JEFF SESSIONS' WAR ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA GETS PUBLIC HEALTH ALL WRONG

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By MEGAN MOLTENI

IF THERE’S ANYTHING Jeff Sessions hates more than answering rapid-fire questions in front of a packed Intelligence Committee hearing, it’s a bag of stinky bud. The Attorney General’s distaste for marijuana is well documented. His Reefer Madness-era alarmism is so anachronistic it’s almost quaint. Or at least it would be if he weren’t using its outdated data to launch an attack on states’ rights to authorize medical marijuana.

In May, Sessions asked congressional leaders to roll back federal protections for the drug that have been in place since 2014, according to a letter that became public Monday. Known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, these protections prevent the Justice Department from using federal funds to block states from crafting their own medical marijuana regulations. In his letter, Sessions complained that the amendment was keeping his department from enforcing other federal laws—namely, the Controlled Substances Act—citing the country’s “historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime” as justification.

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that Session’s position directly contradicts the will of the American people; as of an April Quinnipiac poll, medical marijuana hit its highest levels of support in history, with 94 percent of voters approving of doctor-prescribed weed. Instead, let’s jump straight into why this is a totally bogus way to justify a new national drug enforcement policy.

While it’s true that yes, the US is in the midst of a “historic drug epidemic,” marijuana is not the drug that kills 91 Americans every single day. It is also not responsible for the quadrupling in overdose deaths in the US since 1999. In fact, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration—which Sessions oversees—no deaths from marijuana overdose have ever been recorded. The epidemic the AG referred to is, of course, the deadly opioid sort—drugs like oxycodone, methadone, heroin, and fentanyl. No one is losing family members to some THC oil.

Using this very real public health crisis to justify cracking down on medical marijuana isn’t just disingenuous, it’s irresponsible. Because marijuana, it turns out, is actually pretty great at managing chronic pain. In January, the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering conducted the most thorough review of marijuana researchto date. Across numerous trials and experiments, the report found strong evidence that people treated for pain with marijuana were “more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms,” compared to a placebo.

That was pretty huge, because marijuana’s legal status as a Schedule 1 drug has severely limited the ability of researchers to test whether it can help patients deal with crippling pain, anxiety, insomnia, and nausea. It’s a classic, bureaucratic Catch-22: The DEA won’t change the legal status of marijuana unless the FDA determines its medical usefulness. The FDA can’t make that determination because the legal restrictions on the drug prevent researchers from running gold-standard clinical trials with it.

A meta-analysis published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found just 28 randomized clinical trials evaluating cannabis for chronic pain. Part of the reason for the paucity of pot trials is because whole plants and natural extracts aren’t patentable, so pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pursue them. Plus the FDA doesn’t have an approval process for whole plants or other botanicals, just single molecules.

So instead, scientists are having to rely on observational, real-world data to form a picture of how marijuana might actually help solve the opioid epidemic, rather than contribute to it. So here are a few things Sessions might want to note:

States that permit medical marijuana have fewer opioid overdose deaths. According to a 2014 study in JAMA Internal Medicine, the 13 states that enacted medical cannabis laws before 2010 had a 25 percent lower average annual opioid overdose mortality rate. Painkiller prescriptions go way down after introducing medical marijuana laws. In a 2016 Health Affairs study, researchers found that doctors in states where medical MJ was permissible, prescribed (on average) 1,826 fewer painkiller doses for Medicare patients between 2010 and 2013. Chronic pain patients who use pot don’t need as many painkillers. A 2015 study in the Journal of Pain found that patients in Michigan who visited local dispensaries were 64 percent less likely to report opioid use, which suggests weed could actually substitute for some painkillers.

All of these studies looked at correlation, not causation, so it’s impossible to say for sure that access to medical marijuana will drive down opioid use and abuse. Marie McCormick, a public health researcher at Harvard who chaired this year’s NAS committee report says more research is needed to understand whether or not marijuana could be a substitute for serious painkillers. But it shouldn’t take a PhD or an MD to understand that cutting off people’s access to pot won’t make their symptoms go away. And pot, unlike opioids, doesn’t have a fatal dose.

McCormick says that’s something that states are starting to understand. “We’ve gotten really good feedback that our report is helping them set policies,” she said. “And at the end of the day it’s states that are basically running this thing.”

Well, they are for now. But not if Sessions gets his way. And that’s where researchers like McCormick start to get a little worried. “Once you’ve made up your mind about something, presenting alternative evidence only reinforces what you already think,” she says. Sessions thinks pot is ruining this country, not helping patients. “I really doubt whether this report or any other could convince the AG otherwise.”

US Senate Republicans moving forward on Obamacare repeal bill

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By Kate Randall 

The US Senate “working group” drafting the chamber’s version of the bill repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) appears to be moving closer to a vote on the Senate floor. The Senate leadership hopes to bring it to a vote before the July 4 recess or shortly thereafter.

House Republicans passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA) early last month. That legislation guts Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor jointly administered by the federal government and the states that currently covers 74 million people.

The AHCA would cut $834 billion from Medicaid over a decade. The bill would effectively end Medicaid as an open-ended entitled program, by shifting federal funding to per capita caps or block grants, resulting in people who qualify being denied enrollment or having their benefits slashed.

The AHCA would also end the expansion of Medicaid under the program popularly known as Obamacare. The Congressing Budget Office (CBO) estimates that 14 million people would lose coverage under the AHCA by 2018; this figure would reach 23 million in 2026.

It would slash taxes for the rich, disproportionately taking aim at health coverage for the poor, older Americans and those with preexisting conditions.

Senate “moderates,” who originally signaled their opposition to ending the Medicaid expansion, are now indicating they could agree to phase out the program, but over a seven-year period. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has proposed three years.

The bill will be sent to the CBO to score before the vote. In a major break with Senate protocol, Republicans say there will be no committee hearings or mark-ups for the bill, but it will be brought straight to the floor for a vote. Democrats argue this is a strategy for minimizing time for opposition to the bill to build.

Senate conservatives are still concerned about the longer Medicaid expansion phase-out, as well as moves to dial back the waivers in the AHCA that would allow states to repeal various Obamacare regulations.

The Senate bill is expected to allow states to seek exemptions from ACA rules on what insurance companies are required to cover, known as essential health benefits. These waivers would allow states to allow the sale of policies that don’t include benefits such as maternity care, prescription drugs, emergency room visits, substance abuse treatment, and other vital health needs.

As the Senate bill now stands, however, states would not be allowed to seek waivers preventing people with preexisting conditions to be charged more for coverage. “There has to be a give and take, and right now it seems like conservatives are being told just to take it all and not get anything,” Dan Holler, a spokesman for the conservative group Heritage Action for America, said on Thursday.

Also on the table is retaining some of the ACA taxes on the wealthy in place at least for a while to reach the $133 billion savings goal that is required under Senate rules. As the Senate bill is shaping up, however, it will retain the majority of the AHCA’s reactionary features.

In a conveniently timed move, more health insurance plans across the country are beginning to exit the Obamacare marketplace, citing uncertainty around the ACA’s future. This has prompted continual calls from the Trump administration and Republicans that Obamacare is “exploding” and “collapsing” and is in urgent need of repeal and replacement.

According to Vox, in the past week the number of US counties with zero health insurers signed up to sell coverage in 2018 has doubled. There are now 38,000 Obamacare enrollees across 47 counties where no insurers want to participate in the ACA.

Last week, Anthem announced that it would exit the Ohio marketplace, leaving 20 counties and 15,000 Obamacare enrollees with no 2018 plan options. If Anthem were to exit the rest of the states where it currently sells ACA plans, 300,000 Obamacare enrollees would be left without coverage.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City quit the exchanges on May 24, citing “the uncertain direction of the market.”

Andy Slavitt, who served as Medicare administrator in the Obamacare administration, spoke the truth when he told Vox, “We elected to have a system that is completely market-based so companies get to make individual decisions.”

In other words, the ACA relies on the insurance companies to volunteer to sell their products on these public marketplaces. Just as they are virtually unhindered in the premiums they can charge, they are free to exit the marketplaces when it is not in their best profit interest.

These insurance market conditions are making passage of the Senate bill, and its reconciliation with the House version, an easier process for Trump and the Republicans. While congressional Democrats have made a few protests, the repeal and replacement of Obamacare is for the most part flying under the radar.

While they concentrate on Trump administration ties to Russia and whether or not the president has taped recordings of his conversation with fired FBI Director James Comey, the Democrats and mainstream media have had little to say about legislation, in whichever form it emerges, that will result in millions of Americans losing their health care coverage, or being plunged into poverty due to high premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

This is because they agree in principle with the subordination of the health needs of the vast majority of the population to the profit requirements of the corporations that control the giant hospital chains, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical industries and the Wall Street banks that dominate the economy.

Immigration raids strike Detroit: Dozens rounded up for deportation to Iraq war zone

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By Eric London and Niles Niemuth 

In a series of raids Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested as many as 100 Iraqi immigrants in the Detroit metro area, including Muslims and many Chaldean Catholics, some of whom were reportedly captured while leaving church services.

Family members of the arrestees told the World Socialist Web Site that the detainees were sent to a for-profit prison four hours away near Youngstown, Ohio, from where they face immediate risk of deportation to Iraq.

Protesters held a demonstration at the Mother of God Catholic Church in Southfield yesterday, where friends and family of the arrestees wept and screamed denunciations of Trump and immigration officials.

Relatives say that deportation will be a “death sentence” due to the ongoing war and sectarian strife that has enveloped Iraq since the US invasion of 2003. While ICE claims they are only deporting dangerous criminals, relatives say some of the arrestees were convicted for crimes as minor as marijuana possession and that many of the convictions are decades old.

The decision by the Trump administration to deport refugees to Iraq explodes the claims that the US wars in Iraq and Syria are “humanitarian” interventions aimed at protecting the population. In violation of international law, the US government is sending the arrestees into an active warzone in a region that it continues to bomb. Iraq has been laid to waste by 25 years of permanent US-led war. The death toll is in the millions.

As the ICE raids were taking place Sunday, the Department of Defense issued a press release announcing that the US military launched seven air strikes in Iraq, hitting Bayji, Kisik, Mosul, and Tal Afar in recent days.

Family members were informed that their relatives could be sent to the Iraqi city of Erbil, located less than two hours by car from Mosul, a city under active siege where the US has killed thousands of civilians and where the US-backed invasion force has been accused of using the chemical white phosphorous against the population.

Mosul, which has been largely demolished by the US siege, is the seat of a leading Chaldean Catholic Church diocese and the home of ethnic Chaldeans, an Assyrian population whose roots in Iraq date back over 5,500 years.

Although the Chaldean minority in Iraq was not targeted by the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, persecution grew after the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 as the US stoked sectarian conflict in the country’s northern Kurdish region in an effort to destabilize the Ba’athist government.

Conditions drastically worsened after the US invasion, which fueled sectarian warfare as the US military mobilized Shi’ite forces against insurgents in the majority Sunni areas, and both Islamic factions persecuted religious minorities like Yazidis and Chaldeans. Over 80 Chaldean churches have been bombed since the US occupation began.

Since the 2003 US invasion, Iraq’s total Christian population has fallen from 1.5 million to 400,000 due to death and emigration. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians fled to Syria after the US invasion, only to now find themselves trapped in the conflict raging there.

In order to stoke civil war and force the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria, the US has backed an opposition dominated by Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, which has also carried out atrocities against Chaldeans in both Syria and Iraq. Al Qaeda is believed to be responsible for the 2008 assassination of Mosul’s Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahno.

In the last three years, ISIS has routinely destroyed Chaldean churches, killed religious officials, and desecrated ancient ruins. The Islamist group developed in Iraq and emerged in Syria under conditions where the US’s deliberate policy was to fuel violent religious conflict. In Iraq, the purpose is to keep the population divided and more easily dominated by Washington. In Syria, the aim is to bring down Assad.

Sunday’s round-up is the product of a deal made in March by the Trump administration with the Iraqi government that removed the country from the administration’s revised executive order barring travel from seven predominantly-Muslim nations. Under the terms of the deal, Iraq agreed to take deportees from the US, something the country has not done for years.

Many Chaldeans at Monday’s demonstration told the WSWS they voted for Trump because he claimed he would protect Christians in Iraq and Syria. An older Chaldean man whose brother was arrested said, “I voted for Trump, it’s not fair. This is our home, where are we to go in Iraq? We have no country, that’s why we came to America!”

Steve, another Chaldean protester whose brother was arrested, said, “Trump lied, he said he would go after people without legal papers, but everyone they arrested had papers. My brother went in for a regular check-up with immigration authorities, and he got picked up at home one week later. If they took your brother, father, sister, or mother, how would you feel? What would you do?”

Scenes like the one that played out in a church parking lot in Michigan on Monday afternoon are becoming increasingly common in the US. In the first three months following his inauguration, Trump’s administration arrested over 40,000 immigrants, an escalation from the already high numbers deported under Barack Obama.

Across the country, parents of all backgrounds are being torn from their children and from one another. Many, including those from the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia, will be sent back to impoverished disaster zones suffering from the impact of US imperialist intervention.

The number of lives shattered by these policies is in the tens of millions, and yet there is near total silence from the Democratic Party on Trump’s mass deportation program.

Instead, the Democratic Party is throwing its entire political energy behind advancing unsubstantiated neo-McCarthyite claims that Trump is an agent of Russia, amplified by highly publicized Senate hearings.

But the Democrats’ attempt to whip up public hysteria over “foreign meddling” may exacerbate xenophobic confusion, further poisoning the political climate and creating conditions in which “foreigners” and immigrants may find themselves the victims of physical attacks. The Democrats’ anti-Russian campaign is providing right-wing paramilitary groups and the Bannon-Miller faction of the Trump White House with a springboard to direct social anger against immigrants.

If public hearings were held on Trump’s deportation program, facts would emerge that would shock tens of millions and educate them on the horrific conditions immigrants face.

For example, the government is setting up a network of camps to house hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including those who have committed no crimes. The government has considered mobilizing 100,000 National Guard troops across 11 western and southwestern states to incarcerate millions of immigrants. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are filled with thousands of fascistic officers who describe beating and arresting immigrants as “fun.” Violations of immigrants’ due process rights are so routine they are treated as par for the course by immigration attorneys and judges.

The Democrats have not and will not demand hearings to investigate these widespread violations of democratic rights, in part because Barack Obama’s administration carried out similar crimes and deported 2.7 million immigrants. The task of bringing the Trump administration to justice for the attacks on immigrants therefore falls to the working class.

Trump’s Personal Lawyer Boasted That He Got Preet Bharara Fired

Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s lawyer in the Russia investigation, has bragged he was behind the firing of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

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By Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott

Marc Kasowitz, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the Russia investigation, has boasted to friends and colleagues that he played a central role in the firing of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, according to four people familiar with the conversations.

Kasowitz told Trump, “This guy is going to get you,” according to a person familiar with Kasowitz’s account.

Those who know Kasowitz say he is sometimes prone to exaggerating when regaling them with his exploits. But if true, his assertion adds to the mystery surrounding the motive and timing of Bharara’s firing.

New presidents typically ask U.S. attorneys to resign and have the power to fire them. But Trump asked Bharara to stay in his job when they met in November at Trump Tower, as Bharara announced after the meeting.

In early March, Trump reversed himself. He asked all the remaining U.S. attorneys to resign, including Bharara. Bharara, a telegenic prosecutor with a history of taking on powerful politicians, refused and was fired March 11.

As ProPublica previously reported, at the time of Bharara’s firing the Southern District was conducting an investigation into Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price.

Kasowitz and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Kasowitz became a nationally recognized figure last week, after he acted as Trump’s designated spokesman to respond to former FBI Director James Comey’s landmark Senate testimony.

Kasowitz’s claimed role in the Bharara firing appears to be a sign that the New York lawyer has been inserting himself into matters of governance and not just advising the president on personal legal matters.

Kasowitz has also said in private conversations that Trump asked him to be attorney general, according to four people familiar with the matter. Kasowitz said he turned down the role. Ultimately, Trump decided to give the position to then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.

The Southern District of New York conducts some of the highest profile corporate investigations in the country. According to news reports, it is currently probing Fox News over payments made to settle sexual harassment charges against the network’s former chairman, the late Roger Ailes. The office is also looking into Russian money-laundering allegations at Deutsche Bank, Trump’s principal private lender.

Kasowitz has represented Trump over the years on matters including his failed libel lawsuit against a journalist, the Trump University case, and then-candidate Trump’s response to allegations of sexual assault by multiple women last year. Trump retained him to be his personal attorney in the Russia investigation last month.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Kasowitz has advised White House staffers about whether they need personal attorneys, raising conflict of interest questions.

Trump has also turned to Kasowitz’s firm to fill jobs in the administration. David Friedman, a former name partner of the firm, is now ambassador to Israel. Trump considered former senator and Kasowitz Senior Counsel Joseph Lieberman to replace Comey.

One of the names floated to replace Bharara is Edward McNally, a partner at Kasowitz’s law firm. More than three months after Bharara was fired, Trump has not nominated anyone to fill the Southern District job or most of the other U.S. attorney positions.

Bharara’s firing on March 11 came two months before the firing of Comey, head of the FBI. Critics charge that Trump obstructed justice in forcing Comey out.

Comey testified last week that Trump had tried to “create some sort of patronage relationship.” Bharara said in a television interview Sunday that Trump had attempted something similar with him: Comey’s testimony “felt a little bit like déjà vu.”

THE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT’S FIRST MEMO FOR DONALD TRUMP IS A REAL HOWLER

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By David Dayen

IN APRIL, WITH an eye toward selling off public land, President Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of federal land set aside using the Antiquities Act of 1906.

An interim report by the Interior Department was due June 10, focused mainly on the designation of the Bears Ears National Monument, a 1.35 million acre site in Utah encompassing Native American land. The report was to produce recommendations on whether to alter the status of Bears Ears, “and other such designations as the Secretary determines to be appropriate for inclusion in the interim report.”

It’s bad.

Junior-high-school-book-report-where-you-move-in-the-margins-to-get-to-the-required-page-length bad.

Before yesterday, none of the presidential-level reports mandated by Donald Trump’s executive orders had been made public. But Monday saw both the Interior report and one from the Treasury Department, a partial review of financial regulations, which appeared to at least be a genuine effort.

On deadline day, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke delivered to the president a five-page memo, one and a half pages of which consist of long quotes from the executive order. The summary of the report is longer than the “results of the interim review” section on page 5, and the recommendations (to reduce the existing boundary of Bears Ears, convert part of the site to a recreation or conservation area, and more clearly define management responsibilities) are duplicated twice.

Though other designations could have been discussed, Zinke stuck with just Bears Ears, skating by with the bare minimum required. In two places, Zinke asserts that the memo satisfies the conditions of the interim report, as if trying to convince himself.

It’s not like Zinke didn’t have the raw materials for a full report; he visited the site and solicited public comment on Bears Ears, receiving 76,500 comments. But what appears in the memo, aside from the quotes from the executive order, is a long background of the Antiquities Act, various concerns raised over its use, a Wikipedia-style survey of Bears Ears and the surrounding area, and exactly one page featuring the results of the interim review and recommendations.

Most of those results hinge on one line in the Antiquities Act, that the area reserved “be limited to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management” of the objects. In other words, it was hardly necessary to leave Washington to write this memo. While acknowledging some parts of Bears Ears include Native American artifacts, traditional gathering places, archeological sites, and rock art, Zinke says those areas should be identified and separated, with other sites given other designations or offered for activities like timber harvest or mining.

Obama’s proclamation establishing Bears Ears is several times the size of this report recommending its curtailing.

It’s not clear which exactly is the greater insult to the public — that the administration is clearly determined to sell off even culturally and archaeologically sensitive sites for commercial use whenever possible, or that the administration can’t be bothered to do more than pretend to take concerns with doing so seriously.

It may be, however, that the report is tailored for Donald Trump, a man who famously has a reading appetite of one page or less. But that’s unlikely, because the report does not mention Trump’s name once, which his advisers have said is necessary to keep him engaged. And it includes no pictures or charts.

The final report under this executive order is due August 24, encompassing all designations over 100,000 acres over the past 20 years. Zinke requested that the full review be completed before more specific recommendations be made for Bears Ears.

Eleven of the 13 reports issued to Trump under executive orders remain a secret. You can follow The Intercept’s interactive tracker of Trump’s executive order actions here.

The Koch Brothers & Trump: The Men Who Sold the World

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By Richard Eskow

When he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump gave a speech so filled with falsehoods that it triggered detailed rebuttals by publications ranging from Politifact to Scientific American.

The Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” column, which hands out “Pinocchios” for false or misleading statements, was forced to note that “we do not award Pinocchios in roundups of speeches.” But by then Trump probably had more Pinocchios than the Disneyland gift shop.

But Trump is not the only truth-denier in the Republican Party. In a front-page story by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, the New York Times documented the GOP’s transformation from a party with leaders like John McCain and Newt Gingrich, who accepted the scientific consensus on the climate, to one whose leader believes it is a hoax perpetrated by China.

When Trump pulled the U.S. from the Paris agreement, “the Senate majority leader, the speaker of the House and every member of the elected Republican leadership were united in their praise.”

And the Times laid this transformation squarely at the feet of the Koch Brothers:

“Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.”

The Koch network of funders spent an estimated $1 billion over the last few election cycles telling the Republican Party what to do. “It is, perhaps, the most astounding example of influence-buying in modern American political history,” wrote Jane Mayer in the New Yorker.

You could call Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell “the men who sold the world,” after the David Bowie song of the same name.

Climate Cronies

Trump and his party have been marching in lockstep with the fossil-fuel industry for some time now. Even before Trump took office, the Washington Post reported that “the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a remarkable resurgence as its executives and lobbyists shape President-elect Donald Trump’s policy agenda and staff his administration.”

That influence can be seen in Trump’s appointments, in his deeds and now in his budget.

The head of the EPA is the person responsible for protecting our air, land, and water. Trump chose Scott Pruitt, a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry, to lead that agency. Pruitt is known for his unusually close ties to the that industry, which are extensive even by Republican Party standards.

As Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Pruitt sued the agency he now runs many times. A CMD review of Pruitt’s emails showed that he allowed the industry to write the comments that he filed with federal agencies. The Koch Brothers’ network of shell “advocacy groups,” which CMD has analyzed at length, turned out in force to support Pruitt’s nomination.

Other Trump cabinet appointees are also closely allied with the fossil-fuel industry, including Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and of course Rex Tillerson, who led Exxon for years.

The fossil-fuel connection runs deep in the Trump Administration. The Sabin Center analyzed lower-level appointments in agencies responsible for energy, the environment and natural resources. It found that more than half of those appointed “appear(ed) to lack expertise and/or experience” related to their new responsibilities, while more than one-quarter “had close ties to the fossil fuel industry.”

Dirty Deeds

In March, Trump signed an executive order and made a number of other moves that helped the fossil fuel industry by cutting the EPA, easing up on regulations, approving the KXL pipeline, and overturning Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Trump’s proposed budget, which was released in late May, would cut the EPA by nearly one-third. That budget also includes a number of deep cuts in science spending, including cuts in the kind of research that helps us understand how fossil fuels are harming our health and our planet. Those cuts would end funding for NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), which was established by Congress to track the effects of both natural and human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Other carbon research programs would be cut under the Trump budget. Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, observed that additional cuts to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) would “drastically cut into the agency’s climate research, shuttering a host of labs and programs.” The Department of Energy’s climate research would also be cut significantly under the Trump budget.

Science noted that climate expert David Victor believes that Trump’s proposed NASA cuts alone “would be a long-lasting setback to combating climate change.”

With Trump’s pullout from the Paris agreement, the U.S. becomes one of only three nations that is not part of that agreement. One of the other two, Nicaragua, wants a stronger agreement. The other is Syria, which is in the middle of a catastrophic civil war.

With the help of the Koch Brothers, Trump and the Republican Party have “moved in the opposite direction from virtually the rest of the world,” wrote Jane Mayer.

It’s time the world began to hold them to account.

Why Afghanistan? Fighting a War for the War System Itself

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By Gareth Porter

President Donald Trump is hesitating to agree to thousands of additional troops for the war in Afghanistan as recommended by his secretary of defense and national security adviser, according to a New York Times report over the weekend.

So, it's a good time to put aside, for a moment, the troop request itself and focus on why the United States has been fighting the Taliban since 2001 -- and losing to them for well over a decade.

Some of the war managers would argue that the United States has never had enough troops or left them in Afghanistan long enough. But those very figures are openly calling for an indefinite neocolonial US military presence. The real reason for the fundamental weakness of the US-NATO war is the fact that the United States has empowered a rogues' gallery of Afghan warlords whose militias have imposed a regime of chaos, violence and oppression on the Afghan population -- stealing, killing and raping with utter impunity. And that strategy has come back to bite the Pentagon's war managers.

The Taliban hold the same sexist ideas as many members of rural Afghan society about keeping girls out of schools and in the home. But the organization appeared in 1994 in response to the desperate pleas of the population in the south -- especially in a Kandahar province divided up by four warlords -- to stop the wholesale abduction and rape of women and pre-teen boys, as well as the uncontrolled extortion of tolls by warlord troops. The Taliban portrayed themselves as standing for order and elementary justice against chaos and sexual violence, and they immediately won broad popular support to drive the warlords out of power across the south, finally taking over Kabul without a fight.

Then in 2001 the United States ousted the Taliban regime -- implicitly as retribution for 9/11, even though the Taliban leader Mullah Omar had not been informed of Osama bin Laden's plot and had strongly opposed any such plotting. Instead of forcing the Taliban to give up its power or simply letting Afghan society determine the Taliban's fate, the United States helped its own warlord allies consolidate their power. President Hamid Karzai was encouraged to appoint the most powerful warlords as provincial governors and their private militias were converted into the national police. The CIA even put some of the militias on their payroll along with their warlord bosses to help track down Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.

These early US decisions created the plague of abuses by the "police" and other militias that has remained the underlying socio-political dynamic of the war ever since. Ron Neumann, US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, explained the accepted rules for the warlords and the commanders of their militias toward those who are not part of their tribal in-group. "You take the people's land, their women -- you steal from them -- it's all part of one package," he told me in a 2009 interview.

It was not long before the Taliban began to reorganize for a second resistance to the warlords. From 2003 to 2006, they were taking the offensive across the Pashtun area of the south, with a rapidly increasing tempo of attacks.

In 2006 the US-NATO command responded to the Taliban offensive by creating the "Afghan National Auxiliary Police" (ANAP). ANAP officers were given new AK-47 assault rifles and uniforms like those of regular police, but the group was in essence another warlord militia, composed of the same individuals as other warlord militias. As a senior official in the Afghan Ministry of Interior told Human Rights Watch, the ANAP "was made for the warlords." They were "the same people, committing the same crimes, with more power."

The ANAP program was abandoned in April 2008, an apparent failure, but the US-NATO reliance on the warlords' militias continued. When US and British troops moved back into Lashkar Gah district of Helmand Province in mid-2009, their plan was to rely on police to reestablish a government presence there. But the police, commanded by mujahideen loyal to province warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzadeh, had terrorized the population of the district with systematic violent abuses, including the frequent  abduction and rape of pre-teen boys. The residents and village elders warned the British and Americans stationed in the district that they would again support the Taliban if necessary to protect themselves against being victimized by the police.

By September 2009 as the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was pressing Obama to add 40,000 more troops, his command was no longer under any illusions about being able to regain the support of the rural Pashtun population as long as it was so closely associated with the warlords. In his initial assessment of August 2009, McChrystal referred to "public anger and alienation" toward the US and NATO troops, because of the general perception that they were "complicit" in "widespread corruption and abuse of power."

But by then McChrystal and the US-NATO command chose to continue to rely on their warlord clients, because the US military needed their militias to supply all the US and NATO troops in the country. In order to get food, fuel and arms to the foreign troops at over 200 forward-operating military bases and combat outposts, the command had to outsource the trucking of the supplies and the security to private companies. Otherwise the command would have had to use a large percentage of the total foreign troops in Afghanistan to provide security for the convoys, as the Russians had done in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But the only plentiful and instantly available supply of armed forces to provide the security was in the ranks of the warlords' own militias. So, the Pentagon designed a massive $2.16 billion annual logistics contract in 2008-09 under which about 25,000 militiamen were paid by dozens of private trucking companies and security companies owned by the warlords. The warlords were paid tens of millions of dollars a year, further consolidating their hold on the society.

The abuses by militias continued to be the primary complaint of village residents. The district governor in Khanabad district of Kunduz province told Human Rights Watch, "People come to me and complain about these arbakis [militias], but I can do nothing about this. They collect ushr [informal tax], take the daughters of the people, they do things against the wives of the people, they take their horses, sheep, anything."

When he assumed command in Afghanistan in mid-2010, Gen. David Petraeus immediately decided to turn yet again to the same warlord source of manpower to create the "Afghan Local Police" or ALP to provide 20,000 men to patrol the villages. Each ALP unit had its own Special Forces team, which gave its officers even greater impunity. The chief of the Baghlan Province council recounted a meeting with the US Special Operations Forces officer in charge of the ALP at which he had warned that the militiamen were "criminals." But the officer had flatly rejected his charge.

In theory, the ALP was supposed to be accountable to the chief of police in each district where it was operating. But one district chief of police in Baghlan province complained that it was impossible to investigate ALP crimes because the US Special Operations Forces were protecting them.

A Green Beret officer interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor in 2011 explained the US Special Operations Forces' perspective on the depredations of its Afghan clients:  "The ugly reality," he said, "is that if the US wants to prevail against the Taliban and its allies, it must work with Afghan fighters whose behavior insults Western sensibilities."

By 2013 the ALP had grown to nearly 30,000, and even the State Department annual report on human rights in Afghanistan acknowledged the serious abuses blamed on the ALP. The 2016 State Department report on human rights in Afghanistan refers to "credible accounts of killing, rape, assault, the forcible levy of informal taxes, and the traditional practice of 'baad' -- the transfer of a girl or woman to another family to settle a debt or grievance" -- all attributed by villagers to the ALP.

The linkage between warlord militia abuses and the cooperation of much of the rural population with the Taliban has long been accepted by the US command in Afghanistan. But the war has continued, because it serves powerful interests that have nothing to do with Afghanistan itself: the careers of the US officers who serve there; the bureaucratic stakes of the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA in their huge programs and facilities in the country; the political cost of admitting that it was a futile effort from the start. Plus, the Pentagon and the CIA are determined to hold on to Afghan airstrips they use to carry out drone war in Pakistan for as long as possible.

Thus Afghanistan, the first of the United States' permanent wars, is in many ways the model for all the others that have followed -- wars that have no other purpose than to serve the US war system itself.