Chris Hedges's Blog, page 125
October 20, 2019
U.S. Troops Leaving Syria for Iraq, Not Home as Trump Claims
KABUL, Afghanistan—While President Donald Trump insists he’s bringing home Americans from “endless wars” in the Mideast, his Pentagon chief says all U.S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq and the American military will continue operations against the Islamic State group.
They aren’t coming home and the United States isn’t leaving the turbulent Middle East, according to current plans outlined by U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper before he arrived in Afghanistan on Sunday. The fight in Syria against IS, once spearheaded by American allied Syrian Kurds who have been cast aside by Trump, will be undertaken by U.S. forces, possibly from neighboring Iraq.
Esper did not rule out the idea that U.S. forces would conduct counterterrorism missions from Iraq into Syria. But he told reporters traveling with him that those details will be worked out over time.
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Trump nonetheless tweeted: “USA soldiers are not in combat or ceasefire zones. We have secured the Oil. Bringing soldiers home!”
The president declared this past week that Washington had no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners fighting in Syria against IS extremists. Turkey conducted a weeklong offensive into northeastern Syria against the Kurdish fighters before a military pause.
“It’s time for us to come home,” Trump said, defending his removal of U.S. troops from that part of Syria and praising his decision to send more troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom defend against Iran.
Esper’s comments to reporters traveling with him were the first to specifically lay out where American troops will go as they shift from Syria and what the counter-IS fight could look like. Esper said he has spoken to his Iraqi counterpart about the plan to shift about 1,000 troops from Syria into western Iraq.
Trump’s top aide, asked about the fact that the troops were not coming home as the president claimed they would, said, “Well, they will eventually.”
Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told “Fox News Sunday” that “the quickest way to get them out of danger was to get them into Iraq.”
As Esper left Washington on Saturday, U.S. troops were continuing to pull out of northern Syria after Turkey’s invasion into the border region. Reports of sporadic clashes continued between Turkish-backed fighters and the Syria Kurdish forces despite a five-day cease-fire agreement hammered out Thursday between U.S. and Turkish leaders.
The Turkish military’s death toll has risen to seven soldiers since it launched its offensive on Oct. 9.
Trump ordered the bulk of the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria to withdraw after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made it clear in a phone call that his forces were about to invade Syria to push back Kurdish forces that Turkey considers terrorists.
The pullout largely abandons America’s Kurdish allies who have fought IS alongside U.S. troops for several years. Between 200 and 300 U.S. troops will remain at the southern Syrian outpost of Al-Tanf.
Esper said the troops going into Iraq will have two missions.
“One is to help defend Iraq and two is to perform a counter-ISIS mission as we sort through the next steps,” he said. “Things could change between now and whenever we complete the withdrawal, but that’s the game plan right now.”
The U.S. currently has more than 5,000 American forces in Iraq, under an agreement between the two countries. The U.S. pulled its troops out of Iraq in 2011 when combat operations there ended, but they went back in after IS began to take over large swaths of the country in 2014. The number of American forces in Iraq has remained small due to political sensitivities in the country, after years of what some Iraqis consider U.S. occupation during the war that began in 2003.
Esper said he will talk with other allies at a NATO meeting in the coming week to discuss the way ahead for the counter-IS mission.
Asked if U.S. special operations forces will conduct unilateral military operations into Syria to go after IS, Esper said that is an option that will be discussed with allies over time.
He said one of his top concerns is what the next phase of the counter-IS missions looks like, “but we have to work through those details.” He said that if U.S. forces do go in, they would be protected by American aircraft.
While he acknowledged reports of intermittent fighting despite the cease-fire agreement, he said that overall it “generally seems to be holding. We see a stability of the lines, if you will, on the ground.”
He also said that, so far, the Syrian Democratic Forces that partnered with the U.S. to fight IS have maintained control of the prisons in Syria where they are still present. The Turks, he said, have indicated they have control of the IS prisons in their areas.
“I can’t assess whether that’s true or not without having people on the ground,” said Esper.
He added that the U.S. withdrawal will be deliberate and safe, and it will take “weeks not days.”
According to a U.S. official, about a couple hundred troops have left Syria so far. The U.S. forces have been largely consolidated in one location in the west and a few locations in the east.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, said the U.S. military is not closely monitoring the effectiveness of the cease-fire, but is aware of sporadic fighting and violations of the agreement. The official said it will still take a couple of weeks to get forces out of Syria.
Also Sunday, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a group of American lawmakers on a visit to Jordan to discuss “the deepening crisis” in Syria.
Jordan’s state news agency Petra said that King Abdullah II, in a meeting with the Americans, stressed the importance of safeguarding Syria’s territorial integrity and guarantees for the “safe and voluntary” return of refugees.
Super PAC in Ukraine Scandal Faced Multiple Legal Troubles
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Last year, a Department of Defense contractor quietly donated half a million dollars to a group supporting President Donald Trump’s reelection.
Once a watchdog organization noticed it, the contribution raised an alarm. Federal contractors are not allowed to donate to political entities. And groups are required by law to examine all donations for potential legal issues. If they discover that a contractor has made a contribution, the money has to be returned.
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The other unusual aspect of the donation was the man behind it. Randy Perkins, the founder of DOD contractor AshBritt Environmental, had no history of six-figure contributions to federal political groups, although he has been a to Republicans for the past 15 years. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in 2016.
The watchdog group pointed out that the money came in a day after AshBritt won a supplemental contract award worth $460,000 from the DOD for wildfire cleanup, bringing its contract total to about $1.7 million.
Asked about the donation, Perkins said he had meant to make a personal donation to express his support for specific Trump policies: “I actually think this administration cares deeply about children and mental health issues.” He said the contract extension had nothing to do with the contribution.
America First Action, the Trump super PAC that accepted the donation, adjusted its report on the source of the funds only after the watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Since America First’s creation in 2017, it has refunded just a fraction of 1% of all the funds it has raised.
If you’ve been hearing about America First recently, it’s likely because two associates of presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani were arrested on allegations that they illegally funneled money to the group.
But that case is not the only problem that has ensnared the PAC as its role in backing Republican candidates has grown.
In another instance, the American subsidiary of a Canadian company made three donations totaling $1.75 million to America First in 2018. In another complaint, the Campaign Legal Center questioned the source of the donation and alleged that Wheatland Tube LLC may have violated laws against foreign nationals contributing to federal campaigns. The company declined to comment on the matter.
Last year, Common Cause, the political reform group, asked the FEC to determine whether the Trump campaign had illegally coordinated with America First and America First Policies, a related group that can raise money without disclosing its donors. The complaint alleged that the president and his campaign were improperly soliciting contributions for the two entities.
The FEC has not acted on any of these complaints to date, and it currently lacks a quorum to vote on enforcement actions proposed by its staff.
“The number of complaints is pretty remarkable,” said Ann Ravel, a Democrat who served as chair of the FEC in 2015.
America First communications director Kelly Sadler told ProPublica that the group takes its obligations seriously and goes to great lengths to comply with the law.
The PAC has denied any wrongdoing in the criminal case against the Giuliani associates. Sadler said the contribution at the heart of the indictment has been placed in a segregated account and will remain there “until these matters are resolved and a court determines the proper disposition of the funds.”
As a super PAC, America First can take unlimited donations from corporations and individuals. In return, it is not supposed to coordinate with campaigns, which are restricted in the amount of donations they may accept.
America First has raised more money to support Trump’s reelection than any super PAC. It is currently chaired by Linda McMahon, and it has raised nearly $50 million over the last two years, including about $9 million in this election cycle to reelect Trump.
Its affiliated nonprofit group, America First Policies, was co-founded by Brad Parscale, now the president’s campaign manager.
McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, until March was a member of the president’s cabinet, overseeing the Small Business Administration. She also donated $1 million to the PAC, whose public filings show 19 donations of at least $1 million.
The PAC’s top donors include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and Geoffrey Palmer, a billionaire California developer. Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who run a shipping supplies company, donated half a million dollars each.
In the 2018 election, America First spent more than $29 million supporting Republican candidates in House and Senate races. Former Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, a powerful GOP leader, received heavy backing from the PAC — $3 million toward a contest he would go on to lose.
The $500,000 donation attributed to AshBritt was among a flood of big donations coming into the PAC in the spring of 2018. The company, based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, does disaster cleanup work.
The Campaign Legal Center’s complaint got little attention. Under FEC rules, a committee has 30 days to confirm the legality of a questionable donation or to refund it; nearly three months passed before the PAC amended its filing to show the donation as being made directly by Perkins.
Perkins said he tried to rectify the matter by providing “all paperwork to the FEC” and resubmitting forms to America First stating that the funds were in fact drawn from a corporate account that would later be taxed as personal income.
“When I wrote the check, I cleared it with America First,” Perkins told ProPublica.
Perkins acknowledges that the optics of his America First donation are less than ideal.
“The facts might be a problem,” he said. “But they are facts.”
A few weeks after Perkins’ donation, the PAC received $325,000 from Global Energy Producers, the Florida energy company that is now at the center of a presidential impeachment inquiry. The PAC was referred to as “Committee 1” in the federal indictment of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
The two men, according to the indictment, were key characters in a coercion campaign to recall the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, which they believed would pave the way for an investigation into Trump’s Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.
The indictment also alleges that Fruman and Parnas promised to fundraise for Sessions. Around the same time, Sessions wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging Yovanovitch’s ouster.
Sessions, who is now running for Congress in a new district, did not respond to messages from ProPublica. In a statement issued on his behalf, he acknowledged meeting with the two Florida businessmen several times but said he took no action on their behalf.
Sessions denied that his letter to Pompeo was directly related to the meetings. He said he will donate the contributions Parnas and Fruman gave to his campaign to Texas charities.
Ocasio-Cortez Backs Sanders at Packed NYC Rally
“I am back,” Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Saturday, as he spoke to over 25,000 people at a rally in New York City that featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed the Vermont senator’s White House bid.
Watch video of the event below:
The “Bernie’s Back” event, which kicked off shortly after 1 pm in Queensbridge Park in Queens, marked the campaign’s first rally since Sanders was hospitalized for a heart attack earlier this month. Sanders told the crowd he was “more ready than ever to carry on with you the epic struggle that we face today” and “more than ready to assume the office of president of the United States.”
On Saturday afternoon, the hashtag #BerniesBack was trending in the U.S.
Thank you @AOC pic.twitter.com/Wtn5N2HSNJ
— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) October 19, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement was reported earlier this week by the Washington Post.
Tomorrow: I’m so excited to be joined by @MMFlint and @AOC in New York for a rally to show the billionaire class we’re ready to take them on. RSVP here: https://t.co/nyqtMVEcXQ pic.twitter.com/Ux03Z6qbkE
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 18, 2019
THIS CROWD!!!
Thousands upon thousands are here in Queensbridge Park – with a line still in the streets – for the #BerniesBack rally with @AOC pic.twitter.com/EvhP8MKCMZ
— Bill Neidhardt (@BNeidhardt) October 19, 2019
The capacity for the rally was 20,000, but so many people came the campaign had to turn people away, said Sanders. According to the campaign, nearly 26,000 people were in attendance.
“Our priority is not only defeating Donald Trump,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “It’s defeating the system of which he is a symptom.”
“It wasn’t until I heard of a man named Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education and a living wage.” –@AOC #BerniesBack https://t.co/Rv0o4i9s9L
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 19, 2019
The two lawmakers sung each other’s praises. AOC praised Sanders for his “non-stop advocacy” including fighting for a single-payer healthcare system while she was a child relying on CHIP.
Sanders, meanwhile, called Ocasio-Cortez a “fierce defender of the working class of our country” who’s “taken on the greed of Wall Street” and “electrified this country” with her Green New Deal legislation.
At the rally, Sanders said in a tweet Friday night, “we will say, without apology: Safe and decent housing is an essential right. A Green New Deal is the only sufficient response to our climate crisis. And the obscene greed of corporate America must end.”
On social media, the campaign shared remarks from other speakers at the rally, including campaign co-chair and San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Caren Yulín Cruz, filmmaker Michael Moore, and campaign co-chair Nina Turner.
“We want a justice system that doesn’t gun down Black folks in their houses. We are going to clean up this criminal injustice system.” –@ninaturner #BerniesBack https://t.co/Rv0o4i9s9L
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 19, 2019
“We must win because of a fundamental value that power is in the streets and government is to serve the people, not just the 1%. We must win because there is too much at stake.” –@CarmenYulinCruz #BerniesBack https://t.co/Rv0o4i9s9L
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 19, 2019
Speaking to NBC News Saturday before the rally began, Ocasio-Cortez, who was an organizer for Sanders’ 2016 campaign, said her endorsement was due to “a moment of clarity” about the role she wanted to play. She said she decided, “I want to be part of a mass movement.”
“It was less about… being overly politically calculating,” she said, “and it was more about the authenticity and clarity of that moment.”
Sanders has also received the endorsement of two other members of the Squad—Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)
Explaining her support, Omar said in a video released this week: “The senator is the only candidate that is proposing a complete cancellation of student debt. The senator is the only candidate that is proposing to provide universal school meals. The senator is the only candidate that wants to make sure that we end our endless wars and will fight for human rights and hold everyone accountable regardless of whether they are an ally or a foe.”
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In a phone call with supporters on Friday, Sanders said the rally would be a “powerful event” and touched on key issues of his campaign including income and wealth inequality, Medicare for All, and the climate crisis.
The campaign, added Sanders, has “a great path to victory.”
That path relies on generating “the largest voter turnout by far in the history of our country” to counter President Donald Trump, whom Sanders called “the most dangerous president in the history of this country,” as well as a “formidable opponent” who will have “unlimited amounts of money from his billionaire friends and from others.”
That makes the endorsements from Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and other progressives so key, said Sanders, as “they are able to generate and are generating enormous support among young people, among people of color, among working class people all over this country.”
“With Alexandria, with Ilhan, and others on board,” Sanders continued, “we’re going to put together a coalition that is going to win and win big” and be able to create “an economy and a government that works for everybody and not just the one percent and wealthy campaign contributors.”
October 19, 2019
Mexico Gunbattle Underscores How Government Has Ceded to Cartels
EL AGUAJE, Mexico—The Mexican city of Culiacan lived under drug cartel terror for 12 hours as gang members forced the government to free a drug lord’s son, but in many parts of Mexico, the government ceded the battle to the gangs long ago.
The massive, rolling gunbattle in Culiacan, capital of Sinaloa state, was shocking for the openness of the government’s capitulation and the brazenness of gunmen who drove machine-gun mounted armored trucks through the streets.
But in state after state, the Mexican government long ago relinquished effective control of whole towns, cities and regions to the drug cartels.
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“They are the law here. If you have a problem, you go to them. They solve it quickly,” said a young mother in the town of El Aguaje, in western Michoacan state. El Aguaje is so completely controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel that the young wife of lime-grove worker – who would not give her name for fear of reprisals – can’t turn to police: They are too afraid to enter the town.
When a convoy of Michoacan state police did make a rare appearance in El Aguaje last Monday, they were ambushed and slaughtered by Jalisco cartel gunmen. Thirteen state police officers were shot or burned to death in their vehicles.
When police returned to recover the burned-out patrol vehicles the next day, they were in such a hurry to accomplish their task that they left behind the crushed, burned, bullet-pierced skull of one of their colleagues lying on the ground.
In the neighboring town of El Terrero, meanwhile, the rival New Michoacan Family cartel and its armed wing, the Viagras—who control that side of the river—have daubed their initials on houses and lamp posts, and last week burned several trucks and buses to block the bridge and prevent a Jalisco cartel incursion.
In some cases, the government has even defended cartel boundaries, apparently as part of its strategy of avoiding bloodshed at all costs.
For example, in the Michoacan town of Tepalcatepec, police line up every day to man a checkpoint at a highway leading into Jalisco state to prevent an armed incursion by Jalisco cartel gunmen. The problem is that the government force is working in coordination with a vigilante group allied with a drug cartel. The vigilantes are posted on a nearby hilltop where they can watch over the highway, armed with .50 caliber sniper rifles.
In Guerrero state, to the east of Michoacan, soldiers and state police man checkpoints between rival gangs of vigilantes, many of which are allied with drug gangs. Soldiers allow vigilantes armed with assault rifles to roam freely, but not to invade each other’s territories.
And in the northern state of Tamaulipas, when the United States began returning asylum seekers to wait for hearings in Mexico, the government knew it couldn’t protect the migrants from the Zetas drug cartel in the border city of Nuevo Laredo and so it simply bused them out of the city. Now known as the Cartel of the Northeast, the former Zetas control Nuevo Laredo so completely that they recently ordered local gas stations to refuse to sell gasoline to army vehicles.
In many regions, cartels enriched by drug profits have held extensive control for at least a decade, buying off or cowing law enforcement and building huge arsenals, along with networks of informants to protect narcotics routes from the government or rivals.
The cartel grip in Tamaulipas was so firm by 2011 that Zetas gunmen were able to kidnap almost 200 people from passing buses and kill them even as the passengers’ unclaimed luggage kept piling up at local bus stations. Nobody reported the crimes for months.
In this context, the government’s decision to release drug lord Ovidio Guzmán—son of imprisoned capo Joaquin Guzmán Loera—after the Culiacan shootouts was striking only because the government so publicly dropped even the pretense of enforcing the law.
“It’s not unprecedented for Mexican authorities to pick up a major capo and then release him; that’s actually unfortunately too common,” said David Shirk, a political science professor at the University of San Diego. “But what’s really unprecedented is to openly acknowledge that the state does not have the capacity or the stomach for keeping a major capo behind bars because of the potential consequences.”
“But what message does it send to people who are under the yoke of criminal organizations all over Mexico?” Shirk asked. “I think the message is, ‘You’re on your own. We’re not going to come in and rescue you because you could get killed in the process.'”
The message to soldiers in the Mexican army is also pretty clear: The Defense Department blamed a military squad for the “rushed” operation to arrest Ovidio Guzmán that set off the Culiacan gun battles and pledged to investigate and punish the leaders of the squad.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office less than a year ago, has repeatedly urged military restraint, saying his predecessors’ hardline confrontation strategy in gang-controlled areas “turned this country into a cemetery, and we don’t want that anymore.”
Earlier this year praised a squad of soldiers for restraint after they were kidnapped and forced to return a .50 caliber rifle seized by a previous patrol. He defended the response to the Culiacan uprising by saying, “The capture of one criminal cannot be worth more than the lives of people. … “We do not want deaths. We do not want war.”
Hence, soldiers are likely to avoid taking any initiative, slide into a passive role and do anything to avoid bloodshed.
And the message to the cartels is clear. “Of course this is a victory for the Sinaloa Cartel, and a defeat for everyone,” said Ismael Bojorquez, the director of the Sinaloa newspaper Rio Doce.”In practical terms, Lopez Obrador decreed a truce with the narcos, and they are happy, they can move freely … the narcos can grow and grow and become more dangerous.”
Average citizens in many zones, meanwhile, can only hope the most benign cartel comes to rule in their town. The problem is that almost all of the cartels promise to respect the local population and not kidnap them or shake them down for protection money. But all of the gangs eventually break that promise.
It thus becomes a question not of fighting the cartels, but accepting whichever seems the least malign at any given moment. And the gangs appear to be picking up on that message, too.
When the Jalisco cartel left the bodies of 19 members of a rival gang scattered on an overpass in the Michoacan in August, they left behind a banner saying “We are not a threat … Beautiful people, go on about your routine.”
On Friday, after the Culiacan gunbattles, José Luis González Meza, a lawyer for the family of Ovidio’s father, the imprisoned drug lord known as “El Chapo,” said the family “apologizes” for the shootouts and pledged, “They will take care (of the expenses) of the wounded and the dead. … However many there were, man, no problem, they will help them economically.”
“In his (Guzman’s) territory … there are no protection payments charged to taxi drivers, or bus drivers,” said González Meza, referring to extortion commonly practiced by other gangs. “Every two weeks, he draws up a list of poor people and sends it to stores, telling them to cancel their debts.”
And the message for the rest of the world? Don’t expect Mexico to help capture or extradite drug lords anymore, as the country did with the elder Guzmán.
“It does send a very sobering signal, I think, to Mexico and arguably to Mexico’s U.S. partners,” said Shirk. “If I were going to write the next State Department advisory for Mexico, I would dramatically increase this number and the number of advisories that I had for different parts of Mexico, because it’s very clear that the federal government is ceding territory … and not just rural territory, but major cities and perhaps even entire states to drug traffickers.”
____
AP Writers Christopher Sherman and Maria Verza contributed to this report
Thousands in Germany, France Protest Turks’ Push Into Syria
BERLIN—Thousands of people in the German city of Cologne and in the French capital demonstrated Saturday against Turkey’s offensive in northern Syria.
Cologne city authorities said around 10,000 people took part in marches organized by left-wing groups. Police were out in force amid concerns about possible violence but authorities said the event was largely peaceful.
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In Paris, more than 1,000 gathered at the Place de la Republique to denounce Turkey’s actions. Some displayed banners saying “The Turkish state is committing crimes against humanity in total impunity.”
Turkey’s incursion into Syria, aiming to rid the border area of Kurdish fighters as U.S. forces withdraw, has caused death and destruction and sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing their homes.
“America has abandoned us. Everyone has abandoned us,” said Kurdish student Zade Adjoev in Paris, noting that the Kurds were on the front line as partners with the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group. “When it works for them, they call us Kurds. When it doesn’t, we are terrorists.”
A member of the Kurdish Democratic Council in France, Cemile Renklicay, called Turkey a “more dangerous enemy” than the Islamic State group because the extremists “didn’t have fighter jets.”
In Cologne, some demonstrators carried flags of the Syrian Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which Turkey is trying to push back. Others carried placards with slogans such as “No deals with the AKP regime” — a reference to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party.
Germany is home to large Turkish and Kurdish communities, and tensions between them have turned violent in the past.
Gabbard Fires Back at Clinton Suggestion That She’s Russia’s Pawn
MANCHESTER, N.H.—It’s Hillary Clinton vs. Tulsi Gabbard on the sidelines of the 2020 presidential race.
The Hawaii congresswoman fought back unsparingly after Clinton appeared to call her “the favorite of the Russians” in a recent interview and said she believes the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Clinton, the former senator, U.S. secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, did not name Gabbard directly.
In a series of tweets Friday, Gabbard called Clinton the “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.” Gabbard also alleged there has been a “concerted campaign” to destroy her reputation since she announced her presidential run in January.
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“It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me,” Gabbard tweeted about Clinton. “Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
There is lingering trepidation in the Democratic Party of a repeat of the 2016 presidential race, when Russia interfered in the U.S. election in an effort to help Donald Trump defeat Clinton. U.S intelligence agencies have warned that Russia intends to meddle in the 2020 presidential election, as well. Russian President Vladimir Putin has mocked that possibility, joking earlier this month that Moscow would “definitely intervene” again.
During a Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday, Gabbard criticized a TV commentator who she said had called her “an asset of Russia.” She called the comments “completely despicable.”
Without naming Gabbard, Clinton seemed to echo the commentator’s remark during a podcast appearance this week on “Campaign HQ with David Plouffe.” Plouffe was campaign manager for President Barack Obama in 2008 and served as served as a senior adviser to the president.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said, referring to the person she had earlier identified as a woman “who’s currently in the Democratic primary.” ”They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton also called Trump “Vladimir Putin’s dream” in the interview. She went on to say that Trump’s inauguration speech was “like a declaration of war on half of America.” Clinton also describes 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as “a Russian asset.”
The Russians know they can’t win without a third-party candidate, Clinton added.
Gabbard said later Friday on CBSN that she “will not be leaving the Democratic Party. I will not be running as an independent or a third-party candidate.”
Stein, who ran against Trump and Clinton as a Green Party candidate, received about 1% of the vote in the 2016 election, but some Democrats said her candidacy syphoned votes away from Clinton and helped Trump win, particularly in states like Wisconsin. The Senate Intelligence Committee asked Stein for documents as part of its probe into Russian interference in the election because she attended a 2015 dinner in Moscow sponsored by Russian television network RT with Putin. Stein has said she attended “with a message of Middle East peace, diplomacy and cooperation.”
In a tweet Friday, Stein accused Clinton of “peddling conspiracy theories to justify her failure instead of reflecting on real reasons Dems lost in 2016.”
Boris Johnson Insists He’ll Stand Firm Against Brexit Delay
LONDON—A defiant Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that he would resist attempts to delay Britain’s departure from the European Union beyond the end of the month, after Parliament postponed a decision on whether to back his Brexit deal and ordered the government to ask the EU for more time.
Johnson said he still aimed to meet the Oct. 31 deadline and would tell EU leaders that delaying Brexit is a bad idea. The bloc said it would wait to hear from the British government about what it wanted to do next. The government has until 11 p.m. Saturday to send a letter asking the EU for a three-month postponement.
“I will not negotiate a delay with the EU and neither does the law compel me to do so,” Johnson said. “I will tell our friends and colleagues in the EU exactly what I’ve told everyone in the last 88 days that I’ve served as prime minister: that further delay would be bad for this country, bad for the European Union and bad for democracy.”
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At a rare weekend sitting of Parliament, lawmakers voted 322-306 to withhold their approval of the Brexit deal until legislation to implement it has been passed.
The vote sought to ensure that the U.K. cannot crash out of the EU without a divorce deal on the scheduled departure date. Johnson, who struck the agreement with the EU earlier this week, said he was not “daunted or dismayed” by the result and would continue to do all he can to get Brexit done in less than two weeks.
Parliament’s first weekend sitting since the Falklands War of 1982 had been dubbed “Super Saturday.” It looked set to bring Britain’s Brexit saga to a head, more than three years after the country’s divisive decision to leave the EU.
But the government’s hopes were derailed when House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said he would allow a vote on an amendment to put the vote on the deal off until another day.
The amendment makes support for the deal conditional on passage of the legislation to implement it, something that could take several days or weeks. It also gives lawmakers another chance to scrutinize — and possibly change— the Brexit departure terms while the legislation is in Parliament.
The government still hopes it can pass the needed legislation by the end of the month so the U.K. can leave on time.
The leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said the government would hold a debate Monday on its Brexit-implementing legislation — effectively a second attempt to secure approval for the deal.
It’s unclear whether that would be allowed under House of Commons rules against holding repeated votes on the same question. Bercow said he would make a ruling Monday.
Despite Johnson’s vow not to “negotiate” a Brexit delay, the government has said it will comply with a law passed by Parliament last month ordering it to request an extension if a deal has not been approved by Saturday.
Opposition lawmakers warned that Johnson must ask for the Brexit extension or face legal consequences.
“Any failure of a prime minister who thinks he is above the law — well, prime minister, you’ll find yourself in court,” said Ian Blackford of the Scottish National Party.
The vote was welcomed by hundreds of thousands of anti-Brexit demonstrators who marched to Parliament Square, demanding a new referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU or remain. Protesters, many wearing blue berets emblazoned with yellow stars symbolizing the EU flag, poured out of subways and buses for the last-ditch effort.
“Another chance for sanity and perhaps rationality to take over, rather than emotion,” said filmmaker Jove Lorenty as he stood outside Parliament. “Never give up until the fat lady sings. No one knows what will happen, but we have hope.”
Johnson, who came to power in July vowing to get Brexit finished, called any delay to Britain’s departure pointless, expensive and deeply corrosive of public trust.” And he warned that the bloc’s approval could not be guaranteed.
“There is very little appetite among our friends in the EU for this business to be protracted by one extra day,” Johnson said. “They have had three and a half years of this debate.”
EU leaders have made the same point. French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that “the Oct. 31 date must be respected. I don’t believe new delays should be granted.”
The EU was guarded in its response to Saturday’s vote.
“It will be for the U.K. government to inform us about the next steps as soon as possible,” EU Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva tweeted.
When push comes to shove, the EU seems likely to grant an extension if needed to avoid a disruptive no-deal Brexit.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said his country saw the vote as a delay, rather than a rejection of the Brexit deal. For EU leaders, avoiding a chaotic, no-deal Brexit should be the “top priority,” he said in a tweet.
And the European Parliament’s chief Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt, noted that time was now tight to get the deal approved by the EU legislature before Oct. 31, meaning a short delay might be needed.
If Parliament approves the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in time, Britain could still leave by the end of October. The government plans to introduce the bill next week and could hold late-night sittings of Parliament in hope of getting it passed within days.
But Johnson must win over a fractious and divided Parliament, which three times rejected the Brexit plan negotiated by his predecessor Theresa May.
His hopes of getting the deal through Parliament were dealt a blow when his Northern Ireland ally, the Democratic Unionist Party, said it would not back him. The party says Johnson’s Brexit package — which carves out special status for Northern Ireland to keep an open border with EU member Ireland — is bad for the region and weakens its bonds with the rest of the U.K.
To make up for the votes of 10 DUP lawmakers, Johnson has tried to persuade members of the left-of-center Labour Party to support the deal. Late Friday, the government promised to bolster protections for the environment and workers’ rights to allay Labour fears that the Conservative government plans to slash those protections after Brexit.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dismissed the prime minister’s promises as inadequate.
“This deal is not good for jobs, damaging for industry and a threat to our environment and natural world,” he said. “Supporting the government this afternoon would merely fire the starting pistol in a race to the bottom in regulations and standards.”
___
Associated Press writers Gregory Katz in London and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed to this story.
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Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit and British politics at https://www.apnews.com/Brexit
October 18, 2019
Presidential Candidates Refuse to Discuss the Country’s Worst Crisis
In September 2015, I wrote a three–part series for Truthdig on homelessness. “Homelessness doesn’t rate a mention on the presidential campaign trail,” I wrote. “The subject is ignored or followed sporadically in the national media outside of policy oriented journals. Washington is happy to leave it in the hands of local politicians, cops and reporters who cover city halls and city streets. Out of sight and out of mind is the American treatment of the homeless.”
Since I wrote those articles, the homeless population in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, has grown from more than 44,000 to about 59,000. In the city of Los Angeles alone, the number of homeless people has increased from more than 25,000 to over 36,000. Nationally, the homeless numbers have grown, too.
Yet, as another presidential campaign gets underway, the homeless remain out of mind, although in many places they are no longer out of sight.
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I’ve followed this issue during the campaign. Some candidates have made passing mention of the need for affordable housing, a popular issue related to homelessness. But where are the ringing cries for mobilization for the very poor? “I see one-third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Franklin Roosevelt said at his second inaugural. Harry Truman passed the Housing Act of 1949, which financed public housing. Jimmy Carter, who once lived with his family in public housing, continues to bring the issue into the public view with his work for Habitat for Humanity.
As a humanitarian crisis grows in the wealthiest country in the world, most of the media attention goes to President Trump and his expected impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate. Donald Trump has so overwhelmed politics that dialogue consists of his shouted lies, insults and threats and the Democrats’ scattered efforts to respond to them.
I confess that the drama obsesses me, too. As part of my daily morning ritual, I turn on cable news for the latest evidence of Trump’s insanity. I read the morning paper, drink coffee and pet one of our cats in a burst of multitasking. Then I go for a walk around the neighborhood.
That’s when I am reminded again that the homeless and their troubles haven’t made it onto the presidential campaign agenda. That omission is painfully evident as I pass by the increasing numbers of homeless who live in tents or under blankets on the streets of Los Angeles. Where were the homeless in the Democratic presidential debate this week? They got barely a mention.
At a Starbucks a few blocks from my house, an elderly African American man seated in a wheelchair on the sidewalk recently asked if I could help him out. I gave him some money.
“Where did you spend the night?” I asked.
“In a tent, near downtown,” he replied. He took the Expo Line commuter train to this more affluent neighborhood, where he had a better shot at some handouts. When he said “near downtown,” he likely meant skid row, the largest of the city’s ragged encampments, where the tents are packed so tightly on the sidewalks that passersby must walk in the street.
The man in front of Starbucks reflected much about the American homeless crisis. It is, to a large extent, a black crisis, inextricably linked to the systemic racism directed against African Americans.
African Americans make up 40% of the nation’s homeless, but only 13% of the population, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. In California, blacks are 6.5% of the population but comprise 40% of the homeless. This is a higher percentage than for Latinos, Asian Americans and whites.
There are many causes of the high rate of black homelessness, but behind them all is invariably the great affliction of American society: racism.
As the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the area’s main anti-homeless organization, put it recently:
”The impact of institutional and structural racism in education, criminal justice, housing, employment, health care and access to opportunities cannot be denied: Homelessness is a byproduct of racism in America.”
It is also a byproduct of income inequality, as racism and income inequality are also related.
Racism dooms too many African Americans to poor education, a fact that plays a key role in depriving them of the possibility for economic upward mobility. It maroons them in poor neighborhoods with substandard schools. This makes it hard to climb out of poverty and homelessness. Add to this that the poor need two or three jobs to survive, and you begin to see how they live in constant peril of losing their housing.
“We see that just one expense, one emergency of $500 or $1,000, throws them over the edge,” said Megan Joseph, executive director of Rise Together, a San Francisco Bay Area anti-poverty group. “We’re talking about a huge percentage that’s living on the edge and barely [making] ends meet.”
I am among many reporters who have spent years examining homelessness. I’ve interviewed people of all races who have become homeless at one point or another. I’ve talked to the admirable people who are dedicating their lives to fighting for the homeless, working in the streets, in medical care facilities, drug rehab clinics and jails. I still wonder how they keep at it day after day.
It is an endless war. And with Trump and the right in power, I don’t see the end to it. The president’s only interest in the homeless is to blame them for violating homeowners’ and merchants’ rights, and to somehow link them to the Democrats, as he does with undocumented immigrants. That’s what he did on a recent visit to California.
The homeless have no political clout. There are no votes for politicians to gain for helping them. They don’t do much marching or demonstrating. Political organizers don’t bother with them. The people who care are the volunteers, unpaid or low-paid, trying to steer them into the limited number of housing and aid programs that exist.
There seems to be no place for them in the presidential campaign.
I don’t have solutions. I once made the mistake of confessing that to Roosevelt Grier, the great National Football League star turned minister, when he asked me for my ideas on solving some problem. I said I was just a reporter. He looked down at me from his lineman’s bulk and in a powerful voice said it was my duty to have solutions. I believe he said that God wanted me to have them.
So here are some ideas, although not solutions: Raise taxes on the rich and big corporations, with the money going for housing for the poor, along with medical and mental health services.
Build public works projects in the hardest-hit areas. Many of the homeless are just a job away from making it. Give them a break.
And here is one more idea: The presidential candidates should talk about the homeless, visit the encampments, hear the stories and convince their more fortunate constituents to help. Out of sight, out of mind is no longer acceptable.
US-Turkey Frictions Raise Doubts About Nukes at Turk Base
WASHINGTON—Frayed U.S. relations with Turkey over its incursion in Syria raise a sensitive question rarely discussed in public: Should the United States remove the nuclear bombs it has long stored at a Turkish air base?
It’s a tricky matter for several reasons, including the fact that by longstanding policy, the U.S. government does not publicly acknowledge locations of nuclear weapons overseas. Still, it is almost an open secret that the U.S. has as many as 50 B-61 bombs stored under heavy guard at Incirlik air base in southern Turkey.
President Donald Trump implicitly acknowledged the stockpile this week when asked by a reporter how confident he was of the bombs’ security.
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“We’re confident,” he said.
Turkey, a NATO ally, has reportedly hosted American nuclear weapons for 60 years. The bombs could be dropped by U.S. planes in a nuclear war. The arrangement at Incirlik air base is part of NATO’s policy of linking Turkey and other member countries to the alliance’s aim of deterring war by having a relatively small number of nuclear weapons based in Europe. Removing them, therefore, would be a diplomatic complication.
There is no known evidence that the nuclear weapons at Incirlik are at direct risk, but relations between Washington and Ankara are at perhaps a historic low and the war in Syria has grown more complex and unpredictable. Incirlik is about 150 miles from Syria by road.
Thursday’s announced U.S. deal with Turkey to pause its offensive against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria may have slowed the deterioration of relations. But the overall direction has been decidedly and increasingly negative.
“The arc of their behavior over the past several years has been terrible,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said last Sunday, noting that Ankara defied repeated U.S. warnings not to purchase a Russian air defense system that the White House has likened to a portal for Russian spying. He added: “I mean, they are spinning out of the Western orbit, if you will.”
In July, the Pentagon kicked Turkey out of its F-35 fighter jet program because Turkey refused to halt its purchase of the Russian-made air defense system. This was a major blow to U.S.-Turkey relations and raised questions in Washington about whether Turkey was a reliable ally.
Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and senior Pentagon official, said Friday he believes the nuclear weapons are safe and secure. He sees risk in removing them.
“I’m not in favor of taking any actions that would potentially accelerate Turkey’s thinking about pursuing its own independent nuclear deterrent,” he said, noting that Erdogan as recently as September mentioned this possibility.
Some American arms control experts say the U.S. bombs at Incirlik would be safer in another NATO member country.
Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, who has followed the issue for many years, said in an interview that a review of options for the U.S. bombs at Incirlik, near the city of Adana, is long overdue. He believes the Air Force, which is responsible for the bombs, has grown concerned about their security in recent years.
“The Air Force is concerned about not only the standard physical perimeters — whether they are good enough — but also about the manpower on the base, whether they have enough to hold back an attack from someone,” Kristensen said.
The conflict in northern Syria, which has only grown more complex and unpredictable with a U.S. troop withdrawal, has added a new layer of worry for American officials, he said.
“They’re afraid of the spillover” inside Turkey, he said.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on the matter.
“It is U.S. policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of nuclear weapons at any general or specific location,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Uriah Orland, a Pentagon spokesman. “The U.S. does not discuss the movement of nuclear weapons, the capability to store weapons at U.S. or foreign locations or planning for any of these activities.”
Even private experts who study the matter are not sure how many weapons are stored there, but Kristensen believes there are up to 50 B-61 bombs designed to be dropped by U.S. fighter aircraft. He says the U.S. has had nuclear weapons in Turkey continuously since 1959.
The bombs in Turkey are part of a network of roughly 150 U.S. air-delivered nuclear weapons based in Europe. Kristensen says the host countries, in addition to Turkey, are Belgium, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday he and Trump share “love and respect,” but he also let little doubt that he was offended by an Oct. 9 letter from Trump telling Erdogan, “Don’t be a fool!”
Erdogan told reporters Trump’s words were not compatible with “political and diplomatic courtesy” and would not be forgotten. He said he would “do what’s necessary” about the letter “when the time comes.” He did not elaborate.
A Tool for Dismantling Capitalism Is Hiding in Plain Sight
“Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State”
A book by Samuel Stein
Over computerized images of a nondescript early American city and a rushing river, a man with a quiet voice and a delightful Philadelphia accent describes the process by which the city of Franklin developed its first water distribution system. The Goodhill Water Works, the voice explains, was created after a series of yellow fever outbreaks that the city blamed on contaminated local water. This led town elites to decide that a new water source was required for the growing municipality. Despite the fact that the state-of-the-art space doubled as a tourist attraction while it pumped fresh water straight into town, residents could only access the water if they had the money to pay for installation and a subscription. Otherwise, they would have to use the few free fountains placed around the city. The bulk of the city’s residents — including indentured servants, a small number of enslaved people, and free workers — had no time, money, or, in some cases, freedom to take in the beautiful grounds and stunning architecture. For them, despite this impressive achievement on the road to their city’s modernization, it was more or less as if nothing had changed at all.
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Franklin, as you may have guessed, is not a real place. It is the creation of Justin Roczniak, who publishes a series on YouTube (where he goes by donoteat01) using the video game “Cities: Skylines” to explore the historical development of cities, and to discuss how inequality has been built into American cities from their earliest moments. Starting with an Indigenous settlement along a river, Roczniak describes the displacements and conflicts that have gone into city-building, as well as developments such as the carceral system and organized labor. A self-described socialist, Roczniak uses this historical narrative to examine “how we view cities and what cities are capable of,” as he told Kotaku last year.
The series weds the often wonkish world of urban planning discourse to the pop culture juggernaut that is gaming, and in doing so claims a space in both fields for leftist analysis. And both urban planning and gaming are in dire need of some socialism. In recent years, the public urban planning conversation has been dominated by “urbanism,” a bland quasi-progressive ideology that typically lacks any coherent class or power analysis. Now a dominant tendency among city-planners and many municipal politicians, urbanism treats procedural changes like tweaks to zoning laws as key to solving the problems of the modern city.
Because urbanism dominates discussions about cities — about what ails them and how to fix them — structural analyses have been sorely lacking. The discourse around gentrification still focuses too much on fancy coffee shops and not enough on systematic disinvestment in areas inhabited by people of color and the working class. For urbanists, unaffordable housing can be solved by increasing the amount and density of housing units through “upzoning,” while a more structural analysis would focus on rent control or building more public housing.
Much like Roczniak’s YouTube series, Samuel Stein’s captivating “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State” is an effort to shift the discussion away from urbanism and toward socialism. Stein offers a planner and geographer’s perspective on the way the city works today, but also shows that planners — even those interested in dismantling oppressive systems — often uphold the power of capital. “[C]apitalism makes the best of planning impossible,” he writes. “[A]ny good that planners do is filtered through a system that dispossesses those who cannot pay.” It is clear that Stein is interested in recuperating a more expansive set of possibilities for cities and city-dwellers than exists under capitalism, and that he sees planning as an avenue toward them. “Capital City” ultimately shows that socialists belong in the public conversation about cities — a conversation that has long been controlled by neoliberal politics ranging from austerity on the right to urbanism on the center-left.
¤
“Capital City” begins with a brief history of planning as both practice and profession. Stein shows how race and class often determine the way that space is structured in the United States. In addition to noting the racist practices of redlining and segregation, Stein discusses a foundational aspect of American history that has often been ignored in mainstream discussions of how cities and space are apportioned: the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples. He shows that settler colonialism has been — and continues to be — key to the establishment and expansion of American cities. As Europeans arrived on the land now known as the United States and dispossessed Indigenous nations, they engaged in a “spatial form of primitive accumulation,” building their early towns’ street grids over top of Indigenous settlements and trails.
Click here to read long excerpts of “Capital City” at Google Books.
After outlining this history, Stein lays out his book’s central argument: in recent decades, the financialization of real estate has given rise to what he terms the “real estate state.” Real estate capital exerts inordinate power over the levers of government, he argues, taking advantage of deindustrialization to extract value from cities. “When manufacturing firms exited post-war urban centers,” Stein writes, “they left behind not just a tremendous amount of property but also a political vacuum.” Real estate capital was perfectly situated to take advantage of the glut of now-empty warehouses and abandoned space, and, because it was necessarily “place-based,” it had always been a presence in local politics.
As politicians sought to fill the gap left by the disappearance of industry, many aligned with development-friendly movements and explicitly pushed for gentrification as a way of “renewing” city cores. Desperate to retain capital investment — a desperation that remains today, as the grotesque municipal competition for Amazon’s “HQ2” illustrated — cities have taken to enticing developers and real estate investors with “geobribes.” One of the most egregious examples that Stein names is Tax Increment Financing, a “widely used development incentive” in which a city designates a “blighted” area, issues bonds to pay for infrastructure upgrades, and then gives the improved area over to a private developer to build private housing or retail space. The city is responsible for making the bondholders whole whether the area is profitable or not; meanwhile, if it is profitable, the developer accrues most of that windfall (save whatever they pay in taxes), and another neighborhood is dramatically gentrified. Strategies like these allow real estate developers to reap profits through a cruel, mutually constitutive process of dis- and hyper-investment (the latter is more commonly called gentrification).
While much of the United States is experiencing disinvestment, rarefied areas are experiencing a flood of capital invested in land and property, resulting in skyrocketing costs of living. The two processes go hand in hand, Stein explains: disinvestment causes property values to crater and leads better-heeled (often white) residents to depart, typically taking needed community services and amenities with them. These declining property values then create the conditions for a new round of hyper-investment, which takes advantage of a gap between profit potential and existing value. In other words, disinvestment causes property values to decline enough so that developers can come back, years or decades later, and make a killing, sweeping up now-cheapened real estate and “flipping” it for sale to a new round of gentrifying buyers.
¤
Despite writing that real estate capital’s power is a global phenomenon, Stein is overwhelmingly focused on the United States, and specifically New York City; readers from outside this epicenter of real estate capital will largely be left to draw their own conclusions about how Stein’s analysis relates to their own surroundings. But there are good reasons to focus on New York City too. First, as Stein acknowledges, it is the city he lives in and knows best. More importantly, the focus on New York City allows Stein to draw on the city’s history as a site for early and extreme experiments in financializing the spaces in which we live.
The city was a leader in public housing and rent control in the first several decades of the 20th century, owing largely to well-organized tenants’ movements. Yet after the financial crisis of the 1970s, it led a different way — rapidly reversing those earlier working-class gains. Stein explains that New York was pulled back “from the brink of bankruptcy” by a coalition of “banks, real estate interests and municipal unions, who disciplined the city through a process of privatization and disinvestment from social services that continues to this day.” Local politicians, restrained and still smarting from their brush with economic disaster, were eager to appease capital. In addition to buying up abandoned industrial spaces, enterprising real estate interests began to eye neighborhoods that had low property values due to the longstanding racist practice of redlining (by which black residents were forced into specific neighborhoods that were then systematically underserviced). They saw in both locations an opportunity to capitalize on disinvestment. By converting industrial space for residential purposes, pushing out poor (mostly nonwhite) residents, improving existing housing stock, and replacing it with more luxurious spaces, landlords and developers attracted higher-income residents, raised property values, and remade whole segments of the city “from places into products.”
Today, New York is a playground for the wealthy where thousands of luxury apartments sit empty, serving as some business tycoon’s fifth pied-à-terre, as the workers who make the city run crowd into cramped apartments or, worse yet, don’t have a home at all. The situation has been exacerbated by city and state governments happy to sell out working-class residents in favor of private investment.
To illustrate this last point, Stein looks at the policies of New York’s two most recent mayors: incumbent Bill de Blasio and billionaire business magnate Michael Bloomberg. Though the two are often framed as polar political opposites, with Bloomberg prioritizing corporate interests and de Blasio a progressive, Stein shows that, in many ways, de Blasio has continued Bloomberg-era real estate policies that have allowed investors and developers to run roughshod over what was once a livable city for the 99 percent.
Both Bloomberg and de Blasio have used zoning as a way to reshape certain areas of the city. Bloomberg’s practice was to rezone neighborhoods. Stein writes that there was a specific, racist character to Bloomberg’s pattern of upzoning primarily working-class, black areas while, in essence, protecting the character and value of primarily white neighborhoods. By contrast, de Blasio has been a proponent of inclusionary zoning, and so is widely seen as progressive by urbanist types. Stein, however, does a superb job of describing exactly why de Blasio’s policy does not deserve that reputation. Because it requires some (usually small) number of housing units in a new development to be “affordable,” it relies on building more unaffordable housing in order to add a small number of affordable housing units in a given development (and even then, the measure of an “affordable” apartment is unreachable for many New Yorkers). De Blasio’s metric for “affordability,” while an improvement over Bloomberg’s, still effectively prices out 57 percent of New York’s Black and Latinx residents.
¤
Stein ends with a set of prescriptions for how radical planners might seek to use the tools at their disposal to “unmake the real estate state.” He is attentive to the difficulties that this call to action involves: “All consciousness is contradictory,” he writes almost apologetically, “but the situation for capitalist urban planners is especially thorny. They are simultaneously far-seeing visionaries and day-to-day pragmatists.” Ultimately, however, he sees promise for radical planning within the capitalist state (and this despite his earlier claim that by helping establish spatial order in capitalist states, “planners — whatever their intention — are working for the maintenance, defense and expansion of capitalism”). At the close of his book, Stein suggests that leftist planners could both make use of existing tools and widen the horizons of what is possible. In answer to the perennial question “reform or revolution,” it seems Stein would echo the little girl in the meme who asks, “Why not both?”
In this prescriptive section, Stein has something to offer almost everyone. Are you merely dipping your toes in the idea that the capitalist city has problems? Perhaps you’d be interested in using inclusionary zoning to target wealthy white neighborhoods for integration or protecting working-class areas with preservation policies. Skeptical about the prospect of repurposing tools originally designed for the benefit of the white and the wealthy? You might want to move on to socializing land and “unmaking the social relations that produce capitalist private property.” If that gives you pause and makes you ask how, exactly, we are supposed to accomplish such a goal, it’s time to look at the final section of this chapter: politics. Here, Stein readily acknowledges that planners cannot unmake the real estate state on their own — not even close. Mass politics that both forcefully advocate for specific goals and “make the status quo untenable” are integral to the process.
It’s clear from his prescriptions that Stein sees a joint effort between mass political movements and radical, avowedly anticapitalist planners as a fruitful path. Yet this prescription, simultaneously the most ambitious and the most realistic for actually effecting lasting change, feels tacked on given how vanishingly little space activists and organized grassroots politics are afforded throughout the book. He might have discussed previous examples of collaborations between planners and activists — collaborations that sometimes worked well and other times resulted in disaster. While groups like the Planners Network put progressive planners to work with community organizations, the midcentury project of “urban renewal” involved razing “blighted” (usually poor and/or nonwhite) areas to create new and apparently improved housing or retail, displacing existing tenants and disrupting their communities. A more comprehensive exploration of the complex historical relationship between planning and activism, and the tensions and possibilities in that pairing, might have grounded the analysis in a way that would give his conclusions more force.
Nevertheless, “Capital City” is a fascinating read for anyone interested in cities, capitalism, racism, or housing. It will undoubtedly be a great resource for socialists who are looking for common ground with urbanist friends or family (or a friendly method of radicalization). Stein has produced a book that is concise and digestible, without sacrificing analytical heft. Socialists are re-entering the popular conversation about cities from coast to coast, reminding people that winning another world is not only possible but necessary, and that we can only do it together. Stein’s work is an important addition to this movement, and, crucially, a promising tool for introducing more people to these ideas.
This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .
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