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Canadá apresenta queixa “sem precedentes” contra os EUA na Organização Mundial do Comércio

Ottawa submeteu documento de 32 páginas a acusar Washington de violar as regras do comércio internacional, citando práticas de dumping e outras violações cometidas desde 1996

O governo do Canadá apresentou esta semana uma longa queixa na Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) contra os Estados Unidos na qual acusa o país de estar há décadas a quebrar as regras de comércio internacional. Entre outras coisas, Ottawa questiona as formas como os EUA têm investigado produtos para subsidiárias e vendas abaixo do preço de mercado. Washington já reagiu, falando em acusações "infundadas".

A queixa formal, apresentada num documento de 32 páginas, surge num momento em que os dois países estão envolvidos numa série de disputas relacionadas com a venda de laticínios, madeira serrada e aviões, e a tentar renegociar o NAFTA, o tratado de livre comércio da América do Norte (a Reuters noticiou ontem que o Canadá está cada vez mais convencido de que Trump vai abandonar esse acordo, implementado em 1994).

Segundo Eric Miller, presidente do Grupo Estratégico Potomac Rideau, que faz consultoria sobre questões de trocas comerciais na América do Norte, diz que a abrangência desta queixa "não tem precedentes" na história da organização mundial. "É global, abrange vários anos [há queixas que remontam a 1996], é sistemática e portanto é certamente algo que, no que toca aos casos da OMC, está fora das normas em termos do seu alcance e da sua ambição."

A queixa tem como alvo primordial um processo comercial a que a administração proteccionista de Donald Trump recorre muitas vezes, aponta a BBC, e cita o facto de o Departamento de Comércio dos EUA ter aberto em 2017 mais de 80 investigações a práticas de dumping, uma prática comercial que consiste numa ou mais empresas venderem bens ou mercadorias a preços muito inferiores aos estipulados nos mercados em que fazem negócios.

O número de investigações no ano passado representa um aumento de 46% em comparação com 2016, investigações essas que são, na maioria das vezes, abertas na sequência de queixas de empresas privadas competidoras e que podem conduzir à subida das tarifas comerciais.

Em reação ao passo do Canadá, o representante norte-americano para as Trocas Comerciais, Robert Lightizer, acusou o país de estar a lançar um "ataque abrangente e imprudente contra o sistema de trocas dos EUA", garantindo que "as alegações do Canadá são infundadas e só podem levar à perda de confiança dos EUA no empenho do Canadá em alcançar um acordo mutuamente benéfico".

A petição foi apresentada por Ottawa à OMC a 20 de dezembro e partilhada com os restantes membros da organização na quarta-feira. Seguem-se 60 dias de "consultas" para tentar resolver a disputa de forma pacífica. Caso isso não aconteça, o assunto será ajudicado por um painel de especialistas da OMC.

Questionado sobre isto, o chefe do Departamento do Comércio dos EUA, Wilbur Ross, disse ter "toda a confiança" de que Washington vai vencer o processo por adjudicação. "Estes casos [que estão na base da queixa] foram conduzidos de forma aberta e transparente de acordo com as leis, regulações e práticas administrativas aplicáveis para garantir uma revisão total e justa dos factos."

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Nações Unidas dizem que palavras de Trump são "racistas"

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How to Build a Wall and Lose an Empire
The world according to Donald Trump

As 2017 ended with billionaires toasting their tax cuts and energy executives cheering their unfettered access to federal lands as well as coastal waters, there was one sector of the American elite that did not share in the champagne celebration. Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts.

Across the political spectrum, many of them felt a deep foreboding for the country’s future under the leadership of Pres. Donald Trump.

In a year-end jeremiad, for instance, conservative CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria blasted the “Trump administration’s foolish and self-defeating decision to abdicate the United States’ global influence — something that has taken more than 70 years to build.”

The great “global story of our times,” he continued, is that “the creator, upholder and enforcer of the existing international system is withdrawing into self-centered isolation,” opening a power vacuum that will be filled by illiberal powers like China, Russia and Turkey.”

The editors of The New York Timesremarked ruefully that the president’s “boastfulness and belligerence and tendency to self-aggrandizement are not only costing America worldwide support, but also isolating it.”

Discarding the polite bipartisanship of Washington’s top diplomats, Pres. Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, ripped Trump for dumping “principled leadership — the foundation of American foreign policy since World War II” — for an “America first” stance that will only “embolden rivals and weaken ourselves.”

Yet no matter how sharp or sweeping, such criticism can’t begin to take in the full scope of the damage the Trump White House is inflicting on the system of global power Washington built and carefully maintained over those 70 years.

Indeed, American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they no longer remember how they got there. Few among Washington’s foreign policy elite seem to fully grasp the complex system that made U.S. global power what it now is, particularly its all-important geopolitical foundations.

As Trump travels the globe, tweeting and trashing away, he’s inadvertently showing us the essential structure of that power, the same way a devastating wildfire leaves the steel beams of a ruined building standing starkly above the smoking rubble.

The architecture of the world order that Washington built after World War II was not only formidable but, as Trump is teaching us almost daily, surprisingly fragile. At its core, that global system rested upon a delicate duality. An idealistic community of sovereign nations equal under the rule of international law joined tensely, even tenuously, to an American imperium grounded in the realpolitik of its military and economic power. In concrete terms, think of this duality as the State Department versus the Pentagon.

At the end of World War II, the United States invested its prestige in forming an international community that would promote peace and shared prosperity through permanent institutions, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization.

To govern such a world order through the rule of law, Washington also helped establish the International Court of Justice at The Hague and would later promote both human rights and women’s rights.

On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus — military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine — to grimly advance its own global dominion. At its core was an unmatched military that circled the globe, the most formidable nuclear arsenal on the planet, massive air and naval forces and an unparalleled array of client armies.

In addition, to maintain its military superiority, the Pentagon massively promoted scientific research, producing incessant innovation that would lead, among so many other things, to the world’s first system of global telecommunications satellites, which effectively added space to its apparatus for exercising global power.

Complementing all this steel was the salve of an active worldwide diplomatic corps, working to promote close bilateral ties with allies like Australia and Britain and multilateral alliances like NATO, SEATO and the Organization of American States.  In the process, it distributed economic aid to nations new and old.

Protected by such global hegemony and helped by multilateral trade pacts hammered out in Washington, America’s multinational corporations competed profitably in international markets throughout the Cold War.

Adding another dimension to its global power was a clandestine fourth tier that involved global surveillance by the National Security Agency and covert operations on five continents by the Central Intelligence Agency. In this way, with remarkable regularity and across vast expanses of the globe, Washington manipulated elections and promoted coups to insure that whoever led a country on our side of the Iron Curtain would remain part of a reliable set of subordinate elites, friendly to and subservient to the United States.

In ways that to this day few observers fully appreciate, this massive apparatus of global power also rested on geopolitical foundations of extraordinary strength. As Oxford historian John Darwin explained in his sweeping history of Eurasian empires over the past 600 years, Washington achieved its “colossal imperium … on an unprecedented scale” by becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia” through its military bases and mutual security pacts.

While Washington defended its European axial point through NATO, its position in the east was secured by four mutual defense pacts running down the Pacific littoral from Japan and South Korea through The Philippines to Australia. All of this was, in turn, tied together by successive arcs of steel that ringed the vast Eurasian continent — strategic bombers, ballistic missiles, and massive naval fleets in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Pacific. In the latest addition to this apparatus, the United States has built a string of 60 drone bases around the Eurasian landmass from Sicily to Guam.

The dynamics of decline

In the decade before Trump entered the Oval Office, there were already signs that this awesome apparatus was on a long-term trajectory of decline, even if the key figures in a Washington shrouded in imperial hubris preferred to ignore that reality. Not only has the new president’s maladroit diplomacy accelerated this trend, but it has illuminated it in striking ways.

Over the past half-century, the American share of the global economy has, for instance, fallen from 40 percent in 1960 to 22 percent in 2014 to just 15 percent in 2017, as measured by the realistic index of purchasing power parity. Many experts now agree that China will surpass the United States, in absolute terms, as the world’s number-one economy within a decade.

As its global economic dominance fades, its clandestine instruments of power have been visibly weakening as well. The NSA’s worldwide surveillance of a remarkable array of foreign leaders, as well as millions of the inhabitants of their countries, was once a relatively cost-effective instrument for the exercise of global power.

Thanks in part to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the agency’s snooping and the anger of targeted allies, the political costs have risen sharply. Similarly, during the Cold War, the CIA manipulated dozens of major elections worldwide. Now the situation has been reversed with Russia using its sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities to interfere in the 2016 American presidential campaign — a clear sign of Washington’s waning global power.

Most striking of all, Washington now faces the first sustained challenge to its geopolitical position in Eurasia. By opting to begin constructing a “new silk road,” a trillion-dollar infrastructure of railroads and oil pipelines across that vast continent, and preparing to build naval bases in the Arabian and South China seas, Beijing is mounting a sustained campaign to undercut Washington’s long dominance over Eurasia.

During just 12 months in office, Trump has accelerated this decline by damaging almost all the key components in the intricate architecture of American global power.

If all great empires require skilled leadership at their epicenter to maintain what is always a fragile global equilibrium, then the Trump administration has failed spectacularly. As the State Department is eviscerated and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discredited, Trump has — uniquely for an American president — taken sole control of foreign policy, with the generals he appointed to key civilian posts in tow.

How, then, do those who have been in close contact with him in this period assess his intellectual ability to adapt to such a daunting role?

Although since his election campaign Trump has repeatedly bragged about his excellent education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as a qualification for office, he started there in the late 1960s thinking he already knew everything about business, prompting his marketing professor, who taught for more than 30 years, to brand him “the dumbest God-damn student I ever had.”

That brash unwillingness to learn carried into the presidential campaign. As political consultant Sam Nunberg, sent to tutor the candidate on the Constitution, reported, “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before … his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

As Michael Wolff has recounted in his bestselling new book on the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, at the close of a phone conversation with the president-elect about the complexities of the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hung up and said, “What a fucking idiot.”

And in July 2017, as no one is likely to forget, after a top-secret Pentagon briefing for the White House principals on worldwide military operations, Tillerson seconded that view by privately labeling the president a “fucking moron.”

“It’s worse than you can imagine — an idiot surrounded by clowns,” one White House aide wrote in an email, according to Wolff. “Trump won’t read anything; not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh claimed that dealing with the president was “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

Those qualities of mind are amply evident in the administration’s recent National Security Strategy report, a vacuous document that wavers between the misguided and the delusional. “When I came into office,” Trump (or at least whoever was impersonating him) writes darkly in a personal preface, “rogue regimes were developing nuclear weapons … to threaten the entire planet. Radical Islamist terror groups were flourishing … Rival powers were aggressively undermining American interests around the globe … Unfair burden-sharing with our allies and inadequate investment in our own defense had invited danger.”

In just 12 short months, however, the president — so “his” preface indicates — had singlehandedly saved the country from almost certain destruction. “We are rallying the world against the rogue regime in North Korea and … the dictatorship in Iran, which those determined to pursue a flawed nuclear deal had neglected,” that preface continues in a typically Trumpian celebration of self.

“We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East … to help drive out terrorists and extremists … America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances … We are making historic investments in the United States military.”

Reflecting his administration’s well-documented difficulties with the truth, almost every one of those statements is either inaccurate, incomplete or irrelevant. Setting aside such details, the document itself reflects the way the president and his generals have abandoned decades of confident leadership of the international community and are now trying to retreat from “an extraordinarily dangerous world” into a veritable Fortress America behind concrete walls and tariff barriers — in some eerie way conceptually reminiscent of the Atlantic Wall of beachfront bunkers Hitler’s Third Reich constructed for its failed Fortress Europe.

But beyond such an obviously myopic foreign policy agenda, there are vast areas, largely overlooked in Trump’s strategy, that remain critical for the overall maintenance of American global power.

All you have to do is note headlines in the daily media over the past year to grasp that Washington’s world dominion is crumbling, thanks to the sorts of cascading setbacks that often accompany imperial decline. Consider the first seven days of December 2017, when The New York Times reported that nation after nation was pulling away from Washington.

First, there was Egypt, a country which had received $70 billion in U.S. aid over the previous 40 years and was now opening its military bases to Russian jet fighters. Then, despite Obama’s assiduous courtship of the country, Myanmar was evidently moving ever closer to Beijing. Meanwhile, Australia, America’s stalwart ally for the last 100 years, was reported to be adapting its diplomacy, however reluctantly, to accommodate China’s increasingly dominant power in Asia.

And finally, there was the foreign minister of Germany, that American bastion in Europe since 1945, pointing oh-so-publicly to a widening divide with Washington on key policy issues and insisting that clashes will be inevitable and relations “will never be the same.”

And that’s just to scratch the surface of one week’s news without even touching on the kinds of ruptures with allies regularly being ignited or emphasized by the president’s daily tweets. Just three examples from many will do. Pres. Peña Nieto’s cancelation of a state visit after a tweet that Mexico had to pay for Trump’s prospective “big, fat, beautiful wall” on the border between the two countries.

Outrage from British leaders sparked by the president’s retweet of racist anti-Muslim videos posted on a Twitter account by the deputy leader of a neo-Nazi political group in that country, followed by his rebuke of British Prime Minister Theresa May for criticizing him over it. Or his New Year’s Day blast accusing Pakistan of “nothing but lies & deceit” as a prelude to cutting off U.S. aid to that country.

Considering all the diplomatic damage, you could say that Trump is tweeting while Rome burns.

Since there are only 40 to 50 nations with enough wealth to play even a regional, much less a global role on this planet of ours, alienating or losing allies at such a rate could soon leave Washington largely friendless — something Trump found out in December 2017 when he defied numerous U.N. resolutions by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The White House soon got a 14-to-one reprimand from the Security Council, with close allies such as the Germans and the French voting against Washington. This came after U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley had ominously warned that “the U.S. will be taking names” to punish countries that dared vote against it and Trump had threatened to cut aid to those that did. The General Assembly promptly voted 128 to nine, with 35 abstentions, to condemn the recognition — eloquent testimony to Washington’s waning international influence.

Next, let’s consider the “historic investments” in a central pillar in the architecture of American global power, the U.S. military, mentioned in Trump’s National Security Strategy. Don’t be distracted by the proposed whopping 10-percent increase in the Pentagon budget to fund new aircraft and warships, much of which will go directly into the pockets of giant defense contractors.

Focus instead on what once would have been inconceivable in Washington: that the proposed Trump budget would slash funding for basic research in strategic areas like “artificial intelligence” likely to become critical for automated weapons systems within a decade.

In effect, the president and his team, distracted by visions of shimmering ships and shiny planes are ready to ditch the basics of global dominion. The relentless scientific research that has long been the cutting edge of U.S. military supremacy. And by expanding the Pentagon while slashing the State Department, Trump is also destabilizing that delicate duality of U.S. power by skewing foreign policy ever more toward costly military solutions.

Starting on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump has also hammered away at another pillar of American power, attacking the system of global commerce and multilateral trade pacts that have long advantaged the country’s transnational corporations.

Not only did he cancel the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which promised to direct 40 percent of world trade away from China and toward the United States, but he’s threatened to void the free-trade pact with South Korea and has been so insistent on recrafting NAFTA to serve his “America first” agenda that ongoing negotiations may well fail.

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Continuação:

The crumbling U.S. geopolitical position

As serious as all that might be, Trump revealed the deepest damage he was capable of doing to the geopolitical foundations of the country’s global power in two key moments on his trips to Europe and Asia last year. In both places, he signaled his willingness to deliver hammer blows to Washington’s position at those strategic axial ends of Eurasia.

During a visit to NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels in May, he chastised European allies, whose leaders reportedly listened “stone-faced,” for failing to pay their “fair share” of the military costs of the alliance and, while he was at it, refused to reaffirm NATO’s core principle of collective defense.

Despite later attempts to ameliorate the damage, that sent shudders across Europe and for good reason. It signaled the end of more than three-quarters of a century of unchallenged, unquestioned American supremacy there.

Then, at an Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Vietnam in November, the president launched “a tirade” against multilateral trade agreements and insisted that he would always “put America first.” It was as if, in an Asia in which China was rising fast, he were again announcing that Washington’s post-World War II supremacy was an artifact of history.

Appropriately enough, at that same meeting, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing the TPP agreement he had so symbolically rejected — and did so without the United States. “The U.S. has lost its leadership role,” commented Jayant Menon, an economist at the Asian Development Bank. “And China is quickly replacing it.”

Under Trump, in fact, Washington’s close relations with three key Pacific allies continue to weaken in visible ways. During a courtesy phone call upon taking office, Trump gratuitously insulted Australia’s prime minister, an act that only highlighted that country’s mounting alienation from the U.S. and a growing inclination to shift its primary strategic alliance toward China.

In recent polls when asked what country they preferred as a primary ally, 43 percent of all Australians chose China — a once-unimaginable transformation that Trump’s version of diplomacy is only reinforcing.

In The Philippines, the inauguration of President Rodrigo Duterte in June 2016 brought a sudden shift in the country’s foreign policy, ending Manila’s opposition to Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea. Despite an aggressive courtship by Trump and a certain temperamental affinity between the two leaders, Duterte has continued to scale down the joint military maneuvers with the United States that were an annual event for his country and has refused to reconsider his decisive tilt toward Beijing.

That realignment was already evident in a leaked transcript of an April phone call between the two presidents in which Duterte insisted that the resolution of the North Korea nuclear issue should rest solely with China.

It is, however, on the Korean peninsula that Trump’s limitations as a global leader have been most evident. In two uncoordinated, ill-informed initiatives — denigrating the Korean War-era U.S. alliance with South Korea and demanding total nuclear disarmament by the North — Trump fostered a diplomatic dynamic that has allowed Beijing, Pyongyang and even Seoul to outmaneuver Washington.

During his presidential campaign and first months in office, Trump repeatedly insulted South Korea, demeaning its culture and demanding a billion dollars for installing an American missile defense system. No one should then have been surprised when Moon Jae-in won that country’s presidency last year on a “say no” to America platform and on promises to reopen direct negotiations with the North Korea of Kim Jong Un.

Then, during a state visit to Washington last June, the new South Korean leader was blindsided when Trump called the free-trade agreement between their two countries “not fair to the American worker” and blasted Moon’s proposal for negotiating with Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong Un oversaw 16 rocket tests in 2017 that left his country with missiles that could potentially deliver a nuclear weapon to Honolulu, Seattle or even by year’s end New York and Washington, while testing its first hydrogen bomb.

Convinced that North Korea “seeks the capability to kill millions of Americans,” Trump became obsessed with curtailing Pyongyang’s nuclear program by any means, even threatening last August to unleash on that country “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Within days, however, then-White House strategist Steve Bannon exposed the empty bluster of all of this by telling the press, “There’s no military solution until somebody solves the part of the equation that … 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons.”

So the threats failed and Trump flailed, repeatedly trash-tweeting Kim Jong-un as “little Rocket Man” and bragging that his own “nuclear button” is “much bigger” than the North Korean leader’s. These 12 months of bizarre, destabilizing presidential twists and tweets, almost without precedent in the annals of modern diplomacy, have pushed Seoul toward direct talks with Pyongyang — excluding Washington and weakening what had been a rock-solid alliance.

In the war of nerves with North Korea over its missile tests, Trump’s strategy of triangulation with China — that is, Washington nudges Beijing, Beijing shoves Pyongyang — has already inflicted a major, unrecognized defeat on American power in the Pacific.

For the last six months, to encourage Beijing to pressure Pyongyang, the White House has suspended the “freedom of navigation” patrols that challenge Beijing’s spurious claims to territorial control over the South China Sea, effectively conceding this strategic waterway to China.

In a deft bit of dissimulation, Beijing has made a show of cooperation with Washington by expressing “grave concerns” over Pyongyang’s missile tests and imposing nominal sanctions, while playing a longer, smarter strategic hand. In the process, it has been working to curtail joint American-South Korean military maneuvers and neutralize the U.S. Navy in what China considers its home waters.

In this diplomatic edition of The Art of the Deal, Beijing is trumping Washington.

Taking down the empire

Quite understandably, many Americans have focused on the damage Trump’s first months in office have done domestically, from opening pristine wilderness areas and offshore waters to oil and natural gas drilling to threatening access to medical care, skewing the progressive tax code to favor the rich, cancelling net neutrality and voiding environmental protections of every sort.

Most if not all of these regressive policies can, however, be repaired or reversed if the Democrats ever take control of Congress and the White House.

Trump’s strikingly inept version of one-man diplomacy in the context of America’s ongoing global decline is an altogether different matter. World leadership lost is never readily recovered, particularly when rival powers are prepared to fill the void.

As Trump undercuts the U.S. strategic position at the axial ends of Eurasia, China is pressing relentlessly to displace the United States and dominate that vast continent with what New York Times correspondent Edward Wong calls “a blunt counterpoint … synonymous with brute strength, bribery and browbeating.”

In just one extraordinary year, Trump has destabilized the delicate duality that has long been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy. Favoring war over diplomacy, the Pentagon over the State Department and narrow national interest over international leadership. But in a globalizing world interconnected by trade, the Internet and the rapid proliferation of nuclear-armed missiles, walls won’t work. There can be no Fortress America.

Alfred McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the just-published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.

https://warisboring.com/49333-2/

[Viajante]

Pelo menos podemos ficar tranquilos que o Trump não está maluquinho, passou no teste cognitivo com distinção, com uma pontuação de 30 em 30 possíveis! Quem será o conselheiro que lhe fez o teste!?

https://www.publico.pt/2018/01/17/mundo/noticia/trump-esta-de-excelente-saude-e-passou-num-teste-cognitivo-de-dez-minutos-1799684/amp

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Trump quer um desfile nos EUA igual ao que viu em Paris

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"Tiroteios em escolas tornaram-se parte do quotidiano"

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Treze russos acusados de influenciar eleições dos EUA em 2016

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Protesto na Flórida pede mais controlo na venda de armas

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Manifestações contra o uso de armas nos EUA continuam

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Trump quer professores armados

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Professores contra ideia das armas de Donald Trump

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Trump diz que teria agido mesmo desarmado na Florida

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Professores contra ideia das armas de Donald Trump

How Texas is a model for Trump's gun-toting teachers
The state created a program to intensively train and arm 'school marshals.' Its creator thinks it could well be the inspiration for the president's endorsement of arming educators.

By BENJAMIN WERMUND

President Donald Trump’s vision of a force of armed teachers, “highly trained” and ready to stop school shooters, already exists — in Texas.

State lawmakers have created a program to train and arm “school marshals” — teachers, principals, coaches, custodians and others ready to defend a school. And the program’s creator thinks it could well be the inspiration for Trump’s endorsement of armed teachers, following the murder of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.


“I was watching the press conference ... and realized quickly he was talking about our bill, and had described in exquisite detail what the bill does, even going so far as to use our talking points,” state Rep. Jason Villalba, a Dallas Republican, told POLITICO. “It looks like the president of the United States is looking to Texas as a model for the nation.”

Villalba said that he texted Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who, as Texas governor, signed the bill that created the school marshal program, and “congratulated him.” Perry did not respond.

“I know he’s got the president’s ear. In Texas when we’ve got a good idea, we share it,” Villalba said. “We’re excited about expanding what we believe to be the model for the nation.” Perry aides did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Under the program, schools in districts that participate can designate marshals who undergo background checks and active-shooter training. “This is not some insignificant, go-to-a-weekend class and all of a sudden you’re Rambo,” Villalba said. “This is a serious requirement.”

It's not clear how many marshals there are because it is a secret force. The few districts that are thought to have authorized them typically won’t even say they have done so — so gunmen can’t target them. Students don’t know if their teacher is a marshal. Neither do parents. It’s based on the theory of secret flight marshals — which Trump has also referenced.

But its backers insist it’s been effective, pointing to the lack of active shooter assaults at schools in the state, though there's no research or concrete evidence to make the case.

Supporters concede it wouldn’t be right in school districts where parents and teachers object to the concept, which likely would be many.

Texas already was one of a handful of states that allow districts to choose whether to let teachers carry guns at school, even without the intensive training that comes along with the school marshals program. Lawmakers in at least a half-dozen other states — including Florida — are considering legislation this year that would ease restrictions on firearms on campus.

"When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones it just puts our students in more danger, far more danger — well-trained, gun-adept teachers and coaches should be able to carry concealed firearms," Trump said Friday. He added that if concealed carry had been allowed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the gunman entered last week, “a teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened."

After the Sandy Hook mass school shooting in 2012, Villalba, who had children in kindergarten at the time, had feelings similar to Trump’s: If people had been armed in that school, maybe they could have stopped it sooner.

“The problem is, most school districts and parents and trustees are not comfortable with that,” Villalba said. “We wanted something that would give parents some comfort.”

That led to the marshals program, signed into law in 2013. Schools can designate one marshal for every 400 students, or one per building in schools that don’t have that many students. Marshals go through a series of background checks and psychological evaluations and undergo the same active shooter training as police — an 80-hour program created by the same state agency that enforces standards for law enforcement. And they do that every two years.

The full process cost between $5,000 and $7,000 per marshal. Districts are allowed to offer marshals a stipend, if they choose. The state initially created a small grant program to help districts that took part cover training costs or stipends, but the money ran out and lawmakers have not reauthorized the funding.

The marshals are technically a new class of police officer who are deputized only in an active shooting situation. They are not legally authorized to break up fights, for instance. If students are around, they have to keep their guns in a lockbox. They can only use frangible ammo, which breaks apart upon impact — theoretically stopping bullets from blasting into other classrooms.

Because of the anonymity required, there aren’t solid numbers on the size of the program. Villalba said there are roughly 100 marshals in the state.

Some estimates put the number of districts with marshals at about 20. Villalba said he believes it’s more districts than that, but fewer than 50. Most of them are smaller, more rural districts that don’t have their own police forces, and in some cases are far from law enforcement. The state has nearly 1,300 districts.

In addition, Texas districts have long been allowed to let school staff carry guns, with or without the marshal training.

The tiny Harrold school district, near the Oklahoma border, decided to let some staff carry more than a decade ago, after the Virginia Tech shooting.

These staffers aren’t marshals, so they don’t follow the same rules. But David Thweatt, the superintendent, said they’re also trained by local law enforcement. The staff who carry guns (Thweatt wouldn’t say how many) have to keep their guns on them, though hidden, at all times.

The district is in a fairly large county, geographically, and Thweatt says his schools are all on one campus, which is about 30 minutes from first responders. He thought arming his staff was necessary.

Thweatt said he picks the staff members who he thinks would be best for the job and the school board approves them.

“The problem we hear from opponents to our plan — they all picture that absent-minded teacher they had in high school who couldn’t find her pens on a regular basis,” he said. “We aren’t doing that. We have personalities in mind. It would be people who are good in a crisis, would run in direction of gunfire, are willing to protect others.”

The district drew a lot of attention when it created the program and Thweatt says he “would be hard-pressed to say I have not spoken to people over the last 11 years in every state.”

But many doubt how effective arming teachers would be. Teachers’ unions have said educators have too much on their plate already.

A school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, meanwhile, resigned Thursday after it was revealed he stayed outside of the school as the shooting unfolded inside. Trump on Friday told reporters the officer "trained his whole life but when it came time to do something he didn't have the courage."

None of the Texas officials POLITICO interviewed were aware of teachers or other school staff having to respond to an active shooter situation. Thweatt said “the only thing we have are wild hogs that on occasion we have to discourage.”

But proponents of the Texas programs argue the lack of shootings is evidence they’re working — that they’re deterring would-be shooters.

They also concede it might not be right for all schools.

“It’s just based on the needs of our community, the wishes of our school board. I think if there’s not parental support for it, it’s not going to be effective,” said Kevin Dyes, the superintendent of the Holliday school district, about an hour east of Harrold, which has a similar program.

Their program works, in part, because the town is small enough for law enforcement to know virtually everyone in the school, Dyes said. That would cut down on confusion for police responding to a school shooting, he argued.

But also, he pointed out: “We know if there ever is a situation when law enforcement are coming, we’re somewhat at risk. If one of our employees is running around with a gun and law enforcement has been told there’s someone with a gun, they’re looking for someone with a gun.”

Dyes said he carries a gun, but only at work. He sees it as part of his job, and he locks the gun away when he goes home.

“There’s a lot of people with a lot of guns out there and there are a lot of people out there who are unstable,” Dyes said. “We don’t believe everybody ought to be toting guns or anything, but let’s be practical. If somebody harbors ill will and comes on our campus, how are we going to stop that person?”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/24/armed-teachers-texas-trump-362397

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Diretora de comunicação de Donald Trump demitiu-se