Chris Hedges's Blog, page 111

Trump’s Syria Oil Mission Raises Legal Questions

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has approved an expanded military mission to secure an expanse of oil fields across eastern Syria, raising a number of difficult legal questions about whether U.S. troops can launch strikes against Syrian, Russian or other forces if they threaten the oil, U.S. officials said.

The decision, coming after a meeting Friday between Trump and his defense leaders, locks hundreds of U.S. troops into a more complicated presence in Syria, despite the president’s vow to get America out of the war. Under the new plan, troops would protect a large swath of land controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters that stretches nearly 90 miles (150 kilometers) from Deir el-Zour to al-Hassakeh, but its exact size is still being determined.

Officials said many details still have to be worked out. But, Trump’s decision hands commanders a victory in their push to remain in the country to prevent any resurgence of the Islamic State group, counter Iran and partner with the Kurds, who battled IS alongside the U.S. for several years. But it also forces lawyers in the Pentagon to craft orders for the troops that could see them firing on Syrian government or Russian fighters trying to take back oil facilities that sit within the sovereign nation of Syria.

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The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump’s order also slams the door on any suggestion that the bulk of the more than 1,200 U.S. troops that have been in Syria will be coming home any time soon, as he has repeatedly promised.

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, called the mission misguided.

“Risking the lives of our troops to guard oil rigs in eastern Syria is not only reckless, it’s not legally authorized,” Kaine told The Associated Press. “President Trump betrayed our Kurdish allies that have fought alongside American soldiers in the fight to secure a future without ISIS – and instead moved our troops to protect oil rigs.”

The Pentagon will not say how many forces will remain in Syria for the new mission. Other officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations, suggest the total number could be at least 800 troops, including the roughly 200 who are at the al-Tanf garrison in southern Syria.

According to officials, lawyers are trying to hammer out details of the military order, which would make clear how far troops will be able to go to keep the oil in the Kurds’ control.

The legal authority for U.S. troops going into Syria to fight Islamic State militants was based on the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force that said U.S. troops can use all necessary force against those involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on America and to prevent any future acts of international terrorism. So, legal experts say the U.S. may have grounds to use the AUMF to prevent the oil from falling into IS hands.

But protecting the oil from Syria government forces or other entities may be harder to defend.

“The U.S. is not at war with either Syria or Turkey, making the use of the AUMF a stretch,” said Stephen Vladeck, a national security law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

He added that while the U.S. Constitution bestows significant war powers on the president, those are generally meant to be about self-defense and for the collective defense of the country. Arguing that securing the oil is necessary for national security “just strikes me as a bridge too far,” he said.

Members of Congress, including Kaine, have also raised objections to the Trump administration using the AUMF as a basis for war against a sovereign government. That type of action, he and others have argued, required approval by Congress.

U.S. officials said the order approved by Trump does not include any mandate for the U.S. to take Syria’s oil. Trump has said multiple times that the U.S. is “keeping the oil.” But the White House and the Pentagon have so far been unable to explain what he means by that. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday he “interprets” Trump’s remarks to mean the military should deny IS access to the oil fields.

There were already a couple hundred U.S. troops around Deir el-Zour, and additional forces with armored vehicles, including Bradley infantry carriers, have begun moving in. Officials have said the total force there could grow to about 500.

Trump, Esper and other defense leaders have said it’s important to protect the oil so that Islamic State militants can’t regain control of the area and use the revenues to finance their operations.

Currently, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces have controlled the oil, supported by a small contingent of U.S. troops. A quiet arrangement has existed between the Kurds and the Syrian government, whereby Damascus buys the surplus through middlemen in a smuggling operation that has continued despite political differences. The Kurdish-led administration sells crude oil to private refiners, who use primitive homemade refineries to process fuel and diesel and sell it back to the administration.

It’s unclear how long that agreement may continue. And if some dispute arises, U.S. troops must have clear guidance on how to respond.

U.S. forces can use military force to protect themselves. But the oil fields are expansive, and troops can’t be everywhere. If, for example, Syrian government troops try to retake a portion of an oil facility and U.S. troops are not nearby, it’s unclear now how much force they could use if they aren’t acting in self-defense.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Robert Burns contributed to this report.

How Warren’s ‘Medicare for All’ Plan Hurts the Cause

Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren agree that the American health care system causes harm to the people it claims to help. They also believe it needs massive change, and that a “Medicare for All” plan is the best avenue to achieve that. Their sharpest disagreements are over how to pay for it, however, and Warren’s funding scheme is getting major criticism from the left.

The Massachusetts senator is adamant that her plan would not impose any taxes on the middle class. According to Tim Higginbotham, a Democratic Socialists of America organizer writing in Jacobin, her plan is “an impossible premise.”

Higginbotham believes Warren’s no-middle-class-taxes claim is dishonest: First, because any Medicare for All plan “will require some form of taxation, direct or indirect, on the broad ‘middle class.’” Second, because her premise ignores the possibility that even with a modest tax increase, Medicare for All will still provide overall health care cost savings in the long run for low- and middle-income families.

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Sanders told ABC News that his plan “would raise taxes on the middle class, but [also] would substantially reduce the cost of health care for the average American.” That is because, he explains, “We’re doing away with all premiums, copayments, deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. So for the overwhelming majority of the American people, they would save, and save substantially, on their health care bills.”

As Vox’s Ezra Klein writes, Warren is operating under the impression “that … a middle-class hike is politically lethal,” while Sanders “has long believed that Americans will support European-style taxes in return for a European-style social welfare state.”

Warren plans to tax employers, which seems like a plus until you consider the ways employers could try to get out of it. In Warren’s vision, a company would pay a head tax—a designated amount in taxes per employee—regardless of the employee’s salary. The tax wouldn’t apply to employees that classify their workers as independent contractors, or smaller businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Higginbotham goes deeper on the dangers of that approach:

Instead of taxing a certain percentage of an employee’s pay (a payroll tax), Warren’s head tax would charge employers a flat amount no matter the employee’s salary. Seeing as any employer-side tax ultimately comes out of workers’ potential earnings, this is a regressive approach that would disproportionately impact low- and middle-income workers.”

And not taxing employers who use independent contractors also could backfire in a big way—by giving employers an incentive to reclassify their workers away from full-time status and the ability to get benefits in the first place.

Matt Bruenig, president of People’s Policy Project, a progressive think tank, told Politico that Warren’s plan is “most regressive of all the possibilities,” adding that “[a]mong all the ways you can solve this piece of the puzzle, it’s the worst. … Even a payroll tax that’s a flat percentage instead of a flat amount would be more progressive, because if you make twice as much income, you pay twice as much into the system.”

Worse than the tax issue, according to Higginbotham, is “the lack of urgency” in Warren’s plan. “Warren argues that her plan for comprehensive immigration reform could free up $400 billion toward Medicare for All over ten years, while cutting the dangerous military slush fund will free up another $798 billion,” he explains,

Tying Medicare for All to these larger fights, coupled with her use of the word “eventually” in relation to the date by which Medicare for All would implemented, is a sign, to Higginbotham, that Warren is not ready to fight hard for the cause, unlike Sanders, his preferred candidate. According to Higginbotham, “[Sanders] takes every opportunity given to him to straightforwardly explain how Medicare for All will benefit Americans … while pointing his finger straight at those who have financial- and power-based interests in defeating his plan.”

9 U.S. Citizens Killed in Drug Cartel Ambush in Mexico

MEXICO CITY—Drug cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road, slaughtering at least six children and three women — all of them U.S. citizens living in northern Mexico — in a grisly attack that left one vehicle a burned-out, bullet-riddled hulk, authorities said Tuesday.

The dead included 8-month-old twins. Eight children were found alive after escaping from the vehicles and hiding in the brush, but at least five had bullet wounds or other injuries and were taken to Phoenix for treatment.

The attackers apparently killed one woman, Christina Langford Johnson, after she jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she wasn’t a threat, according to an account published by family members and corroborated by prosecutors and a relative in a telephone interview.

Around the ambush scene, which stretched for miles, investigators found over 200 shell casings, mostly from assault rifles.

The attack took place Monday in a remote, mountainous area in northern Mexico where the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in a turf war. The victims had set out to see relatives in Mexico; one woman was headed to the airport in Phoenix to meet her husband.

Mexican Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said the gunmen may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of rival gangs.

“There’s apparently a war right now,” a relative of the dead who did not want his name used for fear of reprisals said wearily. “It’s been going on for too long.”

While a drug-related violence has been raging for years in Mexico, cartel gunmen have become increasingly unconcerned about killing children as collateral damage. In August in Chihuahua state, gunmen fired 123 bullets at a man but also killed three girls, ages 4, 13 and 14.

The victims in Monday’s ambush lived in neighboring Sonora state, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of Douglas, Arizona, in the hamlet of La Mora, which was founded decades ago by an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A number of such American farming communities are clustered around the Chihuahua-Sonora border. Many members were born in Mexico and thus have dual citizenship. While some of the splinter groups were once polygamous, many no longer are.

All of the victims were apparently related to the extended LeBaron family in Chihuahua, whose members have run afoul of the drug traffickers over the years. Benjamin LeBaron, an anti-crime activist who founded neighborhood patrols against cartels, was killed in 2009.

In a tweet, President Donald Trump immediately offered to help Mexico “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.” But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rejected that approach, saying his predecessors waged war, “and it didn’t work.”

State prosecutors said Johnson, the woman who waved her arms, was found 15 yards (meters) away from her Suburban van, shot to death. Her 7-month-old daughter, Faith Marie Johnson, was discovered uninjured in her car seat.

Kendra Miller, a relative, wrote that the baby’s car seat “seemed to be put on the floor, by her mother to try and protect her. … She gave her life to try and save the rest.”

A short distance away, Dawna Ray Langford, 43, lay dead in the front seat of another Suburban, along with the bullet-riddled bodies of her sons, ages 11 and 2.

Some of the children who escaped had grisly wounds. One had been shot in the face, another in the foot. One girl suffered gunshot wounds to her back and foot.

Cowering in the brush, one boy hid the other children and then walked back to La Mora to get help. Another girl, who was initially listed as missing, walked off in another direction, despite her gunshot wounds, to get help.

A group of male relatives set out to try to rescue the youngsters but turned back when they heard gunfire ahead.

The relative who did not want his name used said in an interview that when they finally made it to the scene where the ambush started — about 11 miles (18 kilometers) from where the two other mothers were killed — they found a burned-out, shot-up Chevy Tahoe.

Inside, they saw the charred remains of Rhonita Miller, 30, her 10-year-old daughter, a son, 12, and 8-month-old twins. They were “burnt to a crisp,” the relative said.

The gunmen had riddled the vehicle with dozens of bullets and apparently hit the gas tank, causing it to explode. There was nothing the relatives could do but watch the still-smoldering vehicle.

“When we were there, the cartels from Sonora, there were probably 50 or 60 of them, armed to the teeth, about a mile on this side,” said the relative.

Trump tweeted that a “wonderful family” got “caught between two vicious drug cartels.”

He tweeted that the U.S. “stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively,” adding, “The great new President of Mexico has made this a big issue, but the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”

But Mexico’s president said: “The worst thing you can have is war.”

It was the second failure in recent weeks for López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” anti-crime strategy. Two weeks ago, Mexican forces seized a son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman but had to release him after cartel henchmen launched a furious counterattack in Culiacan, Sinaloa.

Prosecutors on Tuesday said a suspect was detained near Agua Prieta, but it was unclear whether the person had taken part in the ambush. The suspect had assault rifles and a .50-caliber sniper rifle and was holding two bound kidnap victims, authorities said.

The 2009 killing of Benjamin LeBaron marked a watershed in Mexico’s 2006-12 drug war. Gunmen tortured him in front of his family, then killed him and his brother-in-law.

But the 2009 killings — which sparked a further crackdown on cartels — also showed how much worse things have become: No children were killed back then.

The Trump Doctrine Demands a Democratic Response

I’ve been publishing anti-war material for more than five years now. Seeing as I only retired this past February, I did most of my dissenting while still on active duty, and much of it during the Obama years. During that time, the overwhelming majority of hate mail in my inbox—and sometimes my actual mailbox—almost always came from the political right. Then Trump was elected, occasionally said some modestly prudent things about ending endless war in the Middle East, and when I dared write approvingly about those words, my hate mail began to change. Now it invariably emerges from the mainstream “left,” my own ostensibly ideological compatriots.  (More on this phenomenon in my Nov. 6 column at antiwar.com). Now, despite spending almost all of my adult life in uniform, I’m labeled a “Putin apologist,” a “traitor,” an “asset” and a “useful idiot.”

It’s ironic; maddeningly so, in fact. A cursory glance at my body of work since January 2017 reveals a consistent propensity to challenge this president.  Nonetheless, I’ve felt of late a professional, and ethical, obligation to occasionally (if cautiously) cheer Trump’s more prudent critiques of the forever wars I once waged. My more thoughtful critics note that all that Trump-talk hasn’t been backed by much follow-through, and they ain’t wrong. As I’ve been long apt to point out, the distance between Trump’s anti-interventionist “rhetoric” and his actual actions in the greater Middle East remains, for now, wide enough to drive a semi-truck through.

Still, in the interest of answering my critics, I thought it time to try—wildly difficult as it may be—to tease out something resembling a Trump “doctrine” for the region.  As such, I hope to answer the vital question: what exactly is Trump up to in the Middle East? My tentative conclusion is, well, nothing new! The president’s sporadically anti-war language may be unique, but most of his policies adhere to the pre-9/11 formula of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Allow me to explain.

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As long as he eschews an illegal, ill-advised war with Iran, Trump does seem committed—eventually—to removing at least some U.S. soldiers from direct combat and winding down our efforts at nation-building in the Muslim world. After the first Persian Gulf War, Clinton (and to a lesser extent Bush) largely avoided these missions. Nonetheless, even if American troops weren’t doing much of the killing or dying, Uncle Sam remained a hegemonic presence from West Africa to Central Asia. Dotting the landscape with army bases and warships, inflicting untold suffering in the form of economic sanctions on the regimes Washington didn’t like and backing the worst internal and external crimes of its favored despots, the U.S. was still experienced as a neo-imperial force in the everyday lives of Muslim peoples.

Trump employs the same old policies but they are sprinkled with his uniquely, even refreshingly, direct pronouncements and unabashed worship of regional strongmen. He gleefully fawns over Egypt’s military dictator, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi—“a fantastic guy” who gunned down about 1,000 peaceful demonstrators in 2013, and runs a veritable police state. True, Sissi is secular and shares a common enemy in Islamist jihadis, but does he deserve to be the second-largest recipient of American military aid and the beneficiary of such hyperbolic praise?  In reality, such policies alienate the people on Cairo’s proverbial “Arab street” and catalyze anti-American sentiment.  Remember, there was a prominent Egyptian—Mohamed Atta—among the 9/11 hijackers. Al Qaeda’s current top dog, Ayman al-Zawahri, is also an Egyptian national.

In Israel/Palestine—to the extent it remains plausible to even use the term “Palestine”—Trump enthusiastically follows in the footsteps of his 1990s predecessors, backing every militarist Israeli encroachment and providing top cover against United Nations’ attempts to enforce (Israeli violations of) international law. Like Bush and Clinton, Trump ignores the plight of the millions of Palestinians living in an “open-air prison.” He’s gone steps further, however, in the following ways: Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, gave Israel the green-light to openly annex illegal West Bank settlements, recognized the 52-year (and similarly illegal) Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and dismissed the hundreds of peaceful protesters shot dead along the Gaza border as “all Hamas,” or “terrorists,” in a shocking resuscitation of far-right Israeli talking points.

In Syria, Trump rightfully, if clumsily, ended Obama’s foolish, all-risk, no-reward mission in northeast Syria. Problem is, he just as quickly reversed course and deployed an almost identical number of troops—including armored vehicles— to indefinitely “secure” Syria’s (relatively paltry) oil refineries in the area. One can’t help but marvel at Trump’s admission that the U.S. intends to “fight for the oil,” and that he’ll “perhaps, make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” Beyond the obvious immorality of risking American blood for oil, such actions constitute a clear violation of international law.

On that subject, Syrian strongman Bashar Assad seems to better grasp American foreign policy better than Trump himself, noting recently that the U.S. president is the “best type of foe” because he states his objectives plainly. The whole absurd, oil-snatching power play smacks of old-school extractive imperialism—and that won’t be lost on a suspicious, self-consciously post-colonial Arab populace. Oh, and it’s unclear Trump has an exit strategy for this venal new mission.

What’s more, Trump has sent at least three more troops to Saudi Arabia for each one he’s removed from Syria, for a military installment now in the thousands. What they’ll do there—assist in the execution of Saudi war crimes in Yemen or gear up for a disastrous new American war with Iran—remains unclear and illustratively unstated. What we do know is that Trump’s peculiar justification for the deployment, that the Saudi royals will foot “100%” of the bill, all but officially establishes the U.S. military as a mercenary force. Speaking of the war in Yemen—the world’s worst humanitarian crisis—when an asleep-at-the-wheel Congress finally got around to invoking the War Powers Act this year, passing a bill to cut off U.S. aid to the Saudi terror campaign, Trump subsequently vetoed the legislation. A hawkish, dysfunctional Congress lacked the votes to override the president, and so the war must go on.

If there is a Trump doctrine, then, it’s little more than a bombastic, in-your-face revival of Clintonism. Back Israel and assorted regional autocrats, abet those regime’s bad behavior, including the killing or starvation of countless brown folks, occasionally fling a few cruise or drone missiles at “terrorists” (at this, Trump has outpaced even the assassin-in-chief, Barack Obama), maintain ample U.S. military bases in the area (but out of rifle range), all while limiting the deaths of U.S. troops. Now I’m all for the latter, but the problem is two-fold: 1) Much evil is still done in our name, and, relatedly, 2) While most Americans remain oblivious to the mayhem their military wreaks abroad, the locals aren’t fooled. They see it, live it, suffer it every day.  Their anger will inevitably boomerang back and inflict damage on U.S. troops and/or America’s cities.

Remember, the Clinton Doctrine didn’t end so well last time around. In fact, his strategy of loyally backing Israel, maintaining military bases near the Saudi “Holy Cities,” and sanctioning-to-death a half million Iraqi civilians found their reflection in Osama bin Laden’s three justifications for declaring war on the United States. (That he put these in writing made him more specific and transparent than George W. Bush, who issued a notoriously vague war resolution that Congress obediently rubber-stamped while smoke still billowed from the crumbled Twin Towers.)

As muddled as Trump’s foreign policy may be, the Democratic Party and American people ought to pay attention and take it quite seriously. If Democrats run on a foreign policy that reflexively opposes all the good in Trump’s anti-war rhetoric and keeps U.S. soldiers in harm’s way in a series of aimless wars, well, they’re apt to blow another election and hand Trump a second term.

Intellectually honest Democrats with real character, and a more informed and active citizenry, should, in fact, praise what’s sensible in Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric. Then they ought to hold his feet to the fire and force him to follow through. If he fails, when he fails, they should offer a more genuinely anti-war agenda in 2020. Of course, that seems like pure fantasy in today’s alarmist environment in which anyone consistently anti-war or even mildly complimentary of Trump’s more prudent remarks is considered a Russian asset. Still, if the republic is to stand, we must continue to dream.

If, as I fear, Trump’s endgame is to pull U.S. troops out of direct combat but leave the infrastructure of our Middle Eastern hegemony in place, a new Bin Laden could strike us on American soil. There are many waiting in the wings, and they only need to get lucky once. Then Trump or perhaps an even more hawkish successor will feel obligated to respond. An unimaginative Pentagon will follow the old Bush II or Obama playbook, and George Orwell—perhaps the original prophet of forever war—will roll in his grave, futilely screaming through six feet of soil, I warned you!

————

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major and a regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The L.A. Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

 Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

‘Free Markets’ Will Be the End of the Middle Class

National industrial policy was once something you might read about in today’s equivalent of a friend’s Facebook post, as hard as that might sound to believe. It was in newspapers; it was on the radio. Taxi drivers had opinions about it. That all changed in the last 35 years, when the rise and fall of the stock market and a shallow conversation about unemployment rates took over. Industrial policy became an inside-baseball conversation, and to the extent that it was discussed, it was through the prism of whether it imperiled the golden gospel and great economic distraction of our time, “the free market.”

The decades of free-market propaganda we’ve been exposed to are basically an exercise in distracting the public from the meaningful choices that are now made behind closed doors. The two big political parties that outwardly represent symbolic issues like gun rights and school prayer spend the bulk of their time and political energy on complex industrial and regulatory questions.

But much like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, they’d better start considering the question of a national industrial policy before there’s no industry left to manage. Manufacturing is now at its smallest share of the U.S. economy in 72 years, reports Bloomberg. Multinational supply chains undermine the negotiating power of workers, thereby exacerbating inequality.

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Are there ways to bring back manufacturing, or should we just capitulate to a mindset that argues that these jobs are gone for good, that software retention is good enough, even as we shift what’s left of our manufacturing sector overseas to sweatshop economies? That seems short-sighted. After all, it’s pretty easy to steal IP; it’s not so easy to steal an auto manufacturing facility. The real question is: In the absence of some sort of national industrial strategy, how do Western societies retain a viable middle class?

Decades of American middle-class exposure to favor China and other Asian countries’ industrial capacity have foisted it right back from elite circles into our politics and the ballot box, in spectacular fashion, through the unlikely Donald Trump, who, in his typically blunderbuss fashion, has called attention to some serious deficiencies in our current globalized system, and the competitive threat posed by China to which we have remained oblivious for all too long.

Not that Trump’s 19th-century protectionism represents the right policy response, but his concerns about Beijing make sense when you compare how much China invests in its own industrial base relative to the U.S.: Robert D. Atkinson and Caleb Foote of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write that a recent Harvard Business School “study estimated that the Chinese governments (national, provincial, and local) paid for a whopping 22.2 percent of business R&D in 2015, with 95 percent of Chinese firms in 6 industries receiving government cash—petrochemicals, electronics, metals and materials, machinery and equipment, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and information technology.”

In addition to the direct government grants on R&D, Atkinson and Foote estimate that “the Chinese R&D tax credit is between 3 and 4.6 times more generous than the U.S. credit. To match China’s R&D tax credit generosity, the U.S. rate for the Alternative Simplified Credit would have to be increased from 14 percent to between 35 and 40 percent.” Atkinson and Foote also note that “97 percent of American federal government funding went to just three sectors: transportation equipment, which includes such as fighter jets, missiles, and the like ($14 billion); professional, scientific, and technical services ($5 billion); and computer and electronic products ($4 billion).”

Taken in aggregate, Atkinson and Foote calculate that “nearly 25 percent of all R&D expenditures in China come in the form of government subsidies to firms.” That’s the sort of thing that must enter the calculations of antitrust advocates when they call for breaking up big tech, without considering the ramifications to research and development, especially relative to their Chinese counterparts. (Statistically, as Anne Marie Knott and Carl Vieregger find in a 2016 paper “Reconciling the Firm Size and Innovation Puzzle,” there are ample studies illustrating that R&D spending and R&D productivity increase with scale.)

Why does this matter? Robert Kuttner, writing at the Huffington Post at the inception of Barack Obama’s presidency, made a compelling argument that many of America’s great industrial enterprises did not simply spring up spontaneously via the magic of the “free market”:

“American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America’s wounded banks is also an industrial policy.

“So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century, such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?”

In fact, Kuttner describes a problem that well preceded Barack Obama. America’s belief in national industrial planning has been undermined to the extent that the U.S. began to adhere to a doctrine of shareholder capitalism in the 1980s and beyond, a philosophy that minimized the role of the state, and gave primacy to short-term profitability, as well as production growth through efficiency (i.e., downsizing) and mergers. Corporate prioritization of maximizing shareholders’ value and the ways American corporations have minimized long-term R&D expenditures and capital investment, all of which have resulted in the “unproductive disgorging of corporate cash profits—through massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases—over productive investment in innovation,” write Professors Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad.

Although European companies have not gone quite as far down that route, their “stakeholder capitalism” culture has been somewhat subverted to the same short-term goals as their American counterparts, as evidenced via Volkswagen’s emissions scandal and the erosion of workers’ rights via the Hartz labor “reforms” (which actually undermined the unions’ stakeholder status in the companies, thereby freeing up management to adopt many of the less attractive American shareholder capitalism practices). The European Union too is now belatedly recognizing the competitive threat posed by China. There’s no doubt that the European political classes are also becoming mindful that there are votes to be won here as well, as Trump correctly calculated in 2016.

In the U.S., industrial policy is increasingly finding advocates on both the left (Elizabeth Warren’s policy director, Ganesh Sitaraman) and the right (Professor Michael Lind), via the convenient marriage of national security considerations and with international investment and trade. If trade policy is ultimately subordinated to national security concerns, it is conceivable that industrial policy could be “bi-partisanized,” thereby giving primacy to homegrown strategic industries necessary to sustain viable national defense and security.

But this approach is not without risks: it is unclear whether the “national security-fication” of the industrial policy renaissance will actually enhance or hinder creativity and risk-taking, or merely cause these firms to decline altogether as viable civilian competitors vis a vis Beijing. The current travails of Boeing provide a salutary illustration of the risks of going too far down the Pentagon rat hole. And there are a number of recent studies illustrating that the case for “dual-use” (i.e., civilian and military) manufacturing does not substantially enhance civilian industrialization and, indeed, may retard overall economic growth. On the other hand, as the venture capitalist William Janeway highlights in his seminal work, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, there are advantages at times to being “[d]ecoupled from any direct concern with economic return… [It allowed] the Defense Department… [to] fund numerous alternative research agendas, underwriting the ‘wasteful’ search for solutions that inevitably accompanies any effort to push back the frontiers of knowledge.” So there’s a balance to be struck here. But, as Janeway notes, “the strategic state interventions that have shaped the market economy over generations have depended on grander themes—national development, national security, social justice, liberation from disease—that transcend the calculus of welfare economics and the logic of market failure.”

Furthermore, to the extent that national security considerations retard offshoring and global labor arbitrage, it can enhance the prospects for a viable form of “national developmentalism,” given that both mean tighter labor markets and higher wages, which in turn will likely push firms toward upgrading R&D spending in order to upgrade on the high end of the technology curve (as Seymour Melman argued years ago), as well as enhancing productivity gains. As author Ted Fertik observes:

“Higher productivity makes possible more generous welfare states, and helps national industries compete to supply the world with high-tech products. If technological leadership and a prosperous, patriotic citizenry are the surest guarantees of military preponderance, such an economic policy represents the best military strategy in an era of great power competition.”

Both the left and the right are beginning to recognize that it makes no sense to make war on wage-earners while claiming to protect the same wage earners from Chinese competition. But governments need to do more than act as a neutral umpire, whose role never extends beyond fixing market failures. As Janeway has illustrated, governments have historically promoted the basic research that fueled innovation and nurtured the talent and skills that “became the foundation of the Innovation Economy”; “the central research laboratories of the great corporations were first supplemented and then supplanted by direct state funding of research.” But in spite of providing the foundational research for a number of leading commercial products (e.g., Apple’s iPhone), the government has proved reticent in considering alternative forms of ownership structure (e.g., a “government golden share,” which gives veto rights on key strategic issues, such as relocation, offshoring, special voting rights, etc.), or retaining intellectual property rights and corresponding royalty streams to reflect the magnitude of their own R&D efforts, as Professor Mariana Mazzucato has proposed in the past. At the very least, we need to consider these alternative ownership structures that focus entrepreneurial development on value creation, as opposed to capitulating to the depredations of rentier capitalism on the spurious grounds that this is a neutral byproduct of the market’s efficient allocation of resources.

Within the U.S., national industrial policy also suits green advocates, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, whose Green New Deal plan, while failing to address domestic/local content, or manufacturing in the broadest possible sense, at least begins to move the needle with regard to the federal government building and owning a national renewable grid.

Likewise in Europe, German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier recently published a “National Industrial Strategy 2030,” which, according to Dalia Marin of Bruegel think tank in Brussels, “aims to protect German firms against state-subsidized Chinese competitors. The strategy identifies key industrial sectors that will receive special government support, calls for establishing production of electric-car batteries in Europe, and advocates mergers to achieve economies of scale.” It is striking that EU policymakers, such as Lars Feld of the German Council of Economic Experts, still apparently think it is a protectionist step too far to consider coordinating with the car companies (where there is already a high degree of trans-European policy coordination and international consolidation), and other sectors, to help them all at the same time—as Beijing is now doing. Of course, it would help to embed this in a manufacturing-based Green New Deal, but it represents a healthy corrective to offshoring advocates who continue to advocate that their car industry should migrate to China, on the short-term grounds of cost consideration alone.

Essentially, the goal should be to protect the industries that policymakers think will be strategically important from outsiders, and to further integrate with allies and partners to achieve efficiencies and production scale. (Parenthetically, it seems particularly perverse right at this juncture for the UK to break away from all this continental European integration, and to try to go it alone via Brexit.) The aim should not be to protect private rent-seeking and increasing private monopolization under the guise of industrial policy, which, as Dalia Marin notes, is why EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager blocked the proposed merger between France’s Alstom and Germany’s Siemens. The two companies “rarely compete with CRRC in third countries, because the Chinese company mainly focuses on its home market.” Hence, the grounds for creating “heavyweight champions” was really a cover for developing an oligopoly instead.

Much of the focus of negotiation in the seemingly endless trade negotiations between the U.S. and China has been on American efforts to dismantle the wave of subsidies and industrial support that Beijing furnishes to its domestic industries. This seems both unrealistic as well as being the exact opposite of what the U.S. should be doing if it hopes to level, or at least carve up, the playing field.

Likewise, the problem in both the EU and the U.S. is not the size of these companies generated by national developmentalism, but a size-neutral form of national regulation that precludes these companies from stifling competition. The goal of a truly successful and workable industrial policy should be to create an environment that supports and sustains value creation and that socializes the benefits of the R&D for society as a whole, rather than simply licensing it or selling it on to private companies so that it just becomes a vehicle that sustains rent extraction for private profits alone.

We are slowly but surely starting to move away from market fundamentalism, but we still have yet to make the full conceptual leap toward a sustainable industrial policy that creates an economy for all. At least this is now becoming a fit discussion as far as policy making goes, as many of the neoliberal shibboleths of the past 40 years are gradually being reconsidered and abandoned. That is a start.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

A Tragic Crash, but Was It Murder?

Semi-pro football player Cedric Mitchell was driving to practice on June 7 when he says he lost consciousness. “I remember blacking out,” the 35-year-old told Truthdig from the county jail in Twin Falls, Idaho, “and coming back to when somebody was taking me out of my truck.”

Mitchell had been going 75 to 79 miles per hour in a 30-mile-per-hour zone, according to police reports. His truck slammed into the back of Dwayne Steiner’s 1997 Dodge Ram, throwing both cars into oncoming traffic, where they collided with more vehicles. Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Boise, while Steiner and his wife, Maryann, were taken to a hospital in Twin Falls. Maryann Steiner died of her injuries two days later.

According to prosecutors, witnesses heard Mitchell say, “God take me. I want to die.” Idaho State Police put him in custody.

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“They told me in jail that somebody had passed away,” Mitchell said. His wife, Tiffany, said he was devastated when he found out the collision had cost Maryann Steiner her life. Cedric Mitchell has been in jail since that day.

As previously reported in Raw Story, Mitchell is charged with first-degree murder in Maryann Steiner’s death and several counts of felony aggravated battery in the injuries of others in the crash. In Idaho, first-degree murder is punishable by death or life in prison. Prosecutors contend his actions were purposeful, with no evidence that he tried to brake or swerve before the collision, maybe as a suicide attempt.

Cedric maintains it was an accident and that the pursuit of the first-degree murder charge against him is driven by racial animosity, as evidenced by the community reaction on social media and past experiences in town. Cedric Mitchell is black and his wife, Tiffany, is white. But prosecutors think they can prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he drove into another other car to kill himself and that this makes him a murderer.

He maintains his innocence. “I wouldn’t hurt a butterfly,” he told Truthdig.

——————————

At a hearing at the end of October, a judge set his bond at $2 million. “No way,” Tiffany Mitchell said when asked if the family could afford to bring Cedric home to prepare his defense. She is struggling to take care of their eight kids, working as a health care worker at two jobs, including a night shift. “I’m barely making it now.”

At the hearing, prosecutors said they wouldn’t seek the death penalty. Tiffany is relieved, but the other option is not particularly helpful to her family. “Life without parole is the same to our babies,” she says.

It’s impossible to know for sure what was going on in Cedric Mitchell’s head as he drove that day. But both he and his wife claim he wasn’t suicidal.

Suicide-by-vehicle happens, but it’s rare. In 2017, more than 50% of suicides were gun-related, 27.7% involved suffocation and 13.9% were poisonings. Cuts, falls and “other injury” registered in the single digits.

Cedric had not left a suicide note and Tiffany does not recall anything seeming off when he chatted with her on the phone that day. He set off for football practice like any other afternoon. Even according to the worst-case scenario of a suicide attempt gone wrong,  it was not a targeted, premeditated killing. Cedric said he did not know the woman who died and had no motive to end her life (the prosecutor said he was not claiming Cedric knew Maryann Steiner).

The Mitchells contend Cedric Mitchell had some kind of a medical emergency that led him to pass out. He suffers from a host of health issues like obesity, high blood pressure and asthma. Tiffany raised the possibility that he might have Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the disease that afflicts football players who suffer multiple blows to the head. Cedric started playing football at the age of 7. He played through high school, two years of college and then semi-pro, with the Magic Valley Bulldawgs in Jerome, Idaho. “Offense, defense, a lineman,” he recalled of the positions he played throughout his life. The symptoms of CTE range from memory loss to personality changes — -at their most severe, sufferers might experience seizures and dementia.

Medical records obtained by Truthdig show that Cedric had encephalopathy, a symptom of CTE.

Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, researcher at the CTU center at Boston University, cautioned that encephalopathy — which can roughly be thought of as ‘disease of the brain’ — is not 100% indicative of CTE, which can only be diagnosed when a sufferer dies and their brain can be studied. It’s similar to how a fever is a symptom of an underlying cause, which might be anything from the flu to some rare tropical disease.

Daneshvar said blacking out is not among the most common diagnostic criteria for CTE, but it’s possible. He also pointed out  “there are other health reasons [for which] he might have blacked out or not remembered what happened.”

Another theory that makes far more sense to Tiffany is that Cedric passed out when his blood pressure spiked. According to a medical report released after the incident, his blood pressure was 220 over 120. Blood pressure measuring 180 over 120 is considered a hypertensive emergency. Cedric is a very large man. Tiffany said she thinks he passed out and his foot weighed down the gas pedal.

Despite an inconclusive medical report, prosecutors appear determined to put Cedric Mitchell in prison for life.

It’s not like he would face no consequences — after all, a woman died. But states have many other laws on the books to punish drivers who cause a traffic fatality. For example, California’s vehicular manslaughter charge is a misdemeanor, carrying no more than a year in prison.

There are recent comparisons in Idaho of how traffic fatalities are punished in the courts. For example, a pickup driver in Blane, Idaho, killed three girls while driving drunk over the summer. He was charged with three felony counts of vehicular manslaughter and two of aggravated DUI, according to the Idaho Statesman. Another fatal car crash in August led to the death of a woman. Officials found meth and heroin in the car. So far, the defendant has been charged with drug possession. In July, a 7-year-old-boy was struck and killed while riding his bike and the driver has yet to be held accountable for his death.

Cedric and Tiffany Mitchell believe he’s being unfairly targeted because he’s black in a predominantly white area. “There’s no other type of accident that’s happened in the past that’s been charged this way,” he pointed out.

They have plenty of reason to be suspicious. After Mitchell was arrested, the family was bullied on social media in strikingly racist language.

“Just take him out and hang him, that’s what he deserves,” wrote the wife of a deputy sheriff with the Twin Falls County Sheriff’s Office.

“He should be linched (sic) on main and Shoshone at high noon!” another man said.

Screen shots of online bullying. (Facebook)

It’s not the first time the couple has run across racism in the town.

“When I’m out with my family, we get a lot of stares, people speaking under their breaths,” Cedric said.

“Our kids have been called nigrets. It’s awful,” Tiffany said. “Our daughter gets called Afro girl. She was only 10 when someone on the bus called her a ‘black bitch,’” she recalled.

The couple met in Phoenix, where Tiffany was scoping out a new place to live because she was sick of what she saw as pervasive racism in Twin Falls, Idaho, a town of 42,741 that’s 92% white and Native Americans slightly outnumber black people. Right after they met, Cedric came to visit her in Twin Falls. They started a relationship that quickly turned serious. Despite the racist sentiment they sensed in Idaho, they opted to have him relocate there because the weather was better for his asthma. He got a job at a sugar factory and they got married.

Tiffany recalled an incident in which she and Cedric went on a date at a diner and an older white couple walked in. They headed to sit in a neighboring booth, but when the man saw Cedric and Tiffany, he froze, yanked his wife away and sat at the very opposite end of the restaurant. Tiffany said she’s been called a “mud shark” and that people have said her husband is only with her because her family has money—which they don’t.

Tiffany’s first husband, Cody Hanks, who was white, was shot and killed by a police officer while he was on meth. When Tiffany married Cedric, he was happy to take over fatherly duties for his adopted kids. Tiffany and Cedric had three kids of their own, creating a large, interracial family. “My 3-year-old talks in his sleep and says, ‘Can someone find my Daddy?’” Tiffany said.

“I’m exhausted. And still struggling to make sense of this or prepare for our future,” she said of the family’s day-to-day life and her efforts to cover the astronomic legal bills from Cedric’s case.

“It’s been almost four months since these charges came,” she said. “And I still just don’t understand.”

What We’re Not Being Told About Inhalers

Many people affected by breathing conditions like asthma may be unwittingly adding to global heating, because of the climate threat from inhalers often used to relieve their suffering.

Many of the appliances used at present – termed metered-dose inhalers – contain propellants that are potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) which contribute to the problems of climate change.

A new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK says that if health services switched to prescribing “green” inhalers instead, big cuts would be possible in the output of the climate-damaging gases.

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The study, published in the BMJ Open journal, says that by switching from expensive brand-named drugs and inhalers to alternative products, there’d also be considerable cost savings.

It’s estimated that more than 330 million people worldwide suffer from asthma, with a substantial proportion of that number having to use inhalers.

Ozone Damage

Commonly-used metered-dose inhalers contain liquefied compressed gases that act as a propellant, atomising the drug in the inhaler and pumping it out to the user.

At one stage chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs – potent greenhouse gases which also damage the Earth’s ozone layer) were used in inhalers. Their use is now banned, and another gas called hydrofluoroalkane, or HFA, acts as the propellant instead.

The Cambridge study says that though HFAs do not damage the ozone layer, they are nonetheless potent greenhouse gases and contribute to overall global warming.

It recommends a switch from metered-dose inhalers containing HFAs to what it describes as effective alternatives such as dry powder inhalers or aqueous mist inhalers.

The researchers were mainly examining the use of inhalers in the UK and the costs to the country’s National Health Service (NHS). Some countries have already switched to non-HFA inhalers.

“In 2017, around 50 million inhalers were prescribed in England, of which seven out of ten were metered-dose inhalers, compared to only one in ten in Sweden”, says the study.

The researchers say they found that the output of greenhouse gases from metered-dose inhalers was between 10 and 37 times that of dry powder inhalers.

“At 2017 prescription levels, replacing one in ten metered-dose inhalers in England with the cheapest equivalent dry powder inhalers could lead to a reduction in drug costs of £8.2 million (US$10.6m) annually and would reduce carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions by 58 kilotonnes.”

“At the individual level each metered-dose inhaler replaced by a dry powder inhaler could save the equivalent of between 150 and 400kg of CO2 annually, which is similar to many actions that environmentally-concerned individuals are taking at home already, such as installing wall insulation, recycling or cutting out meat.”

Zero Carbon Aim

The researchers stress that patients shouldn’t stop using inhalers, but should discuss their treatment with their doctor. Patients should ensure inhalers are used correctly and properly disposed of.

“Climate change is a huge and present threat to health that will disproportionately impact the poorest and most vulnerable on the planet, including people with pre-existing lung disease”, says Dr James Smith, consultant in public health at the University of Cambridge.

“Our study shows that switching to inhalers which are better for the environment could help individuals and the NHS as a whole, and reduce their impact on the climate significantly.

“This is an important step towards creating a zero carbon healthcare system fit for the 21st century.”

Ralph Nader: Boeing Is Playing Congress for Fools

This past week, Boeing’s deadly 737 MAX crashes were the focus of two back-to-back hearings – one in the Senate and one in the House. In the House Transportation Committee hearing, at least 50 Democrats and Republicans criticized Dennis Muilenburg’s mismanagement and implied criminal negligence. Muilenburg’s actions allowed Boeing’s marketeers to overrule Boeing’s engineers so that Boeing could circumvent FAA’s safety oversight, which had already been diminished by the Congress.

These hearings were held because of efforts by the families of the victims aboard preventable airplane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Family members attended the hearings, holding up large signs with photos of their lost loved relatives. There were 346 fatalities in two crashes driven down by stealth, faulty software installed to address, what Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger called, the reduction of the “aircraft’s natural aerodynamic stability in certain conditions.”

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The hearings were held in a packed room, full of media members, staffers, lobbyists, and citizen activists. House lawmakers questioned Muilenburg and his chief engineer, John Hamilton, for over five hours, during which the hugely compensated CEO made over $75,000 for pretending to be humble and respectful. The Committee members demanded to know what the top brass knew about the plane’s hazards and when they knew it.  Lower-level Boeing engineers, technicians, and test pilots had already told Boeing executives about the plane’s problems, but the warnings were ignored in the rush to market.

There were table-thumping questions and demands (e.g. for Muilenburg’s resignation) by both Democrats and Republicans. However, no legislative proposals were on the table. One year after the Lion Airlines plane crashed into the Java Sea, there is still no tangible effort to provide the FAA with the stronger authority, a larger budget, and the staff needed to properly oversee the aircraft/airline industry. The FAA must be able to enforce meaningful laws with civil fines and, when necessary, referrals to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. The lack of proper regulation has allowed for continued unsafe aircraft manufacturing, corner-cutting, and cover-ups.

Ever since the Congress, under Boeing pressure, ordered the FAA to delegate more self-certifying power to Boeing and other aircraft makers, hearings with the FAA, Boeing, and airlines have been theater. Nothing results except giving in to aircraft manufacturers and carriers’ demands, rubber-stamped by the toady FAA and an indentured Congress.

Given all the freebies the airlines give to the U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives (See the survey sent to every member of Congress, which has yet to receive a response) the Congress has never passed the comprehensive passenger bill of rights championed by Flyers’ Rights and numerous aviation columnists.

Given the formidable organization of the knowledgeable families and consistent, thorough media coverage, will Congress do its job? So far, the answer is – not likely. Not one member of Congress has yet returned Boeing’s campaign contributions – over three hundred members take the cash regularly. No Congressional Committee has demanded resignations of Dan Elwell or Ali Bahrami, the FAA officials responsible for enabling Boeing’s “regulatory capture” of the FAA. This failure of regulation was even condemned by the likes of Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

No Congressional Committee has even pressed for repealing the notorious provisions, inserted by Boeing, into the 2018 FAA Authorization Act that pushed the FAA further under Boeing’s giant thumb.

On the other hand, the families of the crash victims and Flyers’ Right’s Paul Hudson are advancing critical findings by the National Safety Transportation Board (See their report) and the Joint Authorities Technical Review (See their report), along with the serious findings of a long-neglected 2017 airline union-sponsored report (See Aircraft Certification “Transformation” Pre-Decisional Involvement Report). With increasing numbers of aerospace safety specialists and inspectors who have been coming forward, maybe Congress can end its indentured status. Maybe the national legislature can stand tall for airline safety regulation and a reformed Boeing corporation, shorn of its presently complicit executives and trophy Board of Directors.

To make action on Capitol Hill more likely, the Congressional Committees must schedule hearings now for consumer groups, families, the airline industry unions, and very importantly, the experienced technical critics of the 737 MAX and Boeing’s handling of that aircraft – past, present, and future. All these parties have been waiting with rising impatience to be called.

In public releases, October 23 and 29, 2019, the families of Boeing’s MAX victims laid out what Boeing and the FAA need to do before the hundreds of MAX planes are allowed in the air.

Summarizing their demands:

If the MCAS (software) fix is not publically disclosed, the 737 MAX should not fly;
If the purpose of the MCAS system is not determined, the 737 MAX should not fly;
If there is no recertification of the whole plane as an integrated system, the 737 MAX should not fly;
Until Boeing fixes its culture to eliminate undue pressure on engineers, the 737 MAX should not fly; and
Until Boeing identifies and removes those who made the decision to conceal the MCAS from the FAA, pilots, and the public, the 737 MAX should not fly.

Paul Hudson, the longtime director of Flyers’ Rights, who is on an FAA Advisory Committee, has put forth numerous MAX-related demands, as well as a detailed series of recommendations to reform the FAA from top to bottom.

Airline passengers, please note that Boeing intends to put 5,000 flawed 737 MAX airplanes into operation. Already about 400 of them have been grounded since March by U.S. and foreign airlines.

With Boeing already in trouble with its big pentagon and NASA contracts, don’t bet on its full-page ads and other propaganda. Boeing’s P.R. spin will not protect you. Rely on your own vigilance and “Axe the MAX” from your future travel plans.

Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Accuses Mainstream Media of Erasure

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign alleged Monday that corporate media outlets are intentionally ignoring—and attempting to undermine—the Vermont senator’s significant gains in recent polls with “cartoonishly inaccurate” reporting and headlines.

“In the last week, a wave of polls has emerged showing a genuine, full-on Bernie surge—but you might not know that if you tuned into cable TV or read the headlines from the national press corps,” Sanders speechwriter David Sirota wrote in the campaign’s Bern Notice newsletter. “In fact, you might not even know Bernie is running for president.”

Sirota highlighted what he described as a widening “divide between The Actual Polls and The Media’s Manufactured Narrative.”

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The polls, Sirota noted, show Sanders is leading in New Hampshire, in second place and gaining momentum (pdf) in Iowa, in second place and surging in the key battleground state of Michigan, and the only 2020 Democrat leading President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

“Despite all this data, many in the national press corps continued to both inaccurately report the polling results—and also pretend Bernie doesn’t exist,” wrote Sirota, who pointed to several flagrant examples that he said are part of a pattern of media outlets attempting to “ignore and derail” the Sanders campaign’s momentum.

“In a report about its own poll showing Bernie in first place in New Hampshire,” Sirota wrote. “CNN put an inaccurate graphic up showing Bernie in second place.”

The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim highlighted the error on Twitter:

The poll on the right actually found Sanders in first. It’s even CNN’s poll. They dropped him to 2 anyway. pic.twitter.com/bNDfyZVwJa

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 2, 2019

Sirota also cited a report by the New York Times claiming that South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg “eclipsed” Sanders—despite the poll the story was based showing Sanders in second place ahead of Buttigieg.

On other occasions, corporate media outlets like CNN and the Times have simply left Sanders out of the conversation—a phenomenon the Sanders campaign has described as the “Bernie Blackout.”

Journalist Ken Klippenstein noted the phenomenon on Monday in response to the Times poll that showed Warren and Sanders—given the margin of error—statistically tied. The newspaper’s push notification tellingly left Sanders’ name out entirely.

Ah yes, the only three contenders pic.twitter.com/EZurBx2aeE

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) November 1, 2019

Last week, Grim highlighted CNN‘s decision not to give Sanders the headline for its latest Iowa state poll even though he came out on top:

CNN has five articles up about its new NH poll that shows Sanders in front, yet none of the five say that in the headline pic.twitter.com/ECJ11xEYLL

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) October 29, 2019

As the patchwork of evidence mounts, critical observers of the corporate media’s treatment of Sanders have now made efforts to compile examples of the behavior:

THREAD: Corporate media’s anti-Bernie campaign

There’s a constant stream of disinformation & lies about #Bernie2020 coming from corporate media. Let’s document it all in one place.

Use this as a resource & definitely add anything I missed.

For starters:https://t.co/NQjwIkdu6c

— Samuel D. Finkelstein II (@CANCEL_SAM) November 2, 2019

“All of these examples are no accident,” Sirota tweeted late Monday. “This is a deliberate attempt to erase Bernie Sanders. But here’s some news: We’re not being erased. We’re going to win.”

If one of these things happened, you could call it an accident. But all of them together suggest that this is a deliberate effort by billionaire-owned media to erase @BernieSanders, the candidate most powerfully confronting the billionaire class. https://t.co/eo6JljsrPq pic.twitter.com/UJDGilrvhc

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 4, 2019

The Sanders team has not been shy about calling out unfair corporate media coverage of the Vermont senator’s 2020 presidential campaign. In July, as Common Dreams reported, the campaign fired back at MSNBC after several hosts and contributors to the Comcast-owned network launched a series of fact-free attacks on Sanders.

The Vermont senator in August also called out what he described as biased coverage of the campaign by the Washington Post, owned by world’s richest man and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

“We’ve said from the start that we will have to take on virtually the entire media establishment in this campaign, and so far that has proven to be true,” Sanders tweeted at the time. “Ok. Fine. We are ready.”

Will Trump Have His Own Reichstag Fire?

This piece originally appeared on The Progressive.

On February 27, 1933, roughly one month after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building housing the German parliament in Berlin was gutted by a fire. Hitler and the Nazi Party blamed the conflagration on communist agitators, and the next day they pressured German President Paul von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree suspending freedom of assembly and the press.

Four weeks later, the nation’s parliament passed the Enabling Act, permitting Hitler as chancellor to enact laws by decree. After Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, the offices of chancellor and president were merged, giving Hitler absolute control of the German state.

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Although four communists were arrested, tried, and executed for staging the Reichstag fire, including a hapless twenty-four-year-old Dutch national who allegedly confessed to the arson, the cause of the blaze has been a subject of sharp and enduring debate. Some notable writers—including the British historian Alan Bullock, the American war correspondent William Shirer and, more recently, the prominent German lawyer Benjamin Hett—have argued that the fire was set by the Nazis themselves to foster a climate of fear that allowed them to crush all forms of political dissent and govern with impunity.

Whatever the actual cause of the Reichstag fire, the incident has assumed outsized status over the decades as a meme and metaphor for political subterfuge and conspiracies on a massive scale.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not about to suggest that Donald Trump and his Attorney General, William Barr, are scheming to burn down the U.S. Capitol Building and blame the deed on Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in order to endow Trump with autocratic, neo-fascist powers.

I am suggesting, however, that Trump has dispatched Barr on a Reichstag-esque mission to promote a wacky and discredited right-wing conspiracy theory that could, if given widespread credence, discredit the findings of former special counsel Robert Mueller on Russian election interference, divert public attention from Trump’s manifold acts of corruption, and cripple the impeachment inquiry initiated against the President.

As other commentators have noted, Barr is chasing a conspiracy theory that originates from the darkest corners of the rightwing Internet. It holds that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in our 2016 election, and was responsible for hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee. It posits, without a shred of evidence, that Ukrainian operatives acted in concert with the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and rogue elements inside the CIA and FBI to make it appear that the email hack was carried out by the Russians to stymie Trump’s presidential bid.

Trump raised the conspiracy theory in his infamous July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. The call, in turn, triggered the current impeachment inquiry after the conversation between the two leaders was publicly revealed in late September following the disclosure of an anonymous whistleblower’s complaint.

In addition to asking Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, Trump during this call pressured Zelensky to “find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine” in 2016, and specifically to help find out what happened to a computer server allegedly belonging to Crowdstrike, Inc., the California-based tech firm that provided cybersecurity services to the Democrats in 2016. “They say,” Trump told Zelensky without defining who they are, “Ukraine has it [the server].”

Barr, with Trump’s blessings, announced in May that he had appointed John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, to lead the Justice Department in an administrative review of the origins of the Russia inquiry conducted by Mueller. Last month, it was announced that the DOJ had converted the probe into a criminal investigation, equipping the department with subpoena authority.

According to several news outlets, Barr has taken personal charge of the new probe, traveling to Britain and Italy to hold face-to-face meetings with government intelligence experts in those countries, and conferring by phone with Australian security officials.

Any pretense that Barr is acting on behalf of the country rather than in furtherance of Trump’s personal interests has fallen by the wayside. In Barr, Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn, as he longed for aloud in January 2018 in the thick of Mueller inquiry, referring to the deceased lawyer who had served as chief-counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn later worked as Trump’s private attorney in New York.

It’s too early to tell what kind of narrative Barr will ultimately confabulate to come to Trump’s rescue. In the meantime, the President’s other surrogates have been hard at work, auditioning defenses to impeachment, lambasting the impeachment process and contending, among other risible verbal broadsides, that Congressional Democrats are trying to engineer a coup d’état. Thus far, they have bungled their assignments.

As a sign of just how badly the impeachment battle has gone for Trump thus far, the President’s present personal attorney and initial go-to defender on Ukraine—former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani—is reportedly under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for violating lobbying laws in connection with his own business interests in Ukraine.

As House Democrats transition from the closed-door depositions they have been conducting the past few weeks to public hearings later this month, it appears more certain every day that Trump indeed attempted to pull off a quid pro quo bribery/extortion shakedown of Zelensky, clearly meeting the impeachment threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But we’ve yet to hear from Barr. The Attorney General is Trump’s ace in the hole, and he is far more competent and dangerous than Giuliani, or Trump’s lackeys in Congress, or the sycophants who regularly sing Trump’s praises on Fox News.

It’s not entirely clear why a man with Barr’s credentials—he served as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush before joining a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C.—would jeopardize his legacy by indulging Trump’s most irrational impulses.

One possible explanation is that Barr is a proponent of the legal doctrine of the “unitary executive.” Long popular in rightwing circles dating back to the Reagan era, the doctrine maintains that that all authority of the executive branch is concentrated in the person of the President, and that the presidency is largely immune from Congressional oversight.

Barr may believe he has found the perfect vehicle for the unitary theory in Trump. If that theory now prevails, it will remain in place for future conservative Presidents to utilize. If that’s the case, we can expect Barr to confect a figurative version of the Reichstag fire, endorsing the far right’s most blatant pro-Trump conspiracy theories, in the weeks and months ahead.

Whether Barr and Trump succeed remains to be seen. Nothing less than the fate of our fragile democracy hangs in the balance.