Chris Hedges's Blog, page 179

Words We’re Not Hearing From Leaders Who Should Be Saying Them

On April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death, Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the presidency, climbed up on a flatbed truck at a rally in an African American section of Indianapolis.

“Do they know about Martin Luther King?” he asked someone. Not everyone did. This was before 24-hour cable news and the internet. News traveled slowly compared with today.

“I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight,” he said. “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.”

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The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate



by Chris Hedges

In his brief speech that followed, Kennedy asked a stricken people to rise above grief and anger, to heights almost inconceivable in that terrible decade of the 1960s. A half-century later, his words are an example for this time of mass murders and race hatred. But today, politicians don’t seem to be able to find the words to inspire a shaken nation and rise above the muck of the presidential campaign.

When Kennedy spoke, the nation was torn, every bit as divided as it is now. There was the debate over the Vietnam War. Police assaulted African Americans and Latinos protesting racial segregation and denial of the vote. Segregationists murdered protesters. College students massed against the war and racism. Bombs planted in buildings were weapons of protest. America was in revolt.

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in,” Kennedy told his audience. “For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible (for King’s death)—you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization—black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

At this point, we must be reminded that there was another side to this story. Kennedy had a hypocritical side. It is told in the archives of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, and in the journalism of the time.

In October 1963, Kennedy, then attorney general, authorized wiretaps on King’s home and the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover insisted that one of King’s closest advisers was secretly a member of the Communist Party. The FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) subjected King to surveillance, according to the Stanford archives. It “produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs but no evidence of Communist influence.”

This history is relevant today.

Law enforcement will no doubt be given more power in the search for white terrorists. In the Hoover-COINTELPRO era, law enforcement—from the FBI down to the local police—were given such latitude, and some of the cops indulged their right-wing feelings. There’s some—maybe much—of that among today’s law enforcement, now directed against immigrants and African Americans who protest police conduct. These feelings no doubt will be part of the new war against extremists, led by a president who encourages white extremists and his toady of an attorney general.

The Kennedy who eulogized King rose above the man who was persuaded by Hoover to wiretap King.

Toward the end of Kennedy’s life (he was assassinated in June 1968) he exemplified the words and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln, another inspirational speaker. Seeking to bring the nation together in his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Almost a century later, with the country almost as divided as it was on the eve of the Civil War, Kennedy’s speech in Indianapolis reflected the spirit of Lincoln, in words that should guide this generation of politicians.

As he summed up his thoughts, he said, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Sadly, today’s politicians are too cautious, too inarticulate, too glued to the polls to rise to this terrible moment of American history.

Kashmir Could Become the New Palestine

On August 5, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill in the Indian Parliament. The bill divides the Indian State into two parts: the Union Territory of Ladakh and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

The Legislative Assembly in the state has been suspended. Its elected officials have been placed under house arrest. The press has been gagged, protests have been violently disbanded, and social media has been shut down.

A bill in parliament suggests the normal function of democracy; the actual situation on the ground in Jammu and Kashmir is undemocratic.

T.K. Rangarajan, a Communist Party of India (Marxist) member of parliament, condemned the government’s decision. “You are creating another Palestine,” he warned. Despite the gag on the press, news began to filter out. Before Shah introduced this bill, his government sent tens of thousands of Indian troops into Kashmir. There is no official number, but it is often said that there are nearly 600,000 Indian troops in the state. That a population of 12 million people needs this kind of armed action suggests that they are an occupied people. Rangarajan’s parallel with Palestine is credible. As each day passes, Kashmir resembles the West Bank.

Humiliation

Last year, my colleague and friend Shujaat Bukhari was murdered. Shujaat was a journalist who had tracked the levels of anger in Kashmir as a result of the behavior of the Indian government and its army. The use of the military, long curfews (some for two months on end), brazen violence against young people, and denial of dialogue have created a dangerous situation. “This is a political bomb that can explode with even a minor trigger,” he wrote.

In July, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report that showed that terrible violence had become routine. The military has been using metal shotgun pellets, arbitrary detentions, and “cordon and search operations.” The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society’s calculations showed that casualties have escalated over the past few decades to be the highest in 2018. Their report on torture shows that thousands of civilians have been arrested and imprisoned without charge, and tortured. There was no sign that the violence would end.

Undemocratic

The BJP-led government kept the reorganization policy under wraps. No one was informed about this before Shah made his speech in parliament. There was no discussion allowed in Jammu and Kashmir, neither in the Legislative Assembly nor in the press.

The Constitution of India (1950) created a federalist structure, with states and local government sharing power with the central government. In this case, the central government—led by the right-wing BJP—simply set aside the federal provision of the Constitution and went ahead with its policy. Not only is this policy against the federalism of the Constitution but was also applied in an undemocratic manner.

Change of Special Status

Jammu and Kashmir, like many of India’s border states, has a special status in the Indian Constitution. Articles 35A and 370 ensure the integrity of the state and allow its autonomy in aspects of governance. In India’s northeastern states, article 371 offers states from Mizoram to Sikkim the same kind of autonomy. The BJP has said that it would not annul article 371. The action was taken pointedly against Kashmir.

The Supreme Court, as recently as 2018, had upheld the constitutionality of article 370, while the special presidential order of 1954 that inserted Article 35A cannot be easily dislodged. Legally, the BJP-led government’s actions should and will be challenged in court. But the damage is done. A suffocated Jammu and Kashmir feels the weight of the BJP’s pillow on its face.

There is nothing new about the harsh treatment of India’s border states. Violence from the northeast to Punjab has become utterly common. This is often in the name of securing the state from its enemies. But the violence of the state has been a greater spur to the alienation of the people from Nagaland to Kashmir than any gesture from China or Pakistan. The behavior of the BJP-led government is along the grain of this violence, which had been legally secured through the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, which gave the Indian military license to behave like an occupying army along the border region.

To Delhi, the border regions have always been threatening. Rather than integrate the population in a humane manner, it has—for decades—sought to treat the people of the border regions as a threat. That has been the “special status” of the border.

Geopolitics

Will the Indian government release maps of the new union territories of Ladakh and of Jammu and Kashmir? It is unlikely.

In 1962, India and China fought a war over territory in Ladakh and the northeast of India. China seized the territory of Aksai Chin, which forms a considerable part of the high plateau of Ladakh. That territory allowed China to build a road to connect Tibet to Xinjiang province. It is now effectively Chinese territory. It is highly likely that the BJP government has informed the Chinese of its action in Jammu and Kashmir and has now ceded any claim to the Aksai Chin region. A map of Ladakh will be truncated, with Chinese control of Aksai Chin now acknowledged.

The Kashmir region is divided between India and Pakistan. On both sides of the border, the Kashmiri people face undemocratic treatment. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) runs through Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. It is a $46 billion project that runs from the Gwadar Port in Balochistan along the Karakoram Highway into China. Last year, troops from China’s People’s Liberation Army were spotted along the highway, not far from the line of control between India and Pakistan.

At the same time, Chinese construction crews have been building a roadway near (or in) Bhutan, a country whose foreign policy is run by India. This road in the Doklam area raised the temperature between India and China, with diplomatic notes flying from one capital to the other.

The Indian government’s move on Jammu and Kashmir should not merely be seen as an internal matter. It is inextricably linked to the geopolitical atmosphere around the region. Pakistan has taken the matter to the United Nations, while India’s senior diplomat has hastened to China. China has thus far supported the Pakistani position. This is not about democracy for them, but the Belt and Road Initiative.

For the BJP-led government as well, this might be as much about fears of the expansion of China’s Belt and Road project as it is about a long-standing project to bring Kashmir to heel. Both of these motivations are in play.

Lal Ded

Either way, the hospitals in Jammu and Kashmir fill up with injured civilians. It has been hard to celebrate Eid in the state. Journalist Mudasir Ahmad visited the Lal Ded maternity hospital in Srinagar. He met Bilal Mandoo and Raziya, who were sitting with their stillborn baby. Stuck in the curfew, complications at the birth led to the death of their child. They are trapped in the hospital. “I feel like I’m choking here,” says Raziya. She speaks for all Kashmiris.

The hospital is named for a 14th-century mystical poet Lal Ded. She wrote a poem centuries ago that speaks to the uncertainty of her homeland:

I’ve been unchained from the wheel

of birth and death.

What can the world do to me?

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Ralph Nader: Boeing Execs Must Be Hauled Before Congress

Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes, one in Indonesia last October and one in Ethiopia this past March, took a combined 346 lives. Steady scrutiny by the media reported internal company leaks and gave voice to sidelined ex-Boeing engineers and aerospace safety specialists. These experts have revealed that Boeing’s executives are responsible because they chose to use an unstable structural design and faulty software. These decisions left the flying public, the pilots, the airlines, and the FAA in the dark, to varying degrees.

Yet Congressional Committees, which announced investigations months ago, still have not called on Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, or any member of Boeing’s Board of Directors to testify.

Given the worldwide emergency grounding of all 400 or so MAX aircraft and the peril to crews and airline passengers, why are the Senate and House Committees holding back? House Committee Chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) wants to carefully prepare for such action after the staff goes through the much delayed transmission of documents from Boeing. Meanwhile, Senate Committee Chair Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) deferred to Boeing’s request to put off their testimony before Congress until the Indonesian government puts out its report on the Lion Air disaster, presumably sometime in October.

Meanwhile, just about everybody in the airline industry, the Department of Transportation, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Justice Department (with its criminal probe), the transport unions, the consumer groups such as Flyers Rights, and the flying public are anxious to see top Boeing officials in the witness chair under oath answering important questions.

It is not as if Boeing lobbyists are absent. The giant company has been everywhere in Washington, D.C. getting its way for years in Congress, with NASA, the Department of Defense, and of course, the hapless, understaffed FAA. Boeing gives campaign donations to about some 330 members of Congress.

Corporate CEOs hate to testify before Congress under oath when they are in hot water. CEOs from the tobacco, drug, auto, banking, insurance, and Silicon Valley industries have all dragged their feet to avoid testifying. Eventually they all had to show up in public on Capitol Hill.

The Boeing case involves a more imminent danger. The company and its “captured” FAA want to unground the MAX as fast as possible and to get more new MAXs, under order, to the airlines.

This haste is all the more reason why Congress has to pick up the pace, regardless of “MAX Mitch” McConnell, the Kentucky dictator of the Senate who is a ward of the Boeing complex and its campaign cash. If the 737 MAX is ever allowed to fly again, with its shaky software fixes, glitches, and stitches, the pressure will build on members of Congress to go soft on the company. They will be told not to alarm millions of passengers and unsettle the airline industry with persistent doubts about the plane’s prone-to-stall and other serious safety hazards from overautomation and sloppy construction, already documented in The New York Times, the Seattle Times, and other solid media reporting.

With investigations underway at civil aviation agencies all over the world, and a grand jury operating in the U.S. looking into criminal negligence, this is no time for Congress to take its time in laying open the fullest truths and facts in public. Bear in mind, apart from the civil tort law suits, all other investigations are not being conducted in public.

There is a growing consensus by impartial specialists that after many iterations of the Boeing 737 series, beginning with the 737-100 in 1967, the much larger, more elaborate Boeing 737 MAX must be seen as a new aircraft requiring full certification. Certainly that is the view of some members of Chairman DeFazio’s committee and Chairman David Price’s House Subcommittee on Appropriations which holds the keys to funding a much larger FAA budget to do its job as a regulator, not as a deregulator that abdicates to Boeing.

Moreover, retired airline Captain Chesley Sullenberger, in his brilliant testimony before DeFazio on June 19th, called for full simulator training for pilots before they fly the MAX on scheduled routes (read Captain Sullenberger’s full statement here).

In a precise letter to the Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao and the acting and incoming heads of the FAA (Daniel Elwell and Stephen Dickson respectively), dozens of families and friends of the victims from many countries asked for full recertification and mandatory simulator training before any decision is made about the 737 MAX. Currently 737 MAX pilots are only given an hour of iPad training—a clearly insufficient measure and an affront to safety (see more here). The letter, which was sent on August 7, 2019, also called for the resignation of Ali Bahrami, the abdicator in charge of safety at the FAA.

Many decisions are coming up for the FAA and Boeing. The FAA would be very foolish to unground the 737 MAX just for U.S. airspace without the counterparts in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa concurring.

As for Boeing, the company cannot afford another one or two crashes attributed to continued indifference to longstanding aerodynamic standards of stability. The issue for Boeing’s celebrity, minimally experienced Board of Directors is how long it will tolerate Boeing’s management that, over the judgement of its best engineers, has brought the company to its present predicament.

How long before the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Transportation or the Congress and the betrayed airlines themselves call for the resignation of both officers and the Board and, end the career conflict of interest these failed incumbents have with the future well-being of the Boeing Corporation itself?

U.S. Economy Faces ‘Strongest Recession Signal Yet’

Warning signs that the U.S. economy could be barreling toward a recession quickly became alarm bells Wednesday after the Treasury bond yield curve—a key indicator that has preceded every major downturn over the past five decades—inverted for the first time since the Wall Street crash of 2007.

As the Washington Post reported, “the yields on short-term U.S. bonds eclipsed those of long-term bonds” on Wednesday, a phenomenon that “suggests investors’ faith in the economy is faltering.”

Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the Post that “yield curves are all crying timber that a recession is almost a reality, and investors are tripping over themselves to get out of the way.”

CNBC described the inverted yield curve as the “strongest recession signal yet.”

There she goes… US Treasury yield curve – a leading recession indicator – goes negative for the first time since 2007.

…taking equities down with it, the day after a big spike on trade relief.https://t.co/Vc5ueqVUOH

— Kayla Tausche (@kaylatausche) August 14, 2019

Economists and other commentators were quick to place at least some of the blame for worsening market volatility on President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, the world’s second-largest economy behind the U.S.

Though Trump sparked a brief rally on Tuesday with his decision to delay his planned 10 percent tariffs on Chinese goods until Dec. 15, markets tanked again Wednesday in response to the inverted yield curve, wiping out the previous day’s gains and triggering fears that a major recession could be imminent.

“Amazing how many people have spent time trying to project some rationality onto Trump trade policy,” tweeted economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “What looks like raw ignorance and prejudice is, in fact, raw ignorance and prejudice.”

Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall pointed out that while presidents are often incorrectly blamed or credited with the state of the economy, “it’ll be impossible not to point to a ruinous, needless trade war as a key cause” if a recession hits.

Though Presidents r routinely blamed are praised for it, they seldom have clear immediate responsibility for the economy. The US is arguably overdue for a recession. But if and when it comes it’ll be impossible not to point to a ruinous, needless trade war as a key cause.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 14, 2019

As markets slid on Wednesday, others noted the historic pattern of recessionary cycles that have corresponded with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest:

It’s SO WEIRD these recessions happen EVERY TIME Republicans balloon the deficit to give billionaires a tax cut. https://t.co/CFB5XolGUG

— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) August 14, 2019

Further intensifying fears of a recession, said economists, is the fact that the Trump administration does not appear willing to take the steps necessary to combat a serious downturn, such as spending money on meaningful government initiatives like an infrastructure program.

“If Trump proposed a serious infrastructure plan, Dems would have a hard time saying no even though it would help him politically. But no such plan has been or will be offered, for a couple of reasons,” tweeted Krugman.  “One is that [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and his wing of the party oppose any kind of government program, no matter how much good it might do.”

“Another,” added Krugman, “is that Trump and co. just can’t bring themselves to advocate anything that doesn’t include scams on behalf of their cronies.”

What Happened to Jeffrey Epstein?

What follows is a conversation between The Nation’s Jeet Heer and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us.

Jeffrey Epstein was found dead, as you all know, of an apparent suicide. Apparent means that there are a lot of unanswered questions. But so much of the media and public discourse seems to be bouncing between #trumpbodycount and #clintonbodycount. All these conspiracy theories abound, but what do they do for us? Where do they really take us? There are questions to be answered, for sure, like why was he left alone? What was the shrieking before he was found in his cell? Why didn’t Acosta prosecute him in the first place? What do we make of the alleged murky ties to law enforcement and intelligence communities? How do his ties with the rich and powerful play into all of this, and I mean all of it?

Well, on our quest to find out that, we will talk to our guest. Jeet Heer is the National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation and the article he wrote was “Epstein’s Death Demands Investigation, Not Conspiracy Theories.” And Jeet, welcome back. Good to have you with us.

JEET HEER: Good to be here.

MARC STEINER: So, you know, whenever these things happen, it seems the first thing that we resort to in this world are all these massive conspiracy theories. Clinton did it and they figured out how to kill them. Or Trump made sure he was dead so he couldn’t expose him and his cronies or—I mean, that’s where we always go and it seems to kind of dominate the conversation. So, how do we, for want of a better term, un-dominate that situation?

JEET HEER: Well, I think it’s natural for there to be conspiracy theories particularly in this case because it’s always “Jeffrey Epstein’s entire life was a conspiracy.”

MARC STEINER: Right.

JEET HEER: And I think got away. He was both a child molester and it seems a pimp, who kept an army of slave children that he would service out to very rich, and powerful friends and he got a sweetheart deal from federal prosecutors and, as far as we can tell, he had some sort of relationship with intelligence and federal law enforcement. So this is all very murky and troubling stuff. I think one thing to keep in mind is this most recent time, why did he end up in jail? It was because of diligent investigation by Julie Brown of The Miami Herald, who did this terrific reporting that really revived the case and made clear that the original 2008 deal was just unconscionable. There was something very fishy going on there.

A man was found guilty of multiple counts of child molestation and got this deal where he’s basically under house arrest. He has to spend the nights at the local jail, but during the daytime, he can go into his office. So, she revived the case through investigation and I think that’s what we need. We need investigation. It’s too important of a case to be left to conspiracy theorists. It should actually be handled by people who know how to investigate, which includes journalists, which includes law enforcement, and which includes Congress.

MARC STEINER: No, I agree. I think that’s why it’s important to do the kind of work that you do and other are doing because we get into this realm of madness. But let me start with some contradictions here early. So we have Attorney General Barr speaking about this and let’s take a look at him for just a moment.

ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: This sex trafficking case was very important to the Department of Justice and to me, personally. I was appalled and, indeed, the whole Department was and, frankly, angry to learn of the MCCs failure to adequately secure this prisoner. But let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein. Any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice and they will get it.

MARC STEINER: But, before he said that, this came from his boss in a tweet. So, here we have the President himself talking about the – saying no to the Trump body count, but let’s look at the Clinton body count and the Clinton crime family and adding his own conspiracy theory twist to all of this. So, what do we make of this? How do you reconcile these two ends of the spectrum in this administration— one with Barr and one with the man he works for?

JEET HEER: Sure, sure. I mean, in some ways this is very common in the Trump administration that you have this Jekyll and Hyde routine, where Trump represents the raw id of Republican politics, which is inclined to—I mean, Trump did not invent Clinton conspiracy theories. In the 1990s, members of the Republican Congress were going around saying that the Clintons were responsible for murdering Vince Foster, what was in fact a suicide. Trump is unleashing this reservoir of Clinton conspiracy theories and Barr has to be the more respectable face. Trump is the id and Barr is the superego, if you want use – in terms of psychology. But in some ways, Barr himself is – his statement I find very bizarre. He’s angry at this failure, but the failure was his failure. He’s actually like—The Administration is in charge of federal jails, right?

MARC STEINER: Right.

JEET HEER: Epstein was under the control of the Trump administration and they failed. He’s castigated blame. So in both parties, there’s an attempt to pass the blame on this outside group, whether it’s the Clintons or whether it’s the jail particularly, without acknowledging their unique, personal complicity.

MARC STEINER: I could do a satirical routine on this, thinking about the Barr-Epstein syndrome, but I won’t do that at the moment.

JEET HEER: No, no. But what feeds the conspiracy theory is that this is a very small, interlocked world and Barr’s own father was the one who hired Epstein, then a high school dropout, to work at Dalton, a very elite boy’s school and got his start in life. So this is like—

MARC STEINER: Without a degree, without a degree.

JEET HEER: Yeah, yeah. He had no degree. He had no college degree and he was hired to teach at one of the prime prep schools in New York City.

MARC STEINER: So this is a good segue here to talk about what we need to know and why we need to know it. And let’s just take, first of all, the alleged suicide. Maybe it was a suicide. Maybe it wasn’t. We don’t know, but there are a lot of things we have to understand about this to really get to the bottom of it. I mean, The Washington Post reported that there was a shriek going on, that some insider told them in an article that they wrote. What was that shriek? What really happened? Some people we talked to who were inside, who had been inmates, who had been incarcerated, said it’s almost impossible to hang yourself in a jail cell like that. How did he do that? Why weren’t there [crosstalk] suicide? There are a lot of questions about this—

JEET HEER: Suicide in jail is very common, but not that particular jail. This is a very – jail where high-value prisoners, mafiosos are kept. I believe El Chapo was kept there, right?

MARC STEINER: Right.

JEET HEER: So, this is not like an ordinary jail. Even if they’re over-staffed, as they seem to be, they have some skill and ability to keep prisoners alive. So there was a failure. There was clearly a series of failures and it’s that series of failures that’s feeding conspiracy theories. You could say, well, there should be one thing. He was taken off suicide watch and it happened that the guards weren’t fully trained guards. They  were working overtime and weren’t inspecting him that night. Then you start adding it up and you think like, well how many of these failures do there have to be? So there’s a lot of possibilities. I think the most likely is that he did kill himself, but that there might have been some sort of pressure put to allow that to happen from Epstein’s own side.

MARC STEINER: Well, you see, that’s the thing. So, unless there’s an investigation, conspiracy theories take control and we don’t know what really happened there.

JEET HEER: That’s right, yeah, yeah. And the thing is, we can’t have Barr investigating himself. That’s like the classic case of the fox guarding the hen house. Barr is totally – he’d be investigating himself, basically. So we need Congress and I think Congress—Yeah. I think the good news is that Congress is going to step up. Earlier, there was a reluctance on Nancy Pelosi’s part to sort of investigate the Acosta deal, but it really does seem like things are so bad that even the Democrats in Congress will do something.

MARC STEINER: Well, let’s talk about what you think they might do because you mentioned this in your article, about Pelosi’s reluctance to do an investigation of Acosta to find out why he did what he did in letting Epstein go free basically in Florida, and what that was all about. And so, there’s a lot we do not know. So what does Congress have to do here besides that?

JEET HEER: Well, so Congress can, yeah—They could investigate the whole Acosta deal and bring that forward and have hearings on that. They can take charge of the investigation into the prison. They can take charge into the sort of larger—I mean, it almost feels like, it’s not 9/11, but it does seem to call for a kind of independent counselor investigation of that scale with somebody – people who are outside the normal bounds. I mean, the troubling thing about all of this is that Epstein had all these ties with very elite figures. This is a guy who was friends with two presidents, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And just within 12 hours before he was found dead, there was a release of information about people he might have blackmailed, which included the governor of a state, a prominent diplomat, and a prince in England. So that’s very—So how do you investigate something that big? How do you investigate something that implicates so many people of both parties?

MARC STEINER: And then, on top of that, you talk about the kind of wealth and power, and all the wealth and power of people that we talked about who are a part of Wall Street, and part of that entire world that he was tied to. And the socialites who procured young girls, these children, to come and be his sexual toys. I mean, who knows how many other men were involved in that, or women, right?

JEET HEER: Yeah, we don’t know. Apparently, there is evidence from Epstein’s own testimony that he kept blackmail information of other people and the police have found tapes and other records. And that all has to be investigated. I think that we can’t let the police drop this matter just because Epstein is dead, right? The other aspect that could become a part of this is a civil case against Epstein and perhaps against some of these accomplices. So the lawyers who—And I think the women who were young girls at the time that they were molested, but the ones who have come forward who are now women, the ones that have come forward are incredibly brave. And there really has to be support given to them.

MARC STEINER: And I think, before we conclude, I want to get into one other subject with you before we stop. I think when you mention that about the women, I think it would be important to hear their voices. Let me just for a moment play some of the voices now for all of you just to not forget. The heart of this for me, besides the political power that may be involved in all this and what that really means, what may be unfolding all this, are the women who were children when they were victims of this man and his friends.

VIRGINIA ROBERTS GIUFFRE, SEXUALLY ABUSED BY JEFFREY EPSTEIN: You’re just thrown into a world that you don’t understand and you don’t know how to—You’re screaming on the inside and you don’t know how to let it come out and you just become this numb figure who refuses to feel and refuses to speak and refuses. All you do is obey. That’s it. And eventually, it led to, “Well, now we’re going to experiment and we’re going to try you with another guy and see how you go.” And it started with one, and then it trickled into two, and then so on and so forth. And before you know it, I’m being lent out to politicians and to academics and to people that – royalty. Still to this day, it is my biggest shame that I carry around that I will never get rid of. And I’m really, really sad that I brought other girls my age and even younger, into a world that they should have never been introduced to.

MARC STEINER: You know, and that’s that heart of it, Jeet, to me – is what power does to some people and how that’s transferred sexually and their proclivities for young girls. I mean, it’s just—That obscenity has to be unfolded and all the people involved have to be found out and have to be—That’s what good investigative journalists and Congress and others in law enforcement really have to unveil.

JEET HEER: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. Yeah, we can’t really let this drop. Something really horrible happened and their justice has not yet been done.

MARC STEINER: And so, as you look at this, I’m curious what are the other— as we conclude— the other things you’ve written about and thinking about in terms of what has to be unfolded and who has to do this?

JEET HEER: Well, I think that there is like—Everything really does come back down to politics and to organization. People are really—Nothing happens unless there’s pressure that’s put on people. As I mentioned before, the great reporting of Julie Brown at The Miami Herald—

MARC STEINER: Right.

JEET HEER:  … really reignited this. And I think that, combined with public pressure on Congress has to go forward because I do think that there’s a reluctance of people in power to go too far because this implicates too many people and implicates people who are friends. Someone who’s prominent in the Democratic Party tweeted when this first broke out that “this might implicate some of our faves.” Well, I think that we really have to give up our faves and we really need the public to step up to the bar and to put pressure on politicians and Congress, especially. I really think Congress is the key here and they have the power of the subpoena and they have the power to put pressure on the Department of Justice to pursue this wherever it leads.

MARC STEINER: And that’s the important point, what you just said, which is this cannot be a partisan issue. I don’t care if they’re Republicans or they’re Democrats, the people in power and the powerful have to be exposed and held accountable for what they’ve done and maybe not making this to be something that is common practice or allowed by certain parties of the rich and powerful. We just have to stop it.

JEET HEER: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

MARC STEINER: Well, we’ll stay on this and I hope the nation stays on this. I’m sure they will. And, Jeet, thank you so much for your work. I appreciate you always being willing to talk with us.

JEET HEER: Oh, sure. It’s always great to be here.

MARC STEINER: Jeet Heer is a National Correspondent for The Nation and I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you all for watching. Please let us know what you think. Give us your ideas. Take care.

Bernie Sanders Sees Right Through The Washington Post

Many decades ago, the great media critic George Seldes observed: “The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.” That remains true today.

Bernie Sanders set off the latest round of outraged denial from elite media this week when he talked to a crowd in New Hampshire about the tax avoidance of Amazon (which did not pay any federal income tax last year). Sanders went on to say: “I wonder why the Washington Post — which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon — doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection.”

Sanders has fought explicitly and effectively to raise the wages of Amazon workers as well as millions of others. Yet the mass-media pretense is that the financial interests of the Post’s owner have no effect on the newspaper’s coverage of Sanders.

Corporate denial is the name of that media game. Usually, expressed denials aren’t necessary. But there’s nothing usual about Bernie Sanders, who’s been willing to call out the biases and blind spots of corporate media since he entered politics.

For his latest transgression, Sanders earned purportedly authoritative pushback from the likes of the Post’s top editor, its media columnist and others with high media visibility. “Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Post executive editor Martin Baron declared, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

The Post’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan quickly chimed in with a harmonizing tweet on Tuesday, defending her editor boss along with the owner of the paper: “I’ve never seen or heard a hint of @jeffbezos interfering in @washingtonpost coverage.”

CNN’s Chris Cillizza, citing his work at the newspaper for a decade, indignantly wrote: “For the last three of my years at the Post, Bezos owned the company. Not once in all of that time — and I wrote multiple pieces a day about politics and politicians (including Sanders and Trump) over that time — was there ever even a whiff of Bezos’ influence in the newsroom.”

As George Seldes commented long ago, “The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, ‘I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.’” Seldes noted that reporters routinely “know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do.”

All Baron or Sullivan would need to do to disprove their own current claims would be to write a bunch of pieces denouncing the man who owns the Post — and then see what happens due to their breach of required self-censorship.

On television, a CNN anchor joined with a USA Today columnist to claim that Sanders’s criticism of the Post’s coverage was free of evidence. The fact that corporate-media employees are vehemently defending corporate media is illustrative of the dynamic. It makes you wonder where career self-interest ends and sincere delusion begins.

Baron, Sullivan, Cillizza and countless other employees of corporate media are well-paid while publicly maintaining their denial in the service of corporate power. So, with the virtues of the Washington Post on parade, Emperor Bezos must be decked out in the journalistic finery of his new clothes, even when the self-interest and implications of billionaire leverage over media are stark naked.

What Bernie Sanders is pointing out is not — and he never said it was — a “conspiracy.” The problems are much deeper and more pernicious, having to do with the financial structures of media institutions that enable profit-driven magnates and enormous corporations to dominate the flow of news and commentary.

The Post’s Baron is ill-positioned to defend his newspaper against charges of anti-Sanders bias. Such bias has been profuse, and it began well before a pivotal moment in the 2016 campaign on the eve of the high-stakes Michigan primary in early March. Then, as FAIR analyst Adam Johnson showed, “the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours.”

This year, the Post has strained to throw negative light on Sanders’s campaign, whether focusing on Wall Street or Venezuela. Nor is the Post far afield from other powerful media outlets. For instance, the New York Times reportage has taken Sanders to task for alleged sins such as desiring to exercise control over his own campaign and failing to please Democratic critics who are actually corporate lobbyists but not identified as such.

Nor is the AT&T-owned CNN far afield from the baseline of cable news giants that supposedly provide a liberal alternative to the odious Fox News. Coverage from MSNBC — owned by Comcast, “the world’s largest entertainment company” — has provoked one assessment after another after another documenting the network’s anti-Bernie bias.

“The corporate-owned and corporate-advertiser-funded media of this country are the biggest barriers between Bernie Sanders and the Oval Office,” I wrote five months ago. “Often functioning as propaganda outlets, the major news media serve as an amplification system for corporate power that has long shielded the Democratic Party from the combined ‘threats’ of social movements and progressive populist candidates.” (I continue to actively support Sanders.)

Journalists who have staked their careers on remaining in the good graces of corporate employers are certainly inclined to say in public that billionaire owners and huge corporations don’t constrain their journalistic work. And in their minds, they might be telling the truth. As George Orwell wrote, “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

Corporate Media’s Embarrassing New Case for Joe Biden

Coming out of the second round of Democratic debates, a curious storyline crystallized in the media: The candidates are attacking Obama, and that’s a sure-fire way to hand the election to Trump. It’s the latest flavor of “the Democrats are moving too far left” (FAIR.org, 7/2/19)—this time echoing both Trump himself and the right-wing Democratic candidates, including former Obama Vice President Joe Biden.

During the first debate, Rep. John Delaney pitched the story, claiming, “Most of the folks running for president want to build economic walls to free trade and beat up on President Obama.” Biden’s team was also quick to hype the story after his own appearance in the second debate. The Washington Post‘s Steven Stromberg (7/31/19) quoted one of his advisers immediately after the debate: “Many people on this stage spent more time attacking Obama than they did Trump. I think Democratic primary voters will make a judgment about this.”

The next day, Trump (Politico, 8/1/19) picked up the Biden spin, declaring:

The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically. This morning, that’s all the fake news was talking about.

Indeed, it was hard to read coverage of the debates without tripping over pieces like, “Do Democrats Think They Can Win by Attacking Barack Obama?” (Washington Post, 7/31/19), “Worst Democratic Strategy Yet: Attack Obama’s Legacy” (New York Times, 8/2/19) or “‘Stay Away From Barack’: Dems Seethe Over Criticism of Obama” (Politico, 8/1/19). (Note that the “Dems” who are seething in these stories are almost exclusively Biden strategists, former Obama administration officials or strategists, and other party centrists.)

MSNBC hosts helped promote the storyline that criticisms of Biden were really attacks on Obama (Mediaite, 8/1/19).

It’s a curious storyline, if you actually watched the debates. For the record, Trump was mentioned 199 times across the two nights; Obama (or “Obamacare”) was mentioned 32 times (including eight name-drops by Biden). And the non-Biden Obama mentions were largely framed as praise—as when Julián Castro argued (7/31/19) that most of the job growth Trump takes credit for was “due to President Obama. Thank you, Barack Obama. Thank you, Barack Obama”—or as a prop for the candidates’ plans, as when Kamala Harris said that the “architect of the Obama Affordable Care Act” supported Harris’s healthcare plan.

On healthcare, while there were plenty of attacks on left-wing positions from CNNmoderators, who peppered candidates with industry-friendly questions about “raising taxes on the middle class” to pay for Medicare for All, and “forcing” people to give up their private insurance, on neither night did candidates attack the ACA or Obama on healthcare. In fact, only a few candidates (besides Biden) mentioned the ACA; none of the mentions could be construed as direct attacks on it, with the possible exception of Beto O’Rourke’s claim (7/30/19) that his “Medicare for America” plan is a “better path” than either Medicare for All or “improv[ing] the Affordable Care Act at the margins.”

Immigration was probably the most-cited “Obama attack” issue—but it was CNN‘s Don Lemon who teed up the attack, asking Biden:

In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly 800,000 immigrants were deported, far more than during President Trump’s first two years. Would the higher deportation rates resume if you were president?

Many candidates talked about wanting decriminalization, and reducing deportations, but, again, none aimed their attacks at Obama—unless you take criticism of the healthcare system as criticism of Obama, as the Post seemed to when it cited Warren’s criticism that “we have tried the solution of Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance. And what have the private insurance companies done? They’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our health care system.”

Some did aim directly at Biden, including Castro and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Postpointed to Castro, who was Obama’s Housing secretary, quipping about the deportation policy of the administration in which he and Biden both served: “It looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past, and one of us hasn’t.” The Times piece, by Timothy Egan, didn’t even bother citing evidence, instead just asserting that Obama was “now a target for cannibalistic candidates from the left.”

And both the Post and Politico cited Cory Booker criticizing Biden, after Biden attempted to distance himself from Obama’s deportation policy (answering Lemon’s question about whether he would resume Obama’s policy with an unequivocal “absolutely not”): “You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign,” said Booker. “You can’t do it when it’s convenient and dodge it when it’s not.”

Tellingly, no one cited Biden’s distancing from Obama policy—in this case, or when he said he would not re-enter the TPP under the same terms Obama did—as criticism of Obama.

Obama was and continues to be highly popular with the public (and especially Democrats), so it’s no surprise that Biden is largely pinning his campaign on his connection to the former president, and trying to discredit opponents whose plans might differ from any of Obama’s policies. By going along with Biden’s efforts to construe any attacks on himself, his record or proposals as attacks on Obama, media are helping to construct a trope that seeks to trap anyone to the left of Obama—and to the left of the media’s comfort zone—by effectively putting most criticism of Biden off limits.

Epstein Jail Guards Suspected of Falsifying Logs

NEW YORK — Jail guards on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein apparently killed himself are suspected of falsifying log entries to show they were checking on inmates every half-hour as required, according to a person familiar with the investigation into the financier’s death.

Surveillance video shows guards never made some of the checks noted in the log, said the person, who was not authorized to disclose information about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Tuesday.

Epstein, 66, is believed to have killed himself early Saturday at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where he was awaiting trial in a sex trafficking case. The cause of the death has not been announced, but a person familiar with operations at the federal lockup said the financier was discovered in his cell with a bedsheet around his neck.

His death prompted the Justice Department to place two guards on leave and remove the jail’s warden pending the outcome of investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general. Falsifying log entries can be a federal crime.

The case has thrown a spotlight on chronic understaffing at the jail, which has long been used to house some of the world’s most notorious criminals, including mobsters, drug lords and terrorists.

A person familiar with the jail’s operations told the AP that a guard in Epstein’s unit was working a fifth straight day of overtime and another guard was working mandatory overtime the day he was found. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he lacked authorization to publicly discuss jail operations.

Last month, Epstein had been put on suicide watch, with 24-hour monitoring and daily psychiatric evaluations, after he was found on the floor of his cell with bruises on his neck. But he was taken off suicide watch at the end of July and returned to the jail’s special housing unit, for inmates requiring close supervision.

___

Balsamo reported from Washington.

Coming Into His Own, With Springsteen Leading the Way

Like most teens, Javed (Viveik Kalra) struggles to define himself and find his own voice. This is more challenging for him than for his schoolmates in the working-class borough of Luton, England, in 1987, when, prefiguring the present day in the U.S. and U.K., the rising tides of Thatcherism and British nationalism polarized the nation.

The anarchic voices in the classroom are worlds away from the Punjabi-inflected English spoken at home by his parents, immigrants from Pakistan. Whipsawed between the punk rebellion of his classmates and his father’s insistence that he study medicine, Javed can’t hear himself think, let alone his voice.

When a mate presses a decade-old Bruce Springsteen cassette on Javed, he is electrified. Hearing The Boss find his voice moves Javed to articulate his own. You can’t start a fire without a spark, sang Springsteen in “Dancing in the Dark.” That spark of Springsteen’s ignites a conflagration under Javed in “Blinded by the Light,” Gurinder Chadha’s buoyant and blissful film based on the memoir of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor.

Watching the teenage Javed become his own man is the best time I’ve had at the movies this year.

Chadha, best known for her feverishly enjoyable soccer-gals movie, “Bend it Like Beckham” (2002), and the charming Jane Austen musical update “Bride and Prejudice” (2004), is a Kenya-born, Britain-raised artist of Punjabi descent. Her best movies focus on characters’ multiple cultural identities, characters that negotiate original, best-of-both-worlds definitions of who they are. In view of today’s bruising issues of nationalism and immigration, these movies are deeply healing.

Yet the revelation here is how the director (who also produced and co-wrote) finds film language to show how music gives wings to the mind and flight to the imagination. When Javed listens to Springsteen, the lyrics (literally) dance around him onscreen, fueling his transformation from class nerd to its poet laureate, from awkward teen to confident romantic, self-assured enough to ask Eliza (Nell Williams), the smart punkette in English class, for a date.

Chadha has a great eye for actors (she did, after all, effectively discover Keira Knightley and Archie Panjabi). And while there is every reason to see the film for the charismatic performances of Kalra and Williams, the joy of the film is not in their individual turns, but in how, in a time of political factionalism, music unifies them and their community.

In the current era of jukebox musicals—think “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman”—Chadha is on to something original with “Blinded by the Light.” Namely, that rather than making a film about the life of a musical artist, the best way to tell a biopic is to make it about the artist’s legacy and influence on listeners.

The takeaway of “Blinded by the Light” is that by connecting with Springsteen’s stories of the inner lives of real people, Javed is able to find himself as a man, a writer and a human capable of forgiveness and love. In Springsteen’s music, Chadha and her protagonist find the means of putting poetry with the reach of the man (and woman) on the street.

P.S. One of Chadha’s lesser known films, “What’s Cooking?” (2000), is a lovely story of four separate Thanksgiving dinners in Los Angeles ethnic communities that dovetail in a startling way. See it somehow.

How Wavering Democrats Bought Into Kochs’ Free Trade Scheme

When George Soros and Charles Koch announced in July that they are partnering to create a think tank dedicated to ending the United States’ forever wars, Steven Kinzer of The Boston Globe called the idea “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history.”

Despite the jarring image of the liberal billionaire joining forces with the radical conservative, the forthcoming Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is not such an anomaly in the history of the Koch family. As Ryan Grim and Andrew Perez explain in a joint report from The Intercept and Maplight, in 2007, Koch Industries “ secretly financed a report by Third Way, a corporate-funded think tank with ties to the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.”

Grim and Perez’s reporting is based on research from a new book, “Kochland,” by Christopher Leonard, an investigative reporter.

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In 2007, Third Way and Koch Industries were concerned that public opinion among Democrats and Republicans was turning against free trade. Right-wing CNN anchor Lou Dobbs railed against it, and so were many congressional Democrats. George W. Bush managed to ram the Central American Free Trade Agreement through Congress with Republican votes in 2005, but prospects for future free trade deals were looking grim.

So Third Way issued a white paper titled “Why Lou Dobbs is Winning,” which was, as Leonard, Grim and Perez report, created with Koch funding, a fact that was not immediately obvious.

Grim and Perez observe that Koch Industries is not directly thanked in the white paper’s acknowledgements. Rather, they report, it “[offered] thanks to Rob Hall, then a lobbyist for Koch Industries’ Invista division, ‘for his support in helping us conceive of and design Third Way’s trade project.’”

The report contained an additional message in the acknowledgements, Leonard writes in “Kochland”: “The authors offer their sincerest thanks to Third Way’s Board of Trustees for their continuing intellectual support of Third Way and in particular for providing several of the key initial insights on which this paper is built.”

As Grim and Perez report, “Third Way’s board of trustees is a who’s who of Wall Street and corporate elites.”

The white paper aimed to change the conversation around trade policy, and warned of “a new and powerful populist strain [that] has emerged on both the left and the right of American politics that threatens to turn the nation fearful and inward,” Grim and Perez write.

According to The Intercept, the paper was part of a larger project “to sell free trade policies to Democratic politicians, laid out a series of prescriptions to reframe the debate.”

In the white paper, Third Way argues that Americans distrusted free trade because it costs low-income and middle-class Americans their jobs, and only benefits giant corporations. The report concedes that Americans have reason to be wary: “Middle-class economic anxiety is widespread and legitimate. And fairly or not, much of the blame for this anxiety is landing squarely on trade.”

The white paper’s aim of promoting free trade among Democrats was successful, to the extent that the Obama administration was friendly toward free trade, and entered the United States into the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (which Donald Trump later pulled out out of). In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both oppose the TPP. Third Way, despite fighting Warren in the past, says she’s more palatable than Sanders.

Third Way is not the only centrist Democrat organization the Kochs have cozied up to when it was economically beneficial for both sides. As Grim and Perez explain, Hall, who was thanked in Third Way’s report, also was involved in the Democratic Leadership Council:

A 2001 American Prospect investigation noted that Koch Industries was a member of the executive council of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985 by centrist Democrats to combat the left inside the party. Hall, thanked in the report, was a member of the DLC’s event committee at the time.

Both Third Way and Koch Industries declined to comment to The Intercept.