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Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is in over his head.

Few had high hopes for Liberman when he was appointed to his post, but most observers on the political Right were willing to swallow the pill of having a man with an understanding of military and strategic affairs that began and ended with applause lines because his appointment solved two pressing political problems.

Libermans appointment to serve as defense minister brought his Yisrael Beitenu party into the government, which increased the size of the coalition from its razor-thin 61-seat majority to a more healthy 66 seats. Moreover, by appointing him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to remove Moshe Yaalon from the Defense Ministry. Yaalon had become unacceptable to Likud voters due to his rush to convict IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria as guilty of criminal wrongdoing last March when Azaria killed a downed terrorist who had stabbed a fellow soldier in Hebron.

Monday morning Liberman showed that concerns about his suitability for his position were spot on.

Speaking to reporters at the Knesset, Liberman said that growing discussion among leading members of the coalition about applying Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria must stop.

Anyone who wants to apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria needs to understand that such a step will bring immediate repercussions from the new US government, Liberman alleged.

He added, We received a direct not indirect message: Apply sovereignty and you will be cutting ties with the new administration.

Libermans statement was both ignorant and damaging.

It was ignorant because it critically misrepresented how decisions are made in US administrations.

It isnt hard to guess which Trump administration official is threatening Israel and trying to force the government to abide by the failed and damaging policy of surrendering Jude and Samaria to Palestinian terrorists.

As defense minister, he speaks to his counterpart, US Defense Secretary James Mattis. Mattis is no friend of Israels.

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate, when Senator Lindsay Graham asked him what the capital of Israel is, Mattis replied Tel Aviv.

Mattis also said that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a vital [US] interest.

After being fired from his command of Central Command in 2013, Mattis claimed that the US alliance with Israel harms the US. In his words, I paid a military security price every day as the commander of CentCom because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel, and... moderate Arabs who want to be with us... cant come out publicly in support of people who dont show respect for the Arab Palestinians.

In the same address, Mattis argued that if Israel continues to allow Jews to assert their property rights in Judea and Samaria, it will risk becoming an apartheid state.

When President Donald Trump appointed Mattis, supporters of Israel in the US were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that his statements were the product of his service in the anti-Israel Obama administration and that once liberated from its intellectual straitjacket, he would abandon his preposterous positions on Israel. Concern over Mattis was abated by the fact that he opposed president Obamas Iran policy.

But last week Mattis made clear that he actually shares Obamas worldview when he decided to appoint Anne Patterson to serve as his undersecretary of defense for policy. Patterson, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs under Obama, is a harsh critic of Israel and an apologist for the Palestinian Authoritys support for terrorism.

In testimony before Congress in April 2014 for instance, Patterson defended the PAs practice of paying salaries to Palestinian terrorists and their families. The payments are legitimate, she told lawmakers, because they need to provide for the families.

Last year, when Mahmoud Shalan, a Palestinian terrorist with US citizenship was shot by soldiers at a checkpoint after he tried to kill them, and later died of his wounds, Patterson demanded an explanation from Israel for his death.

As Steven Flatow, father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza in 1995, noted in an article at JNS news service, Patterson did not demand that the PA provide an explanation for why Shalan, who was a resident of the PA, was engaged in terrorism against Israelis.

Before being appointed to head the State Departments Near East bureau, Patterson served as Obamas ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013, during tumult that saw two leaders outed in so many years.

Patterson supported the overthrow of longtime US ally then-president Hosni Mubarak.

She supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime that replaced him.

She urged Christians and others who were being persecuted by the Muslim Brotherhood regime not to demonstrate against it. She supported Morsis moves to seize tyrannical power and transform Egypt into an Iranian-allied Islamic state.

After the military overthrew Morsi and his regime, Patterson supported cutting off US military assistance to the regime of President Abdel Fattah Sisi.

For her pro-Muslim Brotherhood positions, Patterson became one of the most hated people in Egypt and a symbol of the Obama administrations abandonment of Egypt.

Mattiss decision to appoint Patterson was rejected by the White House, on the basis of Pattersons record in Egypt and at the State Department.

The Patterson episode shows that Mattis continues to embrace Obamas policy of supporting Islamists and opposing US allies. The White Houses rejection of Patterson shows that Mattis is not in charge of policymaking, the White House is.

The fact that Liberman has represented Mattiss threats to Israel as the official policy of the Trump administration indicates that he doesnt understand either who Mattis is, or how decisions are made in US administrations generally or how they are made in the Trump administration in particular.

Moreover, by claiming that Mattiss positions are US policy, Liberman insulted Trump, attributing policymaking powers to Trumps appointed adviser that belong to the president alone.

Trump, for his part, has clearly not made a determination of where he stands on the disposition of Judea and Samaria. But he has made clear that he has no intention of striking out at Israel. He similarly made clear that he has no intention of maintaining Obamas position, which Patterson communicated to Congress, of supporting payoffs to Palestinian terrorists.

If this werent reason enough to be appalled by Libermans deeply destructive statement, the fact is that this isnt the main problem with it.

Libermans argument that Israel must maintain allegiance to the failed and destructive policy of empowering the PLO lest it wreck its ties to America is most destructive because it undermines Israeli democracy and Israels international position. Libermans statement invites indeed begs for a foreign government to threaten Israel in order to cow elected officials and the public into accepting a policy they rightly reject and abandoning discussion of an alternative path that advances Israels strategic interests.

In behaving in this manner, Liberman is adopting the anti-democratic practice of Israels political Left. Incapable of winning the publics support for their obsessive agenda of giving land to Palestinian terrorists, for years, leftist politicians like former justice minister Tzipi Livni have threatened the public and her fellow elected officials that if they dare step away from the disastrous policy, Israeli officials and citizens will face war crimes indictments in international courts.

To his great discredit, Prime Minister Netanyahu began engaging in this sort of behavior recently as he warned that passage of the Settlements Regulation Law would expose Israel to war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court.

Netanyahu was substantively ridiculous. There is no international legal basis for such charges. On its own, the ICC would be unlikely to initiate such proceedings, given their legal weakness. But by arguing that action by the ICC would be a reasonable response to the law, Netanyahu created the political opening for anti-Israel lawfare by the ICC.

After all, if the prime minister himself is saying such charges will ensue, far be it for ICC prosecutors to disagree with him.

This practice of alleging foreign opposition and so inviting foreigners to attack Israel in order to prevent Israels elected officials from loyally performing their duties in accordance with the wishes of their constituents has always been harmful to the country.

Libermans false statement regarding the purported policies of the Trump administration brings this practice to a new low.

Liberman should issue an immediate clarification.

Prime Minister Netanyahu should reject Libermans statement. And both men should affirm their commitment to Israeli democracy and the power of elected officials to determine the course of the nation in accordance with Israel law and on basis of their assessments of Israels national interests.

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Our World: Avigdor Liberman vs. Israeli democracy - Jerusalem Post Israel News

FBI Director James Comey is asking the Justice Department to publicly refute President Trumps unsubstantiated claims that former President Obama ordered Trumps phones be wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign. FBI Director Comey, President Obama and others have all rejected Trumps allegations, which he first made during a tweet storm on Saturday. Trump began by tweeting "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" He went on to tweet, "How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" Trump has called for a congressional investigation and the White House is standing by the allegations, even though it has not provided evidence to back them up. This is Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaking to Martha Raddatz on ABCs "This Week" Sunday.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: "Look, I think hes going off of information that hes seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential. And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place."

It appears the "information" Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders is referring to is a Breitbart article that has been circulated within the White House. The article draws on a Thursday report by the far-right-wing radio host Mark Levin, who claimed without evidence that Obama submitted a request to the secret FISA court to tap Trumps phones at Trump Tower. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, say they have seen "no evidence" supporting these claims. This is California Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi: "This is called a wrap-up smear. You make up something, then you have the press write about it, then you say everybody is writing about this charge. Its the tool of an authoritarian, to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about."

The Intercept reports that, as President of the United States, Trump has the power to declassify surveillance recordsmeaning if his wiretapping claims were true, he could prove it immediately.

Continued here:
US Military Carries Out 30 Airstrikes in Yemen - Democracy Now!

Many of the crisis symptoms that European democracy is currently experiencing have been growing for a long time and have anchored themselves in countries in the southeast of the continent: The democratic crisis in Southeast Europe is clear for all to see, and the "idea of liberal democratic consensus no longer exists," Florian Bieber from the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz in Austria told Deutsche Welle.

Yet the crisis is not a result of an acute depression, emphasizes Michael Hein, a professor at Berlin's Humboldt University, but rather, has grown out of a long, negative process. Hein analyzed and evaluated a number of statistics and indicators that measure various developmental, legal and social parameters. They show the same tendencies across the board: All of the countries of Southeast Europe, with the exception of Kosovo, and regardless of whether they are EU member states or not, have exhibited a constant downward trend over the last ten years.

Read: Western immigrants feel 'welcome' in Balkans

This pertains to objectively measurable declines, but also to subjective parameters, such as citizens' faith in political and social institutions, which show the same downward tendency.

In nations that are not members of the European Union, or others -like Croatia -who are new to the EU, the democratic crisis is closely tied to more fundamental crises of orientation and values. In moments of uncertainty strong leaders offer hope -most often with simple messages gleaned from national history. Bieber says that nationalism welds people together under the leadership of democratically elected but authoritarian leaders.

Thousands of people took part in the 'colorful revolution' against the Macedonian government

New form of rule in the Balkans

Vedran Dzihic, a political scientist from Vienna, says that this has aided the spread of a new form of rule in the Western Balkans: One that combines authoritarian leadership, nationalist ideology and neoliberal economic policy. Politicians that govern in this way exhibit an "incredibly pragmatic use of power," much like role models such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Democracy is simply a means to an end for them, but it is not the goal. Such leaders use democratic instruments in order to cancel the power of those very instruments.

In this way, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic could be seen as the prototype of a politician acting in "messianic and narcissist" fashion. Such leaders suggest to voters that crises can only be solved by a strong leader, says Dzihic.

'Vucic is a dictator' reads the graffiti in Belgrade

Democratic institutions are rendered practically powerless in such instances, and the system only works because the country is repeatedly said to be in a constant state of national crisis. The same applies to economic policies in which the people are baited by politicians' "I can do it, I can fix this" rhetoric, which promises that everyone will benefit from a supposed economic upswing. In reality only a small number of people within a leader's inner circle profit politically and economically.

The EU has to stay engaged

Dzihic is nevertheless convinced that there are ways to break through this negative trend, as well as through autocratic structures. He says it is important that people defend themselves against obvious injustices. Recent mass protests in Romania showed how an awakened civil society can force a government to return to its principles of the rule of law. Dzihic is calling for more "alliances between free and democratic forces." He says that courage and constructive forms of civil protest are also needed to fight the increasing concentration of media control in the hands of the political elite.

Natasha Wunsch, a political scientist from Zurich, sees the support of civil society and independent media as another possible route to breaking through antidemocratic tendencies. "Setbacks in democratization and fatigue from EU expansion fuel one another," she told DW. The concept of integration through democratization has become obsolete because Europeanization and democratization have been decoupled from one another.

The EU must speak out sternly against democratic breaches while at the same time establishing mechanisms that promote democracy and civil society. Wunsch says that a more positive overall image of democratic progress and European integration could be furthered through exchange and education programs. Experts are unanimous in their opinion that two areas, above all, need special attention: the rule of law and freedom of the press.

It is in these two areas that the most alarmingly negative developments are to be seen. And it is here that quick and decisive measures must be formulated and positive steps to foster them be taken. Otherwise, the countries of Southeast Europe will drift ever farther from the community of shared European values, and with that, their EU membership will fade into the distance, forever beyond their reach.

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How to deal with democracy in crisis in Southeast Europe - Deutsche Welle

Thanks to millennials, socially responsible investing is now a big deal.

Investment funds dedicated to sustainable investing rose 33% during 2014-16 to $8.72 trillion, says the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

Millennials no doubt played a big role in this. More than 70% of them say they favor sustainable investing, according to Morgan Stanley. Its a trait they picked up from their baby-boomer parents.

This is all well and good, but many sustainable investing devotees, young and old, have a blind spot that needs fixing. Blame it on the so-called experts in the industry.

They make a big deal of avoiding fossil fuel companies and polluters. The environment isnt the only thing that needs minding. We also need a sustainable democracy. Without that, it doesnt matter how clean the environment is. Life could get ugly.

And make no mistake, sustainable democracy is at risk. No, this isnt another Donald Trump rant. Democracy was precarious before he came into office.

A key turning point was in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled against government restrictions on corporate political spending in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Since companies have deep pockets, their interests may trample those of average voters.

In short, its hard to say which did more harm, Citizens United or the Gulf oil spill, as baby boomer Jackson Browne wrote in his song The Long Way Around.

Whatever you think about Citizens United, its not going away soon. The best thing to do now is to learn how to contain the potential damage. For socially responsible investors, this means favoring companies with these three traits in the arena of campaign contributions:

Political spending transparency

Policies governing how they donate

Strong board oversight of managements campaign contributions

Above all, these qualities help shareholders understand how companies are contributing to politicians. If investors disagree, they can sell their shares or challenge boards of directors and management. Openness and board oversight help prevent managers from secretly going rogue with campaign contributions that work against shareholder values.

All of this seems fairly obvious. So its odd that the sustainable investing experts often put little emphasis on investing in sustainable democracy.

A list of sustainable investing themes from Arabesque Asset Management, which you can find in this note, appears comprehensive. It includes 30 topics of interest everything from carbon emissions and community relations, to diversity and CEO pay. What about political campaign contributions and investing in sustainable democracy? Nowhere to be seen.

In a way, this isnt surprising, since definitions of sustainable investing are all over the map.

The first stop for investors wanting to invest in sustainable democracy is the Center for Political Accountability (CPA) website. CPA examines the websites of S&P 500 SPX, -0.33% companies to gauge whether they have 24 qualities that CPA says companies need in the realm of campaign contributions. The big picture is that CPA is looking for the three qualities I mentioned above: transparency, policy and board oversight.

CPA then ranks S&P 500 companies on a scale of 0-100. You can find a spreadsheet with rankings here. This ranking serves two purposes:

It tells you as an investor which companies are doing the right thing. Its a handy guide to investing in sustainable democracy.

The rating system also pressures companies to change their ways if they arent up to snuff.

It is pushing companies to more broadly disclose their political spending and political spending policies, where no disclosure is required by law, says Bruce Freed, CPAs president and founder. There are a growing number of companies that take our index seriously that are looking to strengthen the way they oversee and disclose political spending.

A big question for investors is whether sustainable investing hurts performance. One theory says it should help. Consider companies that are more responsible because they are more transparent and they take the long view on matters like the environment. They may also naturally make wiser long-term business decisions and attract more customers because of good will.

Research results vary. Arabesque Asset Management claims 80% of academic studies found the stocks of companies with good sustainability practices outperform other stocks. Morningstar thinks social impact funds gained about 5% annually in the past 10 years, lagging behind other funds by about a percentage point a year.

Morgan Stanley seems to be in the middle, concluding in this note that sustainable investments have usually met, and often exceeded, the performance of comparable traditional investments.

I think investing in a sustainable democracy may well give you an edge, for two reasons.

1. Better governance

I had a hunch that companies ranking high in CPAs system also have solid corporate governance, which can work in your favor as an investor. So I asked Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) to help check. ISS assigns companies a corporate governance rating, called ISS QualityScore, based on four factors: board structure and independence, executive pay policies, shareholder rights, and audit and risk oversight.

Heres what we found. The top 48 ranked companies in CPAs system (those with a score of 90% or higher) had a median corporate governance risk rating of 4 on the ISS 1-10 scale, where a lower score is better. The bottom 48 companies, which all got a 0% rating from CPA, had a median ISS rating of 7.5. (A higher ISS score is worse.)

This makes sense, because companies that are generally more open and transparent with shareholders tend to get better governance scores, says John Roe, head of ISS Analytics. But he also cautions the sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions on whether CPA scores are a proxy for governance scores.

2. Better results

To test how youd do if you used CPAs system as a sustainable democracy investment guide, I looked at how well CPAs top 48 companies did against the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF RSP, -0.45% I chose this ETF because I used a simple equal weighting of the companies, so this ETF is the fairest comparison. (In contrast, the S&P 500 Index that most people track uses a market-cap weighted system. This means that smaller companies have a smaller impact on overall index returns.)

The results are remarkable.

CPAs top 48 stocks beat the market by 7 percentage points over the past three years. From the start of 2011 through Feb. 21 of this year, CPAs stocks returned 41.5% compared with 34.3% for the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF. (For reference, the market-cap-weighted S&P 500 Index did a little better. It advanced 36.1%. But the CPA stocks still beat that.) All returns include dividends.

One pushback on my performance test might be that the CPAs list of top-ranked companies may have over-represented companies in sectors that just happened to do well during that time frame. So I looked at a different time frame, the past five years. The results were even better. CPAs top 48 stocks beat the market by 20 percentage points. They advanced 133.3% vs. 113.3% for the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (and 108.9% for the market-cap-weighted S&P 500 Index).

Some of the best-performing stocks in this group, in either time frame, included: Bank of America Corp. BAC, -0.75% Morgan Stanley MS, -0.56% J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM, -0.95% Visa Inc. V, +0.17% Altria Group Inc. MO, +0.01% Time Warner Inc. TWX, -0.65% Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.03% Boeing Co. BA, -0.69% Becton Dickinson & Co. BDX, -0.11% Celgene Corp. CELG, -0.11% Edwards Lifesciences Corp. EW, -2.69% and Tesoro Corp. TSO, +1.14%

Some of the weaker performers included: International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +0.23% Coca-Cola Co. KO, -0.71% Qualcomm Inc. QCOM, +0.02% Praxair Inc. PX, +0.11% Schlumberger Ltd. SLB, +0.02% Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD, -0.89% Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. BMY, -0.51% Express Scripts Holding Co. ESRX, -2.14% Noble Energy Inc. NBL, +0.27% and Exelon Corp. EXC, -0.69%

Before you conclude that my mini-study proves you can do well by doing right, as the clich goes, a few qualifiers are in order. Statisticians would point out that theres no attempt to tease out what caused the performance difference. Correlation does not equal causation. The sample size is small. And there are only two time frames.

Plus, my test for outperformance against a rising market might be the wrong way to look at this. Heres what I mean. Lets assume Im right that CPA scores are a way to measure corporate governance. The nuance here is that quality corporate governance is really better at suggesting possible protection against downside risk, as opposed to outperformance, says Roe, the head of ISS Analytics.

Even if investing in sustainable democracy didnt help you outperform the market, does this really matter?

After all, if socially responsible investing is about putting money into the stocks of companies that share your values, then maybe its OK to give up some gains in the process. People give up money and time whenever they donate to charities or volunteer. There is a cost to those activities. But its offset by the benefit of knowing you might be improving the world. Why should investing be any different?

A lot of millennials seem to agree with this. Over half of them in the Morgan Stanley study I cited above said they get it that sustainable investing may involve some trade-off in financial gain yet they are some of the biggest fans of this style of investing.

At the time of publication, Michael Brush had no positions in any stocks mentioned in this column. Brush has suggested BAC, JPM, CELG,KO, GILD and BMY in his stock newsletter, Brush Up on Stocks. Brush is a Manhattan-based financial writer who has covered business for the New York Times and The Economist group, and he attended Columbia Business School in the Knight-Bagehot program.

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Now there's a way to invest and save democracy at the same time ... - MarketWatch

FBI Director James Comey is asking the Justice Department to publicly refute President Trumps unsubstantiated claims that former President Obama ordered Trumps phones be wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign. FBI Director Comey, President Obama and others have all rejected Trumps allegations, which he first made during a tweet storm on Saturday. Trump began by tweeting "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" He went on to tweet, "How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" Trump has called for a congressional investigation and the White House is standing by the allegations, even though it has not provided evidence to back them up. This is Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaking to Martha Raddatz on ABCs "This Week" Sunday.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: "Look, I think hes going off of information that hes seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential. And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place."

It appears the "information" Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders is referring to is a Breitbart article that has been circulated within the White House. The article draws on a Thursday report by the far-right-wing radio host Mark Levin, who claimed without evidence that Obama submitted a request to the secret FISA court to tap Trumps phones at Trump Tower. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, say they have seen "no evidence" supporting these claims. This is California Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi: "This is called a wrap-up smear. You make up something, then you have the press write about it, then you say everybody is writing about this charge. Its the tool of an authoritarian, to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about."

The Intercept reports that, as President of the United States, Trump has the power to declassify surveillance recordsmeaning if his wiretapping claims were true, he could prove it immediately.

More here:
At Oklahoma Capitol, Muslim Students Asked if They Beat Their Wives - Democracy Now!