The West Takes NATO for Granted. One Country Still Wants In.

On April 3, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

TBILISI—Transnational security cooperation, as an idea, has seen better days.

Real and rhetorical commitments to NATO are flagging: President Donald Trump has called the alliance “obsolete”; Germany sees itself soon spending barely half of NATO’s mandated but unenforced target for defense spending; and Britain’s defense budget fell by nearly one-fifth from 2010 to 2015.

The trend is largely understandable. Seventy years after NATO’s founding, and nearly three decades after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, maintaining the alliance is a lesser priority, if not a burden. Even with a resurgent Russia, the threat of tank divisions rolling across Europe seems mostly ludicrous.

Yet farther to the east, this scenario is not a fantasy—it is recent history. Indeed, for this small country, not even a member state, NATO is nearly sacrosanct.

[Read: The president of the United States asks, ‘What’s an ally?’]

Situated on Russia’s doorstep, the Caucasus republic of Georgia has long been an enthusiastic proponent of NATO membership. Since the Rose Revolution in 2003, when peaceful demonstrations forced the ouster of a Moscow-backed leader and propelled the pro-Western politician Mikheil Saakashvili to power, the country has prioritized integration into the transatlantic security alliance. Georgia remains the top non-NATO contributor of troops to the coalition mission in Afghanistan, with 885 soldiers in the country, and previously stationed the third-largest contingent of soldiers in Iraq during that country’s occupation, after the United States and Britain. Despite such efforts, the prospects of Georgia joining the alliance remain dim.

Remarkably, however, this has not been reflected in the public mood here. A poll released in January by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American think tank, showed that 78 percent of Georgians favored their country joining NATO, a figure that was topped only by the 81 percent who approved when asked the same question in the NDI’s November 2013 poll.

This level of support might appear strange. With the Trump administration regularly admonishing its allies and questioning the United States’ international commitments, the past two years would seem an unlikely moment for enthusiasm toward NATO to grow, particularly among countries outside the organization. Here in Georgia, however, that is precisely what is happening.

Georgians have long been well disposed toward NATO, and in six and a half years of polling on the issue, the NDI has never found that less than three-fifths of the population want their country to enter the alliance.

The most notable demographic that has historically been lukewarm is the country’s minorities, primarily ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis, who together make up about a tenth of Georgians. In June 2017, only 29 percent of those in ethnic-minority settlements supported NATO membership, while an equal amount opposed it. Strong familial and cultural links among those communities to Russia contributed to this, and a partial estrangement from Tbilisi also played a role. A mere 20 percent of Georgian Armenians and Azerbaijanis said they have a strong or intermediate command of the Georgian language, according to the NDI’s most recent figures.

In the latest NDI poll, though, support for NATO among minorities surged to 48 percent. There is no immediately apparent reason why this occurred. Talking with representatives of those communities, however, the picture becomes clearer. After the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, Tbilisi began providing more information to minority groups about Europe, about NATO, and “about the alternative,” Mariam Araqelova, the chairwoman of the Union of Georgian Armenians, an advocacy organization that provides community services, told me. For example, in Samtskhe-Javakheti, a region in southwest Georgia where most of the country’s ethnic Armenians live, a government-funded NATO information center was opened.

Shalala Amirjanova, a Georgian Azerbaijani civic activist from the Azerbaijani-majority town of Marneuli, about 25 miles south of Georgia’s capital, notes that locals “still have many misconceptions about the alliance.” But in this regard, too, a gradual change is under way, with local NGOs engaging the population on the issue. More training exercises have also increased visibility: In August, NATO held the fourth iteration of its Noble Partner multinational exercises in Georgia, which included more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and 500 more from countries including Britain, France, and Germany, alongside 1,300 Georgian servicemen.

[Read: Who caused the Russian-Georgian war?]

The largest boon to NATO’s image among Georgians, and Georgia’s minorities in particular, however, seems to have come indirectly. In March 2017, the European Union began allowing Georgians to travel to EU countries visa-free. The knock-on effects in terms of their views toward Europe, as well as NATO, have been significant.

“We never had a chance to visit Europe before. The message from them was always: You are good people, but you can’t come here,” Araqelova said. Amirjanova agrees, saying the country’s Azerbaijani community had felt similarly.

Russia’s creeping land grabs in South Ossetia, a breakaway territory that hosts numerous Russian military bases, have also not gone unnoticed, notably by Georgia’s Armenian community. Moscow has been accused of conducting a policy known as borderization, moving its fences forward several hundred meters at a time past the ill-defined border of South Ossetia to de facto annex more Georgian territory. “The situation with South Ossetia in particular has created many skeptical views about Russia’s intentions,” Araqelova said. “People see that the border is moving closer and closer, and they start to think that Russia does not have their own country’s best interests in mind.”

Their northern neighbor’s worsening economic situation has shifted views, too. “People live in Russia to work,” Araqelova said. “Those who have gone more recently have found that it’s more difficult to make a living than they thought. ”

Nationwide, the reasons for the appeal of major international security guarantees to a country that fought the 21st century’s first full-scale state-on-state war are evident. Wider Georgian society today is almost bereft of pro-Russian views, with the few politicians who do represent this viewpoint confined to the margins.

“In Georgia today, there are very people who oppose NATO,” says Iago Kachkachishvili, the director of the Institute of Social Studies and Analysis, a Tbilisi-based think tank. “We simply don’t have another choice.”

[Read: What Putin really wants]

The two main anti-NATO political forces, the loudly pro-Russian former president Nino Burjanadze and the right-wing nationalist Alliance of Patriots of Georgia, both claim support in the single digits. The Alliance of Patriots does not even dare state its anti-NATO views, preferring more tacit messaging, such as emphasizing an “independent path,” fearing a loss of support otherwise. Thus, an almost complete consensus exists among political parties in the country. “Support for NATO is a kind of benchmark for being accepted by the population,” Kachkachishvili asserts.

This largely unified worldview likely explains why Georgians have remained so willing to contribute troops to U.S.-led military campaigns abroad, despite a steady stream of casualties. (In a single incident in Afghanistan in June 2013, seven Georgian soldiers were killed when a Taliban truck bomb struck their compound.)

The path to NATO membership is long. The organization has been unwilling to advance on Georgia’s prospects so long as a fifth of its territory remains outside of government control, with Russian troops present in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There is no sign that Georgia is close to being offered a Membership Action Plan, the first concrete initiation of eventual accession.

But there is likewise no indication that anyone in Georgia is prepared to abandon the dream. “It is a requirement for us,” Kachkachishvili says. “We will always have a monstrous neighbor, thinking of Georgia’s destruction. Without strong partners, we cannot be winners.”

Araqvelova is equally certain. “The change has been gradual,” she said, “but it is unstoppable.”

Egypt’s Brutal Crackdown on Workers’ Rights

On April 3, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Khaled Abol Naga – an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government – stands accused of treason (AFP). It was comical, farcical, droll. An actor’s dream if you were going to put the drama on stage or screen – but the three principal characters were actors themselves. The lead player, as usual in Egypt, was His Excellency Field Marshal President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the theme of this theatrical production was an old and familiar one: the power of trade unions and the fear of real revolution.

But we’ll start with the latest act, virtually ignored in the west where freedom of speech, workers’ rights and liberty are “precious”, “sacrosanct”, “close to our hearts”. This week, two prominent Egyptian actors, Amr Waked and Khaled Abol Naga, were expelled from the government-controlled Egyptian actors’ union for “treachery”. They were condemned for “betraying the nation” and working for “the agenda of conspirators against Egypt’s security and stability”. The head of the union told AFP that the two men “will no longer be allowed to act in Egypt”.

Although Waked won the best actor award at the Dubai film festival five years ago and starred in 2005 film Syriana with George Clooney, the starring performance of both men came last Monday when they used the platform of a US congressional hearing to condemn the worsening human rights situation in Egypt and the extraordinary legislation which may allow Sisi to stay in power until 2034.

Film actor Amr Wake is also accused of treason by Egypt (AP) Naga, a star of many Egyptian movies, described a country whose people were either imprisoned or lived in fear of arrest. Waked said that the regime run by Sisi, who staged a military coup against the first elected Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi in 2013, had developed an “allergy” to the truth, a claim which contained its own painful irony. For both Waked and Naga – like dozens of novelists, artists, journalists and other Egyptian literati – were among those who originally and naively supported the bloody coup which brought Sisi to power. Waked, whose criticism of the government earned him, this month, a sentence of eight years in an Egyptian prison (in absentia, of course, because he lives in Europe) pointed out that the union’s prohibition on his acting hardly mattered. “If I go back to Egypt, I won’t even have time to act,” he has said – because he’d be locked up at once.

But now we enter a more serious drama: Sisi’s crushing of all dissent within Egypt’s traditionally powerful trade union movements, which have historically fought the British colonial power as well as the Nasser and Sadat regimes, and which played a powerful but tragically disregarded role in the revolution which destroyed the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

Just over a year ago, the Egyptian authorities excluded independent trade syndicates from participating in the first trade union elections to be held in 12 years. Amnesty has complained about the Egyptian government’s “punitive campaign against workers and trade unionists to deter and punish them from mobilising or going on strike”.

Romantics like to portray Egypt’s independence struggle as a battle for freedom by a nationalist, anti-colonial people who demanded democracy, free elections and dignity after years of oppression under a succession of dictatorships financed by Britain, Russia and then by the United States. But this is only partly true. It was also a religious struggle (hence the brief Morsi interlude after Mubarak’s overthrow) and, less well publicised, it was also a workers’ demand for freedom and a living wage.

Egypt’s great cotton industry in the Delta north of Cairo has been the centre of this often forgotten revolution, an export centre whose workers have great industrial power – if and when they are permitted to exercise it. They struck under British rule and they staged successive rebellions under Mubarak. The most important of these occurred in 2006 when women cotton workers led their menfolk in an uprising against the regime in the big industrial city of Mahalla. They used social media to bring tens of thousands of workers from the countryside into the central square of the city – it was, in fact, also called Tahrir Square – and set up tent encampments under fire from police tear gas.

They even called for the overthrow of Mubarak – a demand typically ignored by most of us journalists, who were only interested in Islamist opposition to Egyptian government rule – but it impressed the dictatorship of the time, which immediately gave the citizens of Mahalla pay rises, improved conditions, new workers’ canteens and shorter hours. And, although we reporters did not identify this when it happened, the cotton workers of Mahallah were among the first industrial groups to arrive in Cairo’s far bigger Tahrir Square when the uprising really got under way in January of 2011.

The Egyptian army, which stage-managed the aftermath of the revolution, realised very shrewdly that working class solidarity could be just as dangerous as Islamic unity. The Muslim Brotherhood, which was not a “terrorist” organisation – despite Sisi’s present-day accusations – was poorly led, politically unorganised and internally divided. The independent trade union of Egyptian workers who had now thrown off the official union movement of government stooges, was a quite different creature. For it, too, was an army; and every bit as much a child of the Egyptian people as the soldiers who were entrusted to “guide” the future of the post-2011 revolution.

Official realisation of this was all too clear by 2015 when the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court decided that the right to strike “goes against Islamic teachings and the purposes of Islamic Sharia” law. This ruling came only a day after Sisi had attended a labour day celebration alongside the regime’s own General Federation of Egypt Trade Unions, whose president, Gebali Al-Maraghi, described Sisi – who would win the supposed presidential election last year with 97.08 per cent of the “votes” – as a hero and “Egypt’s saviour”.

In case the workers’ masses had missed the point, “trade unionist” Maraghi said that Sisi had restored Egypt’s dignity, a claim which even Sisi found deeply embarrassing. “This is not proper,” he said, insisting that millions of people had saved Egypt. But then Maraghi handed Sisi a “code of honour” of ‘his Egyptian workers whose second article rejected strikes and committed the union to “dialogue with the government and business owners”.

Even more shocking, Maraghi gave a newspaper interview in which he said that “our task is to carry out all the demands made by the president in his meeting with workers, increasing production and fighting terrorism”. From then on, all talk of independent unions was over; workers’ representatives were imprisoned or threatened with arrest.

It took a petition for the UK to complain about Italian Giulio Regeni’s deathIn case anyone should underestimate the regime’s fear of union power, let us remember the case of Giulio Regeni, the 28-year-old Italian student who, in 2016, was studying the very same independent trade unions which frightened Sisi. A few weeks before his death, Regeni had written that “the [Egyptian] unions’ defiance of the state of emergency and the regime’s appeal for stability and social order – justified by the ‘war on terror’ – signifies…a bold questioning of the underlying rhetoric the regime uses to justify its own existence and its repression of civil society.”

The student held meetings with some of these union representatives, in Mahalla as well as in other Delta cities and in Cairo, and then was found by the side of a Cairo suburban ring-road, his face and body hideously disfigured by the torture under which he died. Sisi’s cops waffled about gang murders and “evil people”, and even suggested poor Regeni was killed in “a lover’s argument”. He was not. The Italian government concluded he had been murdered by the regime’s state security police because his enquiries – innocent enough, in the context of his University of Cambridge thesis – brought him too close to the men running the workers’ committees which so terrified the regime.

Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent MindsHe had indeed met these men: some of them took videotapes of Regeni asking them questions and, in return, being asked for foreign support for their syndicates. And so the police picked up Regeni and he was never seen again.

The British Foreign Office only bothered to complain about the murder after it had received 10,000 signatures of protest from within the UK; and we all know right now – today — how much signatures count for British governments. But the Italian government exploded in anger. Regeni’s mother would not release photographs of her son after death because his wounds were too terrible. Western embassies in Cairo, including the British, did nothing – even though they were given the name of the senior police officer in charge of Regeni’s torture and murder.

So the little fandango over two Egyptian actors this week had far darker historical and murderous roots than we might have thought. They stretched back into history and they still exist beneath the carapace of Egypt’s present government authority. The Egyptian actor’s union may be a farce but the power of workers is an ever-present danger to Middle East regimes.

One day, Regeni’s successors will complete his PhD work and write their own theses on the Arab awakening of 2011; and it will likely be a different story to the one we wrote eight years ago from Tahrir Square. Meanwhile, it would indeed probably be a good idea if messrs Waked and Naga stayed abroad.

Florida apartments in country clubs selling for as low as $1…

On April 3, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Florida apartments in country clubs are trading for as low as $1

You can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be deals in Palm Beach County.

Seller Stephan Burklin just dropped the price of the one-bedroom apartment he inherited at Boca West Country Club from $10,000 to a mere $1.

“My mother passed, and my father is moving to assisted living,’’ says the 51-year-old married father of three. “But it’s just too small for us.”

Shockingly, Burklin’s listing is not exceptional. The South Florida area, which includes the tony enclaves of Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and Boca Raton, has jaw-dropping deals right now, with condos selling for less than $100,000 — many for less than $15,000 — in upscale country clubs where newer or renovated pads boast six-figure asks.

Many owners of inexpensive listings, who bought their homes when these communities were built in the ’70s or ’80s, are moving on to independent or assisted living facilities. Their inheritors don’t want to take over the properties because they are living elsewhere, disinterested in the country club lifestyle or unwilling to keep up with any annual or monthly payments.

But for many in the New York area looking to flee the cold — or buy a second home in a sunny locale with no income tax — there are now bargains that seem too good to be true, particularly when you consider that the median sales price of a condo in Palm Beach County in the fourth quarter of 2018 was $589,130, a 16.5 percent jump over the prior year, according to Douglas Elliman.

One caveat: Most country club communities have hefty membership buy-ins that range from about $40,000 to upwards of $100,000. But when the apartments themselves and their monthly carrying costs are relatively affordable, many buyers can justify the expense. (And Burklin, for one, is offering to pay any buyer’s homeowners association fees for the first year.)

“We have people coming down who have gotten rid of their New York apartments and were able to buy a place with the money they made from selling one bathroom,’’ says Ben Schachter, president of Signature Real Estate Companies, a brokerage that focuses on the South Florida country club market. “There are others who have been able to purchase homes for what they saved in New York taxes, which can run from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand a year.”

In February, Boca West — the country club where Burklin’s $1 apartment is located, which has a $50 million clubhouse, four golf courses and seven restaurants — unveiled a new building with units ranging from $1 million to $4.5 million; the majority have already sold. In addition to a gym and a spa, the club has lectures and performances by big-name talent like Diana Ross, Jay Leno and Chris Evert.

This month, former Manhattanite Paul Green, who worked in media and advertising for 40 years, paid $1 for a one-bedroom home in another part of Boca West with a wraparound terrace overlooking a golf course. The community’s initial membership fee is $70,000 (though the seller is giving him $35,000 to defray that cost).

“The owner of my condo was 92, and his wife just passed away,’’ explains Green, 68. “He was motivated to sell for $1. I think the reason for the low prices is that people get scared off by country club fees. But the truth is, if I spend about $2,000 a month here, I can live the same luxurious lifestyle as someone who paid over $1 million. There are a lot of people moving down here from the north now.”

Newly single Green sees it as an ideal bachelor pad. “It came with everything, down to the glassware,” he says. “All I need is a mattress.”

A 30-minute drive north, at the swanky Hunters Run development in Boynton Beach — complete with three championship golf courses, tennis, pools, on-site restaurants, a fitness center and a spa — are other steals. Golf pro Jonathan Margolies, 41, relocated there from Greenwich, Conn., last year. First, as an investment in 2016, he bought one condo for $2,000 and just flipped it for $80,000. He then paid $14,000 for an updated 1,800-square-foot unit into which the owners had put a $100,000 renovation before they moved to a larger home. “They were eager to sell,’’ he explains. “My property taxes are only $200 a year, and I spend about $1,700 a month in total. My friends are wary of the [pricey] club fees, but they are renting for $2,000 or $3,000 per month and I own my home.”

Another younger Hunters Run resident lured by modest price tags is Christina Fasciana, who bought a two-bedroom condo for $1,500 in 2016, when she was 45, via Bobbi Brodie of Realty Home Advisors. “They waived the first year of golf membership for anyone under 62, which saved me $15,000,’’ says the academic tutor, who is dating a 35-year-old Hunters Run renter. “I was training for a triathlon and I run 5Ks here. There is a saltwater pool for laps right downstairs . . . I don’t have a mortgage. I have a lifestyle.’’

“People from the Northeast would buy a second or third home in a mid-rise and then upsize,’’ says Matthew Linderman, Boca West’s president. “Those smaller units are now the new entrance for buyers. There have always been great deals in South Florida, but recently more of these homes are coming on the market because original residents are up in age. Sales and membership in general are definitely on the rise.’’

For some new residents — some of whom split their time between colder climes and the Sunshine State, even spending just one day longer down south to avoid taxes — landing a home in these communities is about more than a deal.

“It’s like being in summer camp all year. I love it!’’ declares Lynda Newman, 56, who moved from Milburn, NJ, to a $33,500 two-bedroom at Gleneagles Country Club in Delray Beach after a recent breakup. Initiation was $40,000 and monthly expenses are under $1,500. “I wanted to clear my head and start fresh. There are so many amenities — Pilates, yoga, everything you could want — and it’s very easy to meet people.’’

Newman’s buy looks extravagant compared to Beverly Wexler’s Hunters Run condo, which sold a week and a half ago for its asking price of $1. The 91-year-old plans on relocating to an assisted living facility due to her husband’s recent passing. Their children, who would have inherited the place, now live in California and Massachusetts and have no desire to use a home in Florida. “My husband really loved it here. If he were alive I wouldn’t be doing this, but now that I’m alone, I’m going to do what I want,’’ Wexler says. “I’m in my 90s, so I can’t wait a few years to sell. I figure that offering it for a dollar is the quickest way to get out.’’

The Wexlers installed tile floors, added an elevator and enclosed a porch with a view of the lake and golf course with floor-to-ceiling windows.

The supply of $1 pads is not endless, warns Rhonda Scott, an agent with Keller Williams in Boca Raton. “There are still a number of these unbelievable opportunities in communities that also have homes for $2 million and $3 million,” she says. “But people are starting to recognize them and there are just a limited number available.’’

This winter, temperatures dipped into the single digits at David Bluestein’s White Plains, NY, home. But 1,300 miles away, the retired packaged-goods manager enjoyed an 80-degree day on the patio of the Hunters Run condo that he and his wife Carol bought last year for $1. Surveying a pond and trees surrounded by manicured grass, the 73-year-old had just finished a round of golf. When his wife Carol was done with her water aerobics class, they jumped in the Jacuzzi before heading to a happy hour at the clubhouse.

Bluestein’s friends had raved about Hunters Run’s resort-style amenities, so in 2018 he contacted Carolyn Liss at Signature Real Estate Companies to find a rental in the gated community.

She sent him an attractive listing for a fully furnished two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit. One catch: The owner would not rent, only sell — for less than the price of a candy bar. The owner’s wife was ill, they hadn’t used the home in three years and he didn’t want to continue paying to maintain the apartment.

“It was ridiculous to pass up, so we jumped at it,” he says. “The place came equipped down to the linens and silverware. And the bedroom furniture was so beautiful I would have picked it myself! All we had to buy were some rugs.’’

The Bluesteins had to pay a one-time initiation fee of $45,000 as well as club fees of about $1,500 per month.

“My friends jokingly asked, ‘You didn’t negotiate? You could have gotten it for 50 cents!’ ” adds Bluestein. “But people who want to get out from under expenses just want out.’’

Trump, All About Winning, Sees Losses in Court Pile Up

On April 3, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Joe Sexton

The drumbeat of defeats grew hard to ignore.

A federal judge struck down the Donald Trump administration’s plan to require some people to work for their Medicaid benefits. Another judge halted Trump’s plan to open Arctic waters to drilling. Yet another ordered an end to what critics said was the administration’s efforts to encourage an end run around the Affordable Care Act. All in the span of about a week.

I spent some time exploring whether I could create a more formal list only to discover that The Washington Post had basically done that.

Here’s how the article by Fred Barbash and Deanna Paul started:

Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.

In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance for shifting policy, including providing legitimate explanations supported by facts and, where required, public input.

Many of the cases are in early stages and subject to reversal. For example, the Supreme Court permitted a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from certain predominantly Muslim nations to take effect after lower-court judges blocked the travel ban as discriminatory.

But regardless of whether the administration ultimately prevails, the rulings so far paint a remarkable portrait of a government rushing to implement far-reaching changes in policy without regard for long-standing rules against arbitrary and capricious behavior.

It only got more startling.

Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

I decided to reach out to the reporters and hear how their project came together and what they made of it. It seemed all the more timely in that the Trump administration is likely looking at a challenging legal road as it seeks to enforce the president’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.

Barbash agreed to a modest Q&A:

What prompted you to undertake the review?

I watch the federal courts closely and became aware over time that the administration was being challenged in court on almost every important policy and deregulatory decision and that U.S. district court judges, who ordinarily defer to the government in most of these challenges, were no longer doing so. Deanna Paul and I began keeping track of the adverse rulings. I’ve been watching regulation and courts for a very long time, and the numbers of defeats were well beyond anything I had seen.

Was it hard to capture all the possible cases?

I’m not sure we did capture all the possible cases. The highly publicized cases, like DACA and the travel ban, are obvious. Nobody seems to keep some sort of master list of everything else. So Deanna and I began to track them down using a variety of sources. We wound up with the number 63, which even since we wrote the piece has increased to about 68.

What finding surprised you most?

As we interviewed experts on the subject, including former Justice Department officials who keep track of these things, we realized that these numbers were extraordinary. No one had an exact count comparing, say, the Obama administration’s record in court after two years with the Trump administration. But as we researched the subject, we found studies estimating the average “win rate” for administrations in the courts was somewhere around 70% whereas the Trump administration appeared to be losing at least 70% of the time.

Were you able to say the losses in nature or volume were different than prior administrations?

It would have taken six or seven months to get exact numbers. But every expert we talked to agreed that the volume was much higher for the Trump administration. The question then became why. As I wrote in an earlier story, when the losing streak started, it’s kind of like relationships. When one or two don’t work out, you can plausibly blame the other people. When the numbers mount, you have to think, maybe the problem is me, that is, maybe I’m doing something wrong.

Some experts you cited said the government had failed to do basic legal homework. You think that was really true? Seems kind of crazy.

It does seem crazy, but when you read the cases and the opinions of the judges, including Republican judges, that’s what they found in so many instances. It’s hard to tell whether the agencies knew that they were out on a limb with so many of these decisions and went ahead anyway, or didn’t have competent legal advice. Some experts, as the article said, thought that the failure of some agencies to “do their homework” as they suspended or delayed regulations, for example, showed that they were more interested in making announcements of deregulatory change than in the change itself, so the risk of a judge blocking their actions didn’t concern them all that much. Of course, the agency spokespeople deny that. But lawyers know, for example, that the law sometimes requires public notice and comment when making regulatory change. It’s not hard. It just slows things down. But if they fail to do it, it’s almost a certainty that a judge will object. These are not close calls. Now some of the cases, like the census case (the Commerce Department’s decision to add a citizenship question to the census), are much more complex than what I’m describing and raise deeper issues, which we continue to pursue.

Theresa May’s Appalling Legacy Will be the Destruction of the Good Friday Agreement

On April 2, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

A German general once explained that he divided officers looking for promotion into four categories: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and industrious.

He said that the clever and lazy should be appointed to senior leadership positions because they could take important decisions without trying to interfere with the work of others. The clever and industrious should be made their deputies. The stupid and lazy should be sent to the front line, but the stupid and industrious should be pushed out of the army immediately of at once because they are a danger to everyone.

Theresa May surely belongs to the fourth category of leader, because as prime minister she has shown that she has a lethal blend of tunnel vision and obstinacy that automatically produces ill-judged decisions.

Her list of blunders is too long to repeat here but must include her decision to treat the outcome of the EU referendum as if it was a decisive choice by the British people. The near dead heat should have meant that the wishes of both sides would need to be accommodated to stop existing divisions widening.

Instead, May acted like a British First World War commander at the Somme, pushing ahead regardless of actual circumstances. She triggered Article 50, taking the UK out of the EU without a plan; acted as if she had a parliamentary majority and had no need to compromise with the opposition; approached negotiations with the EU as if the balance of power lay in her favour and not in theirs; and she tried to bluff Brussels with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit far more damaging to Britain than the EU.

But the most poisonous part of her legacy is her feckless gutting of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998, which ended 30 years of savage violence in Northern Ireland.

This was probably the greatest achievement of the British state for half a century, bringing to an end the Irish conflict, a running sore in English politics since the Tudors, through a compromise that everybody could live with. But, with May in charge, it has been a compromise that has shrivelled by the day.

Essential building blocks of the agreement, such as British government neutrality between nationalists and unionists in the North, were discarded because of the need for DUP votes in parliament. So too was cooperation with the Irish government to ensure the GFA was kept in working order.

Proponents of Brexit are strikingly parochial despite their boasted ambitions for global Britain, once it is freed from EU shackles. They were wilfully ignorant of Irish politics, fondly imagining that the nationalist population in border areas would tolerate cameras and electronic devices used to monitor the border where it cuts through their fields and villages. If customs are sent they will need police to protect them and the police in turn will need the army. We will be back to a militarised frontier.

A puerile suggestion is that the border be left to its own devices, forgetting that the EU is not going to tolerate a gaping hole in the tariff and regulatory walls protecting the customs union and the single market.

Why not tell the EU to just get lost, as many Leavers will argue? Because they will not “get lost”, and they are more powerful than we are with 47 per cent of British exports going to the EU and 15 per cent of EU exports coming to Britain.

For the DUP, the collapse of the GFA has no terrors because they voted against it and, whatever they may say publicly, they would like to see it stripped of any substance even if it still has a formal existence.

May either did not understand this or did not care, because she was fixated on her own unpassable Brexit deal that was voted down for the third time on Friday afternoon.

Right up to the end, she was trying to play what used to be called “the Orange card” as she struggled to persuade Tory Brexiteers to support her. Her meeting with them at her country residence Chequers last Sunday throws a bizarre light on what she thinks is happening in Ireland.

Press reports say that she spoke passionately about an enhanced threat of a united Ireland by claiming that the liberalisation of Ireland’s laws on homosexuality and abortion had made opinion in Northern Ireland more sympathetic towards union with the Republic. She pointed out that Sinn Fein is demanding a border poll and might win it because of the Republic ending its ban on abortion following a referendum last year – unlike the North, where it is still forbidden.

May went on to say that Northern Ireland leaving the union might have a knock-on effect on Scotland, where people “would demand the right to leave the UK and then the union would be destroyed”.

May is right in saying that Sinn Fein, which won more than two-thirds of the nationalist vote in the North during the last two elections, has been campaigning for a border poll since the Brexit referendum vote. It is also true to say that a few more voters who previously saw Irish unification as unity with a priest-ridden regressive state might change their minds.

But far more important in enhancing the prospect of a united Ireland is the UK leaving the EU which is contrary to the referendum result in the North where Remain won by 56 per cent to 44 per cent – something usually ignored in British media reports on the DUP.

Most important, support for Irish unity no longer looks like a retreat from the modern world into the Celtic twilight, joining a small weak regressive Irish nation state in preference to remaining in a powerful socially progressive Britain. Unification with the Republic now means reunification with the EU. Keep in mind that, while 88 per cent of nationalists voted Remain, the unionist vote was much more split, with better-educated middle-class unionists voting not to leave the EU.

It is important to draw the right conclusions from this. It does not mean that the unification of Ireland is close. Most Northern Irish Protestants remain adamantly against it. Plenty of Catholics still do not want it even if they are fewer in number than before. Many note the lamentable state of the Irish health service compared to the NHS. The Irish government does not want a referendum which would probably confirm the union and would certainly be highly divisive.

Nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland tend to underestimate the toughness of the other side. The unionists did so in the past by trying and failing to impose their own exclusive rule, but the bulk of them are certainly not going to accept Irish reunification without a fight whatever the outcome of a poll.

What May and Brexit have succeeded in doing is putting issues like the Irish border and partition back on the agenda. The GFA compromise is all but dead.

Ireland has traditionally been Britain’s worst political ulcer and it has started bleeding again. The German general was right about the dangers of stupid but industrious leaders.