Chris Hedges's Blog, page 17

A Real Super Tuesday Calls for a Strong Progressive Media

The corporate media has cast itself as a bulwark against the erosion of our democracy under Donald Trump. The president has declared the media the “enemy of the people” and routinely rails at the critical coverage of his administration, dismissing it as “fake news.” Democracy depends on a free and independent press that can hold power accountable, but sadly, the corporate media does not meet that standard.

Take The New York Times, a paper that famously claims it runs “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” A common advertisement for the Times, as seen on social media platforms like Facebook, encourages readers to subscribe by declaring, “The Truth is Worth It. Support Independent Journalism.” While it may be true that the Times is quite critical of Trump, to call itself “independent” is a stretch. The New York Times is a publicly traded company on the stock market, generating more than $420 million in revenue last year alone. In addition to its print and digital subscribers, the paper relies on advertising to fuel its corporate profits. The paper claims to report on the current economic system objectively and independently — yet it directly benefits from a status quo that has resulted in massive inequality. Can it truly be independent?

A critically important discourse on capitalism is taking place right now across America, embodied by the rise in popularity of candidates like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Both Sanders and Warren are openly challenging the configuration of the financial universe that Michael Bloomberg, Trump and The New York Times inhabit. The strength of movements behind such progressive presidential campaigns and their magnetic draw for supporters at the grassroots — measurable during Sanders’ blowout victory in the Nevada caucuses — has boosted the decibels of alarm bells on Wall Street and elsewhere in the top echelons of corporate America.

While the corporate media usually get their facts straight, it is the framing of those facts that reveals the bias. One galling example is a piece the Times published on the morning of  Nevada caucuses by Lisa Lerer headlined, “Teflon Bernie: Why Is It So Hard to Beat a Democratic Socialist?” (The newspaper later changed the headline to “Bernie Sanders, the Teflon Candidate, Faces Sudden New Tests.”) Lerer dredged up numerous minute missteps or whiffs of controversy surrounding the senator since his early adulthood.

The Times writer raised a dubious intelligence report asserting that Russians may be trying to help Sanders win. She waxed on about how he “honeymooned in the Soviet Union,” had “secret plans to mount a 2012 primary challenge against President Obama,” “resisted detailing the costs of his signature policy proposal, ‘Medicare for all,’ ” how his health had suffered with a recent heart attack — and then the story complained unhappily that despite all of the (alleged) detrimental baggage, “Nothing sticks.”

Watching Fox News long enough, without a critical eye, is apt to inculcate attitudes that are racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, pro-police and pro-military. Watching or reading the supposedly liberal corporate media long enough, without a critical eye, is apt to inculcate the notion that programs like Medicare for All will destroy the American economy, that a candidate like Sanders is as dangerous as Trump, or that only a so-called moderate is “electable.” Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein more directly expresses priorities than the corporate media, saying quite openly in a recent interview: “I think I might find it harder to vote for Bernie than for Trump.”

Truly independent journalism relies on facts, just as corporate media often does, but frames issues with a clearly stated bias — a bias that lights a fire under the powerful and roots for the vulnerable, amplifies the voices of working people to topple power and strengthen the powerless. The function of the press in a democracy is to pursue truth in the interest of progress, not in the interest of an unjust status quo. Seen through such a lens it isn’t hard to judge whether the likes of The New York Times (or CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, etc.) truly meet the definition of independent journalism.

A crucial way to fight back is to drastically amp up support for independent progressive media. Information flow is key, whether in small communities or nationwide. That flow is essential to the health of the body politic, but blockage is routine from massive clots of concentrated wealth and corporate power. Media organizations that are fueled by people power instead of money power can disrupt the dominant media narratives — and replace them with authentic stories about people’s lives and grassroots efforts to create a more humane society.

Engaged in challenging the power structures that make the rich powerful and the powerful rich, progressives have created a vast array of media organizations and projects. We have a lot to be proud of, whether online or offline. But let’s face it: We’ve got to gear up our strength as never before if we hope to effectively counteract the forces of corporate capitalism at this juncture.

Along with boosting financial support for media outlets that serve their interests instead of corporate America, progressives should help to promote those outlets by methodically sharing information about them with friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers and others. Such person-to-person promotion of progressive media has become more important than ever — to thwart the Democratic Party establishment and its aligned media outlets as they keep stepping up propaganda assaults on the Bernie 2020 campaign.

On Super Tuesday (March 3), a three-hour TV and radio broadcast will bring together the voices of grassroots movement builders, labor organizers, independent journalists, voting rights activists and those working for economic, racial, gender and climate justice to analyze and articulate the powerful electoral changes sweeping across America. Watch the live broadcast online at Truthdig and via our media partners at KPFK Pacifica Radio , Free Speech TV , The Real News Network and RisingUpWithSonali.com . 

A short video about the broadcast can be found here. 

Unfettered communication is how we learn from each other and build political power together. The historic achievements that movements are working for during this year’s elections require democratic communication. Vote, organize, protest, listen, watch and share.

Democrats Are Willing to Blow Up the Party to Stop Sanders

It was a moment that was destined to go viral. During a town hall in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday, Jason Pietramala, an account manager at a software company and a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., posed the following question to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.: “During the Nevada debate, you and every other candidate on the stage, except for Bernie … indicated that the candidate with the plurality of delegates should not necessarily be the nominee. This essentially means that the will of the voters could be denied by the superdelegates and the DNC, which is basically undemocratic, and in my opinion is a bunch of baba booey to put it politely. Can you explain why the will of the voters should not matter if no candidate reaches a majority of delegates?”

“So you do know that was Bernie’s position in 2016?” she replied, her grin widening when Pietramala answered that he didn’t. “That was his position … that it should not go to the person who had a plurality. And remember, his last play was to superdelegates. So the way I see this is that you write the rules before you know where everybody stands, and then you stick with those rules. Bernie had a big hand in writing these rules. I didn’t write ’em, but Bernie did. … I don’t see how come you get to change [them] just because he now thinks there’s an advantage to him for doing that.”

With a “Hello Somebody” shoutout to @ninaturner, 1 @JasonPietramala asks Elizabeth Warren if she still will go against Bernie being the nominee if he has the most delegates, but not 1991 in Milwaukee?

It got testy, with Warren saying she would take it to the floor. #CNNTownHall pic.twitter.com/gBf1cu0q9m

— Andrew Jerell Jones (@sluggahjells) February 27, 2020

For the Massachusetts senator’s most vocal supporters online, the exchange was cathartic — an opportunity for their candidate to undress a Howard Stern-quoting “Bernie Bro” in the flesh and for them to temporarily forget she’s finished no higher than third in a caucus or primary. That she was technically correct made it all the more gratifying. Sanders did appeal to superdelegates in 2016 after denouncing them throughout the campaign, even if his primary goal was to extract concessions from Hillary Clinton on the Democratic platform.

Warren is hardly alone in her willingness to deny Sanders the nomination. A New York Times report Thursday finds that in addition to the other presidential hopefuls, dozens of superdelegates are committed to stopping the Vermont senator, even if it means sacrificing the party’s progressive base.

“From California to the Carolinas, and North Dakota to Ohio,” write Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein, “the party leaders say they worry that Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist with passionate but limited support so far, will lose to President Trump, and drag down moderate House and Senate candidates in swing states with his left-wing agenda of Medicare for all” and free four-year public college. … In a reflection of the establishment’s wariness about Mr. Sanders, only nine of the 93 superdelegates interviewed said that Mr. Sanders should become the nominee purely on the basis of arriving at the convention with a plurality, if he was short of a majority.”

According to the rules set forth by the Democratic National Convention, 773 superdelegates will determine the party’s nominee should a candidate fail to secure 1,991 delegates on the first round of voting. What the Times makes clear is that anything less than a clear majority would put a potential Sanders nomination in jeopardy. Some Democrats even appear willing to consider officials who aren’t running in the 2020 race. From the report:

‘If you could get to a convention and pick Sherrod Brown, that would be wonderful, but that’s more like a novel,’ Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee said. ‘Donald Trump’s presidency is like a horror story, so if you can have a horror story you might as well have a novel.’

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce — either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

It’s easy to dismiss Cohen’s and Owen’s suggestions as wish-casting from a small segment of an increasingly desperate and delusional political establishment. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi herself has said that the party will rally behind whoever is nominated, Sanders included. The Vermont senator is the first presidential hopeful in history, Democratic or Republican, to capture the popular vote in his first three contests, and he won the Nevada caucus in convincing fashion. But as Joe Biden’s polling numbers have surged in South Carolina over the last week, so too have the odds that no candidate will win a majority of delegates before the convention in July. Per FiveThirtyEight, that probability currently stands at 50%, the highest of the election cycle.

The dangers of the Democratic Party appointing a candidate who has not earned a plurality of delegates are manifold. While it’s difficult to predict precisely how voters might respond, an Emerson poll from January found that just 53% of Sanders supporters would commit to backing another Democrat if he’s not the nominee. That number is likely to plunge if a cadre of unelected officials deprives him of the nomination.

“It may seem reasonable to suggest a party nominee should have the support of more than half of its members, but in actual practice, the alternative process to determine that nominee is a form of voter disenfranchisement,” argues Shuja Haider in The Outline. “It will be determined not by representative democracy, but by those who already hold power. No wonder people rioted in 1968.”

Then there is the election itself to consider. A brokered candidate all but invites the kinds of cronyism charges that helped depress voter turnout to devastating effect in 2016. Donald Trump would spend the next eight months railing against the party’s corrupt elites, and it’s not hard to foresee those attacks resonating. Moderates will reason that they’d saved the ticket, but evidence that Sanders fares worse than the rest of the field in a general election is inconclusive at best and flatly wrong at worst.

If Democrats succeed in their gambit, they not only risk reelecting Trump but shattering the party. The lone silver lining in that scenario, if it even qualifies as one, is that they will have gotten what they deserved.

Countries Take Harsh Steps as They Struggle to Contain Virus

BANGKOK — Saudi Arabia cut travel to Islam’s holiest sites, South Korea toughened penalties for those breaking quarantines and airports across Latin America looked for signs of sick passengers Thursday as the new virus troubled a mushrooming swath of the globe.

With the illness pushing its way into a sixth continent and the number of sick and dead rising, the crisis gave way to political and diplomatic rows, concern that bordered on panic in some quarters, and a sense that no part of the world was immune to the disease’s spread.

“Viruses don’t know borders and they don’t stop at them,” said Roberto Speranza, the health minister in Italy, where northern towns were on army-guarded lockdowns and supermarket shelves were bare.

As growing parts of Europe and the Middle East saw infections and a first case was found in South America, air routes were halted and border control toughened. But for an illness transmitted so easily, with its tentacles reaching into so many parts of the world, leaders puzzled over how to keep the virus from proliferating seemed willing to try anything to keep their people — and economies — safe.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for schools across the country to close for weeks, a decision that impacted 12.8 million students.

“The most important thing is to prevent infections,” said Norinobu Sawada, vice principal of Koizumi primary school, “so there aren’t many other options.”

In South Korea, the hardest-hit country outside China, four Busan markets known for colorful silks and a dizzying array of other wares were shuttered while the country’s military sent hundreds of its doctors and soldiers to aid in treatment and quarantines.

In Iran, the front line of Mideast infections, officials loosened rules barring the import of many foreign-made items to allow in sanitizers, face masks and other necessities, and removed overhead handles on Tehran’s subways to eliminate another source of germs. Peru put specialists on round-the-clock shifts at its biggest airport, Argentina took the temperature of some new arrivals and El Salvador added bans for travelers from Italy and South Korea.

The Dominican Republic turned back a cruise ship carrying 1,500 people because eight of those aboard showed potential symptoms of the Covid-19 virus. And in Africa, South Africa’s president ordered the evacuation of citizens from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus outbreak began.

The holy city of Mecca, which able-bodied Muslims are called to visit at least once in their lives, and the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina were cut off to potentially millions of pilgrims, with Saudi Arabia making the extraordinary decision to stop the spread of the virus.

With the monarchy offering no firm date for the lifting of the restrictions, it posed the possibility of affecting those planning to make their hajj, a ritual beginning at the end of July this year.

“We ask God Almighty to spare all humanity from all harm,” the country said in announcing the decision.

Disease has been a constant concern surrounding the hajj, with cholera outbreaks in the 19th century killing tens of thousands making the trip. More recently, another coronavirus that caused Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, prompted increased public health measures, but no outbreak resulted.

It wasn’t just governments that were taking action: Cologne Cathedral, one of Germany’s main religious sites, was emptying its basins of ‘holy water’ to prevent the spread of infection. And in the United States, Facebook said it was canceling its annual conference for developers.

COVID-19’s westward creep — including a case in California in the United States that does not appear linked to overseas travel — had some countries warning their people to obey measures intended to keep a single case from blossoming into a cluster that could paralyze a community.

A man originally from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the global outbreak, who contracted the virus was charged alongside his wife in Singapore for allegedly lying about their whereabouts as officials tried to stem further infections. In Colombia, which has yet to report any cases, officials reminded residents they could be jailed for up to eight years if they violate containment measures. And in South Korea, the National Assembly passed a law strengthening the punishment for those violating self-isolation, more than tripling the fine and adding the possibility of a year in prison.

“It came later than it should have,” said Lee Hae-shik, spokesman for the ruling Democratic Party, calling for further non-partisan cooperation to address the outbreak.

Countries’ efforts to contain the virus opened up diplomatic scuffles. South Korea fought prohibitions keeping its citizens out of 40 countries, calling them excessive and unnecessary. China warned Russia to stop discriminatory measures against its people, including monitoring on public transit. Iran used the crisis to rail against the U.S., which it accused of “a conspiracy” that was sowing fear.

The global count of those sickened by the virus hovered around 82,000, with 433 new cases reported Thursday in China and another 505 in South Korea, where the military called off joint drills planned with American troops. Iran’s caseload surged by more than 100 cases.

Even the furthest reaches of the globe were touched by the epidemic, with a woman testing positive in Tromsoe, the fjord-dotted Norwegian city with panoramas of snow-capped mountains. Health officials said the woman had traveled to China.

___

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Contributing to this report were Tong-hyung Kim and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo.

Trump Officials Are Cynically Spreading Lies About the Coronavirus

President Donald Trump and Larry Kudlow, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, aren’t doctors, but they play them on TV. As the coronavirus epidemic spirals into a pandemic, causing a plunge in the U.S. stock market, Trump and Kudlow, a former CNBC TV host, are cynically spreading disinformation about the contagion.

“We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight,” Larry Kudlow told CNBC Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, Trump tweeted, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus (sic) look as bad as possible, including panicking markets …USA in great shape!”

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These statements directly contradicted a dire warning issued earlier that day by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. She said on a press call: “The global novel coronavirus situation is rapidly evolving and expanding…[meeting] two of the criteria of a pandemic. The world moves closer toward meeting the third criteria: worldwide spread of the new virus.”

Referring to an outbreak in the U.S., Dr. Messonnier said, “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather … exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”

As of Wednesday night, there were more than 82,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections globally, and 2,800 deaths, as reported by a team at Johns Hopkins University. Most of these cases were in China, but the virus has been detected on every continent save Antarctica, with deaths also reported in Iran, Italy, France, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong and aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, quarantined in Yokohama, Japan.

One of the most critical actions a government can take to prevent or to limit a pandemic is to clearly communicate accurate information to as wide a population as possible.

That is probably why Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, China, shared his observations on the outbreak as he was treating patients on Dec. 30. The Chinese government censored his posts, and he was ordered to a police station to sign a confession that he had made “untrue statements” on social media. At least seven others were similarly harassed. Days later, Li Wenliang became sick with coronavirus, and was hospitalized. He died on Feb. 6. His death sparked widespread criticism of the Chinese government for suppressing news of the epidemic’s severity and for punishing a courageous whistleblower. The 47-year-old director of the Wuhan hospital died of the same viral infection not long after.

China mounted a massive response, building a 1,000-bed hospital in less than a week, and locked down Wuhan and other huge cities, quarantining up to 100 million people.

In the U.S., as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases increases, our preparedness, or lack thereof, is causing concern.

Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Laurie Garrett recently reported in Foreign Policy, “In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command.” Currently, no coherent structure exists in the U.S. to address a rapidly spreading, deadly pandemic. Instead, a hodgepodge of unqualified Trump loyalists are on the front line, with, thankfully, career professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health trying their best to protect the public despite a dysfunctional White House.

At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy seemed incredulous with acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf’s lack of preparation. After grilling Wolf on respirators, infection rates, anticipated number of patients and more, Sen. Kennedy, exasperated, said: “Mr. Secretary, I’m going to stop here. You’re supposed to keep us safe. And the American people deserve some straight answers on the coronavirus. And I’m not getting them from you.”

At a Wednesday evening news conference, Trump again assured the public that everything was going to be fine, as long as people wash their hands and avoid touching doorknobs.

He also announced that Vice President Mike Pence would coordinate the federal response, citing the “Indiana Model” of public health Pence implemented as governor. What experience was Trump touting?

Between 2011 and 2015, first as an Indiana congressmember then as the governor, Pence oversaw the defunding of Planned Parenthood, as well as the shutdown of needle exchange programs. After an outbreak of HIV infections, Pence was forced to back down. His moralistic prescriptions, canceling sensible, public health policies, caused lasting harm. What can we expect from him now?

Here’s a message for Trump and his cronies: This is not about the stock market or your reelection; the coronavirus epidemic — or pandemic — demands a concerted, professional, fully funded global public health response.

Centrist Candidates Are Losing the Plot

I thought I might end up watching an Iowa-style meltdown when my cousin, a precinct chair in Nevada, invited me to Reno to watch the complicated vote counting at the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Feb. 24, less than three weeks after Iowa’s disaster.

I hate to admit it, being a cynical correspondent for a skeptical progressive website, but things went pretty well. Those tallying up the votes appeared to be honest and dedicated to doing a good job.

The participants gathered at Swope Middle School on a Sunday morning were in a good mood. Under the direction of chairs like my cousin, they divided up quickly, as they were supposed to do, and raised their hands to vote in an orderly fashion.

Caucuses around the state gave Bernie Sanders an overwhelming victory, and a big boost toward the Democratic presidential nomination. That wasn’t true in the sessions I attended, where white, often upscale, presumably more middle-of-the-road Democrats favored Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

The volunteers who ran the caucus operation gathered at 8 a.m., two hours before the doors opened for caucusgoers. Swope school had enough volunteers, in contrast to other areas that were short of them. I decided to go as an “observer,” rather than a reporter, figuring a journalist asking questions would make people nervous. My cousin introduced me as her Cousin Bill, visiting from Los Angeles. I signed a book and was given an orange wristband, which permitted me to wander through the several caucuses being held in the school.

I was quickly put to work. The volunteer designated to guard the election material was called away for another job. The chief volunteer looked at me. “Cousin Bill, could you stand here and watch this table,” she said. I was glad to help. Later, I got another job. Small contributions to pay for expenses were being collected in my cousin’s caucus. She asked me to hold the envelope with the money while she went about organizing the vote. “You sure you want someone from Los Angeles holding the money?” I said, drawing some laughs from those who scorn my hometown. Despite their joking skepticism, I handed over the envelope.

It wasn’t all smooth. State headquarters were slow in delivering the ballots of those who had voted in previous days. The earlier votes were to be combined with the votes of those attending the caucuses for a final count. They were supposed be delivered by noon, when the caucuses started. They arrived just before the deadline. One man told me he had been to several training sessions but still didn’t understand the system. Another participant watched the early confusion and said, “This is learning as you go.” But after an hour or so, things settled down. Results were delivered to state headquarters without trouble. The volunteers were pleased with themselves.

Watching this miniature election, I got a clearer insight into the Democratic contest. The numbers tell the story.

Even in this precinct of a moderate Democratic area, Sanders looked strong. He didn’t outpoll his rivals, who split up the majority of votes.

In one caucus I observed, he got 37 votes. That was a minority of the caucus. Assume his supporters are the liberals. Assume the same for those who backed Elizabeth Warren, 36. That’s 73 in the liberal column. The votes for the others were Buttigieg 41, Klobuchar 35, Biden 14. That adds up to 90 for moderates.

In other words, middle-of-the-road philosophy won this particular caucus, but its votes were divided among the three candidates.

The reason for the moderates’ indecision was clear to me the night before the caucuses, when I saw Klobuchar speak at a different school.

Her organization had rushed like mad to bring in workers for door knocking, phoning, organizing rallies and other campaign chores. I talked to one young woman who had flown to Nevada from Des Moines, Iowa, where she had spent a month campaigning for Klobuchar. She was staying with a Reno resident, and after the caucuses she would move on to another state. Her enthusiasm was impressive as she organized a line leading into the middle school gym.

Klobuchar showed the same enthusiasm when she bounded — or bounced — up to the microphone. She’s got a big smile that melts into a serious expression when she gets to the meat of her speech.

But the crowd, I was told, was smaller than the Reno gathering the night before. And while the audience applauded, it wasn’t with the wild enthusiasm that an underdog candidate needs.

I got no sense of what she would do if elected president, except preserve some form of Obamacare. I wanted to hear more about income inequality, raising taxes on the rich, the persecution of people of color by the criminal justice system and the inequalities of public schools, colleges and universities. I didn’t want a whole platform, but something I could grab onto, more outrage to discuss and argue about in later days. I wanted to hear more than her boasts of how she won senate races in Minnesota.

That’s what’s wrong with all the moderate, middle-of-the-road candidates. They don’t transmit a feeling that they know where they are going. They are relying on hatred of President Donald Trump. That’s a bad mistake. “If you rely on your opponent’s mistakes, you’re going to lose the election,” a political pro once told me.

Voters know where Warren is going, sometimes in heavy detail, maybe too much.

And, there is no mistaking Sanders’ direction.

He doesn’t speak with Warren-like detail. He doesn’t have to. There’s more to him than the shouting angry Bernie you sometimes see on television. In person, he is a dynamic speaker, able to stir up a crowd of thousands. His speeches are the same as when he ran in 2016, but this time the ailments he discusses — health care, income inequality, poverty, climate change — grip the nation much more than they did in 2016. This year may be his time.

The fact that the middle-of-the-road does not have an answer to these worsening problems explains its splintered showing in the caucus I attended and in all of Nevada. If enough people are driven by economic and class grievances, it may be enough to give Sanders the nomination.

Neoliberalism Has Radicalized a Whole Generation

When the conversation veered toward “capitalism” and “socialism” at last week’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, the preeminent capitalist on the stage, Michael Bloomberg, could hardly believe what he was hearing. “I can’t think of a way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation,” lamented billionaire Bloomberg, who pronounced the discussion ridiculous. “We’re not going to throw out capitalism,” he said. “We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work.”

Ten, or even five, years ago, Bloomberg’s concern would have probably seemed justified. In the recent past, having a serious discussion about the benefits of socialism versus capitalism on American national television — and at a major presidential debate, no less — appeared almost inconceivable. For as long as many Americans have been alive, capitalism has been widely considered the natural order of things. Questioning its existence seemed not only wrong but woefully naive and dangerous.

Since the Cold War began in the mid-20th century, the United States has been viewed as the center of the capitalist world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism seemed to have triumphed once and for all, ending the historical struggle between the competing ideologies that characterized modernity (hence the notion of the “end of history”). There was no more questioning capitalism, which had proved to be the economic system that corresponded most with human nature. (At least that’s what orthodox economists, who subscribed to the homo economicus, or “economic man,” model of human nature, told us.)

In his 2009 book, “Capitalist Realism,” the late author Mark Fisher described a certain pessimistic attitude on the left, captured by the popular saying: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Capitalist realism, Fisher wrote, was the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

In the decade-plus since Fisher wrote these words, a great deal has changed. Though it is still hard to imagine the end of capitalism, it is no longer universally accepted that capitalism is simply part of the “natural” order, or that there is “no alternative” (as the United Kingdom’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously proclaimed). The armor of neoliberalism was first pierced by the global financial crisis, and the rise of populist movements on both the left and right in the years since have further eroded the political and intellectual hegemony of the all-encompassing worldview.

Neoliberalism wasn’t even acknowledged as an actual ideology until fairly recently. In fact, many neoliberals continue to deny its very existence. As scholar Adam Kotsko notes in his book, “Neoliberalism’s Demons,” neoliberalism “loves to hide” and its “very invisibility is a measure of its power.” Neoliberalism, according to Kotsko, is more than just a set of economic policies that have been implemented throughout the world in the last half-century. Rather, it “aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview, in a way that previous models of capitalism did not.” For this reason, Kotsko describes neoliberalism not just as an ideology but as a form of “political theology.”

In neoliberalism, Kotsko remarks,

an account of human nature where economic competition is the highest value leads to a political theology where the prime duty of the state is to enable, and indeed mandate, such competition, and the result is a world wherein individuals, firms, and states are all continually constrained to express themselves via economic competition. This means that neoliberalism tends to create a world in which neoliberalism is ‘true.’

The very fact that we are now discussing neoliberalism, Kotsko writes, is a “sign that its planetary sway is growing less secure.” As the “planetary sway” of neoliberalism has weakened over the past decade, more and more people — especially young people who were born and raised in the neoliberal era — have started to question a system that has left their generation drowning in debt, burned out and mentally exhausted, and stuck in an endless loop of precarious uncertainty.

Neoliberal ideas, political scientist Lester Spence writes, “radically change what it means to be human, as the perfect human being now becomes an entrepreneur of his own human capital, responsible for his personal development.” Young people entering the workforce today are expected to cheerfully embrace their own alienation and the commodification of their whole existence. Under neoliberalism, citizens become producers/consumers who are “free” to participate in the market economy but not necessarily free to engage in political protest or to form unions.

Neoliberalism is the opposite of solidarity. It encourages an extreme form of selfish individualism that ends up depoliticizing the populace and eroding the collective spirit of democracy. It also leaves the individual isolated and alone. “In a brutal, competitive, and atomized society, psychic well-being is so difficult that success on this front can feel like a significant accomplishment,” observes political theorist Jodi Dean. “Trying to do it themselves, people are immiserated and proletarianized and confront this immiseration and proletarianization alone.”

Considering the hellish reality that it has created for so many people, the backlash against neoliberalism was as predictable as it was inevitable. In a real sense, neoliberalism has radicalized an entire generation, pushing many young people to revolt against the existing order as a whole. The fact that the Democratic Party’s likely presidential nominee (especially after his landslide victory in Nevada) is self-professed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders tells us that the secular religion of neoliberalism has quickly lost all credibility and authority.

During the Cold War, under the threat of communism, America and other capitalist countries in the West embraced social democratic reforms that played an essential role in curbing the more extreme contradictions of capitalism. This led to a less brutal and unequal system, and therefore a more stable one. When communism fell in the late 20th century, the neoliberal age was already in full swing, with both parties uniting to reverse many of the progressive reforms that had been enacted after the Great Depression. Now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, the worst contradictions have returned, and unsurprisingly, mass movements opposing the current system also have returned.

When Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor of New York City came to an end in 2013, a few years after the Great Recession, it was already clear the neoliberal era was on its last legs. Bloomberg used the New York Police Department (the world’s “seventh largest army,” he once boasted) to crush Occupy Wall Street in 2011, but the spirit of the movement could not be crushed. On the debate stage almost a decade later, Bloomberg’s neoliberal talking points no longer sounded like Thatcherist truisms.

Sanders began his “political revolution” in 2016, and he is clearly still leading it in 2020. For most people in the halls of power, his electoral success has come as an utter shock. “Something is happening in America right now that actually does not fit our mental models,” remarked journalist Anand Giridharadas on MSNBC after Sanders’ big win in Nevada. The donor class, the media elites and those in the political establishment, Giridharadas said, are behaving like “out-of-touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy.” While 18th and 19th century aristocrats in Europe were coming to terms with the collapse of monarchism after it was undermined by the radical critiques of enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, today’s elites are dealing with the collapse of neoliberalism, the ruling ideology for the past half-century.

There’s little doubt that elites will do whatever they can to stop Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination and perhaps the general election. Although they are less likely to succeed after Nevada, it is unwise to underestimate the reactionary impulses of a dying aristocracy (the Bloomberg campaign is already plotting its brokered convention strategy). Regardless of what happens in the next few weeks, one thing is absolutely clear: The neoliberal worldview that has dominated the discourse for decades is being consigned to the dustbin of history.

Multiple People Dead in Milwaukee Shooting at Molson Coors

MILWAUKEE — Multiple people were killed Wednesday in a shooting on the Molson Coors Brewing Co. campus, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said.

The dead include the shooter, said Barrett, who did not give an exact number of people killed.

“It is a horrible, horrible day for the employees here. It’s a very rough day for anyone who is close to this situation,” the mayor said.

Police tweeted that there was no longer an active threat. Authorities did not immediately release details about the shooter or how the shooting unfolded.

It occurred at a sprawling complex that includes a mix of corporate offices and brewing facilities. At least 600 people work at the complex, which is widely known in the Milwaukee area as “Miller Valley,” a reference to the Miller Brewing Co. that is now part of Molson Coors.

James Boyles told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that his wife, Lasonya Ragdales, works at Molson Coors in the claims department. She was texting from inside the facility and told her husband that there was an active shooter and she was locked in a room with a bunch of co-workers, the Journal Sentinel reported.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers was on his way to the scene. Attorney General Josh Kaul called the shooting “gut-wrenching.”

“Miller Valley” features a 160-year-old brewery, with a packaging center that fills thousands of cans and bottles every minute and a distribution center the size of five football fields. A massive red Miller sign towers over the complex and is a well-known symbol in Milwaukee, where beer and brewing are intertwined in the city’s history.

The facility is also home to corporate customer service, finance, human resources and engineering. Tours take people to underground caves where beer was once stored, a saloon with intricate woodwork, a stein hall with stained-glass windows, a champagne room meeting hall with leaded-glass windows, and an outdoor beer garden that can hold 300 people.

Before Wednesday’s shooting, there had been three mass killings nationwide in 2020, with 12 total victims. All have been shootings. In 2019, there were 44 mass killings, with 224 total victims. The Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings database tracks all U.S. homicides since 2006 involving four or more people killed over 24 hours regardless of weapon, location, victim-offender relationship or motive.

The last mass shooting in the Milwaukee area was in August 2012. when white supremacist Wade Michael Page fatally shot six people and wounded four others at a Sikh temple in suburban Oak Creek. Page killed himself after being wounded in a shootout with police. The worst mass shooting in the area in the past 20 years was in 2005, when seven people were killed and four wounded at a church service in Brookfield, a Milwaukee suburb. The shooter killed himself.

___

Associated Press writers Dave Kolpack in Fargo, North Dakota, Meghan Hoyer in Washington and Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.

Congress Makes Lynching a Federal Crime, 65 Years After Till

WASHINGTON — Sixty-five years after 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi, Congress has approved legislation designating lynching as a hate crime under federal law.

The bill, introduced by Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush and named after Till, comes 120 years after Congress first considered anti-lynching legislation and after dozens of similar efforts were defeated.

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The measure was approved 410 to 4 on Wednesday in the House and now goes to the White House, where President Donald Trump is expected to sign it. The Senate unanimously passed the legislation last year. It designates lynching as a federal hate crime punishable by up to life in prison, a fine, or both.

Rush, a Democrat whose Chicago district includes Till’s former home, said the bill will belatedly achieve justice for Till and more than 4,000 other lynching victims, most of them African Americans.

Till, who was black, was brutally tortured and killed in 1955 after a white woman accused him of grabbing her and whistling at her in a Mississippi grocery store. The killing shocked the country and stoked the civil rights movement.

“The importance of this bill cannot be overstated,” said Rush, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. ”From Charlottesville to El Paso, we are still being confronted with the same violent racism and hatred that took the life of Emmett and so many others. The passage of this bill will send a strong and clear message to the nation that we will not tolerate this bigotry. “

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who represents the area where Till was abducted and murdered, called the anti-lynching bill long overdue, but said: “No matter the length of time, it is never too late to ensure justice is served.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., used similar language to urge the bill’s passage. “It is never too late to do the right thing and address these gruesome, racially motivated acts of terror that have plagued our nation’s history,” he said, urging lawmakers to “renew our commitment to confronting racism and hate.”

Democratic Rep. Karen Bass of California, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, called lynching a lasting legacy of slavery.

“Make no mistake, lynching is terrorism,” she said. ”While this reign of terror has faded, the most recent lynching (in the United States) happened less than 25 years ago.”

Although Congress cannot truly rectify the terror and horror of these acts, Bass said, a legislative body that once included slave owners and Ku Klux Klan members will belatedly “stand up and do our part so that justice is delivered in the future.”

Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey applauded House passage of the bill, which they co-sponsored in the Senate along with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. The three are the Senate’s only black members.

“Lynchings were horrendous, racist acts of violence,” Harris said in a statement. “For far too long Congress has failed to take a moral stand and pass a bill to finally make lynching a federal crime. This justice is long overdue.”

Booker called lynching “a pernicious tool of racialized violence, terror and oppression” and “a stain on the soul of our nation.” While Congress cannot undo lynching’s irrevocable damage, ”we can ensure that we as a country make clear that lynching will not be tolerated,” Booker said.

Congress has failed to pass anti-lynching legislation nearly 200 times, starting with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Rep. George Henry White, the only black member of Congress at the time.

Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said passage of the anti-lynching legislation “marks a milestone in the long and protracted battle against white supremacy and racial violence in our country.”

The bill “makes clear that lynchings occupy a dark place in our country’s story and provides recognition of thousands of victims of lynching crimes,” including Emmett Till and many others, Clarke said.

Trump to Detail U.S. Coronavirus Efforts; Schumer Seeks $8.5B

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pushed back Wednesday against criticism that his administration isn’t doing enough to meet the coronavirus threat, as lawmakers called for giving disease fighters much more money than the $2.5 billion the White House has requested.

A day after he sought to minimize fears of the virus spreading widely across the U.S., Trump prepared to hold a White House press conference with experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Meanwhile, two new coronavirus cases have been reported in Americans who had traveled on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, health officials said Wednesday. The new cases bring the U.S. tally to 59.

Trump tweeted Wednesday that the CDC, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and others in the administration are “doing a great job with respect to Coronavirus!” and accused some news outlets of “panicking markets.”

The White House said Wednesday that it had faith in Azar and was not considering appointing a virus czar.

On Capitol Hill, senior lawmakers called for a bipartisan spending package that would give federal, state and local officials more resources. Congress in recent years took a similar approach with the opioid epidemic, pumping out federal dollars for treatment and prevention. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York unveiled an $8.5 billion coronavirus proposal.

Trump and members of his administration have been sending mixed messages about the virus.

The CDC on Tuesday warned the American public to prepare for an an outbreak of the disease, which has spawned more than 80,000 cases around the world but relatively few so far in the U.S.

The count includes 14 people who traveled back from outbreak areas in China, or their spouses; three people who were evacuated from the central China city of Wuhan; and 42 Americans, passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship who were evacuated by the federal government to the U.S. from where the ship was docked in Japan.

But before he flew home from India on Tuesday, Trump said the coronavirus situation is “very well under control in our country.” The administration has asked Congress for an additional $2.5 billion to speed development of a vaccine, support preparedness and response activities, and to gather needed equipment and supplies.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have questioned whether that request is sufficient.

Schumer’s $8.5 billion plan is more than triple Trump’s request. It includes $4.5 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services to work to contain the outbreak in the U.S., $1 billion to develop and manufacture a vaccine, $1 billion to help other countries battle the coronavirus, and $2 billion to reimburse states for costs incurred in tackling the outbreak.

“We will put together a supplemental that will address this issue,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who chairs a key panel that sets spending for health agencies. Aides said the House measure is likely to be unveiled next week. Bipartisan “four corner” meetings — Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate — are beginning Wednesday, a House Democratic aide said, with a bipartisan bill the goal.

DeLauro dismissed the White House’s $2.5 billion request, saying the two-page summary appeared to have been put together without much thought. She contrasted it to a 28-page submission from the Obama administration on Ebola.

Testifying before her committee Wednesday, Azar said, “I appreciate your frustration with the two-page letter being the documentation,” but he said he believes $2.5 billion will be enough for now. “If it doesn’t fund it, we’ll come back to you.”

Schumer has been harshly critical of Trump’s response to the outbreak, and his request — announced before the Democratic-controlled House Appropriations Committee has weighed in — rankled some Democrats hoping for quick, bipartisan action to address the crisis.

Arriving back in the U.S. early Wednesday, Trump immediately began to counter critics who say he should have acted sooner to bolster the federal response to the coronavirus.

He tweeted announced that he would be briefed later Wednesday. Then would come the news conference.

Trump also accused some news outlets of “panicking markets.”

The president keeps close tabs on the stock market, seeing it as an indicator that his economic policies are working and frequently boasting of its growth. Markets tumbled Monday by a huge amount and then again on Tuesday, and Trump noticed.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also engaged in the pushback after returning with Trump. Grisham retweeted a CDC post that said “there is currently no reported community spread” of coronavirus in the U.S.

This week, the National Institutes of Health received a shipment of test doses of a vaccine candidate from Moderna Inc., in preparation for first-step safety testing in a few dozen people aimed to begin by April. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIH’s infectious disease chief, cautioned reporters that in a best-case scenario, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine would be ready for widespread use.

Fauci said that while only a few cases have turned up in the U.S. from travelers outside the country, “we need to be able to think about how we will respond to a pandemic outbreak.”

“It’s very clear. If we have a global pandemic, no country is going to be without impact,” Fauci said.

A pandemic involves the continual spread of sustained transmission from person to person in multiple regions and hemispheres throughout the world simultaneously, Fauci noted.

__

Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire, Andrew Taylor and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

Naked Fearmongering at the New York Times

I have often gone after the media on printing large numbers that are meaningless to almost all their readers. The point is that when you throw out numbers in the millions, billions and trillions, very few readers have any idea what these numbers mean. It is possible to make them meaningful by simply adding some context, such as expressing them relative to the size of the economy or as a per-person amount.

I actually got Margaret Sullivan, then the New York Times public editor, to completely agree with me on this point. In her column, she also enlisted the enthusiastic agreement of then Washington editor David Leonhardt. But then nothing changed.

We see the fruits of this failure in a New York Times article (2/22/20) that compares the tax and spending plans of the leading Democratic contenders. It gives a true orgy of really big numbers, in the form of trillions of dollars of additional taxes and spending, providing readers with no context that would let them know how much impact these taxes are likely to have on the economy and/or their pocketbooks.

We are told that:

Even Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire himself, would raise taxes on the rich and corporations by an estimated $5 trillion, which is about 50% more than Mr. Biden would.

A bit later we get:

Mr. Sanders’ policy agenda is by far the most expensive of the leading candidates, though estimates vary. The cost of his policy plans on just a handful of topics — healthcare, higher education, housing and climate change—could exceed $50 trillion over ten years. By contrast, the federal government is currently projected to spend roughly $60 trillion over the next decade. [Total federal spending is some context.]

…In addition to a Medicare for All program that would require an estimated $20.5 trillion in new federal spending over ten years, Ms. Warren’s proposals include a sweeping set of new programs addressing areas like Social Security, climate change, higher education, K–12 schools and housing. Taken together, those proposals and her Medicare for All plan have an estimated 10-year price tag of more than $30 trillion.

Since most readers probably don’t have a very good idea of how much money $30 trillion would be over the next decade, a useful starting point might be the projected size of the economy. The Congressional Budget Office puts GDP over this ten-year period at roughly $280 trillion. That means $30 trillion in additional taxes and spending would be a bit less than 11% of projected GDP. Mr. Bloomberg’s projected $5 trillion in taxes would by roughly 1.8% of projected GDP.

To get a bit more context, the tax take projected for 2020 is 16.4% of GDP. By contrast in the late 1990s boom, tax revenue was over 19% of GDP, peaking at 20% in 2000. This means that Bloomberg’s proposed increase in taxes would still leave us with revenues that are far smaller as a share of GDP than what we paid in the late 1990s.

The proposals from Warren and Sanders would raise above the late 1990s level, but perhaps by less than the really big numbers in this piece might lead readers to believe. If we increased taxes by 11% of GDP, it would raise them to a bit more than 27% of GDP, roughly 7 percentage points about the 2000 peak.

The Sanders proposals would imply an increase in taxes of roughly 18 percentage points of GDP, putting us at a bit over 34% of GDP. That is considerably more than the 2000 peak, but still much lower than in most other wealthy countries. (To get a full comparison, we have to add in state and local taxes. This is difficult to do, since many of Sanders’ proposed federal expenditures [e.g. Medicare for All] would in part replace spending currently being undertaken by state and local governments.)

These proposals can certainly be discussed in considerably more detail, but a piece like this could at least try to put the numbers in some context that would make them meaningful to readers, rather than just tossing around “trillions” like it is some sort of mantra. The reality is that the Biden/Bloomberg proposals are not terribly big deals in terms of the budget and what we have done historically. Clearly the Warren and Sanders proposals are more ambitious. Readers can decide whether they think the potential benefits are worth the cost; taking a few minutes to add a little context would give readers an idea of what is at stake.