Donald Trump is accustomed to addressing diehard supporters at rallies. His press conferences are rare and tightly controlled. So the open derision of his fellow leaders at the UN general assembly clearly came as a surprise.

He insisted he was “OK” with the mirthful reaction to his claims of historic achievements, but he was clearly not OK. Trump is said never to forgive or forget those who laugh at him, so this second outing at the UN podium is unlikely to end well for his administration’s already ambivalent relations with the global body.

Trump made an entrance – nearly half an hour later than his allotted time – determined to trash everything the UN stands for. The president explicitly rejected “the ideology of globalism” in globalism’s high temple and proposed in its place the “doctrine of patriotism”.

While most leaders have used their time on the UN stage to list the agreements they have made, the protocols agreed and treaties signed, Trump clearly delighted in telling the world how many such pieces of paper he had ripped up.

The lead writer of the speech was reportedly Stephen Miller, now the primary bridge between the White House and the American far right. It showed. The address was a manifesto for nativism.

Any remaining pretense of altruism was stripped away from this vision of US foreign policy, and in its place was a strong tinge of resentment and self-pity.

The European Union, Iran, China and Russia have set out a plan to sidestep unilateral US sanctions designed to cripple the Iranian economy and force the Iranians to renegotiate the nuclear deal signed in 2015.

European diplomats hope the proposed measure – known as a special purpose vehicle (SPV) – will help persuade an increasingly reluctant Iran to stay inside the deal in the hope of rescuing its economy.

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York, Federica Mogherini, the EU external affairs chief, said the SPV was designed to facilitate payments related to Iran’s exports – including oil – and imports, so long as the firms involved were carrying out legitimate business under EU law.

The aim is to make the SPV available not just to EU firms but to others, she added.

In his address to the United Nations general assembly, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, stressed Tehran’s continued commitment to the deal and accused the US of pressurising other countries into violating the nuclear agreement.

“Confronting multilateralism is not a sign of strength,” he said. “Rather, it is a symptom of the weakness of intellect. It betrays an inability in understanding a complex and interconnected world.”

....The transformation of Wisconsin from the birthplace of public-sector unionization to a conservative stronghold with a battered labor movement is remarkable on its own terms. But even more remarkable is how the same story is playing out across dozens of other states. To be sure, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has not enjoyed the same success in every state as in Wisconsin and has endured some high-profile losses, too – most notably the re-election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2012.

But all told the Koch network has racked up important victories across many policy areas, like stymieing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (and especially the expansion of Medicaid to poor uninsured adults) in states like Missouri and Tennessee, rolling back state efforts to address climate change (for instance, in Kansas and West Virginia), and passing massive tax cuts for wealthy individuals and companies (as in Kansas and Oklahoma).

Undoubtedly, however, AFP’s biggest accomplishment has been the passage of new anti-labor bills, like Act 10, that will permanently weaken unions and the left’s political power. “We fight these battles on taxes and regulations, but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees, so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles,” one top AFP staffer has explained about his group’s thinking.

With key anti-labor victories in states like Wisconsin, it makes sense why the Kochs are able to look past their squabbles with a unruly Trump presidency. Regardless of what happens in Washington, AFP and the Koch network has already succeeded in shifting the political terrain of Wisconsin – and the nation from the states on up.

New Yorkers crowded into historic Riverside Church on Monday evening where Anya Schiffrin of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs joined New York’s 14th Congressional District candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Columbia Business School Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who is Schiffrin’s spouse, to discuss the country’s political and economic trajectories.

The 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, recently sent shock waves through the Democratic Party when she snatched a primary victory from powerful incumbent Joe Crowley. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winner and author of several books, including The Price of Inequality, has been sharply critical of policies that exacerbate the divide between the rich and the rest.  

Ocasio-Cortez spoke of the frustration she had witnessed of working class Americans sliding into poverty. She criticized the Democratic Party for not being more responsive to the problem of economic inequality and observed that many “reluctant” Trump voters shared anger with her supporters over the country’s economic divide.

“There’s consensus that the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer,” she said. The candidate noted that the party and the people have been parting ways too often, observing, for example, that 70% of all Americans and 84% of Democrats currently support an improved and expanded Medicare for all.

“So why aren’t 84% of Democratic members of Congress cosponsoring this legislation right now?” asked Ocasio-Cortez. She also called upon the party to develop “a more comprehensive and intersectional argument for working people.”

Among the topics discussed were climate change and fate of Puerto Rico, which suffered devastation from Hurricane Maria in 2017. The candidate blasted politicians and financiers whom she said were trying to drive Puerto Ricans away so that they could turn the island into a resort, adding that what was needed instead was a “new Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico” and a future-based program of 100% renewable energy. (See Martin Guzman: “Puerto Rico is Getting Squeezed).”

The issue of racism threaded many of the evening’s discussions. Ocasio-Cortez accused President Trump of opening racial wounds in order to distract from “runaway income inequality.” During an exchange on Mexico, the candidate said that Trump had opened “Pandora’s Box” of racial tension. When Stiglitz asked for her view of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), she did not mince words.

“We know that NAFTA really set up the slide of the Democratic Party for thirty years,” she said, faulting the policy for creating environmental imbalances and exacerbating economic inequality. “Gains of trade should be enjoyed by all workers who helped create those gains,” she insisted.

Both Stiglitz and Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that issues of race, the economy, and the environment were intertwined. The candidate cited Hurricane Katrina, which battered New Orleans in 2005, as “disaster capitalism at its finest.” She decried a situation in which a city was allowed to be ravaged by a storm, neglected in recovery, and its people left worse off than they were before. She criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for focusing on rebuilding what was there before the storm instead of looking for sustainable solutions and a “just transition” that focused on people’s needs and updating infrastructure.  

On racial and economic justice, Stiglitz added, “Martin Luther King put it very strongly that those two are really two sides of the same coin.”

Schiffrin observed that programs like Medicare for all and free college tuition would not be possible in a world in which companies refuse to pay taxes. Stiglitz added that the Republicans’ 2017 tax bill, when fully implemented, would raise taxes on the majority of people in the middle class “to finance a tax cut for the corporations and the billionaires.” He said that the same people who resisted a stimulus in 2009-10, citing fears of the deficit, were now fine with adding trillions to the deficit to finance a tax cut for the rich.

Ocasio-Cortez, calling the tax bill a “wealth transfer” from working people to the very rich, asked why it is that this type of transfer was “business as usual” when any wealth transfer in the reverse would be deemed inconceivable.

Stiglitz touched upon the problem of student debt, noting that it has ballooned to one-and-a-half trillion dollars. “What’s striking over the last five to ten years,” he said, “is that there has been almost no new lending. It’s mostly just compound interest” on the debt that had already accumulated. Ocasio-Cortez expressed outrage that “an entire generation was delaying the milestones of getting a house, getting married, or buying a car” and that student debt was having “a profound dragging effect on economic activity.”

Stiglitz emphasized that other countries with fewer resources were able to give young people greater access to education, noting such investment was a matter of choice. “It’s not that we can’t afford it,” he said. “We’ve been making some very bad choices which are putting into jeopardy our future economy and the wellbeing of large portions of our country.”

When asked about what she could do in Congress to address the problems discussed, Ocasio-Cortez observed that much depended on the outcome of the midterm elections and the future composition of the House and Senate. But solutions, she noted, had to come from the “mass mobilization of organizing.” Women in Congress, she noted, were not leading the MeToo movement, but rather acting as part of it in response to the mobilization and protesting of constituents. That why people needed to stay, as she put it, “loud and active.” ...

Chinese coal-fired power plants, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built and are threatening to “seriously undermine” global climate goals, researchers have warned.

Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing.

The projects are part of an “approaching tsunami” of coal plants that would boost China’s existing coal capacity by 25%, according to the research group Coalswarm.