Berenberg Bank: Politics right now ‘evokes memories of the dreadful 1930s’

Business Insider reports: German investment bank Berenberg believes that “some aspects of Donald Trump’s successful election campaign evoke memories of the dreadful 1930s.”

The bank’s chief economist Holger Schmieding says in a note sent out on Monday that: “After the Brexit vote and the triumph of Trump, the echo of the early 1930s sounds a little less faint than it did before.”

Schmieding highlights populism, rising protectionism and nationalism, isolationism, and the erosion of the political middle ground as key features of both the current political climate and the 1930s.

“Populist” leaders — often dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini — came to power across Europe in the 1930s with promises to restore glory and honour to their countries, often blaming foreign races and religions for the problems.

Both recent the Brexit and Trump campaigns blamed outsiders for problems at home (the EU, Mexicans, Muslims) and had strong nationalist streaks (Make America Great Again, Take Back Control).

International trade tailed off in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash as the US turned inwards. Schmieding says: “Two major policy mistakes turned the financial crisis into a depression” — the US fed tightening monetary policy and the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which enacted protectionist taxes on imports.

Both Trump and the current pro-Brexit UK government have promised to reverse the rising tide of globalism. Trump plans to do this by scrapping or significantly changing a trade deal with Mexico and putting tariffs on imports from China. UK Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to reign in globalisation.

Schmieding calls the 1930s “dreadful” because the Great Depression, triggered by policy mistakes, led to widespread poverty. The potent economic and political cocktail of depression and nationalism also led to World War II.

But Schmieding says that “the [current] situation is very different in at least three key respects.” These are:

  • Rising employment: “Despite widespread anger at the establishment, we are not quite living in pitchfork times again.”
  • Lack of ideology: “Trump and some other leading populists today come across as opportunistic self-promoters rather than incorrigible ideologues.”
  • International cooperation: “Institutions of international co-operation and the rule of law at home are much stronger in the developed world than they were in Europe in the 1930s.”

As a result, he does not think we are hurtling towards another major global conflict or serious economic crisis. Still, there are significant risks. [Continue reading…]

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What could the rest of the world do if Trump pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change?

By Henrik Selin, Boston University and Adil Najam, Boston University

Climate change negotiators from around the world – now meeting at the COP22 conference in Marrakech, Morocco – continue steadfastly with the task of putting meaning and action into the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to bring down global greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, the tone in Marrakech has suddenly become more subdued. While many conversations remain staunchly defiant, others have assumed a funeral-like quality, as national delegates and civil society representatives try to assess the ramifications of the U.S. presidential election.

Elections have consequences for global climate change negotiations and the future of the planet.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly stated he does not believe in human-induced climate change. He has argued that climate change is an expensive hoax that was created by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive. He has also declared his intent to roll back federal climate change and renewable energy policy. Most poignantly for Marrakech, he has loudly declared an intention to “cancel the Paris climate agreement.”

Some cling to the hope that President Trump will forget pronouncements made by Candidate Trump just as Candidate Trump had ignored the pontifications of Citizen Trump. An important indicator of why this may not be the case is the appointment of Myron Ebell as head of the transition team for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Ebell, also a front-runner to be appointed as head of the EPA, is an outspoken climate change denier who flat out rejects the Paris Agreement as unconstitutional.

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China threatens to cut sales of iPhones and U.S. cars if ‘naive’ Trump pursues trade war

The Guardian reports: US president-elect Donald Trump would be a “naive” fool to launch an all-out trade war against China, a Communist party-controlled newspaper has claimed.

During the acrimonious race for the White House Trump repeatedly lashed out at China, vowing to punish Beijing with “defensive” 45% tariffs on Chinese imports and to officially declare it a currency manipulator.

“When they see that they will stop the cheating,” the billionaire Republican, who has accused Beijing of “the greatest theft in the history of the world”, told a rally in August.

On Monday the state-run Global Times warned that such measures would be a grave mistake.

“If Trump wrecks Sino-US trade, a number of US industries will be impaired. Finally the new president will be condemned for his recklessness, ignorance and incompetence,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

The Global Times claimed any new tariffs would trigger immediate “countermeasures” and “tit-for-tat approach” from Beijing.

“A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted. China can also limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US.”

“Making things difficult for China politically will do him no good,” the newspaper warned. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama left the door open for Trump to resume torture

The New York Times reports: As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”

It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk. But if the Trump administration follows through on such ideas, it will find some assistance in a surprising source: President Obama’s have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.

Over and over, Mr. Obama has imposed limits on his use of such powers but has not closed the door on them — a flexible approach premised on the idea that he and his successors could be trusted to use them prudently. Mr. Trump can now sweep away those limits and open the throttle on policies that Mr. Obama endorsed as lawful and legitimate for sparing use, like targeted killings in drone strikes and the use of indefinite detention and military tribunals for terrorism suspects.

And even in areas where Mr. Obama tried to terminate policies from the George W. Bush era — like torture and the detention of Americans and other people arrested on domestic soil as “enemy combatants” — his administration fought in court to prevent any ruling that the defunct practices had been illegal. The absence of a definitive repudiation could make it easier for Trump administration lawyers to revive the policies by invoking the same sweeping theories of executive power that were the basis for them in the Bush years. [Continue reading…]

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Is Trump reaching out to Europe’s far right before he talks with the heads of state?

The Washington Post reports: Marion Maréchal-Le Pen — a rising star in France’s far-right National Front and the niece of the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen — wrote on Twitter on Saturday that representatives of President-elect Donald Trump had invited her to “work together.”

Le Pen, 26, became the youngest member of France’s Parliament in 2012. She was elected to represent Vaucluse, a region in southern France with heavy ties to the National Front, a party founded by her grandfather, the 88-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen. He once referred to the Nazi concentration camps as a “detail of history.”


“I answer yes to the invitation of Stephen Bannon, CEO of @realDonaldTrump presidential campaign, to work together,” Marion Maréchal-Le Pen tweeted.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News Network with ties to the so-called alt-right — is rumored to be among the possible candidates for Trump’s chief of staff. [On Sunday, Bannon was named as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.]

Her tweet reflected a highly unusual phenomenon: an American president-elect seeking to forge relationships with ultranationalist and populist factions overseas that are often sharply critical of their countries’ governments. It also raised the question of whether Trump and his representatives have been reaching out to foreign populist parties before first reaching out to foreign heads of state. [Continue reading…]

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Swedish Nazi group hails Trump in largest demo yet

The Local reports: Sweden’s neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR) mounted the biggest march in its history on Saturday, with its leadership saying the election of Donald Trump in the US marked the start of a world revolution.

Five people were arrested and two were injured in Stockholm on Saturday as an estimated 600 far-right demonstrators marched from the central Kungsträdgården park to Mynttorget, the square where Sweden’s parliament is based in historic Gamla Stan.

“A number of people have been held. They were aggressive at one of our barriers,” Kjell Lindgren, a press spokesman for the Stockholm police said. He said that police had registered two cases of violent rioting, which carries a maximum four-year sentence. At least twenty others were detained for the duration of the march.

The NMR, set up in 1997, promotes an openly racist and anti-Semitic doctrine, and press commentators had questioned the wisdom of authorising Saturday’s rally, given the likelihood of violence. [Continue reading…]

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Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, one of most formidable forces fighting Assad

The Washington Post reports: President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obama’s concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europe’s southern doorstep, the officials said.

The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counter­terrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces­­ battling the Syrian government.

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham — or Front for the Conquest of Syria — and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants with criminal records

The Washington Post reports: In a “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to immediately deport two to three million undocumented immigrants who “have criminal records” after his inauguration next January.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump told “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. “But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.”

Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to deport “millions and millions of undocumented immigrants.” Trump told her that after securing the border, his administration would make a “determination” on the remaining undocumented immigrants in the country.

“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about — who are terrific people. They’re terrific people, but we are gonna make a determination at that,” Trump said. “But before we make that determination…it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.” [Continue reading…]

Vox reports: Donald Trump doesn’t have to implement any unprecedented immigration policy to create an unprecedented immigration regime. He could just use the precedents the last two presidents created for him.

Both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations created powerful tools for apprehending and deporting immigrants. It’s just that no one’s ever used them together.

The Obama administration was already more aggressive about immigration enforcement than many people realize. Obama set deportation records during his first term, deporting 400,000 people a year. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had relatively free rein to catch and deport immigrants — and easy access to local jails to pick up immigrants who’d come in contact with local police. Many of those deported were labeled “criminals” because they’d been pulled over for broken taillights or arrested for minor offenses like selling illegal phone cards. [Continue reading…]

In August, ABC News reported: President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the “Deporter in Chief.”

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who “self-deported” or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history.

In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century. [Continue reading…]

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Post-election spate of hate crimes worse than post-9/11

USA Today reports: What may seem like a dramatic rise in the number of hate harassment and hate incidents happening across the country in the wake of Tuesday’s general election is not in anyone’s imagination, experts say.

There indeed has been a spike in the number of reports of such incidents, say representatives for two organizations that track such occurrences. A representative for one group, in fact, said the rise appears to be even worse that what was took place immediately after the terror attacks in 2001.

“Since the election, we’ve seen a big uptick in incidents of vandalism, threats, intimidation spurred by the rhetoric surrounding Mr. Trump’s election,” Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., told USA TODAY. “The white supremacists out there are celebrating his victory and many are feeling their oats,” Cohen said.

The incidents, some that bring up memories of the Jim Crow era, continued into Friday. In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania issued a statement saying it was working to find the source of racist messages sent to black freshmen, and in Syracuse, N.Y., a group of pickup trucks – one draped with the Confederate flag – drove through an anti-Trump rally. In Columbus, Ohio, a man banged on the car window while a Muslim woman was driving, her children and elderly parents with her, and told her, “C–t, you don’t belong in this country,” according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington.

All those were added to the list of incidents that included black children being told to get to the back of a bus and Latino children being taunted about the wall that Trump promised to build between Mexico and the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump picks Reince Priebus as chief of staff

The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump on Sunday chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose friendship with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, could help secure early legislative victories.

In selecting Mr. Priebus, the president-elect passed over Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing media mogul who oversaw his presidential campaign. If Mr. Trump had appointed Mr. Bannon, a fierce critic of the Republican establishment, it would have demonstrated a continued disdain for a party that Mr. Trump fought throughout his campaign.

Mr. Trump’s choice is certain to anger some of his most conservative supporters, many of whom expect him to battle the Washington establishment over issues like taxes, immigration, trade, health care and the environment. They view Mr. Priebus as a deal maker who will be too eager to push the new president toward compromise.

Mr. Priebus is expected to have multiple deputies, including Katie Walsh, the chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, who is close to Mr. Priebus and helped ensure a tight working relationship between the party’s operational infrastructure and Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Other advisers in Mr. Trump’s inner circle will also have his ear, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, who is likely to wield great influence over the new president regardless of whether he holds a formal title. Mr. Kushner, who has no experience in politics or government, is often the last person Mr. Trump turns to for counsel.

Mr. Bannon — the longtime chairman of Breitbart News, a site distinguished by its nationalist, conspiracy-laden coverage — was named chief strategist and senior counselor, and a news release from Mr. Trump’s transition team said that Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon would work as “equal partners.” Mr. Bannon is also likely to serve as a conduit to the populist right and conservative media outlets. [Continue reading…]

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Marine Le Pen says she and Donald Trump are building ‘a new world’

BuzzFeed reports: The far-right leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, has hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the US election and claimed they are both part of a “new world” being built in the wake of Brexit.

Le Pen was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show on Remembrance Sunday – a move which has angered critics of Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist politics and provoked protests outside the BBC studio.

The National Front leader said June’s Brexit vote and Trump’s victory had boosted her chances of winning the French election next year, saying the votes had “made possible what had previously been presented as impossible”.

Le Pen frequently echoed Trump by criticising worldwide “elites” and went on to predict the European Union would disintegrate if each member state were to hold a referendum on membership. [Continue reading…]

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The media must confront President Trump on climate change

Oliver Milman writes: Imagine the world was facing upheaval on a scale not seen during modern civilization, a change that would imperil the world’s great cities by the rising seas and snuff out species at at the fastest rate since the dinosaurs disappeared. Then imagine you were a journalist, had repeated chances to ask the next president of the United States about this and decided to not do so.

The apparent failure of the media during the presidential election has been multifaceted and fiercely debated. But the absence of climate change as a leading topic in the election of Donald Trump is perhaps the single greatest rebuke to the idea that power should be held to account for the benefit of this and future generations.

This failure was most apparent during the presidential debates, where four-and-a-half hours of television saw not one moderator question pitched to Trump or Hillary Clinton on climate change. It was left to Ken Bone, he of the red sweater and brief internet fame, to come closest with a question about coal mining.

The mind-boggling consequences of unchecked climate change, which is essentially what Trump proposes by denying the problem exists, dwarfed every other issue – yes, including emails – discussed during the debates. And yet it wasn’t raised. It was the equivalent of getting an exclusive interview with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1942 and not asking them about the war. [Continue reading…]

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Russian warships arrive off Syrian coast ahead of ‘final’ assault on Aleppo

The Telegraph reports: A flotilla of Russian warships arrived off the coast of Syria on Saturday, readying for a large-scale land and sea assault on the city of Aleppo.

The eight-strong battle group, led by Moscow’s only aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and accompanied by a nuclear-powered missile cruiser, had provocatively travelled through the English Channel to reach the eastern Mediterranean.

Sergei Artamonov, commander of the Kuznetsov, confirmed to Russia-1 television station via videolink on Saturday that aircraft were already taking off from the ship’s deck for reconnaissance flights.

“Flights are being carried out from the deck… they are working on coordination with the shore port,” he said.

Asked whether foreign aircraft were flying over the ships, Vladislav Malakhovsky, commander of the Peter the Great missile cruiser, said: “they are afraid to come closer than 50 kilometres away, realising very well how powerful the nuclear cruiser is.”

The warships will be deployed to the Mediterranean for at least six months, the pro-government Syrian website al-Masdar News reported, quoting a military source. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The United Nations implored all sides in the Syria conflict on Thursday to allow food deliveries to rebel-held eastern Aleppo, where roughly 250,000 residents, under siege for months, just received their last rations.

Russia appeared to reject the plea.

“I don’t think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving in east Aleppo,” Jan Egeland, the United Nations official in charge of a humanitarian task force for Syria, told reporters at the organization’s Geneva headquarters.

Food supplies have not been replenished in eastern Aleppo since mid-July, Mr. Egeland said. “The last food rations are being distributed as we speak,” he said. “There will not be more to distribute next week.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s appointees will set course of his presidency

The New York Times reports: “Busy day planned in New York,” President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Twitter on Friday morning, two days after his astonishing victory. “Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!”

If anything, that understates the gravity of the personnel choices Mr. Trump and his transition team are weighing.

Rarely in the history of the American presidency has the exercise of choosing people to fill jobs had such a far-reaching impact on the nature and priorities of an incoming administration. Unlike most new presidents, Mr. Trump comes into office with no elective-office experience, no coherent political agenda and no bulging binder of policy proposals. And he has left a trail of inflammatory, often contradictory, statements on issues from immigration and race to terrorism and geopolitics.

In such a chaotic environment, serving a president who is in many ways a tabula rasa, the appointees to key White House jobs like chief of staff and cabinet posts like secretary of state, defense secretary and Treasury secretary could wield outsize influence. Their selection will help determine whether the Trump administration governs like the firebrand Mr. Trump was on the campaign trail or the pragmatist he often appears to be behind closed doors. [Continue reading…]

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General Services Administration, a federal agency doing business with Trump, is trying to avoid a massive conflict of interest

BuzzFeed reports: For the first time, federal officials have acknowledged a potential conflict of interest that faces incoming president Donald Trump over his high-profile hotel deal with the United States government. And the federal agency that’s involved wants to talk to Trump’s transition team about it before he takes the oath of office.

In 2012, the General Services Administration agreed to lease the Old Post Office Building — a landmark building just blocks from the White House — to Trump’s organization so that the mogul could turn it into a luxury hotel. In the complicated 109-page lease, Trump is required to pay the GSA $3 million a year plus a portion of his revenue, and he has to abide by a complex set of restrictions regarding what he can do and how he can build.

But once Trump becomes president, he will have authority over the GSA and will be able to fire its administrator at will, raising profound issues of a conflict.

Questioned about that conflict, a GSA spokesperson sent a statement to BuzzFeed News: “Prior to Mr. Trump taking the oath of office, GSA plans to coordinate with the President-elect’s transition team to allow a plan to be put in place to identify and address any potential conflict of interest relating to the Old Post Office building.”

Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks did not respond to emailed questions about the matter. [Continue reading…]

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Sidney Blumenthal: Donald Trump won the election as a result of an FBI ‘coup d’état’

Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Bill Clinton and long-time confidant to Hillary Clinton, was interviewed on Friday on Nieuwsuur (News Hour) which is broadcast on Dutch public television. The introduction is in Dutch but the interview itself is in English.

Blumenthal says the decisive intervention in the election by FBI Director James Comey “was the result of a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani who was a member of Trump’s campaign and I think it’s not unfair to call it a ‘coup’.”

 

“Trump has positioned himself to be Vladimir Putin’s junior partner… His policy is consistently pro-Putin and I think that we will see, if his rhetoric is made into reality, that American foreign policy since the end of World War Two will be overthrown.”

The New York Times reports: Hillary Clinton on Saturday cast blame for her surprise election loss on the announcement by the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, days before the election that he had revived the inquiry into her use of a private email server.

In her most extensive remarks since she conceded the race to Donald J. Trump early Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton told donors on a 30-minute conference call that Mr. Comey’s decision to send a letter to Congress about the inquiry 11 days before Election Day had thrust the controversy back into the news and had prevented her from ending the campaign with an optimistic closing argument.

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.” [Continue reading…]

Suppose the Clinton campaign had stayed on track and there had been no FBI intervention. It seems much more likely than not, that Clinton would have won.

That campaign would now be a subject of analysis in which pundits were describing the keys to its success, alongside the reasons Trump had failed.

In other words, it’s easy to picture two versions of the Clinton campaign that are virtually identical, the only significant difference being on whether the FBI had stepped in.

Even though it’s reasonable to point out that the FBI would never have got involved in the first place had it not been for Clinton’s ill-judged decision to set up a private email server, that mistake itself didn’t appear to be an obstacle to her election until the FBI willfully reawakened it as a campaign issue.

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Bitter infighting could cripple Trump’s administration before it ever gets off the ground

Politico reports: The bitter infighting that plagued Donald Trump’s campaign during the Republican presidential primary is starting to spill over into his team’s efforts to establish an administration and political operation, according to more than half a dozen sources familiar with the planning efforts.

The tensions played a role in a Friday shakeup in which the president-elect replaced his transition team chief Chris Christie with his running mate Mike Pence. Sources familiar with the move say it was precipitated partly by clashes between Christie’s allies and rival factions on the transition team, as well as Trump’s influential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Those rifts and others are complicating what was an already a herculean task for Trump’s team: building a massive new government for a man who has never held public office.

“It’s the same situation as in the primary – everyone has the knives out for each other,” said a Republican operative who worked with the campaign and is now advising people on the transition team.

Asked about the tensions, and about Kushner’s role in the leadership change at the transition team, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said, “Anybody seeing today’s news about the appointment of Vice President-elect Mike Pence to run the Presidential Transition Team realizes that President-elect Donald J. Trump is serious about changing Washington whether the town likes it or not. This might ruffle the delicate sensitivities of the well-heeled two-martini lunch set, but President-elect Trump isn’t fighting for them, he’s fighting for the hard-working men and women outside the Beltway who don’t care for insider bickering.”

It’s not uncommon for rivalries to emerge inside campaigns and administrations as advisers jockey to place allies in key roles and advance their policy priorities. But the level of internecine conflict during Trump’s drive toward the GOP nomination was so extreme that it sometimes resulted in conflicting directives for even simple hiring and spending decisions.

People who witnessed that infighting up close see signs of similar patterns emerging, with some of the same players involved. And they fear that the dynamic could cripple Trump’s operation before it ever gets off the ground, since launching an administration requires hiring thousands of employees and setting up far more intricate chains of command than those in place during Trump’s bare-bones presidential campaign. [Continue reading…]

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