Clinton team, which is—which is saying a lot.

On the international front, it's not as if Trump is being digested by the security establishment. It's that Trump is pushing the security establishment to become even more violent, to use cruder, less subtle tactics. Already, he has moved away from one key element of U.S. policy overseas, which is hypocrisy. The U.S. has always supported—the basic U.S. policy for decades has been, in country after country, to support the military and security forces as the primary U.S. interlocutors, but then, on top of that, to also support, when it's convenient, when there's no dangerous candidate, an elected government that can give some veneer and also some local social stability, and also, while on the one hand handing arms and training and political cover and intelligence to the armies and the security forces and the death squads, using the other hand to admonish them, saying, "Oh, that massacre you just did, using our weapons, using our training, you shouldn't have done that massacre. That was a little—little bit excessive." This is one reason why you often find resentment from U.S. clients regarding this hypocritical approach of the U.S., which is, after all, fundamentally supporting them. Trump strips away the hypocrisy. He continues to give the arms and the training and the intelligence and the political cover. But he does away with the aspect that the Obama administration, in particular, specialized in, was the hypocrisy, the criticism.

For example, when el-Sisi and the army seized power in Egypt, after two massive massacres of opponents, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, roughly a thousand people in each massacre, John Kerry said that they had moved to implement democracy. After the army and el-Sisi seized power in Egypt and did two massacres of roughly a thousand people each, of opponents and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, John Kerry said they had moved to implement democracy. The Obama administration continued military and intelligence aid to the el-Sisi government, but they cut some of it back, in protest of these massacres, and they made some human rights criticisms of the government.

Trump comes in, and he changes the approach. He revokes the criticisms. He fully restores and says he intends to increase the military aid, and he welcomes el-Sisi to the White House, embraces him, says they agree. And he does this, by the way, three days before he criticizes Assad, who for years worked with the CIA. The CIA would send abductees to Assad for interrogation and torture. Trump criticizes Assad and said he's going after him, and then later he does bomb Syria. But Trump welcomes el-Sisi to the White House, and giving him the message, "Go for it. The U.S. is totally behind you. We are not going to criticize you."

It's the same approach to Israel. One reason why Israel and the Netanyahu administration is so delighted with Kerry—with Trump. Obama pushed through a massive, largest-ever weapons and aid and training package for the Israeli military, as the Israeli military was in the midst of tightening the repression in the West Bank, after they had, not too long before, done a massive slaughter with their air attack on Gaza. Obama did that. But at the same time he wagged his finger at Israel on certain issues, like settlements. Trump comes in and says no more finger wagging, and, to boot, we're going to try to increase the military aid that props up the Israeli state even more, and we're going to align politically with the elements in Israel, the settler elements, who are constantly attacking and berating Netanyahu for being too soft on the Palestinians. That's who Trump's new ambassador to Israel represents. And in country—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, David Friedman was approved. He was his bankruptcy lawyer. He now is the new U.S. ambassador to Israel. And he raised money for the settlements.

ALLAN NAIRN: And he openly aligns with the political elements in Israel who want expulsion and even more killing of the Palestinians. And this is the new Trump policy in country after country after country around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you talk specifically about the environment? I mean, talk about the Trump Cabinet, from Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, being secretary of state, to the Oklahoma attorney general—Oklahoma, which is now rocked by earthquakes—

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —which it never had in its past. It's this—now has become the state of fracking. But the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times, now head of the EPA, to Governor Perry, head of the Energy Department, who sat on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, that owns the Dakota Access pipeline.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, Trump has essentially sent subversives into the Cabinet, atop the agencies, to dismantle, destroy the agencies. In the words of Steve Bannon, to—how did he put it? To deconstruct the administrative state. Gorsuch, the new Supreme Court justice put in by Trump, his mother, Anne Gorsuch, was Reagan's EPA administrator. She was one of two such Cabinet appointees sent in by Reagan to dismantle their respective departments. The other was the head of Interior. When I say "dismantle," I mean dismantle all aspects of their work and regulations that run counter to the interests of corporations and polluters and may be favorable to the interests of what are seen as liberal or Democratic interest groups. Reagan only did that with two agencies: EPA and Interior. During the—when Rick Perry ran for president, he got in trouble, because, although he was openly touting similar dismantling of various government departments, including education, unfortunately for him, he couldn't remember the whole list, so everybody laughed at him.

Now, with Trump in—and not just Trump, but Trump and the whole radical Republican rightist establishment—they're trying to do it with every department, every department that has within its mission any kind of service to the poor, service protecting the rights of working people, protecting the rights of protesters, protecting the rights of women, or that has within its work any kinds of projects or regulations that inconvenience corporations and rich oligarchs. This administration is trying to dismantle those functions of government across the board. It is systematic. It is sweeping. And Bannon is entirely right when he makes the claim that it's revolutionary. You know, he compared himself to Lenin, kind of a Lenin from the other direction, from the radical right. And it's true. They are engaged in a truly revolutionary project. And it has to be stopped.

What you might say is the good news is that history is moving in a much faster pace now. Events have speeded up. Bigger change is possible faster than it was before. So it is conceivable that if there's enough resistance from the streets, if there's enough activism within the many corners of the system where concessions can be won, especially at the state and local level, especially within the Democratic Party, that's backed up by mass disruption from below, it might be possible to reverse some of these revolutionary steps from the right, perhaps sooner than would have been the case in the slower historical conditions that prevailed before Trump.

But we're in the midst of this massive crisis. And, you know, the damage assessment is months from coming in. We have just seen a tiny fraction now of the people in this country and overseas who are going to die preventable deaths as a result. For example, they're going after programs run by the Agriculture Department and others that feed hungry kids in the United States. They want to kill them. They're also going after programs in the U.S. foreign aid budget that feed starving people overseas. Now, the U.S. government does lots of bad things, but it's also the case that the U.S. still is, to a certain extent, a democracy. And over years and years of struggle, activists have won certain concessions. And there are thousands upon thousands of passages in laws and programs within government that are the result not of corporate dictates, but of pressure from below, pressure from racial justice and labor and human rights and women's rights activists, consumer rights, environmental justice. There have been victories won over the years, very hard-fought. And lots of these are put into legislation. They're put into the functions of departments. And what Trump and the Republican coalition are trying to do is rip them out systematically, dismantle them systematically. And that's what's underway now. And many, many thousands of extra people will die in the U.S. and overseas as a result.

AMY GOODMAN: You have an enormous irony, where here you have President Trump accusing the Obama administration, President Obama himself, of surveilling him, of wiretapping him, yet, at the same time, in Congress, they roll back privacy protections, the whole internet privacy act that has now been written into law. Can you talk about the significance of this, which would seem to join right and left?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. I'm actually a little surprised that the—what I guess is the—maybe the majority of the population, or at least the majority of younger people in the United States, who essentially live their lives online, are not completely up in arms about this, are not storming Washington about this, because what they've done is they've made it easier for online private, profit-making corporations to sell the most intimate details of your life. You'd think people would object to that.

But what it also shows is that much of this new government's agenda is strictly corporate. Strictly corporate. Now, the Democratic Party is, of course, also dominated, at its elite level, by corporations and the rich, but the Democratic Party also has as its base all sorts of working and poor and activist constituencies that are against those corporate interests and the rich. And they fight it out. And the outcome of those fights is Democratic policy. In the new order, with this Trump Republican administration, it is straight corporate. And the only resistance that those corporations get is if some aspect of their agenda happens to clash with, impinge on the program of, say, the racists or the neofascists or a rival corporate faction. For example, the Kochs have disagreements with other oligarchs on various issues. But those are the only constraints on corporations. There is absolutely no constraint within this new Republican governing coalition from working people or poor people, even though Trump is making a big play to working people by addressing, in a way that the Democrats should have, but they never did, the realities that the U.S. working class has been gutted by the decades upon decades of bipartisan neoliberalism that was embraced by Obama and Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, can you talk about Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, their position in the White House, what they represent, the talk of the infighting between them and Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Bannon comes from Goldman Sachs. Miller comes from the most openly racist part of the anti-immigrant movement, and after that, from the office of then senator, now attorney general, Jeff Sessions, one of the most openly racist—racist politicians in Washington. I was actually a little—I've actually been a little surprised that Bannon has lasted this long, not for any political reason, but just because a few weeks back they put him on the cover of Time magazine, and they started talking about him as the real president, and you wouldn't think Trump would tolerate that kind of thing. Whether he stays or goes matters in a certain sense, because he's obviously a very powerful adviser, but all it really matters for is the balance of the competing radical-rightist interests within the administration. So, for example, if the Bannon and the neofascist, racist people are edged aside a bit, maybe that means more power for the Koch brothers' philosophy. Or maybe that means more power for the mainstream Goldman Sachs philosophy. Or maybe that means more power for the radical, intolerant religious right faction. Or maybe that means more powerful for whichever company or foreign interest made the biggest indirect payoff to Trump and his family that particular week. Whatever.

But the point is—the larger point is that that's what this administration, and this Republican group that now controls Congress, consists of. All of these radical factions that mean increased suffering and increased death for the majority of people in this country and overseas, they are now in there. They are now inhabiting the state. And they sometimes clash among themselves. But whoever wins those internal clashes, the loser is poor people, working people, people who are targets of discrimination. And also, another loser is the chance to reverse these radical changes they're making, because they're—they're very strategic. They're trying to set it in stone. And now with a majority on the Supreme Court and perhaps the impending lifting of the legislative filibuster in the Senate, they will have the power to set it in stone, and a near absolute power within the federal establishment system.

AMY GOODMAN: Longtime, award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn has won many of the top honors in journalism, including the George Polk Award for his coverage of Haiti, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of East Timor, as well as the duPont-Columbia Award. He's written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Nation, the New Republic, The Progressive. To see his conversation with Julian Assange on Democracy Now!, go to our website, democracynow.org.

And that does it for our show. We begin the Democracy Now! "Covering the Movements Changing America" tour Sunday, April 23rd, when I'll be speaking in Princeton, New Jersey, then on Monday, April 24th, at Wesleyan College in Middletown, Connecticut. That evening, I'll be conducting a public interview with Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then we're on to New Haven, Connecticut; South Hadley, Massachusetts; then to Vermont from April 26th to 29th. We'll stop in Middlebury, Montpelier, Bennington, Burlington. And then we'll be going on to Washington, D.C.; Raleigh, North Carolina; Miami, Florida; Tampa, Florida; and beyond. Go to Democracy Now! to see our 60-cities-in-30-days tour at democracynow.org.

A very happy birthday to Anna Özbek!

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.