Chris Hedges's Blog, page 122

A Key Reparation to Descendants of Slaves Wouldn’t Cost a Dime

On Oct. 10—World Day Against the Death Penalty—opponents around the globe gathered to call attention to the conditions of men and women living under death sentences and to call for the abolition of capital punishment. I am both an abolitionist and a man living on death row in California’s San Quentin State Prison.

The death penalty is the state-sanctioned killing of people who have been convicted of killing people. If killing people is a crime, how is it different for the state to kill people? The whole world should be opposed to this. In fact, most of the world’s countries—106—ban capital punishment, as do 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The United States belongs in the company of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Iraq in executing people.

Contemplating the death penalty brings me back to four months ago, when, on June 19—known as Juneteenth by African Americans—there was a hearing in Congress attended by many influential people. They included journalist-activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, actor-activist Danny Glover, Democratic presidential candidate and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Each person spoke on whether reparations should be given to the descendants of slaves.

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There was powerful talk about what many people describe as America’s original sin and all the negative things that have been done and are still being done to the descendants of slaves because of the institutional racism that remains embedded in every part of our modern-day society.

To understand what reparations are, I looked the word up in my poor man’s dictionary. Here is what I found:

1) The act of making amends for a wrong; and 2) amends for a wrong: especially money paid by a defeated nation in compensation for damages caused during hostilities. Synonyms: Redress, restitution, indemnity.

Some people say that reparations from one people to another are given to try to make the damaged people whole, as an act of acknowledgement of the wrong done to them.

No matter what the definitions of reparations are, in my opinion there should be no talk of reparations in the United States unless it includes the ending of the historic and horrific crime against humanity: the death penalty.

The death penalty in all its heinous forms was used not only to force people to submit to being slaves but also to keep them enslaved, from the shores of Africa to the shores of the United States.

From 1619, when the first African slaves set foot on this land, the death penalty and torture that preceded it kept an entire population of African and African American people in fear and enslaved. Even white abolitionists who tried to end slavery were tortured and executed.

This took place from 1619 to 1865, and from 1865 to 1965, the freed slaves and their descendants went from chattel slavery to slavery by another name—by way of the prison leasing system. That system, just like the system it replaced, relied on the death penalty and torture to force black people to work and live against their will in inhumane conditions. For many, that was a fate worse than death.

In the tortured history of this country, the death penalty has reigned supreme over the lives of the descendants of slaves. For decades, studies have shown that often, all-white or mostly white juries have disproportionately imposed the death sentence on blacks.

When Jim Crow segregation was used to keep black people in the separate and unequal world, the death penalty was right there as a reminder of what would happen to them if they got out of line, or out of their place, or became too “uppity.”

It is neither right nor fair to talk about reparations and not include ending the main tool that has been implemented to terrorize a people forced to live, work and raise a family while contributing to a country hellbent on denying them their humanity.  The system that exists gives lip service to the historical suffering, torture and cold-blooded murder of the people who have had the death penalty imposed on their black bodies.

Reparations is more than about money, restitution, or compensation, especially given that life is priceless. No amount of money can justly be paid to people who have been humiliated and terrorized in life and in death in the name of the law, god, manifest destiny, white supremacy or anything else.

It won’t cost a dime to end what has to be one of the worst crimes against humanity—the death penalty. In fact, it would save money that could go toward life, rather than toward death.

Kevin Cooper is a death row inmate at California’s San Quentin Prison. In 1985, he was convicted of a 1983 quadruple murder and sentenced to death in a trial in which evidence that might have exonerated him was withheld from the defense. Since his arrest, Cooper has become active in writing from prison to assert his innocence, protest racism in the American criminal justice system, and oppose the death penalty. His case was scrutinized in a June 17, 2017, New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. Visit savekevincooper.org for more information.

ExxonMobil Hasn’t Stopped Bankrolling Climate Deniers

ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?

According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.

Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.

So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?

Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber

In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.

Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.

Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”

Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career.

Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.

Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.

Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.

Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.

Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock

On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the 2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent $11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.

One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.

ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.

In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.

Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Stop Acting Like LGBTQ+ Rights Are Debatable

As a newly out lesbian, I couldn’t help but watch the recent Supreme Court hearings on employment rights for LGBTQ people, and a recent Democratic presidential candidate town hall on LTBTQ issues, and think: “I’m sorry, what?”

How are my rights and my humanity a debate? And why is a personal, private matter that affects nobody except for the women I date a controversial issue?

I’m not new to LGBTQ rights advocacy, but in the past, I truly thought I was straight. I’d date men, looking for Mr. Right, like “No, not that one… not that one… he’s nice, and good looking, I just don’t know why I’m not feeling it with him.”

I fought for LGBTQ rights but I didn’t question the need to fight for them. The “debate” over these rights felt like a fact of life every bit as much as what goes up comes down.

My personal life as a straight person wasn’t a controversial issue, but it was up to me as a good ally to fight for the rights of oppressed others.

Once I came out — well after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell had already ended and marriage equality was the law of the land — I felt guilty that I’d bypassed so much of the injustice other LGBTQ people suffered by remaining closeted until it was over.

Then I realized that I didn’t skip it. I just experienced it in a different way.

Growing up, being straight was presented as the only option, so I assumed I was. When I learned about homosexuality, it was highly sexualized and stigmatized.

I was a kid then. My feelings for other girls didn’t feel romantic. They were more along the lines of “I feel so amazing when I’m with Jessica” and “Amy is the best girl ever! I wish she’d talk to me.”

In junior high, I wondered if I was gay because I didn’t like boys — but I thought I also didn’t like girls. I assumed that gay feelings would be more, well, sexual.

I also thought gay feelings would feel more… weird. Everything I felt seemed normal and natural. I just assumed every girl felt for their girl friends what I did for mine.

Thus commenced two decades of unsuccessfully dating men and going into adulthood alone — without love, without the ability to start a family — because I was shopping in the wrong aisle for a romantic partner.

My gay feelings were so buried it took a while to even find them. Once I did, it was like, “Wait what? That’s what people have a problem with? Why?”

The feelings are ones of love, plain and simple. The joy of being with another human, of getting closer to her, of caring about her, of wanting to share my life with her.

Where, exactly, is the controversy in that?

I live in Wisconsin now, and I was here in 2004, when the majority of this state voted to constitutionally ban my right to marry. Before moving back here, I lived in California — where in 2008, the voters of that state overturned marriage equality too.

Why are anyone’s love life, family, and identity a referendum? Why are they a debate? Why must we plead our case to not get fired for who we love in front of the Supreme Court?

I wish we did not even have to dignify our opponents with a response that legitimized the debate, but, sadly, we do. If we don’t, we will be denied those rights. And there’s nothing normal about that at all.

Grim Find: 39 Dead in One of U.K.’s Worst Human Trafficking Cases

LONDON — Investigators were trying to piece together the movements of a large cargo truck found Wednesday containing the bodies of 39 people in one of Britain’s worst people smuggling tragedies.

Police initially said the cargo truck had traveled through Ireland and then to Wales via ferry, but that theory changed Wednesday afternoon when Essex police in England said they believe the container with the people inside went from the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium to Purfleet, England, where it arrived early Wednesday. Police also said they believe the tractor unit traveled from Northern Ireland and picked up the container unit.

Details about the victims, including where they were from, were scarce. Essex police said they have not been identified — a process they warned would be slow.

The truck’s driver — a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland — was arrested on suspicion of murder. He has not been charged and his name has not been released. He and other drivers who may have been at the wheel earlier would have taken advantage of the European Union’s generally open borders to travel in several countries without checks at the various frontiers.

The case began when an ambulance service was called at 1:40 a.m. Wednesday to a truck on the grounds of the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of London on the River Thames.

In Parliament, Prime Minister Boris Johnson put aside the Brexit crisis, at least for a few minutes, and vowed that the people traffickers would be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

“All such traders in human beings should be hunted down and brought to justice,” he said.

The possible connection to Bulgaria was murky. The Bulgarian foreign ministry said in a press release that the cargo truck has a Bulgarian registration. It said the Swedish-made “Scania” truck is registered in the Bulgarian Black Sea port city of Varna to a company owned by a woman from Ireland.

The number of victims was shocking, although it has become sadly common in recent years for small numbers of migrants to occasionally be found dead in sealed vehicles after having been abandoned by traffickers.

The tragedy recalls the death of 58 migrants in 2000 in a truck in Dover, England, and the deaths in 2015 of 71 migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who were found suffocated in the back of a refrigerated truck that was abandoned on an Austrian highway close to the Hungarian border.

It seems likely the traffickers shunned the most popular English Channel route from Calais, France, to Dover, England because of increased surveillance at those ports and instead chose a more circuitous route.

Dover and Calais, which have been under pressure from human traffickers for years, have sniffer dogs, monitors and more advanced technological surveillance due to the fact that they are the endpoints for the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain.

Groups of migrants have repeatedly landed on English shores using small boats for the risky Channel crossing, and migrants are sometimes found in the trunks of cars that disembark from the massive ferries that link France and England, but Wednesday’s macabre find in an industrial park was a reminder that trafficking gangs are still profiting from the human trade.

“To put 39 people into a locked metal container shows a contempt for human life that is evil,” lawmaker Jackie Doyle-Price, who represents the region in parliament, told Parliament.

The National Crime Agency said its specialists were working to “urgently identify and take action against any organized crime groups who have played a role in causing these deaths.”

It said in May that the number of people being smuggled into Britain via cargo trucks was on the rise.

It was unclear how the ambulance workers who found the bodies heard of the tragedy. No cause of death has been made public. Police said one victim appeared to be a teenager but gave no further details.

“This is a tragic incident where a large number of people have lost their lives,” Essex Police Chief Superintendent Andrew Mariner told reporters at a press conference.

A cordon was put around the white tractor-trailer and access to and from the industrial park was restricted. People running businesses in the park said they were unable to open.

The truck’s route across Europe was not clear. Bulgarian authorities said they could not yet confirm that the truck had started its journey in that country.

“We are in contact with our embassy in London and with British authorities,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tsvetana Krasteva said.

___

Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary, contributed to this story.

A Glimpse of the Climate Apocalypse to Come

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

This article was co-published with The New York Times Magazine.

At the beginning of October, my kids’ preschool informed me that it might be closed the next day because of rolling blackouts — a radical new effort by our local power utility in Northern California to avoid sparking wildfires. The water company, faced with the shutdown of its pumps, asked us to fill our bathtubs before the cutoff. On the advice of experts, my car was backed into the driveway for a quick escape, its hatch packed with 7 gallons of water and a go-bag including leather gloves, breathing masks, spare clothes, headlamps and emergency food.

The National Weather Service was predicting 55-mile-an-hour winds, with 10% humidity. It was like living inside a ticking time bomb. And so, in a desperate attempt to avoid detonation, the utility decided to haul almost 800,000 households backward through time into premodernity, for days at a stretch. Around Silicon Valley, residential areas adjacent to some of the most technologically advanced corporations in the world — the offices of private space-exploration companies, internet search engines, electric vehicle manufacturers — would forgo basic electricity.

The blackouts solved nothing, of course. De-energizing the electrical grid is a bludgeon: imprecise, with enormous potential for collateral damage as people deal with a darkened world. It doesn’t even eliminate fire risk. What it largely does is shift responsibility away from Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility company, whose faulty transmission lines had been found to have caused some of the most destructive wildfires on record.

In fact, cutting power can exacerbate some fire risks. In a blackout, more people rely on home generators, many of which have been installed without permits and might be no less faulty than the utility’s own equipment. Detours and gridlock force more cars into vulnerable places. (Sparks off roadways are another top cause of wildfire.) The blackout makes it harder for the public to respond to fire emergencies even as it does little to prevent all the other factors that cause them — from careless barbecues to tossed-out cigarette butts to plain old arson. One of the state’s most serious fires so far this year was ignited by burning garbage.

But a mandatory blackout does have one radically positive effect. By suddenly withdrawing electrical power — the invisible lifeblood of our unsustainable economic order — PG&E has made the apocalyptic future of the climate crisis immediate and visceral for some of the nation’s most comfortable people. It is easy to ignore climate change in the bosom of the developed world. But you can’t fail to notice when the lights go out.

Only once the blackouts began to take effect did local agencies and governments seem to begin to grasp their rippling effects and implications. As the city of Oakland prepared to lose power, its Police Department — already strained by understaffing and rampant corruption — called back its off-duty officers and put its investigative units into uniform in the hopes of managing a city in the dark. Transportation officials prepared to close four tunnels that make up one of the Bay Area’s major highway arteries, effectively walling off thousands of people from their jobs in downtown Oakland and San Francisco.

As the lights went out across the region, the economies of whole towns and small cities ground to a halt. Grocery stores and gas stations closed, air conditioning was shut off and cell towers faltered — even as the cellphones themselves, now many households’ only means of communication, slowly began to lose battery power. People whose lives depended on home medical equipment faced life-threatening emergencies, and cars — without operating gas pumps — risked running out of fuel. My own town sat on the edge of an arbitrary boundary. The lights stayed on, but the mood was ominous.

And it ought to be. In the American West, our climate will only get hotter and drier, our wildfires worse. Every year more places are going to burn, and we will, repeatedly, be horrified by the losses. But we should not be shocked by them. The blackouts have laid bare the uncomfortable fact that the infrastructure we’ve built and maintained over the course of many decades isn’t matched to the threats we face in our rapidly unfolding climate emergency.

The safest way to proceed under such circumstances — on an annual basis, every time the thermometer kicks up and the winds begin to blow — is probably not simply to forgo the use of one of civilization’s most elementary and essential innovations. Significantly lowering emissions, reducing waste, managing our landscape and fortifying our communities would all do much more to save lives. But it’s hard to imagine that even deep-blue California will make sufficient progress on the climate-adapting steps we’ve long been implored to take.

At least mandatory blackouts force a glimpse into this new reality. They’re like a thin wedge opening our minds to the fact that even here, in the heart of one of the wealthiest regions of a state that is (we are often reminded) by itself the world’s fifth-largest economy — one that is shepherding into existence some of the nation’s most enlightened and aggressive climate-adaptation policies — deep and unpredictable consequences are unavoidable. Perhaps if blackouts were mandated in your community, your neighbors might awaken to this eerie truth as well.

Bernie Sanders Issues Unprecedented Pledge to Whistleblowers

Sen. Bernie Sanders vowed, if elected president in 2020, to break with both the Trump and Obama administrations by refusing to use the repressive, century-old Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, a stance that was applauded by press freedom advocates and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In an interview with The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim released Tuesday, Sanders condemned President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the Ukraine whistleblower and emphasized the crucial role whistleblowers play in the political process.

Asked if the Espionage Act of 1917 should be used against those who raise the alarm about government wrongdoing, Sanders said, “Of course not.”

“The law is very clear: Whistleblowers have a very important role to play in the political process and I am very supportive of the courage of that whistleblower, whoever he or she may be,” Sanders said of the individual who filed the complaint about Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Grim pointed out that the 1917 law “had largely gone out of fashion until it was deployed heavily by the Obama administration, which prosecuted eight people accused of leaking to the media under the Espionage Act, more than all previous presidents combined.”

“President Donald Trump is on pace to break Barack Obama’s record if he gets a second term,” Grim wrote. “He has prosecuted eight such whistleblowers, five of them using the Espionage Act, according to the Press Freedom Tracker.”

Former U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning, currently behind bars for refusing to testify before a secretive grand jury, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for Espionage Act violations and served seven years in prison before Obama commuted her sentence at the end of his presidency.

Manning released classified information to WikiLeaks, whose founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has been indicted by the Trump administration for espionage.

Last year, NSA whistleblower Reality Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for Espionage Act violations after leaking classified information.

Progressives hailed Sanders’ pledge to end the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers as a potential “sea-change” and urged other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to follow his lead.

Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called Sanders’ vow “the most important stance any candidate has taken affecting press freedom so far.”

Snowden—who, like Manning and Winner, was charged with Espionage Act violations—tweeted a simple response to Sanders’s pledge: “Whoa.”

The Uncomfortable Truth About Tulsi Gabbard

What follows is a conversation between The Nation’s Jeet Heer and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you all with us.

Hillary Clinton has now accused both Green presidential candidate Jill Stein and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of being Russian assets. Now, there’s a long history in this country of being accused of being a Russian asset. There’s a history that goes back to unions and black activists in this country in the 30s, again going after people in the 1950s with the House Un-American Activities Committee, to anti-war and black activists in the 60s, working on behalf of the Russians, they said. The Soviet Union is what it was called back then. So now it’s back. And Tulsi Gabbard is now an asset of the Russians to ensure a Trump victory in 2020.

Okay, so the Russians may be undermining some things. I mean, they learned it from us. Everybody does it. That’s not the case here. But asset? Agents? What’s really going on here? Many on the left see Tulsi Gabbard as an anti-war candidate. But the whole thing is much more nuanced than that. While Hillary Clinton once again is showing why she lost, Tulsi is not a simple anti-war candidate. A lot of ground to cover here in this short time to go through what all this means, which is why we’re about to talk with Jeet Heer, National Correspondent of The Nation, who just wrote the article, “The Real Trouble With Tulsi” that appeared in recent Nation online. And Jeet, welcome back. Good to have you with us.

Jeet Heer: Good to be here.

Marc Steiner: So let’s just start with former Secretary of State and former Senator Hillary Clinton, former presidential candidate, and what she did here and the attacks she made. It kind of took a lot of people by surprise. She just kind of blurted that out on this radio show. I mean, what do you think that was about?

Jeet Heer: [crosstalk 00:01:45]. I thought you were going to play the audio. So yeah, no, it is really surprising. I wasn’t completely taken by surprise because we’ve heard rumblings of this from Clinton’s circle. The New York Times had an article about Gabbard just a few days before the audio which quoted a Clinton advisor saying very similar things. But it is a very shocking thing for the former presidential candidate, nominee for her party, former Secretary of State, to say that an elected congresswoman is a Russian asset.

The first thing to say is that there’s no evidence of this. This is a completely fanciful, speculative statement. But also, the whole term “Russian asset,” as you indicated, is very problematic. It’s kind of a CIA term. It’s a term coming out of the world of espionage. And it’s designed to kind of smear people. It’s a weaselly, slippery term because it creates ambiguity between people who are consciously agents of a foreign power and people who are assisted by a foreign power unknowingly. And in this case, the idea of an asset extends to, well, if you get retweeted by Russian bots, you’re an asset. Well, we can’t control who we get retweeted by. So it’s a very, very dubious statement.

Marc Steiner: I mean, and when you look at this, and the history, as I alluded to in the beginning of the program, is that if you were a union activist or a radical activist in the 30s, especially if you were a black radical activist in the 30s, you were accused of being a Russian agent, all the people called up before HUAC whose lives were destroyed. If you opposed the Vietnam War, if you supported civil rights in the beginning, you were a communist. And that meant you were a Russian asset, or a Soviet asset in those days. So using this in this way is hearkening back to a different time, and that has not left us yet, which is part of the problem here.

Jeet Heer: Yeah, no, absolutely. As I said, it comes out of the CIA and the sort of Cold War mentality, and in some ways is maybe a sign that people who were formed by the Cold War, people in the espionage world, and people like Hillary Clinton, are having a hard time adapting to this new world and they’re bringing the terminology that they’re used to. And I mean, it’s very bad.

I’ll give you one example of why it’s bad from my own magazine, which was, we had a writer, a great journalist, I. F. Stone-

Marc Steiner: Oh yeah, sure.

Jeet Heer: … and there were people who accused him of being a Russian asset. But their evidence of that was that he would meet with the Russian ambassador as part of his journalistic duties, and would meet with other Russian people to gather information. So basically, you’re criminalizing or trying to cast as treason the basic act of journalism.

Marc Steiner: And I mean, and I knew Izzy. He was a mentor of mine when I was at the Washington Free Press back in the 60s. And yeah, I mean, to call him a Russian asset is almost as absurd as this.

Jeet Heer: Yes.

Marc Steiner: Let’s take a look though here, this is a response that Tulsi Gabbard tweeted out. And we’ll also look at John Nichols’ writing about this as well. So Tulsi tweets out: “Great. Thank you to Hillary Clinton. You, the queen of warmongers, the embodiment of corruption, the personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy,” blah, blah, blah.

But then, your colleague and our friend, John Nichols, tweets out something really interesting. Let’s look at this and talk about this. He said: “Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard had 606,000 Twitter followers. She’ll finish today with 656,000 followers. That’s a startling jump in interest in her candidacy. And there’s a fair bet to be made that this Tulsi surge is not finished. It’s starting to look like Clinton did her a favor.” So yeah, I mean, this is backfiring in many ways on Hillary Clinton and the centrist Democrats in their attack on Tulsi.

Jeet Heer: Yeah, I don’t know. It depends on what Clinton was up to, to see if it’s backfiring. But it’s definitely elevated Tulsi Gabbard. And in that sense, Hillary Clinton is Tulsi Gabbard’s asset. And if Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, then Hillary Clinton is a Russian asset by two degrees.

But I think this is a very typical Clinton behavior though. And it really has roots in how they see politics. In 2015, DNC staffers prepared a memo where they said, “The best way forward is to elevate the fringe candidates of the Republican Party,” and they named Ben Carson, and they named Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz. And so, the idea was that if you elevate fringe figures, then you can present yourself as the more moderate alternative. And as we know, that worked out wonderfully well.

Marc Steiner: So let’s talk about though the other [inaudible 00:06:43] heart of what you’re writing about. And I think that this is something … I’ve received different emails from people who watch The Real News upset we didn’t have Tulsi on more. And I look forward to interviewing Tulsi about all this as well, directly. But to really wrestle with her record, and what she’s really done and said, so let’s take this back for a minute. Let’s look at something that has happened with her interaction with the Indian Prime Minister, Modi, and also with Sisi when she went there. And what was interesting to see is that, Murtaza Mohammad Hussain tweeted this, he said: “If you want to know why Tulsi Gabbard is accused of being a supporter of murderous dictators who fit her ideology rather than a simple peacenik, reminder, she did a solidarity visit to Sisi after he massacred 800 protesters in one day. Don’t think Egypt was facing regime change.”

So let’s talk a bit about that. There are some contradictions here. I’ll go back to something you wrote in your article in a moment as well. She’s a complex character when it comes to this. I mean, it’s not so simple.

Jeet Heer: Yeah, yeah. No, no, I think to understand Gabbard, you have to understand the war on terror and the kind of … which has been going on for long enough that there are soldiers serving in Afghanistan who were born after 9/11. And Gabbard has a very interesting background in Hawaii, belonged to a group that’s kind of an offshoot of Hare Krishna. But after 2004, she joined the military and she served in Iraq in sort of a combat zone. And I think a lot of her politics is the sort of frustration that many soldiers have with the war on terror, with especially the sort of boots on the ground strategy and the regime change strategy.

But her alternative is very similar to Trump. It’s like more rubble, less trouble. What you do instead of Bush-style regime change, or Obama-style regime change, is you support the hard-line dictators in the region, use drones and targeted assassinations. And so it’s not something that I think the left should be very comfortable with. She’s very much … She calls herself a “hawk,” and she is a hawk.

Marc Steiner: Well, I mean, in your article, you wrote that, you had this quote here in your article, you said, “‘In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,’ Gabbard told a newspaper in 2018. ‘And when it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.’ And as Marcetic notes …” you write, this fellow who wrote in Jacobin that you quote, “‘Gabbard is offering nationalism in anti-war garb, reinforcing instead of undercutting the toxic rhetoric that treats foreigners as less deserving of dignity than Americans.’”

So let’s wrestle with that for a moment. I mean, how real do you think that is? I mean, and it’s not an uncommon thing to say we don’t want to end up overthrowing governments and starting wars, but how do you respond to terrorism? So this is something Americans wrestle with as well. And she may, in some senses, be hitting a pulse of what a lot of Americans are confused about and wrestling with.

Jeet Heer: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And I think, as I said, she’s a product of the war on terror. But the solution that she’s come to, I think is a very problematic solution. It is very Trump-like. And I think this is one reason why Trump has had some success. But we have to really challenge this politics that the best way is not to do regime change, but to just support really terrible dictators and to sort of do selective counter-terrorism.

I think what gets left out of the equation, what gets left out of her equation is diplomacy. And that’s what someone like Bernie Sanders offers. Bernie Sanders has a more sort of social democratic foreign policy. And he recognizes we have to actually really get at some of the root causes of these problems. So we have to actually have diplomacy to deal with Israel, Palestine, and we have to have democracy promotion that’s not based on sending in the Marines, but actually using diplomatic resources.

Marc Steiner: So let me conclude with this. I mean, the Tulsi Gabbard question, she’s a very interesting politician, she has ideas that are across the board. And just to add, when she was a kid, she was kind of born into this kind of [inaudible 00:11:15] … She didn’t join it. I mean, her father was part of it, and she was kind of in it-

Jeet Heer: Yes, [crosstalk 00:11:19]-

Marc Steiner: … and has kind of since distanced herself from all of that. But at the same time, when Trump was elected, it appeared she was seriously considering joining his administration. Steve Bannon liked her. And you’ve seen articles recently about how a lot of people on the right and libertarians really think a lot of her. So I mean, she, in some ways, reminds me of a lot of people, as I said earlier, are struggling with how to define the future. And she has that kind of confused thing. That’s why people, I think are not quite sure where she stands or what she really stands for.

Jeet Heer: Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly right, that she’s … And I think she’s always had this sort of bipartisan instinct all along, which is not a terrible instinct, by any means. But I think it becomes terrible when the person you want to link up with is Trump. And she has been more Trump-curious than any other major Democrat. And I think that, in some ways, the end point of the solutions that she’s coming to, precisely because she rejects diplomacy, are kind of like Trump solutions. And so it’s not surprising that a lot of Republicans like her. And I think we have to be very … It’s not enough to call yourself “anti-war,” you actually have to have positions that will lead to a more peaceful world. And I don’t see that with her. So even though I think Hillary Clinton is terrible for bringing up this false accusation of being a Russian asset, there are other good reasons to criticize Tulsi Gabbard.

Marc Steiner: That’s why I loved your article so much. It was really very well-balanced and really an interesting view that I think more people should read. And we’ll connect to that on our website. And Jeet Heer, I want to thank you once again for joining us here on The Real News. I enjoy your writing because it always makes us think. And have a great rest of the day.

Jeet Heer: Always great to be here, a lovely conversation.

Marc Steiner: Take care. And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you all for joining us. Let us know what you think. If you like Tulsi, write to me and I’ll write you back, and we’ll go back and forth about it. Take care.

Anonymous Trump Official Writing ‘Unprecedented’ Inside Take

NEW YORK — The Trump administration official who wrote an anonymous essay about resistance from the inside has a book deal.

The book, titled “A Warning,” will come out Nov. 19, The Hachette Book Group imprint Twelve announced Tuesday. It will likely set off the biggest Washington guessing game since “Primary Colors,” the fictionalized take on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign that turned out to be written by journalist Joe Klein.

The anonymous essay appeared in The New York Times in September 2018 and said that many within the administration were actively blocking some of Trump’s orders. No one has named the official despite widespread speculation and Trump’s own suggestion that the author’s identity be investigated.

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Twelve is calling the book “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait” that “offers a shocking, first-hand account of President Trump and his record.” The author will be identified as “A Senior Trump Administration Official.”

According to the publisher, the author accepted no advance and will donate a portion of royalties to nonprofits that focus on accountability and “standing up” for truth in oppressive countries.

The official’s literary representatives, the Washington-based Javelin, have made deals for other books that have enraged Trump, including former FBI director James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty” and former White House aide Cliff Sims’ “Team of Vipers.”

The Democratic Establishment Is Terrified of a Biden Loss

Last Saturday, nearly 26,000 people packed themselves into Queensbridge Park in New York City, angling for a chance to see Bernie Sanders speak. Almost 20,000 people did the same for Elizabeth Warren in Manhattan in September. Multiple presidential polls show Sanders and Warren, the two most progressive Democratic primary candidates, alternating between the second and third spots behind Joe Biden in the 2020 race. Those results suggest that a policy agenda that includes Medicare for All and high taxes on the wealthy is gaining traction among voters.

Establishment Democrats are panicking at this prospect, and at Biden’s declining performance. As The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin reports, they are “engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race and longing for a white knight to enter the contest at the last minute.”

After Joe Biden’s middling debate performances and repeated gaffes, Martin’s sources doubt the former vice president’s “ability to finance a multistate primary campaign.” They also worry about Elizabeth Warren’s “viability in the general election,” and whether South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg “can broaden his appeal beyond white voters.”

The centrist donor class is at it again, idly floating Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama as potential late-in-the-game entries to the presidential race, according to Martin’s unnamed sources who attended a dinner for Democratic donors at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel last week.

Leah Daughtry, a longtime Democratic party fixture and CEO of the 2016 and 2008 Democratic National Convention Committees, told Martin: “Since the last debate, just anecdotally, I’ve had five or six people ask me: ‘Is there anybody else?’ ”

Connie Schultz, a journalist married to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who considered a run earlier this year, told Martin, “There’s more anxiety than ever,” adding, “We’re both getting the calls [suggesting Brown should run]. I’ve been surprised by some who’ve called me.”

Martin does not explain whether the likes of Clinton, Bloomberg, Brown and John Kerry (another name Martin’s sources floated), would have any more luck attracting nonwhite voters or beating Trump. Only two of the names mentioned in the piece, former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, are not Caucasian.

As former Obama adviser David Axelrod explained to Martin about the Warren-Biden dynamic: “With Trump looming, there is genuine concern that the horse many have bet on may be pulling up lame and the horse who has sprinted out front may not be able to win.”

Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana, still believes Biden has the best chance to beat Trump, but says Biden’s weak fundraising remains “a real concern.”

Party elites are also apparently concerned about Warren’s “liberal politics,” although the arguably even more liberal policies of Bernie Sanders get only a brief mention at the end of the article. In fact, Sanders is not listed among the frontrunners despite his poll numbers and what CNN called his “massive” $25 million fundraising haul in the third quarter.

A Marquette University Law poll from September also suggested that Sanders could beat Trump in Wisconsin, a key swing state.

In a September article about Sanders’ electability prospects, Gloria Hoag, a New Hampshire Democratic delegate attending the state party convention, told Politico, “I love Bernie. … But I don’t know if he can beat Trump because he’s so far to the left. We need someone who’s a little more moderate.”

Perhaps all involved would do well to take Deval Patrick’s advice, as he explained to the Times: “Everybody needs to calm down, it’s early. It’s so early.”

Diplomat: Trump Linked Ukraine Aid to Demand for Probe

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Ambassador William Taylor provided lawmakers Tuesday with a vivid, detailed and what some lawmakers called “disturbing” account of the way President Donald Trump wanted to put the new Ukraine president “in a public box” by demanding a quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment probe.

In a lengthy opening statement to House investigators, Taylor described the way Trump’s demand that “everything” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wanted, including vital military aid to counter Russia, hinged on making a public vow that he would investigate Democrats going back to the 2016 U.S. election as well as a company linked to the family of Trump’s potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Taylor testified that what he discovered in Kyiv was the Trump administration’s back channel to foreign policy, led by the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a “weird combination” of “ultimately alarming circumstances” that threaten to erode the United States’ relationship with a budding Eastern European ally.

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Lawmakers emerging after hours of the private deposition said Taylor relayed a “disturbing” account, including establishing a “direct line” to the quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment probe .

Lawmakers said Taylor recalled events that filled in gaps from the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who testified last week and whose statements now are being called into question by Taylor’s account. They said Taylor kept records of conversations and documents.

“The testimony is very disturbing,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., used the same word. Asked why, he said, “Because it’s becoming more distinct.”

Taylor’s appearance was among the most watched because of a text message, released by House investigators earlier in the probe, in which he called Trump’s attempt to hold back military aid to Ukraine “crazy.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said Taylor “drew a straight line” with documents, timelines and individual conversations in his records.

“I do not know how you would listen to today’s testimony from Ambassador Taylor and come to any other (conclusion) except that the president abused his power and withheld foreign aid,” she said.

Lawmakers did not discuss other details of the closed-door session, which was expected to continue into the evening. Taylor declined to comment as he entered the deposition. He was the latest diplomat with concerns to testify. Like the others, he was subpoenaed to appear.

But the career civil servant’s delivery was credible and consistent, people said, as he answered hours of questions from Democrats and Republicans, drawing silence in the room as lawmakers exchanged glances.

Taylor laid out the quid pro quo of the White House’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless the new president, Zelenskiy, agreed to Trump’s requests to investigate Democrats, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the private testimony.

In a July phone call, Trump told Zelenskiy he wanted “a favor,” which the White House later acknowledged in a rough transcript of the conversation was Trump’s desire for Ukraine to investigate the Democratic National Committee’s email hack in 2016 as well as a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, with ties to Biden’s family.

Taylor told lawmakers that another diplomat on the string of text messages, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Sondland, was aware of the demands and later admitted he made a mistake that the aid hinged on agreeing to Trump’s requests, the person said.

The account calls into question the testimony from Sondland, a wealthy businessman who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, who told Congress last week he did not fully remember some details of the events. Sondland may be asked to return to Congress after he testified that, among other things, he was initially unaware that the gas company was tied to the Bidens.

Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., said Taylor, a career civil servant, had a better recall of details than Sondland.

Taylor, a retired diplomat, had been chosen to run the Ukraine embassy after the administration abruptly ousted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

In a series of text messages released earlier this month by impeachment investigators, Taylor appeared to be alarmed by Trump’s efforts to withhold U.S. military assistance to Ukraine that had already been approved by Congress.

“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor wrote in excerpts of the text messages released by the impeachment investigators.

He has stood by that observation in his private remarks to investigators, according to a person familiar with his testimony who was spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss it.

Taylor’s description of Trump’s position is in sharp contrast to how the president has characterized it. Trump has said many times that there was no quid pro quo, though his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, contradicted that last week. Mulvaney later tried to walk back his remarks.

Taylor, a former Army officer, had been serving as executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan think tank founded by Congress, when he was appointed to run the embassy in Kyiv. He had served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.

“He’s the epitome of a seasoned statesman,” said John Shmorhun, an American who heads the agricultural company AgroGeneration.

Before retiring from government service, Taylor was involved in diplomatic efforts surrounding several major international conflicts. He served in Jerusalem as U.S. envoy to the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers. He oversaw reconstruction in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, and from Kabul coordinated U.S. and international assistance to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003.

He arrived in Kyiv a month after the inauguration of Ukraine’s new president, prepared to steer the embassy through the transition.

After Trump’s phone conversation with Zelenskiy, Taylor exchanged text messages with two of Trump’s point men on Ukraine as they were trying to get Zelenskiy to commit to the investigations before setting a date for a coveted White House visit.

In a text message to Sondland on Sept. 1, Taylor bluntly questioned Trump’s motives: “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland instructed Taylor to call him. A week later in texts to Sondland and U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Taylor expressed increased concern and referred to the arrangement as “crazy.”

Taylor also texted that not giving the military aid to Ukraine would be his “nightmare” scenario because it would send the wrong message to both Kyiv and Moscow: “The Russians love it. (And I quit).”

U.S. diplomats based at the Kyiv Embassy have refused to speak with journalists, reflecting the sensitivity of the impeachment inquiry. The embassy press office did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

___

Associated Press writers Lynn Berry in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Matthew Lee and Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.