Chris Hedges's Blog, page 212

Kaepernick Stirs New Controversy for Nike

NEW YORK — Nike’s sales have only grown since it seized attention with its ad campaign featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. So, the shoemaker deferred to its star endorser when he raised concerns over a sneaker featuring an early American flag.

Nike pulled the Air Max 1 USA shoe, which included a Revolutionary-era U.S. flag with 13 white stars in a circle on its heel, after Kaepernick told the company he and others found the flag offensive because of its connection to an era of slavery, according to the Wall Street Journal. The shoe had been sent to retailers to go on sale this week for the July Fourth holiday, according to the Journal.

The decision caused an instant backlash among conservatives who accused Nike of denigrating U.S. history, with Arizona Governor Doug Ducey tweeting that he is asking the state’s Commerce Authority to withdraw financial incentives promised to Nike to build a plant in the state.

Related Articles





Kaepernick Has New Deal With Nike Though He's Not in NFL



by











2 NFL Players Kneel for Anthem, Kaepernick Tweets His Thanks



by

















Can Nike, Too, Sacrifice Something?



by

Others expressed surprise that the symbol known as the “Betsy Ross” flag, so named after the beloved Philadelphia woman credited with designing it, could be considered offensive. Although some extremist groups appear to have appropriated the flag, it is not widely viewed as a symbol of hate, and is used in museums that focus on 18th century U.S. history.

The Anti-Defamation League does not include it in its database of hate symbols. Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow for the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said extremist groups have occasionally used it, but the flag is most commonly used by people for patriotic purposes.

“We view it as essentially an innocuous historical flag,” Pitcavage said. “It’s not a thing in the white supremacist movement.”

But Nike was showing consistency by listening to Kaepernick, the star of the brand’s “Just Do It” campaign last year that ultimately proved a win for the company, said Chris Allieri, founder of New York public relations firm Mulberry & Astor.

“Listening to somebody that has helped brands in so many countless ways, it makes sense. It would be completely hypocritical for them not to listen to him,” Allieri said.

Because the flag is not widely considered a racist image, it’s difficult to judge whether or not Nike should have designed the shoe in the first place.

“Can a brand be expected to know everything possible that could be offensive? That’s probably tough, but that’s why you have to have inclusive teams,” Allieri said.

Kaepernick was the first NFL athlete to take a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Some people called for boycotts after Nike featured him in a campaign last year that included a print ad featuring a close-up of his face and the words, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

The boycott calls fizzled.

Nike’s annual sales have jumped 7% to more than $39 billion, according to the company’s last quarterly report. Its stock is up 12% since the start of the year. And Nike CEO Mark Parker has said the Kaepernick campaign inspired “record engagement with the brand,” an important goal for a company trying to strengthen its direct-to-consumer business.

Several Republican politicians condemned Nike, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who called the company “anti-American” in a tweet.

“If we are in a political environment where the American flag has become controversial to Americans, I think we have a problem,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Ducey ordered Arizona to withdraw a grant of up to $1 million that was slated for Nike, said Susan Marie, executive vice president of the Arizona Commerce Authority, which administers the grant. But the governor has no authority over more than $2 million in tax breaks over five years that were approved Monday by the City Council in the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear, where Nike committed to opening a $185 million factory to make mid-sole cushioning for athletic shoes. Nike agreed to hire at least 505 full-time employees who would earn an average annual salary of more than $48,000.

Nike confirmed in a statement that it “has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July as it featured an old version of the American flag,” but did not comment further.

But Nike is unlikely to suffer financially over the flag flap, said Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst at NPD Group Inc.

“I’m sure there are plenty of states out there that would love to have a Nike factory that would employ 500 people,” Powell said. “Today’s consumers really want brands to be vocal on social issues, especially the younger consumers. This very much aligns with the social position of their core consumers.”

Indeed, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham responded to Ducey’s tweet with her own: “Hey @Nike, Let’s talk.”

The abandoned shoe sparked a discussion on social media and beyond about the Betsy Ross flag itself. Some thanked Nike and Kaepernick on Twitter for yanking the sneaker.

In 2016, a Michigan chapter of the NAACP said the flag has been “appropriated by the so-called ‘Patriot Movement’ and other militia groups who are responding to America’s increasing diversity with opposition and racial supremacy.” The statement came in response to a high school football event where the NAACP said some white students used the flag while attempting to intimidate players from a predominantly black school.

The Anti-Defamation League says “Patriot movement” describes groups that include militias and others who have adopted anti-government conspiracy theories. The ADL says there is some overlap between the “Patriot” movement and the white supremacist movement, but that overlap has shrunk over time.

Lisa Moulder, director of the Betsy Ross House in Philadephia, said she has never heard of the flag being used as a hate symbol.

“Personally, I’ve always seen it as a representation of early America,” Moulder said. “The young nation was not perfect, and it is still not perfect.”

___

Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, Jonathan Cooper in Phoenix, and Summer Ballentine in Jefferson City, Missouri contributed to this story.

Census Will Be Printed Without Citizenship Question

WASHINGTON — Days after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday started the process of printing the questionnaire without the controversial query.

Trump administration attorneys notified parties in lawsuits challenging the question that the printing of the hundreds of millions of documents for the 2020 counts would be starting, said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco confirmed there would be “no citizenship question on 2020 census.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that while he respected the Supreme Court’s decision, he strongly disagreed with it.

“The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question,” Ross said in a statement. “My focus, and that of the Bureau and the entire Department is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”

President Donald Trump had said after the high court’s decision last week that he would ask his attorneys about possibly delaying next spring’s decennial census until the Supreme Court could revisit the matter, raising questions about whether printing of the census materials would start as planned this month.

For months, the Trump administration had argued that the courts needed to decide quickly whether the citizenship question could be added because of the deadline to starting printing materials this week.

Even though the Census Bureau is relying on most respondents to answer the questionnaire by Internet next year, hundreds of millions of printed postcards and letters will be sent out next March reminding residents about the census, and those who don’t respond digitally will be mailed paper questionnaires.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling left little opportunity for the administration to cure the defects with its decision to add a citizenship question and, most importantly, they were simply out of time given the deadline for printing forms,” Clarke said in an email.

Opponents of the citizenship question said it would discourage participation by immigrants and residents who are in the country illegally, resulting in inaccurate figures for a count that determines the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending and how many congressional districts each state gets.

The Trump administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box.

Democratic mayors and governors opposed to the question argued that they’d get less federal money and fewer representatives in Congress if the question was asked because it would discourage the participation of minorities, primarily Hispanics, who tend to support Democrats.

Top congressional Democrats hailed Tuesday’s news. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “a welcome development for our democracy,” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer promised his party “will be watching the Trump administration like a hawk to ensure there is no wrong-doing throughout this process and that every single person is counted.”

Dale Ho, who argued the Supreme Court case as director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said, “Everyone in America counts in the census, and today’s decision means we all will.”

Are America’s Billionaires Turning on Forever War?

A new think tank is coming to Washington, D.C., this September, a development that might not elicit more than a shrug (or a groan) if not for the unlikely duo behind it. Two billionaires, George Soros, a liberal, and Charles Koch, a conservative, have teamed up to create the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which will advocate for ending the United States’ forever wars. Stephen Kinzer of The Boston Globe, which first broke the story, calls the think tank “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history.”

A statement on the institute’s website says, “The foreign policy of the United States has become detached from any defensible conception of U.S. interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of humankind.”

Aside from both being billionaires, at first glance Koch and Soros seem to have little in common politically. As Kelsey Piper explains in Vox, “Soros is, of course, widely hated on the right for his support of liberalized immigration and is frequently the target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Koch, meanwhile, has come under fire for his contributions to the Republican Party and his opposition to climate policies.”

The institute, which will open in September before an official inauguration later in the fall, is named for former U.S. President John Quincy Adams who, Piper points out, “said in an 1821 speech that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ ” Koch and Soros contributed half a million dollars each to the institute, which has received an additional $800,000 in contributions from individual donors.

“This is big,” Trita Parsi, former president of the National Iranian American Council and a co-founder of the new think tank, told the Globe. The institute will advocate for restraint and diplomacy instead of military intervention, which Kinzer calls “a radical notion in Washington, where every major think tank promotes some variant of neocon militarism or liberal interventionism.”

Kinzer believes that Soros and Koch’s opposing political backgrounds bring their new project credibility. “The street cred they bring from both ends of the political spectrum — along with the money they are providing — will make this new think tank an off-pitch voice for statesmanship amid a Washington chorus that promotes brinksmanship,” he writes.

The two have previously been vocal about their objections to foreign intervention. In a 2015 MSNBC interview, Charles Koch told “Morning Joe,” “To me, foreign policy is a form of insanity. … We keep kicking out dictators and then we don’t get anything better, and we mess up a lot of people’s lives in the process — spend fortunes and have Americans killed and maimed. What do we have to show for it?”

Soros has also spoken out against war on multiple occasions, including in HuffPost, where in 2006, he wrote of the war on terror:

An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money.

Koch and Soros plan to release reports and become involved in various grassroots anti-war campaigns before eventually helping to place allies on congressional staffs and in the executive branch, according to the Globe.

The Only Hope Left of Ending Partisan Gerrymandering

This piece first appeared in Truthout.

The Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to strike down partisan gerrymandering. This occurs when one party intentionally manipulates district boundaries to skew its voting power, notwithstanding the will of the voters. Although both parties engage in partisan gerrymandering, Republicans benefit from it far more than Democrats.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative 5-4 majority in Rucho v. Common Cause, admitted that excessive partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But, the Court held, challenges to the practice “present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

In her passionate dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan noted that extreme partisan gerrymanders “deprive citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights” — the rights of equal participation in the political process, “to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.” Kagan wrote, “For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”

The Court consolidated two partisan gerrymandering cases for decision in Rucho. The North Carolina case involved gerrymandering by Republicans. In the Maryland case, it was Democrats who engaged in gerrymandering.

North Carolina’s Republican legislative leadership drew a congressional map to entrench long-term Republican majorities. Although they won roughly 50 percent of the popular vote, Republicans picked up a majority of available seats in the 2018 Midterm elections by the extreme margin of 10-3.

In Maryland, Democrats used voters’ histories and party affiliations to move 70,000 Republican voters out of a district and 24,000 Democratic voters in.

Federal district courts in both North Carolina and Maryland struck down the partisan gerrymanders. The high court reversed the district court decisions and concluded there are no standards for federal courts to use in gauging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders.

The remedy for partisan gerrymandering lies with the people.

But federal courts have actually devised formulas to strike them down. “The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country … have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims,” Kagan pointed out. These courts used “neutral and manageable — and eminently legal — standards.”

Kagan cited the three-part test the federal district courts in North Carolina and Maryland, and other courts around the country, used to decide vote dilution claims. The test examines intent, effects and causation. First, plaintiffs must show that the state officials’ “predominant purpose” in drawing district lines was to “entrench [their party] in power” by diluting the votes of the rival party. Second, plaintiffs must establish that the lines drawn “substantially” diluted their votes. Third, the burden shifts to the State to posit a “legitimate, non-partisan justification to save its map.”

Applying that test to the North Carolina and Maryland cases, Kagan determined that illegal partisan gerrymandering had occurred in both. “By substantially diluting the votes of citizens favoring their rivals, the politicians of one party had succeeded in entrenching themselves in office,” she wrote. “They had beat democracy.”

But the majority was willing to sacrifice democracy on the altar of partisanship. There is no case more impactful than this one, and it’s no accident that it was the right-wing Republicans who upheld partisan gerrymandering.

In a 2004 concurrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy signaled his openness to striking down extreme partisan gerrymanders, which amount to “rigging elections.” He wrote in Vieth v. Jubelirer, “It is not in our tradition to foreclose the judicial process from the attempt to define standards and remedies where it is alleged that a constitutional right is burdened or denied.”

Kennedy’s retirement and Mitch McConnell’s replacement of Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch all but foreclosed the possibility that the Court would review partisan gerrymandering.

Kagan ended her powerful dissent by warning that this is not the moment for the Court to back down. “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” she wrote. “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”

Looking Ahead

Partisan gerrymandering is “far more effective and durable” now than in the past, Kagan observed, because advances in technology provide mapmakers with “more granular data about party preference and voting behavior than ever before.” They can utilize it “with unprecedented efficiency and precision.”

The Rucho decision “is almost guaranteed to facilitate massive election rigging in the future,” Ari Melber, senior writer at Mother Jones, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. We can no longer look to the federal courts, to which the disenfranchised have traditionally turned for relief, he said.

Now that the high court has denied judicial review of partisan gerrymandering in federal courts, it is up to the people in the several states to remedy it.

Independent citizen-led commissions in states such as Michigan, Colorado, Utah and Missouri draw fair and representative district maps. But in most states, “the party that controls the legislature draws districts for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the state legislature,” Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “They inevitably do so in a way to maximize their political control.”

Voter advocates can organize campaigns to put measures on the ballot that require independent redistricting commissions.

The Supreme Court has struck down racial gerrymandering as violative of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. But after Rucho, claims of partisan gerrymandering will no longer be reviewed by federal courts.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Eric Holder, attorney general in the Obama administration, plans to file racial gerrymandering claims in federal court and partisan gerrymandering claims in state courts. The organization is also considering support of constitutional amendments to establish independent redistricting commissions in Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Hampshire.

The House has passed H.R. 1 — the For the People Act — that would require states to draw congressional districts utilizing independent redistricting commissions. Members of these commissions would “represent diverse communities across the state, by establishing fair redistricting criteria, and by mandating greater transparency for the redistricting process,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) has introduced the Fair Maps Act, which would establish baseline criteria for map-drawing and provide a private legal cause of action for voters to challenge skewed maps in court.

But, as Kagan noted, “The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for legislative reform are slight.”

The remedy for partisan gerrymandering lies with the people. “The Supreme Court’s decision has made one thing clear,” Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said. “The only way we’ll end partisan gerrymandering is by voting Republicans out of power in state legislatures.”

One-half of the states allow voter ballot initiatives. Voter advocates can organize campaigns to put measures on the ballot that require independent redistricting commissions rather than politicians to draw the maps. It is up to the people to make the voting system fair.

Border Patrol Faces Probe as New Facebook Posts Surface

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has opened an investigation into vulgar and misogynistic social media posts made by members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents.

On Monday, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection was made aware of disturbing social media activity hosted on a private Facebook group that may include a number of CBP employees,” said Matthew Klein, head of the agency’s internal affairs unit.

Klein said CBP “immediately informed” the investigators with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and initiated an inquiry. The office typically takes the first look at allegations of serious misconduct within the CBP.

The investigation comes after a ProPublica report exposing the secret three-year-old Facebook group, which is called “I’m 10-15” and has some 9,500 members. Group members posted offensive graphics, including a photo illustration of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being sexually assaulted by President Donald Trump; discussed plans to disrupt a congressional visit to a Border Patrol facility; and joked about the deaths of migrants.

Recent posts shared with ProPublica include a meme using graphic language to mock CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation and a comment that referred to soccer star Megan Rapinoe as a man. A separate thread made fun of a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag.

One poster wrote, “At least it’s already in a trash bag.”

Another wrote, “Sous-vide? Lol,” referring to a method of cooking in a bag.

Klein said CBP’s code of conduct bars employees from making hateful and abusive statements on social media.

The group’s posts were also condemned by Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost.

“These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” she said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”

The disclosure of the group’s existence and the nature of the posts raise a number of questions that remain unanswered. It’s apparent from some of the comments that agents were aware that the posts were inappropriate, and potentially actionable, for serving government employees. But it’s unclear whether CPB’s senior leadership was aware of the group or if any complaints had been made to the agency.

On Capitol Hill, the leader of a key oversight committee expressed outrage.

“This Facebook group is beyond sexist and racist — it is truly abhorrent and shameful, and there is no excuse for this depraved behavior,” said Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, one of the committees with jurisdiction over CBP. “The agents found to be responsible for these vile comments should no longer have the privilege of representing the United States of America in uniform.”

The story generated widespread revulsion on social media, with more than a dozen members of Congress expressing horror and disgust at the posts. Some called for an investigation into the group.

One of the targets of the offensive posts, Ocasio-Cortez, responded several times on Twitter.

This just broke: a secret Facebook group of 9,500 CBP officers discussed making a GoFundMe for officers to harm myself & Rep. Escobar during our visit to CBP facilities & mocked migrant deaths.

This isn’t about “a few bad eggs.” This is a violent culture. https://t.co/SkFwThHElx

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2019

The union representing Border Patrol employees, the National Border Patrol Council, issued a statement saying that the Facebook group is “not representative of our employees and does a great disservice to all Border Patrol agents, the overwhelming majority of whom perform their duties admirably.”

ProPublica’s reporting, the union said, “cited a handful of people who posted inappropriate content out of 9,500 members of the Facebook group, not all of whom are active active duty agents.”

But CBP insiders told ProPublica that the Facebook group has played host to offensive memes and degrading humor since it was launched in 2016.

“The problems with the 10-15 page have been going on for years,” said one current Border Patrol agent who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “No one has done anything about it.”

The agent said that during the 2016 election, group members wrote up homophobic posts attacking an openly gay agent who voiced support for Hillary Clinton. “Nobody seemed to care,” recalled the agent.

Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd, who is now an immigrant-rights activist, told ProPublica that language like “floaters” — used to refer to the bodies of drowned migrants in a post about the widely shared Associated Press photograph of a father and daughter who died crossing the Rio Grande last week — is “normal, everyday terminology.”

“That’s as normal as saying ‘10-15,’” Budd said, referring to the code for a migrant in custody that the Facebook group uses as its name. Budd said that degrading comments about women were also endemic to Border Patrol, whose workforce as of 2017 was only 5% female.

Budd said she had little faith that CBP really intends to investigate its own.

“When they sit there and say, ‘We’re not going to tolerate this,’” Budd said, “they are, I’m just going to say it, lying.”

Revelations about the group came the day after Facebook released an auditof its efforts to protect civil rights across the social media platform. The audit specifically recommended strengthening protections against hate speech and calls for harassment related to national origin.

Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said she’d been pressing Facebook to pursue secret groups like 10-15 and hidden hate speech for years. Facebook, she said, “can use their AI or their people to identify these groups, and with the horrible language in there, they should have been finding these people.”

Facebook has not yet responded to questions from ProPublica.

Some members of the Facebook group predicted there would be trouble if the posts ever became public. “A bunch of people gonna regret comments they write on 10-15 if it shows up in court,” wrote one member in a post obtained by ProPublica.

“You understand this page is full of Agents, right?” replied another member, apparently suggesting that no one would expose the offensive comments of their fellow Border Patrol employees.

Trump Promises Tank Procession, Flyovers for July 4

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday promised military tanks along with “Incredible Flyovers & biggest ever Fireworks!” for the Fourth of July in Washington. But the District of Columbia’s says “Tanks, but no tanks” and complains that Trump is politicizing what traditionally has been a nonpartisan celebration.

White House and administration officials have tried to calm those concerns by stressing that Trump plans to deliver a patriotic speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday during his “Salute to America” event that is billed as honoring the U.S. armed forces.

But one of Trump’s closest White House advisers strayed from that reasoning when asked to preview his remarks.

Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters Tuesday the speech would cover “how wonderful this country is, our troops and military, our great democracy and great call to patriotism, the success of this administration in opening up so many jobs for individuals, what we’ve done for veterans.”

Trump also criticized Democrats after first saying he thinks he can give a speech for everyone.

“I think I’ve reached most Americans,” Trump said Monday during an Oval Office appearance, adding that most Americans want no crime, a strong military, good education and good health care.

“If you look at preexisting conditions, the Republicans are going to save preexisting conditions. The Democrats won’t be able to do it. What the Democrats’ plan is going to destroy the country, and it’s going to be horrible health care. Horrible health care.”

Trump tweeted Tuesday: “Big 4th of July in D.C. ‘Salute to America.’ The Pentagon & our great Military Leaders are thrilled to be doing this & showing to the American people, among other things, the strongest and most advanced Military anywhere in the World. Incredible Flyovers & biggest ever Fireworks!”

But not everyone is on board.

The military appreciates national recognition, but some members worry that they will be seen as political props. This concern has been heightened during Trump’s administration by his repeated focus on showcasing the military as the main symbol of U.S. power and influence in the world.

The District of Columbia government previously had complained about damage that tanks would do to city streets and reissued its complaint on Monday after The Washington Post reported on Trump’s plan to station military tanks in the city.

“We have said it before, and we’ll say it again: Tanks, but no tanks,” the City Council tweeted. The tweet included an image of a Defense Department memo from 2018 that suggested only wheeled vehicles be used to minimize damage to streets from 60-ton tanks.

Trump had wanted a military parade of tanks and other equipment in Washington after he watched a military parade on Bastille Day in Paris in 2017. That plan eventually was scuttled, partly because of cost, though Trump apparently held on to the idea. Local officials objected at that time, too.

Thursday’s events are also expected to include military flyovers by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, F-22 fighter jets and possibly other military aircraft.

“It’ll be special and I hope a lot of people come,” Trump said.

The annual fireworks display will be held near the Lincoln Memorial instead of its usual location by the Washington Monument.

A ticket-only area in front of the memorial is being set aside for VIPs, including members of Trump’s family, friends and members of the military, the White House said.

The Republican National Committee is distributing a “small number” of tickets to the event, which it says is standard practice and follows what the Democratic National Committee did under Democratic presidents.

Members of Congress, local officials and others have voiced concerns that Trump could alter the tone of what traditionally is a nonpartisan celebration of America’s independence from the British by delivering a political speech. Trump formally announced his bid for re-election in June.

There are also unanswered questions about costs associated with the military involvement in the celebration. Conway referred questions about the price tag to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials referred back to the White House.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said Tuesday that the Interior Department, which oversees the National Mall, has not answered lawmakers’ request for details.

“The American people deserve to know how much of their money the president is spending to turn their July 4th celebration into a de facto campaign rally,” Udall said.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who represents nearby suburbs in Virginia, called on Trump to personally reimburse U.S. taxpayers and local governments for any damage to roads and bridges. Beyer said he found it “appalling” that Trump would try to make the annual Independence Day celebration about him.

___

AP National Security Writer Robert Burns and Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

Trump Understands Peace Is Good Politics—Do Democrats?

If there’s one thing Democrats agree on, it is that President Trump’s very brief visit to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to shake hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is a “photo op,” not a substantive move; a stunt, not diplomacy.

Kamala Harris said it. Elizabeth Warren said it. Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes said it. So did Max Boot, one of the leading advocates on invading Iraq in 2003. On North Korea, these Democrats are siding with the Washington hawks who have advocated endless war in pursuit of “national security.”

The question is, why?

South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in who accompanied Trump to the DMZ did not criticize the meeting. Moon, whose statecraft over the last two years has been ignored by Democrats and the Washington press corps, is a liberal who has staked his presidency on coaxing a deal out of two mercurial authoritarians. What Moon is trying to secure is nothing less than a world-historic agreement: a formal end to the Korean war and the negotiated denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

You might think liberal Democrats would support Moon’s liberal peace agenda. They don’t even seem to know about it. The “photo op” the Democrats deride was, in Moon’s view, a “significant milestone” on the road to peace. After the failure of the Hanoi summit in February due to the demands of Trump’s adviser John Bolton, the chance for resolving the dangerous six-decade-long impasse between North and South Korea seemed to be slipping away.

By meeting with U.S. national intelligence director Dan Coats, Moon helped keep peace alive. Moon knew the handshake was coming before it happened, and he welcomed it.

“Through their meeting today, the South and North Korean leaders and the American leader made history,” Yoon Do-han, Moon’s press secretary, said after the border meeting.

The handshake was hailed by Hankyoreh, South Korea’s leading left-liberal newspaper, as a key step toward ending the Cold War on the Korean peninsula:

“The convergence of these three leaders at a single place was a historic meeting on a different level from an inter-Korean summit or a North Korea-US summit. It can be seen as the result of Moon’s proactive and indefatigable role as facilitator, as the South Korean president is determined to sit in the driver’s seat on Korean Peninsula issues.”

The conservative Seoul newspaper, JoonAng Daily, also endorsed the meeting:

“Such a hurriedly arranged meeting naturally could not bring any dramatic breakthrough in bilateral relations or the denuclearization process. Still, the more the leaders meet, the greater the chances are for a positive outcome in the future. Mutual trust is built through constant contact and communication.”

No, the handshake is not an agreement. Yes, Trump’s policies are impulsive and inconsistent. But the DMZ get-together has restored the diplomatic track, by signaling all three leaders want some kind of deal. The Trump administration is now reportedly considering a freeze in North Korea’s nuclear program as a first step in a peace agreement. Working-level talks will resume later this month.

While hawks are already denouncing the freeze as acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear state, it is only tacit recognition of the reality that North Korea—like Iran—is not going to surrender its nuclear option without securing real benefits.

Indeed, all of the arguments in favor of the Iran nuclear deal—unanimously supported by the Democratic candidates—apply to the Korean negotiations. Carefully negotiated international agreements can make the world safer. Resolving issues of both nuclear arms and human rights in one agreement is impossible. A real deal will require significant concessions by both sides. And, an imperfect agreement with an undemocratic regime that curbs the nuclear danger is better than doing nothing. The fact that Trump was foolish to tear up the Iran nuclear deal does not negate any of these realities. It confirms them.

The last two months have shown that Trump, with an eye on his lousy poll numbers going into the 2020 election, understands that making peace is good politics, and making war is a recipe for rejection by American voters.

On Venezuela, Trump lost interest in “regime change” as soon as the Pompeo/Bolton fantasy of a quick victory evaporated. A scheme concocted by Bolton’s NSC to bribe Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s inner circle into supporting opposition leader Juan Guaido fell apart. Guaido’s hastily improvised April 29 call for the Venezuelans to rise up against the government sputtered into failure. With military intervention as the only remaining option to enforce the bully-boy demands of Pompeo and Bolton, Trump has walked away from his own policy, reportedly muttering about how Bolton wants to get him “into a war.”

Trump doesn’t care if he looks foolish or inconsistent. But what about the five Democratic presidential candidates who effectively endorsed the aggressive Venezuela policy that Trump has now abandoned? They look more warlike than the president.

On Iran, Trump approved an attack on Iranian military positions for downing an unmanned U.S. drone that would have killed 150 people. When Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson pointed out, probably correctly, that attacking Iran would doom Trump’s reelection prospects, the president canceled the attack, saying correctly, that it would have been “disproportionate.”

Now Trump has torn up the playbook that has ruled U.S. Korea policy for decades. That Washington playbook calls for North Korea to eliminate its nuclear arsenal before the United States lifts sanctions or agrees to an end to the Korean war. Such a maximalist agenda offers nothing to South Koreans living under the threat of war, which is why President Moon and the South Korean press are supporting Trump.

Bernie Sanders had a more measured response to the “photo op,” which did not echo the talking points of Washington hawks.

“I don’t have a problem with him sitting down and negotiating with our adversaries,” Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I don’t want it to be a photo opportunity. We need real diplomacy.”

“Real diplomacy” is what President Moon has been quietly practicing and what Democrats should support. Whether Trump is capable of a deal that puts the Koreas on a path to peace is, of course, open to question, especially with Bolton at his side. The national security adviser has opposed every effort to negotiate with North Korea over the last 30 years and has often said “regime change” is the only solution.

Given the choice between Trump’s opportunism and Bolton’s intransigence, Moon’s diplomacy is the best option for securing peace and protecting U.S. interests. It’s also good politics for 2020. Trump knows that. Do the Democrats?

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

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

The Washington Post’s Botched Fact-Check of Bernie Sanders

Critics of massive wealth inequality in the United States defended a statistic frequently cited by 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday after Glenn Kessler, author of the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” column, claimed the fact that the bottom half of the country has zero or negative wealth was “not especially meaningful.”

The statistic in question was brought up most recently by Sanders during the Democratic primary debate last week:

“We have three people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America,” Sanders said.

The statement, Kessler said, is factually true—but he rejected Sanders’s suggestion that the inequality evidenced by the fact means that a major correction to the U.S. economy is required.

“This snappy talking point is based on numbers that add up, but it’s also a question of comparing apples to oranges,” Kessler wrote. “But people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth, as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have. So the comparison is not especially meaningful.”

Critics denounced Kessler’s suggestion that the notion of 50 percent of the population of the world’s richest country carrying so much debt that any wealth they own is canceled out, could hold no meaning about the state of the nation’s economic system.

The column, wrote Sanders’s speechwriter, David Sirota, should be filed under “things you can’t make up.”

THINGS YOU CAN’T MAKE UP: WashPost “fact checker” @GlennKesslerWP criticizes @BernieSanders for saying 3 families control more wealth than the bottom 50% – Kessler says because the bottom 50% have no wealth at all, this is “not especially meaningful.” https://t.co/Piv4ZCJxA0 pic.twitter.com/k7qGpqGgjD

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 1, 2019

“Glenn Kessler’s logic here—that it’s ‘not meaningful’ that the bottom 50 percent of earners have no net worth because they have a bunch of debt that’s obscuring all the assets they do have—is a completely nonsensical take,” wrote journalist Matthew Chapman.

I’m with Sirota on this one. @GlennKessler‘s logic here — that it’s “not meaningful” that the bottom 50% of earners have no net worth because they have a bunch of debt that’s obscuring all the assets they *do* have — is a completely nonsensical take. https://t.co/fF6vZqI3ve

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) July 1, 2019

Kessler’s dismissal of the plight of middle-income and lower-income Americans was indicative of the desire of many to ignore “perfectly correct data” which “point out ugly truths” about the United States, wrote Greg Greene, a blogger for Planned Parenthood Action.

… and in holding to his assumptions, Kessler insists on scolding folks — like Bernie Sanders, or AOC — who, use perfectly correct data to point out the ugly truths hidden by his green eyeshade. https://t.co/Nkyaisp4EH

— Greg Greene (@ggreeneva) July 1, 2019

Big Business to Supreme Court: Defend LGBTQ People From Bias

NEW YORK — More than 200 corporations, including many of America’ best-known companies, have signed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal civil rights law bans job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The brief , announced Tuesday by a coalition of five LGBTQ rights groups, is being submitted to the Supreme Court this week ahead of oral arguments before the justices on Oct. 8 on three cases that may determine whether gays, lesbians and transgender people are protected from discrimination by existing federal civil rights laws.

Among the 206 corporations endorsing the brief were Amazon, American Airlines, Bank of America, Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Domino’s Pizza, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Starbucks, Viacom, the Walt Disney Co. and Xerox. Two major league baseball teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Tampa Bay Rays, were among the group.

Related Articles











Corporate Opportunism Has Reached a New Low



by

















The Damage of Trump's Judicial Appointments Is Already Done



by

In their brief, the companies argued that a uniform federal rule is needed to protect LGBTQ employees equally in all 50 states.

“Even where companies voluntarily implement policies to prohibit sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, such policies are not a substitute for the force of law,” the brief argued. “Nor is the patchwork of incomplete state or local laws sufficient protection — for example, they cannot account for the cross-state mobility requirements of the modern workforce.”

Federal appeals courts in Chicago and New York have ruled recently that gay and lesbian employees are entitled to protection from discrimination; the federal appeals court in Cincinnati has extended similar protections for transgender people.

The question now is whether the Supreme Court will follow suit, given its conservative majority strengthened by President Donald Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The three cases are the court’s first on LGBTQ rights since the retirement last year of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored landmark gay rights opinions.

The Obama administration had supported treating LGBTQ discrimination claims as sex discrimination, but the Trump administration has changed course. The Trump Justice Department has argued that the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not intended to provide protections to gay or transgender workers.

The companies signing the brief represent more than 7 million employees and $5 trillion in annual revenue, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest of the LGBTQ rights groups organizing the initiative. Other organizers included Lambda Legal, Out Leadership, Out and Equal, and Freedom for All Americans.

“At this critical moment in the fight for LGBTQ equality, these leading businesses are sending a clear message to the Supreme Court that LGBTQ people should, like their fellow Americans, continue to be protected from discrimination,” said Jay Brown, a Human Rights Campaign vice president. “These employers know firsthand that protecting the LGBTQ community is both good for business and the right thing to do.”

In one of the cases heading to the Supreme Court, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a gay skydiving instructor who claimed he was fired because of his sexual orientation. The appeals court ruled that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.”

The ruling was a victory for the relatives of Donald Zarda, now deceased, who was fired in 2010 from a skydiving job that required him to strap himself tightly to clients so they could jump in tandem from an airplane. He tried to put a woman with whom he was jumping at ease by explaining that he was gay. The school fired Zarda after the woman’s boyfriend called to complain.

A second case comes from Michigan, where a funeral home fired a transgender woman. The appeals court in Cincinnati ruled that the firing constituted sex discrimination under federal law.

The funeral home argues that Congress was not considering transgender people when it included sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The law prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

The third case is from Georgia, where the federal appeals court ruled against a gay employee of Clayton County, in the Atlanta suburbs. Gerald Bostock claimed he was fired in 2013 because he is gay. The county argues that Bostock was let go because of the results of a financial audit.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed Bostock’s claim in an opinion noting the court was bound by a 1979 decision that held “discharge for homosexuality is not prohibited by Title VII.”

Let’s Shut Down the Authoritarian Machine

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

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.

– Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Trump’s ominous tweet about how his supporters might “demand” that he stay in office for more than two terms is the latest proof that his authoritarian ideology has little regard for the law. The tweet also reflects Trump’s strong desire to use threats of violence, if necessary, to reshape the political landscape and mode of governance.

Other recent evidence of the rising threat of authoritarianism in the U.S. include Trump’s continuing efforts to run roughshod over Congress with the most recent attempt being his urging former staff members not to respond to House subpoenas and his attempts “to block Congress from obtaining documents about the census citizenship question.” Trump’s authoritarian politics is also evident in his embrace of and fascination with dictators and demagogues, his promotion of a militarized foreign policy that threatens war with Iran, and his ongoing criticism of mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times and The Washington Post as “enemies of the people.” Moreover, his abuses of executive privilege reflect new levels of disdain for the separation of power; his attempts to prevent the full Mueller report from being handed over to Congress are just one example of this.

As these incidents show, we live in dangerous times, or what might be called the Age of Jackals: that is, an era ruled by the architects of an apocalyptic nationalism, regressive populism, and brutally repressive and racist forms of authoritarianism.

Right-wing populism is washing away the most basic institutions of democracy in countries that extend from the United States to Brazil. Authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil are now invited to the White House in which they receive an endorsement for their policies of repression, their crushing of dissent, their use of state violence, and their much publicized hatred of democracy. Trump appears to pride himself on flouting the law, making a mockery of justice, enriching his personal wealth through corrupt business practices, and using the office of the presidency to enhance what even timid liberals such as the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt call “the global standing of authoritarianism.” Increasingly, authoritarian and fascist movements pose a threat to those they deem disposable, such as Black youth, intellectuals critical of the corrupt Jackals in power, and social movements fighting to save the planet.

Related Articles











Born Disposable: Trump’s War on Youth



by Henry Giroux

The project of addressing the rise of authoritarianism both in the United States and abroad takes on a new urgency as the power of financial capital consolidates its forces over the commanding institutions of society, turning them into workstations for propaganda, social sorting, violence, and disposability. The normalization of terror is now matched by the normalization of the spectacle as everyday life is treated as a Reality TV show that endlessly replays the virtues of extreme competition and a survival-of-the fittest ethos.

The Age of Jackals is the outgrowth of a new political formation that I call neoliberal fascism. This is a historical conjuncture in which neoliberalism and its updated form of finance capital have produced massive degrees of inequality, extreme austerity measures, and ever-expanding attacks on the welfare state. The consequences have been a merging of popular anger and declining hopes for social mobility and a decent life, combined with an intensifying discourse of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism. The current manifestation of finance capital has merged the elements of a fascist politics with the hostile death-dealing machinery of a market fundamentalism, as I discuss in “The Terror of the Unforeseen.”

We now live in a world where in which there appear to be few alternatives to a ravaging global capitalism—a world in which existing authoritarian societies announce themselves as the only viable reality. Under such circumstances, it may appear that all that is left to choose from are competing fictions. This is an age dominated by dangerous narratives that are free of evidence, that bulge with misrepresentations, and that are adamant about destroying any semblance of not just truth, but morality, social responsibility and justice. For the Jackals, language, thinking, memory, and civic values function like an auto-immune system threatening to weaken their power and modes of legitimation. As the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized, language becomes emptied of meaning, filled with the blighted values of commercialization, the lure of the spectacle, and the ever-growing registers of corruption.

One consequence is that everything touched by rabble-rousing power becomes a performance and fodder for a mainstream media eager to increase their ratings. Discourses that invoke historical memory and take on the task of moral witnessing while interrogating the abuse of power are derided as fake news or dismissed as being irrelevant in light of the reigning assumption by those demagogues occupying the highest political offices arguing that democratic socialist society is no longer worth pursuing and that all that is left is illiberal “democracy” — code for the suppression of political and civil liberties in return for authoritarian notions of security. This attack on democratic socialism appears to be more than a rhetorical flourish, especially since more and more members of the public are supportive of democratic socialist policies, especially as articulated by Bernie Sanders, who is arguing for affordable health care, an Economic Bill of Rights, a living wage, economic security, independence from the dictates of a market society, and a full-fledged attack on massive inequalities in wealth and power.

As the Trump administration makes clear, truth, justice, and social responsibility have no place in the Age of Jackals. Power is written in the language of economics rather than ethics, justice, and compassion. Language has been turned on its head to mean its opposite. “Freedom” now often signifies the freedom to hate, “work” now often means wage slavery. Individualism is now defined exclusively as a part of an ethos of ruthless competition, self-interest is the enemy of solidarity and compassion, and social atomization, bolstered by an emphasis on individual responsibility, is elevated to a virtue, all while “justice” is used to refer to legal illegalities. The Jackals want to break away from history not only by rewriting it in their own regressive interests, but also by erasing the haunting and lingering ghosts of a fascist politics to which they have sold their souls. Lies are no longer subtle, just as the violence waged against children and undocumented immigrants becomes a badge of honor for Trump and his cowardly and corrupt minions. State violence for the Jackals across the globe is the organizing principles of the societies they rule.

The Jackals are drunk on greed and power and are willing to kill the planet and any vestige of decency and economic and social justice in order to gorge themselves on wealth. If anyone doubts that capitalism breeds iniquitous amounts of greed and wealth and that its endpoint is fascism, take into account the fact that three white men — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — have more wealth collectively than the bottom 50 percent of the population. Bear in mind that global power and wealth concentrated in few hands give rise not only to massive repression and misery, but also to unthinkable acts of violence and cruelty. Consider the consequences of neoliberal policies that operate according to the idea that economic and property rights are more important than human rights. Such policies refuse to recognize health care as a basic right that should be free, deny tuition-free college, obstruct laws for raising the minimum wage and denounce necessary environmental reforms such as the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, these policies maintain massive degrees of inequality, as millions of Americans are forced to choose between food and health care, between paying their bills and medicine, as they work 80 hours a week simply to be able to survive.

In the age of Jackals, reason loses its power to inform judgment. Truth, like capital and trade, is now flexible, making it easier to deny even a modicum of rational judgment, allowing what late academic Elisabeth Young-Bruehl called the “intrusion of criminality into politics.” The Jackals feed on fear, a war culture, and a culture of cruelty. Language is weaponized and masculinity is militarized. At the heart of the militarization of societies run by Jackals is a profound sense of emptiness, a destruction of civic values and the public institutions that nurture them. Trump, as the Jackal-in-chief, offers tyrants across the globe a newfound energy to legitimate their authoritarian values, policies, and oppressive actions. Under such circumstances, the United States becomes a model for a form of governmentality in which, as Zygmunt Bauman once argued in “Liquid Evil,” “everything that matters is denied and everything that embodies evil is reinvented.” As the politics of lying moves from the margins to the center of power, Trump’s false cries of “fake news” wield enormous political and pedagogical influence, while accelerating and normalizing an endless stream of actual fake news and misrepresentations. Ignorance becomes the breeding ground for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, and allows the powerful to weaponize everyday discourse.

Trump’s attack on the truth resonates with a larger culture of speed, instant gratification and consumerism. Coupled with a society that worships celebrity culture, the spectacularization of power makes it easier for Trump and his associates to rehabilitate fascist ideas, principles and a political culture. At the core of Trump’s disdain for reason and truth is a full-fledged attack on the institutions that promote the habits, sensibilities, values, dispositions and culture that produce critically engaged citizens and sustain a strong democracy. The crucial lesson here is that without informed citizens, a critical press and critical agents, the power of democratic institutions along with established checks and balances wither, and the threat of twenty-first century authoritarianism becomes more imminent.

The current age of Jackals constitutes both a crisis of politics and a crisis of history, memory, agency, and education. What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role and is unapologetic about enacting policies that further enable the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him) and by mega-corporations. Trump represents a reemergence of a past that should terrify us. Trump’s ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing, his love affair with some of the world’s most heinous dictators and his hatred of democracy echo a period in history when the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the concentration camp.

Andrea Pitzer, the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” says that such camps already exist in the United States, explaining that she defines concentration camps as “mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Citing Pitzer, Esquire writer Jack Holmes argues:

The government of the United States would never call the sprawling network of facilities now in use across many states “concentration camps,” of course…. But by Pitzer’s measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama’s government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify…. These kinds of detention camps are a military endeavor: they are defensible in wartime … But inserting them into civil society, and using them to house civilians, is a materially different proposition. You are revoking the human and civil rights of non-combatants without legal justification.

Trump represents and enables the age of Jackals — a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred authoritarianism. Of course, Trump is only a symptom of the apocalyptic forces of racism, xenophobia, nativism, consumerism, and neoliberalism-induced forms of misery that have been brewing for some time. Tom Engelhardt believes that Trump is the product of a blowback induced by a number of factors. He writes:

The Donald clearly arrived on the scene as blowback — the CIA term of tradecraft Johnson first put into our everyday vocabulary — from at least two things: an American imperium gone wrong with its never-ending wars, ever-rising military budgets, and ever-expanding national security state, and a new “gilded age” in which three men and the .01% have one of their own, a billionaire, in the Oval Office. (If you want to add a third blowback factor, try a media turned upside down by new ways of communicating and increasingly desperate to glue eyes to screens as ad revenues, budgets, and staffs shrank and the talking heads of cable news multiplied.)

Trump is both the outcome and symptom of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance and lifts the veil from the lies and misrepresentations that normalize the neoliberal capital machinery of death. What is needed is a language of militant possibility: what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined futures,” one that “can snap us out of our present-day socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives, build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic commitment.” Such a language needs to “remember” that the history of the first Gilded Age is being reproduced today as the distance between the wealth of the financial elite and the bottom half of the population grows exponentially while the planet heats up, ice caps melt, and millions of plants and animal species become extinct.

The Jackals are spreading updated forms of fascism throughout the globe and in part they do so through forms of civic illiteracy distributed by the oligarchs in control of the new digital platforms and landscapes, which know only one rule — make money in spite of the consequences. Neoliberal fascism is the new toxin that empowers the Jackals, who live off the energies and lives of the walking dead. They inhabit a space produced in the fusion of neoliberal policies of austerity, militarism, xenophobia, social and economic discrimination, racial hatred, and the impoverishment of civic life and culture.

As Marx pointed out, violence is the midwife of capitalism, and as Adorno made clear fascism is capitalism’s endpoint. Under the brutal strictures of finance capital — a more brutal stage of capitalism — the line separating democracy and violent oppression disappears. In an age in which the Jackals spread powerful forms of market, religious, political, and ideological fundamentalism, a new brutalism appears in which everything sinks into chaos while producing a political earthquake. How else to explain the rise of what Nancy Fraser describes as

the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports.

Cynicism is embedded in the social fabric as the Jackals use their cultural apparatuses to wage war against criticism, dissent, and forms of political resistance willing to imagine a future that does not imitate a dystopian present. The power of the Jackals is intimately connected to their ability to produce disimagination machines, cultural apparatuses that both normalize their putrid ideologies of privatization, deregulation, unchecked individualism, and commodification and close off the possibility of imagining new radical horizons. What must be remembered here is that neoliberal fascism cannot be understood narrowly as simply an economic system. It also functions as a form of public pedagogy and mode of persuasion and rationality intent on naturalizing its own worldview. Most importantly, it works through a range of cultural apparatuses to depoliticize by colonizing justifiable forms of mass anger and redirecting them into cesspools of hatred aimed at those populations considered disposable.

There is no worthwhile politics without a realistic and critical understanding of the world in which one lives. We must engage in a spirited criticism of the range of existing and widening forms of oppression that extend from racism and mass incarceration to an assault on public provisions, public good, education and the planet. However, we must also look forward. There is no sense of agency unless individuals can imagine a future in which a democratic socialist society matters and is worth struggling for. The first step in getting rid of the Jackals is to build a strong-anti-capitalist movement, one capable of uniting a vast array of social movements under the banner of a radical socialist democracy. The war against the Jackals and their neoliberal fascist societies needs to call for a deep restructuring of power outside of the ethos of capitalism, a restructuring not afraid to call for a democratic and political revolution. No form of resistance will succeed without developing a new narrative, language, and politics willing to link struggles for political and economic change with struggles for social equality and social justice.

At the same time, there is a need for nonviolent forms of resistance that can bring authoritarian societies to a halt. Both Hong Kong and South Korea have used the general strike to stop the economic and cultural machineries at work under the rule of authoritarian societies. In Hong Kong, over 2 million people took to the streets exhibiting the power of collective struggle, and thus far they have succeeded in turning back a repressive piece of legislation. In extreme times, we need extreme forms of resistance that can make headway in societies in which normal legislative and electoral processes no longer work to bring about radical and fundamental change.

History is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if we want to imagine and fight for alternative futures and horizons of possibility. We need to stoke the radical imagination to make sure that justice never goes dead in us and that no society is ever just enough. It is time to shut down the authoritarian machine that has descended upon the globe.