“How to Hide an Empire”: Daniel Immerwahr on the History of the Greater United States

“How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” That’s the title of a new book examining a part of the U.S. that is often overlooked: the nation’s overseas territories from Puerto Rico to Guam, former territories like the Philippines, and its hundreds of military bases scattered across the globe. We speak with the book’s author, Daniel Immerwahr, who writes, “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.” Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University.

U.S. Rejects New European Dirty-Money Blacklist

List of 23 jurisdictions also includes Panama and Puerto Rico

The EU list includes Saudi Arabia and Panama, but it also U.S. territories such as the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, placing them alongside the likes of Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Banks in the EU will be required to use increased due diligence on financial operations involving customers and financial institutions from the blacklisted countries.

.. The U.S. Treasury Department said it “has significant concerns about the substance of the list,” saying its development was flawed. It said it didn’t expect U.S financial institutions to take the European Commission’s list into account as they carry out anti-money-laundering compliance.

.. The U.S. Treasury said the European Commission didn’t include sufficiently in-depth reviews, only gave affected jurisdictions a cursory basis for the determination, told the jurisdictions they were going to be included only days before the announcement and didn’t give them meaningful opportunity to challenge their inclusion.

.. Policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic need to acknowledge that nobody is doing enough to combat money laundering, said Clark Gascoigne, the deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, a consortium of research and advocacy groups.

Trump Pulls Back From Declaring a National Emergency to Fund a Wall

WASHINGTON — President Trump has stepped back from declaring a national emergency to pay for a border wall, under pressure from congressional Republicans, his own lawyers and advisers, who say using it as a way out of the government shutdown does not justify the precedent it would set and the legal questions it could raise.

“If today the national emergency is border security, tomorrow the national emergency might be climate change,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the idea’s critics, said this week. Another Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, told an interviewer that declaring a national emergency should be reserved for “the most extreme circumstances.”

.. “What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,” he told reporters gathered in the Cabinet Room as the shutdown approached its fourth week. Minutes later he contradicted himself, saying that he would declare a state of emergency if he had to.

.. Instead, Mr. Trump would use his authority to transfer funds to the wall that were appropriated by Congress for other purposes. Toward that end, the Army Corps of Engineers has been directed to study whether it can divert about $13.9 million in emergency aide set aside for Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and California. And with the money secured, the president could drop his opposition to the appropriations bills whose passage would end the shutdown.

.. Former White House aides, who noted that Mr. Trump did not focus on the wall during the first two years of his presidency, said the optics of fighting for the wall were more important to the president than erecting it.

.. But opposition has come from many Republican quarters. Some conservatives see it as an unacceptable extension of executive power. Kellyanne Conway, a White House aide, has said it would essentially give Congress a pass. Representative Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said it was not clear to him that an emergency declaration would even lead to the prompt reopening of the government.