Chris Hedges's Blog, page 190

Sanders and Warren Defend Medicare for All From Moderates and Media

It was “like clockwork.”

In the middle of a heated back-and-forth on Medicare for All at the beginning of Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, Sen. Bernie Sanders called out CNN for airing anti-single payer ads from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries during commercial breaks.

“By the way, the healthcare industry will be advertising tonight on this program,” Sanders said after accusing CNN moderator Jake Tapper of deploying “a Republican talking point” against Medicare for All. “They will be advertising tonight with that talking point.”

SANDERS earlier tonight: “By the way, by the way, the health care industry will be advertising tonight, on this program —”

TAPPER: “Thank you, senator”

SANDERS: “Oh, can I complete that please?” pic.twitter.com/KmsdPzwlWK

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 31, 2019

Sure enough, during the debate’s commercial breaks, ads by pharmaceutical giants and industry-backed organizations dominated the airwaves, further vindicating Sanders and other progressives who have raised alarm at the role corporate advertising plays in America’s media coverage.

As Variety reported last week, CNN—which is owned by AT&T—required “a commitment of $300,000 in advertising on the network before a potential sponsor can purchase commercials within the two debate telecasts.”

Bernie mentioned that the health care industry was running commercials during the CNN debate. He‘s right. Here’s a clip of the pharma “Go Boldly” campaign. pic.twitter.com/d4Fmb6JPVR

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 31, 2019

the ad break includes a commercial for a pill named “otezla” that partially clears skin at the cost of nausea, diarrhea and depression at a listed price of $3,400 for a 30-day supply. anyway back to asking candidates why they’d change our terrific health care system

— the norms misser (@cd_hooks) July 31, 2019

The American Prospect‘s David Dayen noted that, in addition to ads from the pharmaceutical lobby, the debate’s breaks also featured commercials from “the anti-single payer group Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), funded by hospitals and drug companies, and an Alzheimer’s disease patient advocacy group that takes major funding from drug companies.”

“The unfiltered 90 seconds of three of these commercials in succession comprised more screen time than anything in the debate about money in politics,” Dayen wrote. “The country cannot afford to have CNN creating the proscenium through which America gets informed.”

Pointing to the PAHCF commercial—which is part of a six-figure ad campaign against Medicare for All—Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s staff director, tweeted, “If Medicare for All was on trial, the entire corporate media would have to recuse itself for a y-u-g-e conflict of interest.”

CNN just aired this ridiculous tv ad paid for by the big health insurance & drug companies that make massive profits by denying Americans care. If #MedicareForAll was on trial, the entire corporate media would have to recuse itself for a y-u-g-e conflict of interest. #DemDebate

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) July 30, 2019

Sanders’s CNN call-out came at the tail end of the debate’s healthcare segment, which was largely driven by a question that progressives said disingenuously framed Medicare for All as a tax increase on the middle class, rather than a cost-saving overhaul of the nation’s broken healthcare system.

“Jake, your question is a Republican talking point,” Sanders told CNN‘s Tapper.

The debate moderators were not the only ones accused of parroting right-wing attacks against Medicare for All Tuesday night.

After former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) called Medicare for All “bad policy” and suggested it would take healthcare away from millions of Americans—a line that was echoed by other right-wing Democratic candidates on the debate stage—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hit back.

“We are not about trying to take away healthcare from anyone. That’s what the Republicans are trying to do,” said Warren, a co-sponsor of Sanders’s Medicare for All bill in the Senate. “And we should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other about how to best provide that healthcare.”

Sanders, Warren Clash With Cautious Rivals Over ‘Big Ideas’

DETROIT—The signature domestic proposal by the leading progressive candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination came under withering attack from moderates Tuesday in a debate that laid bare the struggle between a call for revolutionary policies and a desperate desire to defeat President Donald Trump.

Standing side by side at center stage, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren slapped back against their more cautious rivals who ridiculed “Medicare for All” and warned that “wish-list economics” would jeopardize Democrats’ chances for taking the White House in 2020.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” said Warren, a Massachusetts senator, decrying Democratic “spinelessness.”

Sanders, a Vermont senator, agreed: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”

A full six months before the first votes are cast, the tug-of-war over the future of the party pits pragmatism against ideological purity as voters navigate a crowded Democratic field divided by age, race, sex and ideology. The fight with the political left was the dominant subplot on the first night of the second round of Democratic debates, which was notable as much for its tension as its substance.

Twenty candidates are spread evenly over two nights of debates Tuesday and Wednesday. The second night features early front-runner Joe Biden, the former vice president, as well as Kamala Harris, a California senator.

While much of the debate was dominated by attacks on the preferred liberal health care policy, the issue of race emerged in the second hour. The candidates, all of whom are white, were unified in turning their anger toward Trump for using race as a central theme in his reelection campaign. Sanders called Trump a racist, while others said the president’s rhetoric revived memories of the worst in the country’s history, including slavery.

“The legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression is alive and well in every aspect of the economy and the country today,” said former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, adding that he supported the creation of a panel to examine reparations for the descendants of slaves.

The marathon presidential primary season won’t formally end for another year, but there was an increasing sense of urgency for many candidates who are fighting for survival. More than a dozen could be blocked from the next round of debates — and effectively pushed out of the race — if they fail to reach new polling and fundraising thresholds implemented by the Democratic National Committee.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is working to keep her campaign alive, aligned herself with the pragmatic wing: “We are more worried about winning an argument than winning an election.”

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, in his first debate appearance, took a swipe at Sanders: Working people “can’t wait for a revolution,” he charged. “Their problems are here and now.”

While he avoided any direct confrontations with his more liberal rivals, Pete Buttigieg tried several times to present himself as the more sober alternative in the race. He rejected extreme positions, quoted scripture and abstained from calling out his opponents.

The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also subtly emphasized the generational difference between himself and Sanders, the candidate 40 years his senior standing to his side.

Perhaps no issue illustrates the evolving divide within the Democratic Party more than health care.

Sanders’ plan to provide free universal health care, known as Medicare for All, has become a litmus test for liberal candidates, who have embraced the plan to transform the current system despite the political and practical risks. Medicare for All would abandon the private insurance market in favor of a taxpayer-funded system that would cover all Americans.

In targeting Medicare for All, the more moderate candidates consistently sought to undermine Sanders and Warren. The moderates variously derided Medicare for All as too costly, ineffective and a near-certain way to give Republicans the evidence they needed that Democrats supported socialism.

“They’re running on telling half the country that their health care is illegal,” said former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

“We have a choice: We can go down the road that Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything and impossible promises,” he continued. “It will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected.”

Yet Sanders and Warren did not back down. While they are competing for the same set of liberal voters, there seemed to be no daylight between them.

“Health care is a human right, not a privilege. I believe that. I will fight for that,” Sanders said.

Buttigieg called on his party to stop the infighting.

“It is time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say,” Buttigieg declared. “It’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.”

A new set of candidates, none with more to lose than Biden, will face off on Wednesday.

There, Biden will fight to prove that his underwhelming performanceduring last month’s opening debate was little more than an aberration.

It won’t be easy.

The 76-year-old Democrat is expected to face new questions regarding his past policies and statements about women and minorities — both key constituencies he needs to claim the Democratic Party’s nomination and ultimately defeat Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump said earlier in the day that he would watch Tuesday’s primetime affair from the White House. But his Twitter feed was uncharacteristically silent throughout the debate.

___

Peoples reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

Sanders, Warren Clash With Moderates Over ‘Medicare for All’

DETROIT—The signature domestic proposal by the leading progressive candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination came under withering attack from moderates Tuesday in a debate that laid bare the struggle between a call for revolutionary policies and a desperate desire to defeat President Donald Trump.

Standing side by side at center stage, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren slapped back against their more cautious rivals who ridiculed “Medicare for All” and warned that “wish-list economics” would jeopardize Democrats’ chances for taking the White House in 2020.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” said Warren, a Massachusetts senator, decrying Democratic “spinelessness.”

Sanders, a Vermont senator, agreed: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”

A full six months before the first votes are cast, the tug-of-war over the future of the party pits pragmatism against ideological purity as voters navigate a crowded Democratic field divided by age, race, sex and ideology. The fight with the political left was the dominant subplot on the first night of the second round of Democratic debates, which was notable as much for its tension as its substance.

Twenty candidates are spread evenly over two nights of debates Tuesday and Wednesday. The second night features early front-runner Joe Biden, the former vice president, as well as Kamala Harris, a California senator.

While much of the debate was dominated by attacks on the preferred liberal health care policy, the issue of race emerged in the second hour. The candidates, all of whom are white, were unified in turning their anger toward Trump for using race as a central theme in his reelection campaign. Sanders called Trump a racist, while others said the president’s rhetoric revived memories of the worst in the country’s history, including slavery.

“The legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression is alive and well in every aspect of the economy and the country today,” said former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, adding that he supported the creation of a panel to examine reparations for the descendants of slaves.

The marathon presidential primary season won’t formally end for another year, but there was an increasing sense of urgency for many candidates who are fighting for survival. More than a dozen could be blocked from the next round of debates — and effectively pushed out of the race — if they fail to reach new polling and fundraising thresholds implemented by the Democratic National Committee.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is working to keep her campaign alive, aligned herself with the pragmatic wing: “We are more worried about winning an argument than winning an election.”

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, in his first debate appearance, took a swipe at Sanders: Working people “can’t wait for a revolution,” he charged. “Their problems are here and now.”

While he avoided any direct confrontations with his more liberal rivals, Pete Buttigieg tried several times to present himself as the more sober alternative in the race. He rejected extreme positions, quoted scripture and abstained from calling out his opponents.

The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also subtly emphasized the generational difference between himself and Sanders, the candidate 40 years his senior standing to his side.

Perhaps no issue illustrates the evolving divide within the Democratic Party more than health care.

Sanders’ plan to provide free universal health care, known as Medicare for All, has become a litmus test for liberal candidates, who have embraced the plan to transform the current system despite the political and practical risks. Medicare for All would abandon the private insurance market in favor of a taxpayer-funded system that would cover all Americans.

In targeting Medicare for All, the more moderate candidates consistently sought to undermine Sanders and Warren. The moderates variously derided Medicare for All as too costly, ineffective and a near-certain way to give Republicans the evidence they needed that Democrats supported socialism.

“They’re running on telling half the country that their health care is illegal,” said former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

“We have a choice: We can go down the road that Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything and impossible promises,” he continued. “It will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected.”

Yet Sanders and Warren did not back down. While they are competing for the same set of liberal voters, there seemed to be no daylight between them.

“Health care is a human right, not a privilege. I believe that. I will fight for that,” Sanders said.

Buttigieg called on his party to stop the infighting.

“It is time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say,” Buttigieg declared. “It’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.”

A new set of candidates, none with more to lose than Biden, will face off on Wednesday.

There, Biden will fight to prove that his underwhelming performanceduring last month’s opening debate was little more than an aberration.

It won’t be easy.

The 76-year-old Democrat is expected to face new questions regarding his past policies and statements about women and minorities — both key constituencies he needs to claim the Democratic Party’s nomination and ultimately defeat Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump said earlier in the day that he would watch Tuesday’s primetime affair from the White House. But his Twitter feed was uncharacteristically silent throughout the debate.

___

Peoples reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

Hong Kong Authorities Called to ‘Do What Needs to Be Done’ to Quell Protests

As sustained, significant mass protests continue to rock Hong Kong, a spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said his office intends to “resolutely punish violent crimes according to law” and “restore social stability.”

The protests that began about eight weeks ago are the largest to strikingly challenge Beijing’s authority since 1997, the year the United Kingdom handed over its former colony to the Chinese government. Some of the gatherings have drawn an estimated 2 million people to the streets.

At the time, it was determined China and Hong Kong would create a “one country, two systems” setup. Hong Kong is supposed to have its own legal and judicial systems that work independently from the Chinese government except in matters of foreign and defense affairs.

HKMAO spokesman Yang Guang made the remarks at a news briefing, the office’s first of its kind since 1997.

“In our view, the most dangerous situation in Hong Kong is that violent crimes have not been effectively stopped,” he said, as he also condemned what he referred to as “evil and criminal acts committed by the radical elements.” In addition, the office said “irresponsible figures in Western countries” were at fault in the escalating tensions.

The Guardian reports:

The last eight weeks of protests were sparked by a now delayed bill that would allow suspects to be extradited to mainland China, but most recently the anger has pivoted towards the police, who have been accused of using excessive force.

Protesters have also focused their ire on what many believe to be collusion between the authorities and triads, Hong Kong’s organised crime groups, after masked and armed thugs conducted vicious attacks on metro commuters, protesters and journalists on 21 July.

At the press conference on Monday the Hong Kong office said “rumours” of police or Chinese involvement in the attacks were “unfounded and insulting.”

Echoing statements previously made by state-owned media and other Beijing officials, the spokesman also sharply criticised foreign “interference,” blaming western politicians for trying to cause trouble in the country.

Hours before the briefing on Monday, the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, called on the Hong Kong government and police to “not hesitate” and “do what needs to be done” to end the weeks of protest.

“For some time, the power of the Hong Kong police has been severely limited by politics, public opinion, and even the judicial environment,” said one editorial, describing protesters as “thugs” and “militants” who have undermined stability in Hong Kong.

Last weekend, police fired rubber-coated rounds and tear gas as thousands of pro-democracy protesters gathered in various parts of Hong Kong. Most of the gatherings were nonviolent, but according to Al Jazeera, some protesters lobbed bricks, improvised weapons and glass as riot police went into the crowds Sunday.

In addition to scrapping the extradition-to-China bill, demonstrators are demanding the resignation of Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leader Carrie Lam, direct elections for a new leader and an independent inquiry into the police force used against protesters.

 

 

Trump Administration, Democrats Make Progress on New NAFTA

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats appear to be moving from “no way” to “maybe” on President Donald Trump’s rewrite of a trade pact with Canada and Mexico.

House Democrats have met four times with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, most recently on Friday, and both sides say they are making progress toward a deal that would clear the way for Congress to approve Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who heads a House subcommittee on trade, declared a couple of months ago that there was “no way” Democrats and the administration could bridge their differences. Lately, he’s reconsidered. “In the course of the last two months, we have seen significant progress,” Blumenauer said.

Negotiators so far have not offered details on where they’re making progress. Democrats want the agreement to include stronger protections for workers and the environment. They also are seeking to jettison a provision they see as a giveaway to big pharmaceutical companies.

Talks could still fall apart. Meetings between congressional staffers and officials from Lighthizer’s office during Congress’ August recess could prove critical. House Democrats working on USMCA will submit text next week to the administration “memorializing the concrete and detailed proposals that we have made.”

They called on the administration to do the same.

“It is time for the administration to present its proposals and to show its commitment to passing the new NAFTA and delivering on its own promises,” the Democratic lawmakers said.

Supporters of USMCA are pushing for a deal before the 2020 election campaign heats up, which could make it harder for Democrats and Republicans to compromise.

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said there was growing optimism within the administration about USMCA’s prospects amid signs that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was willing to work toward a compromise.

“The smart money in Washington is that USMCA will pass this fall following a bargain,” said Daniel Ujczo, a lawyer with Dickinson Wright in Columbus, Ohio, who specializes in North American trade. “However, it is just as likely that we will be in a ‘bump and blame’ scenario where the president can blame Speaker Pelosi and Speaker Pelosi can blame the president.”

By ratifying the agreement, Congress could lift uncertainty over the future of U.S. commerce with its No. 2 (Canada) and No. 3 (Mexico) trading partners last year and give the U.S. economy a modest boost. U.S. farmers are especially eager to make sure their exports to Canada and Mexico continue uninterrupted.

Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who oversees efforts to get Democrats elected to the House, said Pelosi “understands the sense of urgency” about USMCA among some lawmakers who represent rural districts.

“The hope is that we can get to a yes,” Bustos said. “But first and foremost, it has to look out for working men and women in our country.”

The USMCA is meant to replace the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated most tariffs and other trade barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Critics — including Trump, labor unions and many Democratic lawmakers — called NAFTA a job killer for America because it encouraged factories to move south of the border, take advantage of low-wage Mexican workers and ship products back to the U.S. duty free.

Lighthizer last year negotiated a do-over with Canada and Mexico. But it requires congressional approval.

He sought to reach a deal that would win over Democrats. It includes provisions designed to nudge manufacturing back to the United States. For example, it requires that 40% to 45% of cars eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour — that is, in the United States and Canada and not in Mexico.

Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the carmaker provisions during a speech Tuesday in Lancaster, Ohio, where officials are beginning construction of a car seat manufacturing plant. He’s been traveling to states the Trump administration believes would most benefit from a new agreement.

I mean, this state has so much to gain from the USMCA,” Pence said. “And so, for Ohio, for the automotive industry, and for America, we’ve got to get the USMCA done. And we got to get it done this year. ”

But Democrats say it still doesn’t go far enough.

Democrats are also lined up against a provision of USMCA that gives pharmaceutical companies 10 years’ protection from cheaper competition in a category of ultra-expensive drugs called biologics, which are made from living cells. Shielded from competition, critics warn, the drug companies could charge exorbitant prices for biologics.

Congress is supposed to give trade agreements an up-or-down vote, no amendments allowed.

The reality is different. Despite those so-called fast-track provisions, Congress has managed to pressure past administrations into making changes to the last four U.S. free-trade agreements before approving them.

The trade pact picked up some momentum after Mexico in April passed a labor-law overhaul required by USMCA. The reforms are meant to make it easier for Mexican workers to form independent unions and bargain for better pay and working conditions, narrowing the gap with the United States.

Mexico ratified USMCA in June. But Democrats are also watching whether Mexico budgets enough money later this year to provide the resources needed for labor reform.

In Washington, lawmakers are getting pressure from all sides. Business and farm groups want the new deal approved as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, labor, environmental and other activist groups last month declared a “No Vote Until NAFTA 2.0 is Fixed” day and collected 300,000 signatures on petitions demanding changes to the trade pact.

“The only way forward is making the fixes,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the existing NAFTA — it remains in effect — if Congress won’t OK his version. But analysts say that pulling out of NAFTA would squeeze automakers and farmers.

“The president knows that his voters here in the heartland and manufacturing Midwest cannot take another hit — we hope,” Ujczo said.

Are the Green New Deal and China the Answers to Climate Change?

At its best, the earth was once likened to a spaceship that sails through the heavens with a crew working together for the common good. Thanks to climate change, this metaphor no longer works. Our planet is now more like a lifeboat that’s sprung a major leak. People onboard are beginning to panic and the clock is ticking.

It is, however, the perfect environment to test out the best way to deal with life-and-death situations.

For such a test, imagine not one but two lifeboats of survivors bobbing in an endless, empty sea. Both contain the same number of people and a limited amount of food. Based on some educated guesses by one knowledgeable crewmember, the boats are at least five days from land, if everyone rows together and they don’t veer off course.

In the first boat, the survivors debate the problem: Should they stay in place and conserve their energy or strike off in search of land? They divide into three committees to address the different aspects of the problem and present their findings, making sure everyone has input. They debate for hours, growing weaker and weaker until they no longer have the energy to do anything and the issue decides itself.

In the second boat, one person takes control, believing he alone has the skill and knowledge to steer the lifeboat toward land. Not everyone agrees, but dissenters are silenced. The others agree that there’s no time for more discussion. The new leader imposes rules on who rows and who eats. When someone falls deathly ill, he orders the incapacitated man thrown overboard.

The second lifeboat is moving at a good pace — but is it going in the right direction?

On Lifeboat Earth, time and resources are similarly limited. According to most climate scientists, the window of opportunity to prevent irrevocable climate change is about a dozen years. Opinion is divided, however, on how to address this problem with the urgency it requires.

The international community has tried, in a roughly democratic fashion, to avoid the apocalypse. In 2015, the countries of the world came together in Paris and negotiated a non-binding climate accord that was a victory for compromise but a failure for shrinking the planet’s actual carbon footprint. In a number of countries around the world, democratic elections subsequently brought climate-change deniers like Donald Trump to power, further compromising that accord.

In this way, the planet risks following the first lifeboat scenario: talking ourselves to death.

The second lifeboat option — think of it as eco-authoritarianism — seems to better fit the temper of the times. The current climate emergency coincides with a profound disillusionment with the liberal world order. Authoritarianism has become significantly more popular these days, even in otherwise democratic societies like India, Brazil, and the United States.

Droves of voters have abandoned mainstream parties across the planet, disillusioned by the way they’ve supported a version of economic globalization that has wildly enriched the already rich, challenged the middle class, and left the poor at the bottom of the barrel. Those voters have increasingly turned to right-wing populists who disparage “globalists” and promise swift action on a range of issues from immigration to crime.

Such authoritarians couldn’t, of course, be less “eco.” Most of them deny that climate change is even a problem and some, like Donald Trump, are working with the giant energy companies to heat the planet faster. They’ve commandeered the lifeboats, only to steer them ever further from possible rescue.

Feckless democrats or reckless authoritarians: Lifeboat Earth doesn’t stand much of a chance with such options.

It’s no wonder that China has emerged as a last hope for those frustrated by the torpor of the international community and the delusions of the axis of denial. Hasn’t that country, after all, redirected enormous streams of funding into sustainable energy? Wasn’t that state’s coercive one-child policy a critical way to address overpopulation and, by extension, the consumption of resources? Hasn’t China stepped ever more firmly into the international leadership void created by Trump’s nationalist retreat? As in the second lifeboat scenario, however, China may not be heading in the right direction.

So there we are: 12 years, leaky lifeboats, and no safe haven in sight.

The Ongoing Tragedy of the Commons

In the early 1970s, after the world’s first Earth Day, the lifeboat problem seemed to be on everyone’s mind. When an oil crisis hit in 1973, energy suddenly no longer seemed like an inexhaustible resource. Overpopulation was threatening to outstrip food production. Pollution darkened the skies over major cities and industrial effluents befouled the waters. Environmentalists were having a field day exposing the ruthless exploitation of resources at the heart of both the capitalist and the communist systems.

Almost half a century ago, some visionary thinkers were already worrying about climate change. In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect in 1973, political scientist Robert Heilbroner delineated the various environmental challenges facing the world, including “global thermal pollution,” before concluding that only a combination of military discipline and religious faith could transform the social order.

Fellow political scientist William Ophuls, writing in 1973, posed the problem even more starkly as “Leviathan or oblivion.” Either humanity would opt for a “government with major coercive powers” to preserve the environment or it might as well give up. Several years later, he applied his argument to international relations as well, writing, “The already strong rationale for a world government with enough coercive power over fractious nation states to achieve what reasonable men would regard as the planetary common interest has become overwhelming.”

No such world government, of course, ensued. The international authorities that did exist at the time proved to have neither the coercive power nor the will necessary for the task. In 1979, however, scientists from 50 nations did gather in Geneva for the first World Climate Conference to issue a call for action on global warming. Later that year, the leaders of the seven richest countries on the planet actually agreed on the need to reduce carbon emissions (something long forgotten in the twenty-first century). Those 1979 meetings began what Nathaniel Rich describes in his article (and now book) Losing Earth as the decade of missed opportunities in the fight against climate change. In 1989, diplomats from 60 countries finally gathered to pass a binding treaty on the subject. “Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous,” Rich writes. “Action had to be taken and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.”

Here was a vivid early display of that first lifeboat scenario: much talk, no action.

Those early efforts to grapple with climate change were all a response, in different ways, to what ecologist Garrett Hardin had called the “tragedy of the commons.” In a famous 1968 essay, he described an age-old problem: herders let their few cattle graze in a common pasture without thinking much about the future; there comes a time, however, when the livestock multiply or more farmers are attracted to the pasture by the rumor of free fodder and, sooner or later, all the grass is eaten, the topsoil blows away, and the field falls into ruin.

To prevent such a scenario, an intervention is obviously necessary. According to enthusiasts for laissez-faire capitalism, the invisible hand of the market should solve the problem, with the field being sold to the highest bidder. Fans of Soviet-style communism argued that nationalizing the property would ultimately protect it. As it turned out, neither capitalism nor communism had much of a track record when it came to protecting that commons. The invisible hand proved not to have a green thumb and neither did the all-too-visible hand of state planning.

Still, in the 1970s, it was commonplace to assume that the two systems would sooner or later converge at some social democratic point on the far horizon. On the environment, in other words, two wrongs would somehow make a right. In their 1974 book Ark II, Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich proposed adding a “planning branch” to the U.S. government that could address systemic problems like the environmental crisis by developing not only five-year plans, as in the Soviet Union, but 10-year or even 50-year plans as well.

Instead, Americans — and the rest of the world — ran screaming in the opposite direction. The debate in the 1970s about the possible use of state power to deal with pressing environmental concerns gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to the mania of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for an unfettered capitalism in which state planning would be a no-no (outside the Pentagon). Meanwhile, increased yields from industrial agriculture, modest environmental reforms by the major powers, and the technological advances that made globalization possible all seemed to diminish the urgency of the environmental crisis (except among environmentalists). Long lines at gas stations were a thing of the past and the air above most cities became clearer, while the world community dodged the bullet of ozone depletion through a rare instance of global cooperation. Spaceship Earth seemed to be motoring along quite well enough, thank you very much.

But there was one niggling detail that even eco-optimists could no longer ignore. Global temperatures were continuing to rise in a dramatic fashion, a problem impermeable to modest policy adjustments, free-market solutions, or even, it seemed, global agreements. Talking about climate change didn’t make climate change go away.

And so Leviathan has returned.

“Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being,” scientist James Lovelock said in 2010. “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war.” A slew of books in recent years have addressed the question of whether democracy can handle climate change. In Climate Leviathan, political theorists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright suspected that William Ophuls was prophetic, that a powerful hegemon would “seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to Earth, all in the name of saving life.” In The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith identified the possible solution as a Singaporean one: rule by an enlightened class of technocratic mandarins.

Not everyone, however, was so quick to give up on democracy. Libertarians, liberals, and radicals all rejected the eco-authoritarian option. Libertarians worried about limitations on individual rights. Liberals pointed out that only democracies can hold their leaders accountable for the direction they take, while “real existing authoritarianism” generally can’t. Radicals like environmentalist Naomi Klein urged not less but more democracy as climate activists, through pipeline blockades and fracking protests, challenged the nexus of transnational corporations and corrupt governments.

As in the 1970s, however, the international community has continued to prove far too weak to enforce anything, while the effects of climate change in the form of extreme weather, stunning heat waves, increasing inundations, and expanding wildfire seasons make themselves ever more evident.

Meanwhile, the United States, particularly under Donald Trump, is utterly uninterested in leading the way on reducing carbon emissions. So, there’s really only one viable candidate for a Climate Leviathan today.

China and Climate Change

Two weeks after the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989, 30 top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party gathered to endorse the government’s violent response to protestors. Previously, there had been profound disagreements in the Party over how to deal with the protest movement — and with the reform process more generally. After the tragedy of June 4th, a new consensus emerged among that country’s powerbrokers: China needed one strong leader, a “great helmsman” in the tradition of Mao Zedong who could eliminate factionalism.

Prescribing a solution to China’s leadership problems was one thing, filling that prescription something else entirely. The country’s post-Tiananmen leaders — Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao — were not exactly helmsman material. Within years, China was adrift, without a grand strategy or strong coordination from above.

Then, in 2012, along came Xi Jinping. In the years that followed, on the domestic side, he would promote a “Chinese dream” of economic prosperity and national dignity restored, a kind of Make China Great Again program. In foreign policy, he would unveil a Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure by land and sea to grow the economies of China’s neighbors, while making Beijing ever more central to markets ever farther afield.

Here was a Leviathan in the making: a strong, centralized state no longer hobbled by intra-party disputes, no longer paralyzed by contending public interests or movements in the streets demanding their rights. As the country’s president, Xi showed no hesitation about seizing control of the helm of state. After consolidating his power through anticorruption purges, he declared himself leader for life in 2018.

Meanwhile, he continued to redirect vast sums into renewable energy. By 2017, the government was planning to devote $360 billion to it through 2020, creating 13 million new jobs in that sector. China has in these years installed more solar panels and wind power generators than any other country on Earth, approximately three times those of second-place America. It leads in the production and export of most of the key components of a clean-energy future, from wind turbines to electric vehicles. Even more telling is how many renewable energy patents China has registered: 150,000. Number two again is the United States with around 100,000.

So, China has emerged as a seemingly capable Leviathan, combining state planning with a fervent embrace of market forces to fulfill the dreams of the convergence theorists of the 1970s, while creating a strong set of domestic incentives in favor of renewable energy.

Unfortunately, however, the Chinese solution looks like anything but a successful eco-authoritarian way to go, in part because Beijing is using its Belt and Road Initiative to maintain an unsustainable environmental status quo on an increasingly planetary scale. It matters little that Xi Jinping has labeled the massive project green and sustainable. The record so far suggests quite another story. For instance, China is now building or planning to build 300 coal-fired plants abroad as part of its global infrastructure push, even as it cuts down modestly on state contracts for similar plants at home. Beijing, it turns out, also has to deal with its equivalent of the West Virginia coal industry and is rewarding it with international contracts galore.

But coal plants are only the most obvious part of the problem. All the roads that China is building will be filled with motorists and truckers. All its new and refurbished ports will host huge gas-guzzling ships. Some of its projects threaten carbon-absorbing forests and other delicate ecosystems. And then there’s China’s not-so-hidden desire to use all of this future infrastructure to gain access to raw materials. In Africa alone, China is now investing more than $100 billion a year to get critical minerals. “The effort to secure these resources has spawned its own infrastructure boom that typically involves building large-scale roads, railways, and other infrastructure to transport commodities from interior areas to coastal ports for export,” writes journalist Basten Gokkon.

It’s not too late, of course, to green that Belt and Road project. Outfits like the Global Green Growth Initiative are working to shrink China’s overseas carbon footprint. A couple of years ago, China even issued its own $2.15 billion Green Climate Bond to finance renewables and energy efficiency.

But here’s the irony. When it comes to that Belt and Road Initiative, China is actually not Leviathan enough. Although the Party centralized authority in Xi Jinping’s hands, those infrastructure projects come from a variety of sourcesin China, including different government agencies, provinces competing with each other, and the business sector. It’s hard enough for the Chinese state, even with a new and more powerful Ministry of Ecology and Environment and a cadre of environmental police officers, to impose stringent standards within the country. More to the point, China has shown little interest or capacity when it comes to imposing them outside its borders.

Mutual Coercion

China is not actually auditioning for the job of eco-authoritarian Climate Leviathan — not yet, at least — while the rest of the authoritarians coming to the fore, like Donald Trump or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all seem fiercely focused on boosting carbon emissions, not limiting them. Meanwhile, it doesn’t look like patient negotiations at U.N. conferences are likely to come up with the necessary solutions, much less implement them, before the window of opportunity closes. No wonder Nathaniel Rich and others lament that humanity must now contemplate not just mitigation and adaptation in the face of the global warming crisis but outright failure.

On the horizon, however, is one potentially quite different kind of Climate Leviathan: the Green New Deal, or GND. As of now, it remains more a slogan than a worked-out plan, but it’s gaining currency within a Democratic Party competing for power in 2020 and interest in it is growing internationally as well. It might only be a couple of elections — in a few key countries — away from political viability.

To achieve the GND’s global goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the United States would have to lead the way with its own eco-version of a Belt and Road initiative, a massive infrastructure development project that would involve high-speed rail, the energy retrofitting of buildings, and huge investments in renewable energy (as well as the creation of staggering numbers of jobs). And it would have to do all this without compensating polluting industries with export contracts, as China has done.

Think of it as a potential future Apollo 11-style green moonshot: a focused mobilization of investment, construction, and administrative resolve to achieve what has hitherto been considered impossible.

That last element — administrative resolve — could prove the most challenging. The present crew of global right-wing populists are not just climate-change skeptics. Most are also committed to what Steve Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile guru, has called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In other words, they want to reduce the power of government in favor of the power of corporations (and the rich). They want to remove the government’s capacity to administer large-scale projects domestically and negotiate international accords that impinge on the sovereignty of the nation-state.

Ultimately, they want to eliminate what Garrett Hardin identified as the only way to avoid the tragedy of the commons: “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” To push through a Green New Deal in the United States, for instance, a distinctly non-Republican Congress would have to coerce a range of powerful interests (coal companies, oil and gas corporations, auto manufacturers, the Pentagon, and so on) to fall into line. And for any global pact that implements something similar, an international authority like the U.N. would have to coerce recalcitrant or non-compliant countries to do the same.

Something as transformative as the Green New Deal — a democratically achieved Climate Leviathan — will not come about because the Democratic Party or Xi Jinping or the U.N. secretary general suddenly realizes that radical change is necessary, nor simply through ordinary parliamentary and congressional procedure. Major change of this sort could only come from a far more basic form of democracy: people in the streets engaged in actions like school strikes and coal mine blockades. This is the kind of pressure that progressive legislators could then use to push through a mutually agreed-upon Green New Deal capable of building a powerful administrative force that might convince or coerce everyone into preserving the global commons.

Coercion: it’s not exactly a sexy campaign slogan. But if democracies don’t embrace moonshots like the Green New Deal — along with the administrative apparatus to force powerful interests to comply — then the increasing political and economic chaos of climate change will usher in yet more authoritarian regimes that offer an entirely different coercive agenda.

The Green New Deal isn’t just an important policy initiative. It may be the last democratic method of guiding Lifeboat Earth to a safe harbor.

Capital One Hack Exposes Personal Information of About 106 Million

SEATTLE—A security breach at Capital One Financial, one of the nation’s largest issuers of credit cards, compromised the personal information of about 106 million people, and in some cases the hacker obtained Social Security and bank account numbers.

It is among the largest security breaches of a major U.S. financial institution on record. The bank’s stock tumbled 7% Tuesday, the largest single-day decline in four years.

Paige A. Thompson, who uses the online handle “erratic” — was charged with a single count of computer fraud and abuse in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Thompson made an initial appearance in court and was ordered to remain in custody pending a detention hearing Thursday.

Federal agents began tracking Thompson online after being notified by Capital One of a possible breach in July.

On June 18, Thompson sent a message on Twitter to another user saying, “Ive basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, (expletive) dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it.”

The FBI raided Thompson’s residence Monday and seized digital devices. An initial search turned up files that referenced Capital One and “other entities that may have been targets of attempted or actual network intrusions.”

Thompson was a systems engineer at Amazon Web Services between 2015 and 2016, about three years before the breach took place.

A resume Paige Thompson posted on a Slack group she created says she worked on its front-end the interface with users and security updates.

While that service is used by Capital One, there is no evidence that Amazon’s cloud system was involved in the breach.

“AWS was not compromised in any way and functioned as designed,” a company spokesperson said Tuesday. “The perpetrator gained access through a misconfiguration of the web application and not the underlying cloud-based infrastructure. As Capital One explained clearly in its disclosure, this type of vulnerability is not specific to the cloud.”

Capital One Financial Corp. was notified by a third party on July 19 that their data had appeared on the code-hosting site GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. The McLean, Virginia, company says it immediately notified the FBI.

The FBI said a Twitter user who went by “erratic” sent a user direct messages warning about distributing the bank’s data, including names, birthdates and Social Security numbers. That user reported the message to Capital One.

Capital One said it believes it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud, but the investigation is ongoing.

The data breach involves about 100 million people in the U.S. and 6 million in Canada.

The bank said the bulk of the hacked data consisted of information supplied by consumers and small businesses who applied for credit cards between 2005 and early 2019. In addition to data such as phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and self-reported income, the hacker was also able to access credit scores, credit limits and balances, as well as fragments of transaction information from a total of 23 days in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

“While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” said Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank. “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”

Capital One Financial Corp., the nation’s seventh-largest commercial bank with $373.6 billion in assets as of June 30, is the latest U.S. company to suffer a major data breach in recent years.

In 2017, a data breach at Equifax, one of the major credit reporting companies, exposed the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of roughly half of the U.S. population.

Last week, Equifax agreed to pay at least $700 million to settle lawsuits over the breach in a settlement with federal authorities and states. The agreement includes up to $425 million in monetary relief to consumers.

Many major banks have sought to stem the risk of data breaches in recent years. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank began replacing customers’ debit cards several years ago with more secure chip-based cards. While the cards with chips are common these days, many merchants still rely on the older, less secure card-swiping equipment. Credit card companies have also beefed up fraud monitoring in the wake of high-profile data breaches that hit retailers such as Target and Home Depot.

The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. last year was just under $8 million, according to a study by IBM Security and Ponemon Institute.

A public defender appointed to represent Thompson did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

___

Associated Press reporter Alex Veiga in Los Angeles contributed to this article.

Democrats Must Give Up ‘Center Is Better’ Myth

On the night Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, the soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said those who oppose the Trump administration and the Republican Party “must try [to find] common ground” with them and stressed the importance of “a bipartisan marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong.”

Her words were an unwelcome shock for voters who had just elected freshmen lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. They and others ran on progressive, ambitious goals like a Green New Deal and single-payer health insurance that are far from bipartisan and took umbrage at big-money influence even in the Democratic Party. It also surprised some centrist Democratic voters who were looking forward to more oversight of the Trump administration and pushback against his policies.

It wasn’t the first time progressives clashed with establishment Democrats over the value of compromise in policymaking, or the first time those not aided by wealthy donors confronted those who are, The Intercept reporter Ryan Grim explains in his new book, From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement” (Strong Arm Press, 2019).

Grim, in his years of covering the Democratic Party for outlets like Politico, HuffPost and The Intercept, where he is now the D.C. bureau chief, has chronicled multiple instances of such situations, from Howard Dean’s attempt to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to elect Democrats to the House as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the rise of online advocacy and fundraising groups like MoveOn.org that popularized the kinds of small-dollar donations that propelled Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign.

In the book, Grim goes back even further, looking at the links between Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 congressional run and Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, the erosion of the New Deal Coalition and restructuring of alliances in the Democratic Party after labor unions lost power, and the rise of more conservative policies on health care and criminal justice reform during the Clinton years.

Grim talked to Truthdig’s Ilana Novick by phone about money in politics, the current myths powering the Democratic Party, the lessons learned from Jackson and what it means to be electable.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ilana Novick: Your book starts with Jackson’s presidential campaigns in the 1980s, particularly in 1988, and connects them to Ocasio-Cortez’s win in 2018. When and how did you first see the connection between the two politicians?

Ryan Grim: You know, the Jesse Jackson campaign, I was only 6 when he first ran, so it wasn’t something I paid attention to, but I always knew that Sanders had endorsed him, and I knew he [Sanders] was one of the only people, he and Paul Wellstone [a Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash in 2002], these are the only two white elected officials to endorse him [Jackson]. So I figured there must’ve been something interesting going on there. But, as I’d gone back and read about it, I was surprised to find that [Jackson’s campaign] had been as successful as it was, because today, if it’s talked about at all, [it’s seen] as just a quixotic kind of messaging campaign, when really it was a fundamental challenge to the structure of the party back then.

Right after Ocasio-Cortez won, I realized that people finally cared about this wing of the Democratic Party, finally cared about the insurgency and the struggle between the establishment wing and the left wing of the party. Now, because I’d been writing about it for more than 10 years, I knew that that had been lacking for a long time. It’s much easier to get traffic for stories about Tea Party shenanigans, or later, Donald Trump, or anything else. But writing about the Congressional Progressive Caucus was not a way to generate clicks.

IN: Speaking of messaging and policy, it seems like Jackson, more so than many politicians today, was able to connect economic suffering to racism, not seeing the two as mutually exclusive problems to be pitted against each other. I wonder why you think he was so effective in doing that, and what people in the Democratic Party could learn from that today?

RG: He was more sophisticated about how he did it then than are 99% of Democrats in how they do it today—and they’ve had 30 years to think about it. I think part of it, you have to remember that he was Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man. King himself was one of the best at making those connections through the March for Jobs and Justice through the Poor People’s Campaign, and I think part of it is because they were closer to the time when it was much more explicit. [President Lyndon B. Johnson] understood it very well, what was his famous quote? “If you can convince a white man he’s better than a black man, he’ll empty his pockets for you,” something like that. And so, people like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson watched how economic anxiety was explicitly used to undercut the civil rights movement.

They just very instinctively recognized the links between those two, because they watched it being done in reverse. And, you’re right, if somebody who has a casual understanding of Jesse Jackson would think about his ’84 and ’88 campaigns, they would say, “Oh well, this was probably an extension of the civil rights movement, and demanding a voice for African Americans at the Democratic table.” And, in fact, it was a legacy of the civil rights movement, but a legacy of the kind of Jobs and Justice, Poor People’s Campaign of the civil rights movement. And, he really led with economic violence as the thing he was running against.

The farm crisis at the time, and the hollowing out of manufacturing really played into it, because you’re watching it happen in front of you. Today, we look at Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin, and you can see the consequences of that hollowing out of the manufacturing industry. At the time, we were seeing it happening in real time.

IN: Your book details how, when the Democratic Party and its consultants decided which candidates they should run to help address that hollowing out, among other issues, they seem to choose those that are economically centrist, if not entirely pro-corporations, and are afraid to mention race. Why?

RG: Yeah, it’s this hangover from the ’80s where a certain element of the Democratic establishment convinced themselves that white backlash to the civil rights movement and to the counterculture is the reason they were pushed out of power. And that they just run as far away as they possibly can from those issues. And, you know, I think part of it also would be that if they’re leaning into it, then they would actually have to start to deliver on a policy basis. To do that, they might have to advocate for the universal programs that business interests would be against. So, it just becomes easier to just avoid it altogether, just bask in the corporate cash.

IN: You also push back against a lot of ideas about certain politicians, like Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, and even Howard Dean, about somehow being too liberal, and you’re kind of arguing that perhaps their policies weren’t necessarily that liberal at all, and I’m wondering why you think those ideas started in the first place, and why they’ve been so long-lasting in terms of the way that Democrats choose candidates to run in all kinds of elections?

RG: I think it’s because actual centrists recognize that if back-to-back losses by Carter and Mondale, and then Dukakis in ’88, are cast as failures of centrists and centrism, then the solution, strategically, would be, well, “Let’s go with the left-wing candidate.” There was a progressive primary challenger to Carter, Ted Kennedy, there was, like we said, we had Jesse Jackson and others in ’84 who ran to the left of Mondale, but the establishment just kind of organized around him immediately.

And then, in 1988, of course, there were progressives, including Jesse Jackson, who was the finalist against Dukakis. So, if the centrists keep winning the primaries, but then they lose the general elections, then you don’t want the conclusion to be that progressives ought to be nominated and take a different tack, then you just have to say, “Well, the problem is actually these liberal elements of these candidates, and actually Carter was too liberal, or Mondale was too liberal, or Dukakis from Massachusetts, he’s too liberal.” You have to kind of pretend that it was your opponents who failed rather than you, so that you can keep running your centrists until you can get somebody in. And, in ’92, they finally got [President Bill] Clinton in.

IN: Your mention of Clinton also reminds me of another person that the book spends quite a bit of time on, which was Rahm Emanuel, who was a key staffer for both Clinton and Obama. There’s an ongoing idea that his leadership of the DCCC was particularly helpful for Democrats in the 2006 midterm election. He advocated spending a lot of money on consultants, making expensive television ads and not spending more on field organizing. I’m curious why, even if these tactics didn’t help Democrats win, the party kept using them?

RG: Part of this has to do with the rise of television as the primary means of mass communication. You see the explosion of corporate influence and big money on politics rising at the same time as the influence of television. In 1980, Republicans had very much exploited television and 30-second television ads much faster and more effectively than Democrats had, and that was a big part of why they did so well in the Senate. And so, Rahm Emanuel—his first campaign was when he was 20 in 1980—he saw this. And he saw that Democrats needed to be competitive in that arena, which is true. A lot of these senators had pretty illustrious careers and high approval ratings, and they just couldn’t stand up to the weight of this barrage of television ads.

And one of the reasons that small dollars, and people, have a chance of making a comeback at this point is that the power of television is declining. It’s still big—if you spend several million dollars on television in a congressional district in a week, you’re going to move the needle. That’s the disturbing reality people need to understand, and you see it playing out in interesting ways.

IN: Any recent examples?

RG: Wisconsin, for instance. Just this spring, Democrats were on the brink of electing a [state] Supreme Court justice in a key election, and dark money and Republican groups came in in the last week or two and dumped millions of dollars in television ads, smashing the Democratic judicial candidate and elevating the Republican one.

The strategy and the tactics line up. You know, if you empower people at the grassroots, you’re empowering people that are the most excited about parties, you’re probably going to get the most progressive people. And people like Rahm are embarrassed by people like that and threatened by them, because they have different politics than the bankers or the other corporate interests who they kind of link their stake to.

IN: I also wanted to ask you about when and how Democrats decided that the only way to win a swing district was to run a centrist, Army veteran business owner who was tough on crime, or something like that? When did that become the only version of what is considered electable?

RG: This is a debate that has been happening in American politics since the very first congressional election. When the Republican Party was first formed in the 1850s, [party members]debated whether … a full-on abolitionist [could] win in a district that had people who opposed the extension of slavery but didn’t advocate its full abolition. They debated, “Well, if you run on abolition, you’ll draw people out who are excited about fighting for a moral good. So, you’ll inspire the base.” And others would say, “Well, you’re going to turn off the people who are kind of OK on some elements of slavery.”

We’ve been having this debate for 150, 200 years, and it never gets resolved, partly because a lot of it is district-dependent and candidate-dependent. [Also, it’s] because we don’t do … proportional parliamentary elections where people choose a party because they like its particular platform. Instead, we have these geographic districts where it really matters if the person went to college in the district, were they born in the district, were their parents from the district? Are they really an Akron person if they’re running in Akron, Ohio, or whatever. So much of that matters before you even get to what their policy positions are.

It’s just kind of an endless cycle until you get people to combine all the different elements in a single candidate. Like, Ocasio-Cortez would be a good example of somebody who is from the district, fits the demographic, she talked about this, but then has strongly progressive politics as well. And so, you can endlessly debate, was it her politics, was it who she is, was it where she comes from, was it her talent as a campaigner? It’s like, well, it was all of them in different degrees.

IN: One scenario that comes up multiple times in the book involves the role of consultants and the politicians that are close to them advising other politicians not to push too hard for certain policies that are seen as too extreme. I’m thinking in particular of the 2009 battle over whether to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act, and how much power could have been taken away from insurance companies but wasn’t. And then politicians who voted for the compromise version still often lost to conservative Tea Partiers in the 2010 midterms who accused them of being socialists. The Democrats lost control of Congress anyway, but the people giving them advice still have power. Why?

RG: I think there are two key lessons to take from 2010. One is that you’ve got to go as big as you possibly can when you can, because the window isn’t open for very long, and if you do something that is ultimately popular, even if you lose power, it’s going to be difficult for the other party to repeal. So, it’s like almost all of the Affordable Care Act was. Once people were getting the benefit, they didn’t want to lose it. So, you need to get the benefit to people faster.

Democrats did a completely horrible job on the foreclosure crisis, and they did not turn the economy around anywhere near fast enough. And they did not deploy their kind of grassroots army that they built up throughout 2008 to try to pressure Washington to do a much bigger economic stimulus. You can check the numbers, but on Election Day 2010, unemployment was something like 10% and by then Democrats were getting the blame for it, even though the crash happened under Bush.

A third kind of related lesson is that you’re going to lose power. You shouldn’t structure a strategy around the notion that you’re going to be a permanent everlasting majority; that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be to take power, put into place policies that make people’s lives better, and policies that can endure if you lose power—if and when you lose power. Then it goes to the question of, what’s the purpose of the political party, is it to help a group of people take and maintain power, or is it to actually improve the lives of people the party represents?

IN: Can you think of any examples, either in 2018, or even before, when a politician either won or came close to winning, as a Democrat, and they stuck to their progressive policy positions in the face of establishment backlash?

RG: One example I mention in the book is Barack Obama. Democratic voters then were told: “This guy can’t win. His name’s Barack Hussein Obama, the country is not ready for a black president.” And they went with it, and he won. But, in 2018, [Rep.] Katie Porter [of California’s Orange County] I think is a pretty good example. She ran in a Republican-held district, and she did not trim her sails at all, and she’s gotten here, and she beat an establishment-backed primary candidate, and then she won in the general election. Then you had a bunch of candidates who kind of low-key endorsed things like Medicare for All, and went on to win despite the arguments from Washington that it would doom your campaign.

Even people who are talked about now as new-Dems or centrists, like Colin Allred in Dallas, he ran on Medicare for All. And he won his primary and then he won the general election, and he since has been less than an unapologetic … progressive, but it shows you can win those campaigns. And Kara Eastman came very close to winning in Omaha when the DCCC failed her. She was completely doomed, but she came awfully close. Then on the Senate side, people like John Tester, he’s now won three times in Montana, kind of bucking the consultant wisdom each time, in 2006 when he first won he ran as an anti-war candidate, when Rahm was telling people not to oppose the war.

IN: You write about how, even as the Iraq War was getting underway, a bright spot was the rise of online fundraising. Organizers for the Howard Dean campaign and organizations like MoveOn.org started to capitalize on the internet as a tool for fundraising. What groups do you think have really done this well, and what can learn from 2003 and 2004 going into 2020?

RG: I think trying to build capacity from one election to the next, and linking your social welfare organizations and your electoral organizations is really important. There’s this split where people talk about inside and outside, or electoral and non-electoral, and I understand that there are tax implications that need to be grappled with to do it. But there’s got to be more of an effort in organizing regular people in ways that can get them quickly involved in campaigns both in donating and volunteering, and then turning out to vote. That’s going to be increasingly important as the total collapse of an agreed-upon media ecosystem really starts to take effect in elections. You need your party to be its own organism that can rally against that kind of stuff.

And, you have to do it pretty quickly and take a lot of the profit motive out of the consultancies, which profit by keeping these campaigns siloed, and these projects siloed. Like, if the party had a massive database it was constantly building that could be used by organizations and candidates, then consultants would be able to cash in a lot less. So that’s something they need to grapple with, what they’re going to do, just going to have to, every year, start re-creating the wheel.

IN: Are there any 2020 candidates you think are learning from the mistakes you write about?

RG: I think both Sanders and Warren are trying it, and so if one of them wins the nomination, they’ll be putting it to the test. But then, there’ll be the risk that the center [is afraid of running on more progressive policies]. … It’s sad the establishment doesn’t want to see that test given a fair shot and would rather see it go down.

 

NBC Debate Questions Show Media Is Out of Touch With Voters

With Round 2 of the Democratic primary debates beginning today, it’s worth looking back at what was asked in the first round to see whether the issues of most concern to Democratic voters are being addressed.

The initial debates, hosted by NBC, focused heavily on the economy (19% of questions), healthcare (18%) and immigration (18%) — central issues to many voters, to be sure. But other issues that Democrats want to hear about got short shrift. Climate change, which multiple polls put second only to healthcare as a top issue for Democratic voters, got only 10 questions (8%), while core issues around race and women’s rights got eight (6%) and five (4%), respectively. Two questions were asked about LGBTQ concerns.

Savannah Guthrie: “What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?”

The first question on the first night (6/26/19) gave a pretty good sense of the network’s approach to the debates. Turning to Elizabeth Warren, NBC‘s Savannah Guthrie asked:

You have many plans — free college, free childcare, government healthcare, cancellation of student debt, new taxes, new regulations, the breakup of major corporations. But this comes at a time when 71 percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60 percent of Democrats. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?

Who, exactly, is worrying about these plans being risky? Guthrie’s sleight-of-hand suggests it’s Democratic voters, when in fact they overwhelmingly support pretty much all of the plans she listed. (Warren’s “new taxes” are highly popular wealth and corporate taxes.) And, in fact, even the general population tends to support such policies. But the fiscally conservative, risk-averse, largely-happy-with-the-status-quo voter—which, by the way, probably fits the profile of most of the corporate media questioners—would haunt much of the debate.

A single question was asked about education, but “free college” was mentioned among other social welfare policies in four other questions, all of which were framed around cost, or supposed pragmatism, rather than benefits—e.g., asking whether such policies give “a false sense of what’s actually achievable,” or whether “Democrats have a responsibility to explain how they will pay for every proposal they make along those lines” (6/27/19).

Chuck Todd: “What’s your message to a voter who…suddenly feels as if government’s telling them how to live?”

Climate, too, got the “how will you pay for this” treatment in two of its 10 questions, in addition to a question asking Beto O’Rourke to respond to a hypothetical voter who—in response to “big changes,” like “switching to renewable energy [and] pushing to replace gas-powered cars in favor of electric ones”—”feels as if government’s telling them how to live and ordering them how to live.” Meanwhile, none of the environment-related questions raised the issue of how much not addressing the climate crisis will cost, or foregrounded the fears of voters concerned about insufficient government action on climate. The Green New Deal was not mentioned at all.

Questions about organized labor were also notably absent, as were the issues of campaign finance and Citizens United—a noteworthy omission, when several of the candidates have made a point of swearing off money from various corporate interests or Super PAC money.

The foreign policy questions, 11% of the total, were notably bellicose, with Lester Holt asking three different candidates, “How would you stand up to China?” and Chuck Todd asking everyone in the first debate to give a one-word answer for “greatest political threat.”

The threat the US poses to the world might have been a relevant issue, given that the US is involved in ongoing drone wars in at least six countries, and at least 5,000 civilians in Iraq and Syria have been killed in drone attacks and other US and US-allied airstrikes since the beginning of Trump’s presidency. But the only drone question asked in the first debates was about worries that drones will take over domestic jobs.

Compared to the questioning in the early Democratic presidential primaries for the 2016 election, there was a dramatically greater focus on healthcare (from 2% to 18%) and immigration (from 6% to 18%). Questions about foreign policy dropped significantly, from 25% to 11%. Non-policy questions, which often eat up an outsize portion of debate time with a focus on non-substantive issues like electability, personal questions or general questions about other candidates, also dropped significantly, from 21% to 2%. New this year were a series of questions about governance: ten questions about bipartisanship, gridlock, court-nominee obstruction and damage to our political institutions.

 TOPIC
 NUMBER
 PERCENT


 Economic
   24
  19


 Healthcare
   22
  18


 Immigration
   22
  18


 International
   14
  11


 Guns
    11
   9


 Environment
   10
   8


 Governance
   10
   8


 Race
     8
   6


 Women
     5
   4


 Non-Policy
     3
   2


 LGBTQ
     2
   2


 Education
     1
   1


 Total Questions
 124

Methodology: FAIR counted all questions except for requests for opening or closing statements, interjections, clarifications and follow-ups to the same candidate on the same subject. Some questions were classified as belonging to more than one category, so total percentages exceed 100%.

Suburban Parents Giving Up Custody to Help Kids Get College Aid

ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates.

Dozens of suburban Chicago families, perhaps many more, have been exploiting a legal loophole to win their children need-based college financial aid and scholarships they would not otherwise receive, court records and interviews show.

Coming months after the national “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, this tactic also appears to involve families attempting to gain an advantage in an increasingly competitive and expensive college admissions system.

Parents are giving up legal guardianship of their children during their junior or senior year in high school to someone else — a friend, aunt, cousin or grandparent. The guardianship status then allows the students to declare themselves financially independent of their families so they can qualify for federal, state and university aid, a ProPublica Illinois investigation found.

“It’s a scam,” said Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Wealthy families are manipulating the financial aid process to be eligible for financial aid they would not be otherwise eligible for. They are taking away opportunities from families that really need it.”

While ProPublica Illinois uncovered this practice in north suburban Lake County, where almost four dozen such guardianships were filed in the past 18 months, similar petitions have been filed in at least five other counties and the practice may be happening throughout the country. ProPublica Illinois is still investigating.

Borst said he first became suspicious when a high school counselor from an affluent Chicago suburb called him about a year ago to ask why a particular student had been invited to an orientation program for low-income students. Borst checked the student’s financial aid application and saw she had obtained a legal guardian, making her eligible to qualify for financial aid independently.

The University of Illinois has since identified 14 applicants who did the same: three who just completed their freshman year and 11 who plan to enroll this fall, Borst said.

ProPublica Illinois found more than 40 guardianship cases fitting this profile filed between January 2018 and June 2019 in the Chicago suburbs of Lake County alone. The parents involved in these cases include lawyers, a doctor and an assistant schools superintendent, as well as insurance and real estate agents. A number of the children are high-achieving scholars, athletes and musicians who attend or have been accepted to a range of universities, from large public institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Missouri and Indiana University, to smaller private colleges.

ProPublica Illinois reached parents or guardians in 15 of these cases and none agreed to speak on the record. Some hung up, others declined to comment and some demanded anonymity.

Borst said the university told the three students midway through last school year that their university-based financial aid would be reduced. “We didn’t hear any complaint, and that is also a big red flag,” Borst said. “If they were needy, they would have come in to talk with us.”

The university now asks more questions of students who have recently entered into a guardianship, including whether they have contact with their parents, who they live with and who pays for their health insurance and cellphone bill. The questions have deterred some families from continuing to seek university aid, Borst said.

While the university has discretion over offering institutional aid, it is obligated to distribute the federal and state grants for needy students, known as the Pell Grant and the state Monetary Award Program, or MAP grant in Illinois, Borst said. Combined, they can total about $11,000 a year.

He said the university has alerted the U.S. Department of Education and officials at the Illinois agency that administers state financial aid, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission. An ISAC spokeswoman said the agency has not yet been told about a specific case, but that it would alert the state attorney general and the U.S. Department of Education if necessary. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman said he could neither confirm nor deny current or potential investigations.

In Illinois last year, about 82,000 students who were eligible for the MAP grant, up to about $5,000, did not receive it because there wasn’t enough money. The grant is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.

When filling out the application for financial aid, called the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, students have to prove formal separation from their parents to qualify as an independent. One of the few ways to do that is through a legal guardianship change. Students cannot just declare financial independence — even in cases where parents are able to pay but refuse to do so, Borst said.

According to the U.S. Department of Education website, “a student in legal guardianship does not need to report parent information on the FAFSA form because he or she is considered an independent student.” Independent students are evaluated for financial aid based on their own income and resources and not that of their parents.

“It’s not like these families are close or on the tipping point” of being eligible for the aid, Borst said. “I don’t know how big this is, but I hope we can nip this in the bud now. … If it is legal, at what point is it wrong?”

The process starts in the courthouse.

Nearly all the cases identified by ProPublica Illinois were handled by one of two law firms: The Rogers Law Group in Deerfield, which handled most of them, and the Kabbe Law Group in Naperville. The only case filed by a different firm involved the family of Rick Rogers, of the Rogers Law Group.

The petitions filed by Rogers, whose firm specializes in real estate, are very similar, with language saying the guardianship would be in the minors’ “best interest” and typically citing educational reasons.

Many, for example, say: “The Guardian can provide educational and financial support and opportunities to the minor that her parents could not otherwise provide.”

Reached by phone, Rogers declined several times to comment about the families he represented, the process or why he sought a legal guardian for his son.

The Illinois Probate Act, the law that governs guardianship, does not specify circumstances in which guardianship should be denied. According to Illinois law, a court can appoint a guardian if the parents consent, the minor agrees and the court determines it is in the minor’s best interest. Even if a parent is able to care for the child, the court can approve the guardianship if the parents voluntarily relinquish custody of the child.

That is what was happening routinely in the Lake County courthouse until late last month, when Judge Joseph Salvi, who recently began hearing guardianship cases, questioned a petition involving a high school student who lives with his parents in suburban Long Grove. The judge denied guardianship and, in response, the attorney for the guardian, a “close family friend” of the student, wrote a brief arguing why the judge should use his “broad authority” to grant the guardianship.

In the brief, attorney Mari Berlin argued that the student’s parents are finalizing a divorce and can’t afford to support his college education. It said that the family is “working with a Certified College Planner to help him find a way to independently support himself through college, with specific focus on how to afford tuition.”

Berlin wrote in the brief that the student, who dreams of becoming a doctor, would be best served by a guardianship “that would allow him to attain the independent status necessary to achieve his goal.”

Berlin, of the Kabbe Law Group, said the firm has represented families in about a dozen cases in Lake County. She said the firm has filed between 20 and 30 cases in all, with varying success, throughout the Chicago area during the past two years, including in Kane, Will, DuPage, Cook and McHenry counties.

Berlin said families who are going this route are in a financial position where their income is too high to qualify for financial aid but they still will struggle to pay for college. While this is an atypical use of guardianship, Berlin said, families have a strong legal basis for bringing the cases. The law doesn’t preclude it, she said.

“It’s a solution they have been able to find as college costs go up and they are unable to pay,” she said. “It is in the best interest of the minor, which is the statute’s purpose.”

In typical guardianship cases, an adult is stepping in to care for a child after an unexpected or troubling event: Mothers are homeless, seeking mental health care or working two jobs and can’t care for a child, fathers are in prison, addicted to drugs or deported. One Lake County guardianship case describes a child suffering from “severe physical and emotional abuse” by a parent, while another pleads: “He is a good kid. He is alone. He needs someone to take care of him.”

Those are the types of cases Rebekah Rashidfarokhi usually deals with at Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, a legal aid group that she said handles more than 300 guardianship cases in Cook County annually. While she said she hasn’t seen the so-called college guardianship cases, she said the law is intended to address the life of a child as a minor and who will care for the child on a day-to-day basis, not an “11th-hour petition” right before the teen turns 18.

“That’s not the way guardianship is supposed to be used,” she said. “If someone is trying to do that at the very last minute, it seems that they might be trying to take advantage of the system.”

The children obtaining guardianships for educational opportunities have attended some of the area’s most prestigious schools, including Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire and Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook. Others go to high schools in Vernon Hills, Grayslake, Libertyville and Lake Forest.

A guardian interviewed by ProPublica Illinois said he felt conflicted when some family friends asked him to be their daughter’s guardian. He wanted to help the girl, whose work ethic and grades he admires.

“I did wrestle with this,” said the man, who agreed to speak as long as he was not identified. He said his wife works at a university and “knows it from the other side,” he said. “And her comment was, ‘Is it going to deprive someone else of … financial aid?’ And so that’s the issue. I was told it does not.”

“It’s one of these gray areas, and my heart wanted me to do it for the family,” the man said. “But I also have a conscience. I wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing.”

The man eventually agreed to become the teenager’s guardian, though the guardianship lasted only about a month, until she turned 18. He said that he did not provide financial support for her, and that she did not live in his home.

The man said he asked “a lot” of questions of Rogers, the attorney on the case, and a college consultant named Lora Georgieva with whom the family worked.

Georgieva runs a Lincolnshire-based college consulting company, Destination College, which offers “strategies to lower tuition expenses.” The company’s logo is a graduation cap with dollar bills spilling out of it. In video testimonials, clients praise the company for saving them money.

She is tied to at least several of the families, as well as to Rogers, the attorney, who is also featured in the video.

The description for the company’s “premier” services includes a “College Financial Plan, Using Income and Asset Shifting Strategies to Increase Your Financial and Merit Aid and Lower Out of Pocket Tuition Expenses.”

Reached Monday morning, Georgieva said she was “in the middle of something” and would call later. She then contacted an attorney, Phillip Zisook, who called ProPublica Illinois on her behalf to say she was worried about being depicted in a false light.

Zisook said he would relay ProPublica Illinois’ questions to Georgieva. As of publication time, she had not responded.

Mark Kantrowitz, a leading financial aid expert and publisher and vice president of research for savingforcollege.com, called the guardianship changes “an extreme measure.”

“This is the first time I have heard of something so brazen,” Kantrowitz said. “It’s completely unethical.”

Universities began responding Monday afternoon to the ProPublica Illinois investigation.

Christian Basi, a University of Missouri spokesman, said the school is investigating to ensure that guardianships are not filed “simply to try and gain financial advantage.” He said university officials are flagging accounts that may have benefited from this practice and have been in contact with other schools in the Midwest.

“We are and would be extremely disappointed with anyone who would try to change their information with the sole purpose of taking money from a need-based program when they would typically not be eligible,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the University of Wisconsin-Madison said the university may review and adjust its financial aid award at any point if evidence emerges that a student is actually receiving parental or other financial support not reported on the FAFSA.