Chris Hedges's Blog, page 124

Mark Zuckerberg Has More Than Pete Buttigieg’s Ear

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg toured America. The cross-country trip was, as BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz described, “a charm offensive and a focus group.” Zuckerberg visited factories. He held a kitten. Multiple publications questioned whether he was running for president, or simply trying to deflect attention from mounting privacy concerns and accusations that Facebook had allowed Russian interference in the 2016 election.

While Zuckerberg may not be running for president, that doesn’t mean he’s not involved in the 2020 race. As Bloomberg reported Monday, he’s been advising the Pete Buttigieg campaign, “[recommending] several hires,” which Bloomberg writers Tyler Pager and Kurt Wagner say is “a rare example of direct political involvement from one of tech’s most powerful executives.”

Both Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, emailed Buttigieg campaign manager Mike Schmuhl with suggestions for staffing. The campaign, according to Bloomberg, hired two of those recommended. They are Eric Mayefsky, senior digital analytics adviser, and Nina Wornhoff, organizing data manager.

Chris Meagher, a campaign spokesman for Buttigieg, confirmed the emails and the hires, telling Bloomberg, “From the CNN town hall in March to our launch a month later, we literally got 7,000 resumes,” and, “I think that he (Zuckerberg) thought Eric would be a good staff hire with a lot of experience and same with Nina and Priscilla.”

Both had previously worked for Zuckerberg and Chan at least tangentially; Mayefsky at Facebook itself, and Wonhoff at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

“Having seen Mark’s visit to South Bend in 2017 and Facebook Live with Mayor Buttigieg, colleagues later asked Mark and Priscilla to connect them with the Buttigieg campaign as they were interested in joining,” Ben LaBolt, a spokesperson for the Zuckerberg-Chan family, said in a statement to Bloomberg. (Zuckerberg had also visited South Bend, Ind., as part of his cross-country tour.)

While LaBolt emphasized that neither Zuckerberg nor Chan have made any formal endorsements, he did not answer follow-up questions about whether either had made similar staff suggestions for other campaigns.

“The staff recommendations from Zuckerberg are the first evidence of the Facebook CEO actively assisting a presidential campaign,” Prager and Wagner write. It was not, however, the only link between the social media giant and the Buttigieg campaign. Per Bloomberg:

A number of other high-ranking Facebook executives, including David Marcus, the executive leading Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts, Naomi Gleit, one of Facebook’s longest-tenured executives, and Chris Cox, former chief product officer who is close friends with Zuckerberg, have donated to Buttigieg.

The email recommendations are also raising concerns, because Buttigieg has been less critical of Facebook than have other presidential candidates.

He’s become “a Silicon Valley darling in the 2020 presidential field,” as Cat Zakrzewski observed in The Washington Post in July. Bloomberg points out that Buttigieg has been “repeatedly returning to San Francisco for high-dollar fundraisers. Even though Buttigieg’s economic plan, as Zakrzewski says, takes aim at tech companies that classify workers as independent contractors rather than full employees, he’s been more hesitant to say that tech companies constitute a monopoly.

By contrast, Elizabeth Warren has a plan to break up Facebook, over which Zuckberg threatened to sue should it ever come to fruition. Even the more business-friendly Joe Biden was unsuccessful in his campaign’s attempt to convince Facebook to take down ads that falsely accused the former vice president of corruption involving the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

CNN obtained Facebook’s response to the Biden campaign, which said its decision was “grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and belief that in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”

Zuckerberg may have gotten off relatively easy so far, with just a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for Facebook’s 2016 activities involving Russian campaign meddling, but as the 2020 election ramps up, and both Zuckerberg and his company face greater scrutiny, his ability to influence politicians may prove harder than it has been. He’s scheduled to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee this Wednesday.

Chilean Military Returns to Streets as Public Unrest Mounts

Demonstrators in Chile continued their “pots and pans” protests Sunday following a week of unrest that saw hundreds arrested and the military patrolling the streets for the first time in decades.

A curfew and state of emergency are still in effect in Santiago and several other cities, The Associated Press reported.

Video posted below from online outlet El Monstrador shows a protest Sunday in Santiago’s Plaza Ñuñoa:

AHORA| Pese al estado de emergencia y la primera noche de toque de queda, las protestas ciudadanas no ceden y nuevamente este domingo se reactivaron los cacerolazos. Acá, Plaza Ñuñoa pic.twitter.com/Q12IoldaWZ

— el mostrador (@elmostrador) October 20, 2019

The country’s billionaire right-wing President Sebastián Piñera announced late Saturday that he was suspending a planned 4 percent increase in subway fares. That fare hike had prompted hundreds of young people on Monday to jump metro turnstiles and triggered protests in other cities in the country. But that may not have been the only catalyst. As The Guardian noted, the “latest protests follow grievances over the cost of living, specifically the costs of healthcare, education, and public services.”

Reuters reported Saturday:

Fires continued to burn and looters were seen in flashpoints around the city of six million people where earlier police and military clashed with protesters. There was also significant unrest in the port city of Valparaiso, seat of Chile’s Congress, where the government also declared military rule late on Saturday, and in the southern city of Concepcion.

“The center-right Pinera said he would invoke a special state security law to prosecute the ‘criminals’ responsible for the city-wide damage,” Reuters reported.

According to Santiago Mayor Karla Rubilar Barahona, two people died from a fire in a supermarket in the San Bernardo area of the capital and a third person died after being taken to the hospital.

In addition to the curfew and state emergency, the government responded to the unrest by dispatching the military to city streets.

It marks the first time the army marched through the streets of Santiago, AP noted, since  1990, when the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ousted Salvador Allende in a U.S.-backed coup, ended.

This is so awful. The military is in the street in Chile to repress protests against increased public transport fees. The echoes of images from 1973 are surreal; the military is nothing if not consistent as an enforcer of neoliberalization https://t.co/qOgKSQ5LtK

— Madeleine Wattenbarger (@madeleinewhat) October 19, 2019

Another user shared video of soldiers in the city of Valparaiso:

Imágenes perturbadoras desde #Valparaíso, ya bajo toque de queda. Es muy doloroso ver a #Chile con militares controlando todas las calles, mientras la población muestra su hartazgo social. #ChileResiste pic.twitter.com/aCveQHtdZf

— Erika Guevara-Rosas (@ErikaGuevaraR) October 20, 2019

The images, wrote Erika Guevara-Rosas, are “disturbing.”

Is War on the Ballot in the 2020 Elections?

We complain that democracy is under assault from Donald Trump, but he’s just a cog in a much larger worldwide machine that is tearing down democratic self-governance. Purely to enhance profits, the transnational corporate community literally works every day to more deeply intertwine our economic, social, and political systems with those of “business-friendly” authoritarian regimes around the world.

These American corporations are thus normalizing authoritarianism and helping silence those who speak out in favor of democracy. As a result, Freedom House notes, “Between 2005 and 2018, the share of Not Free countries rose [from 23 percent] to 26 percent, while the share of Free countries declined [from 46 percent] to 44 percent.”

And when democracy fails, history tells us that war usually follows.

It used to be at least embarrassing for American companies to get caught trying to do business with brutal governments; now it’s the core of the American business model, with American companies embracing and depending on governments and government-owned companies from Saudi Arabia to China (two countries currently subsidizing the construction of Trump resorts within their borders) and Turkey (with its own Trump “twin tower”).

CEOs who lecture us on free speech, customer service and LGBT rights cravenly snivel before the Chinese government when told they can’t mention Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, or the Hong Kong democracy movement. Oil companies, banks and defense contractors eagerly court the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia even as the CIA concludes he ordered the brutal murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

This transition in business ethics has led to an ongoing crisis in democratic institutions and governments around the world.

Here at home, the post-Powell Memo (1971) corruption of American government by billionaire and big business interests has led to an explicit failure of democracy—where average American voters don’t get what they want when they vote—that is now tearing our country apart.

Admiral William McRaven, who ran the operation to take down Osama bin Laden, has recently written that America is under attack from within by Donald Trump. He added that our power on the world stage comes not from military or economic might, but because our “ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.”

But McRaven—and other commentators generally—fail to identify the largest source of support for regimes around the world that illicitly imprison millions of their own people, murder their political critics while their corrupt leaders live opulent lives, and ruthlessly suppress free speech and forbid a free media.

The source that has empowered Trump to claim that the Constitution says he can do anything he wants and that the press is the “enemy of the people” is the American-based transnational business community, particularly its largest members.

It wasn’t always this way.

In the last months of Reagan’s first year in office, Armand Hammer, the president of one of the world’s largest oil companies, was frustrated that his repeated attempts to reach out to the president were being “blocked” by people in the administration.

Like Fred Koch, who built an oil empire in the USSR with the help of Joseph Stalin, Armand Hammer had bought Occidental Petroleum out of near bankruptcy and, with the help of Vladimir Lenin and, later, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, turned it into one of the largest private oil and chemical empires in the world.

Unlike Koch (who had become fervently anti-communist upon his return to the U.S.), though, Hammer enthusiastically traded with every Soviet administration until the day he died in 1990. And it worried the men around Reagan.

Reagan himself was highly corrupt, as were many of the people around him. But they knew they couldn’t openly challenge the idea of democracy, or openly embrace violent authoritarians.

America has never lived up to the values we claim to espouse, but at least we’ve held them up as goals worth accomplishing. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that every person was entitled to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” everybody in the world knew he wasn’t referring to all Americans.

But it was a beginning, and by holding high the ideals of the Enlightenment, we ensured that we’d steadily, albeit slowly and in fits and starts, get to the targets we were espousing.

And even though we’ve helped out and collaborated with our share of despots over the years, at least we generally did it with what we considered to be a good reason that would one day lead to a greater good—or we did it outside of the light of day. The result of this apparent moral clarity was an explosion of nations throughout the 20th century claiming for themselves our values and thus instituting democratic forms of governance.

Although there were only a handful of democratic governments worldwide in the 19th century, by the beginning of the 21st century, nearly half the world’s population lived in democracies, comprising fully one-third of the world’s nations.

And democracy, it turns out, is the most powerful way of preventing war.

Back in 1795, when the idea of a stable and enduring democracy was only a flickering experiment in North America and just catching fire in France, Immanuel Kant suggested that it might be possible to eliminate the worst scourge that had, since the days of Gilgamesh, afflicted humankind: he believed that, through the simple institution of a political system, war could be ended for all time.

Kant’s treatise on the topic, Zum Ewigen Frieden: Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Draft), suggested that when a nation was ruled democratically—that is, by the will of the majority of the people—those people would never choose war unless it was in self-defense. Therefore, Kant reasoned, if all nations were democratic, there would never be aggressors (because no majority of citizens would ever vote to send their own children off to die unless attacked), and war would be eliminated.

Kant’s prediction didn’t come out of the blue. Similar sentiments had been implied by Adam Smith in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, and were openly advocated by America’s founders, particularly Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, who wrote that “All wars are follies,” and, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

That’s almost certainly why the Constitution gives the ability to declare war exclusively to Congress, which answers to the people of the nation every two years in a national election.

The concept of democracy preventing wars wasn’t much discussed—other than among philosophers—between the Civil War and World War I. But in the 20th century, scholars rediscovered Kant’s work on democracy, and the “democratic peace theory” became a credible subject of study and debate.

One of the first was former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, later U.S. president, who echoed Kant in his belief that the promotion of democracy around the world (through the League of Nations, in his case) could end war for all time. This is why World War I was, during its time, considered “the war to end all wars.”

Later, social and political scientists began a more methodical analysis of the world since the widespread creation of liberal democracies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What they found shocked them, because it didn’t just indicate a possibility or a trend but pointed to what Kant had predicted—an immutable law of human behavior.

In a 1972 paper, Dean Babst, a research scientist with New York State, found that in a study of 116 wars that involved 438 countries, “no wars have been fought between independent nations with elective governments [between 1789 and 1941].”

If you were to consider that even though Germany was theoretically a democracy when Hitler was elected, it was no longer a “liberal democracy” when it went to war (because he had banned opposition parties and a free press), the date stretches well into the present era.

After Babst piqued the interest of the international research community, a number of papers and books were published confirming his perspective. Among the best known is Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 by Melvin Small and David Singer that examined every war from 1816 to 1980 that produced more than 1,000 deaths in battle. Not one of them was fought between two democracies.

One of the world’s leading experts on democracy and the author of several books on it, including Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, Professor Rudolph J. Rummel used a similar definition of a war (producing over 1,000 casualties) in an exhaustive analysis of 353 dyads (pairs) of nations that had engaged in battle between 1816 and 1991. Rummel, like Babst, defined a democracy as a nation with universal suffrage, a free press, and active multiple political parties. (By these definitions, the United States didn’t become a “full democracy” until 1920 when women were enfranchised; this squishiness of definitions of democracy is the main critique of democratic peace theory.)

Dr. Rummel found that dictatorships fought each other in 198 of the 353 conflicts, and democracies fought against non-democracies in 155 wars, but was unable to find evidence of any war between two fully functioning democracies.

As Causes of War author Jack Levy pointed out, “the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything to an empirical law in international relations.”

Similarly, famine, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, simply doesn’t happen in functioning democracies. In his book Development As Freedom, he writes explicitly that, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Per Ahlmark, the late deputy prime minister of Sweden, addressed the European Parliament to echo that sentiment, saying:

“Again, the crucial factor is freedom. Where there is an active opposition and a free press, governments cannot neglect tens of thousands of people starving to death. When the opposition is silenced and mass media give voice only to the propaganda of the dictator, the fate of millions of people dying from famine could be kept secret and ignored—because of ideology, incompetence, systematic lying and total lack of compassion.”

Ahlmark recounts how democracies don’t initiate wars, commit democide, or experience famine, and then concludes:

“Since the last century, liberals [citizens of liberal democracies] have imagined or felt these connections to be true. And later we have seen how mass murderers have torn peoples and nations to pieces when Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao seized power. Now the peace researchers have confirmed our fears and convictions with figures, analysis and the collection of countless documents. So, my report today to the liberal parties of Europe is that you have been right about freedom the whole time.”

Some scholars suggest that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other not because of universal suffrage, multiple parties and a free press, but rather because they have a commonality of interests; this is the argument that has been made by neoliberals for corporate-managed “free trade.” Democratic peace theory was also invoked by Bush and Cheney as a justification for overthrowing the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq to “establish democracy” in those countries, although Americans have since learned the two oil CEOs were less interested in peace than in American control of the world’s second-largest supply of oil.

Others point out that some democracies have gone to war with each other, although most of their examples don’t involve fully functional and mature democracies or do involve what are basically civil wars (like the Yugoslav wars).

But regardless of the mechanism of action, there’s a broad consensus that the more corrupt and authoritarian a government is, the more likely it is to go to war.

Unfortunately, over the past 40 or so years, corporate money has corrupted government after government around the world, as other democracies embrace the radical doctrine of five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court that “money is free speech.”

The result for the world is that, since this ruling in 1976 and its adoption in similar forms by other nations over the following decades, nation after nation have discarded egalitarian democratic norms and their people know it. In most cases, what has risen in the place of democratic norms have been authoritarian strongman governments that rely heavily on corrupt corporate structures.

In moving America’s factory floor to cheap labor countries with repressive regimes like China and subsidizing Saudi Arabia’s brutal dictatorship for generations, American businesses and neoliberal politicians are both subsidizing and endorsing undemocratic governance.

By embracing the leadership of nations that have recently discarded democratic norms—like India, the Philippines, Hungary and Turkey—Trump has told the rest of the democratic world that they’re essentially on their own.

America, which fought two bloody world wars we believed were necessary to preserve democracy, is, according to Trump, done fighting even rhetorically for democracy (the Syrian Kurds, for example, had embraced secular democratic governance in most of the regions of northern Syria that Trump just handed to strongman Erdogan).

Now the question is if we’ll continue down the same long slide Trump and his billionaire buddies are pushing us into (plutocracy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy)—or whether we’ll wake up and return to democratic norms. We’ll almost certainly find out in November 2020.

A world at war or at peace is literally in the balance.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute .

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Netanyahu Dealt Setback in Attempt to Form New Coalition

JERUSALEM—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that he had failed to form a majority government in parliament, marking a major setback for the embattled Israeli leader that plunges the country into a new period of political uncertainty.

In a statement, Netanyahu said he had worked “tirelessly” to establish a unity government with his chief rival, former military chief Benny Gantz, but been repeatedly rebuffed. Facing a Wednesday deadline, Netanyahu said he was returning the “mandate” to President Reuven Rivlin, who will now ask Gantz to try to form a coalition.

While Netanyahu remains at the helm of his Likud party, his announcement marked the second time this year that he has been unable to form a government. With Israel’s attorney general set to decide in the coming weeks on whether to indict Netanyahu in a series of corruption cases, the longtime Israeli leader could come under heavy pressure to step aside.

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In last month’s national election, Netanyahu fell short of securing a 61-seat parliamentary majority. But Rivlin gave Netanyahu the first opportunity to form a government because he had more support — 55 seats — than Gantz, who was supported by only 54.

Netanyahu had hoped to form a broad “unity” government with Gantz, who heads the centrist Blue and White party. But Netanyahu insisted that his coalition include his traditional allies, a collection of hardline and religious parties, drawing accusations from Gantz that he was not negotiating in good faith.

“Since I received the mandate, I have worked tirelessly both in public and behind the scenes to establish a broad, national unity government. That’s what the people want,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

“During the past few weeks, I made every effort to bring Benny Gantz to the negotiating table. Every effort to establish a broad national unity government, every effort to prevent another election,” he said. “To my regret, time after time he declined. He simply refused.”

In a short statement, Gantz’s Blue and White party said that “now is the time of action.”

“Blue and White is determined to form the liberal unity government, led by Benny Gantz, that the people of Israel voted for a month ago,” it said.

There is no guarantee, however, that Gantz will succeed.

He has expressed willingness to form a partnership with Likud, but not if Netanyahu continues to lead while he faces such serious legal problems. For the time being, Likud has remained steadfastly behind its leader.

Without Likud, Gantz will have a hard time securing a majority in parliament. The opposition to Netanyahu includes a diverse group of parties, ranging from Arab parties to the secular ultranationalist party Yisrael Beitenu, that are unlikely to sit together in partnership.

If Gantz fails during his 28-day window, a majority of lawmakers could try to endorse a third candidate, something that has never happened before. And if that fails, the country would be forced into the unprecedented scenario of a third election in under a year.

$260 Million Deal Averts 1st Federal Trial on Opioid Scandal

CLEVELAND—The nation’s three biggest drug distributors and a major drugmaker reached an 11th-hour, $260 million settlement over the toll of the opioids in two Ohio counties, averting what would have been the first federal trial over the crisis.

The settlement was announced just hours before the trial was scheduled to start, with a jury selected last week.

The trial involved only two counties — Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County and Akron’s Summit County — but was seen as an important test case that could gauge the strength of the opposing sides’ arguments and prod them toward a nationwide settlement.

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Across the country, the drug industry is facing more than 2,600 lawsuits brought by state and local governments seeking to hold it accountable for the crisis that has been linked to more than 400,000 deaths in the U.S. over the past two decades. A federal judge in Ohio has been pushing the parties toward a settlement of all the lawsuits for nearly two years.

The agreement announced Monday calls for the distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson to pay a combined $215 million, said Hunter Shkolnik, a lawyer for Cuyahoga County.

Israeli-based drugmaker Teva would contribute $20 million in cash and $25 million worth of Suboxone, a drug used to treat opioid addiction.

“People can’t lose sight of the fact that the counties got a very good deal for themselves, but we also set an important national benchmark for the others,” Shkolnik said.

The deal contains no admission of wrongdoing by the defendants, said Joe Rice, a lead plaintiffs’ lawyer.

But it could turn up the pressure on all sides to work out a nationwide settlement, because every partial settlement reached reduces the amount of money the companies have available to pay other plaintiffs.

Separately, the small distributor Henry Schein also announced Monday that it is settling with Summit County for $1.25 million. The company was not named in Cuyahoga’s lawsuit.

After the new settlements and previous ones with other drugmakers, the only defendant left in the trial that had been scheduled for Monday is the pharmacy chain Walgreens. The new plan is for Walgreens and other pharmacies to go to trial within six months.

Monday’s settlement removes the risks and uncertainties involved in a trial for both sides: The counties immediately lock in money they can use to deal with the crisis, and the drug companies avoid a possible finding of wrongdoing and a huge jury verdict.

“There’s no amount of money that’s going to change the devastation and destruction that they’ve done to families not only all across our county but all across the country,” said Travis Bornstein, who was preparing to testify in the Cleveland trial. But he said the settlement should help provide services for people who are struggling.

Bornstein said his son, Tyler, became hooked on opioids as a teenager after receiving a prescription after surgery on his arm and died from a heroin overdose five years later, in 2014.

Better funding for treatment programs might have helped his son, who was on a waiting list for a county treatment program when he died, Bornstein said.

The settlement also means that the evidence prepared for the trial won’t be fully aired.

Lawyers for the counties were preparing to show the jury a 1900 first edition of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” featuring the poisonous poppy fields that put Dorothy to sleep, and a 3,000-year-old Sumerian poppy jug to show that the world has long known the dangers of opioids.

U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing the mountain of lawsuits, has long pushed for a coast-to-coast settlement that would provide money for treatment and other expenses associated with the crisis and force the industry to change its ways.

The plaintiffs have accused the industry of aggressively marketing opioids while downplaying the risks of addiction and turning a blind eye toward suspiciously large shipments of the drugs. The industry has denied wrongdoing.

Industry CEOs and attorneys general from four states met Friday in Cleveland, where the offer on the table was a deal worth potentially $48 billion in cash and drugs to settle cases nationally.

But they couldn’t close the deal, partly because of disagreements between state and local governments over how to allocate the settlement, which would have come from the three big distributors, Teva and Johnson & Johnson.

In a statement, the attorneys general from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, which are leading those talks, said that effort will continue — and that the Ohio settlement helps.

“People in every corner of the country have been hurt by this crisis, and it is critical that settlement funds be distributed fairly across states, cities and counties and used wisely to combat the crisis,” they said.

In a statement, the three big distributors said they dispute the counties’ accusations but agreed that the settlement could help clear the way for a bigger one.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, often cast as the biggest villain in the crisis, reached a tentative settlement last month that could be worth up to $12 billion. But half the states and hundreds of local governments oppose it. It remains to be seen whether the settlement will receive the approvals it needs.

In a statement, Walgreens noted in its defense that it distributed opioids only to its own pharmacies, something it says differentiates the company from others in the industry.

“We never sold opioid medications to pain clinics, internet pharmacies or the ‘pill mills’ that fueled the national opioid crisis,” the company said.

___

Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Boris Johnson Will Ruin Britain or Cry Trying

Another day, another drama in the Brexit saga that has consumed the United Kingdom. The past few days have once again left heads spinning around the world as those interested in U.K. politics try to catch up with the events that keep unfurling at neck-breaking speed. On Friday, the Oct. 19 deadline put forward in the Benn Act to either get a Brexit deal passed through Parliament or ask the European Union for an extension past the Oct. 31 deadline loomed. That’s when Prime Minister Boris Johnson miraculously managed to negotiate a deal with the EU—well, I should say, a regurgitated, amended version of his predecessor Theresa May’s deal.

After over a month of defeats in his homeland, things seemed to be looking up over the weekend for the newly minted prime minister. On what was dubbed “Super Saturday,” Parliament convened on a weekend for the first time in over 40 years to vote on his deal just before the 11 p.m. deadline to send an extension request to the EU—something he’s publicly stated he’d rather be “dead in a ditch” than do. But because we’re talking about Brexit here and the only thing that’s clear about this mess is that nothing is ever clear or straightforward, Saturday went very differently than Johnson presumably hoped as he returned to Westminster with his “my deal or no deal” approach.

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A Member of Parliament—who, up until September, when he had the whip withdrawn, was a member of Johnson’s Tory Party—threw a “spanner in the works,” as the Brits say. Oliver Letwin introduced an amendment stipulating that Parliament would not vote on Johnson’s deal until the legislation required to implement the deal had been passed. The Letwin amendment essentially would ensure that the U.K. didn’t crash out of the EU on Oct. 31 if the legislation had not yet been passed, which could very well have happened if some MPs had indicated their support of the deal in Saturday’s vote, but then blocked legislation to implement it moving forward.

The motion passed 322 to 306, forcing Johnson by law to request a three-month extension of Article 50 from the EU in order to allow time for the legislation to be voted on in Parliament. The thinking behind this move was that parliamentarians need time to properly review the 500-plus-page deal before signaling their support. All of this, it’s worth noting, took place against a backdrop of anti-Brexit protests in which thousands took to the streets, including children with signs that read along the lines of “Brexit stole my future.”

The very existence of the amendment speaks to how little faith even those who were once supporters have in the prime minister. Many, including some politicians who are still members of the Tory Party, believe Johnson cannot be trusted to stick to his word, and are doing everything they can to ensure he doesn’t pull a fast one, not only on his fellow parliamentarians, but on the entire U.K. It is a sad state of British affairs when even members of your own party don’t believe you’ll do what you say.

In a move that seemed to affirm the reason for MPs’ lack of faith, Johnson sent two letters to the EU on Saturday evening—one requesting an extension, which he refused to sign, followed by a signed letter in which he opined that it would be a mistake to delay the process any longer. The move was that of a petulant child, as Labour’s Brexit Shadow Minister Keir Starmer quickly pointed out. More importantly, it was the act of a man who has coasted through life on his white male privilege all the way to one of the most powerful positions in the world. This moment, like no other, sums up Johnson’s ethos: He is through and through an unscrupulous, wealthy man who is simply unaccustomed to hearing the word “no,” and will throw a tantrum and play games with countless lives in order to get his way.

This two-letter business reminds me of another moment in Johnson’s career in the not-so-long ago past of 2016. Just days before he declared he would join the campaign to leave the European Union, the then-power-hungry backbencher wrote a secret column in which he argued for the U.K. to remain in the EU. The turning point in Johnson’s ideas on the EU, like his two letters, is illustrative of his true allegiances to none other than himself. At the time, it seems he assessed which campaign would provide him with an easier path to power, over the heads of his former Oxford chums David Cameron and George Osbourne, and chose to back “leave” in direct opposition to his party and the Tory government.

In sending two letters to the EU on Saturday, Johnson was somehow able to create an illusion—although who knows whether anyone is fooled—that he didn’t actually request an extension. It was, put simply, a last-ditch attempt to save face in front of his hard-right supporters who perhaps expected him to keel over before writing such a request. His play is already being challenged in courts and ultimately is unlikely to affect whether or not the EU grants an extension, which it is expected to do.

After the weekend’s defeat, Johnson and his government continued to scramble Monday to shape the narrative and push through another vote on his deal. But what exactly is in this agreement he so triumphantly returned from Brussels with? The main difference between May’s unpopular deal and Johnson’s are the arrangements regarding Ireland. Johnson attempted to replace the so-called “Irish backstop,” which would keep Northern Ireland and, by default, the rest of the U.K. in a customs union with the EU if the U.K. and EU fail to negotiate trade agreements during the designated two-year transition period. Under the new deal, Northern Ireland would have customs checkpoints in various locations not along the border with the Republic of Ireland, in a half-assed attempt to keep to the Good Friday Agreement. Johnson also negotiated further details regarding Northern Ireland, none of which earned him the support of the Democratic Unionist Party that feels, pretty justifiably, betrayed.

From a leftist perspective, as Starmer highlighted, the true issues with Johnson’s deal are that it removes the promise of a “level playing field” with the EU, replacing it with fuzzier language that could potentially allow the U.K. to backslide on environmental and labor standards in order to make deals with the U.S., among others. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had said May’s deal was for a “bargain basement Brexit,” called Johnson’s further-right revisions a “race to the bottom.”

Boris Johnson's sell-out deal risks triggering a race to the bottom on rights and protections: putting food safety at risk, cutting environmental standards and workers’ rights, and opening up our NHS to a takeover by US corporations.

Today, @UKLabour will reject it.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) October 19, 2019

A few questions are still circling around these events. One is whether Johnson actually wants his deal (or any deal, for that matter) to go through, or if he is in fact working toward a no-deal Brexit. In September, around the time the prime minister was being handed defeat after defeat in the House of Commons and a painful loss regarding the prorogation of Parliament in the U.K.’s highest court, Johnson’s government spent an estimated $130 million on a “Get Ready for Brexit” campaign; I’ve seen the posters at London’s bus stops and the Underground, as well as the slogan emblazoned on buses. That’s when Philip Hammond, the former Tory chancellor under May, wrote an op-ed for The Times reiterating what the prime minister’s own sister, Rachel Johnson, had recently pointed out: This prime minister “is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit.”

As with all political games of this scale, those who will suffer most are never the monied elites who have the deep pockets and influence to profit from terrible historical events, something Corbyn has vehemently highlighted time and again. Rachel Johnson and Hammond’s remarks have led to calls for an inquiry into the prime minister’s conflicts of interests.

In the meantime, another question looming is “What now?”—a question that leads to hundreds of other questions rather than answers. Just as with the entire three-year process to date, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow refused to allow Johnson to introduce another meaningful vote on his deal Monday, in a fresh blow to Johnson’s leadership. There have been indications that if his deal gets the votes it needs to pass in coming weeks, Labour backbenchers will add amendments that will require a second referendum, this time with the two options being the negotiated deal or “remain.” Given that most of the British public had no idea what “leave” meant when it voted in 2016, this would make sense, democratically speaking, despite plenty of Brexiteer attempts to frame another people’s vote as anti-democratic.

Another amendment that could be added is wording that would keep the U.K. in the European Customs Union, essentially solving the problem of the Irish border and forcing the U.K. to maintain EU environmental and labor standards in trade negotiations.

Either of these amendments may cause Johnson to either abandon his deal or swallow a potentially softer Brexit.

It’s crucial to recall, as many MPs have been reminding the public, that this is only the divorce agreement—the actual details of a future relationship with the European Union will be hammered out in the next stage over the coming years. The question the British public should ask itself then, especially as a general election is likely in the cards within the next few months, is who it wants leading the negotiations for Britain. If Johnson’s deal and actions are indicative of nothing else, they reveal that he and his government are solely interested in protecting the interests of the elite over those of workers, and will happily take the U.K. in a hard-right direction. This prime minister seems to have little respect for the democratically elected Parliament,  as he proved with his prorogation attempts.

The British may be tired of Brexit—frankly, who can blame them?—but they would be wise to heed the warning that perhaps this public exhaustion and high-pressure, last-ditch game was always the way the Tory Party and its leaders planned to ram this through Parliament.

As the Brexit rigmarole continues to unfold, the questions U.K. citizens and residents are facing aren’t just about what kind of connection to the EU they want to have, but what kind of nation they want to be.

Pete Buttigieg’s Corporate Heel-Turn

Pete Buttigieg burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential candidate. But it turns out he’s a very old kind — a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as Buttigieg escalates his offensive against Medicare for All.

A not-so-funny thing has happened to Buttigieg on the campaign trail. As he kept collecting big checks from corporate executives and wealthy donors, he went from being “all for” a single-payer Medicare for All system in January to trashing it in the debate last week as a plan that would kick “150 million Americans off of their insurance in four short years.” The demagoguery won praise from corporate media outlets.

Those outlets have often lauded Buttigieg for his fundraising totals this year without scrutiny of the funding sources. They skew toward the wealthy — and toward donors with a vested interest in protecting the status quo.

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“Of course, from a voter’s point of view, what really matters is not how much financial support a candidate is getting, but who they’re getting it from — because those supporters may not have the same interests as the voter,” Jim Naureckas at the media watchdog FAIR pointed out this summer. “In the case of Buttigieg, the two main sources of funds seem to be the tech industry . . . and the financial industry, that traditional source of funds for corporate-oriented Democrats.”

So far this year, Buttigieg has reported $27 million in contributions of $200 and above — accounting for 52.5 percent of his total dollars raised. Compare that to Elizabeth Warren at 29.6 percent and Bernie Sanders at 24.9 percent.

And major sources of Buttigieg’s funding are in harmony with his recent hostility toward Medicare for All. “Pharmaceutical, health insurance, and hospital industry donors have flocked to Mayor Pete all year,” journalist Alex Kotch reported last week. “As of mid-2019, he was second only to Donald Trump in overall campaign cash from donors in the health sector. Among Democratic candidates, he was second to former Vice President Joe Biden in terms of pharmaceutical and health insurance donations.”

Reporting for the investigative website Sludge, Kotch wrote: “Over 100 individuals in leadership, legal, consulting, or financing roles in health sector donated $200 or more to Pete for America between July and September. These donors include pharmaceutical industry leaders such as the chief corporate affairs officer at drugmaker Pfizer, the president of Astex Pharmaceuticals, a state lobbyist for Biogen, a vice president of public policy at Novartis, and the deputy vice president at the nation’s largest pharmaceutical trade association, PhRMA, as well as attorneys for AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.”

Buttigieg’s reversal of avowed support for Medicare for All is classic opportunism. In early 2018, he was unequivocal via Twitter: “I, Pete Buttigieg, politician, do henceforth and forthwith declare, most affirmatively and indubitably, unto the ages, that I do favor Medicare for All.”

Eight months ago, as The Hill noted, “Buttigieg also appeared to defend single-payer [Medicare for All] health insurance in a February 2019 interview on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe.’” But now, on its website, the Buttigieg campaign is engaged in a herculean pretzel effort at doubletalk, declaring that his “affordable public plan will incentivize private insurers to compete on price and bring down costs. If private insurers are not able to offer something dramatically better, this public plan will create a natural glide-path to Medicare for All.”

Left unexplained is how Buttigieg is providing any sort of “glide-path” to Medicare for All by now deploying insurance-industry talking points to denounce Medicare for All. Buttigieg is trying to poison the well by conjuring up an effort to precipitously dump people off of health coverage and deprive them of “choice” — deliberately confusing the current “choice” of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that enhanced Medicare for everyone would provide.

“The efficiencies of a single-payer system would make universal coverage affordable and give everyone in the United States their free choice of doctors and hospitals,” David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler wrote this month in The Nation. “But that goal will remain out of reach if private insurers are allowed to continue gaming the system.”

Himmelstein and Woolhandler, who are professors of public health and cofounders of Physicians for a National Health Program, assessed the healthcare scenarios being touted by the two most prominent candidates now attacking Warren and Sanders: “Some proposals, including those by Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, would offer a Medicare-like public plan for sale alongside private plans on the insurance exchanges now available under the Affordable Care Act. These buy-in reforms would minimize the need for new taxes, since most enrollees would be charged premiums. But tens of millions would remain uninsured or with coverage so skimpy, they still couldn’t afford care.”

The sordid story of Buttigieg’s about-face on Medicare for All was well-documented and deftly analyzed days ago by Jezebel writer Esther Wang under the headline “A Brief History of Pete Buttigieg Faking It on Medicare for All.” She observed: “Buttigieg is not the only Democratic presidential candidate who has switched positions on supporting Medicare for All, or is just generally using the public and political confusion around the issue to undermine real efforts to move to a universal system. Kamala Harris, who co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Senate bill, has consistently waffled, and has settled on a plan that continues to let private insurers play a role. But Buttigieg is the only candidate who is now making opposition to the Sanders- and Warren-backed Medicare for All a central focus of his campaign.”

With the mutual alignment of Buttigieg and his corporate healthcare-industry donors, Mayor Pete’s approach seems to be a case of a flimflamming candidate who poses as a forthright leader. For the general public, instead of “Mayor Pete,” a more apt nickname might be “Mayor Elite.”

As for Buttigieg’s slippery slogan of “Medicare for all who want it,” Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out that such a setup “won’t bring the administrative costs down of private insurers or maximize negotiation with Big Pharma and hospitals.” And: “This means higher premiums, higher drug costs, higher deductibles, and more denied claims for the middle class.”

An in-depth report from the Political Economy Research Institute — “Economic Analysis of Medicare for All” — concluded that “Medicare for All has the potential to achieve major cost savings in its operations relative to the existing U.S. health care system. We estimate that, through implementation of Medicare for All, overall U.S. health care costs could fall by about 19 percent relative to the existing system.”

Yet Buttigieg has joined with Joe Biden to open up a well-funded, double-barreled assault on Medicare for All.

“I am tired of seeing Democrats defend a dysfunctional healthcare system where 87 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 30,000 people die every year because they lack adequate coverage,” Bernie Sanders wrote last Friday in an email to supporters. “So I was disappointed this week to see that Joe Biden used the talking points of the health insurance industry to attack Medicare for All and our campaign.”

While Buttigieg is not strong in national polls right now, he’s polling notably well in Iowa, where the first voting for the Democratic presidential nomination will occur in early-February caucuses. And with $23.4 million in the bank, he’s got much more money in hand than Biden ($9 million). The only rivals with more money than Buttigieg are the two he’s assailing for their resolute support of Medicare for All — Sanders ($33.7 million) and Warren ($25.7 million).

While I personally support Sanders, I’m equally appalled by Buttigieg’s attacks on Warren. As part of a campaign strategy that aims to undermine both of his progressive opponents, the mayor continues to falsely characterize Medicare for All — no matter how much confusion and disinformation he creates along the way.

Whether or not Pete Buttigieg can win the nomination, he has certainly emerged as a sharp corporate tool.

Pity the Kurds

I stood on the wind-swept Kalowa Hill in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya as Pershan Hassan, a stocky 53-year-old woman, clambered quickly up the dirt track leading to where a mass grave was being excavated. She clutched a framed black-and-white picture of a boy. She pushed her way through the crowd that was looking down at the unearthed remains of dozens of bodies. Suddenly, she let out a gasp of pain and recognition as she saw the skeletal remains of her 13-year-old son, Shafiq. A faded blue blindfold was wrapped tightly around his skull. The casings from spent bullets were scattered around his dark brown bones.

“I know him by his clothes,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she lifted the garments and kissed them. “I raised him without a father.”

It was December 1991, after the first Iraq war. Saddam Hussein had ruthlessly crushed a Kurdish revolt in the aftermath of Iraq’s defeat that spring by the United States and its allies. Two million refugees had fled toward Turkey and Iran in April 1991. Many froze to death in the snow-covered mountain passes as they tried to escape. The international community, responding to the heartbreaking images, created havens for their return in northern Iraq, forcing Baghdad to withdraw its troops.

I spent months with the Kurds as a reporter for The New York Times after the Iraqi withdrawal, including living and sleeping with seven Kurdish, or peshmerga, bodyguards after Baghdad offered bounties of $1,000 for the murder of Western reporters and aid workers in the Kurdish region. Several of my colleagues were killed or badly wounded.

Kurdistan, “land of the Kurds,” is recorded as far back as the 15th century by European visitors. The Kurds, who speak Kurdish and are mostly Sunni Muslims, were promised a state by the victorious allies following World War I and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. Instead the Kurdish region was carved up among Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq and the Soviet Union. The Kurdish struggle for an independent state, an effort that has included numerous armed insurgencies, has lasted nearly a century. And so have the brutal waves of repression, extermination and betrayal to crush Kurdish aspirations.

President Donald Trump’s abandonment of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria is another chapter in a sad and heartless game, repeatedly replayed, in which Kurdish forces are armed and used to achieve the strategic aims of rival nation-states and then discarded. An estimated 11,000 Kurdish fighters died battling Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. They were cannon fodder for the United States.

Turkey’s recent incursion into northern Syria is aimed at weakening the ties between the SDF and the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carried out an insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984. The PKK, whose popular backing has been bolstered by the brutal Turkish repression of the Kurds, has broad support and is a surprisingly effective insurgent force.

When I was with a PKK unit operating along the border between Turkey and Iraq I noted to the commander how well trained his unit appeared to be. “Oh,” he said, “we tell our fighters to do their two years of compulsory Turkish army service before they join us.”

There are between 25 million and 30 million Kurds who live in the swath of territory that stretches through northern Iraq into Turkey. It is the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its own. Kurdish groups and clans, to survive, make ever-shifting alliances, including the latest decision by the SDF to unite with Damascus. Kurds have forged temporary alliances throughout their history with the U.S., the Soviet Union, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. These alliances have always disintegrated, usually when the Kurds were no longer considered useful. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the United States’ then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, for example, armed the Kurds in northern Iraq as a way to destabilize Baghdad. But the shah, in a secret deal with Baghdad, sold out his Kurdish allies, allowing Iraq to carry out a scorched-earth policy against the Kurds that created a humanitarian disaster and an exodus of Kurds in 1975 as devastating as the one resulting from the aborted Kurdish rebellion in 1991 after the Gulf War.

The counterinsurgency campaigns against the Kurds, often unseen or ignored by the outside world, have at times reached genocidal levels. Baghdad dropped poison gas on some 60 Kurdish villages in 1988 and razed 4,000 Kurdish villages in what was known as the Anfal campaign, an attempt to annihilate the Kurds in Iraq. As many as 200,000 Kurds were “disappeared,” with tens of thousands rounded up and executed. I was present as mass graves each with more than a thousand bodies in northern Iraq were excavated, including one with 1,500 Kurdish soldiers in the Iraqi army who had apparently attempted to rebel. I passed village after village in northern Iraq that had been dynamited into rubble. There was no electricity or running water and little food. It was not uncommon to find families living like moles under the collapsed slabs of concrete of their former homes, the land around them littered with land mines.

The withdrawal of Iraq from the northern Kurdish areas following the 1991 Gulf War created a de facto Kurdish state, the third this century. But Turkey remains determined to destroy it once Turkish forces finish with the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria. If history is any guide, the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq will be as short-lived as the other autonomous enclaves briefly carved out by the Kurds over the last century.

The absence of Iraqi authorities in northern Iraq allowed me to pore through stacks of police files, including photographs and videotapes of torture and executions. I saw the long, typewritten lists that chronicled killing after killing, sometimes for trivial offenses. One man was sentenced to death because he had a picture of a rebel Kurdish leader in his wallet. Eighteen tons of Iraqi intelligence files documenting decades of repression, torture and murder were eventually recovered.

The execution sites were often next to the mass graves. On Kalowa Hill five tires filled with concrete marked the spot where hundreds of people were shot to death. Earthen embankments bordered the site at the back and two sides. Prisoners were blindfolded and their hands were tied at their backs. They were bound to 10-foot poles. I watched videos, left behind in Iraqi detention centers, of many of these executions. I was once shown a picture of three Iraqi officials squatting like big-game hunters next to the slumped body of a man who had been shot to death. One of the Iraqis, wearing a beret, grinned as he held a knife to the corpse’s neck.

Those who lived in the vicinity of Kalowa Hill, threatened with death if they tried to peer into the high-walled compound, said they often heard screams and volleys of shots. “The dogs used to come back with human bones, after getting inside the compound,” Yasin Khader Hassan told me. “Then the guards began to shoot even the dogs.”

Kalowa Hill is a metaphor for the tragic history of the Kurds. I remain haunted by the images of women searching frantically through skeletal remains in uncovered pits for their disappeared children or husbands. I can still feel in my hands the skulls with their blindfolds and bullet holes. While boys and men, the majority of the victims, were usually blindfolded and shot, girls and women were most often blindfolded and strangled.

“Sirwan, Sirwan,” Bahia Khader, another mother, sobbed at Kalowa Hill, swaying over the bones and bits of clothing of her son, who disappeared in 1982 when he was 15. “By the hands of these criminals, you have been taken from me.”

I walked one afternoon through the gloomy remains of a former Iraqi detention center with Jamal Aziz Amin, then a courtly 45-year-old headmaster. He stood in a soundproof room in the darkened basement of Sulaimaniya’s central security prison, where he had spent a year in detention. Large metal hooks were suspended from the ceiling. The prisoners, stripped naked, were handcuffed behind their backs and hoisted from their wrists onto the hooks. They were questioned about Kurdish guerrilla groups, beaten, whipped and given electric shocks until they fell unconscious. A diet of watery soup, bread and thin tea left prisoners weak and emaciated.

“You would scream,” Amin said, “and it would sound as if you were yelling from the bottom of a deep, deep well.”

Kurdish fighters attacked the prison after the Gulf War. The 300 secret policemen and guards, including the warden, held out for three days until all were killed. Amin and other former prisoners stood over the bodies of their torturers. “We wanted them to all come back to life,” he said, “so we could kill them again.”

The cells of the prison were marked with crude drawings, scratched-out calendars and plaintive messages by those who sought to leave behind their names and a record of their suffering.

“These were my friends, arrested with me,” wrote Ahmed Mohammed, one of those who left a message. He listed five names and scribbled, “All were executed.”

“Oh, mother, in this dark room my dreams trouble me and I shake,” one message read. “Then comes the kicking against my door and a voice telling me to get up. It is time for my interrogation. I awake to the unconscious.”

Amin took me to the latrine, a hole in the concrete floor, at the end of a corridor of cells.

“I wanted to show you this,” he said, pointing up at a small shaft of light streaming in from a tiny, barred window 14 feet above us. “Here is where we would come at night so we could pull ourselves up the walls to hear the sound of the dogs barking in the distance. To hear the dogs, this was everything for us.”

U.K.’s Johnson Asks EU for Brexit Delay He Doesn’t Want

LONDON—British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pressing ahead to try to win parliamentary backing for his new Brexit deal as the European Union considers his grudging request to extend the looming Oct. 31 Brexit deadline.

Johnson late Saturday sent an unsigned letter to the EU seeking a delay to Britain’s impending departure from the bloc, as required by law. But he followed it with a signed letter indicating that he does not favor another extension.

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EU officials have not responded to the request.

Johnson could face legal challenges from opponents who feel that sending the second letter was done to frustrate Parliament, which has not approved his Brexit plan but does want to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

Johnson returns to Parliament on Monday to keep seeking support for his Brexit proposal, which was approved Thursday by EU leaders.

Hong Kong Again in Chaos as Protesters Defy Ban

HONG KONG—Hong Kong streets descended into chaotic scenes following an unauthorized pro-democracy rally Sunday as protesters set up roadblocks and torched businesses and police responded with tear gas and a water cannon.

Protesters tossed firebombs and took their anger out on shops with mainland Chinese ties as they skirmished late into the evening with riot police, who unleashed numerous tear gas rounds on short notice, angering residents and passers-by.

Police had beefed up security measures ahead of the rally, for which they refused to give permission, the latest chapter in the unrest that has disrupted life in the financial hub since early June.

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Some 24 people were hurt and treated at hospitals, including six with serious injuries, the Hospital Authority said.

Police did not give an arrest figure. One person was seen being handcuffed and taken away to a police van.

As the rally march set off, protest leaders carried a black banner that read, “Five main demands, not one less,” as they pressed their calls for police accountability and political rights in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

Supporters sang the protest movement’s anthem, waved colonial and U.S. flags, and held up placards depicting the Chinese flag as a Nazi swastika.

Many protesters wore masks in defiance of a recently introduced ban on face coverings at public gatherings, and volunteers handed more out to the crowd.

Matthew Lee, a university student, said he was determined to keep protesting even after more than four months.

“I can see some people want to give up, but I don’t want to do this because Hong Kong is my home, we want to protect this place, protect Hong Kong,” he said. “You can’t give up because Hong Kong is your home.”

Some front-line protesters barricaded streets at multiple locations in Kowloon, where the city’s subway operator restricted passenger access.

They tore up stones from the sidewalk and scattered them on the road, commandeered plastic safety barriers and unscrewed metal railings to form makeshift roadblocks.

A water cannon truck and armored car led a column of dozens of police vans up and down Nathan Road, a major artery lined with shops, to spray a stinging blue-dyed liquid as police moved to clear the road of protesters and barricades.

At one point, the water cannon sprayed a handful of people standing outside a mosque. Local broadcaster RTHK reported that the people hit were guarding the mosque and few protesters were nearby. The Hong Kong police force said it was an “unintended impact” of its operation to disperse protesters and later sent a representative to meet the mosque’s imam.

As night fell, protesters returned to the streets, setting trash on fire at intersections.

Residents jeered at riot police, cursing at them and telling them to leave. The officers, in turn, warned people that they were part of an illegal assembly and told them to leave, and unleashed tear gas to disperse the crowds.

Along the way, protesters trashed discount grocery shops and a restaurant chain because of what they say is the pro-Beijing ownership of the companies. They also set fire to ATMs and branches of mainland Chinese banks, setting off sprinklers in at least two, as well as a shop selling products from Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.

The police used a bomb disposal robot to blow up a cardboard box with protruding wires that they suspected was a bomb.

Organizers said ahead of the march that they wanted to use their right to protest as guaranteed by Hong Kong’s constitution despite the risk of arrest.

“We’re using peaceful, rational, nonviolent ways to voice our demands,” Figo Chan, vice convener of the Civil Human Rights Front, told reporters. “We’re not afraid of being arrested. What I’m most scared of is everyone giving up on our principles.”

The group has organized some of the movement’s biggest protest marches. One of its leaders, Jimmy Sham, was attacked on Wednesday by assailants wielding hammers.

On Saturday, Hong Kong police arrested a 22-year-old man on suspicion of stabbing a teenage activist who was distributing leaflets near a wall plastered with pro-democracy messages. A witness told RTHK that the assailant shouted afterward that Hong Kong is “a part of China” and other pro-Beijing messages.

The protest movement sprang out of opposition to a government proposal for an extradition bill that would have sent suspects to mainland China to stand trial, and then ballooned into broader demands for full democracy and an inquiry into alleged police brutality.