Trump’s global vision is a nightmare. The UN has to act - Guardian

Trump’s global vision is a nightmare. The UN has to act

Mark Seddon

Monday 25 September 2017 19.36 AEST

The presidential cavalcades have departed Manhattan. But the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s speech to the UN general assembly still reverberate. “You can be sure of one thing,” a veteran UN official whispered to me during the speech: “Trump never fails to disappoint.” Still, there had been enthusiasts, including John Bolton, once George Bush’s ambassador to the UN, whose grandstanding and savaging of the organisation is still recalled with a shiver by many older hands. Bolton declared Trump’s tour-de-force to be the “best speech he has given yet”.

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Trump’s American exceptionalism, directed as much towards domestic TV networks as to the rest of the world, has it that sovereignty is all, and that this should be the guiding principle for all nations. So, “America First”, and the question now for the United Nations is how many will choose to follow the US’s lead? And where does this leave an organisation founded on the principles of peaceful cooperation and multilateralism?

In part we know the answer, because Trump has already noisily extricated the US from the Paris climate change agreement. His boastfulness over this piece of unilateralism was not repeated at the UN, where he failed to mention “climate” or “change” even once. But other populists will take heart. Trump’s irredentism will have gone down well with Vladimir Putin of Russia and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. It did with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It would have been appreciated by Narendra Modi of India. It will have chimed with the hardline nationalists now calling the shots in Hungary and Poland. If “Rocket Man” in Pyongyang really had his wits about him, he will have noticed that Trump and his acolytes keep mentioning that they have no real problems with democracy-hating, human-rights-suppressing regimes – so long as they don’t threaten the US and its allies with ballistic, nuclear-carrying, missiles.

Trump’s interest in the UN, until recently at least, had more been directed towards winning a multibillion-dollar “capital master plan” deal to renovate the UN headquarters. A decade ago, he promised Ban Ki-moon that he, Trump, could do it “cheaper and faster”, but never came back with a business proposal.

Ban’s successor, the former Portuguese prime minister António Guterres, must have hoped that Trump would stay in real estate and not come to occupy some of the best-known real estate in the land, namely the White House. Guterres has had the unenviable task of trying to rein in Trump over the past nine months. Ivanka Trump, for instance, has been to lunch on the 38th floor with the secretary general and his advisers. By all accounts she has also developed a good relationship with the politically ambitious US UN ambassador, Nikki Haley.

UN secretary general António Guterres with Donald Trump in New York City.

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UN secretary general Ant ónio Guterres with Donald Trump in New York City. Photograph: D Myles Cullen/Zuma/Avalon.red

Trump was more complimentary about the United Nations than many had expected, saying that it “had great potential”. This perhaps was not least because Guterres is committed to reforming the organisation. But reform means different things to different people. To Trump and Haley, it means substantial cuts in UN peacekeeping budgets (so that monies saved can be spent on the US military). For many countries in the global south, UN reform means taking the ossified architecture of 1945, in particular the security council, and reconfiguring its permanent five membership to give Africa and South America a place at the top table.

It will be easier to achieve the former than the latter. Next week, for instance, one of the leading UN humanitarian agencies is set to lose $37m from its $270m annual budget. Peacekeeping budgets have already been slashed and more cuts are likely to be in the pipeline. The US may be the UN’s biggest funder, but overall less than 1% of the federal budget is devoted to foreign aid – including UN contributions. So Guterres will have to tread a careful path and avoid being seen as being far too faithful to the Trump administration’s approach to reform. For while the UN may be based in New York, it is not the private property of its most powerful member.

But more importantly still, he will surely not be able to avoid taking a stand against Trump’s all-out assault on a vision of the world that drove his political forebears to help construct the UN out of the ashes of the second world war (and the ruins of its neutered predecessor organisation, the League of Nations). Guterres’ evocation last week of a “world in pieces” was powerful, but he will need to call Trump out more strongly still, lest the infection of extreme nationalism, unilateralism and militarism spread.

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Trump is a narcissistic bully. His recklessness was in brutal evidence on occasions this past week in New York. The trouble is that bullies don’t usually respond well to kindness. And as Robert Mueller’s noose tightens still further, coupled with Trump’s inordinate ability to offend virtually everyone in his own party, this could lead in quite quick succession to a more practical and emollient president, Mike Pence, occupying the White House. Accepting Trump’s view of the world as the new norm is not only defeatist, it is plain wrong. The world expects the UN secretary general and the UN to take a tough stand with those who defy international norms, whether they be in Pyongyang, Tehran, Moscow – or even Washington DC.

Since global politics abhors a vacuum, a failure by the UN to provide a strong, moral lead presents an intriguing prospect that in the short term at least, global peace and security may yet come to rest in the hands of the European Union, the US generals who now populate the higher echelons of the Trump administration and the Chinese Politburo. Are you sleeping comfortably?

• Mark Seddon was a speechwriter for the former UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. He is currently a visiting professor of International Relations at Columbia University, New York

Trump Plan Cuts Taxes for Rich and Whacks New York, New Jersey - Bloomberg

Trump Plan Cuts Taxes for Rich and Whacks New York, New Jersey

By Sahil Kapur

September 25, 2017, 6:00 PM GMT+10

President Donald Trump and Republican leaders plan to release a tax framework this week that would dramatically cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, provide a measure of middle-class tax relief and punish some households in Democratic-leaning states like New York and New Jersey.

That summary, based on a list of details that’s circulating among Washington lobbyists, breaks from the president’s recent rhetoric against tax cuts for the rich. It sets the stage for a battle with Democrats and faces a litany of obstacles, including intra-party disputes about whether to pay for the tax breaks upfront or increase the deficit.

The emerging framework includes a proposal to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent -- a costly move in revenue terms that Trump and Republicans say is necessary to create job growth. But its provisions for individual taxes may hit closer to home for many Americans.

Three tax lobbyists familiar with those changes said they include cutting the top individual tax rate to 35 percent and creating a 25 percent rate for certain “pass-through” business owners -- both down from the current top rate of 39.6 percent. Such changes would cut taxes substantially for the top 1 percent of earners, said Kyle Pomerleau, an expert with the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning Washington policy group.

An analysis by Washington’s Tax Policy Center last year found that half of the business income earned by all pass-through businesses, such as partnerships and limited liability companies, goes to those making $693,000 or more annually -- placing them well within the top 1 percent of taxpayers by income.

“I don’t have a good way to thread the needle between the president’s promises and where they are,” said Republican economist Doug Holtz-Eakin. There’s a reason why individual income-tax cuts would tend to favor higher earners, he said: “The income tax is not a broad-based revenue-raiser anymore, it’s a surtax on high income people.”

Lowest Bracket

Trump, who’s planning to travel to Indiana to discuss the tax measures in a speech Wednesday, emphasized the benefits for lower earners Sunday. Asked to confirm that the top individual rate will be 35 percent, the president sidestepped the question and focused on the bottom rate -- which affects the lowest earners.

“We think we’re going to bring the individual rate to 10 percent or 12 percent, much lower than it is now,” he told reporters. “This is a plan for the middle class and for companies so they can bring back jobs. ” Actually, the lowest income-tax bracket in 2017 applies a 10 percent rate to taxable income of $9,325 or less. After that, a 15 percent rate applies to income up to $37,950.

Trump’s plan would double the standard deduction that benefits many middle-class Americans, making it the centerpiece of the tax relief Trump has promised them. It would also seek to pay for some of the tax cuts by ending the state and local tax deduction, which is used mostly by middle-to-high earners in high-tax states like California, New York and New Jersey. The tax break, which is worth more than $1 trillion over 10 years, is favored by representatives of influential industries, like real estate.

Attempts to end it may run into Republican opposition too.

Starting Point

“You have some members from higher-tax states who are concerned about the deductibility of state and local taxes,” said Representative David Schweikert of Arizona, a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and the conservative Freedom Caucus. “You have others who want to really aggressively lower rates.”

The framework that Trump and congressional Republicans plan to release Wednesday would form the starting point for the tax debate in the coming months, which comes as the administration seeks a legislative victory in 2017 after failing to repeal Obamacare or win full funding to build a wall on the southern border.

“We’re excited,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said Sunday night, after Republicans on his panel left a meeting to discuss their plans. He said the White House would determine the timetable for releasing more information, “but definitely this week.”

“I think this is going to move a lot faster than people think,” said Representative Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican.

Standard Deduction

GOP officials argue the tax overhaul is crucial for boosting economic growth, while Democrats are gearing up to paint it as a giveaway to the wealthy.

“Democrats have strongly and firmly stood for the position that not one penny of tax cuts should go to the top 1 percent,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement Sunday.

A White House official said that increasing the standard deduction would expand the number of Americans who don’t pay any net income taxes, and argued a low individual rate would encourage Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder to climb up.

The framework is also expected to eliminate the estate tax, three people familiar with the discussions said. That tax applies to estates worth at least $5.49 million per tax filer. Many Republicans want to end it.

One immediate purpose of the framework is to secure House GOP approval for a budget resolution to unlock the Senate’s procedure for passing a tax bill without Democratic support. Leaders of the conservative House Freedom Caucus have declined to support a budget before members see details of a tax plan; GOP leaders are hoping they’ll be satisfied.

Time is short, and many details have yet to be resolved. Republicans still haven’t decided how much a tax bill can add to the deficit, a decision they must make before beginning to advance a bill. They have also yet to come to agreement on what tax deductions and carve-outs to limit in order to simplify the code, raise revenues and -- as Trump has said he wants to do -- reduce the tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

“I think the wealthy will be pretty much where they are” in terms of tax liabilities, Trump told reporters on Sept. 13.

“The whole objective here is to get the growth rate up to 3 percent-plus,” conservative economist Stephen Moore, who advised Trump’s presidential campaign on tax policy last year, told reporters on Friday. “Not because we want more money in the hands of millionaires.”

— With assistance by Jennifer Jacobs, and Anna Edgerton

German Remembrance Culture: Nazi Past Is Just a Stumbling Stone Away - NBC News

German Remembrance Culture: Nazi Past Is Just a Stumbling Stone Away

by CARLO ANGERER and ANDY ECKARDT

ZIERENBERG, Germany — Gunter Demnig kneeled on a rain-drenched sidewalk in front of a timber-framed house and replaced some cobblestones with two brass-plate-covered slabs. Each was engraved with a name.

“Involuntarily moved 1938,” each inscription reads. These stones mark the night when plainclothes Nazi SS troops and local henchmen ousted Charlotte and Laura Waldeck from the dwelling, destroyed the Jewish family’s furniture and threw their other belongings onto the street.

Humiliated and ostracized, Charlotte Waldeck died three years later, aged in her early 70s. Her daughter Laura was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939. She was later murdered.

These so-called “Stolpersteine,” or "stumbling stones," remind passersby of the Waldeck family and other victims of Nazi terror.

Gunter Demnig replaces cobblestones with "stumbling stones" in Zierenberg, Germany. Carlo Angerer / NBC News

Many hope such displays will not only highlight past horrors but may help to choke the growth of right-wing extremism. On Sunday, the far-right and anti-immigration AfD became the third-strongest force in Germany's parliament — earning 13 percent of the vote. The result could give the populist party up to 30 of the Bundestag's 709 seats. One AfD candidate celebrated by vowing to “take back our country and our people.”

The World Jewish Congress called the party "a disgraceful reactionary movement which recalls the worst of Germany's past."

Demnig launched his art project in 1996, long before the AfD was established. His installations are now widely recognized as individual and personalized Holocaust memorials.

To date, Demnig has placed over 61,000 stones in 21 countries as reminders of the atrocities committed against Jews, the disabled, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma minority groups, and dissidents.

“These stones are symbols, considering the impossibly large number of victims,” said Demnig, 69. He spent 270 days on the road last year installing them.

Germany has embraced so-called "remembrance culture" such as Demnig's works during the past decade.

In Zierenberg, a small town north of Frankfurt, Demnig lays 12 stones in one afternoon.

“This brings back the names of Jewish citizens for whom Zierenberg was once their home,” says Wilfried Wicke, a retired local pastor who was among the locals watching them be installed.

The group is reminded that there were not only victims but also Nazis among the local community.

Recent events such as deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the rise of populist parties across Europe, show that education and awareness should be a priority, according to Josef Schuster, head of the German Jewish Council.

“I think it’s more important than ever to make clear what such developments can lead to,” Schuster said.

He said the rise of Hitler's Nazi party beginning in the 1930s "is a cautionary example that should be a signal far beyond Germany’s borders."

Schuster thinks the growth of remembrance culture might be linked to the fact that most of the Nazi perpetrators have died.

“Now people are open to discuss in their own the families the failures of the past,” he says.

Why the Symbols of White Hate in Charlottesville Look so Familiar Play Facebook Twitter Embed

Why the Symbols of White Hate in Charlottesville Look so Familiar 1:11

Germany struggles with small, but regular neo-Nazi gatherings as well as the surge in popularity of the far-right AfD party which resulted in Sunday's electoral breakthrough.

However, the display of Nazi flags and slogans, as witnessed at Charlottesville, are unthinkable in post-war Germany.

The country's legal system considers Holocaust denial a crime. Public display of swastikas and other Nazi symbols are forbidden and can result in a jail sentence of up to three years.

So the sight of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville unsettled many observers in Germany.

“I could not imagine that in a country like the United States such a large right-wing demonstration could take place, apparently without the government being able to counter this."

Demnig, the artist, says his goal is to steer the next generation away from extremism.

Cobblestones are removed before being replaced as part of the "stumbling stones" project. Carlo Angerer / NBC News

“I have the hope that through engaging the youth something can be achieved,” he added.

Germany's education system is also playing its part.

History lessons dealing with Hitler’s Third Reich and the Holocaust are mandatory in the country's schools. Excursions to former Nazi death camps are also often on the curriculum.

Demnig says the stumbling stones hit home with many young people.

“Large numbers such as 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust are abstract, but now this was someone in their neighborhood,” he added. “It is something concrete, they start to think and might say, 'This victim was as old as I am now.'”