The exercise, conducted in international waters by a cruiser, frigate and replenishment ship, involved what is said to have been poor notice given to Australian authorities on February 21. But the matter has rapidly burgeoned into something else: that what the Chinese task fleet did was mischievously remarkable, exceptional and snooty to convention and protocols. It is on that score that incontinent demagogy has taken hold.

Media outlets have done little to soften the barbs. A report by ABC News, for instance, notes that Airservices Australia was “only aware of the exercises 40 minutes after China’s navy opened a ‘window’ for live-fire exercises from 9.30am.” The first pickup of the exercises came from a Virgin Australia pilot, who had flown within 250 nautical miles of the operation zone and warned of the drills. Airservices Australia was immediately contacted, with the deputy CEO of the agency, Peter Curran, bemused about whether “it was a potential hoax or real.”

Defence Chief Admiral David Johnston told Senate estimates that he would have preferred more notice for the exercises – 24-48 hours was desirable – but it was clear that Coalition Senator and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson wanted more. Paterson had thought it “remarkable that Australia was relying on civilian aircraft for early warning about military exercises by a formidable foreign task group in our region.” To a certain extent, the needlessly irate minister got what he wanted, with the badgered Admiral conceding that the Chinese navy’s conduct had been “irresponsible” and “disruptive”.

Wu Qian, spokesperson for the China National Ministry for Defence, offered a different reading: “During the period, China organised live-fire training of naval guns toward the sea on the basis of repeatedly issuing prior safety notices”. Its actions were “in full compliance with international law and international practice, with no impact on aviation flight safety”. That said, 49 flights were diverted on February 21.

Much was also made about what were the constituent elements of the fleet. As if it mattered one jot, the Defence Force chief was pressed on whether a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine had made up the task force. “I don’t know whether there is a submarine with them, it is possible, task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines but not always,” came the reply. “I can’t be definitive whether that’s the case.”

The carnival of fear was very much in town, with opposition politicians keen to blow air into the balloon of the China threat across the press circuit. The shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie warned listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB of “the biggest peacetime military buildup since 1945”, Beijing’s projection of power with its blue-water navy, the conduct of two live-fire exercises and the Chinese taskforce operating within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Tasmania. Apparently, all of this showed the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to be “weak” for daring to accept that the conduct complained of was legal under international law. “Now that may be technically right, but that misses the deeper subtext, and that is China is now in our backyard, and they’ve demonstrated that we don’t have the will to insist on our national interest and mutual respect.”

There are few voices of sensible restraint in Australia’s arid landscape of strategic thinking, but one could be found. Former principal warfare officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Jennifer Parker, commendably remarked that this hardly warranted the title of “a crisis”. To regard it as such “with over-the-top indignation diminishes our capacity to tackle real crises as the region deteriorates.” Australia might, at the very least, consider modernising a surface fleet that was “the smallest and oldest we’ve had since 1950.”

Allegations that Beijing should not be operating in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, let alone conduct live-fire exercises in international waters, served to give it “a propaganda win to challenge our necessary deployments to North-East Asia and the South China Sea – routes that carry two-thirds of our maritime trade.”

The cockeyed priorities of the Australian defence establishment lie elsewhere: fantasy, second hand US nuclear-powered submarines that may, or may never make their way to Australia; mushy hopes of a jointly designed nuclear powered submarine specific to the AUKUS pact that risks sinking off the design sheet; and the subordination of Australian land, naval and spatial assets to the United States imperium.

Such is the standard of political debate that something as unremarkable as this latest sea incident has become a throbbing issue that supposedly shows the Albanese government as insufficiently belligerent. Yet there was no issue arising, other than a statement of presence by China’s growing navy, something it was perfectly entitled to do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

We look at Donald Trump’s ongoing legal battles with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston, who has been covering Trump since the 1980s. The next major case against Trump is his hush money trial, set to begin April 15, in which he is accused of falsifying business records to cover up payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep an extramarital affair quiet during the 2016 presidential campaign. This comes as Trump is on the hook to produce $175 million to cover a civil fraud judgment in New York, where his bond was originally set at $454 million. Other cases against Trump, including over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after he left office, are still ongoing. “Donald Trump has committed serious criminal acts his whole life, and … he’s finally being held to account,” says Johnston.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We get an update on Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking to fine Trump $250 million and is asking for a permanent ban on Trump family members running a business in New York. The outcome of the trial could put the future of the Trump Organization in jeopardy. Trump himself has already been barred from posting or speaking publicly about the trial after his public comments about James, which she described as “race-baiting,” and about Judge Arthur Engoron. Johnston, the author of three books on Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family, says that though this trial doesn’t carry with it the potential for incarceration that his criminal trials do, it is just as threatening to the Trump empire because “Donald Trump is his money.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On the day of Donald Trump’s historic arraignment in New York, making him the first former president ever to be criminally charged, we speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades. Trump is said to face 34 felony counts for falsifying business records. The case centers in part on hush-money payments Trump made during the 2016 presidential campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels. After his appearance before a judge in Manhattan, where he is expected to plead not guilty to all charges, Trump will fly back to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he will speak publicly later in the day. “Hopefully this is the beginning of a revival and a renewal of American democracy,” says Johnston, co-founder of the news site DCReport and author of The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Johnston also teaches at Syracuse University College of Law.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020. The newly released tax records give a long-overdue glimpse of Trump’s personal and business finances, which he refused to disclose during the 2016 presidential election, breaking with decades of precedent. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades, says the new documents show “absolutely brazen” tax fraud. “Donald Trump has been a criminal his whole life,” says Johnston.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Jake Johnston about US intervention in Haiti for the November 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In July 2021, the Washington Post editorial board declared that the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse put the country “at risk of anarchy,” which, the paper explained to its readers,

poses an immediate humanitarian threat to millions of Haitians and an equally urgent diplomatic and security challenge to the United States and major international organizations. Swift and muscular intervention is needed.

In October, the Post ran an editorial headlined “Yes, Intervene in Haiti—and Push for Democracy.

Washington Post (10/11/22)

A lot of seventh grade government students would pause at that point, and wonder how other countries’ “intervention”–a remarkably unexamined term–in a sovereign nation, much less their “muscular intervention,” could lead to democracy.

But the idea that the US, or an international community presumably guided by the US, is the monitor, arbiter and exemplar of something called “democracy” is a corporate news media staple.

And media observers know that once this country is at something it calls war, dissenting, critical views are ignored or worse.

So while the US is deciding how to involve itself in Haiti’s hardships right now, it’s important to think about what we know, what we should know, and what maybe we aren’t hearing about what would actually help Haitian people right now.

We’re joined by Jake Johnston, senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and lead author for CEPR’s Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch  blog. He joins us by phone from DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston: Thanks for having me.

JJ: I just want to let you go with this. We’re very much in medias res as we record on November 3. There was a letter signed by CEPR and some 90 other groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, Church World Service, Haitian Bridge Alliance, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti–and folks can also read Jane Regan’s piece on FAIR.org that points to opposition to foreign military intervention by many civil society and grassroots groups in Haiti.

So let me just start you with a big-picture question: Why are we seeing so many calls for Haiti’s problems to be addressed like a nail that can only be solved with a hammer? And why are corporate media so invested in that response?

JJ: Yeah, look, I think when you look at the situation in Haiti today–and make no mistake, the situation on the ground is extremely dire, right? People are facing serious hardships, from food insecurity, from violence and insecurity, a lack of fuel and basic supplies.

And I think there’s an approach that you see in the media, often, which treats this all as a recent development. The Washington Post editorial is a good example, saying that the assassination of the president last year is what has caused this situation, right? And so it’s looking at it in terms of a very short timeline.

Washington Post (7/7/21)

And I think it’s far more useful to see this as a much larger phenomenon, something that has slowly developed and transpired over many, many years.

I think this is really key to understanding this call for foreign intervention as well, because the reality is, it’s easy to look at the situation and say, “Oh, Haiti must be this failed state that needs outside help.”

But if you take that longer view, you realize that the situation today on the ground is the situation because of so many prior interventions, right? We can’t separate these things, and you have to have that understanding to look into the future and say what’s necessary for the next steps.

JJ: This letter also notes foreign intervention has led to very concrete and documentable problems in Haiti caused by US troops. There’s a reason to just say, first of all, maybe this isn’t the first thing that we want to do, right?

JJ: Of course. And if you look at that legacy, you can look at some of the more concrete things, right?

The introduction of cholera by UN peacekeepers after the earthquake in 2010. You could look at many decades of sexual abuse, of rape, of extrajudicial killings, right?

I mean, the list goes on. But I think it’s also important to look at a different aspect of that foreign intervention, which is the political effects of it.

And looking at the situation in Haiti today, I think everyone agrees that many of these problems are at their core political. And so if we consider that, we look at the political situation, it is what it is largely because of the role of foreign powers controlling Haiti and Haiti’s democracy, right?

It’s not because the Haitian people have had a say in how their country has been governed for many, many years. And so that’s really important in terms of determining what comes next, and looking at what might be the implications of an intervention today.

FAIR.org (10/25/22)

And I think this is especially important, and you mentioned the piece from Jane Regan: I think it’s an excellent analysis, and making a key point, right? The request for foreign military assistance is coming from a de facto prime minister who has no real legitimacy or popular mandate, but, in fact, was made prime minister after a tweet from foreign embassies urging him to form a government, weeks after the assassination of the president.

And so this is a really important dynamic to understand. And I think it’s one reason why you’ve seen such opposition to this request for military intervention, is that it’s seen as an effort to continue to prop up this unelected de facto prime minister.

JJ: I feel like there are a lot of folks who are trying to be critical, progressive leftists in the US, and they just don’t know what the heck to think about Haiti. And it has to do with this idea of “The US must intervene, the US must do something, because of course the US has to do something.” And the idea of the US not doing something is completely off the page.

And I just wonder, what would a conversation look like about allowing Haiti to be Haiti? What would that even include? Whose voices would that include? Who would we hear that we’re not hearing? Who would we stop hearing from that we’re hearing?

JJ: I think you can go two ways with this. On the one hand, when we’re talking about this question of military intervention, I think there’s an assumption by those folks saying, “Well, the US must act.”

There’s also an assumption behind that that the US can act successfully, right? That they’re motivated for the right reasons, and doing this for the right reasons, and can succeed at what they’re saying those reasons are. But that takes a lot of assumptions that we’re making.

And I think it’s important to, first off, assess those assumptions. So when we look at the history of foreign intervention in Haiti, when does that usually happen? Yes, the situation might be chaotic and difficult on the ground, but it’s usually the elite calling in foreign troops to basically protect their interests.

And so we have to understand those power dynamics in terms of what’s motivating this today, and what’s motivating the situation on the ground. And I wrote a piece about this, but I think it’s naive to think that there aren’t actors in Haiti stoking violence and this humanitarian crisis in order to justify a foreign military intervention, which they see as their best way to maintain their power, status and influence over the political and economic system in Haiti.

Jake Johnston: “Actors in Haiti [are] stoking violence and this humanitarian crisis in order to justify a foreign military intervention.”(image: CGTN)

Now, what’s at the root of so much of what we’re seeing in Haiti, and it gets to your second question, this question of who has this say and who’s actually included in that state. And I think for a very, very long time, you’ve had a Haitian state which has not actually been inclusive and incorporated the vast majority of the population.

The most visible manifestation of this is just the turnout in the last presidential election, the last couple, which were 20% or lower.

But you also just look at what the government actually provides the citizens: The government’s not active in people’s lives.

And so, again, if you’re looking at what would a real Haitian solution look like, that’s what you want to see, is the majority of the population actually being included and listened to and incorporated into that state apparatus, in order to actually have a representative government.

And I think one real big concern is that the presence of foreign military troops makes that process much less likely. Rather, it would be there to basically provide the bandaid to continue with business as usual.

And I think, you talk to folks in Haiti, a solution is not a solution going back three months, before the fuel blockade and before cholera reemerged, right? That’s not a solution. That might be a temporary reprieve, but that’s not a solution.

And I just want to make one other point here, too, because I think there’s an assumption as well that, well, this is a situation in Haiti, and the US must act to help that situation.

CEPR (10/14/22)

Now, the other assumption there is that the US is not actively engaged in this situation today, already. And they are: politically, diplomatically, economically, any number of ways, right?

And so I think US action is necessary, but moving in a different direction. Not action to intervene further, but action to remove themselves from the situation, because their intervention is actively destabilizing the situation, right?

It is making that path forward less likely. And so it is important to call on the US to act, but they need to act in a very different way than what they’re discussing right now.

JJ: I’m going to end it right there. We’ve been speaking with Jake Johnston, senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and lead author for CEPR’s Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch blog.

Please do find their work at CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Jake Johnston, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JJ: Thanks so much for having me. Always a pleasure.

The post ‘Intervention Is Actively Destabilizing the Situation’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

New York Times (10/21/19)

This week on CounterSpin: In 2019, the New York Times reported on Haiti’s hardships with a story headlined “‘There Is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.” The “no hope” phrase was a real, partial quote from a source, a despairing young woman in one of Haiti’s most difficult areas. And the story wasn’t lying about babies dying in underserved hospitals or schools closed or people killed in protests, or people with jobs going unpaid, roadblocks, blackouts, hunger and deep, deep stress in a country in severe crisis. But further into the story was another quote, from that young woman’s mother, who told the Times, “It’s not only that we’re hungry for bread and water. We’re hungry for the development of Haiti.” As we noted at the time, there’s a difference between “there is no hope” and “there is no hope under this system”—and to the extent that US news media purposefully ignore that difference, and portray Haiti as a sort of outside-of-time tragic case, and ignore the role that US “intervention” has played throughout history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again—well, that’s where you see the difference between corporate media and the independent press corps we need. We’ll talk to Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what elite media are calling for right now as response to Haiti’s problems, versus what Haitians are calling for.

Time (10/27/22)

Also on the show: Is racial discrimination over in the United States? Do universities and colleges already reflect the range of inclusion and diversity a democracy demands, such that they should stop even thinking about whether they’re admitting the sort of students they expressly excluded just decades ago? These questions are in consideration at the Supreme Court, though you might not know it from media coverage. Instead, you may have heard about a fair-minded white guy who just, in his heart, wants Asian Americans to get a fair shot at the Ivy League—against all those undeserving Black kids unfairly leveraged by affirmative action. We’ll talk about SFFA v. Harvard with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

The post Jake Johnston on Haiti Intervention, Jeannie Park on Harvard Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.