Category: Politics and American Democracy

Trump Admin Begins Official Withdrawal From Paris Agreement

With all the daily nonsense and diversions perpetrated by trump and his republi-con congressional collaborators, America needs to keep their eyes and focus on the damage being done every day to destroy our environment, pillage our national treasures and reward their fossil fuel benefactors. Vote blue in 2020 like yours and your future generations lives depends on it, because it does.   John Hanno

EcoWatch

Trump Admin Begins Official Withdrawal From Paris Agreement

Jordan Davidson       October 24, 2019
Trump visits French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron at the Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris on Nov. 10, 2018. Chesnot / Getty Images

President Trump confirmed Wednesday that his administration will start its official pullout from the 2015 Paris agreement, a long expected move that sacrifices the country’s ability to be a leader in the fight against the global climate crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal, which can officially begin on Nov. 4, is part of his “America First” policy, he argued at a natural gas conference in Pittsburgh, as Reuters reported.

“The Paris accord would have been shutting down American producers with excessive regulatory restrictions like you would not believe, while allowing foreign producers to pollute with impunity,” said Trump, who was flanked on stage by workers in hard hats, as Reuters reported.

“What we won’t do is punish the American people while enriching foreign polluters,” he claimed, adding: “I’m proud to say it, it’s called America First.”

By the rule of law, the U.S. can submit to the UN a written intention to leave on Nov. 4. It can then officially leave, one year later, which will be one day after the 2020 election.

If the U.S. does withdraw, it will leave the U.S. and Syria as the world’s only two countries not in the Paris agreement — the world’s biggest economy and a war-torn nation. The Paris agreement is essentially a voluntary commitment from countries around the world to cut emissions. The Obama administration agreed to cut emissions 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, but the state department under Trump has not turned over any documents showing progress toward that goal, as The New York Times reported.

“I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided Paris Climate accord. It was a total disaster,” claimed Trump in his speech yesterday, as The Hill reported. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

How a commitment from nearly 200 countries around the world is one-sided was not explained. However, environmentalists, policy makers and scientists quickly criticized the move, noting that leaving damages the ability of the U.S. to lead in the lucrative transition to cleaner energy, as Reuters reported.

“This is really a betrayal of the next generation,” said Malik Russell, a spokesman for The Climate Mobilization, a youth-led environmental advocacy group, who added that the decision was insanity, as the The New York Times reported.

“President Trump’s anti-science stance that climate change is not a serious threat demanding meaningful action puts the profits of fossil fuel polluters above the health and well-being of current and future generations,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a leading expert on the United Nation’s international climate negotiations process, in a statement. “It also impedes the ability of American companies and workers to compete with other countries like China and Germany in the rapidly expanding market for climate-friendly technologies.”

“Fortunately, no other country is following President Trump out the door on Paris,” he added.

The original agreement to cooperate to curtail a mounting crisis was rejected by Nicaragua, a poor central-American nation, because the agreement did not go far enough to slash emissions. Nicaragua subsequently joined in 2017, saying it was the only available instrument that has a unity of intentions to face the climate crisis and natural disasters, as Reuters reported.

“It will take some time to recover from this train wreck of U.S. diplomacy,” said Andrew Light, a former State Department official during the Obama administration and currently a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, as Reuters reported.

The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule

Salon

We have to undo the attack on the middle class that started with Reagan if we want democracy back.

The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule

Thom Hartmann             October 4, 2019

   Ronald Reagan (AP/J. Scott Applewhite

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule.In 2016, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk published a paper in the Journal of Democracy showing how, in the era since Reagan led America out of classical economic policy and into neoliberalism (aka “trickle-down” and “supply-side” economics), many Americans have ceased to value democracy.

“In the United States,” they write, “among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a ‘strong leader’ who does not have to ‘bother with parliament and elections’ has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent.” By the time the paper came out in 2016, fully 49 percent of Americans thought elites should make decisions, rather than “government.”

And the growing disillusionment with democracy as a way to protect the interests of average voters doesn’t just push them toward solutions hatched by the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute; increasingly, Americans would even consider a military junta ruling America, something that would shock the founders.

“In the past three decades,” Foa and Mounk write, “the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing for the ‘army to rule’ — a patently undemocratic stance — has steadily risen. In 1995, just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree.”

And it’s not just in the United States; democracies across the world are falling to the power of right-wing strongman leaders. Just in the past few decades we’ve seen this happen in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, India, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia and, most recently, Brazil. Arguably, it has happened here in the United States with the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump as president. Meanwhile, hard-right groups seeking such autocracy are rising fast across Europe, particularly in France, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

In a recent article for the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes this trend, along with Foa and Mounk’s research, and tries to analyze its cause.

“Why is this?” Zakaria writes. “The best I can guess is that we are living in times of great change — economic, technological, demographic, cultural — and in this swirl, people feel insecure and anxious.”

But America and the world have been in the midst of “great change” many times before, including during and after two world wars, but this trend toward authoritarianism has been happening uniquely since the 1980s.

That decade saw the adoption of the radical economic and political ideologies of Thatcherism and Reaganism — neoliberalism — which have since swept the world’s democracies. Even the European Union (with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993) has adopted neoliberal”reforms” that benefitted wealthy elites while forcing austerity on its poorer member nations, inflicting massive pain and inciting right-wing movements in Greece, Spain and Italy, among others.

In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher led the way in 1978. She rejected government ownership of parts of the commons like railways, busted unions, and later argued that, “There is no such thing as society… [only] individual men and women, and… families.”

Reagan came to power in 1980 with the help of vast amounts of money from corporations and the morbidly rich, made possible by the twin 1976 and 1978 Supreme Court decisions of Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which said that billionaires and corporations owning politicians was “free speech.”

With a nod to his oligarch funders, in his inaugural address, his first day on the job as president, Reagan famously said,  “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

When Reagan flipped our economic system on its head, rejecting two generations of classical Adam Smith economics and replacing it with the Laffer Curve and “supply-side” economics, almost a third of American had union jobs and around 60 percent of American families lived in the economic “middle class.” But starting in 2015, as NPR noted, reporting on a Pew study, “middle-income households have become the minority.”

Since David Koch’s failed 1980 run for VP on the Libertarian ticket, American oligarchs have invested billions of dollars in the message that government is bad and can’t be trusted. The most obvious example was the faux-grassroots Tea Party “movement” funded by Koch front groups, causing thousands of Americans to protest “government-run” health care with slogans like, “Keep your goddamn government hands off my Medicare!”

Koch and his oligarch friends suggested, through their surrogates and think tanks, that instead of a functioning democracy we should have a government both owned and run by them and their billionaire buddies.

And that’s largely what we have now, with the Trump administration. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently tweeted, “A corporate lawyer runs DOL, a pharma exec runs HHS, a coal lobbyist runs EPA, an oil lobbyist runs DOI, a Raytheon lobbyist runs DOD, a steel lobbyist is the US trade rep, and a banking exec runs USDT.” I’d add that a former Verizon lawyer runs the FCC, and midlevel positions across the federal government are now filled with lobbyists and lawyers from industry.

Prior to the Reagan Revolution, Americans usually got what they wanted from the government.

The successes of LBJ’s Great Society programs during the 1960’s are a great example: Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, cutting poverty in half, Head Start, the National Teacher Corps, hundreds of billions in student college aid, PBS and NPR, Air Quality Act, Water Quality Act, Wilderness Act, National Trails System Act, creating the Cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development, Community Action Agencies, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Child Safety Act, mandating warning labels on cigarettes, the Immigration Act that ended race-based immigration quotas, food stamps, and massive investments in public schools and hospitals… among other things.

In the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter followed up by creating the Department of Energy and passing energy programs that would have moved 20 percent of America’s electricity generation to solar by 2000 (it was ended by Reagan), establishing the Department of Education, massively expanding Head Start, passing major laws to regulate coal mining and make it safer, forcing polluters to clean up superfund sites, and doubling our public lands in Alaska. Not to mention winning the Nobel Prize for working out a peace deal between Egypt and Israel that holds to this day.

Before the 1980s, Western Europe and other democracies saw similar expansions of people-based government programs. But nearly all of it came to a screeching halt—and much was even reversed—with the neoliberal Thatcher and Reagan Revolutions.

Today’s standard-bearers for neoliberalism are the Republicans (and a few corporate-owned Democrats), and, as Americans figure out that the probability today of legislation passing that’s supported by the majority of Americans is today equivalent to random chance, they’re revolting.

And the oligarch billionaires have been waiting for just this moment, funding massive voter suppression, right wing media, politicians who tell us that up is down, and efforts to keep their colleague, billionaire Donald Trump, in office. While the outreach to “very fine people” in the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements is a bit less visible, it’s there, too.

So long as the governments of America and other countries are captives of oligarchs and big corporations, and hang onto anti-worker, anti-middle-class neoliberal policies, citizens will continue to drift toward hard-right “populist” politicians.

Democracies will only begin to revive when we reverse the Reagan Revolution and return to the classical economic and political systems that existed in the Western world before the neoliberal 1980s.

And if that reversal doesn’t happen soon, the trend toward autocratic oligarchy will continue to speed up. As Foa and Mounk note in the conclusion of their research paper, “[W]hat was once unthinkable should no longer be considered outside the realm of possibility.”

THOM HARTMANN

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” and more than 25 other books in print.  He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Pence, Pompeo and Barr deserve to be impeached, too

Washington Post

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Pence, Pompeo and Barr deserve to be impeached, too

By Max Boot, Columnist      October 9, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in July. (Bloomberg/Photographer: /Bloomber) (Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg News)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in July. (Bloomberg/Photographer: /Bloomber) (Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg News).

 

President Trump has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he is on the verge of being impeached. He recognizes no legal or moral limits on his “absolute right” to do whatever he pleases — including pressuring a foreign country to intervene in U.S. politics on his behalf. But his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.

Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.

Pence has been Trump’s most prominent proxy in his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cough up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election. Trump told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May so as to turn the screws on the Ukrainian president. When they finally met in Warsaw on Sept. 1, Pence again pressured Zelensky to take action on “corruption,” a code word for investigating Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter.

Pence has adopted the Sergeant Schultz defense: I know nothing! His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, given that the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, publicly proclaimed his desire to get dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine. Moreover, Pence’s national security adviser listened in on the now-infamous July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky that another participant described as “crazy” and “frightening.” Pence himself was given a readout of the call, yet he claims to have seen nothing wrong and is still sticking to the discredited cover story that Trump was pursuing a legitimate investigation of corruption. Pence will be saved from being remembered as the worst vice president in history only because Spiro Agnew had to resign after being charged with tax evasion and bribery.

Pompeo is now officially the worst secretary of state in history — wresting that uncoveted title from his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. As former secretary of state Colin Powell notes, “Our foreign policy is a shambles right now,” and Pompeo bears part of the blame for failing to stand up to Trump. He did not offer his resignation when the president proclaimed himself “in love” with the dictator of North Korea or when he abandoned the United States’ Kurdish allies. Pompeo subordinates the United States’ national interest to his own political interests; he is said to be interested in succeding Trump.

Pompeo was fully aware of how unlawful Trump was acting — he was also on the July 25 call, though he pretended during interviews that he had no idea what had transpired. There is no evidence he did anything to stop Trump. Instead, he has endorsed the crazy conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election. Pompeo is now leading Trump’s coverup: He has refused to allow State Department employees to testify to Congress, denouncing Congress’s request as “an attempt to intimidate” and “bully” the career professionals. If anyone is bullying Foreign Service officers, it is Trump; witness the president’s firing of a respected ambassador in Ukraine because she wouldn’t help Giuliani frame Biden. Pompeo stood by as this happened.

No wonder State Department employees are so disgusted and demoralized. “The mood is low and getting lower,” Thomas Pickering, a distinguished former ambassador, told the New York Times.

But wait. If you think that’s bad, Barr says “hold my beer.” The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.

By waging war on the dedicated professionals in his own department at the behest of a law-breaking president, Barr is ensuring that he will be remembered as the worst attorney general ever. He has even eclipsed in awfulness his immediate predecessor, acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, a political hack who was previously a hawker of toilets for “well endowed” men.

Impeaching Pence, Pompeo and Barr would be an unneeded distraction from the necessary impeachment of their boss but, on the merits, all three richly deserve to join Trump in the dock. They have betrayed the country and their oaths of office. They have even failed Trump by not acting to save the worst person ever to occupy the White House from his worst instincts.

How safe is your tap water? This database can tell you

Yahoo – Lifestyle

Rachel Grumman Bender, Yahoo Lifestyle       October 23, 2019
Your tap water might not be as safe as you think. (Photo: Getty Images)
Your tap water might not be as safe as you think. (Photo: Getty Images)

 

If you’ve ever wondered how safe your tap water really is, you can now find out. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) released its updated Tap Water Database on Wednesday, which allows people to discover which contaminants are in their local tap water and how it may affect their health.

In the database, people can search by ZIP code or state to find their local utility, then can click on the individual contaminants detected in their water to find out more about them and their health risks.

The Tap Water Database contains data from nearly 50,000 local utilities in 50 states, and features water quality tests conducted by water systems from 2012 to 2017. Also included are a total of nearly 32 million test results for 525 chemicals — 284 of which were detected in U.S. drinking water, according to the EWG.

“People take clean water for granted,” Tasha Stoiber, PhD, a senior scientist at the EWG, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Most of the systems in the U.S. do pass federal drinking water standards, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely safe, especially for more susceptible groups, which could include pregnant women, children or those with compromised health states. Even low levels of contamination could cause harm to your health. Water quality could be much better.”

In fact, a recent study published in the journal Heliyon found that cancer-causing contaminants may already be in drinking water. Scientists at the EWG analyzed pollutants in tap water from 2010 to 2017 and found 22 carcinogenic contaminants — including arsenic, disinfection byproducts and radioactive contaminants such as uranium and radium — in drinking water across the U.S. The researchers estimated that, over the course of an average lifetime, the contaminants could lead to 100,000 cases of cancer.

The EWG believes that the government should be doing more to make sure that tap water is safe. “That’s why we want people to know about their water and want to start a conversation about drinking water in the U.S. and what can be done to improve it,” says Stoiber.

The Safe Drinking Water Act — which allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “set national standards for drinking water to protect against health effects from exposure to naturally-occurring and man-made contaminants” — was enacted by Congress in 1974. The last time the act was amended and reauthorized was in 1996.

“There hasn’t been a federal drinking water standard passed for nearly 20 years,” stays Stoiber. “We currently have outdated drinking water regulations that could be more protective of our health.”

The EWG also states that there are “no legal limits for more than 160 unregulated contaminants in U.S. tap water.”

According to the EWG, “The vast majority of the nation’s drinking water supplies get a passing grade from federal and state regulatory agencies. But many of the 278 contaminants detected by local utilities’ tests are found at levels that may be legal under the Safe Drinking Water Act or state regulations but are well above levels authoritative scientific studies have found to pose health risks.”

Stoiber hopes the database encourages people to learn more about what’s in their tap water and to get more involved. “We definitely want people to ask their local officials, ‘What more can be done?’” she says. “‘Why are there contaminants in my water? What are we doing to remove them? How can we better protect drinking water sources?’”

So what can people do if they find contaminants in their drinking water in the meantime? Get a good water filter. The EWG offers a water filter guide to help people find the right one based on the contaminants in their local drinking water.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Study Links Chemicals Common in Tap Water to Cancer

This new study linked 22 chemicals commonly found in tap water to cancer. This video, “Study Links Chemicals Common in Tap Water to Cancer”, first appeared on nowthisnews.com.

Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in angry Cabinet monologue

CNN

Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in angry Cabinet monologue

By Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam            October 22, 2019

Tapper: Trump violates emoluments clause every day
Tapper: Trump violates emoluments clause every day.

 

(CNN)President Donald Trump delivered a blistering and rambling monologue to the journalists he allowed into his Cabinet meeting for more than 70 minutes on Monday. His press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, later tweeted, “I hope we see honest reporting from today’s mtg.”

We can honestly tell you that Trump’s remarks were highly dishonest.
We’re still looking into some of the President’s claims. We can report that at least 20 of them were false:
Barack Obama and Kim Jong Un
“But in the meantime, North Korea, I like Kim, he likes me. We get along. I respect him, he respects me. ‘You could end up in a war.’ President Obama told me that. He said, ‘The biggest problem, I don’t know how to solve it.’ He told me he doesn’t know how to solve it. I said, ‘Did you ever call him?’ ‘No.’ Actually, he tried 11 times. But the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his call. OK? Lack of respect. But he takes my call,'” Trump said.
Facts First: There is no apparent basis for the claim that Obama tried to call Kim Jong Un 11 times.
“This is a total fabrication. Trump is completely delusional, and it’s scary,” Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser, said on Twitter in response to our tweet of Trump’s quote.
“We never called Kim,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told CNN.
Trump has previously claimed that Obama begged Kim for a meeting, another assertion for which there is no evidence.
The Iraq War
“If you remember, I didn’t want to go into Iraq. I was a civilian, so I had no power over it. But I always was speaking against going into Iraq,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump did not publicly oppose the invasion of Iraq before it began. Trump was tentatively supportive of the war when radio host Howard Stern asked him in September 2002, “Are you for invading Iraq?” He responded: “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” The day after the invasion in March 2003, he said, “It looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint.” Trump did not offer a definitive position on the looming war in a Fox News interview in January 2003, saying, “Either you attack or don’t attack.”
Trump started publicly questioning the war later in 2003, and he was an explicit opponent in an Esquire article published 17 months after the invasion. That is not the same as “I was against going to the war.”
The presidential salary
“But I give away my presidential salary. They say that no other president has done it. I’m surprised, to be honest with you. They actually say that George Washington may have been the only other president,” Trump said.
Facts First: Trump does donate his salary, but the rest of his claim was inaccurate. He is not the only president to have donated the official salary; both John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover did so. Washington did not.
Although Washington initially declined his salary, he relented after Congress insisted.
The Emoluments Clause
Trump attacked critics who said that holding a G7 summit at one of his resorts would violate the Constitution. He said: “You people with this phony Emoluments Clause.”
Facts First: There’s nothing phony about the Constitution’s prohibitions against the President receiving payments from foreign and domestic governments.
The clause on foreign emoluments, found in Article I, Section 9, says that “no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”
The clause on domestic emoluments, found in Article II, Section 1, says: “The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
Trump might have been attempting to argue that it is phony to apply the clause to his own activities, but, at very least, his wording left an inaccurate impression.
The deal with Turkey
“People have been trying to make this deal for years,” Trump said of his ceasefire agreement with Turkey.
Facts First: The President’s claim is baseless to the point of being nonsensical. The deal is a narrow agreement specifically tied to the Turkish offensive that followed Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from a Kurdish-held region of northern Syria, not an agreement that resolves long-standing regional disputes. Further, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush never sought to give Turkey anything like the concessionary terms of Trump’s deal.
You can read a longer fact check here.
The Ukraine scandal
The whistleblower’s account
“The whistleblower gave a false account,” Trump said. He also said the whistleblower’s account was “totally false.”
Facts First: The whistleblower’s account of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was largely accurate. In fact, the rough transcript released by Trump himself showed that the whistleblower’s three primary allegations about the call were correct or very close to correct.
You can read a longer fact check here.
Fact check: Trump falsely claims Texas 'made a fortune' on Hurricane Harvey at Dallas rally
The whistleblower’s knowledge
“The whistleblower had second- and third-hand information. You remember that, it was a big problem,” Trump said.
Facts First: Some of the whistleblower’s information came from others, but some did not. Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community, noted that the whistleblower had “direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct.”
Atkinson also explained that the whistleblower was “credible” even about events on which the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge, such as the call: “… although the Complainant’s Letter acknowledged that the Complainant was not a direct witness to the President’s July 25, 2019, telephone call with the Ukrainian President, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community determined that other information obtained during the ICIG’s preliminary review supported the Complainant’s allegations.”
The call document
Trump said, “… I released a transcription then by stenographers of the exact conversation I had.”
Facts First: The document released by the White House explicitly says, on the first page, that it is not an exact transcript of the call.
“A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place. A number of factors can affect the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation,” the document says.
The whistleblower being ‘gone’
“You never hear, what happened to the whistleblower? They’re gone, because they’ve been discredited,” Trump said.
Facts First: There is no evidence that either the first whistleblower (who filed the complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine) or the second whistleblower (whose lawyers say they have firsthand information corroborating claims made by the first whistleblower) are now somehow “gone,” let alone that they are “gone” because the first whistleblower was shown to be inaccurate.
“The whistleblowers have not vanished,” Bradley Moss, a colleague of Mark Zaid, a lawyer for the two whistleblowers, said on Twitter.
The whistleblower and Adam Schiff
Trump said, “So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be shifty Schiff. In my opinion it’s possibly Schiff.”
Facts First: This is nonsensical. Schiff, a Democratic congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not have access to the internal White House information the whistleblower revealed; he could not have told the whistleblower about the contents of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky or other information the whistleblower reported. The whistleblower said information about the call came from “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call.”
Schiff’s comments
Trump said of the comments Schiff made about the Zelensky call at a committee hearing: “So he made up a lie, and I released — they never thought that I’d do this — I released a transcription done by stenographers of the exact conversation I had. And now the game was up.”
Facts First: Schiff made his comments about Trump’s call after the President released the rough transcript, not before. The White House issued the document on September 25. Schiff spoke at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on September 26.
Crowds

Trump Dallas rally fact check nr vpx_00000000

CNN reporter debunks Trump’s rally claim
The crowd in Dallas
“I had 25,000 people, close, in that arena,” Trump said of his rally last week in Dallas.
Facts First: The American Airlines Center has a capacity of about 20,000. The El Paso Times reported a crowd of 18,500.
Trump paused mid-speech to ask the fire marshal to let more people in to fill empty space at floor level.
The crowd outside
Trump claimed that about “at least” 20,000 supporters were outside the arena during his Dallas rally.
Facts First: Trump’s estimate was way off, though it was lower than the “close to 30,000” he had claimed during the speech. “We didn’t have 30K outside. Probably had upward of 5K outside,” Dallas Police Department spokesman Sgt. Mitchell Warren told CNN in response to that previous Trump estimate.
Rally crowds
“I haven’t had an empty seat at a rally,” Trump said.
Facts First: There have been empty seats at various Trump rallies, including a rally earlier this month in Minneapolis, a July rally in Greenville, North Carolina, an October 2018 rally in Houston and an April 2017 rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, according to journalists on the scene.
China’s economic performance
A week after correctly saying that this is China’s worst year for gross domestic product growth in “27 years,” Trump said it is China’s worst year in “57 years”: “China is doing very poorly. Worst year they’ve had in 57 years. I wonder why. I wonder why. I’m sure you can’t figure it out.”
Facts First: China’s second-quarter GDP growth of 6.2% and third-quarter GDP growth of 6% were its worst since 1992, 27 years ago.
While China’s official figures are generally considered unreliable, there is no apparent basis for the “57 years” figure. (Trump has made clear that he knows that this is the reported figure, but he has repeatedly added additional years for no apparent reason.)
Who is paying the tariffs on China
Trump said the US is “taking in billions and billions of dollars in tariffs from China, and they’re eating the tariffs.”
Facts First: Americans make the actual tariff payments, and a bevy of economic studies has found that Americans are bearing the overwhelming majority of the tariff costs.
The length of the Syria mission
Trump said American troops were initially supposed to be in Syria for a mere “30 days.”
Facts First: There was never any specific timeline for the US military’s involvement in Syria, much less a timeline of only 30 days.
“There was never a 30-day timetable on the US presence in Syria,” said Syria expert Steven Heydemann, a professor of government and director of the Middle East Studies program at Smith College. “The previous administration, and officials serving in this administration, have never offered a fixed timetable for the US mission. Official statements have emphasized that the presence of US forces would be short, limited in scope, and small. But beyond general comments along those lines, there has been no statement indicating it would end after 30 days.”
The troops being withdrawn from Syria
“We’re bringing our troops back home. I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home,” Trump said.
Facts First: He is not bringing the troops back home, at least not at the moment.
Trump has announced that “United States troops coming out of Syria will now redeploy and remain in the region to monitor the situation and prevent a repeat of 2014, when the neglected threat of ISIS raged across Syria and Iraq.” He has also announced that 1,800 more troops would be deployed to Saudi Arabia.
Trump conceded at the Cabinet meeting that the soldiers will be “sent, initially, to different parts,” but he claimed that they would “ultimately” return to the US.
The size of Miami International Airport
Touting the benefits of his Doral resort, Trump said it is right next to Miami International Airport, “one of the biggest airports in the world — some say it’s the biggest.”
Facts First: Miami International is certainly not the biggest airport in the world.
The airport was not in the top 20 for passenger traffic in 2018 or 2017. It ranked 15th in cargo traffic in 2018 and 14th in 2017, with less than half of the tonnage of cargo of top-ranked Hong Kong.
Though world airports authorities do not release rankings of airports’ physical size, Miami International is not even close to the largest airport in the United States. Chicago’s O’Hare, for example, occupies about 7,200 acres, Miami International 3,230 acres.
Special elections in North Carolina
“You saw what happened in North Carolina: We picked up two seats that people didn’t think we were going to pick up. That was two weeks ago,” Trump said.
Facts First: The special elections in North Carolina were six weeks ago, not two weeks ago. While the race in the 9th District was considered competitive, the race in the 3rd District was expected by pollsters and analysts to be won easily by the Republican candidate.
Both seats had previously been held by Republicans, so the party did not pick them up. (Trump might have just been speaking informally.)

WP: Fact-checking Trump’s wild Cabinet session

Fact-checking Trump’s wild Cabinet session

By Glenn Kessler       October 22, 2019

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We originally had planned to offer a deconstruction of one of President Trump’s Four-Pinocchio tweets over the weekend, as an example of how many things the president can get wrong in fewer than 280 characters. But then the president had his wild Cabinet session with reporters, and we shifted course.

 

“I don’t want to leave troops there. It’s very dangerous for — you know, we had 28 troops, as it turned out. People said 50. It was 28. And you had an army on both sides of those troops. Those troops could have been wiped out.”

It was Trump that had said 50 troops. But these tiny numbers belie the fact that Trump ordered the withdrawal of about 1,000 U.S. troops from northeastern Syria from about a dozen bases and outposts scattered across the region, where they worked alongside Syrian Kurdish partners. The hasty withdrawal, prompted by Trump’s decision to let Turkey invade, meant many of these bases had to be quickly abandoned.

“I always thought if you’re going in, keep the oil. Same thing here. Keep the oil. … We’ve secured the oil.”

Trump appears to be talking about a plan to leave a few hundred troops along the Iraqi border area, to prevent the Islamic State from reestablishing its self-described caliphate in the area. That would also help the Kurds keep control of oil fields in the region. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper hinted at such a move when he told reporters over the weekend that all forces would be removed from Syria in the coming weeks “except for — the president has approved the — keeping some forces at Tanf garrison in the south.”

But the plan still has to be put into action. Trump’s language suggests the United States is taking control of the oil. But the U.S. military does not seize foreign oil because it’s against international law “to destroy or seize the enemy’s property.”

“We have a good relationship with the Kurds. But we never agreed to, you know, protect the Kurds. We fought with them for 3½ to four years. We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives.”

Trump misleadingly frames the agreement as the “rest of their lives.” But the United States had certainly made a deal with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which lost 11,000 soldiers in defeating the Islamic State, after being trained and equipped by the United States. (Turkey considers elements of this force to be a terrorist threat.) To prevent a Turkish invasion, the United States persuaded the SDF to pull back up to nine miles from the Turkish border. In August, the SDF destroyed its own military posts after assurances the United States would not let thousands of Turkish troops invade. But then Trump tossed that aside.

For context, here’s how Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke of the Kurds in 2018.

“They’ve been fighting for 300 years that we know of, 300 years.”

Trump frequently and misleadingly frames this as a “hundreds of years” conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. There has been a hundred-year effort to create a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with the Kurds frequently manipulated by great powers seeking to flex their muscles against a particular nation, such as Iraq. The United States, for instance, spent $16 million promoting a rebellion in Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1970’s, only to step aside when the Shah of Iran (then a U.S. ally) decided to cut a border deal in 1975 with Iraq. “There is confusion and dismay among our people and force,” the Kurdish leadership cabled the CIA. “Our people’s fate in unprecedented danger. Complete destruction hanging over our head. No explanation for all of this.”

“The whistleblower gave a false account. Now we have to say, well, do we have to protect somebody that gave a false account?”

Trump says this repeatedly — he’s already earned a Bottomless Pinocchio — but it’s simply not true. Our line-by-line look at the whistleblower complaint, compared to the rough transcript of the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other information, shows that it was fairly accurate.

“So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it’s possibly Schiff. He and his staff, or his staff or a whole group.”

This is ridiculous speculation. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) is not the informant. The whistleblower complaint was investigated by the inspector general for the intelligence community, found to be credible and then submitted to Congress.

“I gave away my salary. It’s, I guess, close to $450,000. I give it away. Nobody ever said, ‘He gives away his salary.’ Now it comes up because of this. But I give away my presidential salary. They say that no other president has done it. … They actually say that George Washington may — may have been the only other president to do — but see whether or not Obama gave up his salary.”

The president’s annual salary is currently $400,000 — and Trump is the third president to give away his salary. Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy, both very wealthy at the time, gave their salaries to charity. Barack Obama gave about $1.1 million to charity during the eight years he was president, according to a Forbes analysis. His presidential salary during that period was $3.1 million, though he made millions more from book sales.

“Best location, right next to the airport, Miami International, one of the biggest airports in the world. Some people say it’s the biggest, but one of the biggest airports in the world.”

Trump defended his now-abandoned decision to hold the Group of Seven summit at the Trump National Doral resort, but he needs to get his airport rankings straight. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is No. 1 in the world by passenger volume, with more than 100 million passengers, but Miami does not even rank in the top 20. In 2017, it ranked 40th, according to the Airports Council International.

“Doral was setting records when I bought it, because I owned it for a period of time. Setting records. It was going to — there was nothing like it. It was making a fortune. And then what happened? I announce I’m going to run for office, right? And all of a — and I say we got to build a wall, we got to have borders, we’ve got to have this, we’ve got to have that. All of a sudden, people — some people didn’t like it. They thought the rhetoric was too tough. And it went from doing great to doing fine. It does very nicely now. It’s actually coming back, I understand, very strongly. But Doral was setting records.”

Trump’s Doral resort has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand since he became president. Trump bought it in 2012 and spent several years renovating it, so it’s possible 2015 was the resort’s best year. There is no evidence as yet that it is coming back “very strongly.”

“I don’t know if you know George Washington, he ran his business simultaneously while he was president. … George Washington, they say, had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk.”

We will leave it to readers to decide if the practices at the nation’s founding are relevant today. Washington was one of the nation’s largest landowners when he became president, though they were of dubious value, and he was a shareholder in the Patowmack Co., which aimed to build canals that would have given his land more value. Some historians have been critical — one wrote that Washington “betrayed private trusts in pursuit of private gain” — but our colleague Joel Achenbach, in his 2005 book, “The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West,” concluded: “There is remarkably little tarnish to be mined in the Washington archive. We can be confident that his reputation as an honest man is not the product of a historical whitewash.”

Achenbach told The Fact Checker: “My thinking is that he did remotely run Mount Vernon as a going concern during his presidency, via letters to his farm manager, but it was a completely different era. Back then he had to borrow cash just to make the trip to get inaugurated.”

“Hey, Obama made a deal for a book. Is that running a business? I’m sure he didn’t even discuss it while he was president, yeah. He has a deal with Netflix. When did they start talking about that? That’s only, you know, a couple of examples.”

In defending the Doral deal, Trump mentions deals that Obama arranged after he left office, speculating without evidence that Obama started negotiating them when he was president.

“I don’t think you people, with this phony emoluments clause — and by the way, I would say that it’s cost me anywhere from $2 billion to $5 billion to be president — and that’s okay — between what I lose and what I could have made.”

The emoluments clause is not phony; it’s right in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8): “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Trump’s net worth is valued at $3 billion, so it’s difficult to see how being president could cost him even more than his net worth. Bloomberg News recently estimated that his net worth grew 5 percent in 2018, following two years of declines, bringing it back to the level calculated in 2016. Forbes calculated that as of September, his net worth is $3.1 billion.

“You could end up in a war. President Obama told me that. He said, ‘The biggest problem, I don’t know how to solve it.’ He told me he doesn’t know how to solve it. I said, ‘Did you ever call him?’ ‘No.’ Actually, he tried 11 times, but the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his calls, okay? Lack of respect. But he takes my call.”

We gave this claim Four Pinocchios in July. There is absolutely no evidence that Obama tried to call North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, let alone meet him.

“I see this guy, Congressman Al Green, say, ‘We have to impeach him, otherwise he’s going to win the election.’ What’s that all about? But that’s exactly what they’re saying. ‘We have to impeach him, because otherwise he’s going to win.’ I’m going to win the election.”

One problem with this complaint: Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) says he never said that. The Texas congressman noted that on Twitter, writing, “It’s no surprise that @realDonaldTrump, who promoted birther conspiracies about President Obama, who claimed there were nice people among the bigots and racists in Charlottesville, and who consistently engages in perfidy, would tweet another untruth. I never said that.”

“They’re interviewing ambassadors who I’d never heard of. I don’t know who these people are. I’ve never heard of them.”

This is false. Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and a big donor to Trump’s inauguration, testified to Congress on Oct. 17 that Trump in an Oval Office meeting on May 23 directed him, special envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to talk to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani about Ukraine issues.

“We asked the White House to arrange a working phone call from President Trump and a working Oval Office visit,” Sondland said. “However, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.”

The Worst Day in Earth’s History Contains an Ominous Warning

An artist's depiction of the K-T impact, which wiped out all nonavian dinosaurs.
NASA / REUTERS
The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula.

You may know the story. The asteroid—which arrived, probably, in June or July—immediately drilled a 20-mile hole into the planet’s surface, vaporizing bedrock and spewing it halfway to the moon. The planet shuddered with magnitude-12 earthquakes, loosing tsunamis across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the ejected debris condensed in orbit and plunged back to Earth as searing spheres of molten glass, which torched the land and turned forests into firestorms. Other debris remained high in space, where it blocked the sun’s rays and began to chill the surface of the planet.

By the time it was over, about 75 percent of all species on Earth had died, including all nonavian dinosaurs. The event, which ended the Cretaceous Period and began the Tertiary Period, is named the K-T extinction.

Since 1980, when the K-T impact hypothesis was first proposed, the Day the Dinosaurs Died has attained almost mythic significance. But questions remain about the theory. None of the Earth’s other big mass extinctions were caused by an asteroid impact. Why did this one end the 180-million-year reign of the dinosaurs?

A new paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a possible answer: The impact changed the chemical content of the ocean, rendering seawater more acidic and inhospitable to the tiny plankton that form the base of the marine food chain. Combined with the other effects of the asteroid—darkened skies and a snap of global cooling—this ecologic disruption doomed much of life on Earth.The finding may be satisfying for asteroid fans, but it is an ominous one. Ocean acidification, a hallmark of the planet’s previous mass extinctions, is happening again today.

How does an asteroid prompt an extinction? It chooses the right location. The Yucatán Peninsula was an excellent one, says Pincelli Hull, an author of the paper and a geology professor at Yale. The peninsula is essentially an “old buried reef,” she told me, an accumulation of dead coral and other sea life that is now more than a mile thick. When the asteroid hit, untold megatons of that old organic material—rich in nitrogen and sulfur—instantly became dust and shot up into the atmosphere.

Soon it began to fall back down, now as nitric oxide and sulfuric acid. “It was raining brimstone and acid from the sky,” Hull said. The air would have reeked of acrid smog and burnt matches. The acid accumulated in the oceans, wearing away the shells of the small, delicate plankton that serve as the basis of the marine food chain. Within a few centuries of the impact, ocean acidity had jumped by at least 0.3 pH units.

This spike in ocean acidification may have lasted for less than 1,000 years. But even that pulse “was long enough to kill off entire ecosystems for sure,” Hull said. Ocean acidification also likely worsened other sweeping environmental changes wrought by the impact, such as the years-long darkness caused by orbiting debris and ash from the global wildfires.

With this new finding, it now appears that all three of the worst mass extinctions in Earth’s history featured huge spasms of ocean acidification. They include the K-T extinction; the End-Triassic Extinction, when volcanoes in New Jersey killed 75 percent of all species; and the dread End-Permian Event, the worst extinction in the history of the planet, which killed roughly 85 percent of all species and nearly sterilized the oceans. Scientists call that event “the Great Dying.”

And that pattern is worrying, because the oceans are acidifying again today. Carbon dioxide—the same air pollutant that causes global warming—also dissolves in the oceans and increases the acidity of seawater. Since the late 1980s, the planet’s oceans have become about 0.02 pH units more acidic every decade, according to a report last month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More than a fifth of all modern carbon pollution has already dissolved into the oceans, the report also found.

The researchers collected more than 7,000 of these tiny fossils—each half the size of a grain of sand—from Geulhemmerberg Cave in the Netherlands, the only place on Earth that contains fossils from the oceans in the decades and centuries after the K-T impact. (Michael J. Henehan / PNAS)

 

Modern acidification is not yet at the same magnitude as the K-T pulse. It’s “moving toward that scale, but it’s not quite there yet,” Hull said. What unites our world and the K-T period, she said, is that a number of environmental catastrophes can overlap with ocean acidification to produce a major upheaval.

“You should think of [ocean acidification] as the straw that broke the camel’s back” during the K-T extinction, she said. “It’s dark, it’s really cold after the impact—and the ocean has acidified.”Chris Lowery, who studies the oceans of the past at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that the paper represents “a big leap” in our understanding of the extinction. “We’ve known for a while that there was some amount of ocean acidification due to the Chicxulub impact, but this is the first time that the acidification has actually been quantified,” he said in an email, referring to the town in the Yucatán Peninsula for which the impact crater is named.

While paleontologists have long hypothesized about how an asteroid impact could produce the K-T extinction, this is some of the first evidence that supports those mechanisms, he added. And while the asteroid struck Mexico, the crucial evidence for this study came from a cave in the Netherlands that preserves fossils from the oceans in the decades or centuries immediately after the impact. Michael Henehan, a scientist who was then a postdoc in Hull’s lab, collected more than 7,000 tiny plankton fossils from the cave—each half the size of a grain of sand—and crushed them to analyze their chemical signatures.

“It was a herculean effort to get these measurements,” Hull said. “There’s just one place in the world where we think these fossil preserved.” (Henehan is now a professor at the German Research Centre for Geosciences.)

Two years ago, another study found the first geological evidence of global cooling, another proposed mechanism, following the impact.

Notably, the study’s findings do not support the idea that enormous eruptions from volcanoes in modern-day India, called the Deccan Traps, prompted the surge in ocean acidification and resulting mass extinction. That hypothesis has a small number of ardent advocates, among them Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton who was the subject of a profile in this magazine last year.

But “this study pretty definitively shows that those eruptions had no effect on ocean chemistry,” Lowery said. In an email, Keller disputed the paper’s dating of the impact, arguing the asteroid actually struck Earth “over 100,000 years” prior to the extinction’s start.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers climate change and technology.