Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Trump talked to the dictator, gave him exactly what he wants and got absolutely nothing in return. True, this is better than Trump’s approach from a few months back when a nuclear war seemed to be on the table, however anything is better than that.
No former president gave the murderous dictator the photo op because they understood that is what he wants more than anything, respectability, and the idiot Trump gave it to him for nothing.
Kim has been masterful; nuclear weapons program complete, (that is NEVER going away), missile tests complete, (they are NEVER going away), photo op with the five-year-old in charge of mightiest military on the planet, complete. He is playing the dotard Trump like a fiddle, a boorish, violent dictator, barely an adult, besting Trump. What an embarrassment for the civilized world.
With a shake of the hand, the US president has tightened Kim Jong-un’s grip over an enslaved nation – and got almost nothing in return
The McGlynn
A useful way to test the deal Donald Trump has reached with Kim Jong-un is to imagine what Trump himself would have said had it been Barack Obama rather than him who shook hands with the North Korean dictator. Trump and his echo chamber on Fox News and elsewhere would have poured buckets of derision on Obama for the piece of paper he signed with Kim, for the fawning praise he lavished on a brutal tyrant, and for the paltry non-concessions he got in return. He would have branded the agreement a “horrible deal” and condemned Obama as a sucker for signing it.
Look first at what Kim got from the encounter. Once ostracised as a pariah, Kim was treated as a world statesman on a par with the president of the United States, the two meeting on equal terms, right down to the equal numbers of flags behind them as they shook hands. The tyrant now has a showreel of images – including his walkabout in Singapore, where he was mobbed by what the BBC called “fans” seeking selfies – which will feature in propaganda videos for months, if not years.
What’s more, Trump lauded Kim as “a very talented man … who loves his country very much,” a man the US president admired for his ability to take over North Korea at such a young age and to “run it tough”, as he put it in a later press conference. There was not so much as even a rote condemnation of the brutality of the Kim regime – indeed Trump reserved the word “regime” for the Clinton administration of the 1990s. And when asked if he had even mentioned human rights in their talks, he said it had only been discussed “briefly”. The harshest words he had for a country that starved its own people in a famine that cost up to three million lives, were: “It’s a rough situation there … it’s rough in a lot of places by the way.”
So Kim leaves Singapore having gained much of the international legitimacy the dynastic dictatorship has sought for decades. But the gifts from Trump did not end there. He also announced an end to US military exercises in the Korean peninsula – the “war games” which he said were costly and, deploying language Pyongyang itself might have used, “very provocative”. Trump also hinted at an eventual withdrawal of the 28,000 US troops stationed in the Korean peninsula.
And what did Kim give Trump in return for this bulging bag of goodies? The key concession, the one Trump repeatedly invoked, was a promise of “complete denuclearisation”. Trump held this aloft as if it were a North Korean commitment to dismantle its arsenal, with work beginning right away. To be sure, such a commitment would be a major prize, one that would merit all the congratulation a beaming Trump was heaping on himself. But this is where you need to look at the small print.
First, the text itself says merely: “The DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.” Kim has promised not “complete denuclearisation” but simply “to work toward” that end. Negotiators the world over know is the fudging language you use when you’ve extracted something less than a real commitment. Kim has offered only an aspiration, with no deadline or timetable, not a concrete plan.
US move in exchange for North Korean denuclearisation pledge takes Seoul by surprise
When Trump met Kim: what happened at the Singapore summit – video highlights
The US has agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea in return for a commitment to denuclearisation from North Korea, Donald Trump has announced, after a meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore.
Trump said the war games were expensive and “very provocative”. Stopping them is a major concession, something the US has previously rejected as non-negotiable on the grounds that the exercises are a key element of its military alliance with Seoul, and maintaining a deterrent against North Korea.
In return, the US president said Kim had agreed in a joint statement to reassert “his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.
However, that commitment was vaguely worded. A later paragraph in the statement signed by both leaders said only that North Korea “commits to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”, without defining what that meant.
Denuclearisation is the longstanding policy of the Pyongyang regime, but the regime interprets this as being an open-ended, gradual process in which other nuclear powers will also disarm.
Both the South Korean government and US forces in the region appear to have been taken by surprise by Trump’s declared suspension of joint military exercises.
US forces in Korea said they had not received updated guidance on military exercises. “In coordination with our ROK [Republic of Korea] partners, we will continue with our current military posture until we receive updated guidance,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
The South Korean presidency issued a statement saying: “At this moment, the meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks requires more clear understanding.”
The South Korean military appeared similarly taken aback. NBC News quoted a statement as saying: “Regarding President Trump’s comment regarding ending of the combined military drills … we need to find out the exact meaning or intention behind his comments at this point.”
Military officials from both countries, including the US defence secretary, James Mattis, had vigorously opposed curtailing joint military exercises, on the grounds that doing so would undermine the alliance and its deterrent against North Korea.
Kelly Magsamen, a senior Pentagon official dealing with Asian and Pacific security in the Obama administration, said the surprise suspension of military exercises and their disparagement as expensive and provocative “continues Trump’s disturbing pattern of undermining our democratic alliances while praising our adversaries”.
Missing from the joint statement was the definition, promoted up until now by the Trump administration, of complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement (CVID).
Asked at a press conference why those terms were not included, Trump replied: “Because there’s no time. I’m here one day. It wasn’t a big point today because really this … has been taken care of before we got here.”
Trump insisted he believed Kim was determined to disarm, adding that at the end of the summit, the North Korean leader had offered to destroy an engine-testing site that is part of the country’s missile programme.
“He’s de-nuking,” Trump told ABC News. “I mean, he’s de-nuking the whole place. It’s going to start very quickly. I think he’s going to start now.”
Trump said he accepted that dismantling North Korea’s nuclear arsenal would take a long time, but it would be carried out “as fast as it can be done scientifically, as fast it can it be done mechanically”.
The language on disarmament in the statement was similar to that of previous agreements, in 1994 and 2005, which ultimately collapsed amid differences over interpretation and arguments about verification.
Asked how he could ensure Kim’s undertakings would be any more solid, the president replied: “Can you ensure anything? You can’t ensure anything.”
But he added: “All I can say is they want to make a deal. That’s what I do. My whole life has been deals. I have done great at it … I know when somebody wants to deal and I know when somebody doesn’t.”
Trump gives press conference after summit with Kim Jong-un – watch live
Schumer: joint statement ‘very worrisome’
Minority leader Chuck Schumer is on the floor of the Senate talking about the Singapore summit.
“We must be clear-eyed on what a diplomatic success with North Korea looks like,” he says. That would be “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, he says.
“It’s imperative that we actually get action here, not just photo ops,” Schumer says. He points out there are no details in Trump’s signed statement about the definition of “complete denuclearization.”
“Unfortunately the entire document is short on details,” Schumer says. “…It is worrisome, very worrisome, that this joint statement is so imprecise.”
Schumer says that Trump has drawn a false equivalency between the “legitimate” joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States on one hand, and “illegal” North Korean nuclear testing on the other.
The whole design of this is offensive. The President pees in the punch bowl of the G7, insists the Russians come back into the organization, then flies off to Singapore to make kissy face with a man who routinely murders his own people.
Had Barack Obama done that, Republicans would be demanding his impeachment.
I generally think Donald Trump has run a pretty mature foreign policy that works for American interests. But this past week has been a diplomatic farce, and I suspect those generic ballot numbers that have had Democrats panicking are suddenly going to swing back in their direction.
Document hailed by US president as ‘very comprehensive’ does not go much further than existing denuclearisation agreement
The wording of the document signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un on Tuesday falls some way short of the dramatic billing the president gave it at the end of the leaders’ historic summit in Singapore.
Trump described it as a “very comprehensive” agreement that would “take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world”.
There is significance, of course, in the fact that the two men met at all, and ended their five hours together with the genesis of what could lead to more substantive moves towards denuclearisation. But as it stands, the document does not differ greatly from the agreement issued by Kim and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, after their meeting on the southern side of the demilitarised zone at the end of April.
The Trump-Kim document contains four main points:
The United States and the DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] commit to establish new US-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.
That represents a departure from the fiery rhetoric that has traditionally characterised relations between Washington and Pyongyang, the latter of which routinely uses state propaganda to depict the US as an enemy power intent on destroying the regime and its people. It also reflects Kim’s desire to focus on economic progress – now possibly with American assistance – having achieved his aim of developing nuclear weapons capable of threatening the mainland US and bringing the president to the negotiating table.
The United States and the DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
There is no direct commitment here to formalise those sentiments with a peace treaty to replace the armistice signed at the end of the Korean war in 1953. That would require the involvement of China and other countries that took part in the conflict. As expected, Trump offered “unspecified” security guarantees to North Korea, a gesture whose vagueness matches that of Kim’s commitment to denuclearise.
The actor and long-time critic of Donald Trump receives a standing ovation at Sunday night’s Tony awards in New York after attacking the US president on stage at Radio City Music Hall
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 12th, 2018 at 12:10 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Trump talked to the dictator, gave him exactly what he wants and got absolutely nothing in return. True, this is better than Trump’s approach from a few months back when a nuclear war seemed to be on the table, however anything is better than that.
No former president gave the murderous dictator the photo op because they understood that is what he wants more than anything, respectability, and the idiot Trump gave it to him for nothing.
Kim has been masterful; nuclear weapons program complete, (that is NEVER going away), missile tests complete, (they are NEVER going away), photo op with the five-year-old in charge of mightiest military on the planet, complete. He is playing the dotard Trump like a fiddle, a boorish, violent dictator, barely an adult, besting Trump. What an embarrassment for the civilized world.