Chris Hedges's Blog, page 207

Former Presidential Candidate Ross Perot Dies at 89

DALLAS — H. Ross Perot, the colorful, self-made Texas billionaire who rose from a childhood of Depression-era poverty and twice ran for president as a third-party candidate, has died. He was 89.

Perot, whose 19% of the vote in 1992 stands among the best showings by an independent candidate in the past century, died early Tuesday at his home in Dallas surrounded by his devoted family, family spokesman James Fuller said.

As a boy in Texarkana, Texas, Perot delivered newspapers from the back of a pony. He earned his billions in a more modern way, however. After attending the U.S. Naval Academy and becoming a salesman for IBM, he went his own way — creating and building Electronic Data Systems Corp., which helped other companies manage their computer networks.

Yet the most famous event in his career didn’t involve sales and earnings; he financed a private commando raid in 1979 to free two EDS employees who were being held in a prison in Iran. The tale was turned into a book and a movie.

Perot first became known to Americans outside of business circles by claiming that the U.S. government left behind hundreds of American soldiers who were missing or imprisoned at the end of the Vietnam War. Perot fanned the issue at home and discussed it privately with Vietnamese officials in the 1980s, angering the Reagan administration, which was formally negotiating with Vietnam’s government.

Perot’s wealth, fame and confident prescription for the nation’s economic ills propelled his 1992 campaign against President George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. Some Republicans blamed him for Bush’s loss to Clinton as Perot garnered the largest percentage of votes for a third-party candidate since former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 bid.

During the campaign, Perot spent $63.5 million of his own money and bought 30-minute television spots. He used charts and graphs to make his points, summarizing them with a line that became a national catchphrase: “It’s just that simple.”

Perot’s second campaign four years later was far less successful. He was shut out of presidential debates when organizers said he lacked sufficient support. He got just 8% of the vote, and the Reform Party that he founded and hoped to build into a national political force began to fall apart.

However, Perot’s ideas on trade and deficit reduction remained part of the political landscape. He blamed both major parties for running up a huge federal budget deficit and allowing American jobs to be sent to other countries. The movement of U.S. jobs to Mexico, he said, created a “giant sucking sound.”

Perot continued to speak out about federal spending for many years. In 2008, he launched a website to highlight the nation’s debt with a ticker that tracked the rising total, a blog and a chart presentation.

Henry Ross Perot was born in Texarkana on June 27, 1930. His father was a cotton broker; his mother a secretary. Perot said his family survived the Depression relatively well through hard work and by managing their money carefully.

Young Perot’s first job was delivering papers in a poor, mostly black part of town from his pony, Miss Bee. When the newspaper tried to cut his commission, he said he complained to the publisher — and won. He said that taught him to take problems straight to the top.

From Texarkana, Perot went to the U.S. Naval Academy even though he had never been on a ship or seen the ocean. After the Navy, Perot joined International Business Machines in 1955 and quickly became a top salesman. In his last year at IBM, he filled his sales quota for the year in January.

In 1962, with $1,000 from his wife, Margot, Perot founded Electronic Data Systems. Hardware accounted for about 80% of the computer business, Perot said, and IBM wasn’t interested in the other 20%, including services.

Many of the early hires at EDS were former military men, and they had to abide by Perot’s strict dress code — white shirts, ties, no beards or mustaches — and long workdays. Many had crew cuts, like Perot.

The company’s big break came in the mid-1960s when the federal government created Medicare and Medicaid, the health programs for seniors, the disabled and the poor. States needed help in running the programs, and EDS won contracts — starting in Texas — to handle the millions of claims.

EDS first sold stock to the public in 1968, and overnight, Perot was worth $350 million. His fortune doubled and tripled as the stock price rose steadily.

In 1984, he sold control of the company to General Motors Corp. for $2.5 billion and received $700 million in a buyout. In 2008, EDS was sold to Hewlett-Packard Co.

Perot went on to establish another computer-services company, Perot Systems Corp. He retired as CEO in 2000 and was succeeded by his son, Ross Perot Jr. In 2009, Dell Inc. bought Perot Systems.

In September 2011, Forbes magazine estimated Perot’s wealth at $3.5 billion and ranked him No. 91 on its list of richest Americans.

Perot was not immune to mistakes in business. His biggest might have been a 1971 investment in duPont Glore Forgan, then one of the biggest brokerage houses on Wall Street. The administration of President Richard Nixon asked Perot to save the company to head off an investor panic, and he also poured money into another troubled brokerage, Walston & Co., but wound up losing much of his $100 million investment.

It was during the Nixon administration that Perot became involved in the issue of U.S. prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Perot said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked him to lead a campaign to improve treatment of POWs held in North Vietnam. Perot chartered two jets to fly medical supplies and the wives of POWs to Southeast Asia. They were not allowed into North Vietnam, but the trip attracted enormous media attention.

After their release in 1973, some prisoners said conditions in the camps had improved after the failed missions.

In 1979, the Iranian government jailed two EDS executives and Perot vowed to win their release.

“Ross came to the prison one day and said, ‘We’re going to get you out,’” one of the men, Paul Chiapparone, told The Associated Press. “How many CEOs would do that today?”

Perot recruited retired U.S. Army Special Forces Col. Arthur “Bull” Simons to lead a commando raid on the prison. A few days later, the EDS executives walked free after the shah’s regime fell and mobs stormed the prison. Simons’ men sneaked the executives out of the country and into Turkey. The adventure was recalled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and a TV miniseries.

In later years, Perot pushed the Veterans Affairs Department to study neurological causes of Gulf War syndrome, a mysterious illness reported by many soldiers who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He scoffed at officials who blamed the illnesses on stress — “as if they are wimps” — and paid for additional research.

Perot received a special award from the VA for his support of veterans and the military in 2009.

In Texas, Perot led commissions on education reform and crime. He was given many honorary degrees and awards for business success and patriotism.

While he worked at Perot Systems in suburban Dallas, entire hallways were filled with memorabilia from soldiers and POWs that Perot had helped. His personal office was dominated by large paintings of his wife and five children and bronze sculptures by Frederic Remington.

Several original Norman Rockwell paintings hung in the waiting area, and Perot once told a visiting reporter that he tried to live by Rockwell’s ethics of hard, honest work and family.

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Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.

Defeating the Right’s Favorite Talking Point for Good

The Democratic Party has clearly swung to the progressive left, with candidates in the first round of presidential debates coming up with one program after another to help the poor, the disadvantaged and the struggling middle class. Proposals range from a universal basic income to Medicare for all to a Green New Deal to student debt forgiveness and free college tuition. The problem, as Stuart Varney observed on “Fox Business,” is that no one has a viable way to pay for it all without raising taxes, a hard sell to voters. If robbing Peter to pay Paul is the only alternative, the proposals will die for lack of funding—just as Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill did. 

Fortunately, there is another alternative, one that no one seems to be talking about—at least no one on the presidential debate stage. In Japan, it is a hot topic; and in China, it is evidently taken for granted: The government can generate the money it needs simply by creating it on the books of its own banks. Leaders in China and Japan recognize that stimulating the economy is not a zero-sum game, in which funds are just shuffled from one pot to another. To grow the economy and increase the gross domestic product, demand (money) must go up along with supply. New money needs to be added to the system; and that is what China and Japan have been doing, very successfully.

Before the 2008-09 global banking crisis, China’s GDP increased by an average of 10% per year for 30 years. The money supply increased right along with it, created on the books of its state-owned banks. Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been following suit, with massive economic stimulus funded by correspondingly massive purchases of the government’s debt by its central bank, using money simply created with computer keystrokes.

This has occurred without driving up prices, the dire result predicted by U.S. economists who subscribe to classical monetarist theory. In the 20 years from 1998 to 2018, China’s M2 money supply grew from just over 10 trillion yuan to 180 trillion yuan ($11.6 trillion), an 18-fold increase. Yet China closed 2018 with a consumer inflation rate that was under 2%. Price stability has been maintained because China’s GDP has grown at nearly the same fast clip, by a factor of 13 over 20 years.

Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s massive stimulus programs, called “Abenomics,” have been funded through the Bank of Japan. The central bank has now “monetized” nearly 50% of the government’s debt, turning it into new money by purchasing it with yen created on the bank’s books. If the U.S. Federal Reserve did that, it would own $11 trillion in U.S. government bonds, four times what it holds now. Yet Japan’s M2 money supply has not even doubled in 20 years, while the U.S. money supply has grown by 300%; and Japan’s inflation rate remains stubbornly below the Bank of Japan’s 2% target. Abe’s stimulus programs have not driven up prices. In fact, deflation remains a greater concern than inflation in Japan, despite unprecedented debt monetization by its central bank.

China’s Economy: A Giant Ponzi Scheme or a New Economic Model?

Critics have long called China’s economy a Ponzi scheme, doomed to collapse in the end; and for 40 years it has continued to prove them wrong. According to a June report by the Congressional Research Service:

Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” Such growth has enabled China, on average, to double its GDP every eight years and helped raise an estimated 800 million people out of poverty. China has become the world’s largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), manufacturer, merchandise trader, and holder of foreign exchange reserves.

This massive growth has been funded with credit created on the books of China’s banks, most of which are state-owned. Even in the U.S., of course, credit is simply created on the books of banks; that is what most of our money supply is. The difference is that the Chinese government can and does intervene to direct where that credit goes. In a July 2018 article titled “China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy,” Noah Smith suggests that China’s novel approach to macroeconomic stabilization by regulating bank credit represents a new economic model, one that may hold valuable lessons for developed economies. He writes:

Many economists would see this approach as hopelessly ad hoc, haphazard, and interventionist—not the kind of thing any developed country would want to rely on. And yet, it seems to have carried China successfully through several crises, while always averting the catastrophic financial crash that outside observers have been warning about for years.

Abenomics, Helicopter Money and Modern Monetary Theory

Smith has also written about Japan’s unique model. After Abe crushed his opponents in October 2017, Smith wrote on Bloomberg News, “Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has figured out a novel and interesting way to stay in power—govern pragmatically, focus on the economy and give people what they want.” He said everyone who wanted a job had one; small and midsize businesses were doing well; and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented program of monetary easing had provided easy credit for corporate restructuring without generating inflation. Abe had also vowed to make both preschool and college free.

Like China’s economic model, Abenomics has been called a Ponzi scheme, funded by central bank-created “free” money. But it is a strategy that has been working for the economy. Even the once-dubious International Monetary Fund has declared Abenomics to be a success.

The Bank of Japan’s massive bond-buying program has also been called “helicopter money”—a policy in which the central bank directly finances government spending by underwriting bonds—and it has been compared to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which similarly posits that the government can spend money into existence with central bank funding. As Nathan Lewis wrote in Forbes in February:

In practice, something like “MMT” has reached a new level of sophistication these days, exemplified by Japan. This really is modern; but I haven’t seen any “MMT” theorist who can explain it. The Bank of Japan now holds government bonds amounting to more than 100% of GDP. In other words, the government has managed to finance itself “with the printing press” to the amount of about 100% of GDP, with no inflationary consequences. [Emphasis added.]

Japanese officials have resisted comparisons with both helicopter money and MMT, arguing that Japanese law does not allow the government to sell its bonds directly to the central bank. As in the U.S., the government’s bonds must be sold on the open market, a limitation that also prevents the U.S. government from directly monetizing its debt. But as Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Kikuo Iwata observed in a 2013 Reuters article, where the bonds are sold does not matter. What is important is that the central bank has agreed to buy them, and it is here that U.S. banking law diverges from the laws of both Japan and China.

Central Banking Asia-style

When the U.S. Treasury sells bonds on the open market, it can only hope the Fed will buy them. Any attempt by the president or the legislature to influence Fed policy is considered a gross interference with the sacrosanct independence of the central bank.

In theory, the central banks of China and Japan are also independent. Both are members of the Bank for International Settlements, which stresses the importance of maintaining the stability of the currency and the independence of the central bank; and both countries revised their banking laws in the 1990s to better reflect those policies. But their banking laws still differ in significant ways from those of the U.S.

In Japan, the Bank of Japan is legally free to set interest rates, but it must cooperate closely with the Ministry of Finance in setting policy. Article 4 of the 1997 Bank of Japan Act says:

The Bank of Japan shall, taking into account the fact that currency and monetary control is a component of overall economic policy, always maintain close contact with the government and exchange views sufficiently, so that its currency and monetary control and the basic stance of the government’s economic policy shall be mutually compatible.

Unlike in the U.S., Abe can negotiate with the head of the central bank to buy the government’s bonds, ensuring that the debt is in fact turned into new money that will stimulate domestic economic growth; and he is completely within his legal rights in doing it.

The leverage of China’s central government over its central bank is even stronger than the Japanese prime minister’s. The 1995 Law of the People’s Republic of China on the People’s Bank of China states:

The People’s Bank of China shall, under the leadership of the State Council, formulate and implement monetary policies, guard against and eliminate financial risks, and maintain financial stability.

The State Council has final decision-making power on such things as the annual money supply, interest rates and exchange rates; and it has used this power to stabilize the economy by directing and regulating the issuance of bank credit, the new Chinese macroeconomic model that Noah Smith says holds important lessons for us.

The successful six-year run of Abenomics, along with China’s decades of unprecedented economic growth, have proven that governments can indeed monetize their debts, expanding the money supply and stimulating the economy, without driving up consumer prices. The monetarist theories of U.S. policymakers are obsolete and need to be discarded.

Kyouryoku, the Japanese word for cooperation, is composed of characters that mean “together strength”—“stronger by working together.” This is a recognized principle in Asian culture, and it is an approach we would do well to adopt. What U.S. presidential candidates from both parties should talk about is how to modify the law so that Congress, the administration and the central bank can work together in setting monetary policy, following the approaches successfully modeled in China and Japan.

Joe Biden Was Much More Than a Cheerleader for the Iraq War

During the 2008 presidential primary debates, Barack Obama reminded Americans that unlike Hillary Clinton, he did not support the war in Iraq. As Politico wrote at the time, Obama implied that Clinton’s yes vote showed “bad judgement.” Eight years later, Donald Trump used Clinton’s Iraq War vote against her multiple times, including in the third presidential debate. Whether or not he lied about his own contradictory record on the war was beside the point. Twice, a yes vote for an unpopular war proved to be a liability for the candidate who cast it.

The Iraq war continues to be an issue in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Joe Biden may now be the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination, but as Branko Marcetic writes in In These Times, Biden’s “2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War leaves him with a particularly glaring vulnerability.”

In fact, Marcetic continues, “as an experienced and respected voice on foreign policy, a powerful Democrat, and someone widely perceived as a dove due to his opposition to the Vietnam War, Biden’s backing of regime change in Iraq was crucial to Bush’s effort of selling the public on the war.”

Currently, Biden continues to enjoy a comfortable lead in public opinion polls pitting him against both fellow Democrats and President Trump. In a July Washington Post-ABC News poll, which presented respondents with a hypothetical match-up against Donald Trump, Biden was favored 53% to the president’s 43%. This lead, however, is not consistent among all age groups, and may not survive closer scrutiny of Biden’s foreign policy.

A May poll from Politico and Morning Consult showed that 42% of respondents ages 18 to 29 say Biden’s record on Iraq makes them less likely to vote for him. The poll revealed that Democratic voters overall were more upset by the Iraq issue than any other issue that has plagued Biden on the campaign trail, including, Politico points out, the 1994 crime bill and Biden’s votes in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Marcetic’s detailed analysis of Biden’s record reveals that he, unlike Clinton, not only voted for the war, but “was a leading Democratic voice in its favor, and played an important role in persuading the public of its necessity and, more broadly, laying the groundwork for Bush’s invasion.”

Biden wasn’t always a hawk on foreign policy. Marcetic points out that he was against the Vietnam War as well as the first Gulf War.

Then came the 9/11 attacks, unfavorable coverage from home state newspapers in Delaware, and seemingly, a change of heart. Marcetic writes that Biden, who was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “quickly became a close ally of the Bush administration in its prosecution of that war.” The connection went even further, Marcetic writes, adding that “The White House installed a special secure phone line to Biden’s home, and he and three other members of Congress met privately with Bush in October 2001 to come up with a positive public relations message for the war in Afghanistan.”

Biden would soon do the same for Iraq, in a balancing act that Marcetic calls “well-calibrated for the political climate.” Marcetic elaborates:

Biden could continue to point to disagreements with the administration for liberal audiences, even if they were merely procedural, while putting his weight behind the ultimate goal of war with Iraq. At the same time, Biden’s apparent criticisms doubled as advice for the administration: If you want buy-in from liberals for your war, this is what you’ll have to do.

The war could get that buy-in only if, according to Biden, “the president can make the case that we’re about to be attacked,” and that there was “a clear and present danger” from Saddam Hussein that would justify a preemptive attack on Iraq.

Marcetic argues that those themes, combined with Biden’s standing as the powerful Foreign Relations Committee chair, show that Biden didn’t simply vote for the Iraq War, but, “as an experienced and respected voice on foreign policy, a powerful Democrat … Biden’s backing of regime change in Iraq was crucial to Bush’s effort of selling the public on the war.”

In 2008, as Matt Yglesias writes in Vox, “Democrats responded to the evident unpopularity and failure of the 2003 war in Iraq in the sensible way — by nominating someone who’d spoken out against the war when he had a chance.” Clinton’s yes vote became a liability in 2016. As both Marcetic and Yglesias argue, the Democratic Party needs to consider whether they’re willing to risk a candidate who did so again.

Elizabeth Warren Tops Sanders’ Second Quarter With $19.1 Million Haul

WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren raised $19.1 million in the second quarter, her campaign said Monday, cementing her status in the top tier of Democratic presidential contenders and a leading voice of the party’s liberal base.

The Massachusetts senator’s second-quarter contributions leave her behind only Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor who reported nearly $25 million in donations, and former Vice President Joe Biden, who tallied $21.5 million since his candidacy began in late April.

Perhaps most notably, Warren’s donations exceeded those reported by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her closest rival, who is also vying for liberal voters and is the only other candidate who has joined her in swearing off high-dollar fundraisers.

Warren’s success underscores the threat she poses to both Sanders and California Sen. Kamala Harris, whose $12 million second-quarter fundraising got a major boost in the final days of last month from her performance in the first Democratic debate. While Sanders appeals to progressives seeking an ambitious Democratic agenda, Warren has staked a claim to his base with her now-trademark policy plans. And as Harris seeks a foothold with black voters as the primary’s lone black female candidate, Warren is making headway of her own with black women.

“To sum it up: We raised more money than any other 100% grassroots-funded campaign,” said Roger Lau, Warren’s campaign manager. “That’s big.”

Warren more than tripled the $6 million she raised in the first three months of 2019 , when she silenced some skeptics of her long-term fundraising viability following her decision to rely on grassroots rather than high-dollar donations. The campaign’s $19.1 million came from more than 384,000 contributors giving more than 683,000 donations.

That’s less than the nearly 1 million individual donations Sanders’ campaign reported, but comparable with the 725,000 online donations that President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign reported during the second quarter.

Warren’s extensive organizing apparatus, particularly in early voting primary states, remains both a formidable asset — and a significant cost — as the campaign prepares to report $19.7 million in cash on hand. Her operation currently counts more than 300 paid staff members, 60% of whom are in the four early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, according to the campaign.

While a staffing footprint of that size is likely to spark questions about Warren’s high spending rate among some of her presidential rivals, her team has already underlined its confidence that the campaign will have enough resources for the long term.

“Overall, the Warren operation has a six-figure number of people who own a piece of the campaign and an eight-figure amount of money to go execute the plan. So, game on,” Warren adviser Joe Rospars tweeted after her first-quarter fundraising tally emerged.

Warren has an energetic output of policy proposals on everything from education to climate change, a signature of her 2020 efforts that has helped her push past a rocky start in the primary. That fast pace isn’t likely to change as the Democratic campaign nears an expected winnowing from about two dozen candidates.

This week alone, Warren is scheduled to hold a town hall in Milwaukee after joining a half-dozen other Democratic presidential hopefuls at a gathering hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens. She’ll then head to Philadelphia for Netroots Nation, an annual conference for progressive activists.

“In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll keep growing our movement across the country and Elizabeth will keep rolling out new plans to level the playing field for working people,” Lau wrote in an email to supporters.

Warren was already a guaranteed presence in this fall’s Democratic primary debates, which require at least 130,000 donors as well as minimum polling performance according to rules set by the Democratic National Committee. She’ll likely be joined on that stage in the fall by a rival whose showing she praised after last month’s first debate: former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who reported on Monday that he had met the higher donor threshold needed to qualify.

NY Gov. Cuomo OKs Release of Trump Tax Returns to Congress

ALBANY, N.Y.—President Donald Trump’s New York state tax returns could be given to Congress under a new law in his home state that the Democratic governor signed Monday.

The measure signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo directs state tax officials to share state returns of certain elected and appointed officials upon written request from the chairpersons of one of three committees: House Ways and Means, Senate Finance or Joint Committee on Taxation.

Designed to give Congress a way around the Republican president’s refusal to release his returns, the new law is expected to face legal challenges. And it’s unclear whether Congress will request access to Trump’s state returns, which tax experts say would include many of the same details as his federal return.

“No one person — no matter what office they might hold — is above the law,” said Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat and the Senate sponsor of the legislation.

All sides expect legal challenges and requests for injunctions, meaning it could be many months before any state tax returns are handed over. The White House did not return a message seeking comment Monday on the law.

Trump has long filed taxes in New York as a resident of the state. He is the first president since Watergate to decline to make his returns public, often claiming that he would release them if he were not under audit.

The president has not weighed in on the new law but has repeatedly accused New York Democrats of using their positions to harass him and his allies. Republican state lawmakers say their concerns about the new law go far beyond Trump, arguing that any official from New York could be targeted.

“We’re going to let them, political hacks, decide when they want to invade your privacy,” Sen. Andrew Lanza, R-Staten Island, said during floor debate on the bill. “Today, it’s because you are a Democrat, tomorrow it’s because you’re a Republican, the next day it’s because you want to run for Congress.”

Democrats are eager to get hold of the returns, which could reveal details about his business dealings, his debts and international financial ties.

If Congress does request and obtain Trump’s state tax returns, that doesn’t mean the public gets to see them. Under federal law, the confidential information in the returns is supposed to be for the committee’s eyes only.

To address concerns about the tax privacy of everyday New Yorkers, state lawmakers narrowed the measure so it applies only to the state income tax returns of elected officials, party leaders and top public officials, like judges — as well as any businesses or legal entities they control.

In addition, state tax officials would be required to redact personal information, such as Social Security numbers or personal addresses, before handing over the documents.

Top lawmakers in Washington have differed on whether congressional committees should make use of the new law.

U.S. House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, has touted the bill as “a workaround to a White House that continues to obstruct and stonewall the legitimate oversight work of Congress.”

Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., however, has signaled that he may not be interested. Neal is already pursuing Trump’s federal returns and has threatened to go to court in order to get the administration to comply.

“The difficulty is that we don’t have control over state taxes,” Neal said in May when asked about the New York legislation. “For the moment, we’re still proceeding on our own path.”

The group Stand Up America, created in 2016 to mobilize opposition to Trump, urged Democrats in Washington to immediately request Trump’s state returns.

“New York has provided Congress a new route for getting answers on behalf of the American people — and all they have to do is ask,” Ryan Thomas, a spokesman for the organization, said in a statement. “Any further delay is an injustice to the American people who deserve transparency about Trump’s foreign entanglements and massive conflicts of interest.”

Neal has issued subpoenas for six years of Trump’s tax documents, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has so far resisted, saying Congress’ request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.”

U.S. Women Eye Gender Equality After World Cup Triumph

LYON, France — After every goal celebration and all the confident posturing, the U.S. national team backed up its swagger at the Women’s World Cup by winning it all.

The Americans also took a swipe at gender inequity, too.

The United States won its record fourth Women’s World Cup title and second in a row, beating the Netherlands 2-0 Sunday night when Megan Rapinoe converted a tiebreaking penalty kick in the second half. Rose Lavelle added a goal to seal it.

Afterward, Rapinoe looked out on the sea of reporters and said, “I’ve got a party to get to, y’all.”

Rapinoe scored in the 61st minute after a video review determined Stefanie van der Gragt had fouled Alex Morgan with a kick to the shoulder while competing for a deflected pass in the penalty area.

Two days past her 34th birthday, Rapinoe slotted the ball past Sari van Veenendaal for her sixth goal of the tournament. She became the oldest player to score in a Women’s World Cup final, and earned the Golden Boot for the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as the top player.

Her preferred goal celebration in France, with her outstretched arms in victory, was already on T-shirts.

“I feel like it’s kind of iconic of everything that we have gone through and we continue to go through, and yet we put this beautiful product out on the pitch,” she said.

Lavelle, at 24 the team’s up-and-coming star, added her third goal of the tournament on an 18-yard left-footed shot in the 69th after a solo run from the center circle.

The monthlong journey isn’t over quite yet for players who captured the hearts of a nation. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio needed just a few seconds after the match to invite the team to a ticker-tape parade up the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Fans, many dressed in red, white and blue, chanted “Equal Pay!” at the final whistle , a reminder players sued the U.S. Soccer Federation in March claiming gender discrimination. The sides have agreed to mediate the lawsuit.

Rapinoe drew the ire of President Donald Trump by saying she would refuse to visit the White House. Trump called out Rapinoe on Twitter, saying she should never “disrespect our Country, the White House, or our Flag, especially since so much has been done for her & the team.” He said he would invite the team win or lose.

But shortly after the title game, Trump tweeted: “Congratulations to the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team on winning the World Cup! Great and exciting play. America is proud of you all!”

Always outspoken, Rapinoe also called out FIFA on the eve of the championship, suggesting soccer’s governing body was not doing enough to grow the women’s game, pointing to unequal prize money and the scheduling of the final on the same day as the championships of the CONCACAF Gold Cup in Chicago and the Copa America final in Brazil.

The Americans never trailed at the tournament and set records with 26 goals and a 12-game World Cup winning streak dating to 2015. Jill Ellis became the first coach to lead a team to two Women’s World Cup titles, and the U.S. joined Germany in 2003 and 2007 as the only repeat champions. While the U.S. has four titles, Germany is the only other nation with even two.

“Getting to play at the highest level of the World Cup with the team we have is just ridiculous. But to be able to couple that with everything on the field and to back up all of those words with performances and to back up all of those performances with words, it’s just incredible,” Rapinoe said. “I feel like this team is in the midst of changing the world around us as we live, and it’s just an incredible feeling.”

With confidence that some called arrogance, this American team established a standard that exceeded the U.S. champions of 1991, 1999 and 2015, becoming a goal for all others to match. Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were among the former American players who joined the current generation for the postgame celebration.

Alyssa Naeher, the 31-year-old who succeeded Hope Solo in goal, faced repeated questions entering the tournament but allowed just three goals and finished with her fourth shutout.

The U.S. had scored within the first 12 minutes of its previous six matches but the European champions sat back to keep their defensive shape and kept the score 0-0 through the first half.

Rapinoe, who missed Tuesday’s semifinal win over England with a hamstring injury, became the first woman to score on a penalty kick during a Women’s World Cup final, her 50th goal in 158 international appearances. She ended the Netherlands’ 317-minute scoreless streak and matched Morgan and England’s Ellen White for most goals in the tournament, winning the Golden Ball based on fewer minutes.

She was given a standing ovation when she was substituted in the 79th minute. The crowd of 57,900 at Stade de Lyon for Le Grand Finale included France President Emmanuel Macron.

Rebounding from a loss to Sweden on penalty kicks in the quarterfinals of the 2016 Olympics, the Americans opened the World Cup with a record 13-0 rout of lowly Thailand, triggering debate over whether the celebrations after each goal were excessive. Carli Lloyd responded the next match by following a goal with a polite golf clap. Then Morgan stirred it up again when she scored against England and celebrated as if sipping tea, pinkie outstretched.

Now, after all the memorable drama, they will have a fourth star above the crest on the team’s jerseys and a higher platform to advance their cause.

“It’s something that we’ve worked so hard for. All of us, individually, have just faced so much adversity through this whole journey,” Morgan said. “We’ve been tested individually and collectively so much. So to see, four years ago, us go from two to three, and now three to four, it’s really a dream come true.”

Climate Change Is Producing a Harrowing New Phenomenon

News slips in from here and there in the northern hemisphere of outlandish temperatures. Records have been set; thermometers seem to need recalibration. Relief comes from the drop of a few degrees and from rainfall. But this is momentary. People are aware that the weather is more and more erratic, the heat of the summer much more brutal.

It is true that Europe faced remarkable temperatures in June, but the month before South Asia was hit by a severe heat wave. This is not a freak situation. India’s weather has been measured since the late 18th century. The records improved with the establishment of the Indian Meteorological Department in 1875. The summer has long been an incredibly hot time of the year, the monsoon rains anticipated like manna. Of the 15 hottest years on record, 11 of them have been recorded since 2004. This is a hint of evidence of the climate catastrophe.

Churu (in the state of Rajasthan) was the hottest town at 50.8°C (123.4°F). This is not far from the highest recorded temperatures on earth at Death Valley (California) and Mitribah (Kuwait) of 54.0°C. The government of India recorded an entire month’s worth of days (32) as having experienced heat waves.

In this period, India’s National Disaster Management Authority announced that at least 36 workers had burnt to death. The number is much lower than the 2,081 who died in a 2015 heat wave, although those who follow these calamities note that these numbers are very deflated.

Nine of ten Indian workers are in the informal sector, hundreds of millions of them in construction and agriculture. The most exploited of these workers toil in the hot sunshine, part of the frenzied expansion of India’s cities and part of the crisis-ridden agrarian sector. When these very poor workers die, few pay attention. Their deaths are often recorded not from heat stroke or exhaustion but as merely “unknown causes.”

Working on a Warmer Planet

The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa. Agricultural and construction workers, the ILO says, are most vulnerable to death by rising temperatures.

If heat rises above 35°C, much less than the temperatures in central and northern India this year, then it “restricts a worker’s physical functions and capabilities” and—if it goes above 39°C—it can lead to “heat exhaustion” and death. What happens is that as temperatures rise, the body cannot endure this excess heat. This is what is known as “heat stress.”

A World Health Organization (WHO) report from 2014 points out that the health impact of the climate catastrophe will be caused by heat, coastal flooding, diarrheal disease, malaria, dengue and undernutrition. If you add all these up, then the WHO predicts excess mortality of at least a quarter of a million people per year. That heat is the first cause is not a surprise.

As a result of rising temperatures, global working hours have been lost—largely in agriculture and construction. According to the ILO calculations, the economic losses due to rising temperatures are going to grow. In 1995, an estimated $280 billion was lost due to heat stress; the ILO estimates that by 2030 that number will rise to $2.4 trillion. Most of these losses would occur in low-income countries.

Furthermore, the ILO says that about 80 million people—mostly in agriculture—will lose their jobs as a result of the climate catastrophe. This number is very low. It comes from a calculation that assumes that 40 percent of days are cloudy, not sunny, and that workers can shift their hours from the hottest time of the day to the cooler mornings and evenings. If this assumption is removed, then the job losses can amount to over 136 million.

Alternatives

The ILO has proposed a very mild—even counterproductive—set of reforms. Two of them are increased mechanization and “skills development.” To replace human labor in the hot sun with machines is—of course—humane. But what will this mean for the humans? Will they be compensated in some other way? Besides, in the fields of construction and agriculture, when labor is weak and wage rates are low, there is no incentive for employers to substitute humans with machines.

To increase skills would mean to improve worker productivity. What we have seen in the past 40 years is that little increase in productivity has gone to workers; the bulk of it goes to the bosses.

Both mechanization and skill development merely provide fewer jobs for workers, even as these techniques might save their lives.

The ILO warns that heat stress prompts agricultural workers to flee the countryside for cities, and to flee the hot zones of the planet for more temperate climates. In other words, migration will rise as a consequence of the climate catastrophe.

Protect Workers

The Indian state of Kerala (population 35 million) is governed by the Left Democratic Front, a political alliance of communists and left-wing political parties. As the heat wave developed in India, the left-wing government announced a mandatory embargo on work in the hottest part of the day (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.).

The Labor Department of Kerala warned that if employers did not comply with this order, then they would be prosecuted. This decision was prompted when construction workers came to hospitals in Kerala with sunburn. Labor inspectors and police officers visited construction sites during the worst of the heat to ensure that workers were not being forced to work during the peak heat hours.

These are commonsense measures. Yet, they require the strong arm of the law and of regulation. In India, like in much of the world, workers are increasingly in the informal sector. Here, laws are often discounted, regulation absent.

Unions are the most effective way by which workers exercise power, and yet there are fewer workers in unions now. The left is weak, and Kerala is an exception. Elsewhere, the whips of management strike across the backs of vulnerable informal sector workers, who are burnt in the hot sun to bring profit to their employers.

Obduracy in many Western capitals regarding the climate catastrophe simply means it will continue. As temperatures rise, it is the most vulnerable people who will be burnt in the fields and at building sites. They will flee and then be treated as criminals. Their choices are limited: to die under the blistering sun or to die on the road.

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.

The Obvious Reason Congress Is in No Rush to Make Health Care Universal

For $3.5 trillion a year, shouldn’t we Americans have a world-class health care system? Yet while we spend the most of any advanced nation in the world to get care — more than $10,000 a year per person — we get the worst results.

No surprise, then, that Medicare for All is now backed by 85 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents, and (get this) 52 percent of Republicans!

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So — why isn’t Congress responding to this overwhelming public demand for universal coverage?

I suspect that one big reason for Washington’s big yawn over the people’s plea for sweeping reform is that our lawmakers don’t personally feel the financial pain and emotional distress that are inflicted on millions of regular Americans by a system built on private greed.

After all, their health needs are met by a double-dose of the socialistic care that they so furiously deny to our families.

First, they’re given big taxpayer subsidies to cover the cost of their insurance, with you and me paying about 72 percent of the price. But second, there’s a secretive medical center located right in the U.S. Capitol building that provides a full-blown system of — shhhhh — health care socialism to our governing elites.

Called the Office of the Attending Physician (or OAP), it provides a complete range of free medical service for lawmakers. No appointment needed and no waiting — they walk in and doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, and other professionals tend to them right away.

No need to show an insurance card, and they never get a bill. But they do get what a former OAP staffer calls “the best health care on the planet.” Thus, members feel no urgency to restructure a system that’s working beautifully — for them.

So, to get good care for all of us, we might start by taking away the pampered care that lawmakers have quietly awarded to themselves.

Labor Secretary Faces New Calls to Resign Amid Epstein Charges

The arrest of financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on federal child sex trafficking charges elicited fresh demands for the resignation of Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who helped Epstein secure a “sweetheart plea deal” for previous allegations while serving as Miami’s top federal prosecutor over a decade ago.

Following news of Epstein’s arrest late Saturday, reporters, politicians, and other observers called on Acosta to immediately step down—bolstering demands that have mounted in recent months amid a legal challenge to Epstein’s deal filed by survivors.

In light of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking arrest, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta should resign IMMEDIATELY. He broke the law to protect a serial pedophile who preyed upon dozens of underage girls.

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) July 7, 2019

.@realDonaldTrump Labor Secretary @SecretaryAcosta gave child molester Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal when Acosta was an US Attorney. Now it turns out Epstein may have molested more individuals.

Why is Acosta still Labor Secretary? https://t.co/iP67KNOd4i

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 7, 2019

Alex Acosta should resign https://t.co/wJgk9qqEDJ

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) July 7, 2019

With the Epstein arrest, Labor @SecretaryAcosta is finally getting the attention he should have gotten before Senate Republicans confirmed him. Good! Ever better: let’s now pay attention to ALL the reasons he should have been rejected.#AcostaMustResign https://t.co/PlPXLXWFbB

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) July 7, 2019

CNN opinion contributor Raul A. Reyes wrote Sunday that “Acosta’s actions are worthy of bipartisan outrage and should offend every American father and mother. Acosta betrayed the vulnerable to benefit the powerful. His deal for Epstein shows a disregard for child welfare, victims’ rights and Justice Department procedures. Ironically, as secretary of labor, Acosta is responsible for monitoring human trafficking.”

NOTE: As Secretary of Labor, Acosta now OVERSEES THE NATION’S HUMAN TRAFFICKING LAWS

I’ll have more on Epstein’s arrest and its implications on the Trump administration, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and other powerful people in my newsletter

Sign up at https://t.co/Gl6evXRDcZ

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 7, 2019

Past alleged victims of Epstein include a 15-year-old Mar-a-Lago employee. Past alleged co-conspirators include Trump ally Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. The architect of Epstein’s past federal sweetheart deal is current Trump administration labor secretary Alex Acosta. https://t.co/a5Y9NcJWqL

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) July 7, 2019

Over the years, Epstein has been tied to various high-profile individuals, including retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz and the U.K.’s Prince Andrew as well as former President Bill Clinton and current President Donald Trump.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is a sign of a deep, severe moral sickness in this country. Everyone who shielded him (including Alex Acosta and Donald Trump) are just as culpable for his crimes, and the fact that they remain in positions of power is an absolute disgrace.

— Sen. Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) July 7, 2019

According to the Daily Beast, which first reported on the financier’s arrest late Saturday:

Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. Epstein, who owns a New York City mansion and an island in the Caribbean, was being held at the federal lockup in Manhattan ahead of his court date.

Saturday’s arrest by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

For more than a decade, Epstein’s alleged abuse of minors has been the subject of lawsuits brought by victims, investigations by local and federal authorities, and exposés in the press. But despite the attention cast on his alleged sex crimes, the hedge-funder has managed to avoid any meaningful jail time, let alone federal charges.

The new indictment—which, according to two sources, will be unsealed Monday in Manhattan federal court—will reportedly allege that Epstein sexually exploited dozens of underage girls in a now-familiar scheme: paying them cash for “massages” and then molesting or sexually abusing them in his Upper East Side mansion or his palatial residence in Palm Beach. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors—which could put him away for a maximum of 45 years. The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district’s human-trafficking officials and the FBI.

Sources told the Miami Herald that Epstein was arrested at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport and “around 5:30 p.m. Saturday, about a dozen federal agents broke down the door to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to execute search warrants.” A source in New York told the Florida newspaper that Monday’s bail hearing “will be critical because if they grant him bail, he has enough money that he will disappear and they will never get him.”

In a series of stories from last November titled “Perversion of Justice,” Herald reporter Julie K. Brown detailed how Acosta, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, worked with Epstein’s attorneys to craft an agreement that was kept secret from Epstein’s victims.

BREAKING: With Jeffrey Epstein locked up, these are nervous times for his friends, enablershttps://t.co/wc8vNXex8o

— julie k. brown (@jkbjournalist) July 7, 2019

Epstein “was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls—with the help of young female recruiters—to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day,” Brown reported in November. “Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.”

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal—called a non-prosecution agreement—essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Heraldexamination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators” who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.

As Common Dreams reported in December—amid previous calls for Acosta to resign, which were sparked by the Herald‘s series—National Organization for Women (NOW) president Toni Van Pelt said that “Epstein plays by the same rule book as Donald Trump, Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Eric Schneiderman, and other powerful men who have been revealed as serial abusers of women.”

“Epstein’s scant 13-month stay in a county jail—where he was even allowed to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his office,” Van Pelt said, “was made possible by a culture of powerful men, enabling each other, while dismissing, excusing, or demeaning the women and children they brutalize with physical and sexual violence.”

Will Corporate Democrats Team Up to Block Warren and Sanders?

The odds are now very strong that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic presidential nominee. New polling averages say they account for almost 70 percent of support nationwide, while no other candidate is anywhere near. For progressives who want to affect the news instead of just consume it, active engagement will be essential.

Biden is the most regressive Democrat with a real chance to head the ticket. After amassing a five-decade record littered with odious actions and statements, he now insists that the 2020 campaign “shouldn’t be about the past” — an evasive and ridiculous plea, coming from someone who proclaims himself to be “an Obama-Biden Democrat” and goes to absurd lengths to fasten himself onto Obama’s coattails, while also boasting of his past ability to get legislation through Congress.

As he campaigns, Biden persists with disingenuous denials. During the June 27 debate, he flatly — and falsely — declared: “I did not oppose busing in America.” On July 6, speaking to a mostly black audience in South Carolina, he said: “I didn’t support more money to build state prisons. I was against it.” But under the headline “Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims He Opposed Spending More Money to Build State Prisons,” CNN reported that “he was misrepresenting his own record.”

Biden used the Fourth of July weekend to dig himself deeper into a centrist, status quo trench for his war on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. During a repeatedly cringeworthy interview, Biden told CNN that what can’t be done includes Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and student debt cancelation. Bernie Sanders quickly responded with a tweet calling Medicare for All, debt-free college and a Green New Deal “the agenda American needs — and that will energize voters to defeat Donald Trump.”

No one has summed up Biden’s political stance better than Elizabeth Warren, who told the California Democratic Party convention five weeks ago: “Some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses.” She added: “When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”

Being preferable to Joe Biden is a low bar, and Kamala Harris clears it. But, like Biden, she stands to lose potential support from many self-described liberals and progressives to the extent they learn more about her actual record.

Overall, Harris’s work as San Francisco’s DA and the California attorney general was not progressive. Lara Bazelon, former director of the LA-based Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, wrote in a New York Times column early this year: “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

Last week, Bazelon said: “Kamala Harris claims to be a champion of criminal justice reform. But as a prosecutor . . . she was anything but. She needs to make the case to the voters that her change of heart is genuine. Crucial to that case is reckoning with her past.”

That past needs scrutiny, especially since Harris has refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with it.

“As the top law enforcement official” of San Francisco and then California, the New York Times reported in a February news article, “she developed a reputation for caution, protecting the status quo and shrinking from decisions on contentious issues.” Reporter Kate Zernike wrote:

**  “Years before ending mass incarceration became a bipartisan cause, she started programs to steer low-level drug offenders away from prison and into school and jobs. At the same time, she touted her success in increasing conviction rates, and as attorney general remained largely on the sidelines as California scrambled to meet a federal court order to reduce its swollen prison populations. She also repeatedly sided with prosecutors accused of misconduct, challenging judges who ruled against them.”

**  When Harris first ran statewide, for California attorney general in 2010, “she had campaigned to the right of her Republican opponent on the question of easing the state’s tough three-strikes law. Once in office, she declined to take positions on ultimately successful ballot initiatives intended to reduce prison populations — one expanding opportunities for parole, the other reducing many nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.”

**  “After the Supreme Court upheld the judges’ overcrowding order, the state promised to ‘promptly’ release a significant number of nonviolent prisoners, giving credit for time served. A delay in meeting that promise drew a judicial scolding in 2014. The state’s response proved embarrassing, and unsuccessful: Reducing the prison population, Ms. Harris’s office maintained, would hurt California’s ability to fight wildfires by shrinking the pool of forced labor.”

**  “Ms. Harris won praise for releasing statewide data in a way that informed rather than inflamed the brutality debate: It included numbers on the use of police force but also on use of force against officers. She instituted body cameras for police agents who worked in her office, and offered implicit-bias training for police statewide. But she declined to support statewide regulations for the use of body cameras, agreeing with local departments that they should set their own standards. And she did not support a bill that would have required the attorney general to investigate police shootings.”

**  Early in this decade, responding to the house foreclosure crisis, “the banks agreed to $18 billion in debt reduction that Ms. Harris said would allow California homeowners to stay in their homes, and the national agreement included $2.5 billion for a fund to provide educational counseling and other services for those in danger of foreclosure. But critics, especially on the left, have long said that the settlement was no grand bargain. It did not require banks to pay much out of pocket; $4.7 billion of the $18 billion in relief came from forgiving second mortgages, many of which the banks would have written off anyway because they were so severely underwater, and $9 billion came from homeowners selling their homes for less than the value of their mortgages, meaning that homeowners did not stay in their homes.”

The New Republic recently summed up: “From her role in a California prison labor debate to her prosecutions of sex workers,” Kamala Harris “has a past of her own to defend.”

It’s sometimes difficult to gauge what Harris really believes in, especially in light of her tactical backsliding and flip-flops. Longtime observers had no reason to be surprised last week when she walked back her forceful debate position that the federal government shouldn’t leave it to localities to assist school desegregation with busing. “Harris muddied the waters,” the Associated Press reported, when “she told reporters she too did not support federally mandated busing and supported it only as an option for local governments.”

On foreign policy, the little that Harris has to say is often hazy while conforming with mainstream Democratic Party militarism. In the Senate, she has voted for six of eight major military spending bills.

Harris — who cosponsored a bill to withhold U.S. dues to the United Nations because of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank — pandered to AIPAC while delivering 2017 and 2018 speeches to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong organization. While acquiescing to requests from MoveOn and other groups that presidential candidates not speak to AIPAC’s 2019 conference in late March, she pulled off a smooth maneuver, as Mondoweiss pointed out: “Harris is a very pragmatic politician, and the conference came to her yesterday! She met leading AIPAC officials at her office and then tweeted her devoted support to Israel.”

Harris’s tweet shared the news: “Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world.” But progressive journalist Ben Norton did not share in the upbeat mood as he tweeted: “Far-right Israeli PM Netanyahu just formed an alliance with a literal fascist party, and is bombing people trapped in the Gaza concentration camp right now, but fake ‘progressive’ Kamala Harris is meeting with AIPAC and praising the apartheid regime.”

Yet Harris does not adhere completely to AIPAC positions. She cosponsored the Yemen war powers bill introduced by Bernie Sanders. And she has expressed support for the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama that was canceled by President Trump.

The military-industrial complex might prefer Biden to Harris. But from all indications, that complex would be quite comfortable with a President Harris, and vice versa. The same goes for Wall Street and other big corporate sectors. No wonder they’re pouring many millions of dollars into the Biden and Harris campaign coffers.

However tense and testy the current relations between Biden and Harris might be, their falling out is likely to be temporary. “I adore Joe Biden,” she proclaimed in mid-spring when he was on the verge of announcing his campaign. Anyone who doubts the prospect of a rapprochement — and even a shared ticket — is forgetting how easily campaign-trail conflicts can be jettisoned a little bit down the road. In 1980, George H.W. Bush fought Ronald Reagan for the GOP presidential nomination all the way to the convention, even after losing the vast majority of primaries, and tensions were raw; then came the Reagan-Bush ticket.

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, the viable alternatives to the Biden and Harris corporatist duo are the progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren and the more progressive candidate Bernie Sanders. While Warren is impressive in many ways, I continue to actively support Sanders. As an eloquent essay by Shaun King recently underscored, Sanders — like no other member of the Senate or candidate for president — has boldly participated in progressive movements for his entire adult life.

That orientation toward social movements is crucial in a time of profound needs for fundamental change, in an era of multiple and concentric crises — from record-breaking economic inequality to extreme corporate greed to racist xenophobia to the climate emergency to rampant militarism and so much more. No matter how distasteful or repugnant, the electoral process is an opening for progressive forces to be influential and potentially decisive.