National Security Council Notes: Progress in Liberia and the Lifting of Sanctions

The following statement was issued by Ned Price, National Security Council spokesperson. 

Today, the President signed an Executive Order which takes note of Liberia's tremendous progress since emerging from civil war in 2003, in particular its commitment to democracy and the development of its political, administrative, and economic institutions.  The United States congratulates the people of Liberia for their determination, ingenuity, and commitment to peace and democracy that has made this possible.  Accordingly, the President has terminated the national emergency declared with respect to Liberia pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in Executive Order 13348 of July 22, 2004 and lifted the economic sanctions imposed pursuant to that Order.

Liberia has worked to overcome not only the scars of war but also the challenge of responding to an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola at a time when Liberians were in the middle of the vital work of consolidating democracy, building their economy, investing in infrastructure, and strengthening their security services.  Much remains to be done, especially as Liberia looks ahead to other major milestones including the transfer of security responsibility from the U.N. Mission in Liberia in July 2016 and presidential elections in 2017.  Liberia and its people are up to these challenges, and the United States and our international partners will remain steadfast in our commitment to Liberia.  Today's announcement is one of what will surely be many more steps as Liberia continues to take charge of its future and live up to its full potential.

Source: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary

Governor Cuomo Vetoes Port Ambrose Liquefied Gas Project

Governor Andrew Cuomo today vetoed the Port Ambrose Liquefied Natural Gas Deepwater Port, citing security and economic concerns along with the potential to negatively impact off-shore wind development. The project, which had been proposed by Liberty Natural Gas, LLC, required approval from both Governor Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Christie under the federal Deepwater Port Act. Governor Cuomo detailed his full position in a letter sent today to the U.S. Maritime Administration. A copy of that letter is available here.

“My administration carefully reviewed this project from all angles, and we have determined that the security and economic risks far outweigh any potential benefits,” said Governor Cuomo. “Superstorm Sandy taught us how quickly things can go from bad to worse when major infrastructure fails – and the potential for disaster with this project during extreme weather or amid other security risks is simply unacceptable. Port Ambrose would also hinder the local maritime economy in a way that negatively impacts businesses throughout Long Island, and that is simply unacceptable. This is a common-sense decision, because vetoing this project is in the best interests of New Yorkers.”

The Deepwater Port Act requires approval from the governor of each adjacent coastal state before a deepwater port license is issued. For the Port Ambrose project, both New York and New Jersey are adjacent coastal states.

The Governor’s review found that the project posed inherent and unanswered security risks to the region. The potential for catastrophic impacts during extreme weather events was also found to be unacceptable. Additionally, the project posed significant disruptions to commercial and recreational maritime activities, and would also have interfered with a critical off-shore wind power project proposed by the New York Power Authority. 

Source: Press Office, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Oval Office Chat: Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nayhan

 

President Obama spoke this morning by phone with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.  They discussed ongoing diplomatic efforts to facilitate a political transition in Syria and agreed on the importance of steps to reduce violence.  Toward that end, both leaders reaffirmed the importance of all parties continuing their collective engagement, with the aim of achieving additional progress at the November 14 meeting of foreign ministers in Vienna.  They also reaffirmed their support for the moderate Syrian opposition and committed to increase pressure on ISIL.  Separately, the President and Crown Prince discussed how to best support the Iraqi Government's efforts to combat ISIL.  On Yemen, they also reaffirmed the need to de-escalate the fighting, allow for the unrestricted and expanded access of humanitarian assistance and commercial shipments, and encourage all parties to resume political negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.  Both leaders agreed to remain in close contact and to deepen strategic cooperation on these and related issues. 

Source: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary

Presidential Medal of Honor Ceremony

 

President Obama awards the Medal of Honor to retired Army Captain Florent Groberg, who tackled a suicide bomber while on patrol in Afghanistan in 2012 and saved the lives of fellow soldiers.

Click here for video.

Source: C-Span

Oval Office Chat: Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma

From The G-Man received the following statement today:

President Obama spoke last night by phone with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to congratulate her on her campaign and the success of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma’s historic parliamentary election that was held on November 8, 2015.  The President commended her for her tireless efforts and sacrifice over so many years to promote a more inclusive, peaceful, and democratic Burma. The two leaders discussed the importance for all parties to respect the official results once announced and to work together in the spirit of unity to form an inclusive, representative government that reflects the will of the people.  The President noted that the election and formation of a new government could be an important step forward in Burma’s democratic transition and the effort to forge a more peaceful and prosperous future.

President Thein Sein

President Obama spoke last night by phone with President Thein Sein to offer his congratulations to the people of Burma for their participation in the historic parliamentary election on November 8, 2015.  The President commended the efforts of the Union Election Commission and others in the government for their work with political parties, civil society, and the media to overcome the significant challenges in organizing and conducting the election.  The two leaders discussed the importance for all parties to respect the official results once announced and to work together with a spirit of unity to form an inclusive, representative government that reflects the will of the people.  The President noted that the election and formation of a new government could be an important step forward in Burma’s democratic transition and the effort to forge a more peaceful and prosperous future.

From The G-Man received the following statement on November 11, 2015.

President Jacob Zuma of South Africa

President Obama spoke by phone today with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa to discuss the upcoming climate change negotiations and the situation in Burundi.  President Obama underscored the interest of the United States in reaching an ambitious and durable climate agreement in Paris that incentivizes strong action by all countries. He also expressed his deep concern about the situation in Burundi and asked President Zuma to continue to work with other regional actors to call for calm and press for a dialogue that can bring about a long-term solution to the crisis. In addition, the two discussed the President’s notification to Congress last week regarding the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and the President emphasized his hope that outstanding issues are resolved quickly so that South Africa continues to benefit from AGOA fully.  Finally, the President expressed his condolences for the death of a South African citizen in the attack in Jordan on Monday.  

Source: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary 

Presidential Candidate Ben Carson Remarks at Liberty University

 

Republican Presidential Candidate Ben Carson spoke to students and visitors at Liberty University’s weekly convocation about a number of political topics, including his support of legislation defining and protecting religious freedom for those opposed to same-sex marriage and his plan for a flat income tax. He also answered questions submitted by members of the university’s student government. 

Click here for video.

Source: C-Span

Cybersecurity Threats: Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge discusses cyberthreats to the electrical grid, President Obama’s push to transport detainees from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to the U.S., the Iran nuclear deal, and efforts to combat ISIS.

Click here for video.

Source: C-Span

Dr. Tom Frieden on Foodborne Illness

 

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discusses a 25 percent increase in multi-state outbreaks of foodborne illness in the past five years.

Click here for video.

Source: C-Span

Mayor Bill de Blasio Should Spend Another Night in a NYCHA Building

 
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
By Senator Rev. Rubén Díaz
District 32 Bronx County, New York 

You should know that on July 20, 2013, when then New York City Mayoral Candidate Bill de Blasio was campaigning, he took his friend, Reverend Al Sharpton to spend the night and sleep in a New York City Housing Authority Building.

After spending the night and drawing publicity about the problems facing New Yorkers who live in the projects, when daylight came, Bill de Blasio stated:  “It’s as if tenant’s lives don’t matter.”

Candidate Bill de Blasio pledged that if elected Mayor, he would address the problems facing New York City Housing Authority residents.  He stated: "Staying overnight here, is a powerful reminder that behind the thousands of backlogged repairs that NYCHA never seems to get to, are families living in unacceptable conditions that bring shame to this city."

But as I always say: Surprise, surprise!

After being Mayor for the past 2 years, it’s as if New York City Housing Authority tenant’s lives still don’t matter.  The problems facing the families and residents of the New York City Housing Authority and the problems facing homeless New York City residents are worse than ever.

I wish we could hear Reverend Al Sharpton using his Saturday bully pulpit at the National Action Network, or his Sunday Morning program on MSNBC to push or even ask Bill de Blasio to go back to sleep another night in one of the New York City Housing Authority’s buildings … maybe in one of the following:

(1) Castle Hill Houses in the Bronx where this year, crime and murder continue to make the news; or

 

(2) East River Houses, where Tyrone Howard, the man suspected of shooting New York City Police Officer, Randolph Holder, lived and sold drugs; or

 

(3) Coney Island public housing complex where NYCHA worker Toni Jackson was killed earlier this year when she fell to her death on a jerry-rigged trash hoist; or

  

(4) Lincoln Houses where the lack of security resulted in the murder of Olivia Brown. The lawsuit filed by her mother was shamefully dismissed by New York City's lawyers who stated:“All the risks, hazards and dangers were open, obvious and apparent to [Brown] and said risks, hazards and dangers were openly and voluntarily assumed by [Brown]."

 

It is well known that the Black and Hispanic community, especially the African American community, voted massively for Bill de Blasio for Mayor based upon Reverend Al Sharpton’s support.  Based on this support, Reverend Al Sharpton has been referred to by some of New York’s media as New York City’s Co-Mayor.

 

Because Reverend Al Sharpton has a voice and a special influence in the African American community, and because he was instrumental in getting Candidate Bill de Blasio to participate in a political stunt of spending the night in the projects, it’s about time, now, for Reverend Al Sharpton to once again, invite his friend to coordinate another political sleepover in one of the New York City Housing Authority’s buildings.

  

This way, Mayor de Blasio could remember his own words and realize that life for the New York City Housing Authority residents does matter.

 

I am Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz and this is what you should know.  

Inside Virginia’s Church-Burning Werewolf White Supremacist Cult

Asatru Klangwerke symbol

By Betsy Woodruff

The FBI arrested two young men in Virginia on Tuesday for planning to start a race war by burning churches. But the Norse-inspired white supremacist cults they belonged to are all the rage in parts of Southern Virginia.

Viking-inspired white supremacists trying to terrorize black Christians in the South: not as rare as you think.

News broke yesterday that the FBI arrested two young men under the suspicion that they were planning to start a race war by bombing black churches in their home state of Virginia. The men, Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney, allegedly ascribe to an Icelandic pagan faith called Asatru that has a disturbingly large following among white supremacists.

The faith itself doesn’t seek to endorse or promulgate racist or anti-Semitic views. But you could be forgiven for thinking it does, given its strange appeal to Nazis and other sundry bigots.

Asatru is a pagan religion that draws on Norse mythology. It is related to Odinism, according the Southern Poverty Law Center, and some use the terms interchangeably. Its defenders say the religion itself isn’t inherently bigoted. But many white supremacists find it appealing because, unlike Christianity, it isn’t influenced by Judaism. If you think the KKK is soft on the Jews because it’s Christian-friendly, Asatru might be for you.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Daily Beast

The GOP and the Rightward Imperative: Continued

 

THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

The mythic flag-waving Reagan. A mediocre actor but a powerful propaganda tool for the corporate establishment, Reagan’s regime demarcates the liberaloid past from the new age of ever more blatant plutocratic-imperialist control. The Reagan regime proved that no democracy can co-exist, let alone flourish, in the midst of unchecked business encroachment.

I have been writing about what I call the “Rightward Imperative” of the Republican Party for quite some time, going back to the 1990s. As I said in 2010, Ronald Reagan initiated the historical stream of GOP-led right-wing reaction which we now see in front of us, every day.  They do have real policies which have underlain the Party’s programs since that time. As is well-known, the GOP represents major sectors of the US economy: the extractive/fossil-fuel industries, the military industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, corporate agriculture, the “health” insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and of course corporate and “investment” finance.

But they could, and hardly can, run on a platform of “let the oil and coal companies do whatever they want to,” “we want the rich to get richer, donchaknow,” “we want to export as much American capital overseas where it can make larger profits than it can here, so we really want to de-industrialize our country,” “we don’t care about the health of the American people but we do care about the profits of the health care industry,” “we would like to have permanent war if we can get it,” “we want to convert the US economy from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism,” and so on and so forth.  As is well-known their real policies have included: further tax cuts for the rich; creating ever-widening income and wealth gaps; reducing environmental, transportation, workplace, finance, and etc. regulation to the greatest degree possible; further facilitating the export of capital; promoting the Permanent Preparation for Permanent War economy; the abolition of Social Security and the tattered remains of the “welfare” system, etc.

And so for years, to bring voters to their side, they have cloaked their real policy positions under the camouflage of: the standard, generally meaningless “lower taxes, smaller government” mantra, and the promotion of prejudice: racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, creationism, sexual repression, etc. But done in a supposedly veiled way, by using the so-called “dog whistles.” They allow the GOP for the most part not to talk too much about what they are really about. And when they do, with the abundance of dog whistles about, their noise means that GOP voters hardly notice what their policies really mean. But, at the same time, for individual candidates to attract attention, they have to whistle up the dogs ever-more sharply, moving ever-further to the Right. Which leads to what I call “the Rightward Imperative.” In 1996, Bob Dole made sure that no one could get to his Right.  Now he wouldn’t even be in the conversation.

But something interesting has happened in 2016. In their urgency to get ever-rightward, certain Republicans have broken the rules.  No longer whistling, they are now speaking (actually, in the case of Donald Trump, yelling) the real stuff.   Trump of course is the prime example. Not that the immigration policy that the far-right “Republican base” has not been the same for years –The Wall (to replace the walls already in place, I guess), no “amnesty,” the end of “anchor babyism” (with no shame about using such a putrid phrase) and for some sort of mass deportation. (Actually, the Repubs.’ biggest “immigration problem” is that someday it might be solved, depriving them of a sure-fire issue for appealing to that base.) The only difference is that Trump, following the Rightward Imperative, is now saying these things right out loud, and the “base” has been flocking to him. (That is until the Dominionist, racist-in-dark-skin, possibly least-informed Presidential candidate ever, right down to the base’s level of knowledge, Carson — apparently a great micro-carpenter who apparently doesn’t know much about medicine, e.g., on vaccination, on supplements, and on how pregnancies really happen — came along. But that’s another story.) 

With his “birtherism” dog whistle of a couple of years ago, Trump showed that he was a racist, but back then it was still a dog whistle. And now, more and more, as the other candidates pursue the nomination, they have to follow the Rightward Imperative to get further to the Right than the next guy or gal. Except that this time around, they have to be increasingly open about it. So where does that get you? Well it gets Rubio to not having much of a real chance, not because of his Senate absenteeism or his messy personal finances, but because he moved away from a somewhat sensible  position on the immigration question to some semblance of the Hard Right one that most of the other candidates have adopted. Fiorina has already had her little flare in the polls, but that resulted from open lie-telling: Planned Parenthood dissected live fetuses. Cruz has become very open about his Obama-centric racism. (By the way, if Cruz or some reasonable facsimile of him doesn’t win the Presidency this time around, just wait for 2020. The 2016 version will have sounded like a “moderate.”) The dog-whistles are being put away, because in following the Rightward Imperative, they think that they don’t need them anymore.

But, and it’s a big BUT, they are running into some trouble on this. Cue up the CNBC Republican debate. CNBC ain’t liberal. (I do watch it on a regular basis when I am getting-up/working-out in the morning.) But yes, the hosts did ask some tough questions. But NOT as the resultant GOP whining would make you believe, on anything that the candidates in question had not themselves said, stood for, or associated themselves with.

And so when they got caught up on one or more of their positions that they would really not like have to answer questions on before a national audience, they do what Repubs. have always done: duck the questions and complain of media-bias. What they want to do, and are so often successful in doing, is get the discussion off the subject of what their policies really are and onto the “yes, it is/no it isn’t” one of so-called “media bias.” That goes from the farthest right of the current crop to the supposed calm, “reasonable,” Mr. Public (“I’m simply for lower taxes and smaller government”) Republican, Morning Joe Scarborough, who has really gotten heavy into moaning about the situation.

Of course. Why should a potential President have to answer any questions that might come from non-same-party opponents, either of him/herself or his/her party, which might possibly be in the national interest? So then comes the proposal, from several GOP quarters, that future Repub., debate moderators should be Republicans. One moderator trio that has been mentioned is Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin. And in all of this is of course the total denial that the GOP has its own 24/7 Propaganda/Echo Chamber Channel. (Yes, it is that even though Megyn Kelly of Fox “News” went after Trump that first time. But that was because way back then Roger Ailes thought that it would be a good idea to get rid of Trump early. He was breaking too many dog-whistles).

And so, the Rightward Imperative has worked well for the Republican Party, up to now. It happens that some smart heads inside their leadership and donor class have realized that perhaps it’s starting to not work so well, when some really tough questions are asked in this endless series of “debates.” Why? Because when they follow the Rightward Imperative, openly, they distance themselves further and further away for the general electorate. And now all the whistling in the world won’t bring all those horses back to the barn.

Well, what can bring this up short and what can be used to reveal to that general electorate what the Republican Party is really about if they remove themselves from whatever (not-so-strong) glare certain members of the media are casting on them? Why the other half of the Duopoly of course. In the course of their debates, certain GOP candidates, especially Fiorina (who is really running for the Vice-Presidential nomination) try to burnish their Presidential credentials by showing “how hard they can go after Hillary.” After all, it’s a good way to avoid answering embarrassing questions. How about Bernie and Hillary going after the Repubs. to reveal what they truly are: in their real policies, in the Rightward Imperative, and in the dog-whistle/cover stuff? Now that would make for a real change in U.S. politics. Why Bernie might even stop calling the Republican Senators his “colleagues.”  But, don’t hold your breath.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior Editor, Politics, Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being Senior Editor, Politics, for The Greanville Post, he is: a Contributor for American Politics to The Planetary Movement; a “Trusted Author” for Op-Ed News.com; a contributor to the “Writing for Godot” section of Reader Supported News; and a contributor to From The G-Man. He is the Editorial Director and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine.us. Further, he is an occasional Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter, BuzzFlash Commentary, and Dandelion Salad.  Dr. Jonas’ latest book is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel, Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, and available on Amazon.