Hasta La Gadget!

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind the website Infowars who believes the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job, boasted on his radio show that he has the ear of GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Jones believes that several mass shootings, like the 2012 one in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 26 people were killed, were “false flags” staged by the government. On his radio show on Wednesday, Jones claimed he had personally spoken to Trump and advised him to speak about how the election could be rigged against the Republican nominee.

Jones said he told Trump not to listen to anyone telling him that he shouldn’t stoke fears of election fraud because, he claimed, the Democratic primary election was stolen from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). 

Jones added, “Homeland Security was gonna go in and probably bring in U.N. observers to make sure illegals of people could vote and change the debate away from election fraud to retail voter fraud, which is individuals cheating, rather than the computers being hacked.”

He also said that Trump “didn’t so much do what I told him to do, he already concurred and absolutely was on the same page and was already right there with me or even ahead of me.”

The nominee has added fuel to conspiracy theories throughout his campaign, and said last month he believed the election would be rigged against him.

“It’s not a fair situation. It’s a rigged situation,” Trump told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “In a certain way, it’s rigged by the media, if you think about it.”

In fact, there have been very few instances of voter fraud. President Barack Obama called Trump’s suggestion that the election would be rigged “ridiculous.”

Jones also claimed he told Trump there would be fake polls released showing him behind in the race. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, has claimed that polls showing Hillary Clinton leading in the election were “cherry-picked polling numbers that are put out there by media outlets that are also bent on his destruction.”

Trump’s campaign did not return a request for confirmation on whether Jones has been advising the nominee.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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A Hungarian-born man is found ranting in the street that he is “king of the Puerto Ricans.” A perfectly healthy woman feels compelled to undergo over a dozen operations. A man in a straightjacket somehow manages to commit suicide while inside a locked psychiatric ward.

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Twitter has been known to ban accounts for several reasons, such as if they’re connected to known hacking groups or extremist organizations, and sometimes if the use is offensive/abusive. Once an account has been suspended, there’s really not supposed to be anyway to reverse the ban unless the social network itself decides to. That’s why is comes as a surprise … Continue reading

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced today that the United States and China are formally joining the Paris Agreement on climate change. This caps a remarkable two years of bilateral cooperation on climate change following their joint announcement in 2014, when they revealed their respective greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets, and their joint announcement in 2015, when they agreed on key provisions for what would become the groundbreaking Paris Agreement on global climate change.

As the world’s two largest economies and two largest emitters, one an industrialized economy and the other an emerging economy, this announcement sends an unprecedented signal to the business community, that the agreement reached in Paris is now set to be grounded in domestic law and that climate policy will become a common factor for companies as they assess regulatory risk and opportunity.

The joint announcement continues the unprecedented cooperation between the United States and China on climate change. That these economic powerhouses have become co-champions of a global agreement is itself striking; that climate, energy, and environment is now a cornerstone of their bilateral cooperation is even more so. Climate is prominent in the outcomes of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and their bilateral Climate Change Working Group fosters collaboration in every emitting sector, from supporting low-carbon power generation and clean transport fuels and freight, to promoting energy efficiency in buildings, to reducing deforestation.

With other countries planning similar announcements in the coming weeks, the Paris Agreement is on course to pass the threshold required to come into effect and be legally binding, which is 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions. Moreover, the public policy commitment to climate action now transcends diplomatic agreements among nation states. Almost 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states, and provinces already use carbon pricing mechanisms or are planning to implement them to improve the economics of climate action. And last week, California, which is the seventh largest economy in the world, voted to extend its commitment to climate action by setting a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

This volume of government commitment to climate action is defining for the global economy. By binding themselves to the provisions of the Paris Agreement and to their own Paris targets, the United States and China will incentivize trillions of dollars in low-carbon investment through domestic legislation and regulation. The Paris round of targets is estimated to bring projected warming down to 2.7°C, creating a thriving clean economy in the process. All countries joining the agreement must update their targets and communicate new national climate plans every five years. When the United States and China do so in 2020, they will again unleash investment to reduce emissions and build resilience.

The US-China announcement will have an immediate impact on businesses and investors. It gives strength to domestic efforts to reduce emissions, whether through China’s 13th Five-Year Plan or a series of executive actions in the United States. Businesses selling to American markets or with supply chains running through China will face the impact. And it is a shot in the arm for those businesses and investors managing climate risks and building resilience to climate impacts.

Together this means the nature of corporate climate leadership in a post-Paris world has changed.
Corporate leadership now requires reducing emissions, building resilience, and catalyzing investment in line with the agreement’s long-term goals. Companies that want to get ahead of climate regulation will choose to set science-based emissions reduction targets that follow the Paris trajectory. And true climate leadership will require multinational collaboration to reduce emissions and build resilience in supply chains spanning the globe.

This post has been written by BSR‘s Edward Cameron, David Wei and Samantha Harris.

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How your company can commit to climate action.

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How the Republican presidential nominee is undermining democratic norms at home and abroad.

By Michael Goldfien

If elected president, Donald Trump will give democracy promotion a demotion, and perhaps get rid of it altogether. Trump appears to be ignorant of the benefits the United States enjoys from the spread of democracy abroad, and much less the fact that his often undemocratic campaign for the presidency undercuts Washington’s ability to lead by example. Democracy around the world is in recession, and presidential candidates should be defending the values of representative government. Instead, Trump has made common cause with the autocrats leading the global backlash against democracy.

The spread of democracy worldwide enhances American security. Not every autocracy has been an enemy of America, but all of America’s enemies have been autocracies. Today, countries like Russia and North Korea threaten U.S. interests and global stability. Meanwhile, autocracies turned democracies such as Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy have become powerful allies. Democratic governments are not only more likely to treat their people justly, but they are also more likely to develop productive relationships with the United States.

Much of this is lost on Trump, leading him to eschew America’s traditional role of championing democracy abroad. During a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump said that he would not push Turkey or other allies to be more democratic. According to Trump, the United States has its own “mess” to worry about; Washington is not a good “messenger” and has no “right to lecture” other countries. Yes, the United States faces its own challenges, but in refusing to stand up for democracy abroad, Trump, as Anne Applebaum notes, allows autocrats and leaders with authoritarian tendencies to “sleep easier.”

Even those who downplay the importance of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy usually believe in setting a good example for burgeoning democracies to follow ― not Trump. Throughout his improbable campaign, the reality star-turned-presidential candidate acts as if democratic norms are a nuisance. Trump and his political allies belittle minorities, show contempt for the rule of law, and threaten political opponents with violence. Trump’s behavior sets the worse sort of example for new and backsliding democracies alike. How can American diplomats encourage foreign counterparts to expand press and religious freedoms or respect the judiciary when the Republican standard-bearer bars the Washington Post from press events, proposes banning Muslims from entering the country, and questions the objectivity of federal judge Gonzalo Curiel because his parents were born in Mexico?

Trump, however, isn’t just setting a bad example and renouncing the United States’ traditional role as a leader among democracies, which alone would be enough to embolden the world’s autocrats. No, Trump has taken democracy demotion a step further: actively praising autocrats for their strong leadership and parroting their talking points in campaign speeches and interviews. Trump is notably obsequious toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he defended against the charge of killing journalists and tweeted about as a potential “best friend.” Recently, Trump legitimized Russia’s annexation of Crimea and threw into question Washington’s commitment to NATO allies menaced by Moscow. In fact, the Trump campaign’s conciliation of and ties to Moscow are so great that a former acting director of the CIA called the Republican candidate an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

For several years, democratic backsliding has outweighed democratic expansion. Additionally, as former U.S Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul points out, Vladimir Putin and other autocrats are leading a global effort to undermine the legitimacy of representative government. In Donald Trump, they could not have found a more useful presidential candidate; Trump has shown that he is more effective at promoting Russian foreign policy goals than he is at promoting democracy. For those who care about political freedoms ― not to mention American security ―Trump’s demotion of democracy at home and abroad is a worrying sign.

Michael Goldfien is a Campaigns Fellow at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and has an MA in International Policy Studies from Stanford University.

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