[Marxism] [UCE] What plastic item would you love to ban? 15 ocean experts asked

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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> https://ideas.ted.com/what_plastic_item/
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Re: [Marxism] Recycling: how corporate Australia played us for mugs | Jeff Sparrow | Environment | The Guardian

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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The scam that is recycling for profit has shocked a lot of people here. But
I think there's more concrete and transitional campaigns to be taken up on
recycling per se, with very red-green community control and green jobs
angles, as well as Jeff Sparrow's correct call for the environment movement
to "agitate for fundamental economic change to end the production of
pollutants".

Recycling can and should be a democratic collective activity rather than a
consumerist, individualist diversion. Where I used to live in northern NSW
the Greens-influenced local council, after a public education campaign,
made the collection of food scraps mandatory and halved its collection of
landfill. Landfill was drastically reduced and the council got itself a
quite big municipal socialist worm-farm enterprise into the bargain. A lot
better than handing out subsidised household worm farms like my current
council.

Our Victorian Socialists' call for a local recycling plant hasn't actually
achieved anything yet but has got some good media at last:

In the Murdoch paper <
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/north/bold-vision-to-make-whittlesea-the-recycling-capital-of-victoria/news-story/bb00d92b11c31a1e50d22e67cdba62f8>
(paywalled for me after using free quota)

And the local paper:

Bold plan for recycling hub

Shapiro, Paul. Whittlesea Leader; 13 Mar 2018

SOUTH Morang could become home to Victoria’s main recycling plant under a
new proposal from the Victorian Socialists.

The party is making a run at the Victorian Upper House in the Northern
Metropolitan region and has earmarked Whittlesea as an area in dire need of
public services and infrastructure.

Yarra councillor Stephen Jolly, Moreland councillor Sue Bolton and asbestos
victims lawyer Colleen Bolger will all run at the November state election.

The Socialists are confident they can snare at least one upper house seat
with Mr Jolly, the lead candidate, most likely to be elected.

Mr Jolly said the Socialists had a number of ideas for Whittlesea,
including a major recycling plant which would serve the entire state.

“The recent China decision to cease taking Australia’s recycling has led to
chaos for councils,” Mr Jolly said. “The only long-term solution is for a
recycle facility to be built in Melbourne, which could also have benefit of
new jobs and apprenticeships.” Mr Jolly said he envisioned the plant could
be a hub for apprentices and South Morang would be “an ideal location”.

“The plant will bring hundreds of jobs as well as provide recycling relief
for Victorian households,” Mr Jolly said. “I plan to work with politicians
and experts on specifics such as size, cost and location.” Whittlesea
Council city transport and presentation director Nick Mann said the council
“would work with future governments on this proposal”.

“We would support any proposal that would increase opportunities for the
community to recycle waste,” he said. “(The council) identified that 15 per
cent of garbage could be reprocessed and valuable materials recovered for
re-use rather than sent to landfill.”The Socialists also have a plan to
boost public transport through a fast bus network.

https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/recycling_hub

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 10:25 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2018/jul/19/its-not-recycling-its-collecting-how-australians-were-sucked-into-the-crisis
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[Marxism] Harold Cardenas: The Cuban Revolution's illegitimate children

[Marce Cameron via Marxism]

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https://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/2018/07/harold-cardenas-revolutions.html?m=1
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Re: [Marxism] Helsinki: Was it "excellent"? Should we care?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/20/18 5:23 PM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:

To answer that, we should consider the Helsinki press conference and the
meeting of Putin-Trump itself.


This doesn't really apply to Marxmail that is largely focused on class 
rather than geopolitical chess games but I finally got sick of people on 
FB lambasting the Democratic Party's exploitation of all this 
Trump-Putin crapola. So I wrote this:


Frankly, I don't care if Russia helped Trump get elected or not. As 
someone who spent 5 years trying to support Sandinista Nicaragua in the 
1980s to early 90s, I can write a book about all the ways in which the 
State Department, the NED, the CIA and people like General Singlaub 
helped overthrow the government through a combination of terror and 
disinformation through La Prensa.


That being said, I do wonder whether some of you denouncing (rightfully) 
the Democratic Party's hysteria over this business had so little to say 
for the past 7 years about the vast network of Assadist propagandists 
who took their marching orders from RT.com, starting with people like 
Max Blumenthal who used his credibility based on Palestinian solidarity 
to write shit that made Syrian and Russian terror bombing of hospitals 
acceptable to large swaths of the left.


It wasn't only jackasses like Blumenthal. You had fucking thousands of 
people on Twitter who every time a chemical attack took place would 
circulate the drivel written by Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Theodore 
Postol. All these fucking Twitter accounts belonged to people with fake 
names like RedAvenger and featured pictures of Assad, Stalin and Mao Zedong.


Plus, a thousand and one websites like Moon of Alabama, The Saker, 21st 
Century Wire, UNZ Review, Consortium News, DissidentVoice, Off-Guardian, 
and Information Clearing House that one day after a chemical attack 
would all reproduce the talking points of Assad and the Kremlin.


How is it that none of this seems to have gotten under your skin? Maybe 
because you agree with Max Blumenthal that the White Helmets are 
al-Qaeda and that we need to bomb the shit out of the slums they are 
serving before they come over here and force Sharia law on hipster Brooklyn?



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[Marxism] Helsinki: Was it "excellent"? Should we care?

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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I sent this one before to this list, but I didn't see it come through so
I'm sending it again. Apologies if it came through but I missed it.

Was the Putin-Trump meeting really “excellent” as left journalist Glenn
Greenwald says
?
Should the working class, and socialists among them, support what the far
right racist Senator Rand Paul said

 – that the meeting lessened the chances of war between these two nuclear
superpowers. (Some socialists do!) And should we really “not care that
(Putin and Trump) may have collaborated,” as one left commentator on
Facebook said? Do we agree with another, who asked “What concern is it of
mine if Trump is being directed by Russians?”

To answer that, we should consider the Helsinki press conference and the
meeting of Putin-Trump itself.


*Private Meeting: Why?*The fact that the two world leaders in reaction took
the extremely unusual step of meeting without any of their aides should be
understood in its context. That context is the fact that on the one side,
Putin is in effect the capo-di-tutti-capo of a mafia kleptocracy run amok.

See entire article:

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/07/19/helsinki-was-it-excellent-should-we-care/

John Reimann
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[Marxism] Hasidim See Things Through a New Lens

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Since I plan to write something tomorrow about the Hasidic photography 
buff I wrote about earlier today, I've been doing a bit of research on 
the Pupa sub-sect he belongs to. This NY Times article will give you an 
idea of how strict they are about proper Pupa appearance that makes the 
Saudis and Iranians look practically bohemian by comparison. It takes a 
lot of backbone for someone like the photographer to begin thinking for 
himself.)



NY Times, April 11, 2014
Hasidim See Things Through a New Lens
By Mark Oppenheimer

FailedMessiah.com, the muckraking blog written by the once-Hasidic Jew 
Shmarya Rosenberg, is best known (and, in some quarters, loathed) for 
posts exposing crimes suspected of being perpetrated by Hasidic and 
other highly observant Jews.


But Mr. Rosenberg blogs about every aspect of the community, not just 
its legal troubles. And lately, he has delved into fashion.


Last month, under the headline “Another Hasidic Yeshiva Bans 
Plastic-Framed Woody Allen-Style Glasses,” Mr. Rosenberg posted a letter 
apparently sent to parents of children at the yeshiva run by the Pupa 
Hasidic sect, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Because several students 
recently created a “disruption with respect to dress,” the letter says 
in Yiddish, “we feel that it is important to clarify that our pupils 
should maintain the traditions that are fitting for a Hasidic pupil.”


The yeshiva did not refer to Mr. Allen in its letter; that was Mr. 
Rosenberg’s poetic license. But it seems clear what style the school had 
in mind. “The latest fashion in eyeglasses is that they are tinted a 
dark black or a dark blue or a dark brown and so forth,” the letter 
reads. Subsequent language makes it clear that dark frames, not lenses, 
are the problem. “Everyone understands very clearly that these types of 
glasses make the child look very common, crude,” the letter continues.


Also of concern are “completely rimless” glasses, and glasses in which 
the “glass is separated from the frame.” The letter concludes that “only 
simple glasses of a very light color with thin straight earpieces should 
be purchased.”


Last year, Mr. Rosenberg reproduced on his blog a very similar letter, 
on stationery that appeared to be from the yeshiva run by the Bobov 
Hasidim. Reached by telephone, an administrator at the Bobover yeshiva 
said that he had no idea what letter was being referred to. An 
administrator at the Pupa yeshiva, who would not give his name when 
contacted by phone, confirmed that he knew of the letter, then refused 
to discuss it.


From his home in Minnesota, Mr. Rosenberg said that Hasidim take a dim 
view of such glasses only because they don’t know their own history. “If 
you look at their rabbis in the 1960s, they were all wearing them,” Mr. 
Rosenberg said. “Now they’re banning them as being immodest” and for 
non-Jews.


But a close reading of the Pupa letter reveals an excellent 
understanding of how fashion cycles. “It is truly very difficult to set 
a clear demarcation with respect to the kind of eyeglasses a pupil may 
wear,” the letter reads, “because styles continually change, and glasses 
that were at one time proper can now be called ‘modern,’ and vice versa. 
But the demarcation that one can definitely set is that one must stand 
vigilant and not follow new fashions.”


In other words, if the rabbis once wore such glasses, it’s only because 
that’s what professional men of the era did. They were being boring 
middle-aged men, not fashion-forward hipster kids. As it happens, that 
reasoning was adduced by evangelical pastors in the later 1960s, when 
Christian hippies noted that Jesus may have had long hair. That was the 
fashion of his time, the young people were told. Jesus wasn’t trying to 
be groovy.


By the same logic, good Hasidic boys — who God willing, should know 
nothing of Woody Allen’s turn as a Hasid, in “Annie Hall,” and still 
less of the prurient reasons he has been back in the news — should not 
wear glasses like his. At least, not until such glasses are no longer 
considered “fashionable.”


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[Marxism] Shinobu Hashimoto, Writer of Kurosawa Films, Is Dead at 100

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, July 20, 2018
Shinobu Hashimoto, Writer of Kurosawa Films, Is Dead at 100
By Margalit Fox

Shinobu Hashimoto, a screenwriter whose first film, “Rashomon,” became a 
touchstone of world cinema, and who went on to collaborate with its 
director, Akira Kurosawa, on celebrated pictures like “Ikiru” and “Seven 
Samurai,” died on Thursday at his home in Tokyo. He was 100.


His death was confirmed by Tomo Tran of Vertical Inc., the United States 
publisher of his memoir, “Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I.”


Mr. Hashimoto, who had previously worked as an accountant, was the last 
living member of the cadre of screenwriters around Kurosawa (1910-98). 
Because Kurosawa liked his screenplays to be written collaboratively, 
all of Mr. Hashimoto’s work for him was done with others, including 
Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima and Kurosawa himself.


Of the writers in Kurosawa’s stable, Mr. Hashimoto was among the 
longest-serving, contributing to eight screenplays from 1950 to 1970. 
Their other pictures together include “Throne of Blood” (1957), a 
reworking of “Macbeth” set in feudal Japan; “The Hidden Fortress” 
(1958), an adventure film about a princess escorted in disguise through 
enemy territory; and “Dodes’ka-den” (1970), about the residents of a 
Tokyo slum.


Mr. Hashimoto’s foremost films were widely known outside Japan and 
inspired several Hollywood pictures.


“Seven Samurai” (1950), the story of farmers who hire a band of master 
swordsmen to rout the bandits tormenting their village, was remade in 
1960 by John Sturges as “The Magnificent Seven,” an acclaimed western 
starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson.


“The Magnificent Seven” was itself remade in 2016, directed by Antoine 
Fuqua and starring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke.


“The Hidden Fortress” was acknowledged by the director George Lucas as 
having helped inspire his 1977 blockbuster, “Star Wars.”


Perhaps no film of Mr. Hashimoto’s has had more enduring influence than 
“Rashomon.” Set in medieval Japan, it recounts the story of the murder 
of a samurai and the rape of his wife from four utterly different 
perspectives: that of a bandit (played by Toshiro Mifune), the wife 
(Machiko Kyo), the spirit of the dead samurai, and a passing woodcutter.


A philosophical exploration of the malleable nature of truth, “Rashomon” 
was the first Japanese film to gain wide international acclaim and is 
today considered one of the finest motion pictures ever made. It won the 
Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and that year received what 
was then called the honorary foreign-language film award at the Oscars.


The generic term “Rashomon” has persisted in the English lexicon, 
describing an event characterized by conflicting accounts.


Mr. Hashimoto was born on April 18, 1918, in the Hyogo Prefecture in 
west central Japan. He enlisted in the army in 1938 but contracted 
tuberculosis during his training and spent the next four years in a 
veterans’ sanitarium.


A fellow patient there happened to lend him a film magazine, and Mr. 
Hashimoto became fascinated by the craft of screenwriting. He began work 
on a screenplay about his army experience, a project that took three years.


After he was discharged from the sanitarium, Mr. Hashimoto went to work 
as an accountant for a munitions company, writing on the train to and 
from the office. His fellow patient had told him that the most eminent 
screenwriter in Japan was Mansaku Itami, and with the naïve bravado of 
youth, Mr. Hashimoto sent Mr. Itami his screenplay.


Mr. Itami became his mentor, tutoring him in the screenwriter’s art 
until his death in 1946.


In the late 1940s, Mr. Hashimoto began work on the screenplay that would 
become “Rashomon.” His script was an adaptation of a short story, “In a 
Grove,” by the distinguished early-20th-century writer Ryunosuke 
Akutagawa, in which different narrators offer conflicting accounts of a 
samurai’s death.


With perhaps even greater bravado, Mr. Hashimoto sent his screenplay, 
titled “Shiyu” (“Male and Female”), to Kurosawa.


Meeting with Mr. Hashimoto for the first time in 1949, Kurosawa told him 
that he wanted to film the script but that it was too short. In a panic, 
Mr. Hashimoto blurted out that he could graft another Akutagawa story, 
“Rashomon,” onto the narrative.


The two stories seemed eminently incompatible (“Rashomon,” as it came 
from Mr. Akutagawa’s pen, explored the desperate lives of thieves in 
medieval Kyoto), and for weeks afterward Mr. Hashimoto cursed his folly.


But Kurosawa — possessed, in Mr. Hashimoto’s words, of a “perfectionism 
that exceeded 

[Marxism] Let this movie bother you | Khury Petersen-Smith | Socialist Worker

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://socialistworker.org/2018/07/20/let-this-movie-bother-you


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[Marxism] When Yugoslavia’s Bright Future Was Fashioned in Concrete - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Before 1991, when old enmities savagely resurfaced, these seven 
countries were part of a single federal republic — Yugoslavia — with 
ethnicities, religions and language groups under a single overarching 
roof. “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” 
an outstanding new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, brings us 
back to this vanished Socialist state, whose postwar architecture had 
all the ambition and invention found in the United States, Brazil, Japan 
and other centers of building at the time.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/arts/design/architecture-in-yugoslavia-review-moma.html
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Re: [Marxism] Soviet studies

[David McDonald via Marxism]

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I'm not a scholar but a long-ago former member of the SWP-RMC-RSL-IS
currently studying the fuck out of fascism because you know why.

This book is of interest because, among other aspects of this giant topic,
I am pursuing Hannah Arendt's thesis that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
under Stalin were both totalitarian states. I haven't gotten there yet but
clearly the Eastern Europe countries' post-WWII fate, under Stalin at
pretty much the height of his powers, is worthy of study in this regard. So
therefore, will be the propaganda in this book.

It is also of theoretical interest in my other current interest, which is
the death-agony of the existing left and the rise of the red-brown current.

The Kirkus Review of 1945 is among the most nauseating things I've ever
read so the book should be great.

I will be happy to return it to you or send it along to the next person.
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[Marxism] Andrew Stewart: What I Mailed to Sheldon Whitehouse and Joe McNamara | Rhode Island Media Cooperative

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://rimediacoop.org/2018/07/20/lake-of-fire-whitehouse-mcnamara/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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Re: [Marxism] The Moral and Spiritual Bankruptcy of White Evangelicals

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/20/18 10:48 AM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote


https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/19/the-moral-and-spiritual-bankruptcy-of-white-evangelicals
 


As we have seen, on this list there are a few of us who grew up in this milieu.
While my own reasons for breaking with this upbringing were quite shallow (the 
desire to fit in with my peers, sexual repression, etc.) I do wonder what would 
have been the case if my church had had more moral authority.


This reminds me. I had the most extraordinary experience yesterday that 
falls under the rubric of religious fundamentalism. I was in upstate NY 
working with a drone pilot I had hired for 2 days. We were in Old Falls, 
a tiny hamlet that abuts the Neversink River getting his drone set up, 
when a guy pulled up in a panel truck marked security. At first we 
thought that maybe the local authorities were going to give us a hassle 
but it was only a guy whose job it was to install home security systems.


His name was Yitzy and he was a Hasidic Jew that belonged to the Puppa 
sect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppa_(Hasidic_dynasty)) that I had 
never heard of but is affiliated with the Satmars that I knew quite a 
bit about. The Satmars had colonized my village a couple of miles away 
from Old Falls starting about 25 years ago and my family home is now 
owned by members.


The Satmars are rivals of the Lubavitch sect, distinguished by their 
belief that a Jewish state can only be realized when the Messiah comes. 
A sub-sect called Neturei Karta can be seen at anti-Zionist rallies 
organized by WWP and PSL.


It turns out that Yitzy owns a drone himself and was anxious to talk 
shop with us. He also is on an Instagram-type website 
(https://www.yooying.com/yitzygeephotography) where he describes himself 
as a "Wildlife photographer מה רבו מעשיך ה׳ the wonderful creation of 
G-D". He brought a Nikon camera from out of his truck that had a 
foot-long telephoto lens.


I had an interesting chat with him about how he fits in with the Satmars 
since they are opposed to members going online, or even using smart 
phones. He said that even though he is faithful, the Internet is a huge 
part of his life, including Netflix.


He is aware of films that are critical of the Hasids, using subjects 
that have broken with various sects but still feels part of that world. 
He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt but you could see his sidelocks 
(payis) tucked neatly behind his ears. On Saturday he dons the 
traditional Satmar clothing and goes to synagogue.


The main thing that struck me was his openness and intellectual 
curiosity. Like most Hasids, he only attended religious schools but is 
an autodidact. He taught himself English and Spanish and is obviously 
anxious to learn more about life and culture outside the sect. An 
extraordinary young man whose website is well worth checking out.








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Re: [Marxism] The Moral and Spiritual Bankruptcy of White Evangelicals

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/19/the-moral-and-spiritual-bankruptcy-of-white-evangelicals
 


As we have seen, on this list there are a few of us who grew up in this milieu.
While my own reasons for breaking with this upbringing were quite shallow (the 
desire to fit in with my peers, sexual repression, etc.) I do wonder what would 
have been the case if my church had had more moral authority.
There was a powerful civil rights movement led by religious figures, Martin 
Luther King in particular.  His name was never spoken in my church.  It didn’t 
seem remarkable at the time, but it does in retrospect.

As young people are growing up in evangelical churches, how many will be 
looking for a way out?  How will they judge their church in view of the family 
separation policy and other moral issues?

ken h
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[Marxism] Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The left internationally has been stuck on the horns of a dilemma for 
quite some time now. When radicals take state power but fail to abolish 
private property, internal contradictions eventually catch up with the 
government and dash the hopes initially placed in it—Syriza in Greece 
and Chavista Venezuela being prime examples. With Cuba and North Korea 
as relics of the “communist” past, there are few on the left that 
consider them as models in the way that large parts once did fifty years 
ago, even more so when both hold-outs are now moving rapidly toward a 
Chinese-style economy. Just this week, there was news that Cuba will now 
recognize private property under a new constitution.


Despite such discouraging tendencies, radicalism persists mostly as a 
result of the assaults on living standards the capitalist system 
imposes. As part of an ongoing project to analyze the renaissance of 
social democracy in the United States, rebranded by the DSA, Jacobin and 
the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party as “democratic socialism”, I 
decided to read Richard Seymour’s “Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of 
Radical Politics”. I knew little about Corbyn except what I learned from 
the Guardian, The Nation and the usual leftwing websites that were as 
breathlessly enthusiastic as they were about the Sanders campaign.


As someone who has lauded Seymour’s books in the past, I delayed reading 
his 2016 Verso book because his Lacanian turn, while satisfying his own 
intellectual agenda, left a Freud-hater like me cold. I am happy to 
report that his book on Corbyn vintage is Richard Seymour and necessary 
reading for those grappling with the question of whether capitalism can 
be reformed.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2018/07/20/corbyn-the-strange-rebirth-of-radical-politics/

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[Marxism] Working Class Fiction--Not Just Surplus Value

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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A review of Beverly Gologorsky's Every Body Has a Story

http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2018/07/working-class-fiction-not-just-surplus.html

-- 
Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
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and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
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[Marxism] Roberto Santucho and the Fight for Socialism in Argentina - Part I

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Back in 1973, the Fourth International co-led by Ernest Mandel and Jack 
Barnes, was in the early stages of a fight that would eventually lead to 
a split. Mandel backed an urban guerrilla group led by Roberto Santucho 
and the SWP backed Nahuel Moreno's group that appeared to have much more 
in common with us. As you might expect, Barnes and Moreno had a falling 
out eventually. This article is well-researched. I know nothing about 
the website that published it except that it appears to be based in 
Latin America given its focus on the region. By publishing in English, 
they likely want to get a broader following. It is worth bookmarking.


https://newmilitant.com/mario-roberto-santucho-and-the-struggle-for-socialism-in-argentina/
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[Marxism] Overview of forthcoming university press books (continued) (opinion)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Only one species has evolved to the point of understanding evolution 
itself. (Not all members of it, obviously.) The great apes can think, 
communicate and collaborate -- up to a point. Integrating his own 
research with the work of early Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, 
Michael Tomasello argues in Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny 
(Harvard University Press, January 2019) that "the maturation of humans’ 
evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities … 
into uniquely human cognition and sociality." If a 4-year-old child 
lives in a more complex universe than even the most accomplished of its 
primate cousins, that reflects "the emergence of collective 
intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural 
knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication."


http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/07/20/overview-forthcoming-university-press-books-continued-opinion
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[Marxism] ZCommunications » State of the BRICS Class Struggle, Part 2

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Patrick Bond.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/state-of-the-brics-class-struggle-part-2/
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[Marxism] Putin is invited to U.S. amid growing furor over summit, The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Washington Post, July 20, 2018
Putin is invited to U.S. amid growing furor over summit
By Shane Harris;Felicia Sonmez;John Wagner

Planned meeting takes intelligence chief by surprise
The White House announced Thursday that Vladimir Putin has been invited 
to Washington this fall, even as leaders in Washington tried to fully 
understand what happened when President Trump and the Russian leader met 
earlier this week in Helsinki.


White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the planned 
visit in a tweet, saying that national security adviser John Bolton 
extended the invitation and that "discussions are already underway."


As the late afternoon tweet landed, Director of National Intelligence 
Daniel Coats was on stage at the Aspen Security Forum in the middle of 
an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who broke the news to him. 
Coats, clearly surprised, took a deep breath.


"Say that again," he said. "Did I hear you?"

She repeated the news.

"Oky," Coats said. "That's going to be special."

Coats said he would have advised against Trump and Putin's private 
meeting in Helsinki, which worried U.S. security officials because no 
notes were taken and only two interpreters were present, but that he had 
not been consulted. Underscoring how little is known about the meeting, 
Coats acknowledged that he has not been told what happened in the room. 
Asked whether it was possible Putin had secretly recorded the more-than 
two-hour meeting, Coats answered, "That risk is always there."


Thursday's announcement was the latest unexpected turn in a week in 
which Trump has faced a torrent of bipartisan criticism over his cozy 
approach to Putin and his vacillating utterances about Moscow's election 
interference, all while brushing aside warnings that the Russian leader 
should be viewed as an adversary.


"The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy 
of the people, the Fake News Media," Trump wrote in a morning tweet. "I 
look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing 
some of the many things discussed."


The tensions within the administration have been most evident between 
Trump and Coats. When asked in Helsinki whom he believed regarding 
Russia's interference in the 2016 election, he appeared to give equal 
weight to Coats's warnings and Putin's denial of Russian interference.


"All I can do is ask the question," he said. "My people came to me, 
Daniel Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's 
Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia."


Inside the White House, Trump's advisers were in an uproar over Coats's 
interview in Aspen, Colo. They said the optics were especially damaging, 
noting that at moments Coats appeared to be laughing at the president, 
playing to his audience of the intellectual elite in a manner that was 
sure to infuriate Trump.


"Coats has gone rogue," said one senior White House official, who spoke 
on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment.


After Coats indirectly rebuked Trump's Helsinki performance on Monday, 
senior administration officials were concerned that the intelligence 
director could perhaps resign and so implored Trump to reassure Coats 
and calm the waters. Trump tried to do just that on Wednesday in an 
interview with CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor, singling out Coats by 
name for praise. A transcript of the president's interview was sent to 
Coats to ensure the director of national intelligence saw the comments, 
the senior official said.


White House aides are worried that Trump will interpret the comments by 
Coats as a personal betrayal, since they came so soon after the 
president praised him. Explaining that Trump does not take kindly to 
slights and that he nurses grudges, one official predicted that Coats's 
Aspen interview could bother the president more than the many ethical 
blunders of Scott Pruitt, who was ousted as Environmental Protection 
Agency administrator.


A senior U.S. intelligence official said that Coats has a good 
relationship with the president and speaks with him frequently. He 
disputed the suggestion that the director was somehow undermining the 
president and said Coats was doing his job to describe what the Russians 
did.


"For someone in the White House to criticize Dan Coats for speaking 
truth to power is unfair," the intelligence official said.


On Capitol Hill, where the reaction to Trump's shifting stances on 
Russia's role in the election has ranged from mild disapproval to 
accusations of treason, lawmakers on Thursday gave the president a 
legislative rebuke - albeit a