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Cokie Roberts, Longtime Political Journalist, Dies at 75

NEW YORK — Cokie Roberts, the daughter of politicians who grew up to cover the family business in Washington for ABC News and NPR over several decades, died Tuesday in Washington of complications from breast cancer. She was 75.

ABC broke into network programming to announce her death and pay tribute.

Roberts was the daughter of Hale Boggs, a former House majority leader from Louisiana, and Lindy Boggs, who succeeded her husband in Congress. Roberts worked in local news and CBS News before joining NPR to cover Congress in 1978. She joined ABC a decade later, not leaving NPR.

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She co-anchored the Sunday political show “This Week” with Sam Donaldson from 1996 to 2002.

“Cokie Roberts was a trailblazer who forever transformed the role of women in the newsroom and in our history books,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “Over five decades of celebrated journalism, Cokie shone a powerful light on the unsung women who built our nation, but whose stories had long gone untold.”

Former President Barack Obama said Roberts was a role model for women at a time the journalism profession was still dominated by men, and was a constant over 40 years of a shifting media landscape and changing world.

“She will be missed, and we send our condolences to her family,” Obama said.

Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, called Roberts a talented, tough and fair reporter.

“We respected her drive and appreciated her humor,” the former president said. “She became a friend.”

Roberts, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, kept working nearly to the end. She appeared on “This Week” in August, drawing enough concern about her evident weight loss that she released a statement saying “I am doing fine” and was looking forward to covering next year’s election.

She co-wrote a political column for many years with her husband of 53 years, Steven, who survives. They had two children.

Roberts wrote books, focusing on the role of women in history. She wrote two with her husband, one about interfaith families and “From This Day Forward,” an account of their marriage.

Current ABC News political reporter Jonathan Karl recalled being in awe of Roberts when he first started working at the network.

“When I think of politics, I think of Cokie Roberts,” he said.

Her colleagues said she never became cynical or lost her love for politics. She did force NPR to clarify her role as a commentator when she wrote a column in 2016 calling on “the rational wing” of the Republican party to reject Donald Trump as their presidential candidate.

Where’s George Carlin When We Need Him?

In the old George Carlin joke, the TV sportscaster announces: “Here’s a partial score from the West Coast – Los Angeles 6.”

For a brilliant comedian like Carlin—who skewered corporate power, class structure and political/media propaganda—that’s one of his more innocuous jokes. But it’s sharply relevant today as corporate TV news outlets serve up a series of partial scores. Call it “propaganda by omission.”

Take the coverage that followed Thursday’s Democratic debate. Bernie Sanders didn’t object in the debate when Joe Biden hung a price tag on Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan of $30 trillion (over 10 years). Sanders responded by offering the other score: “That’s right, Joe. Status quo over 10 years will be $50 trillion. Every study done shows that Medicare for All is the most cost-effective approach to providing healthcare to every man, woman, and child in this country.”

The $50 trillion figure for continuing the status quo (actually $47 trillion) comes from the  “National Health Expenditure Fact Sheet” of the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

I checked the post-debate news coverage. As in the Carlin joke, I found many references to the partial score: the $30-32 trillion estimated cost of Sanders’ legislation. But not the other score: the more costly estimate of sticking with a system in which health insurance is provided by for-profit corporations.

I watched, for example, the next day’s in-depth report on CBS Evening News lasting a full two minutes. (That’s “in-depth” nowadays on nightly newscasts.) The $32 trillion estimate was prominent, but the other score was omitted—no estimate for staying with the status quo. When the report ended, anchor Nora O’Donnell accentuated the bias by saying: “That’s an expensive plan, Ed. Thank you.”

CBS opened its report speaking of “government-run healthcare plans being touted by liberal Democrats.” It’s well-known that “government-run healthcare” is a GOP/Fox News/insurance industry talking point. As is “government takeover” of healthcare. Just ask GOP propagandist Frank Luntz.

Of course, when Medicare simply provides the coverage—whether to older people today or everyone tomorrow—that’s NOT “government-run healthcare.”

As I recently wrote to the Los Angeles Times in response to a biased poll question: “Doctors and hospitals are private today within Medicare in the U.S. (I know because I’m old enough to be on Medicare)—and they would remain so under a Medicare for All system, just as doctors and hospitals are private today under Canada’s Medicare for All system. Insurance is government-provided; not the healthcare itself.”

It’s easy to explain why Medicare for All is more cost-effective than the corporate-insurance system.Less bureaucracy and wasteful paperwork. No sales commissions. No exorbitant CEO compensation—averaging $18 million per healthcare CEO last year. No insurance company profits; the “big 8 health insurers” raked in $7 billion in one quarter last year.

But confusion, not clarity, is the job of TV news—which is so heavily sponsored by drug and healthcare companies. (Night after night, big pharma is the main sponsor of network newscasts.) And confusion is the job of industry ads and corporate politicians like Biden , who receives more healthcare industry donations than any other Democratic candidate.

That’s why we keep getting partial scores.

Besides the reduction in financial cost, imagine the reduction in human cost—hardship and anxiety—if our country joined every other wealthy country in achieving truly universal health coverage.

Which bring us to a partial score on another crisis causing hardship and anxiety today: climate change. The Green New Deal proposal in Congress to address the problem, while creating millions of high-paying jobs, has been savaged as “too expensive”—with Mitch McConnell and Republicans incessantly invoking a concocted and ridiculous figure of $93 trillion.

As with Medicare for All, moneyed elites want to omit the other score—the price tag of sticking with the status quo into a future that Bill McKibben describes as “a modern Dark Ages.” From science-denying Republicans to solution-denying corporate Democrats who seek a go-slow “middle-ground,” there’s an attempt to downplay the more expensive cost of deny and delay, including: rising seas and rivers, more damaging hurricanes and floods, worsening droughts and wildfires, buckling bridges and roads, increased air pollution and hospitalizations, premature deaths, crop failures, extinct species, spread of new diseases, intensified migration and more brutal civil wars.

McKibben argues that the Green New Deal “costs pennies on the dollar” compared to the bleak and costly future predicted by scientists. McKibben, of course, doesn’t sponsor TV news. The fossil fuel industry does.

In a country as wealthy as ours—when progressive proposals to address the crises of climate, healthcare and social inequality are routinely shot down by corporate politicians and media as “too expensive”—George Carlin’s quip reminds us to demand the other score: the horrific cost of our unequal and unsustainable status quo.

Impeach Both Trump and Kavanaugh

It’s election season, and impeachment is in the air.

But it’s not just President Donald Trump who is the target of impeachment demands. Thanks to the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is also hearing the “I” word for possible perjury committed during his raucous and controversial Senate confirmation hearings last year about his alleged sexual depredations as a teenager.

The Times triggered the Kavanaugh outcry Saturday, when it published an op-ed adapted from a new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, written by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who helped cover the Kavanaugh hearings for the paper.

No one who watched the hearings on television will forget the gut-wrenching testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who said Kavanaugh tried to rape her while drunk at a house party in high school. Nor will anyone forget Kavanaugh’s angry and tearful rebuttal, delivered under oath, denying Ford’s charges as well as those brought by Deborah Ramirez. A former classmate of Kavanaugh at Yale, Ramirez alleged that in their freshman year, Kavanaugh exposed himself and put his penis in her face during alcohol-infused dorm debauchery. (Unlike Ford, Ramirez was not invited to testify in person against Kavanaugh.)

The Ford and Ramirez stories have been covered before, but in their op-ed, Pogrebin and Kelly revealed a third—and never before disclosed—episode of drunken reveling and indecent exposure at Yale. They reported that another classmate, Max Stier, who is now the president and chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, notified senators and the FBI that he saw Kavanaugh drop his pants and push his penis into a coed’s hand. The FBI, however, declined to investigate, as did the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In an editorial correction published Monday morning, the Times revised the op-ed to clarify the “female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.” Both the original article and the revision also report that Stier has declined to discuss the incident publicly. Nonetheless, in both the original and revised versions, Pogrebin and Kelly claim they have “corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.”

The Pogrebin/Kelly bombshell unleashed a tidal wave of Twitter outrage over the weekend from Democratic presidential candidates, including Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro. Summing up the sentiment, Harris tweeted on Sunday that Kavanaugh “was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice. He must be impeached.”

Kavanaugh, for his part, has wisely declined to comment on the op-ed or the calls for his impeachment. Trump, on the other hand, has proceeded with the usual reckless abandon.

Early Sunday morning, the commander-in-chief tweeted: “Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop? They are trying to influence his opinions. Can’t let that happen!”

In the technical legal sense, the demands for the impeachment of Trump and Kavanaugh are separate and distinct. Impeachment, however, as I’ve written before, is a hybrid of law and politics. Politically, the demands are likely to prove mutually reinforcing, even as they are pursued individually.

Kavanaugh was nominated by Trump to replace the retiring Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court at the suggestion of the Federalist Society and other right-wing groups. He was confirmed by the Senate by the razor-thin margin of 50-48. He is widely perceived by those on the left as illegitimate, especially in light of the Senate’s snub of Merrick Garland, President Barrack Obama’s last nominee to the high tribunal.

Perjury, for which Kavanaugh is implicated, is clearly an impeachable offense. There have been 19 formal impeachments in U.S. history. Perjury and the making false statements figured prominently in the articles of impeachment adopted by the House in four of them, including the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh is at risk of becoming a fifth.

The best defense for Kavanaugh at this stage would be to let the scandal subside, and hope it eventually fades from the headlines. Unfortunately for him, unless Trump suddenly idles his Twitter feed, that’s not likely to happen. By urging Kavanaugh to “start suing people for libel” and suggesting the Justice Department “should come to his rescue,” Trump has all but guaranteed the exact opposite.

At the same time, Trump’s heavy-handed intervention on Kavanaugh’s behalf is an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense in its own right. Three of the 19 prior impeachments involved alleged abuses of power. The impeachment of Richard Nixon would have been a fourth, but Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on three articles of impeachment passed by the Judiciary Committee.

Will Trump’s name be added to the list? We’re still waiting for an answer from House Democrats.

Under the Constitution, the House holds the “sole power” of impeachment, which it can exercise by a simple majority vote in favor of a single article of impeachment. Although Democrats presently enjoy a large House majority with 235 members, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused to support Trump’s impeachment, fearing defeat in the Republican-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to convict. Pelosi also sees a failed impeachment as bolstering Trump’s reelection prospects.

Still, the demands for Trump’s impeachment, and now Kavanaugh’s, will no doubt persist.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee advanced the case against Trump, passing a resolution setting the rules that will govern its ongoing probe “to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment” against Trump for “obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power.” The resolution authorizes Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., to designate the full committee or a subcommittee to issue subpoenas and hold evidentiary hearings.

In form, the Nadler resolution is similar to the measure the Judiciary Committee endorsed on Oct. 30, 1973, to initiate its Nixon investigation. Over the next few months, support for Nixon’s impeachment increased. On Feb. 4, 1974, the full House voted 410-4 to authorize formal impeachment proceedings.

The rest, as they say, is a matter of record. On June 27, 1974, the Senate Watergate Committee issued its damning final report. On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon that the president had to turn over secret Watergate-related audiotapes to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee passed its impeachment articles. On Aug. 9, Nixon resigned.

Of course, there are major differences between the past and the present, and it remains to be seen whether the impeachment remedy the Founding Fathers inserted in the Constitution still has any bite. In 1974, the Democratic Party had something resembling a spine, and a critical mass of Republicans still had a sense of shame and accountability. Not so today, sadly, not by a long shot.

Populism Is Not the Answer to Neoliberal Fascism

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Truthout. 

We have entered an ominous age of political conformity. Support is growing for a right-wing populism that views liberal democracy as both an anachronism and a curse. Meanwhile, many of those who oppose this growth of the right wing are turning to a left-wing populism that is dangerously susceptible to the same patterns of demagoguery and discourses of unity and exclusion.

The signposts are clear. Across the globe, politicians spew out inordinate incitements of hatred and bigotry, while legitimating and often overtly supporting racism. Liberals cling to notions of freedom and liberty that ignore the power of capital to turn such terms into their opposite. The mainstream media measure the task of pursuing the truth against how their bottom line is affected.

What has emerged out of this abyss of rising authoritarian power and its politics of depoliticization is the depredations of an updated version of fascist politics and the normalization of a rising tide of cruel and habituated ignorance. Habit normalized in a politics that destroys notions of informed agency and self-determination now merges ignorance and hatred. One result is the growing support for right-wing populism, which views individuals and populations displaced by global forces and deprived of the most basic means of existence — including food, shelter and pure water — with disdain and hatred. The late Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman issued a warning from another time that seems equally appropriate today. He writes:

How mighty, how terrible, and how kind is the power of habit! People can get used to anything — the sea, the southern stars, love, a bunk in a prison, the barbed wire of the camps.… What creates this abyss is the power of habit. Dull as it seems, it is as powerful as dynamite; it can destroy anything. Passion, hatred, grief, pain — habit can destroy them all.

The Dangers of Right-Wing Populism

Right-wing populism offers a pseudo-democratic notion of politics in which matters of informed judgment, critical agency and collective action disappear into the symbol of the leader. In this discourse, politics becomes personalized in the image of the larger-than-life demagogue, removed from the alleged ignorance of the masses or “herd.” The past and present emergence of right-wing populist leaders is exemplified in the rise of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Geert Wilders, among others. Right-wing populism destroys everything that makes a genuine democratic politics possible.

As I have written elsewhere, right-wing populism builds upon and accentuates a long tradition of anti-democratic, neoliberal and racist tendencies that have been smoldering in the United States for decades. It eliminates critical thinking, undermines acts of civic courage, dismantles genuine collective action rooted in mass movements, suppresses democratic forms of opposition and crushes opponents. Its stark Hobbesian division between friends and enemies, unquestioning loyalty and democratic participation contains a propensity for violence rooted in its unforgiving politics of exclusion. The latter is especially troubling at a time in which violence has increasingly emerged and is accepted as a defining feature and organizing principle of politics, if not society itself. In this instance, the friend/enemy binary becomes all the more dangerous in a context where history is being erased and ignorance colludes with power to give rise to widening networks of oppression.

Trump makes this divisive feature central to his mode of governance. Putting forward coded assertions of white supremacy, Trump acts on a regressive notion of unity that relies on exclusion and a politics of disposability. According to Trump, “The only thing that matters is the unification of the people — because the other people don’t mean anything.” In Trump’s discourse, the call for unity has as its foundation the implication that all opposition is not only illegitimate but constitutes the terrain of the enemy. His notion of “the people” is reduced to a category that mimics the will of the leader whose image of the U.S. is as racist as it is anti-democratic in this deeply authoritarian discourse. The right-wing populist claim to exclusive power, representation and governance in the hands of the leader is not without its critical moments. For instance, right-wing populist leaders go out of their way to criticize globalization and the elite, but in doing so, they claim that only they can “represent the people” while putting policies into play that expand the power of the financial elite and their neoliberal imperatives, such as regressive tax cuts and the hollowing out of the welfare state.

The demagogic character of populism can be seen in its use of a language of simplicity, one that avoids complexity, honest dialogue, multifaceted struggles and the hard work of power-sharing modes of governance. This spirit of populism is at odds with a language that is troubling, calls power into question, disturbs machineries of class, gender, sexual and racial oppression, and uses language to sharpen the moral imagination and bear witness to state and corporate violence. Right-wing populism both demonizes and promotes the fear of an internal enemy, distorts information, and suppresses dissent and resistance. In doing so, it attempts to strip democracy of all of its ideals. Populism’s language of simplicity and its embrace of an agency-stripping notion of anti-intellectualism is further strengthened by neoliberalism’s culture of fear, insecurity and uncertainty that accentuates a sense of frustration, anger and political impotence that traps individuals in their own feelings, unable to translate private troubles into broader social and political considerations.

Right-wing populism speaks in the language of the perpetrator as victim, refigures the language of war as heroic, and merges the rhetoric of command and racial purity with the discourse of commerce and capitalism. Under right-wing populism, the language of violence parades as the language of war, redemption, walls, barriers and security. This is a populism without a social conscience — one that supports authoritarian societies marked by deregulation, the dismantling of the welfare state, the denial of climate change, a soaring inequality and a struggle to define a nation’s past.

The friend/enemy binary becomes all the more dangerous in a context where history is being erased.

Populist leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro rule not for the public interest, but for themselves and their ultra-rich allies, furthering the slide toward lawlessness and barbarism. How else to explain Trump’s pressuring Israel to ban two congresswomen of color from visiting Israel after he has stated that they should go back to their own countries after they had criticized his policies? How else to explain his relentlessly cruel policies, such as cutting federal support for food stamps for over 3 million people, asserting that immigrants who use government benefits such as housing vouchers or Medicaid may be denied green cards and visas, and his ongoing immigration raids which separate families and traumatize communities? Trump’s grotesque sense of entitlement and limitless self-regard translates into a fixation on dominating and humiliating others.

Right-wing populism thrives on the allure of the spectacle of violence and redirects pent-up anger and aggression into a form of collaborative pleasure and emotional release that becomes complicit with the ugliness of authoritarian modes of governance and morally compromised lives.

Right-wing populism shares many elements of a fascist politics, including an ideology of certainty, unhampered by doubt and complexity in its explanation of history and justification for its policies. Its friend/enemy distinction fuels both a politics of disposability that makes some human beings superfluous, and also promotes a culture of fear and terror in which the unthinkable becomes normalized. It disdains the truth and scientific evidence, and empties words of any meaning while elevating lying to the status of a national ideal that legitimates a dystopian mode of governance. A willful forgetting of history covers over its support for anti-Semitism, its hostility toward elites, and its embrace of nativism and racial hatred.

Right-wing populism also destroys any notion of the social marked by the principles of individual freedom, justice, equity and equality; it also thrives on anti-intellectualism, and as Hannah Arendt once said, brings “to light the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.” Finally, right-wing populism, like fascism, supports authoritarian governments in which power is concentrated in the hands of the alleged leader.

The Limits of Left-Wing Populism

Populism comes in many forms, and some writers such as Chantal Mouffe have argued that the antidote to right-wing populism is left-wing populism. She insists that left-wing populism works to expose and denounce rising social and economic inequality, criticize the deep cruelties of capitalism and rightly reveal corrupt middle-of-the road politicians. Mouffe also argues that left-wing populism opposes centrist politics with its investments in neoliberal ideology, finance capital, austerity, deregulation and corporate power.

Federico Finchelstein, meanwhile, has pointed out that left-wing populism is often marked by its “attention to unequal social and economic conditions … questioning even the dogmas of neoliberal austerity measures and the supposed neutrality of technocratic business-oriented solutions.” Yet, he qualifies the latter by pointing out that left-wing populism undermines its political project “by its claim to exclusively represent the entire people against the elites.” Mouffe ignores this criticism and suggests that the combination of popular sovereignty and equality advocated by left-wing populists offers the greatest challenge to the pervading hold of right-wing populism across the globe, which she argues is the background condition for the erosion of the democratic ideals and institutions.

What is particularly strong about Mouffe’s argument is the call for a populist movement rooted in a more comprehensive struggle to recover and expand radical democracy as a political force. For Mouffe, the challenge of left-wing populism is to make clear that the struggle for popular sovereignty has to be part of a broader struggle for democracy. She recognizes that people no longer feel in control of their destinies. Her answer to massive forms of alienation is to create a left-wing populism that highlights the contradictions between liberal democratic ideals and the anti-democratic politics of the emerging right-wing populism. Democracy in this view becomes a means to fight an ideological war against right-wing adversaries and diverse modes of authoritarianism.

Right-wing populism speaks in the language of the perpetrator as victim.

As crucial as some of these arguments are as part of a challenge to confront right-wing populism, they are not unproblematic. Mouffe and many other advocates of left-wing populism fail to understand the pathologies inherent in all forms of populism. As theorists such as Finchelstein along with John Keane and Jan-Werner Muller point out, these extend from underestimating how populism is susceptible to being a politically empty category that can be appropriated by almost any political group. Moreover, populism in all of its forms is too indebted to the personalization of leadership, whether such leaders are on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, or on the right, such as Donald Trump.

Moreover, as Finchelstein rightly observes, “In all cases, populism speaks in the name of a single people, and does so in the name of democracy. But democracy is defined in narrow terms as the expression of the desires of the populist leaders.” In addition, it runs the risk of being organized around notions of unity that replicate the friend/enemy divide and employ politics as a weapon based on hard and fast notions of exclusion and inclusion. Populism tends to ignore the hard work of education as a crucial tool for addressing the crisis of neoliberalism and its corresponding crisis of subjectivity, identity and agency.

Critical Education Could Change the Political Landscape

Education has a central role to play in addressing and changing the consciousness of people who occupy either side of the populist divide, as well as people who hold contradictory attitudes toward power, equality, identity, citizenship, asylum and other central political issues. Binarisms do not produce a collective political consciousness; instead they feed into either the dead end of a rigid orthodoxy or the banality of celebrity culture. Instead of a revolution in consciousness, we get a mix of intellectual infantilism and a commodified culture that denounces all thoughts of a critical public consciousness.

Populism on both sides can open the door to conspiracy theories, create what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of politics, and “morph into a tool of journalistic [if not simplistic] discourse.” In short, populism can represent a range of perspectives and possibilities while still maintaining its illiberal attributes including “understanding its own position as the only true form of political legitimacy” while refusing to recognize the validity of its opponents’ views, subjecting them to the process of demonization and accusing them of “being tyrannical, conspiratorial and anti-democratic.” In other words, such a perspective becomes sclerotic in its own ideology and political certainty.

Populism is susceptible to being a politically empty category that can be appropriated by almost any political group.

Populism on both the right and left narrows the scope of power to the role of leaders, whether progressive or reactionary. This weakens a politics of resistance and potentially undermines the hard work of building a mass anti-capitalist political movement while potentially sabotaging the rise of self-determining and engaged individual and social agents. However, it does more; in its application to any group that challenges power, it loses a sense of political specificity and historical context and tends to overgeneralize the opposition with a homogenizing view of people that conceives of political opponents as enemies. Populism in general runs the risk of pitting groups against each other, and for the left, this means often pitting class against race or failure to move beyond the fracturing of groups into isolated, single-issue movements. In addition, power in all of its complexity is increasingly defined in simplistic terms as something to resist rather than as a tool of possibility rooted in the struggle over developing democratic institutions.

Beyond Populism

Populism has strong tendencies to criticize elites, but power runs much deeper and is present in both economic and political structures and ideologies that develop over time — all of which need to be challenged. At the same time, what is needed in this instance is a vision and a broad-based movement of informed workers, artists, intellectuals, young people, and others who are challenging not just corporate elites, but capitalism itself. Populism runs the risk of becoming synonymous with momentary, if not misdirected, outbursts of anger, discontent and moral outrage, only to be then appropriated by demagogues. Social movements are built not merely on feelings of isolation, anger and emotional dissatisfaction, but also on the hard work of organizing concerted ideological struggles to connect with the problems that everyday people confront, and to create a politics of identification in which people can recognize themselves and join with others not merely to condemn elites, but to radically change the structures of domination.

What is needed is an anti-capitalist movement that can redirect the pain, anger and rage of the dispossessed toward a radical restructuring of society whose aim is the construction of a democratic socialist society. The problems people face in the United States and other authoritarian capitalist societies are too deep, extend too far and command too much power. Their deep sources of oppression must be challenged by building alliances that bring together workers, intellectuals, young people and diverse anti-capitalist social movements. Such a broad-based social and political formation must learn to speak to and with the dispossessed while addressing how capitalism deprives them of the material conditions of freedom, forcing them to compete over scarce resources, time and dignity.

Capitalism is the antithesis of democracy and must be overthrown because it cannot provide what Jeff Noonan calls “universal life-goods,” which translate into “a healthy environment, public healthcare distributed on the basis of need and not ability to pay, and an adequately funded public education system.” Noonan describes these all as “universal life-goods without which we cannot live and live fully.”

Any challenge to the current rise of right-wing populism must address the need for a politics that contains a language both of critique and hope. This suggests a politics that rouses the passions of people to be energized and more informed, and makes clear that resistance must be a collective enterprise with struggles unified in their aim to refuse the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same. Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he argued that we need a politics that comprehends the totality of the system we are fighting, that there is no struggle without risk, and that struggle is a collective project rooted in a revolution of values and the dream of a world in which justice and equality merge.

The depoliticizing forces at work under neoliberalism cannot be underestimated in terms of their contribution to the rise of right-wing populism. Widening inequality, widespread alienation, a hardening of culture, the collapse of public goods and civic culture, the dismantling of the social contract, the expanding criminalization of social problems and a ballooning civic illiteracy, among other forces, all contribute to diverse forms of depoliticization. Under such circumstances, the declining popularity of liberal democracy produces a populace that lacks a sophisticated understanding of how neoliberal fascism infantilizes them politically and undermines their ability to exercise critical judgment, concerted acts of self-determination and collective resistance. The left needs to make visible the right-wing assault on the basic values and programs that undermine democracy and social justice, and promote widespread misery and suffering. It needs to provide alternative educational programs, use alternative media to educate people in a language they can understand, use demonstrations as pedagogical tools to raise consciousness, and make education central to promoting policies that both undermine capitalism and give meaning to what a socialist society looks like. There will be no change to the power and ideological dynamics of capitalism if matters of popular sovereignty, class struggles and economic equality are not central to the collective fights for economic, political and social justice.

Neither a reactionary nor a progressive populism will provide a strategy capable of challenging the new capitalist formation I term “neoliberal fascism.”

Populism tends toward extremes, and a pseudo-democratic style of politics that embraces an imagined people, oversimplifications, and charismatic and demagogic leaders.

Neoliberal fascism must be challenged with a new narrative and vision of what counts as politics at a time in which power has become global and the promises of established liberal elites have become bankrupt politically and ethically. Nancy Fraser rightly argues that we need a political movement in which “a broad spectrum of social actors can find themselves” and address the “challenge of financialization, deindustrialization” and “corporate globalization.”

Populism neither explains the rise of fascist movements around the globe nor does it provide the answer to challenging them. What is needed is a powerful new vision of politics, one that takes education, agency and power seriously in its ongoing efforts to develop an alliance among those forces who can imagine and struggle for a world in which neoliberal fascism no longer exists and the promise of a socialist democracy becomes more than a utopian dream. There will be no justice without a struggle, and there will be no future worth living without the collective will to struggle.

Elizabeth Warren Decries Trump as ‘Corruption in the Flesh’

NEW YORK — Facing thousands of cheering supporters in the nation’s largest city, Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren on Monday decried President Donald Trump as “corruption in the flesh” and outlined her plans to root out corruption in the White House, Congress and courts.

“Corruption has put our planet at risk. Corruption has broken our economy. And corruption is breaking our democracy,” said Warren, a Massachusetts senator who has emerged as a leading presidential contender.

While aggressive, the message was a familiar one. Warren has embraced corruption as a central campaign theme from the beginning of her 2020 presidential bid. But rarely has Warren addressed such a crowd with such a symbolic backdrop.

She faced throngs of supporters from a podium under Washington Square Park’s storied arch, a made-for-television moment designed to showcase the strength of her candidacy as much as the ambition of her message.

The event was set close to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, which killed more than 140 workers in 1911.

She framed those deaths as the direct result of corruption. Many women died because factory owners neglected safety features to save money, with the implicit support of local elected officials who declined to intervene.

Warren charged that the same thing is happening today.

“Giant corporations have bought off our government,” she said.

Specifically, her anti-corruption plan would “end lobbying as we know it” by instituting a lifetime ban on members of Congress and White House Cabinet secretaries from ever becoming lobbyists. At the same time, corporate lobbyists would be blocked from working for the federal government.

Both practices are common today.

She also would prohibit federal judges from avoiding misconduct investigations by leaving their posts, prevent courts from sealing settlements in public health and safety cases and ban class-action waivers for all cases involving employment, consumer protection, antitrust and civil rights.

And taking direct aim at issues involving the Trump administration, Warren would require candidates for public office to post their tax returns online. Presidents, Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress would also be prohibited from owning businesses on the side.

Trump, of course, has refused to release his tax returns years after promising to do so, and the Trump organization continues to do business around the world.

“Donald Trump is corruption in the flesh,” Warren said. “He is sworn to serve the people of the United States, but he serves only himself and his partners in corruption.”

Warren noted, however, that Trump is only a symptom of the corruption that has infected the U.S. political and economic systems.

She has long argued that the nation’s modern government only works for “the wealthy and the well-connected” like big energy, health care and insurance companies that employ lobbyists to advance their priorities over the best interests of ordinary citizens.

She wrote that popular policies championed by the Democratic Party’s progressive wing — and many in its crowded field of presidential hopefuls — like universal child care, an overhaul of the federal criminal justice system, gun reform and plans to promote affordable housing have been “stymied because giant corporations and billionaires who don’t want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way.”

Warren’s campaign noted that she already proposed a series of anti-corruption measures in Congress last year, but it says the proposal released Monday goes farther.

Warren has emerged as a central player in the broader fight for the direction of the Democratic Party in the age of Trump.

Like her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, Warren is demanding transformational change that Trump and his allies deride as socialism. Warren and Sanders are up against Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, a favorite of the party’s establishment wing.

Warren didn’t name any of her Democratic opponents by name.

She noted, however, that “too many politicians in both parties have convinced themselves that playing the money-for-influence game is the only way to get things done.”

Looking out at the swelling crowd, she said she typically takes selfies with everyone who wants one at her events.

“Tonight is a little something different,” Warren said.

New York Prosecutors Reportedly Subpoena Trump’s Tax Returns

NEW YORK — New York City prosecutors have subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s tax returns, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Monday.

Manhattan District Attorney’s Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office recently sent a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm seeking the last eight years of state and federal tax returns for Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, the person said.

The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked about the subpoena as he left the White House on Monday, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about it.” A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Marc Mukasey, said he is “evaluating the situation and will respond as appropriate.”

Vance, a Democrat, subpoenaed the Trump Organization last month for records related to payments Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, helped arrange to a porn actress who claimed she had an affair with Trump. His office is also pursuing a state mortgage fraud case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Vance’s office declined to comment Monday on the tax returns subpoena, the news of which was first reported by The New York Times.

Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, said in a statement that it “will respect the legal process and fully comply with its legal obligations.”

Mazars was subpoenaed earlier this year by a House committee seeking Trump financial records. The firm said it believes strongly in ethical and professional rules governing the accounting industry and does not comment on work it does for clients.

Trump, a Republican, is already fighting efforts by several Democratic-led congressional committees to obtain his tax returns and other records that could give them a window into his finances.

Trump and three of his children filed a lawsuit in April seeking to block two House committees from getting records that his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, has said includes tax returns. A federal appeals court indicated last month that it would take a hard look at the legality of the subpoenas after Trump’s lawyers argued the House committee subpoenas were overly broad and unconstitutional.

In July, Trump sued to block the application of a new state law in New York that could allow a third House committee to obtain his state tax returns. In April, he and his company sued the chairman of the House oversight committee to block a subpoena issued to Mazars seeking financial statements, accounting records and other documents covering 2011 to 2018.

Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating whether Trump exaggerated his wealth to obtain loans. She issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank in March seeking loan applications and other records related to Trump real estate projects and his failed 2014 bid to buy the Buffalo Bills.

Vance’s investigation appears to be covering some of the same ground as two federal probes.

Federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, who spent months probing payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who said they had affairs with Trump, Daniels and model Karen McDougal.

Cohen, who made one of the payments himself and arranged for American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, to pay the other, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion and other crimes and is serving a three-year sentence at a federal prison in upstate New York.

A lawyer for Cohen declined to comment on Vance’s subpoenas.

Trump, who denies any sexual relationship with either woman, has said any payments were a personal matter, not a campaign expense.

The U.S. attorney’s office in New York informed a court last month that it was finished investigating the payments. No one besides Cohen was charged, though prosecutors said in public court filings that Trump himself was aware of and directed the payments.

The Trump Organization also reimbursed Cohen for money he paid to Daniels. Cohen has argued that organization officials disguised the true nature of the payments and that it is unfair he is the only one prosecuted.

The federal inquiry looked at whether campaign finance laws were broken.

The New York Times reported, citing “people briefed on the matter,” that Vance’s inquiry involves an examination of whether anyone at the Trump Organization falsified business records by falsely listing the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal expense.

Falsifying business records can be a crime under state law.

 

The U.S. Military Is Destroying the Environment

The increasingly horrific warning signs on climate change include the suggestion that the Earth already has warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution and that we have only 12 years at which we can sustain this level, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The goals to ward off irreparable harm, however, are as Sisyphean to accomplish as they are necessary for human survival. That’s partially because of who is doing the polluting, in particular fossil fuel companies. However, a less-well-known but equally culpable player is the U.S. military. As Murtaza Hussain writes in The Intercept, “the largest industrial military in the history of the world is also the single biggest polluter on the planet.”

A June report from Brown University’s Costs of War project reveals “the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.” A similar study released just weeks later from Durham and Lancaster universities in England concurred, finding that, as Popular Mechanics reported, “its fuel emissions alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.”

The war in Afghanistan, to Hussain, is a particularly glaring example of how the U.S. pollutes abroad, with no redeeming value:

That massive additional burden on the planet might be justifiable were it all being done in the name of vital national security interests, but the biggest components of the U.S. military’s carbon dioxide footprint have been in wars and occupations that were almost entirely unnecessary. To put it crudely: The U.S. poisoned the planet for vanity projects.

The Iraq war, too, Hussain writes, “led to a spike in carbon dioxide emissions through U.S. military activity, it resulted in the widespread poisoning of the Iraqi environment through the use of toxic munitions and the same so-called burn pits on military bases that were used in Afghanistan.”

The injustices of invasion include environmental destruction. Hussain explains:

In addition to emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide during the war, the U.S. military footprint contributed more directly to the immediate destruction of the Afghan environment. Deforestation has accelerated amid the chaos of the war and, through trash burning and other means, the U.S. armed forces released toxic pollutants into the air that are blamed for sickening Afghan civilians and causing chronic illnesses among U.S. veterans.

Compounding the problem is that even when the United States attempts to take responsibility for the pollution of war, it focuses mostly on threats to its own resources and equipment and not the damages to the countries it invades.

U.S. military “climate policy is fundamentally contradictory,” said Patrick Bigger, of Lancaster University Environment Center and a coauthor of the study said in a media statement. He added this is because the military is”confronting the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, a situation it is locked into for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe.”

If those who care about the future of the planet don’t take massive action, Hussain writes, the result will be even more exploitation of the countries that least protect against it: “Faced with a planet that is clearly at the limits of the abuse it can take, the groundwork is still being laid for more exploitation and violence.”

 

 

Central Bankers’ Desperate Grab for Power

Central bankers are out of ammunition. Mark Carney, the soon-to-be-retiring head of the Bank of England, admitted as much in a speech at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in August. “In the longer-term,” he said, “we need to change the game.” The same point was made by Philipp Hildebrand, former head of the Swiss National Bank, in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “Really, there is little if any ammunition left,” he said. “More of the same in terms of monetary policy is unlikely to be an appropriate response if we get into a recession or sharp downturn.”

“More of the same” means further lowering interest rates, the central bankers’ stock tool for maintaining their targeted inflation rate in a downturn. Bargain-basement interest rates are supposed to stimulate the economy by encouraging borrowers to borrow (since rates are so low) and savers to spend (since they aren’t making any interest on their deposits and may have to pay to store them). At the moment, over $15 trillion in bonds are trading globally at negative interest rates, yet this radical maneuver has not been shown to measurably improve economic performance. In fact, new research shows that negative interest rates from central banks, rather than increasing spending, stopping deflation and stimulating the economy as they were expected to do, may be having the opposite effects. They are being blamed for squeezing banks, punishing savers, keeping dying companies on life support and fueling a potentially unsustainable surge in asset prices.

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So what is a central banker to do? Hildebrand’s proposed solution was presented in a paper he wrote with three of his colleagues at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, where he is now vice chairman. Released in August to coincide with the annual Jackson Hole meeting, the paper was co-authored by Stanley Fischer, former governor of the Bank of Israel and former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve; Jean Boivin, former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada; and BlackRock economist Elga Bartsch. Their proposal calls for “more explicit coordination between central banks and governments when economies are in a recession so that monetary and fiscal policy can better work in synergy.” The goal, according to Hildebrand, is to go “direct with money to consumers and companies in order to enliven consumption,” putting spending money directly into consumers’ pockets.

It sounds a lot like “helicopter money,” but he was not actually talking about raining money down on the people. The central bank would maintain a “standing emergency fiscal facility” that would be activated when interest rate manipulation was no longer working and deflation had set in. The central bank would determine the size of the facility based on its estimates of what was needed to get the price level back on target. It sounds good until you get to the part about who would disburse the funds: “Independent experts would decide how best to deploy the funds to both maximize impact and meet strategic investment objectives set by the government.”

“Independent experts” is another term for “technocrats”—bureaucrats chosen for their technical skill rather than by popular vote. They might be using sophisticated data, algorithms and economic formulae to determine “how best to deploy the funds,” but the question is, “best for whom?” It was central bank technocrats who plunged the economies of Greece and Italy into austerity after 2011, and unelected technocrats who put Detroit into bankruptcy in 2013.

Hildebrand and his co-authors are not talking about central banks giving up their ivory tower independence to work with legislators in coordinating fiscal and monetary policy. Rather, central bankers would be acquiring even more power, by giving themselves a new pot of free money that they could deploy as they saw fit in the service of “government objectives.”

Carney’s New Game

The tendency to overreach was also evident in Carney’s Jackson Hole speech when he said, “we need to change the game.” The game-changer he proposed was to break the power of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. This would be done through the issuance of an international digital currency backed by multiple national currencies, on the model of Facebook’s “Libra.”

Multiple reserve currencies are not a bad idea, but if we’re following the Libra model, we’re talking about a new, single reserve currency that is merely “backed” by a basket of other currencies. The questions then are who would issue this global currency, and who would set the rules for obtaining the reserves.

Carney suggested that the new currency might be “best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies.” This raises further questions. Are central banks really “public”? And who would be the issuer—the banker-controlled Bank for International Settlements, the bank of central banks in Switzerland? Or perhaps the International Monetary Fund, which Carney happens to be in line to head?

The IMF already issues Special Drawing Rights to supplement global currency reserves, but they are merely “units of account” which must be exchanged for national currencies. Allowing the IMF to issue the global reserve currency outright would give unelected technocrats unprecedented power over nations and their money. The effect would be similar to the surrender by European Union governments of control over their own currencies, making their central banks dependent on the European Central Bank for liquidity, with its disastrous consequences.

Time to End the “Independent” Fed?

A media event that provoked even more outrage against central bankers in August was an op-ed in Bloomberg by William Dudley, former president of the New York Federal Reserve and a former partner at Goldman Sachs. Titled “The Fed Shouldn’t Enable Donald Trump,” it concluded:

There’s even an argument that the [presidential] election itself falls within the Fed’s purview. After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.

The Fed is so independent that, according to former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, it is answerable to no one. A chief argument for retaining the Fed’s independence is that it needs to remain a neutral arbiter, beyond politics and political influence; and Dudley’s op-ed clearly breached that rule. Critics called it an attempt to overthrow a sitting president, a treasonous would-be coup that justified ending the Fed altogether.

Perhaps, but central banks actually serve some useful functions. Better would be to nationalize the Fed, turning it into a true public utility, mandated to serve the interests of the economy and the voting public. Having the central bank and the federal government work together to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy is actually a good idea, so long as the process is transparent and public representatives have control over where the money is deployed. It’s our money, and we should be able to decide where it goes.

The Xenophobia Behind Corporate Media’s Use of ‘Oligarch’

Even in corporate media, you will occasionally see references to the United States as an “oligarchy.” That is the judgment of former President Jimmy Carter, of peer-reviewed academic studies, and even opinion pieces in our most prestigious media (e.g., Washington Post, 4/8/14; New Yorker, 4/18/14). Indeed, Paul Krugman has been saying it in the New York Times (11/3/11, 5/15/15, 7/15/19) for years.  Just three men hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country combined, and the richest people in society use their money to influence media, society and the government.

Non-oligarch David Koch. (cc photo: Fred Thompson)

But if the US is an oligarchy, then who are the oligarchs? One candidate who has been in the news of late is conservative multibillionaire David Koch, who died August 23 (FAIR.org, 9/5/19). Koch was the world’s 11th richest and 29th most powerful person, according to Forbes, amassing a fortune of over $50 billion. The chemical and fossil fuel magnate used his enormous wealth to fund climate change denialists and block efforts to address climate breakdown. He bankrolled a multitude of right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, conservative media, politicians and think tanks. Koch undercut unions, opposed gun restrictions, blocked public transport initiatives and thwarted moves towards nationalized healthcare. As such, he and his brother Charles have shaped the Republican Party and modern society more than almost anyone else.

Yet in their obituaries, even media catering to a more liberal audience refrained from using the term to describe him. “Philanthropist” was the preferred description in the Washington Post (8/23/19) and NBC (8/23/19). CBS News (8/23/19) also described him as such, framing him as an “icon” who “committed millions to various hospitals for cancer research.” Meanwhile, the New York Times (8/23/19) glowed over the “gregarious, socially prominent” “man-about town philanthropist,” who gave over $1 billion to charity. (See FAIR.org, 9/5/19.)  The tone of these articles was functionally identical to that of more conservative media, like Fox News (8/24/19) or the Wall Street Journal (8/23/19).

Many outside the corporate media bubble were highly scornful of the coverage. Independent journalist Caitlin Johnston (Medium, 8/23/19) remarked that if Koch were Russian, he would be called an “oligarch,” while the Appeal’s Adam H. Johnson claimed on Twitter (8/23/19) that “oligarch” is a loaded term used exclusively for the elite of enemy foreign countries, and not our plutocrats.

Who is and isn’t an oligarch, according to media

To test these critiques, FAIR analyzed the 50 most recent articles using the search term “oligarch” from the New York Times, CNN and Fox News websites. (Full documentation, including a complete list of sources, used can be found here.) The study sought to ascertain:

Who is referred to as an oligarch?
Which countries are considered oligarchies?

Yevgeny Prigozhin, Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Victor Pinchuk, Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov: That is the full and distinctly Slavic-sounding list of people identified by CNN as “oligarchs.” Indeed, only two articles across the entire sample of 150 identified Westerners as such: one angry New York Times opinion piece (15/7/19) that creatively decried people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson as “rocket oligarchs,” and a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment (Fox News, 4/2/19) in which an NRA spokesperson attacked gun control advocate Cory Booker as a “constitutional oligarch.” The rest were all from Russia or former Eastern Bloc countries.

In the 150-article sample, Russia was described as an oligarchy in 89, while Ukraine was labeled as such in 35. The word was also used in connection to other ex-Eastern Bloc states in 13 articles: Those states were Moldova (6 times), Kazakhstan (twice), Hungary (twice), Georgia (twice) and Azerbaijan (once). Guatemala was also once referred to as possessing oligarchs. In all, 98% of countries referenced in connection to oligarchs were either Russia or formerly Soviet-dominated states.

In contrast, only 1% of articles mentioned the US in connection with oligarchs, which is all the more remarkable, considering all the outlets in the sample are US-based and devote vastly more time, space and words to US issues than Eastern European ones.

The fact that oligarch has taken on ethnic connotations was made doubly clear in a New York Times article (5/22/19) about the changing world of soccer. It noted (emphasis added):

In 1997, the Egyptian businessman and department store owner Mohamed al-Fayed took control of Fulham, a London team in the second division, and led its promotion into the Premier League; in 2003, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who had made his fortune in oil, aluminum and steel, bought Chelsea; in 2007, Stan Kroenke, the husband of a Wal-Mart heir, began accumulating shares of Arsenal. That same year, the family that had controlled Liverpool for half a century sold out to two American businessmen, Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

The word, defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as an individual or group of powerful people that control a country or industry, is surely as applicable to the Walton dynasty as to a mining giant like Abramovich, but US billionaires are merely “businessmen”—when they aren’t “philanthropists”—while Russians are “oligarchs.” In other words, our elites are engaged in normal economic activity or else looking out for the betterment of humanity, while theirs are nefariously dominating politics.

“Especially in Russia” (Late Night, 7/20/17).

Many articles stressed these oligarchs’ apparent connections to President Vladimir Putin (e.g. CNN, 3/20/19, 3/22/19), even when the oligarchs in question aren’t from Russia (Fox News, 3/21/19, 5/14/19). Late Show host Stephen Colbert (7/20/17) defined “oligarch” as “Russian for ‘rich guy don’t ask where his money came from.’” (“Oligarch” actually came to English from Ancient Greek.) To be fair, Colbert joked about the selective use of the term—explaining that “over there, the political system is controlled by wealthy elites who buy influence and pull strings of the government, whereas in America, we speak English.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, however, was apparently quite serious with his xenophobic comments that Russians were “genetically driven” to nefarious ends like co-optation and gaining favor. The guest of one Fox News show (5/7/19) referred to a “Russian” before switching that to a “Ukranian oligarch,” suggesting the entire region was an amorphous mass of devious, plotting, squatting Slavs.

There was very little difference between how the three outlets used the term. Fox News was a little more likely to reference Ukraine, primarily because it closely covered the story of Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s connection to a Ukranian business executive, while CNN’s commitment to Russiagate encouraged it to connect oligarchs personally to Vladimir Putin. But overall, the three outlets displayed a shared tendency in how and to whom they applied the word.

While not labeling its own wealthy and powerful elites as “oligarchs,” US corporate media do, as noted, occasionally acknowledge that the United States itself is an oligarchy. But even those admissions are few and far between, appearing for the most part only in articles devoted to arguing exactly that point. Otherwise, the US is overwhelmingly presented as a democracy and a force for good in reporting.

And when a politician like Bernie Sanders suggests that these oligarchs influence the media, senior editors react angrily, claiming he is “ridiculous” and a “conspiracy theorist.” What a strange country the US is—an oligarchy without any oligarchs.

American Plutocrats Are Taking Food Off Families’ Tables

While the Trumpistas are presently plowing a multibillion-dollar subsidy into big grain farms, they’re using a tangle of federal red tape to deny a meager level of food assistance to millions of poor families.

To qualify for food aid, federal rules say that a family of three should have an income under $27,000 a year. But with rents, utilities, health care, and even food prices constantly rising, millions of Americans can’t make ends meet on such a low income.

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Thus, 40 states have stepped in to loosen that restriction so families at least get the basic nutrition they need. Trump’s minions demean these people as welfare moochers, but overwhelmingly they’re working families, children, the elderly, and Americans with disabilities.

The benefit is hardly lavish, averaging only $127 a month. But even this modest outlay has proven enormously successful in mitigating poverty.

Congress authorized states to make such pragmatic income adjustments in a 1996 revamp of the law. But — look out! — here comes Trump’s reactionary ag secretary, Sonny Perdue. Perdue recently rose up on his hind legs to proclaim that state officials are using that authority as a “loophole” to circumvent Trump’s federal authority.

So Sonny and Donnie are demanding a whole new bureaucracy of “eligibility police” to monitor the financial assets of food stamp recipients. They’ll spend tens of millions of your and my tax dollars to harass the poor in an autocratic hope of nabbing a couple of hungry families who have a dime more than Trump thinks they should have.

What we have here is government by plutocratic authoritarians who will gleefully dole out millions in tax breaks and subsidies to wealthy families, then just as gleefully take food off the tables of poor families.