Socialism Curiously Trumps Fascism in U.S. Political Threat Reporting

On March 19, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

“I Have the Tough People”

Recently Donald Trump, the orange mother of all assholes, said this in an interview with the proto-fascistic alt-right Website Breitbart News:

“You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump–I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Don Veto Trumpleone was saying in not-so veiled ways that efforts to impeach or un-elect him will be met with white police- and military-state violence and carnage from right wing-thugs.  If “the Left” (as FOX News and the Republicans absurdly describe everyone to the portside of Mitch McConnell) tries to remove him from office through constitutional means, Trump was boasting, then forces of repression and right-wing aggression will rightly come to his defense

This warning was consistent with Trump’s toxic history of promoting violence against his political enemies.  It matches his creepy embrace of authoritarian rulers around the world and his longstanding suggestion that any effort to bring an end his presence in the White House would be illegitimate. From the beginning of his presidency, Trump has been using the hoax of immigrant voter fraud to set up a cancellation of the 2020 election or a refusal to recognize its results.

His ugly Ameikaner base will back any such moves..  More than half (52%) of Americans who identify as or lean Republican would support postponing the 2020 election “to ensure that only eligible citizens could vote if it was proposed by President Trump.”  (The mendacious neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton wasn’t all wrong when she called the president’s backers “a basket of deplorables.”)

Trump’s “tough people” comment reflected the authoritarian mindset of a wannabe fascist strongman. Trump was only half-joking when he said the United States should consider making the presidency an appointment “for life” — and when he said this about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: “He is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

“Believe the autocrat,” the Russian-American journalist and dissident Masha Gessen has warned: “He means what he says.”

In some cases, at least, the pathological liar Trump should be believed.

Left Threat Inflation

Who are all the badass lefties who “play it tough,” in Trump’s words? Outside of some dicey Antifa and radical skinhead types, it’s a tiny group – certainly nothing compared to the assault weapon-wielding right-wing militias and other armed and brutish white-nationalists who thrill to Trump’s call to Make America White Again.

Fascism, however, requires the notion that the virtuous and betrayed white Nation is besieged by a big dangerous Left that must be put down by steely-eyed patriots ready to defend the “homeland” by any means necessary. Inflation of the “radical left” threat is a key part of the fascist playbook. It’s why nobody should laugh when they hear Republicans and right-wing media personalities habitually refer to the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party as “socialist,” “radical,” and “leftist.”

Avoiding the F-Word, Running with the S-Word

I watched a panel of experts discuss Trump’s “play it tough” statement on CNN. A dark-haired female commentator suggested that Trump’s comments were the unhinged ramblings of a big dummy drunk on power. A sharp fellow with a stylish white beard called the president’s remarks authoritarian and dangerous.  A clean-shaven Republican hack found Trump’s comments mild and reasonable.

Neither CNN host Don Lemon nor any of his guests could bring themselves to say the F-word, fascism, in relation to Trump’s latest arch-authoritarian outrage.  Too bad. As I have shown across at least twelve commentaries published in the last three years [1], numerous dreadful strands have intertwined to knit Trumpism into a noxious cloth of creeping 21^stcentury-style and  neoliberal-era fascism.  One such strand is Trump’s totalitarian’s recurrent encouragement of extra-legal political violence against his opponents and critics.

Curiously enough, talking heads who can’t properly mouth the F-word when it comes to Trump and his backers love to say the S-word (socialism) when it comes to the Democrats. They are happy to inaccurately call Bernie Sanders’ neo-New Deal progressive populism “socialism” – and to promote the false and perhaps unwittingly fascism-fueling notion that socialism is taking over the Democratic Party.

These narratives are misleading. Yes, Sanders occasionally dons the socialist label. He’s also the Democratic presidential contender to have enjoyed the most impressive 2020 rollout so far.

Another high-profile self-declared socialist, the Republican and FOX News obsession Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), now holds a seat in the U.S. House.

Most remarkably of all, perhaps, 57 percent of the Democratic Party’s voters now say they prefer socialism to capitalism.

But the fact that Sanders calls himself a socialist doesn’t mean he really is one any more than the fact that Trump doesn’t call himself a fascist means the president isn’t a fascist [2]. While Trump wraps his stealth fascism in the flag of American Freedom, Bernie (a social democrat at leftmost) bends over backwards to label his proposals “not radical.”  He doesn’t call for workers to seize control of the means of production, distribution, communication, and investment. He doesn’t advocate the dismantlement of the Pentagon System or the nationalization of the leading financial institutions.

As in 2015 and 2016, Bernie is promising in advance to support the corporate-Democratic candidate, whoever it may be, against the Republican Party. He channels popular energies into the bourgeois masters’ narrow and strictly time-staggered election cycle, focusing on who’s sitting in the White House instead of the more meaningful and radical politics of who’s sitting in the streets, factories, offices, schools, and town halls. He’s no Eugene Debs or Bill Haywood.

At the same time, the Sanders tendency is nowhere close to taking over the Democratic Party. AOC is the only one of the House’s 435 members to identify as a socialist. Sanders is the only one of 100 U.S. Senators to sometimes do the same. The Blue Wave that brought a Democratic majority to the House of Representatives this year was mainly a corporate-Democratic centrist wave, not a lefty-progressive one. That tends to get lost in the flurry of wildly disproportionate attention the media has given to AOC and other “controversial” female and nonwhite progressive House newcomers like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Thalib.

Along with their many friends at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post,  N”P”R, “P”BS, Politico, The Hill, and the Daily Beast,  the “pragmatic” (corporate-neoliberal) wing of the Democratic Party smears progressive Democrats’ calls for decent policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as “half-baked,” “fantastic,” “unrealistic,” and “pie-in-the-sky” – and as guaranteed to help Trump win a second term.

Never mind that these “radical socialist” proposals have majority popular support and that a Green New Deal is now an existential necessity for the species.  Never mind that Sanders would have defeated Trump running on these proposals in 2016.  Or that Sanders is the candidate most capable of mobilizing enough contested state voters to defeat the Great God Trump in 2020.

And never mind that socialism would be the embodiment of democracy, not a threat to popular self-rule – or that “capitalist democracy” means no real democracy at all.

The Democratic Party isn’t about social and economic justice, democracy, popular self-governance, or ecological survival.  It isn’t even mainly about winning elections.  It’s about serving and colluding with corporate sponsors and climbing the neoliberal global-capitalist oligarchy (think Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). Like Sinclair Lewis’ imagined American fascists in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here (see Endnote 2 below), it is no less dedicated than its Republican counterpart to “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.”

Dollar Democrats Prefer Fascism to Socialism

Meanwhile, by contrast with the “threat” posed by “socialism,” the U.S. presidency is now held by a white-nationalist, arch-authoritarian gangster who is at the very least an aspiring fascist leader atop a significantly fascist mass base. Trump’s supporters comprise roughly a third of the U.S. electorate but enjoy wildly outsized political voice thanks to the over-representation of red/Republican districts in the absurdly archaic and undemocratic U.S. system of Congressional apportionment indirect presidential (s)election.

Fascists often get into power peacefully, via the fake-democratic bourgeois electoral process.  They do so thanks to that process’s cringing captivity to concentrated wealth and to the transparent inauthenticity of corporate-bought liberal politicians’ claims to represent ordinary working people and the common good (e.g. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, and Joe Biden).

Fascists stay in power with the help of bourgeois (neo-) “liberals” who inflate the supposedly terrible danger allegedly posed by purported socialism. Listen to the fevered fears of advertising executive and MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch (net worth $200 million). “I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being,” Deutsch recently told MSDNC morning host Joe Scarborough, “but a socialist candidate [Bernie Sanders] is more dangerous to this company, country, as far as the strength and well-being of the country, than Donald Trump.  I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being…I will be so distraught to the point that that could even come out of my mouth, if we have a socialist [presidential candidate or president] because that will take our country so down, and we are not Denmark.  I love Denmark, but that’s not who we are. And if you love who we are and all the great things that still have to have binders put on the side. Please step away from the socialism.” The “liberal” Deutsch, who has likened Trump voters (with no small justice) to Nazis, voiced his readiness to vote for the fascist bigot Trump over anyone who tries to make America more like the happy, social-democratic nation Denmark.

But, of course.  As I’ve been saying for years, the dismal dollar-drenched corporate Democrats prefer losing to the right, even a creeping fascist white-nationalist right, over losing to the left, even the explicitly non-radical social-democratic left in their own party.

That’s why MSDNC and CNN’s liberal chatterboxes go on and on about how “the Democrats have a socialism problem” but continue to step lightly (more than two years into a creeping fascist presidency) around the Republicans’ much more real and genuinely threatening fascism problem.

By falsely inflating the supposed radical menace of “socialism,” corporate neo-“liberal” media personalities help feed the fascist peril they claim to abhor and can’t name.

Gird Your Loins

Trump isn’t just a wacky, thuggish, and “reprehensible human being” (Deutsch).  He’s all of those, but he’s also the aspiring Superpower-heading leader of a global fascist movement whose most recent example is the white-nationalist who recently murdered dozens of Muslims in New Zealand after releasing a manifesto that hailed Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump is precisely that for an angry mass of “blood and soil” male Caucasians at home and abroad.

We can be sure that Trump secretly delights in that role. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, concluded that Trump is not unlike the Nazis who murdered Cohen’s Jewish ancestors in Europe.  Twenty-nine years ago, we learned from the lawyer of Trump’s first wife Ivana that the future president enjoyed reading from a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which Trump kept close to his bed.

A few weeks ago, Cohen tried to tell Congress and the nation that his former boss probably won’t leave the White House without bloodshed. He’s right about that.  Fascists don’t generally leave head-of-state positions peaceably

Gird your loins and give to your local blood bank, America: getting rid of Orange DumpsterFire&Fury, the nation’s first fascist president, is not going to be pretty.

Endnotes

[1]See: this (“The Donald Can Happen Here,” Counterpunch, March 11, 2016); this (“Trump’s Shock and Awe Campaign,” Truthdig, 2-3-2017); this (“Orange Thing,” Counterpunch, 10-13-2017); this (“An Insubordinate President,” Truthdig, 11-14-2017); this (“American-Style Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump,” Truthdig, 12-22-2017); this (“Trump’s Durable Base,” Counterpunch, 2-2-2018); this (“The Madness of King Don,” Counterpunch, 2-16-2018); this (“Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base,” Truthdig, 9-5-2018, including an in-depth examination of the leading social science data on the fascist Trump base); this (“‘Male Energy,’ Authoritarian Whiteness, and Creeping Fascism in the Age of Trump,” Counterpunch, 10-19-2018); this (“Trump’s Endless Mendacity and the Dawn of American Fascism,” Truthdig,10-31-2018, with special emphasis on the assault on truth); this (“Signs of Creeping Fascism are All Around Us,” Truthdig,11-14-2018); this (“Barack von Obamenburg and How Fascism Happens,” Counterpunch, 11-16-2018,); this (“Bordering on Fascism,” Counterpunch,1-11-2019); and this (“Cohen’s Overlooked Warning,” Counterpunch, 3-1-2019).

[2]Consistent with Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 warning, contemporary fascists often don’t openly announce their fascist nature. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” an anonymous mid-20th century American (often but incorrectly said to be Lewis) observed.  No Swastikas, brownshirts in the streets, and “New Man” cults would be required. Lewis wrote in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here that American fascism’s most dangerous promoters were those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty.” American fascism, Lewis warned, would be cloaked in the Star- Spangled Banner and all about “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.” It Can’t Happen Here merits reading 84 years after its publication. It is a biting satirical screed against the comforting notion that “American exceptionalism” inoculated the United States against the disease of fascism.  “The Hell it can’t,” Lewis told us, a bit early in the game, as the United States actually reached its leftmost democratic moment with the rise of the Second New Deal.

GAO Urges Federal Government to Reveal Key Information on Political Appointees

On March 19, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Derek Kravitz

The Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, is urging the federal government to make information about thousands of political appointees — including their names, titles and federal salary disclosures about their assets, debts and past salaries — publicly available. The GAO’s report, which was released Friday, noted that ProPublica’s Trump Town is the only place people can access much of this information.

The report portrayed such information as crucial to holding appointees to high standards. “Strong ethics programs are critical to ensuring public trust in government and the integrity of actions taken on the public’s behalf,” it states. “Political appointees, in particular agency heads, have a personal responsibility to exercise leadership in ethics. … [M]embers of the public need access to information on who is serving in political appointee positions. Otherwise, they are limited in their ability to discern whether appointees are performing their duties free of conflict.”

Neither federal agencies nor the White House are required to publicly post full, up-to-date listings of political appointees or senior government officials, many of whom don’t face confirmation or public hearings by the Senate. “In the absence of comprehensive and timely data on political appointees serving in the executive branch, two nongovernmental organizations — the Partnership for Public Service and ProPublica — stated that they collect and report some data themselves,” the report notes.

The report states that ProPublica’s Trump Town tracks all types of federal political appointees but “one limitation is that they rely on agency responses to FOIA requests and therefore the data may not be comprehensive or timely.” ProPublica staffers (including the author of this article) were interviewed by the GAO in 2018. The report goes on to say:

Making such information available would promote transparency. The public, including independent researchers, the media, and nongovernmental organizations, can use these data to perform independent analyses to identify gaps and challenges for filling political appointee positions or to identify potential conflicts of interest. Such analyses would also facilitate congressional oversight of executive branch appointees by providing a comprehensive and timely source of information on political appointees.

The GAO recommended Congress consider legislation that would require the “comprehensive and timely information on political appointees serving in the Executive Branch to be collected and made publicly accessible.” The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is now considering the GAO recommendation.

The GAO said the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management, is “positioned to collect, maintain, and make political appointee data publicly available on a frequent and recurring basis.” But it also said the OPM is “limited in its ability to provide comprehensive data, in part because it does not regularly receive data from each agency that has political appointees.”

The OPM did not respond to requests for comment.

Elsewhere in the report, the GAO found several instances of lapses and delays in filing required ethics and financial disclosure records by political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior and the Small Business Administration. In response to the report, the lawmakers who requested the GAO review — Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee — criticized those federal agencies as well as the White House, which ignored GAO’s requests for information and interviews.

Launched in March 2018, Trump Town is a searchable database of 3,232 current and former Trump administration political appointees, including their jobs and offices, employment history, lobbying records, government ethics documents, financial disclosures and, in some cases, resumes. ProPublica routinely requests staffing lists and other information through the Freedom of Information Act and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

The Partnership for Public Service, founded in 2001 as a nonpartisan nonprofit that advises federal agencies during the presidential transition process, among other things, started publicly tracking political appointees who were subject to Senate confirmation in December 2016. “The basic insight of the GAO report is that you can’t truly have an accountable government if you don’t know who runs the government in real time,” said Max Stier, the partnership’s president and CEO.

The limitations in accessing government staffing data are partially by design. In 2012, a group of former federal officials in law enforcement, diplomatic and national security positions wrote to congressional leaders, saying a searchable list would “create significant threats to the national security and to the personal safety and financial security of the executive branch officials and their families, especially career employees.” The letter also called complete personal financial information of all senior officials on the internet a “jackpot for enemies of the United States intent on finding security vulnerabilities they can exploit.”

The GAO report did not address this assertion, but it implied such circumstances are a long way off: “Until the names of political appointees and their position, position type, agency or department name, start and end dates are publicly available at least quarterly, it will be difficult for the public to access comprehensive and reliable information.”

All eyes on judge as Manafort faces second sentence…

On March 19, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

All eyes on judge as Manafort faces second sentence

Paul ManafortPaul John ManafortEx-CIA director: ‘I don’t have any doubt’ Trump will pardon Manafort We are not reliving Whitewater: Differences in Starr and Mueller investigations GOP senator says he was surprised at sentence for ‘sleazoid’ Manafort MORE faces his second round of sentencing Wednesday, when all eyes will be on Judge Amy Berman Jackson to see if she throws the book at President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Stone’s defense denies using court to generate publicity for his book release Ocasio-Cortez: Trump sets tone of ‘misogyny, racism, conspiracy theory-ism’ MORE’s former campaign chairman after he received what many legal experts said was a light punishment in a different case.

Last week, Manafort was sentenced by Judge T.S. Ellis III, a Reagan appointee, to nearly four years in prison, considerably less than the 19 to 24 years called for under federal guidelines. That punishment, at a federal courthouse in Virginia, came as a surprise to many legal analysts who expected he would receive a stiffer sentence for crimes uncovered during special counsel Robert MuellerRobert Swan MuellerSasse: US should applaud choice of Mueller to lead Russia probe MORE’s Russia investigation.

Manafort, who turns 70 next month, faces up to 10 years in prison for two charges of conspiracy that he pleaded guilty to last year as part of a deal that involved his full cooperation with the special counsel’s office. That agreement, which allowed Manafort to avoid a second criminal trial, imploded after Jackson determined that he lied to prosecutors about a number of subjects related to the investigation.

It’s now up to Jackson, an Obama appointee on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to decide whether to stack her sentence on top of the one Manafort received in Virginia. Ellis gave Manafort nine months off for time already served, meaning his sentence amounted to three years and two months behind bars.

Shan Wu, a criminal defense attorney who represented Manafort’s associate Richard Gates before he pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the U.S. and lying to the FBI, isn’t expecting Jackson to be too stern.

“I think she’s going to add a little bit of time to it. I don’t think she’ll crack down and give him 10 years,” he said. “She will definitely run some concurrent, but she’ll have him serve a little additional time for the crimes in her case because she found he lied and breached the plea agreement.”

But white collar criminal defense attorney Eli Honig, a former federal prosecutor, said Jackson will likely impose a harsher sentence on Manafort than Ellis did, noting she dealt more directly with Manafort’s lies and witness tampering.

“I think she is absolutely going to add time on, one way or another,” Honig said. “I think she is going to see that Paul Manafort’s conduct really poses a threat to the integrity of the criminal justice system and law enforcement given how many times he lied and how flagrantly he defied every rule and restriction that was put on him.”

Jackson ordered Manafort detained while his case played out in court after he was charged with two additional counts of tampering with witnesses. Manafort’s criminal activity stemmed from his foreign lobbying on behalf of pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine.

As he did in the Virginia case, Manafort will have the opportunity to address the court before his sentence is handed down. But it’s anyone’s guess if he will express remorse for his crimes, as Ellis recommended.

During his sentencing last week, Manafort said the worst pain he feels is the pain he has caused his family, but he did not apologize for cheating the public out of $6 million in taxes, hiding $55 million in foreign bank accounts or defrauding banks when the money ran out.

Ellis told Manafort he was surprised he didn’t hear him express any remorse for breaking the law.

“That should be your true regret, and you should have remorse for that, and I certainly recommend that you do it in the District of Columbia, because you’ll have that opportunity,” he said.

Wednesday’s sentencing will punctuate what has been rampant speculation that Mueller is close to wrapping up his probe. A final report will eventually be submitted to Attorney General William Barr, who will then decide whether to make the findings public.

Manafort, who served in the the upper echelon of the Trump campaign for five months without compensation before he was forced to resign in August 2016 over revelations of his Ukraine lobbying, was viewed as a key witness for Mueller as he investigates links between the campaign and the Russian government.

However, prosecutors last week said Manafort wasted much of their time with his lies.

“Because he lied, it took longer to show Mr. Manafort what the evidence was to allow him to provide truthful proffers,” Greg Andres, one of Mueller’s prosecutors, told Ellis on Thursday. “It certainly was in the interest of the special counsel’s office to have Mr. Manafort provide helpful and meaningful cooperation and he didn’t.”

The dance between prosecutors and defense attorneys about Manafort’s lies has offered a glimpse into the special counsel’s nearly two-year inquiry, perhaps most meaningfully Mueller’s accusation that Manafort deliberately misled investigators about his interactions with a Russian translator named Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort’s consulting business and is suspected by federal agents of having ties to Russian intelligence.

A poorly redacted court document filed by Manafort’s legal team earlier this year revealed that Mueller suspected Manafort of sharing polling data with Kilimnik and discussing a Ukraine peace plan with his former associate during the 2016 campaign.

In ruling that Manafort intentionally lied to federal prosecutors on multiple subjects, Jackson described Manafort’s contacts with Kilimnik as “material” to Mueller’s ongoing probe.

At the same time, Mueller has not alleged any conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Many hope that Mueller’s final report — if it becomes public — will address the central question of whether there was collusion between the campaign and Moscow, something Trump has long denied, deriding the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

It’s unclear whether a presidential pardon is in the cards for Manafort. Trump has not officially ruled it out and continues to voice support for his former campaign chairman. After Ellis handed down his sentence last week, Trump said he feels “very badly for Paul Manafort.”

“I think it’s been a very tough time for him,” Trump said.

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro really wants to be Trump's new best friend

On March 19, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro tried to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump ahead of their face-to-face meeting Tuesday — by denouncing immigrants and the “dirty” left.

The retired military officer, who embraces his “Trump of the Tropics” moniker, will have a private sit-down in the Oval Office Tuesday, before holding a joint press conference with Trump.

And the pair have much in common.

Not only does Bolsonaro deride the press, espouse nationalist values, dismiss negative media coverage as “fake news” and use Twitter to broadcast to the world, he also holds extremely Trumpian views on national borders.

“The vast majority of potential immigrants do not have good intentions,” the Brazilian president told Fox News Monday. “They do not intend to do the best — or do good to the U.S. people.”

As well as speaking to Fox News, Bolsonaro, who arrived in Washington Sunday, visited the CIA, addressed the Chamber of Commerce and told a room of conservative thought leaders — including Steve Bannon — that he wants to rid Brazil of the “dirty ideology of the left.”

Bolsonaro’s three-day visit is about “opportunities for defense cooperation, pro-growth trade policies, combating transnational crime and restoring democracy in Venezuela,” according to the White House.

For the Brazilian, the trip also offers a chance to restart his presidency, following three months of crisis and controversy.

Domestically, Bolsonaro is facing calls to explain his family’s link to a violent gang that controls much of Rio de Janeiro and is suspected of carrying out the execution of lawmaker Marielle Franco.

Those calls intensified last week when a picture surfaced of Bolsonaro with his arms around Élcio Queiroz, one of two men recently arrested for the 2018 assassination.

Fox News

During the Fox News interview aired Monday, Bolsonaro brushed off allegations linking him to Rio’s militias.

“I only learned about Marielle Franco after she was killed,” Bolsonaro told the broadcaster. “She was a councilwoman and I have never ever heard anything about her life. And one further point, what kind of motivation could I possibly have to be the mastermind of some kind of murder like that? I didn’t even know her.”

The Brazilian admitted Queiroz, a former police officer, did live in the same gated community but he never saw him. Bolsonaro also addressed claims that his youngest son, Renan, dated the suspect’s daughter.

“I asked him ‘Did you date her?’ and he said ‘Well I dated just about every girl in the gated community, I can’t remember.’”

The CIA

Earlier Monday, Bolsonaro made a surprise visit to the CIA — a first for a Brazilian president. He was there to discuss “international themes in the region,” according to his son, Eduardo, a Brazilian lawmaker who is also on the trip.

In a tweet likely to raise eyebrows in Brazil, Eduardo described the CIA as “one of the most respected intelligence agencies in the world.” The Agency has traditionally been viewed with suspicion in much of South America.

READ: How Brazil’s business elite helped elect the new far-right president

This view solidified in 2013 when Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had been tapping the phones of former President Dilma Rousseff for several years.

Chamber of Commerce

The U.S. is Brazil’s second-biggest trading partner behind China, and a key reason for Bolsonaro’s trip is to bolster commercial ties.

“Nowadays, you have a president who is a friend of the United States who admires this beautiful country,” Bolsonaro told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Monday.

The U.S. has a $27 billion trade surplus with Brazil, which U.S. officials believe creates an opportunity to bring the nations’ business communities closer, particularly on energy infrastructure.

Ahead of Bolsonaro’s speech, the two countries signed a number of bilateral agreements, including one that allows the U.S. to launch satellites from Brazil’s Alcantara Aerospace Launch Base. Brazil also announced an end to visa requirements for U.S. tourists who visit the country.

Bolsonaro told the Chamber of Commerce that similar to Trump he had mounted an insurgent campaign and had overcome the underdog tag to win, despite facing a torrent of “fake news” and biased media.

“We want to have a great Brazil just like Trump wants to have a great America,” he said.

Cover image: Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro speaks during a discussion on US-Brazil relations at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC on March 18, 2019. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Cook County Judge Blocks ProPublica Illinois From Publishing Details of Child Welfare Case

On March 19, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Steve Mills and Mick Dumke

In an unusual move, a Cook County Juvenile Court judge has barred ProPublica Illinois, as well as other media, from publishing any information that could identify families involved in a child welfare case.

Patricia Martin, presiding judge of the child protection division of juvenile court, issued the order Thursday forbidding news organizations from publishing the names, addresses or any demographic information that would identify the children or the foster parents in a case ProPublica Illinois has been investigating — a rare instance of a judge acting prior to publication.

Martin has scheduled arguments on her order barring publication for April 5.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a First Amendment right to publish without government interference in numerous cases.

Martin issued her order in response to a motion from Bruce Boyer, a professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law and director of the Civitas ChildLaw Clinic, where attorneys, with assistance from law students, represent children in child protection cases and other matters.

Boyer represents the children involved in the case ProPublica Illinois is investigating. He told the judge he wants to protect their privacy. Martin, in her order, also has blocked all media from court proceedings in the case.

At a hearing Friday, a day after Martin issued her order, Gabriel Fuentes, an attorney at Jenner & Block representing ProPublica Illinois, said that every day Martin’s order is in place represents a “constitutional injury” to the news organization. He said restraining the press is “one of the highest bars in national law.”

ProPublica Illinois reporters learned the identities of the children and foster parents independent of and before the court proceedings, which they told the judge in the case at a March 7 hearing.

Fuentes argued Friday that ProPublica Illinois should be allowed to intervene — essentially to join the case — so the news organization could argue why it shouldn’t be prevented from publishing.

Boyer told the judge he was concerned that allowing ProPublica Illinois to intervene would grant the news organization access to information that should remain confidential. “I don’t know how ProPublica can meaningfully participate in the merits of the order without getting access” to the confidential information, he said in court.

“We are not saying ProPublica cannot write about this case,” Boyer said. “We are focused on protecting the identifications of the minors.”

Attorneys from the Cook County public defender’s office representing the birth mother of the minors did not object to ProPublica Illinois joining the case, while a lawyer for the father wasn’t present for the Friday hearing but told other lawyers in the case that she also did not object. Attorneys for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services asked for additional time to study ProPublica Illinois’ motion.

Martin said Friday she would allow ProPublica Illinois to intervene on the issue of prior restraint after she reviewed transcripts of the March 7 hearing. An order had not been issued as of Monday afternoon.

The rest of the juvenile case files would be off-limits, she said.