Chris Hedges's Blog, page 140

What if Trump Refuses to Leave the White House?

Days after amplifying a right-wing pastor’s warning of a “Civil War-like fracture” if he is removed from office, President Donald Trump late Tuesday said the impeachment inquiry launched by House Democrats is a “coup,” heightening fears that Trump could refuse to allow a peaceful transition of power if he is ousted by Congress or defeated in 2020.

“As I learn more and more each day,” the president tweeted, “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!”

Observers reacted with alarm to Trump’s tweet and said it should not be treated as a typical online outburst from the president.

“This is extremely dangerous,” Matthew Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, said, pointing out that Fox News hosts and contributors have been aggressively pushing the “coup” narrative in recent days.

“Trump’s ‘coup’ language isn’t an errant presidential tweet,” Gertz added, “it’s an official Trump administration talking point that multiple top aides have rolled out on state TV today.”

Historian Angus Johnston asked in response to Trump’s tweet: “What happens when he tweets something like this the day after he loses re-election?”

“The orderly transfer of power in the United States has always depended on the active cooperation of the outgoing president. What happens if that cooperation is not forthcoming? The answer—the day-to-day answer for November and December 2020 and January 2021—isn’t obvious,” Johnston said. “Tweets like tonight’s crank up the costs of breaking with Trump, but they also underscore the fact that there’s no guarantee that waiting him out will be an effective alternate strategy.”

The smart money says there’s a strong chance that Trump loses the election next year, and loses it by a big enough margin that it’d be impossible to steal cleanly. With most presidents, that would mean he goes away. With Trump, who knows what it means?

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) October 2, 2019

Concerns that Trump could resist leaving office if ousted by the constitutional process of impeachment or defeated in the 2020 election are not new. Trump has repeatedly suggested on Twitter and during campaign rallies that his term should be extended to compensate for the time “stolen” by the Mueller investigation.

“This is not a drill, and there is no reason to believe Trump will go quietly if he is defeated,” wrote The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan in a column in March. “There is every reason, however, to believe he and his allies will incite hysteria and even violence. Those who assume otherwise haven’t been paying attention.”

In the days since House Democrats formally began their impeachment inquiry last month, Trump has rapidly escalated his hysterical attacks on political opponents and the whistleblower who raised alarm about the president’s call with Ukraine’s leader.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Trump suggested the person who provided information about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president is a spy and a traitor should be executed. On Sunday, Trump warned of “big consequences” for the whistleblower as the anonymous individual’s lawyers said the president’s attacks have put the person’s safety at risk.

On Monday, Trump asked whether Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, should be arrested for “treason,” a crime punishable by death.

Following the president’s “coup” tweet Tuesday night, Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, said “the logical conclusion of this nonsensical statement is that the military should step in, save Trump, and arrest Trump’s political opponents.”

“Let that sink in,” Parsi added.

Israel Begins Netanyahu’s Pre-Indictment Corruption Hearing

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-awaited pre-indictment hearing on corruption charges began Wednesday in Jerusalem, as a jittery political world eagerly sought clarity on his legal standing amid the stalemate that followed the country’s second inconclusive election of the year.

Netanyahu is currently struggling to prolong his lengthy rule by building a unity government with his primary opponent, the centrist Blue and White party, which refuses to partner with him because of the serious crimes of which he is suspected.

Israel’s attorney general has recommended charging Netanyahu with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing, calling them part of a media-orchestrated witch hunt. The allegations against him include suspicions that he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of champagne and cigars from billionaire friends, offered a critical publisher legislation that would weaken his paper’s main rival in return for softer treatment and allegedly used his influence to help a wealthy telecom magnate in exchange for favorable coverage on a popular news site.

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Netanyahu has long promised he’d clear his name in the hearing. A team of his lawyers arrived at the Justice Ministry in Jerusalem to argue that all charges should be dropped.

“We are going to present not only the evidence everyone is aware of but also new evidence. We are sure that once we present our findings there will be no choice but to close the case,” Netanyahu attorney Amit Haddad said, upon entering the hearing. “We believe and know that at the end of the day all the three cases must be closed.”

While Netanyahu was not expected to attend the hearing, he took to social media Wednesday to plead his case with followers, linking to favorable news stories and pledging that the case against him would “fall apart.”

The sessions are expected to extend over four days. It could take several weeks for the attorney general to render his final decision. However, legal experts say the likelihood of an indictment is very high, given the mountains of evidence collected by police over years of investigations and the prosecution’s seeming consensus of pursuing a trial.

Although Netanyahu would not be required to step down if charged, he will face heavy pressure to do so. Already, he hasn’t been able to muster the required 61-seat majority in parliament to build a coalition government and faces stiff resistance from those he will need to back him.

President Reuven Rivlin selected Netanyahu last week as the candidate with the best chance of forming a government. That move came after Rivlin failed to broker a unity government between Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz in recent days. A unity government appears to be the preferred option for both sides, but they remain far apart on who should lead it first and what such a constellation would look like. Netanyahu and Gantz were slated to meet again Wednesday before Gantz abruptly cancelled, signaling the likely breakdown of the talks.

In such a case, Netanyahu will probably inform the president he cannot form a government. Rivlin will then likely offer a chance to Gantz, who faces equally long odds of doing so. If he too doesn’t succeed, Rivlin can select another legislator or he can set in motion what would be unprecedented third elections.

According to the final official results from the Sept. 17 elections, Blue and White finished first with 33 seats in the 120-seat parliament, just ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud with 32 seats. Netanyahu edged Gantz, however, 55-54 in the number of lawmakers who recommend him as prime minister, leaving both short of the magic number of 61.

Bernie Sanders Has Heart Procedure, Scraps Campaign Events

WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders’ campaign said Wednesday that the Democratic presidential candidate had a heart procedure for a blocked artery and was canceling events and appearances “until further notice.”

The 78-year-old Sanders was in Las Vegas when, according to a campaign statement, he experienced chest discomfort during a campaign event Tuesday and sought medical evaluation. Two stents were “successfully inserted” and that Sanders “is conversing and in good spirits,” according to the campaign.

Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, was en route to Las Vegas on Wednesday and said in an email to The Associated Press that her husband was “doing really well.”

Tick Segerblom, a Clark County, Nevada, commissioner who was at Sanders’ fundraiser Tuesday said Sanders seemed fine at the time. “He spoke well. He jumped up on the stage. There was just nothing visible,” Segerblom said.

The Democratic field’s oldest candidate, Sanders sometimes jokingly refers to his age at town halls and other events, especially when interacting with younger participants. His aides have tried to project him as a candidate with energy levels that surpassed his 2016 presidential campaign.

He is one of three candidates over age 70 in the Democratic primary, which has spurred debate over whether the party should rally behind a new generation of political leaders, and President Donald Trump is 73. Sanders’ health issue is certain to revive that discussion in the weeks before the next presidential debate this month.

Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, was on a telephone call with supporters Tuesday night but didn’t mention any health concerns about the candidate. Shakir said the “state of the campaign is strong” and he played up Sanders’ strong fundraising total for the third quarter. The Vermont Senator’s campaign raised $25 million, the highest among the candidates who have reported so far, and scheduled its first television ads in Iowa. On Wednesday, it suspended those spots, too.

Sanders had been among 10 Democratic candidates scheduled to appear later Wednesday at a forum on gun control in Las Vegas. He recently canceled some appearances in South Carolina because he lost his voice. The campaign said at the time he felt fine.

During the first debate in June, Sanders heatedly defended his 76-year-old rival, Joe Biden, after California Rep. Eric Swalwell, 38, said it was time to step aside for a new generation. Sanders told reporters later the question smacked of “ageism.”

“The issue is, who has the guts to take on Wall Street, to take on the fossil fuel industry, to take on the big money interests who have unbelievable influence over the economic and political life of this country?” Sanders said on the stage that night.

The health issue comes as Sanders’ campaign has been trying to turn a corner after a summer that saw him eclipsed as the premier liberal in the field by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 70. Sander has dropped well behind Warren and Biden in most polls and recently reshuffled his staffing in early states to become more competitive.

“Given his recent stalls in the polls, the timing is pretty bad here,” Democratic strategist Jim Manley said of Sanders’ heart procedure.

Sanders’ rivals were quick to wish him well. “We want to send our best wishes for a quick recovery to @BernieSanders today,” tweeted Julian Castro, an Obama administration housing chief. Added Sen. Kamala Harris of California: “If there’s one thing I know about him, he’s a fighter and I look forward to seeing him on the campaign trail soon.”

Sanders mounted an insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination in 2016. He is a top contender in the 2020 primary, and announced Tuesday that he raised more than $25 million over the past three months. But he is facing stiff competition from former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who have overtaken him in many polls.

Sanders is not the first candidate to face health issues in recent years while seeking the presidency. Clinton had to take time off from campaigning in 2016 after being treated for pneumonia.

In 2000, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, the leading Democratic challenger to then-Vice President Al Gore, had to cut short a campaign swing for treatment of an atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that is treatable but potentially serious. Bradley later resumed his campaign.

In Sanders’ case, when doctors insert a stent, they first thread a tiny balloon inside a blocked artery to widen it. The stent is a small wire mesh tube that then is propped inside to keep the artery open. The number of stents needed depends on the size of the clog.

The treatment can immediately improve symptoms such as chest pain or shortness of breath. The stents are threaded into place through blood vessels in the groin or wrist, requiring only a tiny incision. Most are coated with medication to prevent the targeted artery from reclosing. That is still a risk, requiring monitoring, and patients also often are prescribed blood thinners to prevent clots from forming in the stents.

A letter released by Sanders’ physician in 2016 cited a history of mildly elevated cholesterol but no heart disease.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Will Weissert in Washington, Michelle L. Price in Las Vegas and Wilson Ring in Burlington, Vermont, contributed to this report.

Who Would FDR Endorse?

During her speech at Washington Square Park in New York last week, which drew a massive crowd of both supporters and curious bystanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren evoked the legacy of Frances Perkins, the longest-serving secretary of labor and first female member of the presidential Cabinet.

The Warren campaign’s decision to stage a speech at the famous park in lower Manhattan was inspired partly by the fact that it is a block away from the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 garment workers—most of them young immigrant women—died in a fire in 1911. The disaster, as Warren told her audience, prompted major reforms, which Perkins was instrumental in pushing. As the presidential candidate put it in her speech, “With Frances working the system from the inside, the women workers organizing and applying pressure from the outside, they rewrote New York state’s labor laws from top to bottom to protect workers.”

Twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt selected Perkins as his labor secretary (a position she would hold during his entire presidency), and the administration passed everything from Social Security and unemployment insurance to minimum wage and the Wagner Act, which guaranteed labor’s right to organize. One “very persistent woman,” Warren declared, “backed up by millions of people across [the] country,” achieved major structural reforms that had a transformative effect on the country.

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Warren isn’t the first 2020 Democratic candidate to give a major speech on the legacy of the New Deal. In June, in his widely discussed speech on democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders repeatedly invoked FDR and his “bold and visionary leadership” as an example for what we need today.

Though some commentators (including me) questioned the Vermont senator’s decision to make FDR and New Deal liberalism the focal point of a speech about democratic socialism, which presumably goes beyond Roosevelt’s brand of social democracy (a program designed to preserve and stabilize American capitalism, not replace it), from a strategic standpoint, it makes perfect sense to employ Roosevelt as a model for the kind of leadership needed in the 21st century.

Roosevelt, along with members of his administration like Perkins, fought for transformative change that was, in Sanders’ words, “opposed by big business, Wall Street, the political establishment, by the Republican Party and by the conservative wing of FDR’s own Democratic Party.” At the time, Roosevelt was called everything from a fascist to a communist, and he had to deal with smears from members of his own party, such as 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, who founded a group called the Liberty League to oppose the New Deal. At a 1936 Liberty League rally, Smith gave a then-27-year-old Joseph McCarthy a template for his future tactics, painting Roosevelt as a Bolshevik in disguise: “There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only … the clear, pure fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia. There can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the flag of the godless union of the Soviets.”

Roosevelt and his administration didn’t just face ad hominem political attacks, but institutional barriers that threatened to make real structural reform impossible. With a conservative majority, the Supreme Court ruled numerous New Deal policies unconstitutional, and stood in the way of any kind of economic reform. At one point, historian Jeff Shesol tell us in his 2010 book, “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court,” FDR thought that the court would “nullify virtually everything of significance that the administration had done.” This thought didn’t lead Roosevelt to despair, however, as he believed that after the “nine old men” overruled his popular reforms, it wouldn’t be long before “the nation’s streets were filled with marching farmers, marching miners, and marching factory workers.” In other words, Roosevelt was prepared for a fight, and counted on popular support against the so-called “economic royalists.” There would always be those who cried “unconstitutional” at “every effort to better the condition of our people,” Roosevelt observed in 1937. “Such cries have always been with us; and, ultimately, they have always been overruled.”

Roosevelt’s struggle with the Supreme Court culminated with his plan to add more justices to the court, which ultimately failed, but not before the court—Justice Owen Roberts in particular—shifted its tune on New Deal legislation.

Both Warren and Sanders have invoked Roosevelt and the New Deal not just because of policies, but because of the aggressive style of politics that Roosevelt and his team employed to achieve such transformative change. Roosevelt wasn’t afraid of being denounced as a communist or a dictator by right-wing detractors, and he eagerly embraced conflict with the wealthy business leaders who funded such groups as the Liberty League. Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to push his progressive agenda and famously welcomed the hatred of his opponents, who stood against economic and political reform widely supported by the American people—just as many progressive reforms are today.

One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at progressive candidates, often from centrists who claim to sympathize with their agenda, is that their plans are unrealistic and will never make it past Congress, let alone the Supreme Court. Reporting on Warren’s speech at Washington Square Park, The Atlantic’s Russell Berman observed that while Warren’s policy plans are “detailed and specific, her strategy for achieving them is less so.” Like Sanders, Warren calls for a sustained grassroots movement to pressure Washington, but, according to Berman, “that was also Obama’s plea, and while the former president was able to enact the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms, and a large economic-stimulus package early in his tenure, his entreaties for outside help did not succeed in pressuring Republicans to support his plans.”

This is the conventional wisdom one often hears today about the Obama years, and while it is certainly true that President Obama faced unprecedented Republican obstructionism, it is simply false to claim that the 44th president fought aggressively for a progressive agenda and did everything he could to push for radical change. Even before he entered office, Obama had settled on a “pragmatic” response to the financial crisis, hiring centrists and neoliberal ideologues like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, while desperately working to achieve a “post-partisan” consensus (which was far more naive than the progressive approach toward movement-building).

One notable example of the Obama administration’s timid response was its failure to push for legislation that would have allowed judges to modify the terms of home mortgages, colloquially known as “cram down.” As David Dayen reported in 2015, it was within Obama’s power to prevent millions of people from losing their homes (just as it was within the administration’s power to criminally prosecute bank executives for their fraudulent behavior). “The administration’s eventual program, HAMP, grew out of the banking industry’s preferred alternative to [cram down], one where the industry, rather than bankruptcy judges, would control loan restructuring,” Dayen writes. “Unfortunately, the program has been a success for bankers and a failure for most hard-pressed homeowners.”

The idea that Obama was once a populist, and that a Warren or Sanders administration would end up just like the Obama administration did, is simply wrong. The two leading progressive candidates have already expressed a willingness to adopt the Rooseveltian style of politics that Obama was never willing to adopt, and the 44th president never favored the structural changes that the former do. “I am prepared to go to every state in this union and rally the American people around [a progressive] agenda to put pressure on their representatives, whether they are Democratic or Republican,” Sanders recently remarked in an interview, saying that he would also support primary challenges to Democrats who are not supportive of progressive policies like “Medicare for All.” This is an aggressive strategy in the tradition of Roosevelt, and it is the only strategy that could potentially lead to his progressive agenda becoming a reality in the future.

It is completely legitimate to ask how progressives would pass major legislation without a supermajority in Congress, and the fact is that Roosevelt had much more favorable circumstances in 1933 than any Democratic president is likely to have in the foreseeable future. There are certain measures that could give Democratic presidents some wiggle room. Warren has advocated eliminating the filibuster, for example, while Sanders has, curiously, rejected this approach, favoring the complicated budget reconciliation process instead.

None of this will matter, however, if progressive Democrats don’t manage to create a wave of popular enthusiasm for their agenda. It is important for progressive leaders to be honest and forthright about this to their supporters. None of their proposals stands a chance without a popular movement that goes well beyond the election cycle. Roosevelt understood the power of popular will; perhaps it is time for Democrats to refresh their memory.

Ex-Dallas Officer Who Killed Neighbor Found Guilty of Murder

DALLAS — A white former Dallas police officer who shot her black unarmed neighbor to death after, she said, mistaking his apartment for her own was convicted of murder Tuesday in a verdict that prompted tears of relief from his family and chants of “Black Lives Matter” from a crowd outside the courtroom.

The same jury that found Amber Guyger guilty in the September 2018 death of her upstairs neighbor, Botham Jean, will consider her fate after hearing additional testimony starting Tuesday afternoon. She could be sentenced to from five to 99 years in prison under Texas law.

The jury took a matter of hours to convict Guyger, 31, after six days of testimony.

Cheers erupted in the courthouse as the verdict was announced, and someone yelled “Thank you, Jesus!” In the hallway outside the courtroom, a crowd celebrated and chanted “black lives matter.” When the prosecutors walked into the hall, they broke into cheers.

After the verdict was read, Guyger sat alone, weeping, at the defense table.

Jean’s friends and family testified later Tuesday at the punishment phase of the trial, to explain how his death has affected them. First on the stand was Allison Jean, who said her son was killed just before he was due to turn 27.

“My life has not been the same. It’s just been like a roller coaster. I can’t sleep, I cannot eat. It’s just been the most terrible time for me,” she said.

Botham Jean’s sister, Allisa Findley, told the jury that she and her mother cry a lot, her formerly “bubbly” younger brother has retreated as if into a shell, and that her father is “not the same.”

“It’s like the light behind his eyes is off,” Findley said.

She said her children are now afraid of police.

Guyger’s defense attorneys can argue that she deserves a light sentence because she acted out of sudden fear and confusion. The judge is expected to provide guidance on sentencing law.

It is unclear how long the punishment phase of the trial will last.

The basic facts of the unusual shooting were not in dispute throughout the trial. After a long shift at work and still in uniform, Guyger walked up to Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked. Thinking the apartment was her own, she drew her service weapon and entered.

Jean, an accountant from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, had been eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his home and shot him.

The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.

“A 26-year-old college-educated black man, certified public accountant, working for one of the big three accounting firms in the world … it shouldn’t take all of that for unarmed black and brown people in America to get justice,” Benjamin Crump, one of the lawyers for Jean’s family, said at a news conference Tuesday.

Crump said the verdict honors other people of color who were killed by police officers who were not convicted of a crime.

Attorney Lee Merritt, who also represents the family, underlined Crump’s words.

“This is a huge victory, not only for the family of Botham Jean, but this is a victory for black people in America. It’s a signal that the tide is going to change here. Police officers are going to be held accountable for their actions, and we believe that will begin to change policing culture around the world,” Merritt said.

The jury that convicted Guyger was largely made up of women and people of color.

Dallas Police Association President Mike Mata declined to comment Tuesday afternoon, saying Guyger’s lawyers asked him to wait until after sentencing. The group, which represents city police officers, has paid for Guyger’s legal defense and security.

The verdict may have defused tensions that began simmering Monday when jurors were told they could consider whether Guyger had a right to use deadly force under a Texas law known as the castle doctrine — even though she wasn’t in her own home.

The law is similar to “stand your ground” measures across the U.S. that state a person has no duty to retreat from an intruder. Prosecutor Jason Fine told jurors that while the law would have empowered Jean to shoot someone barging into his apartment, it doesn’t apply “the other way around.”

Guyger was arrested three days after the killing. She was later fired and charged with murder . Tension has been high during the trial in Dallas, where five police officers were killed in an attack three years ago.

Guyger tearfully apologized for killing Jean and told the jurors she feared for her life upon finding the door to what she thought was her apartment unlocked. Guyger said Jean approached her when she entered the unit with her gun out. Prosecutors suggested he was just rising from a couch toward the back of the room when the officer shot him.

In a frantic 911 call played repeatedly during the trial, Guyger said “I thought it was my apartment” nearly 20 times. Her lawyers argued that the identical physical appearance of the apartment complex from floor to floor frequently led to tenants going to the wrong apartments.

But prosecutors questioned how Guyger could have missed numerous signs that she was in the wrong place, asked why she didn’t call for backup and suggested she was distracted by sexually explicit phone messages with her police partner.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed this report.

Elizabeth Warren’s Student Debt Plan Can’t Compare to Sanders’

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both offered proposals to cancel student debt, a nearly $1.6 trillion burden on borrowers and a major drag on the economy. While both are aggressive attempts to address the student debt crisis, there is a major difference between the two plans: the Sanders plan is likely to create at least one million more jobs than Warren’s, since it cancels roughly $1 trillion more in outstanding debt.

The figure of one million additional jobs was derived from the conclusions of a 2018 report from the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, which used widely accepted macroeconomic models (the Fair and Moody’s models) to project the macroeconomic effect of canceling all student debt. The Levy report used a start date in 2017 for its projections.

As the graph below shows, the models used in the Levy report show that several million jobs are created by the cancellation of all student debt (the exact amount varies, depending on the economic model used):

Source: “The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation,” Kelton et al., Levy Economics Institute, 2018

Averaging these figures, the report shows that approximately 4.4 million jobs would be created by full cancellation in the first five years. Using these figures, it’s possible to approximate the differing effects of the Warren and Sanders plan with the following steps:

First, reducing the Levy report’s numbers by 60 percent gives us something in the neighborhood of 2.6 million fewer jobs under Warren’s plan. Given that the debt is now larger than it was in the Levy study, that number could be bumped by 10 or 15 percent.

That calculation is, however, too crude. It’s fair to assume that the stimulus effect of cancellation is greater on the lower end of the income spectrum, where urgent needs are going unmet, and would be somewhat smaller for the relatively well-off (although not wealthy) households included in the Sanders plan. The multiplier effect of government stimulus measures is also likely to be smaller in the current economy. To ensure that these factors are considered, I have cut the job difference by nearly half to arrive at the figure of one million more jobs created with full cancellation.

The idea that student debt cancellation creates jobs is intuitive, as well. If 44 million student debt holders are relieved of their debt burden, they will have more money to spend each month for food, entertainment, and other purchases. Studies have shown that student debt is also keeping younger people from forming households (which, ironically, means a lower benefit under the Warren plan if they’re living with their parents). Household formation, which is the result of longer-term thinking about affordability, in turn means the purchase of home items, cars, and houses.

With those factors in mind, I asked the lead author of the Levy report whether it would be safe to say that the Sanders plan would create a million more jobs than the Warren plan. Professor Stephanie Kelton, of Stony Brook University, replied that a full study would be required to answer the question with confidence. But Kelton said the one-million-jobs figure “looks reasonable.” (Kelton, an adviser to Sen. Sanders, is also a macroeconomist and professor. She is not employed by the campaign.)

Why It Matters

Both proposals would create jobs for working people, and the additional one million from Sanders’ plan would be useful. Despite today’s “excellent” job numbers, the working economy isn’t as good as the headlines would have us believe. The number of open jobs (7.2 million) is essentially unchanged from last year’s, and is declining slightly. That means there is relatively little pressure to pay workers more. Wage growth remains weak. It’s not a great time to be a working person in this country.

The biggest losers in this job economy are millennials, the same group that bears the heaviest burden of student debt. (Student debt affects all adult age groups, including seniors, but falls heaviest on younger adults.) Millennials have become the largest generation in the American workforce, and are still suffering the economic consequences of entering the workforce during the Great Recession.

At $1.6 trillion, full student debt cancellation rivals Trump’s tax cut in its scope. It would, however, be far more effective at creating jobs and stimulating the economy. Because the benefits of Trump’s cut were directed toward higher earners, who have much less pressure to spend, the Trump cut left the trajectory of job growth essentially unchanged.

Muddled Debate

That distinction has been obscured in what has been, at least so far, a muddled debate.

Headlines like Vice’s “Elizabeth Warren Is Taking Her Plan to Cancel 75% of Student Debt to Congress” have added to public confusion over the two candidates’ plans. Warren’s $640 billion proposal would, in fact, cancel only 40 percent of all outstanding student debt. The confusion has also been compounded, no doubt unintentionally, by Sen. Warren’s remark during her second presidential debate that her plan would “cancel student debt for 95 percent of the people who have it.”

That statement, while true, could leave some listeners with the wrong impression. Warren’s plan would cancel at least some student debt for 95 percent of debt holders, and all debt for 75 percent of borrowers (the source of Vice’s erroneous headline). But some borrowers owe more than others, which is why the Warren plan leaves roughly $1 trillion in student debt in place. Twenty-five percent of borrowers, more than 10 million people, would still have student debt under Warren’s plan.

Warren’s plan, unlike Sanders’, caps the amount to be canceled at $50,000 per person. That figure is progressively reduced for income above $100,000 per year per household until it reaches $250,000, at which point no cancellation is offered. But households making $100,000 year aren’t necessarily prosperous. While they are not impoverished, a working couple—say, a bus driver and schoolteacher making $51,000 each—aren’t especially well-off by most standards, especially if they’re raising children. If one or more children with student debt lives and works at home, their added income would further reduce the debt relief to a family that may well be struggling.

The desire to limit debt reductions for these households may have some tactical vote-seeking value, especially in a political culture that has directed intra-middle-class resentment toward better-off workers rather than the wealthy. That doesn’t make it the best policy for working people of any age, race, or income level. In fact, because of its limits, Warren’s plan would have a significantly smaller stimulus effect and would therefore help all workers somewhat less.

The Roots of Opposition

The point needs to be reiterated: Full student debt cancellation, of the kind Sanders is proposing, would create at least a million more jobs than the Warren plan. Why, then, would progressives oppose it?

Some of the liberal opposition is often grounded in the mistaken belief that Warren’s plan would do more to reduce the racial wealth gap than Warren’s. The opposite is true: full cancellation would reduce the racial wealth gap more than Warren’s plan would. As economist Marshall Steinbaum, a co-author of the Levy report, later concluded: “The more debt cancellation there is, the more racial wealth inequality is reduced—at least among the plans that have actually been proposed.”

There is also a deep attachment to targeted economic programs in certain liberal circles, based on the sense that government programs should be focused solely on individuals in dire need. (I wrote an essay in The American Prospect on that topic.) For student debt cancellation, this is often framed as a desire to avoid helping the “wealthy.” But truly wealthy individuals are unlikely to hold student debt. If they have family wealth, there would have been no need to borrow for college. If they have subsequently become wealthy, their advisers have almost certainly told them to pay off student debt, which normally charges high interest rates.

It’s true that there are some mildly prosperous professionals who hold a large amount of student debt. But it takes a strange moral logic to deny jobs for a million working people out of fear that, say, a well-to-do orthodontist on Long Island might get a break she doesn’t deserve. There is no such liberal compunction about infrastructure programs, for example, even though they could make a few construction executives wealthy as they create jobs for working people.

The million-plus additional jobs created by full cancellation would go to a broad array of working people in a range of fields, in industries that range from restaurants to sales, and from auto manufacturing to construction. A large percentage of them would go to people of color, which would further reduce the racial wealth gap at a time when the African American unemployment rate remains roughly double that of whites.

Summary

To sum up:

Full cancellation creates at least a million more jobs than Warren’s partial cancellation.
Full cancellation does more to reduce the racial wealth gap than Warren’s plan does.
Full cancellation will almost certainly do much more to benefit millennials, the generation that’s been hardest hit by student debt and is the largest percentage of the workforce.
Full cancellation will almost certainly do much more to help black workers, who are experiencing twice the unemployment of white workers.

There are other benefits to full cancellation, too. It’s easier to explain to voters. Its million-job advantage makes it easier to build support among people who have never gone to college or acquired student debt, groups that might otherwise resent student debt cancellation. It would stimulate more economic growth, with greater advantages for the entire economy (including investors). And it wouldn’t be subject to gaming, the way Warren’s plan would be. (Children would claim to live elsewhere, people would move taxable income from year to year, couples would defer marriage, etc.)

Elizabeth Warren has many impressive policy proposals, and is very possibly unaware of the differing impact of her means-tested student debt plan on working people. There is every reason to hope she will reconsider after reviewing the advantages of a broader proposal, and join with Sen. Sanders in supporting full student debt cancellation.

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

Richard “RJ” Eskow is senior adviser for health and economic justice at Social Security Works. He is also the host of The Zero Hour, a syndicated progressive radio and television program.

Elizabeth Warren Has Mark Zuckerberg Thoroughly Spooked

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress last year, it was apparent that “lawmakers still don’t really understand how Facebook works,” as Kurt Wagner wrote in Recode. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., brought printouts of Facebook groups. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, asked how the social network is able to make money despite being a free service, seemingly oblivious to the news that the internet contains ads, Morgan Sung pointed out in Mashable.

Having potential regulators who don’t quite understand what they’re regulating is an advantage for a tech CEO like Zuckerberg. As Wagner pointed out, “he walked away with a victory.” This is perhaps why Zuckerberg is not thrilled with the idea of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., becoming president.

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” Zuckerberg said during one of two open meetings this summer whose recordings were leaked to The Verge.

Warren was quick with a response. “What would really ‘suck,’ ” she tweeted, “is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”

What would really “suck” is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy. https://t.co/rI0v55KKAi

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 1, 2019

The New York Times writes on Tuesday that “the surfacing of grievances” between Warren and Zuckerberg “has the effect of publicly pitting one of the leading Democratic candidates for president against the head of the world’s largest social network, at a time when Silicon Valley in general and Facebook in particular continue to be scrutinized for their efforts to combat disinformation and prevent election interference in 2020 and beyond.”

Zuckerberg also answered questions from employees on a variety of topics, including his decision not to appear at government hearings in Europe, whether large tech companies are prepared for the 2020 election, whether they should be broken up, and his opinions on competitors like Twitter and TikTok.

He claimed that breaking up companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon “is not actually going to solve the issues,” referring to election security. He added, “And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”

Zuckerberg plays down the stresses and often harrowing working conditions of Facebook’s content moderators. When an employee asks about The Verge’s previous reporting on their experiences, he says the articles were “a little overdramatic,” adding that when a company has 30,000 people working for it, there are going to be a wide range of work experiences.

Read the full transcript of both meetings here.

 

Bigots Welcome on America’s Police Forces

Prison guard Geoffery Crosby was a member of more than 50 extremist groups on Facebook, including scores of racist groups dedicated to the Confederacy. Missouri Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Crites was – and still is – posting anti-Muslim rants on his personal Facebook page. In Georgia, despite warnings from his chief, Abbeville police Officer Joel Quinn continues to post a steady stream of conspiracy theories and right-wing memes on Facebook, including recently sharing an anti-Semitic meme.

In June, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of police officers across the country who were members of closed racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. We sought reaction from more than 150 law enforcement departments about their officers’ involvement in these extremist groups. Yet only one department – the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which fired a detective for racist posts – has publicly taken any significant action.

More than 50 departments promised investigations, but few have taken any other steps. The Portland Police Bureau said “no jurisdiction existed” for it to take any action against an officer whose Islamophobic comments were posted before he joined the agency. The New York Police Department said it couldn’t substantiate reporting showing one of its officers had posted misogynistic comments, even though we obtained screenshots.

Social media activity isn’t just a public-facing display of officers’ beliefs and biases. Officers are susceptible to being radicalized online just like so many civilians, said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor who oversaw the Department of Justice’s civil rights investigation into the Ferguson Police Department.

“It’s hard when you get out there as a new officer, you’re from a sheltered community somewhere, and you start to see a lot of pain and harm that is often happening in poor communities of color,” Lopez said. “And it is easy for officers who are trying to deal with the emotional impact of that to start to dehumanize people.”

Facebook’s algorithms can deepen this problem. After we joined extremist groups as part of our investigation, Facebook suggested new – and often even more troubling – groups to join or pages to like. It was easy to see how users, including police officers, could be increasingly radicalized by what they saw on their news feed.

That, in turn, plays into a long-stated goal of white supremacists and other extremists: to lure converts in initially with edgy humor and memes before introducing ever more hateful ideas.

Lopez said police departments must ensure cops get continued training not just on how to behave online, but on how to deal with the trauma and stress they encounter on the streets. Departments also must monitor and counsel their employees on social media use – not just to avoid looking bad, but also to stop vulnerable employees from getting sucked in by hateful ideas.

At the Ketchikan Police Department in Alaska, Lt. Andrew Berntson said he sits down with new recruits and discusses how to use social media positively to engage with the community instead of isolating yourself from it. Berntson said agencies need to investigate applicants before hiring them. Departments should scour the social media postings of potential recruits, he said, looking for warning signs that applicants have racist or other discriminatory views.

“You have to get a good view of who this person is, because that’s most likely what they’re going to continue to be,” Berntson said. “If they have predisposed opinions, you need to flush that out in the hiring process.”

Social media searches are just part of the backgrounding process, Berntson said. Departments should also reach out to friends, relatives and former employers to gauge a candidate’s suitability, he said. Small town departments should ask around about a future recruit’s associations and connections, to establish whether they have ever been involved with extremist groups, Berntson said. And in big cities, departments should check with the detectives who investigate extremist groups, to see if a potential recruit has ever been involved with any of the groups on the department’s radar.

Police departments could also duplicate efforts like Reveal’s – researching and joining local chapters of extremist groups on Facebook and other social media sites to monitor them and check for current or potential officers, Berntson said.

“Every department should basically maximize their resources to cover themselves. If they have access to information, or can get it, they should use it,” he said. “Best-case scenario, you’ll find that someone is fine. But the worst-case scenario is that you don’t find out about someone’s past, then an officer hurts or kills somebody and the department gets sued.”

Even then, the world of extremism has learned to adapt and shift to deliberately camouflage hateful activity online. Departments therefore have the challenge of staying up to date with the latest lingo and themes hate groups are using, said Megan Squire, a computer science professor and expert on extremism at Elon University in North Carolina.

“The vocabulary, the jargon these hate groups use is deliberately to keep outsiders out,” Squire said. “If you’re hiring a 20-year-old, they’re going to have memes and terminology that your average 40- or 50-year-old isn’t going to know naturally like they would know a swastika.”

Keeping up with the latest trends in extremism is no simple task, Squire said, but departments could outsource their research, working with local academics or activists to build knowledge about how hate groups communicate online. There are also valuable resources available online, she said, like the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database.

And the International Association of Chiefs of Police runs the Center for Social Media, which publishes guidelines and “awareness briefs” to inform police departments about questionable online activity and how to identify and investigate extremists online.

The organization didn’t respond to several calls for comment. A guide to “cybervetting” potential recruits on its website, despite being almost 10 years old, provides extensive guidance for departments. The document details how a department can set up a vetting policy and lays out the legal parameters departments can work inside – explaining how departments should balance privacy concerns with the need to know more about their recruits.

Opacity of departments 

In Savannah, Georgia, Chief Sedrick Rivers, of the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport Police, said the information we uncovered about one of his officers has been instrumental in helping him draft new policies for social media use at the department. We tried to follow up with him to learn more. After initially opening up to us, however, Rivers then stopped taking our calls.

New York Police Department Officer Randy Paulsaint was active inside several closed Facebook groups that denigrate and insult women. When we provided screenshots that showed his activity and his status as a police officer, the NYPD called our claims “unsubstantiated.” The NYPD didn’t respond to repeated calls to elaborate on that explanation.

We tried to understand whether the officers we identified on Facebook had been involved in real-life issues around discrimination. However, all but 13 states keep their police disciplinary records secret.

The public isn’t allowed to view Paulsaint’s disciplinary records because they’re confidential in New York. Therefore Reveal couldn’t establish whether an officer who called women “money grabbing whores” and who posted a GIF of a woman being kicked in the head by a man has a history of treating women with respect in his police work.

Given the revelations of the past few months from Reveal, ProPublica and the Plain View Project, and the long-standing and well-known history of racial bias and discrimination in American policing, departments need to keep detailed records on the conduct of their employees from their first day on the job, said Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of Campaign Zero, which works with local activists and governments to combat discrimination in policing.

And those records should be open to the public for review, he said.

“There’s an established research literature that complaints against officers, officers that are named in misconduct lawsuits, officers who have an above-average number of use-of-force incidents – that all of those things are predictive of future misconduct,” Sinyangwe said.

Not only are police disciplinary records largely shielded from public view, but departments across the country even routinely destroy misconduct records, Campaign Zero found. Sinyangwe said he didn’t know of any departments that could be held up as a success story.

In 2016, the organization studied the union contracts of 81 of the 100 largest police departments in the country. More than half required departments to purge records that would help identify officers with histories of misconduct.

“You look at a city like Cleveland, which signed a contract with the police union to systematically purge records of officer discipline after one or two years,” Sinyangwe said. “They’re actually destroying the evidence that’s needed to identify the most problematic officers and prevent these incidents from happening in the future.”

There are efforts around the country to shed light on police practices, however.

In recent years, some activist groups have focused on altering police union contracts to include new rules for police accountability and transparency.

In Texas, for example, the Austin Justice Coalition demanded a seat at the negotiating table between the city and the police union in 2017, after two high-profile incidents of alleged police brutality.

The grassroots group fought for greater transparency from local cops, and while it didn’t get everything it wanted, the coalition was able to negotiate substantial reforms, like changing police rules on purging disciplinary records, and creating an anonymous, online complaints process against officers.

Chas Moore, co-founder and executive director of the coalition, said his group has secured funding to work with grassroots organizations from 10 different cities to emulate the work.

“The police union contract has become the new fight,” he said. “That’s where it starts.”

If police chiefs, commissioners and sheriffs want to lead with courage and dedication to the community, they need to address how every member of their community is treated, said Vera Bumpers, former president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.

“Leadership always sets the tone for how an agency moves forward,” Bumpers said. “The message to recruits can’t just be a one-time message. We have to continually promote professionalism and the fair treatment of all.”

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson and copy edited by Stephanie Rice.

Will Carless can be reached at wcarless@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @willcarless.

Corporate Media’s Insidious Palestine Propaganda

Prior to the elections in Israel/Palestine in September—marred by blatant racism posturing as the “democratic process,” with millions of Palestinians living under varying degrees of Israeli rule unable to vote due to their ethnicity—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu generated headlines for repeatedly pledging to annex nearly a third of the illegally occupied West Bank, in violation of international law, to gain support for his and the Likud party’s reelection (New York Times, 9/10/19).

The Trump administration’s refusal to release details before the September election on presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Vision for Peace” plan, which would supposedly resolve the enduring conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, was only the latest demonstration of the farce the administration’s “peace plan” has always been for Palestinians.

However, corporate media coverage of “Vision for Peace” continued to transmit the perspective of US official sources, constantly referring unironically to the proposal as a “peace plan,” “peace initiative” or “peace process.” The more difficult and honest approach to reporting on the so-called “peace plan”—by analyzing the plan on its predictable outcomes, rather than its professed objectives—wasn’t taken, despite the media’s own reporting indicating how the plan could never lead to peace.

The Washington Post’s “Kushner Presents Vision of a Middle East at Peace but No Details How to Get There” (6/25/19) tellingly only referred to the Trump administration’s proposal as a “peace plan” in its photo captions, and instead described it as an “economic plan” or a “White House plan” in the text of the article, when it reported on the economic component of Kushner’s plan to raise “$50 billion in regional investment projects over the next decade.” Perhaps this is due to it reporting that the plan has been met with “widespread skepticism” and has already been “rejected by the Palestinian leadership,” who claim that the US can’t be “an honest peace broker after taking several pro-Israel measures,” such as “recognizing the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”

Others have observed how Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan resembles a real estate developer’s brochure, mentioning “human capital” and “property rights” without mentioning “human rights,” along with buzzwords like “unleashing economic potential” and “enhancing Palestinian governance.” Other pro-Israel measures omitted from the article that make it impossible to accept the US as an honest broker include the Trump administration’s support for Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights (FAIR.org, 4/4/19), the closure of the Palestinian diplomatic post in Washington, the transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem and the slashing of aid to Palestinian refugees (Guardian, 6/25/19).

When the Wall Street Journal (8/1/19) reported on the Kushner team’s meetings in Israel and other Arab countries to promote his “peace plan,” it depicted Kushner as a good-faith negotiator and peacemaker trying to “breathe life into Middle East peace efforts.” This despite reporting that he and his team were snubbing Palestinian leaders and their demands, as Kushner’s team was evading a guarantee of full statehood for Palestinians in favor of a vacuous “autonomy.”

The Journal noted that Kushner didn’t bother meeting with “any Palestinian officials” on this trip, and reported how Palestinian officials have long demanded an independent state on the boundaries that existed before the 1967 war, along with East Jerusalem as its capital and the right of refugees to return to land currently in Israel, which is “generally echoed” by “Arab countries.” That Kushner has never seen the Palestinians as genuine negotiating partners has never been more obvious since he expressed his colonialist dismissal of Palestinians as incapable of self-governance (Axios, 6/2/19).

The Los Angeles Times (6/23/19) insisted on referring to the Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace” as a “peace plan,” “peace process” or “peace initiative” throughout its article, despite quoting statements that contradict such benign motives from sources “privy to Kushner’s work,” like former Israeli Defense minister and “hard-liner” Avigdor Lieberman:

Lieberman said the term “peace process” was irrelevant in the explosive region. “You will never see, at least in the next generation, any peace in the Middle East.”

The LA Times utilized this Newspeak even as it offered the assessment of Daniel Benjamin, the director of Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding:

“The Trump administration’s policy for the region is to give the Israelis everything that Netanyahu wants and set up a scenario in which the Palestinians are forced to reject it,” thus providing the White House with “the excuse it needs to continue a basically punitive policy towards the Palestinians,” he said.

FAIR has documented how the New York Times has been one of the most credulous media outlets in covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (e.g., FAIR.org, 5/16/19, 4/26/19), and its coverage of the Kushner plan is no different. Although the Times’ “Trump to Open Middle East Peace Drive With Economic Incentives” (5/19/19) reported on Netanyahu’s plans to annex part of the West Bank (which would make a two-state solution impossible), and Kushner rejecting an independent Palestinian state, that wouldn’t stop its later reporting from dubbing the Trump administration’s proposal a “peace plan.”

The Times (6/1/19) continued to unironically refer to the US proposal as a “peace plan” or “peace initiative,” even as it observed that Trump planned to “throw his full weight behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to save his job as prime minister of Israel”—without mentioning that Netanyahu is facing multiple indictments for corruption. It also had no problem analyzing the “political calculus” behind the Trump administration’s plan:

Mr. Trump, eager not to alienate evangelical voters or influential pro-Israel donors like the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is unlikely to present a plan that would put Israel or Mr. Netanyahu in an awkward position. For both leaders, therefore, the political calculus will argue for a plan that makes as few demands of Israel as possible.

Corporate media refused many other easy opportunities to discredit the Trump administration’s professed desire for peace. How could a genuine peace agreement be reached when the officials in charge of the plan, like Kushner, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman and former chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt, were all supportive of and bankrolling Israel’s illegal settlements, and have overseen some of the most punitive anti-Palestinian measures in US history (Jacobin, 7/9/19)? How could peace be achieved when the staunchly pro-Israel US plan involved approving Netanyahu’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank considered to be the “food basket” of Palestinians, and rendering a viable Palestinian state impossible by fragmenting it into isolated enclaves within Israel (Intercept, 9/11/19)?

Corporate media also gave scant coverage to the absurdity of a “peace plan” that tries to sell potential investments in Gaza and the West Bank as a “hot IPO,” and doesn’t mention Israel’s illegal occupation strangling the Palestinian economy (CounterPunch, 11/20/15). The UN has found that the Palestinian economy would be at least twice as large if it weren’t for the occupation (Al-Jazeera, 9/9/16), while companies doing business in the settlements contribute to and profit from land confiscations and violations of the rights of Palestinian workers (Al-Jazeera, 1/9/16).

Although there has been vigorous debate between those who support a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict (Guardian, 11/2/12; Nation, 7/2/14) and a single, multiethnic, democratic state, advocates for a one-state solution continue to be marginalized in the corporate media discussion (FAIR.org, 6/1/18), despite gaining ground among Palestinians and other people abroad. Rather than treating the denial of democratic rights to Palestinians as a human rights problem, the extension of those rights is portrayed as a threat to Jewish Israelis (FAIR.org, 2/1/19).

Seen from the perspective of those advocating a one-state solution, US and Israeli support for annexing parts of the West Bank is simply an acknowledgment of the reality that Israel/Palestine can only have one government, and a confirmation that democracy is the only path to peace. Whichever path one favors, it should be clear that in media Newspeak, “peace plan” is a propaganda term that only refers to whatever Washington is proposing at any given time.

Chris Hedges: Democrats Cast Their Lot With Elites on Impeachment

House Democrats subpoenaed President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Monday, seeking documents related to his work in Ukraine. Last week, Guliani admitted on television that he had urged the Ukrainian government to investigate Trump’s political rival and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. This comes as House Democrats continue to build their case for impeaching the president, following a whistleblower complaint focused on a phone call in which Trump asked the Ukranian president to do him a “favor” investigating the actions of Democrats, including Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to threaten lawmakers who are pushing impeachment, and publicly admitted he is trying to find out the identity of the anonymous whistleblower, in possible violation of whistleblower protection laws. We host a debate on impeachment with John Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech for People, one of the organizations demanding Trump’s impeachment, and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the growing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. House Democrats subpoenaed Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Monday, seeking documents related to his work in the Ukraine. Last week, Giuliani admitted on television that he had urged the Ukrainian government to investigate Trump’s political rival Joe Biden.

This comes as House Democrats continue to build their case for impeaching the president, following a whistleblower complaint filed by an intelligence officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point. The whistleblower complaint focused on a phone call in which Trump asked the Ukrainian president to do him a, quote, “favor” by investigating the actions of Democrats, including Joe Biden and his son Hunter. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was among the administration officials who were on the controversial July 25th phone call.

Meanwhile, evidence is growing that the Trump administration also pressured other nations, including Australia and Italy, to take steps to help Trump politically. The New York Times reports Trump personally pressed Australia’s prime Minister to help Attorney General William Barr with his review of the origins of the Mueller probe. Barr also traveled to Italy last week, where he reportedly pressed Italian officials to help his probe.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is continuing to threaten lawmakers pushing impeachment. On Monday, Trump suggested House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff should be arrested for treason.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Adam Schiff made up a phony call, and he read it to Congress, and he read it to the people of the United States. And it’s a disgrace. This whole thing is a disgrace. There’s been tremendous corruption, and we’re seeking it. It’s called drain the swamp.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump also publicly admitted he’s trying to find out the identity of the anonymous whistleblower, in possible violation of whistleblower protection laws.

REPORTER: Mr. President, do you now know who the whistleblower is, sir?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, we’re trying to find out about a whistleblower, when you have a whistleblower that reports things that were incorrect.

AMY GOODMAN: In a series of tweets over the weekend, President Trump accused the unnamed whistleblower of spying on the president, promising, quote, “big consequences.” He also threatened civil war if impeachment proceedings move forward. 2020 presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris tweeted Monday, “Look let’s be honest, @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter account should be suspended.”

Well, for more, we host a debate on impeachment. Joining us here in New York City are two guests. John Bonifaz is an attorney and political activist specializing in constitutional law and voting rights. He’s the co-founder and president of Free Speech for People, one of the organizations calling for Trump’s impeachment. John Bonifaz is the co-author, with Ron Fein and Ben Clements, of The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump. Chris Hedges is also with us. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist, columnist for the news website Truthdig. His latest article is headlined “The Problem with Impeachment.” He’s written numerous books, including, most recently, America: The Farewell Tour.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! John Bonifaz, let’s begin with you. Why do you feel Donald Trump should be impeached?

JOHN BONIFAZ: Donald Trump is a threat to our republic. He defies the Constitution and the rule of law almost on a daily basis. And really, from the moment he took the oath of office, he’s showed this disregard for the Constitution, refusing to divest from his business interests all over the world and directly colliding with the anti-corruption provisions of the Constitution, the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses. But, unfortunately, the impeachable offenses do not stop there. He has been repeatedly abusing his power and abusing the oath of office, and he must face impeachment proceedings.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And yet, the House is currently, in its inquiry, looking basically at one issue, at what happened with the phone call in Ukraine. And, Chris Hedges, you’ve said that the fatal mistake that Trump made is trying to take down a fellow member of the ruling elite. Could you —

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it reminds me of the Watergate hearings, where the activities that were carried out by the Nixon White House against the Democratic headquarters in Watergate were directed at the elites. All of those activities had been carried out before, including break-ins into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, against antiwar activists. But it’s when those activities were targeted at the elite. And I think that’s exactly what we’ve seen, and that’s what’s triggered such a reaction, including from Pelosi, who up until now has been very reluctant to carry out impeachment. But what they’ve done, or what Trump, the Trump White House, has done, is target the favored nominee by the Democratic donor class.

JOHN BONIFAZ: That’s not necessarily an argument to not proceed with impeachment proceedings. It’s an argument to expand the scope of the impeachment inquiry to cover all of his impeachable — Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses, from the obstruction of justice, from giving aid and comfort to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, racist abuses of power, placing children and their families in imprisonment unconstitutionally at the southern border. All of the impeachable offenses need to be covered by these impeachment proceedings, not just the Ukraine scandal.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, yeah, I agree with that, and I’m not against impeachment. The problem is that — and you use the phrase “rule of law” — from the very moment Trump took office, he was violating the emoluments clause; very clear evidence that he attempted to obstruct justice during the Mueller investigation; inciting violence and racism; using taxes to punish people he considered political opponents, Jeff Bezos, in particular, at Amazon. Yes, it’s all there, but what has been disturbing for me is the shredding of the rule of law, the inability on the part of the ruling elites on both sides of the aisle to stand up for the rule of law, until now.

And that gets to the much deeper issue that there are — essentially, we live in a two-tiered legal system, where poverty has been criminalized. We live in a city where Eric Garner was strangled to death by New York City police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which he wasn’t on the day he was killed — he was, in fact, not doing anything — and then Wall Street, which has essentially rewritten the rules to — and so, my worry about impeachment, which I’m not against impeachment, is that people see it as a panacea. I think many in the Democratic Party, in particular in the liberal class, have personalized our problems in the figure of Donald Trump. And, in fact, the malaise runs much deeper. This is what I spent the last two years doing in my book America: The Farewell Tour. It is the rupturing of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim calls the social bonds — that’s where you get the term “anomie” — the disenfranchisement of well over half the country, the inability of them to actualize themselves, and acting out in self-destructive pathologies, whether that’s hate groups, the opioid crisis, gambling, sexual sadism, etc.

And so, go ahead with impeachment, but if we don’t begin to address the underlying malaise and disenfranchisement and rage — and legitimate rage — on the part of the white working class — however much Trump lies — and, of course, he lies like he breathes — the Clintons also lied, in far more damaging ways to the working class, and, in particular, the white working class, than Donald Trump. And we know from polls that right before the election in 2016, you had 55% of those who said they were voting for Trump, it was because they disliked Hillary Clinton, only 44%. So, Trump was kind of weaponized. You know, he was the middle finger to the establishment. He was weaponized against the man. And if we don’t begin to deal with those issues, impeachment itself will rend the fabric of American society further into antagonistic tribes. And we have to acknowledge the fact we are a country awash in weapons, 300 million weapons, you know, mass shootings on the average of one a day. And we almost saw, with Cesar Sayoc, the complete decapitation of the Democratic Party with pipe bombs. That’s the territory we’re headed towards.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Texas Congressmember Al Green. He’s the first one to have called for impeachment, several years ago. On Monday, he tweeted, “Mr. President, maliciously attacking a whistleblower and promoting civil unrest to avoid impeachment won’t save you. You should have already been impeached for your bigotry, corruption, and disloyalty to our country. #CivilWar2 #ImpeachNow” Democracy Now! spoke to Congressmember Green last week.

REP. AL GREEN: We have a responsibility to the country and to the future. The future is going to be one that will allow a president to assume that there are no guardrails, if we don’t act now. We have to demonstrate that Congress will honor the Constitution and that we have principle that we will place above politics, that we will place the people above our political parties. And I think that if we do this, we will consider democracy and not Democrats; we will consider the republic and not Republicans.

AMY GOODMAN: Houston Congressmember Al Green was speaking just after Nancy Pelosi had announced that the impeachment inquiry was going to go forward, something he has called for for several years. But, John Bonifaz, as a lawyer, can you explain? Now they’re going after Trump for Ukraine and for pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. How does this expand? I mean, we know the same thing happened with Clinton. It started with Whitewater, but it ended up around his relationship with an intern.

JOHN BONIFAZ: Well, I think we have to first look at why Congress has started these impeachment proceedings. The narrative right now among conventional thinkers is it started because of the explosive evidence that emerged from the Ukraine scandal. But, in fact, that’s not really true. For many months, there’s been a people’s movement building, demanding impeachment proceedings along all the impeachable offenses that this president has already committed. And this was the last straw. This evidence coming from this scandal finally pushed Congress, those who were sitting on the fence, including Speaker Pelosi, to do the right thing and start the impeachment inquiry, which is why we should not let up now with this movement. We need to pressure members of Congress to expand the scope to include the very racist abuses of power Congressman Green has talked about, the emoluments violations, the obstruction of justice and so forth. I don’t disagree with Chris that we have a two-tiered judicial system here, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hold this president accountable for his abuses of power that had begun from the moment he took the oath of office.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. John Bonifaz, attorney and political activist, he is for impeachment, has written a book on it. Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist, questioning is impeachment the way to go now. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with them in a minute, and then we’ll be joined by the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “You Can Tell the World” by Jessye Norman and the New York Philharmonic. The legendary opera singer died Monday at the age of 74. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re continuing our debate on the impeachment of President Donald Trump with John Bonifaz, attorney and political activist, and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist. Chris, I wanted to ask you if we could go a little deeper into what’s going on here. You mentioned this whole issue of the potential for even deeper conflict in the United States. But I want to ask you, as someone who has studied these systems at length over many years: Are we reaching the point where capitalist democracy has reached its limits? We’re seeing, in many countries around the world, total paralysis of governments, in Britain. Peru, the president just recently suspended the national assembly; the assembly is refusing to listen to his orders. And here in the United States, we’re seeing a virtual paralysis of our government as a result of this response to an authoritarian dictator. Is it the reality that democracy, given the huge polarization of wealth, has reached its limits in what it can accomplish?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think democracy has been destroyed by global capitalism, that we have the facade of democracy. Lobbyists write our rules. The Supreme Court inverts constitutional rights. The whole idea that unlimited corporate cash is defined by our Supreme Court as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech is an inversion of constitutional rights. The fact that we are the most spied-upon, watched, monitored population in human history — and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. And I think that that is the far more grave consequence of unfettered or unregulated capitalism, which, as Karl Marx correctly pointed out, is a revolutionary force. So, yes, Juan, I think you hit on a very important point.

And so, the capitalist class, essentially, which has orchestrated this, the largest transference of wealth globally upwards in human history, is determined to beat back even, I would call them, kind of moderate figures, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, essentially New Deal Democrats, and they will turn to support demagogues like Trump, like Boris Johnson, Orbán, etc., that we are seeing arise, rather than carry out policies that will ameliorate the vast disparity in power and wealth. And there was just — I was reading The New York Times on the way in here, and they were writing that — there was an article about Elizabeth Warren and how the donor class within the Democratic Party is — which, of course, backs Joe Biden, which gets back to the whole reaction, I think, by the Democratic leadership over this issue of Ukraine — that they’ve made it very clear that they will swing to Trump rather than support, in particular, Warren or Sanders.

And so, yes, there is a complete breakdown within the democratic institutions that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. And this just goes all the way back to Weimar, or when I covered Yugoslavia, that when there is that societal breakdown, the capitalist class, they may find — they do find a figure like Trump vulgar and repugnant, but they will back him as opposed to, I would even call them, political moderates, like Warren or Sanders, who talk about righting the gross inequality in terms of power and in terms of economics that has taken place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John Bonifaz, what about this Trump retweeting the statements of this extremist minister, a Pentecostal minister, from Texas that civil war may be possible if people try to impeach Trump? What about this issue that there are people on the right in America that are demonstrably willing to fight to keep Trump in power?

JOHN BONIFAZ: So, first of all, Harvard law professor John Coates responded yesterday to that tweet, saying that’s a separate, independent ground now for impeachment proceedings, for the president to retweet that kind of statement and try to incite violence. But we also not be thinking somehow that this president has not already done that kind of incitement of violence. He has. The El Paso shooter cited his rhetoric in regards to that terrible mass shooting.

And this president will continue to engage in destructive behavior and abuses of power, regardless of whether or not we are somehow claiming that he should be held accountable during the election. That’s why impeachment needs to move forward, because he’s a direct and serious threat to our republic today. And that’s why the Framers placed the impeachment power in the Constitution.

The other point I would make here is that we cannot cower to these threats of violence by saying that mob rule gets to rule the day. We have to lift up the Constitution and the promise that no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this impeachment proceeding is moving fast. You have at least the plan of the House Intelligence Committee next week to bring in the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who was pushed out, Marie Yovanovitch, and then, on Thursday, Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, who just quit, and Michael Atkinson, the intelligence inspector general, who will testify on Friday. Then, also on Friday, subpoena deadlines for Mike Pompeo, who’s in Italy right now. In October, now this month, Rudy Giuliani also has been subpoenaed. So, the process of how this will work? On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNBC the Senate would have no choice but to take up Trump’s impeachment if the House charges the president.

MAJORITY LEADER MITCH McCONNELL: It’s a Senate rule related to impeachment, that would take 67 votes to change, so I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you’re on it is a whole different matter. But I would have no choice but to take it up, based on a Senate rule on impeachment.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Senator Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader. What does that look like? I mean, just you’ve studied the impeachment process. So, it goes from the House to the Senate. What does a trial look like? John Roberts, the chief justice, would preside over it?

JOHN BONIFAZ: Yes, he would preside, and the Senate would need to hear from the House. There would be House managers who present the articles of impeachment with the evidence to the Senate, and the Senate sits as the jury in this instance.

And I think it’s significant that Senator McConnell has made this statement, because he, of course, is facing a re-election, or potentially not, in the state of Kentucky. And he knows, he sees where the public is moving on this. We’ve already seen a huge spike just in the last week in terms of public support for this impeachment inquiry. CBS News had it 55% of the public supporting this. So, senators, both Republican and Democratic, are going to need to cast their vote on this historic question and decide where they stand. And they will face consequences if they do not uphold the Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, I wanted you to respond to New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told reporters Friday it would be much worse if Congress doesn’t move forward with impeachment proceedings.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO–CORTEZ: What we’re seeing with these developments from Ukraine are extremely serious. And whether — you know, we can’t ask ourselves about whether we’ve moved too slow or too quickly. We have to ask ourselves what we’re doing right now. … The president has committed several impeachable offenses, he himself. What he has admitted to is already impeachable, regardless of future developments. What he has already admitted to is an impeachable offense, among others. I anticipate and I believe there will be discussion as to whether, when we draft or when the Judiciary examines the question on filing potential articles of impeachment, what those articles will include. … I think we have to hold this president accountable, and we have to protect our democracy. And I believe that we’ll be doing so right now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a major force in pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to conduct an impeachment inquiry.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I’m not against impeachment. The problem is impeachment, divorced from confronting the decay and disintegration of our democratic institutions and the vast social inequality that has fed the rage on the part of the white working class, will potentially make things worse. I mean, I think that, yes, we do have to honor — and we should have, two-and-a-half years ago, begun to honor — the rule of law.

But, you know, there are millions of Trump supporters who look at him as primarily a cult figure, who see in his power an extension of their own power, a way to compensate for their own sense of disempowerment. And it’s very clear that they will react. They already have attempted to react with violence. Ocasio-Cortez herself has been the recipient of death threats. And this violence against her has been stoked by the president.

And so, my big fear is that somehow people think that impeachment is the panacea. Removing Trump — and, you know, Noam Chomsky, probably correctly, points out that Pence will be worse, because he comes out of the community of Christian fascists. I speak as a seminary graduate. They’re heretics. And so, it is very dangerous for those figures who —

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, they’re heretics?

CHRIS HEDGES: Heretics? Jesus didn’t come to drop the — bless the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs across the Middle East or bless the white race above other race or hold up America. I mean, this is heretical. And the failure on the liberal church to call out these people for who they are, and give them religious legitimacy — that’s another show — I think, has been perhaps the greatest failing of the liberal church, which I come out of.

And so, our problems are far more severe. Trump is the product. He is what’s vomited up from a failed democracy, in the same way that I saw figures like Radovan Karadzic or Slobodan Milosevic vomited up from the failed democracy of Yugoslavia, or you can go back to Weimar Nazis. So, we have to begin to address the fundamental root causes that have created the political crisis and the economic crisis, the social and even cultural crisis that we are in. And if we don’t reknit those social bonds, if we don’t confront that crisis, impeachment may very well pour gasoline on the growing antagonisms and violence that is besetting this country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John Bonifaz, I wanted to ask you, though — if Nancy Pelosi’s decision to move forward on an impeachment inquiry on this issue of the phone conversation with the Ukrainian — with Ukraine’s president, I feel like I’m in Casablanca: Surprise, there’s gambling at this establishment. Right? I mean, isn’t the ability of presidents of the United States to pressure foreign leaders to do what they want sort of part of the process of how the United States wields power? Or is it just the situation here that the president did it directly himself rather than have one of his minions exert the pressure?

JOHN BONIFAZ: No, the issue is that he solicited foreign interference to help his election campaign, not that he solicited pressure or forced a country to do something that he claims was for the U.S. foreign policy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, that itself has happened. Didn’t the Reagan administration convince Iran to hold back the release of the — I mean, Ronald Reagan’s people convinced Iran to hold back the release of the Iranian hostages until the president was inaugurated.

JOHN BONIFAZ: There’s no question there’s a history of impeachable offenses being committed by other administrations. But I do want to come back to this idea that impeachment is a panacea. No one in the impeachment movement — and this has been a people’s movement pressuring for impeachment proceedings. No one is suggesting it’s a panacea. What is required is that Congress do its job and hold this president accountable for his abuses of power. But that doesn’t mean we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Free Speech for People has been around for 10 years. We’ve been taking on big money in politics and corruption in government, and we will continue to do that in the fight for our democracy. But we did not believe we could be true to that mandate without also taking on the unprecedented corruption of this presidency.

And I do want to add, you know, because this is a people’s movement, the pressure needs to continue, and will continue, on Congress to expand the scope of its inquiry beyond the Ukraine scandal. On October 13th, there will be a national day of action called by one of our organizational allies, By the People, for marches all across the country. Already a number of marches have been organized on the eve of Congress returning from its recess. People can find out more about that by going to ByThePpl.us and ImpeachNow.org. But this is why we are where we are today, is because people have demanded this, millions of people all over the country, that Congress do its job and uphold the Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, we’ll continue discussions like these, and I thank you so much for being with us, John Bonifaz, attorney, political activist, co-founder and president of Free Speech for People, one of the organizations calling for Trump’s impeachment. John Bonifaz is co-author of The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump. And Chris Hedges, formerly with The New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author, activist, columnist for the news website Truthdig. His latest article, “The Problem with Impeachment.” He has written numerous books; his last, America: The Farewell Tour.

When we come back, we turn to the water crisis in Newark with Mayor Ras Baraka. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “The Healers” by the late Randy Weston, performing on Democracy Now! in 2012. On Sunday, Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived, was co-named Randy Weston Way.