Chris Hedges's Blog, page 13

Trump’s Real Base Is the Ruling Class

Don’t blame the Trump presidency on the white proletariat. The real responsibility for this epically transgressive administration — headed by an individual Noam Chomsky rightly describes as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” — lies with the billionaire class.

According to a mainstream media myth long believed by intellectuals who ought to know better, Donald Trump rode into the White House on a great upsurge of support from poor, white, working-class voters drawn to the Republican candidate’s populist anti-Wall Street pitch in key deindustrialized battleground states. This conventional Rust Belt rebellion wisdom was proclaimed on the front page of the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, a day after the 2016 election. The Times called Trump’s victory “a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters.” That same day, Times political writer Nate Cohn wrote that “Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among working-class whites.”

This storyline — repeated ad nauseam and taken for granted in the mainstream media and even in much of the progressive left — is flatly contradicted by credible data. There was no mass white working-class outpouring for Trump in 2016. Slate writers Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr noted weeks after the election: “Donald Trump didn’t flip working-class white voters,” they wrote. “Hillary Clinton lost them. … Relative to the 2012 election, Democratic support in the key Rust Belt states [Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] collapsed as a huge number of Democrats stayed home or (to a lesser extent) voted for a third party.”

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According to the sources cited in Slate’s analysis, the decline in numbers of working-class Democratic voters between 2012 and 2016 was much bigger than the increase of working-class Republican voters in the “Rust Belt Five.” Among those earning less than $50,000 a year in those states, the drop in Democratic voting was 3.5 times greater than the uptick in Republican voting. The party’s long tilt to the corporatist and Wall Street-friendly right, evident under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, explains in part why 45% of the U.S. electorate didn’t bother to vote in 2016. Trump was elected by just a little more than a quarter of the U.S. voting-age population.

Unheeded by leftist and liberal intellectuals who still insist that Trump’s base comprised lower- and working-class white people, Lehigh University political scientist Anthony DiMaggio (an all-too-rare intellectual from the left with a strong grasp of statistics) has been trying for years to tell us that Trump’s 2016 backers weren’t really all that proletarian. While the president’s voters were less formally educated and more likely to work in blue-collar jobs than backers of the arch-corporatist Hillary Clinton, they earned higher household incomes. They were no more likely to face labor market competition through immigration or trade. They were no more likely to be economically disadvantaged and insecure. Areas hit hardest by manufacturing job losses actually were less likely to back Trump.

Yes, Trump opportunistically ripped on “free trade,” Goldman Sachs, Clinton’s six-figure Wall Street speaking honorariums, finance capital’s cherished carried-interest tax break, and even (indirectly) the Koch brothers. In an appeal to the “forgotten working people of our great heartland,” he bemoaned shuttered factories and mills whose closings he blamed on globalist trade agreements.

But as political sociologists David Norton Smith and Eric Hanley argued two years ago, the disproportionately white Trump base was not differentiated from white non-Trump voters by class, other demographic factors (such as income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of education) or by economic grievances against the wealthy. What set the largely petit-bourgeois Trump supporters apart, Smith and Hanley showed, was their shared allegiance to eight core values and identities: identification as “conservative”; support for “domineering leaders”; Christian fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against Muslims; prejudice against women; and a sense of pessimism about the economy.

If it’s wrong to see Trump as the product of the white working class and its populist-proletarian rage, it’s equally incorrect to think that Trump rose to power without significant and essential backing from the lords of capital. Trump got a big, indirect capitalist boost from elite corporate and financial Democratic election investors who helped Clinton defeat the populist-progressive Bernie Sanders — who by many indicators stood a better chance against Trump than she did. Those same investors then helped convince Clinton to run a campaign that stayed fatally silent on policy matters of critical significance to working-class voters.

Trump also was backed directly by the ruling class. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump was able to leapfrog over the heads of his less wealthy Republican rivals, thanks to disproportionate media attention and to his own fortune — worth $2 billion by The New York Times’ estimation in mid-March of 2016. (A Republican candidate dependent on the usual elite bankrollers would never have been able to get away with Trump’s crowd-pleasing and rating-boosting antics.)

After Trump won the Republican nomination, however, he could no longer go it alone. During the Republican National Convention and in the late summer of 2016, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen have shown, Trump’s flagging, formerly solo campaign was “rescued by major industries plainly hoping for tariff relief, waves of other billionaires from the far, far right of the already far right Republican Party, and the most disruption-exalting corners of Wall Street.”

The Trump general election campaign relied on “a giant wave of dark money — one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney’s munificently financed 2012 effort — to say nothing of any Russian Facebook experiments.” Along with colossal contributions from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife ($11 million), Sands Casino employees ($20 million) and Silicon Valley executives, Trump garnered a campaign finance torrent from big hedge funds and “large private equity firms, the part of Wall Street which had long championed hostile takeovers.” This critical surge of right-wing cash came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its direction from the Russia-tainted Paul Manafort to the far more effective white-nationalist Breitbart executive Steve Bannon. Bannon was strongly connected to the eccentric, right-wing, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who poured a vast sum – $26 million (making him Trump’s third-largest backer) – into the Trump campaign.

Along with the racist voter suppression carried out by Koch-backed Republican state governments and the geographic advantage afforded Republican candidates by the Electoral College, this late-season influx of hard-right election investing tilted the election Trump’s way.

Another key source of support was, of course, Fox News, a critical hard-right, capitalist, propaganda asset owned by right-wing Australian multibillionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It wasn’t for nothing that David Koch stood, in author Jane Mayer’s words, “with a jubilant smile amid the throngs of revelers at the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan” on the night of Trump’s election. Adelson, Mercer, Murdoch and other right-wing oligarchs, including the Koch brothers, appreciated how Trump’s faux-populist campaign promoted a hard-right variant of the extreme neoliberal nostrums they’d long advanced in the name of the “free market.” Trump’s economic plan to “make America great again” and “create 25 million new jobs” was simple and straightforward: massive tax cuts, a simplification of the tax code, a vast reduction in government spending, a rollback of “excessive regulation,” the scrapping of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and expanded oil and gas drilling. With the exceptions of his tariff-mongering and immigrant-bashing (which the Kochs and Mercer likely expected to fade once they placed their people in the new administration), Trump’s economic platform was lifted right out of the neoliberal playbook. While candidate Trump might have promised to smite elites, his proposals, in Mayer’s words, “threatened instead to enshrine a permanent aristocracy in America … [the Kochs] … stood to benefit to an extent that dwarfed earlier administrations, as did many other billionaires.”

Trump has shown that he understands who his real and most powerful base is – the billionaire class – ever since his election. His transition team and inaugural committee swarmed with right-wing oligarchs and their lobbyists. The president spends evening hours conferring by telephone not with MAGA hat-wearing proles but with fellow right-wing billionaires and multimillionaires — the only class of people he really respects. As he rips up regulations, lets key federal agencies wither and staffs top government posts with right-wing oligarchs and their toadies — consistent with Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — the real winners under Trump have been the economic elite. These are the leading beneficiaries of Trump’s effort to introduce what leftist economist Jack Rasmus calls “a more virulent form of neoliberalism,” replete with a pronounced assault on democracy and a drift toward tyranny. Journalist Thomas Meaney notes that Trump as president has “fed the richest in society in the currency they prefer — dollars — and fed his fans lower down with a temporarily effective substitute — recognition.” As David Masciotra writes at Salon, “The acknowledgement and solace Trump provides for the insecurities and prejudices of the little-red-hat boys conceals the true beneficiaries of his presidency. … [Trump’s] socialistic giveaway [tax cut] to the wealthy has cost America $1.9 trillion. For that same staggering sum of money, the Trump administration could have forgiven all outstanding student debt, created a system of affordable child care for working parents, and eliminated tuition at community colleges. … Corporations that profit in the hundreds of million, including FedEx, General Electric and Netflix, pay no taxes under Trump’s plan, while 10 million Americans of average means … saw their tax bills increase.”

Like Trump or not, many in the upper bourgeoisie are contributing to his record-setting campaign finance take (up to a Darth Vader-like $253 million by end of January, more than half from large donors). Trump’s war chest is stocked by big money super-PACS —America First Action, Future45, Great America PAC, Rebuild America Now and The Committee to Defend the President — funneling cash to the grand cause of keeping “the most dangerous criminal in human history” in the world’s most powerful position.

If the lords of capital were seriously concerned by the demented president’s fascistic conduct— replete with regular racist hate rallies, open flirtation with political violence, not-so-veiled threats to resist a 2020 electoral outcome that doesn’t go his way, and the granting of pardons to sociopathic war criminals — they could collapse his presidency with ruling-class weapons they will employ with zeal should Sanders somehow defy the odds and attain the presidency: capital strike and a constant propaganda war claiming that the administration was crippling prosperity.

Expressing sentiments common across the commanding heights of the investor class, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, a lifelong Democrat, has voiced preference for the neofascist Trump over Sanders, a moderate social democrat advancing policies that qualify as centrist in capitalist western and northern Europe. The corporate-captive Democratic Party’s openly authoritarian, Wall Street-friendly superdelegates are ready to hand Trump a second term by “super”-voting in the Democratic National Convention’s second ballot to deny Sanders their party’s nomination, even if he comes to the convention with a large plurality of primary delegates. Deep-sixing the highly popular, progressive senator at the convention will likely wreck the party, crippling it for the general election — a risk the superdelegates are perfectly willing to take.

So what if Trump is, in Chomsky’s words, “dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species)”?

And so what if another corporate-neoliberal Democratic presidency in the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Buttigieg-Bloomberg-Council on Foreign Relations-Center for American Progress mode would (if Biden or Bloomberg could somehow defeat a possibly recession-plagued Trump) birth a 2025 Republican presidency even more fascistic than Trump’s? The oligarchs don’t care. They’ll work out a comfortable accommodation with that monster, too.

Experts Warn U.S. Health Care System Is ‘Woefully Unprepared’ for Coronavirus

As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread across the U.S., nurses and other public health experts are warning that the country’s public health system is unprepared to handle a pandemic and calling on the federal government to take more urgent steps to protect the American people from the disease.

“As the nation braces to confront the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that is quickly spreading across the world, National Nurses United, the largest union for registered nurses in the United States, has been closely monitoring the situation in our hospitals,” NNU presidents and registered nurses Deborah Burger, Zenei Cortez, and Jean Ross wrote Monday in an open letter (pdf) to Vice President Mike Pence. “It is critical that the federal government take quick and meaningful steps to urgently protect the public from this outbreak.”

The letter, which called the nation’s public health system “woefully unprepared” for the pandemic, recommends the administration act to protect health workers and to ensure a vaccine for the virus is provided for free to the public. The nurses also noted that the existing crisis was being exacerbated by public health cuts.

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“At the moment, we have a fragmented and broken public health infrastructure which is woefully unprepared for COVID-19,” the nurses said.

Specifically, the NNU demanded the Trump administration and Congress implement the following policies immediately:

Ensure that all nurses and health care workers receive the highest level of protection in their workplaces, as determined by the precautionary principle, which means erring on the side of safety and taking action even before you know something is unsafe.
Improve the Centers for Disease Control screening criteria and testing capacity to ensure prompt recognition of and response to new cases.
Promulgate an Emergency Temporary Standard through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect health care workers from emerging infectious diseases as soon as possible.
Ensure that any vaccine or treatment that is developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars is provided to the public for free.
Act immediately to pass an emergency spending package to fully fund the response to this outbreak, including dedicated funds for protective equipment for workers, temporary paid sick leave, and coverage of all treatment, care, and services for people with potential COVID-19 infection.

As Common Dreams reported Monday, critics have pilloried the government’s response to the outbreak thus far for seeming to put the happiness of President Donald Trump over public health needs.

That prioritization of the president’s feelings over proactive measures to address the outbreak has reportedly continued. According to The New York Times, Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week instructed U.S. military commanders in bases around the world “not to make any decisions related to the coronavirus that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”

During a meeting on the coronavirus Monday, Trump asked a group of pharmaceutical CEOs if a vaccine would “make you better quicker,” indicating the president does not fully grasp that a vaccine would prevent, not treat, the virus.

TRUMP asks a pharmaceutical CEO: “This would be a combination of a vaccine and also it will — put it in a different way — make you better, quicker?” pic.twitter.com/N7Wti1UByC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2020

Meanwhile, the associated costs of getting tested for the coronavirus are nearing $4,000 for some patients. In a press conference Monday evening, Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Seem Verma said that she was unclear on what costs associated with the testing Medicare and Medicaid would and would not cover.

It is WILD that in the middle of a global health emergency American’s on Medicare and Medicaid are being told the government has to review what will and won’t be covered in terms of treatment. pic.twitter.com/XZrQkwIc3Q

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) March 2, 2020

In a press conference Monday evening, Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Seem Verma said that she was unclear on what costs associated with the testing Medicare and Medicaid would and would not cover.

The prohibitive cost of testing, health professionals have warned, risks infected people staying in the general population without treatment.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said Tuesday that the situation was unacceptable.

“Profiting during an outbreak is not only cruel—it threatens public health,” said Sanders. “All needed tests, treatment, and vaccines must be made free for all.”

The U.S. government put a family in mandatory isolation. Now they’re left with a $3,900 surprise hospital bill.

Profiting during an outbreak is not only cruel—it threatens public health. All needed tests, treatment, and vaccines must be made free for all. https://t.co/4MRQwyuHlR

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 3, 2020

Testing itself is running into problems. One woman from Seattle, who claimed to be a health professional, recounted on Twitter her efforts to get tested—a four phone call ordeal that resulted in her being told she would not be tested despite having all the symptoms of the illness.

Meanwhile, a New York City doctor told CNBC on Monday that the Centers for Disease Control is not providing his hospital with testing kits.

BREAKING: NYC Doctor Turns Whisteblower – Says he’s been pleading to test people for #CoronaVirus. “I still do not have a #Covid19 test available to me.” pic.twitter.com/cCcCQOrU2F

— Alexander Higgins – Coronavirus Updates (@kr3at) March 3, 2020

Bottom line, Vanderbilt University Medical Center preventive medicine and infectious disease professor William Schaffner told The Guardian, is that hospitals and healthcare workers need to be on top of strategizing for an outbreak.

“Every institution ought to be re-educating everybody about appropriate respiratory precautions,” said Schaffner.

In an article for Vice, emergency room doctor Darragh O’Carroll reminded  Americans to trust the professionals.

“Listen to your public health officials, because in order to avoid a healthcare system collapse, we must all act swiftly, and with unity,” said O’Carroll.

Netanyahu’s Election Victory Could Mean Palestine’s Destruction

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) — Three Israeli television news channels’ exit polls suggest that indicted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s far-right, racist Likud Party fell just short of a majority in Israel’s third parliamentary election in a year. The Likud, founded in the age of supremacist, racialist parties of the 1930s and 1940s, was projected to gain 59 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, or Israeli Parliament. If these preliminary indications are borne out in the actual election results, Netanyahu can probably find two MPs to join him so as to form a government — though he needs more than that for a stable governing majority.

Netanyahu will go to trial on corruption charges in mid-March.

Ironically, the Joint List of Palestinian-Israeli parties and some Jewish leftists may do extraordinarily well also, garnering as many as 15 seats out of 120. Palestinian-Israelis, commonly called “Israeli Arabs” or the “Palestinians of 1948,” comprise about a fifth of the population of Israel, but by Israeli law, only Jews have sovereignty. Monday’s victory for the Joint List has few parliamentary implications, since Jewish parties will no more ally or co-legislate with the Joint List than white Alabama politicians would have cooperated with African Americans in the Jim Crow era.

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Shadi Abu Shahada, a member of the Knesset with the Joint List, blamed Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz for the debacle, saying that Gantz’s Blue and White Coalition lost (with a projected 38 seats) because it failed to distinguish itself in any important respect from the Likud. He implied that if all Gantz could offer was a knockoff Likud, it was understandable that Israeli voters decided they might as well go with the real thing. Gantz has been as eager to oppress and expropriate the Palestinians as Netanyahu.

As for the occupied, stateless Palestinians, they viewed the news of the Likud semi-victory as a harbinger of unadulterated doom. PLO official Saeb Erekat proclaimed the results “the triumph of apartheid.”

Netanyahu campaigned on stealing much of the Palestinian West Bank from the indigenous Palestinians, and so forever forestalling a Palestinian state. He was given a green light for these militaristic and expansionist policies, reminiscent of those of Mussolini toward occupied France and Libya during WW II, by the Kushner plan for permanent apartheid. The obvious support of U.S. President Donald Trump for Netanyahu, along with American green-lighting of the expropriation and brutalization of the Palestinians, may help explain why Netanyahu did so much better in these elections than in the previous two.

In his victory speech, Netanyahu proclaimed that he has made Israel a supe-power in every dimension — socially, economically and militarily — and has made the country a delightful place to live.

He promised a quick defeat of Iran, and boasted that he had made new friends among Arab governments, many of which are now supporting Israel (because of common fear of Iran).

In fact, Israel has been turned by Netanyahu into a seedy apartheid state, inextricably entangled, as political scientist Ian Lustick argues, with 6 million Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis, 5 million of them stateless, under Israeli military rule or siege, in one of the worst ethno-nationalist nightmares in the world.

Israel is 31st in the world by nominal gross domestic product, in the same league as Ireland and Norway. Its Gini coefficient, measuring inequality, is .38, one of the higher in the industrialized world. France is .32, Norway is 26. Working-class Israelis face skyrocketing housing costs. The Israeli government offers behind-the-scenes subsidies for Israelis to squat on Palestinian land instead.

Lustick has estimated that as many as a million Israelis live abroad. Some say the Middle East conflicts make them nervous. Others have fled because they are liberals or leftists who are tired of harassment by the dominant far right. Some 20,000 Israelis prefer to live in Germany, along with a total of 200,000 Jews, many of them from the former Soviet bloc, who preferred to emigrate there than to Israel.

One ranking puts the Israeli military at 17th in the world, in the same league as North Korea and Indonesia. The country punches way above its weight, with some 8 million citizens, but it isn’t a superpower. In fact, it receives $3.8 billion a year in direct welfare payments from the United States, and the transfers are much bigger if sweetheart U.S. tariffs and other benefits are counted.

Netanyahu is enormously unpopular among younger Americans, including younger Jewish Americans, and his apartheid state is losing the support of much of the Democratic Party. If he has won, it is hardly good news for Israel.

Super Tuesday Is an Election Security Acid Test

Tuesday’s presidential primaries across 14 states mark the first major security test since the 2018 midterm elections, with state and local election officials saying they are prepared to deal with everything from equipment problems to false information about the coronavirus.

States have been racing to shore up cybersecurity defenses, replace aging and vulnerable voting equipment and train for worst-case scenarios since it became clear that Russia had launched a sweeping and systematic effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. officials said Monday they were on alert and ready to respond to any efforts to disrupt the 2020 elections.

In 2016, the Russians weaponized social media to sow discord among Americans, scanned state and local election systems for cyber vulnerabilities and deployed the targeted release of stolen campaign emails and documents.

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U.S. intelligence chiefs have warned that foreign interference remains a threat for the 2020 election. And the recent outbreak of a new virus could present a bad actor with an opening to spread false information to keep voters away from the polls.

An unexpected interruption occurred in Tennessee, where deadly overnight tornadoes delayed the start of Super Tuesday presidential primary voting in Nashville and another county. The storms spurred election officials to redirect voters from some polling places to alternate locations.

Voting got off to a slow start in Travis County, Texas, on Tuesday because many election workers did not show up, with some citing coronavirus fears, according to the county clerk’s office. The election office says it began implementing emergency procedures, with elections staff and others employees filling in as poll workers.

One California county has sought to address concerns over the coronavirus by sending bottles of hand sanitizer to polling places and asking poll workers to post fliers from the public health department on how to avoid spreading the virus. Jesse Salinas, the chief elections official in Yolo County, California, said a few poll workers have backed out over concerns but most understand the threat is relatively low. The county had no reported cases as of Monday morning.

“We are hoping people remain calm and still participate in the election process,” Salinas said.

California is also a heavy absentee/mailed ballots state, so most people will be either mailing or dropping off their ballots, which creates other challenges. Election officials have been warning the public not to expect complete unofficial results on Tuesday night, and that results could fluctuate as ballots come in and are counted over several days. Ballots postmarked on primary day will be counted as long as they are received within three days. Election officials have up to 30 days to certify the official count.

The national agency that oversees election security said Tuesday it hasn’t detected any notable uptick in either misinformation by foreign nations or targeted attacks on voting equipment during the first hours of voting across the country.

Misinformation campaigns by Russian operatives and others are ongoing but there hasn’t been “any appreciable increase in activity,” as voters go to the polls for Super Tuesday, senior officials with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters.

This year’s voting got off to a rocky start, but not because of any foreign interference. A mobile app deployed in Iowa by the state Democratic Party failed spectacularly the night of the Feb. 3 caucuses and delayed reporting of initial results for nearly 24 hours. Subsequent voting in three states occurred without major problems.

Unlike the Iowa caucuses, which were run by state parties, state and local election officials will be administering Tuesday’s elections in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

“Texas voters can rest assured … that our office and those of local and county elections officials are committed to working hand in hand to ensure smooth elections as well as the integrity of our electoral process,” said Stephen Chang, spokesman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

The states vary considerably in their use of technology to run elections. Some utilize computerized voter lists known as electronic pollbooks to check in voters, while others rely on paper. Voters in a few places will be using new electronic voting machines that produce a paper record of voter selections while some voters in Texas, Tennessee and Oklahoma will be using older ones considered vulnerable by election security experts.

Even those new machines have raised concerns among election security experts, who note many rely on a type of bar code that could be manipulated so the human-readable portion of the ballot printout reflects a voter’s choice but the bar code does not. Election officials who defend ballot-marking devices say there are many security safeguards to prevent problems.

In California, a new publicly owned computerized voting system — the first of its kind in the nation — will face a crucial test in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest elections jurisdiction with 5.4 million registered voters.

The new system won conditional state approval despite serious security and technical issues, with the county ordered to offer all voters the option of using hand-marked paper ballots. An estimated 63 percent of voters were already expected to vote by mail using hand-marked paper ballots. Such ballots are considered the most reliable by election security experts because paper can’t be hacked — or altered by programming errors.

___

Cassidy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Ben Fox in Washington, Frank Bajak in Boston, Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas and Jake Bleiberg in Dallas contributed to this report.

The Democratic Establishment May Fear Sanders More Than Trump

Mainstream news outlets keep pounding home the same message — that the “Democratic establishment” or “Democratic moderates” are worried sick that Bernie Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump. They worry about a Trump landslide, and a “down-ballot disaster” in congressional races.

Democratic insiders, we’re told, fear a rerun of 1972 — when progressive anti-war candidate George McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to Richard Nixon. Given our divided electoral map, with nearly 40 states safely blue or red, such a scenario in 2020 is thoroughly absurd.

That didn’t stop now ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews — who abruptly resigned Monday night after having an on-air, Sanders-induced crackup in recent weeks — from offering this prophecy in mid-February: “I was there in 1972 at the Democratic convention when the people on the left were dancing in glee. … And they went on to lose 49 states in their glee. So that could happen again. So clearly. That’s what I see. It could happen again.”

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Let’s put aside that mad prediction. Or Matthews’ paranoid Cold War comment linking Sanders somehow to public executions in New York City’s Central Park. Or his comparison of Sanders’ triumph in Nevada to the finality of the Nazi conquest of France.

And let’s recognize that even a crazed TV character — like the fictional Howard Beale in the film “Network” — is capable of blurting out an important truth once in a while. On the eve of the Nevada caucus, Matthews let the cat out of the bag about the true fears of many in the Democratic establishment:

I’m wondering whether the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be president. Maybe that’s too exciting a question to raise — they don’t like Trump at all. Do they want Bernie Sanders to take over the Democratic Party in perpetuity? If he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party. Maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in a Democrat that they like.

Notice that the worry here is not that Sanders will lose, but that he will win. And proceed to transform the Democratic Party. And, presumably, the country.

Matthews was not expressing fear of 1972. It was more like fear of 1932. That’s when Franklin Roosevelt (a Sanders hero) triumphed and — propelled by labor and socialist movements — transformed society with a New Deal benefiting working people.

The corporate media’s “Bernie can’t win” drumbeat should arouse skepticism among news consumers. First, because political outcomes are difficult to predict — especially after an unstable reality-TV star and a young African American (middle name “Hussein”) won the White House. Second, because few have been more wrong for so long in their predictions than mainstream media pundits and their pals in the Democratic establishment.

In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore, was sure to win. He didn’t. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn’t.

As a newspaper of the corporate Democratic establishment (and endorser of Gore, Kerry and Clinton in the Democratic primaries), The New York Times has long repeated the “Bernie can’t win” mantra. So I give the Times credit for publishing an important opposing view last week in a guest column by analyst Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color: “Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here’s the Math.”

Phillips cites head-to-head polling that shows Sanders beating Trump nationally and “outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.”

Phillips says the changing electorate (even from 2016 to 2020) and the particular way that Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada augur well for Sanders as the candidate who best matches up against Trump:

In all three early states, he received twice as much support from voters under 30 than his closest competitor. In Nevada, he received about 70 percent of the vote in the most heavily Latino precincts. … This will be the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up fully one-third of all eligible voters. The share of eligible voters from Generation Z (18-23-year-olds) will be more than twice as large in 2020 as it was in 2016.

More than other contenders, Sanders has shown he can inspire the two fastest-growing, anti-Trump sectors of the electorate — youth voters and Latinos. Writes Phillips: “In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in 2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million young people have since turned 18.” He notes that “160,000 Latinos have turned 18” in Arizona, a state Trump won by only 91,000 votes.

I co-produced a documentary in which we interviewed working-class whites in the Rust Belt of Ohio, longtime Democrats who’d voted for Obama, voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and then jumped to Trump (often out of anger over NAFTA). These are the so-called “Obama-Trump voters” — and no Democratic nominee is likely to win more of them back than Sanders.

The progressive senator is also “most likely to reclaim those Democratic voters who defected to the Green Party” — the “Obama-Stein voters.” As Phillips points out: “The increase in votes for Jill Stein from 2012 to 2016 was greater than Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin.”

As the South Carolina primary showed, one crucial voting bloc that Sanders has so far had trouble inspiring is older African Americans — although he beat Biden among blacks under 30, according to an “NBC News” exit poll.

If mainstream media spent less time on horse-race analysis and dubious predictions, and more time accurately presenting the candidates’ records, perhaps almost every voter of every color would know that Sanders was a brave civil rights activist at the University of Chicago — a student leader in the then-renowned Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), who sat-in and was arrested protesting discrimination against African Americans.

The pictures of young Bernie in action are dramatic and important to see.

At least as important as seeing Trump swing a golf club — or watching the latest anti-Sanders smear from TV pundits carrying on the Chris Matthews tradition.

Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Presidential Powers Case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday with whether to make it easier for the president to fire the head of the agency that enforces federal consumer financial laws, a decision that could ultimately impact a vast range of agencies.

The high court was hearing arguments in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency Congress created in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

The agency was the brainchild of Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, and arguments took place as voters in 14 states were selecting who they want to be the Democratic party’s nominee for president.

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During arguments at the high court some justices were clearly bothered by a restriction that keeps the president from firing the CFPB’s head whenever he wants. Justice Brett Kavanaugh called that restriction “troubling.” But other justices seemed willing to let the restriction stand, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who described the restrictions as “modest.”

Under the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB, its director is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term. The president can only remove a director for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” That means that an incoming president usually can’t immediately fire the agency’s head appointed in the previous administration.

Defenders of the bureau’s structure say it is good in that it insulates the agency’s head from pressure by the president. But detractors say the restriction is unconstitutional and improperly limits the power of the president.

The impact of the justices’ decision in the case could go beyond the CFPB because the heads of other so-called independent agencies have a similar restriction on being fired. Those agencies include the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission. Unlike the CFPB, however, those agencies are headed by multi-member boards.

The case was brought to the court by the Orange County, California-based consumer law firm Seila Law. As part of an investigation, the CFPB demanded information and documents from the firm, which is run by a solo practitioner. Seila Law responded by challenging the CFPB’s structure. Two lower courts ruled against the law firm.

The Obama administration initially defended the structure of the agency. The Trump administration later reversed course and now says the structure is unconstitutional.

A decision in the case, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 19-7, is expected by the end of June.

Happy Afghanistan Surrender Day

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com.

Happy Afghan War surrender day, fellas! So began my flippant group text yesterday — which was actually regarding a whole other topic — with the nine lieutenants who worked “for” me when I commanded a cavalry troop in Southern Afghanistan. Now these guys, some still in the army, most long out, run the political gamut from centrist conservative to libertarian (very common among military officers) to mainstream liberal. None are as radical, or full-throated antiwar, as me. Nonetheless, instructively, most responded with some — albeit often sarcastic — level of tacit support for any and all plans to (eventually, and hopefully) get the troops out of Afghanistan. Furthermore, the fact that nearly all of them lost soldiers directly under their command in one of the war’s most dangerous years, within one of the most dangerous provinces of the country, hasn’t diminished this pro-withdrawal sentiment.

My artillery officer – who I profiled a couple years back in the American Conservative — responded first, with: “Victory or loss, thank Allah we’re out of that quagmire.” Then my first executive officer (XO, my second in command) made a joke about the artilleryman’s use of the word “quagmire,” asking “What would Rumsfeld say?” (Bush’s former Secretary of Defense famously eschewed this descriptor for the Iraq War) That XO’s thoughtful successor then wrote: “I’m really glad we are getting out. I hate that it will take 14 months, but I’m thrilled. …” That former lieutenant of mine raised an important point. Much of the critical (and fair) response to my cautious social media support for Trump’s “peace” “deal” centers around either the rather protracted withdraw timeline or skepticism about the sincerity of the U.S. position more generally.

To the first point, as Adam Wunische at the Quincy Institute accurately noted:

President Trump will likely sell the U.S.-Taliban deal as a peace agreement and a US military withdrawal. It is neither. The deal only reduces troop strength to 8,600 from 13,000 [for now], and Trump has said even minor complications will serve as justification to halt or reverse this reduction.

As to the second matter, the probity of the American commitment to meaningfully “leave” Afghanistan, there are other valid concerns. Not least of which are the “secret annexes” that appear to imply the US will keep special forces soldiers, and, one assumes, CIA-backed militias, on the ground long after the “combat” troops are all out. Added to the questionable mix is the minor fact that the president of the ostensibly sovereign, Kabul-based state of Afghanistan wasn’t even present at the deal’s signing, and has already reneged (an early, if predictable, first snag on peace) on releasing some 5,000 Taliban prisoners — as the U.S.-negotiated agreement called for.

What’s more, given the linguistic gymnastics that Barack Obama seemingly perfected regarding what, precisely, constitute “combat” troops — or, even what counts as a “boot,” or as “ground” — it’s increasingly difficult these days to believe much of what his successor, or the national security state in general, pronounces. Finally, given the reportedly vast, and coveted, mineral resources under Afghanistan’s undeveloped soil, its importance as a thoroughfare for key natural gas pipelines, and general, historic, position of geopolitical import, many (rightfully) doubt whether Washington is really prepared to walk away from the region. All of that is fair, and crucial to parse out.

Also worrying is the likelihood that in this age of Trump-worship, Trump-hatred, and/or Trump-derangement syndrome, the situation in Afghanistan — where American men and women are still being killed, mind you — will revert to just another public referendum on the competence and character of the president himself. That’d be a huge mistake. To wit, let me plea: please, MSNBC-Obama-squad liberals, don’t make this critical moment all about bashing The Donald and thereby reflexively default to a stay-forever, status quo position. Odds are they will, of course.

The really salient questions are twofold: could/would a different president (say Hillary “the hawk,” or “Iraq War-cheerleader” Joe B.) do any better with such a decidedly weak military hand? And, what other option, besides eventual withdrawal does Mr. Trump have with respect to this inherited war? I’d submit the discomfiting answers are “no” and “none,” respectively.

Truth be told, I, like the crew over at Quincy, think the U.S. ought to have ditched the Afghan debacle decades ago, and that a more rapid — immediate, even — comprehensive withdrawal is in order. Never trust the hyper-interventionist establishment when it whines about the inefficacy and supposed danger of a sudden troop exodus from a failed war. That’s never anything more than a sleight-of-hand canard for indefinite occupation.

Count me sympathetic to the plain, earthy logic of Ron Paul, when he asked, “Why the dilemma? [regarding Iraq]” and asserted, “We just marched in, and we can just march out.” And that was back in 2007! As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan, and as always: that’s unlikely. Uncle Sam rarely, if ever, leaves a purportedly conquered country of its own volition. That just ain’t Sammy’s style. More often than not, the US military requires an insurgent bouncer to toss it to the proverbially curb … you know, like the Vietcong, for instance.

Like it or not, this is where matters stand: Look, one way or the other, folks, the Afghan War is over, and has been for a long time. We lost, for all intents in purposes, by not achieving the government’s (always fantastical) stated goals. As a nation, but especially so for the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, we’ve just been in deep denial about that inconvenient truth. Bottom line: there’s little left that the U.S. can accomplish in Afghanistan, and that’s been the cases for at least a decade.

So, sure, there’s lots to criticize about the world’s “greatest” dealmaker’s deal. Some will say it doesn’t go far enough (it doesn’t). The interventionist hawks on the other side will counter that it amounts to surrender (it kind of does). Still, there’s scant alternative available other than for Uncle Sam to tuck his tail between the ole legs and beat feet out of the Afghan “graveyard of empires.”

To channel Ron Paul: why all the dramatic hoopla about this? After all, rumor has it, that in war, the losers don’t get to dictate the peace terms. It’s time to “deal“ with it.

Opera Union Member Alleges Cover-Up in Placido Domingo Scandal

SAN FRANCISCO — A senior member of the main U.S. union that represents opera performers resigned Monday, accusing the leadership of a cover-up in its investigation into accusations of sexual harassment against superstar Plácido Domingo.

Samuel Schultz, a baritone and vice president of the American Guild of Musical Artists, had provided the full findings of the union’s investigation to The Associated Press, which he said AGMA’s leadership had planned to keep secret as part of an agreement with Domingo. Schultz said the deal involved the legendary tenor paying the union a $500,000 fine and issuing a negotiated public apology in exchange for the full details not being disclosed.

The union has said that money would have covered the cost of its 4-month investigation, which involved hiring outside counsel, and funding sexual harassment training. But Schultz called it hush money that did a disservice to the women who stepped forward.

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“This is a quid pro quo — silence in exchange for money,” Schultz said in a resignation letter sent Monday to AGMA President Raymond Menard and National Executive Director Len Egert. “I found AGMA’s willingness to bury the details of the investigative report deeply betraying of the women who were sexually harassed by Domingo,” he wrote.

Schultz, who wrote that he was acting “as a sexual assault survivor myself,” provided a copy of his letter to the AP.

In a statement to the AP, Egert denied any cover-up, saying the investigation’s details were kept confidential to protect the identities of people who requested anonymity and that the union’s leaders also felt the settlement could avoid formal disciplinary charges against Domingo that would require an internal hearing.

“Regrettably, due to Mr. Schultz’s admitted breach of confidentiality, the witnesses will now need to determine whether or not they will testify at a disciplinary hearing to prove the charges against Mr. Domingo,” Egert said. The union filed disciplinary charges against Domingo on Friday, initiating a potentially lengthy process that could result in a fine, suspension, censure or expulsion.

The union’s investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations was one of two independent inquiries launched after multiple women accused Domingo of harassment and abusing his power in AP stories published last year. The second inquiry, still ongoing, was launched by Los Angeles Opera, where Domingo had been general director since 2003 before resigning in October.

Last week, AGMA said only that its investigators found Domingo had “engaged in inappropriate activity, ranging from flirtation to sexual advances, in and outside of the workplace.” Based on its findings, the union said, Domingo would “pay fines,” be suspended from the union for 18 months and undergo sexual harassment training.

According to people who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity, the investigation found that 27 people were sexually harassed or witnessed inappropriate behavior by Domingo in the 1990s and 2000s, when he held senior management positions at Washington National Opera and Los Angeles Opera. They said another 12 people told investigators they were aware of the star’s reputation and that it was common knowledge at the two companies.

Schultz’ resignation came after the union launched an inquiry into who leaked the investigation’s findings. In an internal email seen by the AP, Egert and Maynard said the deal fell apart because it “was expressly premised on AGMA’s promise to maintain confidentiality over the details of the investigatory report.”

Last week, Domingo apologized to the women who accused him of misconduct, after denying the allegations for months. “I want them to know that I am truly sorry,” he said. “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

But two days later, as several Spanish concert halls moved to cancel his appearances, he issued a new statement saying his “apology was sincere and wholehearted,” but had generated a false impression. “I have never behaved aggressively toward anybody, nor have I ever done anything to obstruct or hurt the career of anybody,” he said.

Schultz said in his letter to Egert and Maynard that he felt they had “duped the board into believing Domingo was truly sorry,” adding, ““As Domingo made clear when he retracted his apology, he is unrepentant and continues to believe that he did nothing wrong.”

In 2018, Schultz accused opera star David Daniels and Daniels’ husband, William Walters, of having drugged and raped him in May 2010 after a closing-night party at the Houston Grand Opera. Daniels, who denies the accusation, has since been indicted in Texas on a felony charge of sexual assault.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Retire, Citing His Offensive Comments About Women

Veteran MSNBC host Chris Matthews said he’s retiring from his show “Hardball,” citing his inappropriate comments about women.

Matthews opened his program with the announcement he was ending his run on the political hour that he started in 1997.

He said compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, himself included, thought were OK “were never OK.”

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He remained proud of the work he ‘s done on the show, he said.

In a first-person story for GQ published Feb. 28, freelance journalist Laura Bassett said Matthews behaved inappropriately toward her when she was guest on his show.

“In 2016, right before I had to go on his show and talk about sexual-assault allegations against Donald Trump, Matthews looked over at me in the makeup chair next to him and said, ‘Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?’ When I laughed nervously and said nothing, he followed up to the makeup artist. ‘Keep putting makeup on her, I’ll fall in love with her,’” Bassett wrote. “Another time, he stood between me and the mirror and complimented the red dress I was wearing for the segment. ‘You going out tonight?’ he asked.”

Bassett said she written about the encounter in a 2017 essay but didn’t name Matthews because she was afraid of network retaliation, adding, “I’m not anymore.”

Coronavirus Testing Costs Spark Calls for Full Government Coverage

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

Public health advocates, experts, and others are demanding that the federal government cover coronavirus testing and all related costs after several reports detailed how Americans in recent weeks have been saddled with exorbitant bills following medical evaluations.

Sarah Kliff of the New York Times reported Saturday that Pennsylvania native Frank Wucinski “found a pile of medical bills” totaling $3,918 waiting for him and his three-year-old daughter after they were released from government-mandated quarantine at Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, California.

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“My question is why are we being charged for these stays, if they were mandatory and we had no choice in the matter?” asked Wucinski, who was evacuated by the U.S. government last month from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.

“I assumed it was all being paid for,” Wucinski told the Times. “We didn’t have a choice. When the bills showed up, it was just a pit in my stomach, like, ‘How do I pay for this?'”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing, according to Business Insider. “But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof,” Business Insider noted. “A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or conditions.”

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times that “the most important rule of public health is to gain the cooperation of the population.”

Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise.@tedlieu – as my rep, can you please ensure this is brought up?

— William LeGate