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Dear Congress – Stop Wasting Time With Impeaching Trump – End His Famine In Yemen
The pompous U.S. Secretary of State informed Congress that he will designate the Ansarallah movement in Yemen as Foreign Terrorist Organization. As Ansarallah, also known as the Houthi, is ruling over some 80% of Yemen's population such a designation will make aid deliveries to those people impossible:
The designation is to take effect on President Donald Trump’s last full day in office, a day before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Several aid groups pleaded on Monday for Biden to immediately reverse the designation. The Biden transition team has not yet expressed his intentions.
“Acting on day one cannot only be a figure of speech,” Oxfam America’s Humanitarian Policy Lead Scott Paul said. “Lives hang in the balance.”
Six years of war between a U.S.-backed Arab coalition and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have been catastrophic for Yemen. Most of its 30 million people rely on international aid to survive. The U.N. says 13.5 million Yemenis already face acute food insecurity, a figure that could rise to 16 million by June.
The threat of the designation has immediate consequences:
Yemen Solidarity Council @YSCouncil – 5:58 UTC · 11 Jan 2021
We are ceasing all operations in the United States for the time being, as well as putting a temporary halt to our intended plans for humanitarian fundraising.
Let it be known that the Trump Administration just criminalized foreign humanitarian aid to #Yemen.
The famine in Yemen is already acute:
[Seven-year-old] Faid weighs only 7 kg (just over 15 lb) and his tiny, fragile frame takes up barely a quarter of a folded hospital blanket. His family had to travel from Al-Jawf, 170 km (105 miles) north of Sanaa, through checkpoints and damaged roads, to get him there.
Unable to afford Faid’s medication or treatment, the family relies on donations to get him treated. Mohammed says malnutrition cases are on the rise and impoverished parents are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers or international aid to get their children treated.
Missing in almost all reports about the ghastly State Department act is the fact that Congress can easily prevent that the terrorist designation becomes reality. The State Department's designation of the Houthi comes under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Paragraph 219 (8 USC 1189) a.3.B.ii of the law says:
Any designation under this subsection shall cease to have effect upon an Act of Congress disapproving such designation.
In April 2019 Congress voted to end all U.S. support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen:
The House voted 247 to 175 to send the resolution to the president’s desk, where it is likely to be met with a veto. Sixteen Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats in the effort. The Senate passed the resolution last month, with seven Republicans voting in favor of it.
It is likely that a similar majority could be found now to stop the designation of Ansarallah. To immediately do this would only need some initiative from Congress leaders.
Unfortunately those leaders are currently busy with nonsensical stuff:
As the House prepares for impeachment, President Donald Trump faces a single charge — “incitement of insurrection” — over the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a draft of the articles obtained by The Associated Press.
Lawmakers are set to introduce the legislation Monday, with voting mid-week. Pelosi’s leadership team also will seek a quick vote on a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence and Cabinet officials to invoke the 25th Amendment.
The four-page impeachment bill draws from Trump’s own false statements about his election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden; his pressure on state officials in Georgia to “find” him more votes; and his White House rally ahead of the Capitol siege, in which he encouraged thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” before they stormed the building on Wednesday.
…
On impeachment, House Democrats would likely delay for 100 days sending articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial, to allow Biden to focus on other priorities.
The 'insurrection' (as noted in the 14th Amendment, Section 3) apparently relates to last Wednesday's short and seemingly unplanned intrusion into the Capitol building by some Trump supporters. But that was more pantomime or slapstick action than a serious operation against the state.
It followed after a Trump rally speech which, yes, spoke of a 'fight' but only in the sense that any other political rally is calling on supporters to fight for the cause. In the context of Trump's other remarks at the rally it becomes obvious that was a purely rhetorical not literal use of that word:
After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
To construe an 'incitement of insurrection' out of request to people to make 'peacefully' and 'patriotically' their 'voices heard' is pure nonsense. There is no passage in his speech that can be construed as the opposite. There is no call to storm the building or to tackle the police.
This second attempt to impeach Trump is purely for show. It would have little real world consequences. Trump will leave his office nine days from now and Biden will move in. This impeachment is a political stunt which will only increase the rift within the U.S. electorate.
Congress should stop wasting its time with such nonsense. It should immediately take action to prevent the State Department's terrorist designation of Ansarallah from coming into force. That move would allow aid flow to continue and it would prevent a worsening of the famine
The Capitol building incursion needs further investigation. Even while there was a lot of chatter in open source media that some of the Trump supporters might get rowdy, there was astonishingly little done to prevent them from causing trouble. There are questions:
Why did the Mayor of Washington DC explicitly reject federal help before the Trump rally happened?
Mayor Muriel Bowser @MayorBowser – 18:53 UTC · Jan 5, 2021
To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway.
Why was Capitol Police chief Steven Sund told to not call for timely backup by the National Guard?
In an interview with The Washington Post, Sund said he had asked House and Senate security officials ahead of time for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup. But he said he was turned down.
“If we would have had the National Guard we could have held them at bay longer, until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,” he told the Post. He said his superiors had been uncomfortable with the “optics” of formally declaring an emergency ahead of Wednesday’s demonstration.
There was also a well timed diversion of police forces with a pipe bomb placed near the Republican National Committee headquarter. This delayed the arrival of more police forces at the Capitol:
“There was definitely a higher sense of urgency” on police radio traffic as rioters breached the east side of the Capitol, said Ashan M. Benedict, the head of the Washington field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who was working with the Capitol Police at the nearby Republican Party headquarters, where a pipe bomb was found.
Mr. Benedict connected with a commander of the Capitol Police SWAT team who was inside the complex, who acknowledged that they needed immediate help but said he needed a moment to arrange the official request.
A.T.F. and F.B.I. teams were soon headed to the Capitol.
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When Mr. Benedict and his deputy finally got into the building, it was madness, he recalled.
Who placed that diversion?
And who are the people who let all this happen?
@ d dan | Jan 11 2021 20:43 utc | 15
“if there is a way to prevent Trump from running permanently, it might be a worthy effort though.”
There are two ways —
18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious Conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
//
14th Amendment, Section 3. of the Constitution of the United States
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
NOTE: No person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
He could end up in prison for a long, long time, depending upon how many counts the prosecution would care to charge him with.
Posted by: AntiSpin | Jan 11 2021 23:52 utc | 44
DFC@79 asks how a big, diverse city like Detroit could be so one-sidedly for Biden. The answer of course is that Detroit is not diverse. It has been deliberately hollowed out so that it is largely black. The Detroit metropolitan area is diverse, but not Detroit proper. This is done so that funding for schools and amenities can be reserved largely for higher income people in the outer area (suburbs, exurbs, etc.) The poorer people are largely black but there’s no reason in the world for genuinely poor people to love Trump, any more than there was for genuinely poor people to love Clinton in 2016. So, no, the lopsided vote is *not* prima facie evidence of fraud, because Detroit is lopsided, by design. Redbaiting nonsense (from William Gruff?) is just more lying, with a soupcon of racist innuendo.
NoOneYouKnow@36 offers a link to the most significant allegations of fraud. A cursory inspection proves that there is zero critical analysis of what constitutes “significant” by the compiler of the list or, worst, by the people who substitute quantity of allegation for significance. Trying to snow people with a blizzard makes everything look suspicious. To contaminate the elections the allegations have to add up to a false majority and too many of these don’t. Like a middle school kid raking up every grievance they can think of in a quarrel with another kid, all it really testifies to is, the anger of the list maker.
For instance, one item is about how two men were charged with voter fraud. I’m sorry but no one with any judgment thinks people being caught proves thousands more didn’t get caught.
Adding proven instances of errors doesn’t prove fraud. But what it does prove is that Republicans had every opportunity to catch errors or fraud, whichever they may be. None of these instances serves as evidence, much less proof, that Republicans were mystifyingly incompetent to catch other instances of error or fraud, whichever they may be. Adding this stuff is just meant to insinuate a pattern of fraud. Insinuation is not an argument. Worse, the implied pattern imagines a national actor, *THE* Democratic Party. (Or should that be Democrat Party, to tickle the fancy of partisan hacks?) Elections are state affairs, not national. Insofar as there is national coordination of state law and policy, it is largely Republican, via wealthy-donor funded organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has had things to promote regarding election laws, if I remember rightly.
One alleged witness thought a set of ballots were suspiciously “pristine” and the texture of the paper was different. Ballots are not money with stringent quality control on the reams of paper being printed on. Quite aside from the intrinsic difficulty of judging “pristine” the ballots that were falsified would have been handled by the falsifiers as well as whoever they collected them from, leading one to think that overall the suspicious ballots would be suspiciously *non*pristine.
The assumption that signatures can be matched correctly and easily is false, completely false. Many, many people have poor handwriting. Surreptitiously requiring that voters must have perfect handwriting is as unfair as it is stupid for any purpose other than vote suppression. And, vote suppression is a kind of vote fraud. The further assumption that unless signature matching is performed then it’s voter fraud is partisan illogic, tendentious rhetoric instead of sound reason.
Allegations like the security camera showing “men” pulling out and counting ballots without “legal” observers superficially seem so cut-and-dried till you realize the absence of names. Not the names of the supposed perpetrators of course, but the name of the building where this occurred, the precinct or county or state house, and most of all the names of the “legal” observers indignant at not being there. At this point, we can’t even rule out whether this is a deliberate hoax. Or if the “legal observers” who weren’t there were…Democrats! Where there’s smoke, there’s fire? Except, it may just be someone blowing smoke in your eyes. Smoke bombs are a real tactic in warfare and this is true in partisan combat too.
One allegation that does seem to make a serious difference is about the alleged number of ballots sent out in Pennsylvania and received. There’s just one problem, which is that this was actually in the courts, where Republican lawyers and Republican judges were testing this. But there’s another problem, which is that it is not necessary that the ballots sent out be counted. What needs to be counted is the number of mail and in person votes, a count double checked against voter registration.
The incident where a precinct initially reported both in person and absentee ballots together, thereby double counting the absentee, illustrates how that’s what’s important. Unfortunately for the Trumpers, the discovery of this problem is not evidence that more people got away with it. It’s evidence that the bipartisan counting—and counting is bipartisan!—actually leads to corrections. The further assumption that it must have been purposeful is probably projection.
The story about more than a thousand mail-in ballots disguising box numbers as Apt. or Unit sounds terrible until you remember how many forms have Apt/Unit printed above the blank for a mailing address. As to whether a state law taking the franchise from someone who doesn’t have a stable domicile is just, I leave it to others to decide, possibly a court, which may feel that putting a mailing address to receive a mail ballot is common sense, not proof of fraud. Assuming every irregularity is deliberate fraud is wrong, although it may be what’s called “projection.”
Vote suppression is vote fraud, by the way. In my precinct the Republican Secretary of State had purged voter rolls so that people who hadn’t voted in a while couldn’t vote (I saw them turned away, personally.) Additionally, a very cumbersome paper balloting system was put in which slowed voting greatly, and the number of voting machines was cut in half, from four to two. (My precinct amazingly enough had voted for Clinton in 2016.) I still have no idea whether the Republican Secretary of State counted my vote for “Other.” (Hawkins? I’m not quite sure.) Republicans are possibly the ones guilty of massive vote fraud, which would explain the massive difference between polling (including exit polls as I understand it,) and the supposed Republican showing.
The computer printouts that allegedly show suspicious increments of votes of 4 800 votes for Biden are very confusing, as I don’t see literal increments of 4 800 votes. The last two digits of Biden totals would remain the same and they aren’t exactly 4 800 unless I’m somehow looking in the wrong part completely. If the computer were reporting new vote totals after every additional count of, say, 5 000 votes, though in returns from pro-Biden areas or venues (like mail in ballots,) such a hypothesized irregularity is not so strange.
Statistics is marvelous, but it’s not easy. This illustrates a key point, which is that no evidence is good until it’s been tested, not just against your gut feeling of what should be, or even against random chance. Evidence has to be tested against alternative hypotheses to the cause. You do not pile up an indiscriminate pile of allegations and assume they’re “evidence” of massive fraud because low standards accumulated a long list. The item about how a small error in one precinct *extrapolated* statewide would produce 14 000 votes for Trump versus the 10 000 vote margin of victory for Biden. This is like an excerpt from the old statistics book “How to Lie with Statistics” by Huff. There has to be a reason to extrapolate a 37 vote margin in one precinct statewide, such as evidence that the precinct is perfectly representative of all state precincts. When you state the requirement, the transparent dishonesty of the argument is, ironically, apparent.
The entire presumption that mail-in ballots should have the same proportion of Trump to Biden votes is exactly the same flagrant dishonesty.
And one more time, courts with Republican lawyers and Republican judges had an opportunity to support the serious allegations. All claims of massive voter fraud have a serious obstacle to hurdle, namely, why Republicans conspired to assist massive voter fraud. I think the Republicans did promote voter fraud in the form of vote suppression. (Via “legal,” but corrupt means, to be as fair as possible.) Extraordinary claims require real evidence. This laundry list simply does not pass muster.
I have no doubt wasted my time. But if people were able to understand, they need to understand that a random list a la Sharyl Atkisson is nothing but cover.
Pretending it is genuine reason is to solidarize with the fascist lust for murder.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Jan 12 2021 15:26 utc | 79
karlof1 @ 7, excellent presentation and Naomi Prins makes a compelling comparison. If still there is any doubt in the populace that we are on the edge of a precipice, her explanation of the original ‘War of the Worlds’ scenario makes that very plain:
“…
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Published on
Monday, January 11, 2021
by TomDispatch
The Martians of Wall Street Have Invaded
As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever.
byNomi Prins
19 Comments
As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever. (Photo: Scott Beale on Flickr)
Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment. (Photo: Scott Beale on Flickr)
Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. As it happens, I’m thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins.
We all know, of course, that we’re living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people have lost their jobs, a portion of which will never return; that the poorest among us, who can withstand such acute economic hardship the least, have been slammed the hardest; and that the global economy has been kneecapped, thanks to a battery of lockdowns, shutdowns, restrictions of various sorts, and health-related concerns. More sobering than all of this: more than 360,000 Americans (and counting) have already lost their lives as a result of Covid-19 with, according to public health experts, far more to come.
And yet, as if in some galaxy far, far away, there also turns out to be another, so much more upbeat side to this equation. As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever.
Meanwhile, again in the thoroughly cheery news column, banks in 2021 will be able to resume their march toward billions of dollars in share buybacks, courtesy of the Federal Reserve opting to support such a bank-and-stock-market stimulus. The Fed’s green light for this activity on December 18th will allow mega-banks to return to those share buybacks (which constitute 70% of the capital payout that they provide shareholders). In June 2020, the Fed had banned the practice ostensibly to help them better navigate risks caused by the pandemic.
Those very financial institutions can now pour money into purchasing their own stocks again rather than, say, into loans to struggling small businesses endangered by pandemic-instigated economic disaster. As soon as Wall Street got the good news from the Fed as 2020 ended, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, wasted no time in announcing its intent to buy a staggering $30 billion of its own shares in the new year. And as if by magic, those shares leapt 5% that very day. Other mega-banks followed suit, as did their share prices.
The more that individuals, rather than corporations, shoulder the burden of tax revenues, the greater the inherent inequality in society.
Now, for reasons you’ll soon understand, take a little trip back in history with me to the eve of Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre dramatized his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 sci-fi-meets-dystopia-meets-imperialism novel, The War of the Worlds, on the radio. As Martians “invaded” New Jersey (it had been London in the novel) with mayhem in mind, panic evidently ensued among some radio listeners who thought they were hearing perfectly real reports about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. Later accounts suggest that the media blew that reaction out of proportion (“fake news,” 1938-style?), yet people who tuned in late and missed the set-up about the fictitious nature of the program did indeed panic.
And it’s not hard to understand why they might have done so at that moment. There had already been surprises galore. The world, after all, had barely recovered from the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. It was also still reeling from the fiery Hindenburg disaster of 1937 in which a German airship blew up in New Jersey, as well as from the escalation of tensions and hostilities in both Asia and Europe that would lead to World War II. Perhaps people already equated or conflated the Martian invasion on the radio with fantasies about a potential German invasion of this country. In some papers, after all, reports on the reaction to Welles’s performance were set right next to news of war clouds brewing in Europe and Asia. With or without Welles, people were on edge.
Whatever the case, fear has been both a great motivator and an anxiety provoker when it comes to the media, whether in 1938 or today. At the moment, the focus is on economic and health-related fears in all-too-ample supply. It is also on the disconnect that exists between the real economic world that most of us live in and turbo-boosted stock markets. These distorted markets are the result of wealth inequality that once would have been unimaginable in this country. In a way, economically speaking, you might say that today we’re suffering the equivalent of an invasion from Mars.
From the Financial Crisis to the Pandemic
It’s not hard these days to imagine the chaos people would feel if their lives or livelihoods were threatened by an external, uncontrollable force like those Martians. After all, we’re in a pandemic age in which the gaps between the rich, the poor, and the middle class are being reinforced in endlessly stunning ways, a world in which some people have the means to remain remarkably safe, secure, and alive, while others have no means at all.
Covid-19 is not, of course, from Mars or sent by aliens, but in terms of its impact, it’s as if it were. And the pandemic is, in the end, only exacerbating, sometimes in radical ways, problems that already were bad enough, particularly economic inequality.
Remember that, long before Covid-19 hit, the financial crisis of 2008 was met by a multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. At the same time, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, while purchasing U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds from the very banks that had sparked the disaster. Its own assets then rose from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion between August 2007 and August 2015. On the other hand, the U.S. economy never quite reached a growth level of, on average, more than 2% annually in the years after that near collapse, even as the stock market regained all its losses and so much more. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, aided by an ultra-loose monetary policy, steadily rose from a financial-crisis low of 6,926 on March 5, 2009 to 27,090 by March 4, 2020, which was when Covid-19 briefly trashed its rally.
However, within a month of the market dip that followed widespread shutdowns, its climb was refortified by similar but larger maneuvers, as Federal Reserve policy was once again deployed to save the rich under the auspices of saving the economy. Rally 2.0 took the Dow to a new record of 30,606.48 as 2020 closed.
On the other side of reality, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to recent Federal Reserve reports, the U.S. wealth gap continued to widen dramatically as economic inequality increased yet again in 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. That’s because the health and economic devastation it inflicted affected low-wage service workers, low-income earners, and people of color so much more than the upper-middle class and elite upper class.
Meanwhile, as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans owned more than 88% of the outstanding shares of companies and mutual funds in the U.S. The top 1% also controlled more than 88 times the wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. Simply put, the less you had, the less you could afford to lose any of it. Indeed, the combined net worth of the top 1% of Americans was $34.2 trillion (about one-third of all U.S. household wealth), while the total for the bottom half was $2.1 trillion (or 1.9% of that wealth).
And yet, American billionaires scored monumentally during the pandemic, due particularly to their lofty position in the stock market. The planet’s 2,200 or so billionaires got wealthier by $1.9 trillion in 2020 alone and were worth about $11.4 trillion in mid-December 2020 (up from $9.5 trillion a year earlier). Twenty-first-century tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos raked it in specifically because of all the money pouring into shares of their stock. Even bipartisan congressional stimulus measures meant for necessary relief turned into a chance to elevate fortunes at the highest echelons of society.
If you want to grasp inequality in the pandemic moment, consider this: while the market soared, more than 25.5 million Americans were the recipients of federal unemployment benefits. The S&P 500 stock market index added a total of $14 trillion in market value in 2020. In essentially another universe, the number of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and didn’t regain them was about 10 million. And that figure doesn’t even count people who can’t go to work because they have to take care of others, their workplace is restricted, or they’re home-schooling their kids.
The Martians and the Inequality Gap
In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells evokes a species—humanity—rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century.
The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of “robber barons.” Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower. It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned…”
Posted by: juliania | Jan 12 2021 17:35 utc | 87
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