Chris Hedges's Blog, page 230

Sanders to Discuss ‘What Democratic Socialism Means to Me’

WASHINGTON — Seeking to rebut President Donald Trump’s attempts to cast him and Democrats as too liberal, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to give a speech Wednesday on democratic socialism, the economic philosophy that has guided his political career.

Sanders made similar remarks during his first presidential campaign in 2016, when he faced questions about his decades-long association with democratic socialists. He’s again confronting criticism from within and outside the Democratic Party during his second presidential bid, and the speech, which the campaign is billing as a major address, is an attempt to reframe the debate about his views.

But he’s doing this in a reshaped political landscape in which he’s no longer the sole progressive taking on an establishment candidate, as he was in 2016 when he battled Hillary Clinton. He’s one of two dozen Democratic White House hopefuls, several of whom are also unabashed liberals. And they’re all operating in an environment dominated by Trump.

“We now have a president who is attacking me and others because we believe in democratic socialism,” Sanders said in a Tuesday interview with The Associated Press in which he previewed his speech. “This is a president who believes in socialism, but the difference is he believes in socialism for large corporations and the wealthy, not the working people.”

“What tomorrow is about,” he added, “is defining what democratic socialism means to me.”

Shaping those terms will be crucial if Sanders is to convince voters that his embrace of democratic socialism isn’t a barrier to winning the White House. He’s argued that his populist appeal could help win back the working-class voters across the Midwest who swung from Democrats to Trump in 2016.

Sanders is fond of noting that many of his Democratic rivals now back policies, such as “Medicare for All,” that were seen as too costly and too liberal in previous elections. But few of the other Democrats seeking the White House share his support for democratic socialism.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has jumped to the top of the Democratic field in part because of a perception that he’s the most electable candidate in the race, has derided the notion that politicians must be socialists to prove they’re progressive. Other liberal candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California, have noted that while they have problems with the economic system, they remain capitalists.

Trump and his allies have nonetheless lambasted Sanders and the rest of the Democratic field, warning against what they call the threat of creeping socialism.

In this year’s State of the Union address, Trump declared that America “will never be a socialist country.” Weeks later, when Sanders entered the race, a spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign said Sanders had “already won the debate in the Democrat primary because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism” and said Trump is the only candidate who will keep the country “free, prosperous and safe.”

On Tuesday in Iowa, Trump claimed Democrats will “destroy this country” and turn the U.S. into “another Venezuela.”

“Don’t let it happen to us,” Trump warned at an Iowa GOP dinner in West Des Moines.

Sanders last spoke in depth about democratic socialism in November 2015. Also speaking in Washington, he invoked the legacies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that democratic socialism was reflected in their priorities.

While in Tuesday’s interview Sanders promised he would be more explicit this time in describing his belief in democratic socialism, some of the themes he will discuss echo the 2015 remarks, including positioning himself as the heir of the ideals that originated with Roosevelt in 1944.

“Over 80 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made huge progress in protecting the needs of working families,” Sanders will say, according to prepared remarks. “Today in the second decade of the 21st century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion. This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.”

As he did in his first presidential run, much of Sanders’ campaign speech is focused on promising a wholesale revolution, including a fundamental rethinking of the political system. Asked Tuesday how he would tangibly change Washington’s centers of political power to make his visions a reality, he said he would do so “by taking politics out of Washington.”

“What the political revolution means to me, above and beyond democratic socialism, is getting millions of people who have given up on the political process, working people and young people, to stand up and fight for their rights. So those are the profound changes that we will be bringing about,” he said.

Jon Stewart Lashes Out at Congress Over 9/11 Victims Fund

WASHINGTON—Comedian Jon Stewart scolded Congress on Tuesday for failing to ensure that a victims’ compensation fund set up after the 9/11 attacks never runs out of money.

Stewart, a longtime advocate for 9/11 responders, angrily called out lawmakers for failing to attend a hearing on a bill to ensure the fund can pay benefits for the next 70 years. Pointing to rows of empty seats at a House Judiciary Committee hearing room, Stewart said “sick and dying” first responders and their families came to Washington for the hearing, only to face a nearly deserted dais.

The sparse attendance by lawmakers was “an embarrassment to the country and a stain on this institution,” Stewart said, adding that the “disrespect” shown to first responders now suffering from respiratory ailments and other illnesses “is utterly unacceptable.”

Lawmakers from both parties said they support the bill and were monitoring the hearing amid other congressional business.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., predicted the bill will pass with overwhelming support and said lawmakers meant no disrespect as they moved in and out of the subcommittee hearing, a common occurrence on Capitol Hill.

Stewart was unconvinced.

Pointing to rows of uniformed firefighters and police officers behind him, he said the hearing “should be flipped,” so that first responders were on the dais, with members of Congress “down here” in witness chairs answering their questions.

First and foremost, Stewart said, families want to know, “Why this is so damn hard and takes so damn long?”

The collapse of the World Trade Center in September 2001 sent a cloud of thick dust billowing over Lower Manhattan. Fires burned for weeks. Thousands of construction workers, police officers, firefighters and others spent time working in the soot, often without proper respiratory protection.

In the years since, many have seen their health decline, some with respiratory or digestive-system ailments that appeared almost immediately, others with illnesses that developed as they aged, including cancer.

More than 40,000 people have applied to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which covers illnesses potentially related to being at the World Trade Center site, the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the attacks. More than $5 billion in benefits have been awarded out of the $7.4 billion fund, with about 21,000 claims pending.

Stewart and other speakers lamented the fact that nearly 18 years after the attacks, first responders and their families still have no assurance the fund will not run out of money. The Justice Department said in February that the fund is being depleted and that benefit payments are being cut by up to 70 percent.

“The plain fact is that we are expending the available funds more quickly than assumed, and there are many more claims than anticipated,” said Rupa Bhattacharyya, the fund’s special master. A total of 835 awards have been reduced as of May 31, she said.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat whose district includes the World Trade Center site, said a 70% cut — or any cut — in compensation to victims of 9/11 “is simply intolerable, and Congress must not allow it.”

Just as Americans “stood together as a nation in the days following September 11, 2001, and just as we stood together in 2010 and 2015 to authorize and fund these vital programs, we must now join forces one more time to ensure that the heroes of 9/11 are not abandoned when they need us most,” Nadler said.

Mitch McConnell Has a Vested Interest in Blocking Election Security Efforts

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailing his team’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election “stopped short of accusing [President Trump] of criminal wrongdoing,” as Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman write in The New York Times, leaving Congress to decide whether to investigate further any potential obstruction of justice and conspiracy. However, Mueller’s report did conclude Russia breached voting systems in Illinois and Florida in 2016, and testimony from national security officials to the Senate in April also revealed Russia targeted voting systems in a total of 21 states during the 2016 election.

Worried about future elections, Republicans and Democrats alike created legislation to improve election security, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md. These bills, as Donald Shaw reports in Sludge, have another aspect in common: they have all been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

McConnell, Shaw writes, “reportedly told his colleagues that he will not allow the Senate to vote on election security legislation this session.” According to Wyden, “The only logical conclusion is that Sen. McConnell wants American elections to be vulnerable to hackers and foreign interference,” Wyden told Sludge.

Wyden added, “If Congress doesn’t act, it’s only a matter of time before hackers successfully interfere again.”

In The New York Times, Nicholas Fandos echoes Shaw, calling McConnell “the Senate’s leading ideological opponent to federal regulation of elections,” adding he “has long been an implacable foe of legislation that mandates disclosure or limits on political donors.”

McConnell remains a roadblock, Fandos continues, “despite clamoring from members of his own conference and the growing pressure from Democrats who also sense a political advantage in trying to make the Republican response to Russia’s election attack look anemic.”

That the legislation would require disclosures or limits on political donors, Sludge suggests, may be part of McConnell’s reasoning. As Shaw explains:

The two largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, together supply more than 80% of the nation’s voting machines. The companies have operated extensive lobbying operations in states for years, and both companies recently hired new lobbyists to represent them at the federal level.

Some of that money, Shaw continues, went to McConnell:

Several of the lobbyists working for ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have recently made contributions to McConnell’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck’s David Cohen, who lobbies for Dominion Voting Systems on issues related to election security and monitors federal legislation for the company, gave McConnell $2,000 on March 31: $1,000 to his campaign committee and $1,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Lobbyist Brain Wild, who works alongside Cohen on the Dominion contract, gave McConnell $1,000 on the same day.

McConnell and his office did not respond to Sludge’s request for comment.

On previous occasions, McConnell has said existing efforts to protect election systems are enough. Fandos points out that in the same May speech in which he announced “case closed” in reference to the Russia investigation, McConnell also said, “We just had the 2018 midterm elections. Thanks to this administration’s leadership, all 50 states and more than 1,400 local election jurisdictions focused on election security like never before,” adding, “Thanks to efforts across the federal government, in 2018, we were ready.”

Advocates for election security and government transparency remain unconvinced. Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told Sludge, “Mitch McConnell’s conflicts of interest in blocking any and all election security legislation is not only shameful, it is placing our democracy at risk.”

Holman added, “The conflicts of interest arise from more than the campaign contributions he is receiving from voting machine vendors—contributions which certainly appear to be a reward from the industry for letting them off the hook—but it is also a self-serving act for strictly partisan purposes.”

Why Boeing May Never Recover From Its 737 Debacle

This article was produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Most of us are familiar with the acronym “FUBAR.” A recent New York Times article on the Boeing 737 fiasco provides a perfect illustration of the concept. We’re now learning that the company “built deadly assumptions” into its newly designed 737 Max aircraft and, specifically, its computer software system—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Even worse, the New York Times account concludes that the recent air crashes that have resulted in a worldwide grounding of the Boeing Max plane “might have been avoided, if employees and regulators had a better understanding of MCAS” and if the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) itself was not operating with outdated data on the software changes (which Boeing failed to provide).

The analysis is excellent as far as it goes. But the most damning fact only briefly hinted at in the article is that the problems were evident as early as 2012, some five years before the newest 737 version was marketed and sold across the globe. At its core, this was a hardware problem, not a software issue. Even when Boeing was using a relatively “safer” version of the early MCAS software (that was later changed to a more dangerous version), the new 737 still had an engine too large to be accommodated in its traditional spot on the plane, which ultimately distorted “the relationship between the engine’s ‘thrust’ and its center of gravity,” as I’ve written before. The resultant aerodynamic problems could not be solved with a software “solution,” no matter how “safe” the original MCAS version (that was ultimately changed to an even more dangerous version) was purported to be.

Just don’t expect any blowback from Washington. The whole episode provides yet another sick illustration of how our entire system of governance has degenerated into a fully-fledged “predator state.” About the only good thing that might emerge from this whole fiasco is that Boeing will provide future MBA students with a textbook example of how not to manage a crisis. Likewise, future historians and political scientists will marvel in incredulity at the magnitude of corruption that enveloped the country during this very dark time in the life of the republic. Assuming, of course, that there still anything left worth studying by that point.

This is also a story of deception, as The New York Times points out. Throughout the process, Boeing also actively misled the FAA whenever the industry regulatory overseer raised questions. Who was the agent of deception?

In this account, The New York Times identifies one of the leading protagonists responsible for the Boeing disaster, Mark Forkner. Forkner was “the Max’s chief technical pilot”—not merely a “test pilot”—who was in charge of the plane’s training manuals. More significantly, he was Boeing’s point man who neglected to tell the FAA that the MCAS software “was in the midst of an overhaul, according to… three F.A.A. officials.” Forkner requested removing the description of the MCAS from the pilot’s manual, and, as The New York Times reports, “Under the impression that the system was relatively benign and rarely used, the F.A.A. eventually approved Mr. Forkner’s request, the three officials said.”

The question is, was Forkner intentionally deceptive, or simply incompetent?

In his defense, the New York Times suggests that “Mr. Forkner largely worked on flight simulators, which didn’t fully mimic MCAS,” implying perhaps that he didn’t have a full understanding of the MCAS software overhaul. If true, that would suggest that Boeing’s senior management wrongly appointed an incompetent to deal with the FAA.

The other interpretation is that Forkner’s lawyer might be telegraphing a legal defense, diminishing his role in anticipation of a lawsuit. That may be less credible, given that Forkner himself was a former FAA employee, thus in effect a revolving-door technological lobbyist (unregistered) who would therefore be well-placed to deceive the FAA training certification engineers into approving whatever training cover-ups Boeing needed to hide to sell more airplanes. Whenever the FAA pushed, Forkner pushed back.

The New York Times also parenthetically mentions that Forkner started his flying career as a U.S. Air Force pilot. Given how the USAF conducts its own lobbying activities in D.C., this was likely a formative influence on his revolving-door ethics and yet another example of the polluting influence of the military on a once successful civilian enterprise, given the Pentagon’s (especially the USAF) own pathologies in this area.

Even if Forkner is ultimately absolved of responsibility, it does not absolve Boeing. Rather, it represents a monumental management failure on the part of its stability and control aerodynamicists, not its software engineers. Recall that the genesis of this disaster was a problem of hardware, not just MCAS. The extra lift of the far larger diameter engines of the 737 Max (placed on a different position on the wing) caused the plane to pitch up whenever it approached stall angles of attack at both high and low speeds. This is a problem that should have become glaringly obvious to the greenest of aerodynamics personnel at Boeing the moment the first wind tunnel model was tested at angles of attack higher than stall (it may have even been obvious on even-earlier computational fluid dynamics computer simulation results).

The New York Times notes the observations of Ray Craig, then Boeing’s chief test pilot, that the plane wasn’t flying smoothly even during the early development phase (i.e., in 2012, five years before the first sales). After high-speed tests flown in the computer simulator, Craig noted that the newer model was not flying as well as the old model. In response, he advocated a hardware solution to rectify the problem, which Boeing management rejected on the grounds that such “high-speed situations were so rare that… the software would never actually kick in,” the first of many assumptions that would ultimately prove fatal in the two eventual plane crashes.

Reading between the lines, however, it is evident that the original software designers were aware of and had already quantified the pitch-up problem in the plane (which arose because of the larger engine that had affected the plane’s center of gravity) and therefore had already programmed it into the simulator before the test pilot runs in 2012.

To mitigate the hardware flaws, The New York Times explains that:

“engineers initially designed MCAS to trigger when the plane exceeded at least two separate thresholds, according to three people who worked on the 737 Max. One involved the plane’s angle to the wind, and the other involved so-called G-force, or the force on the plane that typically comes from accelerating.”

It is true that the initial MCAS software for the high-speed problem was a relatively safe and competent two-sensor, G-force and angle-of-attack solution. The problem is that this “fix” would not work at low speeds because G-forces at low speed were too small to trigger an alarm in the 737 Max.

It is almost beyond belief that, once having tested and found a high-speed pitch-up problem programmed into the simulator in 2012, no one—neither the chief test pilot nor the aerodynamicists (i.e., the engineers responsible for the interaction of moving objects, such as airplanes with the atmosphere)—thought to check the wind tunnel data or test the simulator to see whether there was a corresponding low-speed pitch-up problem. I previously highlighted that low-speed pitch-up is far more dangerous than the relatively rare problem of very “heavy” or high angle-of-attack maneuvering at high speed. This is because takeoffs and landings occur at low speed, and takeoffs and landings are always done at relatively high angles of attack. But it was not until the 737 Max prototype was flown four years later—in 2016—that anyone reported a low-speed pitch-up problem—and then it was not an aerodynamicist but, once again, a test pilot (Ed Wilson, the new chief test pilot for the plane) who insisted there was an issue.

Here is where the problems began to cascade. Since Boeing management had already imposed the MCAS Band-Aid (in lieu of a hardware fix, albeit a relatively safe version), the cheapest, quickest and easiest-to-cover-up fix for the impossible-to-ignore low-speed problem was to issue a new, and even more ineffective, Band-Aid to the existing MCAS. In the process, it changed MCAS from a relatively safe and competent fix to a disastrously unsafe, mindlessly stupid single-sensor solution. As The New York Times reported:

“The change proved pivotal. Expanding the use of MCAS to lower-speed situations required removing the G-force threshold. MCAS now needed to work at low speeds so G-force didn’t apply.

“The change meant that a single angle-of-attack sensor was the lone guard against a misfire. Although modern 737 jets have two angle-of-attack sensors, the final version of MCAS took data from just one.”

Amazingly, the change was not subject to any further scrutiny from the FAA because, according to William Schubbe, whom the New York Times describes as “a senior F.A.A. official who worked with the training group,” said that Boeing had told him that “this thing is so transparent to the pilot that there’s no need to demonstrate any kind of failing.” In any event, the FAA had already repeatedly shown itself to be out of its depth in terms of determining the overall safety of the plane, having effectively subcontracted much of its oversight to Boeing itself.

The Boeing 737 crashes are tragedies. But what truly moves this tragedy into the realm of sheer predation and, indeed, criminality, is the (non-)response of the government. In spite of everything we now know, there has been no re-think of amending this longstanding laissez-faire revolving-door regulatory approach, especially in this White House. Consider that the newly appointed secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, is already under investigation for allegedly lobbying improperly on behalf of his former company. Additionally, the Trump administration is rolling back safety regulations in the rail sector, in effect re-creating the self-regulatory conditions that now prevail at the FAA, reports Justin Mikulka from Desmog. In short, Trump’s predatory practices continue unabated: the swamp gets filled up even further as more of these fiascos occur. And the truth is that until regulatory bodies like the FAA get a proper budget that will allow them to take on the job of becoming credible third-party regulators, their actions will continue to prove ineffectual.

We can only imagine what is next—allowing the criminals to regulate the prison system? Beyond the scale of human tragedy, the whole episode provides another sad illustration that our system of governance remains profoundly sick, perhaps terminal. Washington policymakers continue to make the citizenry even more ill through their venal corruption—that is, when their political malpractice doesn’t literally kill them in the process.

U.S. Submits Extradition Request for Julian Assange

WASHINGTON — The United States government has formally submitted an extradition request to the United Kingdom for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

Assange faces an 18-count indictment that accuses him of soliciting and publishing classified information and of conspiring with former Army private Chelsea Manning to crack a Defense Department computer password. That indictment, which includes Espionage Act charges, was issued by the Justice Department last month and is pending in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The extradition request had been expected ever since U.S. authorities first announced a criminal case against Assange.

The 47-year-old Assange was evicted on April 11 from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been holed up since 2012 after Ecuador granted him political asylum. He was arrested by British police and is currently serving a 50-week sentence for jumping bail. Sweden also seeks him for questioning about an alleged rape, which Assange has denied.

Assange was initially charged with a single computer crime violation on allegations that he worked with Manning to crack a government password. Some legal experts have said the additional Espionage Act charges might slow or complicate the extradition process to the extent the United Kingdom views them as political offenses and therefore exempt from extradition.

The U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Manning, who spent seven years in a military prison for delivering a trove of classified information to Assange before having her sentence commuted by then-President Barack Obama, has been jailed for civil contempt in Virginia after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

America Faces an Unprecedented Dental Health Crisis

The light of a Friday morning in autumn gently touched the little town: the Farmers and Miners Bank, the grocery store with the hand-lettered signboard advertising sugar on sale, the squat yellow brick courthouse. It was Jonesville, the county seat of Lee County, by many measures the poorest county in Virginia, and the farthest flung, here, in Appalachia. On this day, all attention was focused upon the outskirts, where at the small airport, preparations were under way for a free health clinic, to be held over the weekend.

In a few hours, the first of the patients would start arriving. They would come from the roads and the highways, the nearby towns and the more distant hollows, from southwestern Virginia and Kentucky and farther away. Some barely had the gas money to get to Jonesville. One woman was driving from Tennessee holding her broken glasses to her eyes. The truck with the chest x-ray machine was already parked at one end of the runway. And when the sky cleared a little more, an old airplane would be flying over the mountains, bringing in folding dental chairs and medical equipment and crates of surgical gauze and gloves from Knoxville.

The free clinic was organized by the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps (RAM), a nonprofit that, since its beginnings in 1985, had headed hundreds of missions and brought medical relief to some of the poorest places on the planet. This would be RAM’s first visit to Jonesville. But the health problems in this pocket of Appalachia—the cancers, the diabetes, the ruined joints—were nothing new. The rotten teeth were nothing new. The toothaches were nothing new. In Lee County—remote, isolated, poor—the shortages of all kinds of health care had been a chronic problem. There were not enough primary and mental health care workers. And the shortage of dental providers was most acute.

By federal estimates, roughly 49 million Americans live in communities that have been designated dental professional shortage areas—Lee County is one of them.

And if dentists are in short supply in places such as Lee County, so is the money to pay them. “These are not forgotten people,” explained RAM dental director John Osborn, a Knoxville dentist. “The system has passed them up.”

Hundreds, sometimes thousands of aching teeth are extracted at these free weekend clinics.

The loss of a tooth to disease may prefigure other losses in life quality. In terms of oral health, complete tooth loss, or edentulism, has been called the “final marker of disease burden.” An extraction is emblematic of defeat. The extracted tooth will not grow back. But when routine care is long deferred, when more complex procedures are out of reach or not an option, the extractions serve the urgent need of relieving infection and relieving pain.

The news of the plans for the RAM clinic in Lee County claimed top headlines in the local paper. People talked about it for days in church and at the gas station and in the coffee shop out on the U.S. 58 bypass. On this Friday, at the airport, there was excitement in the air as volunteers worked to set up a sort of field hospital with tents and folding tables. Volunteer doctors and nurses, dentists and hygienists were coming from “out of town.” A man with a “Friends of Coal” bumper sticker on his truck arrived with pizzas. Members of the high school football team, the Lee County Generals, who were waiting in their red numbered jerseys to help unload the plane, ate the pizza quietly and hungrily, out by the runway. Then a great deep-throated roar could be heard and everyone looked up to the pale clearing sky.

“Here’s the plane!” someone shouted.

The World War II–vintage C-47 cargo plane landed smoothly, then stood there shimmering on the narrow landing strip at the foot of the mountains. RAM’s founder, Stan Brock, a lean, charismatic British-born adventurer, greeted the small crowd in his calm, serious way. He was, as always, tan and, as always, dressed in a khaki shirt and pants.

Brock became famous in the 1960s as the anaconda-wrestling co-star of the television program Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. When he started RAM, his original goal was to get health care to the people living in the far-flung, third world places he had visited in his travels. But when he discovered that there were people in desperate need right in the United States, he began organizing clinics much closer to home. (Brock passed away on August 29, 2018, after the publication of this book. He was 82. Remote Area Medical, the organization he founded, is continuing his work.)

Brock told the football players the plane they were seeing was used for the invasion on D-day, that young men about their own age had parachuted out of this very plane on June 6, 1944. “A lot of those young guys didn’t make it back,” he explained, as the football players listened with a kind of shy attention. Then it was time to get to work. There was a military precision to these operations that Brock had honed over the years that helped convey their urgency. At Brock’s direction, the football players began hauling carefully organized crates of supplies out of the plane.

Slowly, methodically, the weekend hospital took shape. Areas were set up for medical tests and exams. Eyeglasses would be provided free of charge. The airport waiting room was transformed into a six-chair dental clinic. By the time the chill of evening fell upon the mountains, a line of cars and pickup trucks had formed on the road coming up to the airport. In the predawn darkness of Saturday, about four hundred people were waiting. Worn-out miners, old farmers, tired homemakers, unemployed workers took their numbers at the gate, wrapped in coats and blankets. Charlton Strader, a retired construction superintendent with tremors and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said he used to have dental benefits but that he lost them. He said his teeth had started “snapping off and breaking.”

“I’ve got one that bothers me all the time,” he said.

Randy Peters, a former miner and mattress factory worker with multiple sclerosis, was also troubled by his teeth. “I’ve got a couple broken ones and a couple of bad cavities,” he said. “It’s getting so I can’t eat.”

Ernest Holdway, a disabled miner, said he came to get a tooth extracted. “It ain’t hurting but it will,” he predicted. His dental insurance ended when he had to leave the coal mine. Now his teeth were starting to fail him. “I always had good teeth until I started the arthritis medicine,” he explained. “Nobody wants to lose their teeth. I’ve heard it takes years off your life.” He said he just finished paying off the $1,500 he’d owed for the extraction of three bad molars, which he was told to get removed before a knee surgery. He was still fighting to save his leg. He showed it. It was fearfully swollen.

“I’m a good person, but I sure have been tested,” he said.

By the time the sun was fully up, Jonesville’s small downtown was empty. “Everybody is down at RAM getting their teeth pulled,” said the waitress at the coffee shop.

Throughout the day, patients emerged from the dental clinic with gauze clenched between their remaining teeth. They took seats in folding chairs underneath a tent to recover, or waited for friends and relatives still receiving services. “I had two pulled,” said Emma Marsee, an unemployed nurse. “One had an infection underneath the filling.” Marsee’s daughter, a waitress, was also in the tent waiting for care. She depended on her smile for her economic security, Marsee said. “It’s all about appearance,” said Marsee, a striking woman, strawberry blonde with golden eyes. Who wanted a waitress with bad teeth? “If you are not a healthy-looking individual, [customers] don’t want that person taking care of [them].”

Everyone in that big tent was struggling.

“It’s tough in this area because there are no jobs,” said Marsee. Even as people sat in their folding chairs, the behavior of some suggested fatalism, weary self-destruction: the girl with the deeply decaying teeth taking another drink of Coke. A baby with a sippy cup of sweet juice in the arms of a gaunt mother waiting to see a dentist. The woman with the rasping cough, taking a drag from a cigarette.

“Nerves” are a common complaint in this region, research by the Southwest Virginia Graduate Medical Education Consortium found.

“A frequently reported cause of nerves was having too many problems and too few solutions,” the authors of a study on the problem found (Southwest Virginia Graduate Medical Education Consortium, “Report to the Virginia State Assembly,” January 2008). The consortium concluded that residents of the area were 70 percent more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the state.

Marsee, too, was familiar with the dark side. “Drug abuse in this area is horrible,” she said. It showed in some of the hopeless, drug-blackened teeth.

The area has been poor for a long time, yet people hate to move on. “All your roots are here,” said Marsee. “It’s hard to leave it.” There was the old beauty of the mist-shrouded mountains, the green woods. The love of family, the kindness of neighbors, of strangers.

The teeth flame out when they die. That is a very old kind of pain. The human fossil record bears mute testimony: the ancient Egyptian mummy unearthed with packing in the jaw. The Alaskan incisor, bored with a simple tool sometime between 1300 and 1700 A.D., apparently to relieve an abscess. The tooth of a medieval Dane, with a rosary bead tucked into a cavity (Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester, Archaeology of Disease, 82).

Decay is a progressive disease and, unchecked, it results in excruciating pain and tooth loss. Many factors contribute; diet plays a major role. In the very old days, when refined foods were rarer, the toothache was a curse of privilege. When sugar became cheaper, tooth decay, the main cause of toothaches, became more widespread. The habit of sipping sweet sodas has been widely implicated. The steady bath of sugar never allows the teeth to repair and remineralize themselves.

These days, too, hundreds of common over-the-counter and prescription medications taken by millions of Americans make teeth more susceptible to disease.

One of their side effects is dry mouth, a condition that reduces the natural flow of saliva that cleanses and buffers the teeth, helping to protect them from decay. Without fluoride to strengthen the teeth, without enough routine home care, without timely professional care, the disease process progresses.

The excruciating pain of toothache is not rare. Millions of Americans experience toothaches.

Financial factors are the main reason Americans delay getting needed professional dental care, a study by the American Dental Association found.

Private and even public dental benefits can help defray the cost of services.

But in 2014, an estimated 114 million Americans lacked them entirely. While the national health care reform program signed into law in 2010 took significant steps to broaden access to dental services for children, it did less to address the broken system for adults. Even many working adults with private health insurance lack adequate coverage for dental care. While routine preventive visits may be covered, beneficiaries are typically required to pay a percentage of the cost of procedures such as fillings, crowns, root canals, and implants, which can run to hundreds and thousands of dollars. Among U.S. adults who struggled with unpaid medical bills, 12 percent reported dental bills made up the largest share of the bills they had problems paying, a 2015 survey found. “Insurance is not a panacea against these problems,” the researchers concluded.

And most people who have dental benefits lose them when they retire. Medicare, the nation’s health care program covering roughly 55 million elderly and disabled Americans, does not cover routine dental services.

The dental suffering among many of the more than one million residents of American nursing homes is particularly acute. Since 1987, when federal law set new standards for institutions receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding, nursing homes have been required to provide oral health services. Yet amid the daily cycle of washing, turning, and changing bedridden and disabled patients, simple tooth brushing and denture care have often been overlooked. “Most clinical studies of nursing home residents report widespread inadequate oral hygiene and associated dental, gingival and periodontal conditions,” noted the authors of one survey. “Medical and nursing services were almost uniformly provided while dental and mental health services were provided much more infrequently.”

Visits by dental professionals are also rare in many institutions. Many of the patients Louisiana dentist Gregory Folse said he has visited on his rounds of nursing homes have not had care in years. When he looks into a new patient’s mouth, he is not surprised to find decay, rampant infection, the broken stumps of teeth, and even oral cancers. He is paid a stipend to serve as the dental director for the homes. Most of the patients are covered by Medicaid, but adult dental benefits in the state are extremely scant. Folse estimated he has donated more services than he has billed to Medicaid. He said he travels forty to fifty thousand miles a year through the backwoods and bayous, driving a pickup truck, carrying portable tools and instruments, setting up in nursing home community rooms and beauty parlors, repairing dentures, pulling teeth. “Nine hundred patients with severe gum disease or abscess. Half of my patients. I take everybody that has swelling. Everybody in pain. Everybody that’s got loose teeth. And I help them as best I can. With funding, without funding. The family pays some, the nursing homes. Sometimes no one pays. I do it.”

Some of the patients suffer from dementia and getting them to open their mouths is a challenge. The work is rewarding, just the same, he said. “I had a patient in a wheelchair. She had a stroke. She was so happy to get her dentures. She reached down and grabbed her purse. She reached inside. She found a piece of bread. ‘Here doc. Take it.’ I didn’t want to take her last piece of bread,” said Folse, with a laugh. “No telling how long it had been at the bottom of her purse. We have to give out of being wealthy. She gave to me out of her poverty.”

The rate of dental suffering is a grim kind of economic indicator. The poor are more likely to suffer from toothaches. Their oral health is worse and it can be hard to find a dentist who will treat them. The lack of money to pay for care is a major barrier: roughly one in five Americans is covered by Medicaid, the enormous federal-state health care program for the poor. But coverage is no guarantee of access to treatment, as only a minority of dentists see Medicaid patients.

Children are entitled to dental care under Medicaid but often face difficulties obtaining services. Fewer than half of dentists saw any Medicaid patients in the majority of states included in a 2010 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

A 2016 study by the American Dental Association found that 42 percent of the nation’s dentists had registered as Medicaid providers on the program’s Insure Kids Now database. But the percentage did not necessarily reflect the percentage of dentists actually participating in the program. “It does not mean you are seeing Medicaid kids. It does not mean you have open appointments,” said economist Marko Vujicic, who helped lead the study. “Take it for what it is. It is the best data we have.”

The situation is harder for Medicaid’s adult beneficiaries. Dental benefits for adults are an optional part of state Medicaid programs. They are among the first line items to end up on budget chopping blocks in times of fiscal austerity.

Toothaches are destroyers of sleep. They make eating painful, working and parenting overwhelming. It is the poor who are most likely to pray to heaven for relief. They turn to drugs, both legal and illegal, and folk remedies. In desperation, some even pull out their own teeth.

Out at the free clinic in Lee County, among the solid, stoic mountain people, Tabitha Hay, with her fragile face and darkly mascaraed eyes, looked like a lost tropical bird, blown off course by a storm. She and her mother-in-law and husband arrived at the clinic after a thirteen-hour drive from Belleview, Florida. They were self-employed. They cleaned houses and took care of pets for well-off retirees. They left after work on Friday evening and drove all night to get to Jonesville. All three of them needed care, but Tabitha, twenty-six, needed it most. She was tormented by a molar, decayed beneath a filling.

“I feel like my jaw is being crushed,” she said. “Sometimes the pressure is like it is going to explode. I’m hungry but I can’t eat. To sleep I have to put a heating pad on it and nothing takes the pain away.” After missing a week of work she tried to get back to the job on the day before the trip.

“I tried to work. I couldn’t do anything. I sat in the back seat and cried.”

She said a Florida dentist told her the extraction would cost $500. It was money she did not have. She arrived too late to get care at the free clinic on Saturday. She was told she would need to wait until Sunday. As night fell upon the mountains, she bedded down in the red Kia with her husband and mother-in-law to face another night of pain.

Copyright © 2017 by Mary Otto. This excerpt originally appeared in Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America by Mary Otto. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. The excerpt was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

YouTube Couldn’t Care Less About Hate Speech

Another day, another internal debate at YouTube about whether it will enforce its own content policies. And yet again, YouTube’s decision seems to solidify that the video platform will continue to be a welcoming home for channels that promote hate speech and harassment, and serve as a conduit for laundering far-right ideology—as long as those channels continue to make YouTube money.

Carlos Maza, host of the Vox online video show Strikethrough, published a tweet thread on June 4 detailing the online harassment he has received as a result of a campaign against him by right-wing pundit and comedian Steven Crowder. Crowder has repeatedly used anti-gay rhetoric to attack Maza, calling him a “lispy queer,” an “angry little queer” and “Mr. Gay Vox,” among other insults. He frequently refers to Maza’s ethnicity, calling him a “gay Mexican” or a “gay Latino from Vox.”

Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video “debunking” Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity. Here’s a sample: pic.twitter.com/UReCcQ2Elj

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019

Crowder, a former Fox News contributor, is perhaps best known for his “change my mind” meme, where he attempts to debate college students over issues like how many genders there are. His YouTube show centers around rants, pranks and sketches designed to shock or “trigger” the usual targets of right-wing anger, like feminists, gays, immigrants and “social justice warriors.” Crowder has a history of using racial slurs in his comedy, and also sells T-shirts on his YouTube page and website that declare “Socialism Is for F*gs.” (He coyly maintains that the word in question is “figs.”)

 

Multiple studies of YouTube’s algorithm have placed Crowder firmly within the same crowd of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and outright Nazis on the website, all of whom network with one another through interviews and promotion, exploiting the algorithm and autoplay functions built into the website in order to increase their views and subscriptions.

While Crowder might not be as extreme as some of his contemporaries, the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and the far-right anti-SJW cadre aren’t some small subculture tucked away deep in the Internet’s basement; they are massively popular and major money makers for YouTube, whose business model is based around selling advertisements. Crowder alone has almost 4 million subscribers, and many of his videos amass tens of millions of views.

In response to Maza’s thread, YouTube reviewed Crowder’s statements in his videos and “found language that was clearly hurtful.” However, the company maintained that Crowder’s videos did not violate their website’s content policy. Never mind that the torrent of hate Maza has documented from both Crowder and his millions of fans violates YouTube’s rules against harassment. Crowder’s videos targeting Maza’s sexual orientation and ethnicity clearly violate the platform’s rules against hateful content as well.

 

According to Gizmodo (6/5/19), who reached out to YouTube parent company Google, the website maintains that it focused on whether the videos were centered “primarily on debating the opinions expressed,” or whether the videos were “solely malicious”—as though slurs embedded in a coherent far-right ideology are preferable to ones uttered at random.

Obsession with “debate” is a constant fixture of the online right. Crowder and contemporaries like Ben Shapiro relish in constantly calling for debates with their ideological opponents, using debate as a mask for their own interest in trolling, harassing and employing slurs against their targets. When their opponents refuse these clearly bad-faith challenges, the right decry the left’s supposed lack of “logic,” “reason” and “rationality.” (Strikingly, when these right-wingers actually do get challenged to real debates, they either refuse or embarrass themselves; when they aren’t arguing with 18-year-old college freshmen, they don’t tend to do so well.)

According to Maza, when he was doxxed last year, he was greeted with an endless stream of texts calling for him to “debate” Crowder. But because Crowder didn’t explicitly instruct his followers to harass or doxx Maza, YouTube decided that Crowder was not in violation. As Maza noted to Vox (6/5/19), “a policy that says that all you need to do to get away with hate speech on the platform is to mix it with something else is an instruction manual to monsters who want to figure out a way to target people based on identity.”

YouTube’s refusal to seriously address Maza’s complaints exposes the platform’s avowed support for the LGBT community as nothing but hollow branding. Like many companies, YouTube and Google have heavily integrated Pride Month and LGBT themes as marketing tools. YouTube’s own spotlight homepage currently displays the company logo in rainbow colors, with the backing of a LGBT mural. All of YouTube’s other official social media accounts use the same branding. The top promotion on the YouTube spotlight homepage is a playlist celebrating Pride. The company also created a Pride documentary commemorating gay liberation struggles, and plans to release two more during the month.

 

There is clearly a fundamental disconnect between the inclusive PR-shaped image that YouTube seeks to promote, and the tolerance for homophobia of its actual content policies in practice. Here is a member of the LGBT community clearly being harassed based on their sexual orientation and race, while the supposedly progressive platform for the harassment throws up its hands, saying that there’s nothing it can do. This sort of “pinkwashing” is the norm within companies that profess to support LGBT rights. However, YouTube’s hypocrisy is much more visible, considering the leeway they give creators who are hostile to the LGBT communities, immigrants and people of color generally.

YouTube’s business model is about empowering creators who attract eyeballs, no matter what content those creators publish. It’s why it took them years to kick the massively popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off the platform. And it’s why YouTube has long been a conduit for conspiracy theories, far-right reactionary ideology, white supremacy and Nazism.

Following a day’s worth of online backlash to their handling of the Maza/Crowder affair, YouTube declared that it would “demonetize” Crowder’s channel, a sanction that it has previously imposed on numerous LGBT channels. (“I’ve done multiple tests in proving that the word ‘transgender’ on my channels has demonetized my videos,” trans YouTuber Chase Ross complains—The Verge, 6/4/18.) However, this decision amounts to a mere slap on the wrist: All of Crowder’s videos remain up, they just won’t get promoted, or make money through YouTube’s AdSense network, until he removes links to his web store that sells the “Socialism is for F*gs” t-shirts. Crowder appears to have met these incredibly lax terms, but followed up by publishing a half-hearted apology video where he maintained that he is not in violation of YouTube’s content policy, and continued to promote his T-shirts—via his website rather than YouTube. In response to the affair, Crowder’s followers have since took to selling T-shirts declaring “Carlos Maza is a F*g.”

Along with Crowder’s demonetization, YouTube announced that it was finally banning content that promotes white supremacy. However, YouTube did not specify which white supremacist accounts had been banned. At first glance, numerous white supremacist accounts, such as Red Ice, American Renaissance and Identity Evropa, along with Charlottesville marchers James Allsup and Nick Fuentes, are still active on the platform. While some of these channels have been demonetized, their continued existence on the site signal that YouTube is ultimately OK with keeping this sort of content on their site. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that most of the accounts that were actually banned were smaller channels with mere handfuls of subscribers.

As an addendum to the white supremacist bans, YouTube’s Chris Dale put out a blog post saying that the platform would take a look at its content policies, and potentially update policies on harassment and hateful content. However, Dale said he was reluctant to ban speech that YouTube considered to be “borderline,” noting that if YouTube “were to take all potentially offensive content down, we’d be losing valuable speech.” “Valuable,” apparently, being the operative word here.

YouTube is not taking a free speech absolutist position, yet it still accords users the right to stir up hatred against a “lispy,” “angry little queer” among millions of followers. Regardless of what YouTube chooses to do about its content management in the future, the white supremacist ban and Crowder’s demonetization have given fuel to the right’s constant paranoid refrain that social media sites like YouTube and Facebook are biased against them.

Crowder, along with scores of other right wingers like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin (who misleadingly labels himself a “classical liberal”), would post videos lamenting “censorship” and a “crackdown” against free speech by YouTube. Popular commentators like Joe Rogan, whose show has hosted numerous members of the alt-right and the Dark Web, equated Crowder’s homophobic content to videos of left-wing figures debunking right-wing videos. As a guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show (2/6/19), free speech advocate and Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald confoundingly called Maza “powerful” and Crowder “marginalized.”

 

In the midst of Crowder’s demonetization and the bans of racist extremists, YouTube, likely on accident, demonetized or banned a number of channels that were not white supremacists or Nazis, but actually ones that document them. These casualties include News2Share‘s Ford Fischer, who extracts clips from the far right to document extremism, and filmmaker and history teacher Mr. Allsop, who uses World War II–era Nazi footage as a teaching tool.

Following the unintended demonetization of Fischer, Allsop and others, the right instantly seized on YouTube’s mistakes, circulating the hashtag #VoxAdpocolypse and accusing Maza of leading a coordinated campaign to silence journalists, citing his support for deplatforming Nazis and throwing milkshakes at members of the far right. Commenters on 4Chan continued to spread blatant lies about Maza, while others dug through his tweets for potentially damning comments, taking many out of context.

There will always be issues with giving multi-billion-dollar tech companies like Google the power and responsibility of policing online discourse, especially when deplatforming tactics intended for the far right are frequently turned against the left. But YouTube, as a private company, has terms of service that clearly bar harassment and the promotion of hatred based on sexual orientation, ethnicity and other identities—yet it allows homophobic slurs to be continually directed against an individual, so long as that target’s ideas are ridiculed along with his identity.

Clearly, YouTube’s content regulation policy is in practice arbitrary, or at the very least not enforceable to the standards that they currently publish on their website. Under this system, whichever way YouTube decides to enforce its content policy on any given day will always piss someone off. More often than not, however, YouTube sides with the creators who drive the most views and engagement, and thus make it the most money. Right now, the platform is too afraid to upset their money-making machine—that is, the content mill of far-right reactionary ideology that brings in tens of millions of views.

As Maza himself said, Crowder isn’t necessarily the problem. There will always be homophobes, racists and bigots in the world. But YouTube gives them an outsized voice and the ability to reach millions of followers, not just by hosting the videos but by steering audiences to them via its system of recommendations.

As long as YouTube continues to adhere to an advertising-based business model that rewards harassment and hate in its recommendation algorithms, high earning bullies like Crowder shouldn’t have much to fear. The same can’t be said about vulnerable members of the LGBT community that YouTube supposedly cares about.

Robert Reich: Trumponomics Has Been an Utter Disaster

Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress keep crowing about the economy, when in reality Trumponomics has been a disaster. Here are its 7 biggest failures:

1. Trump promised to bring down America’s trade deficit “as fast as possible.” Instead, the trade deficit has hit an all-time high. The United States is now purchasing more goods and services from the rest of the world than we sell abroad than at any time in history.

2. As a presidential candidate in 2016, he said he could completely eliminate the federal debt in 8 years. Instead, the federal debt has exploded thanks to Trump and the GOP’s $1.9 trillion tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. They’re already using the growing debt to threaten cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

3. He promised to boost the wages of American workers, including a $4,000 pay raise for the average American family. Instead, wages for most Americans have been flat, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, over the same period, corporate profits have soared and the rich have become far richer, but the gains haven’t trickled down.

4. His administration said that corporations would invest their savings from tax cuts. Instead, corporations spent more money buying back shares of their own stock in 2018 than they invested in new equipment or facilities. These stock buybacks provide no real benefit for the economy, but boost executive bonuses and payouts for wealthy investors.

5. He promised a tax cut for middle-class families. Instead, most Americans will end up paying more by 2027.

6. He promised to keep jobs in America and crack down on companies that ship jobs overseas. Instead, his tax law has created financial incentives for corporations to expand their operations abroad. Trump’s trade wars have also encouraged companies like Harley Davidson to move production overseas.

7. He promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington lobbyists. Instead, he’s put them in charge of health, safety, and environmental protections–which has endangered most Americans while increasing corporate profits even further.

The real recipe for economic growth is to invest in Americans–in their health, education, job training, and infrastructure.

But Trumponomics has exploded the deficit, hurt ordinary Americans, and lined the pockets of the wealthy and corporations.

Don’t let Trump and Republicans claim otherwise.

A Soldier’s Defense of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com. 

It’s a matter of principles over personalities. Whether one loves or hates Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is beside the point. The First Amendment freedom of the press is at stake now. In this case, the government’s tool for oppression is the Espionage Act, an archaic relic from America’s repressive World War I-era legislation. Chelsea Manning already served seven years of a 35-year sentence, one of the longest ever meted out to a whistleblower, and was recently jailed again after she refused to testify about WikiLeaks.

That was harsh and disturbing enough for those of us who value transparency regarding our national security state. Now the Trump administration has gone a step further and threatens, for the first time ever, to imprison an actual publisher–in this case Julian Assange. Charged on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, Assange–currently jailed in Britain–faces extradition and a lengthy sentence in the United States.

I’ve been called a whistleblower, myself, for my decision to write a book and articles critical of the American warfare state and the military to which I dedicated my entire adult life from the age of seventeen. But the truth is I’ve got nothing on Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. Manning broke the law, risked it all, went to prison for her principles. Assange is headed for the same fate. And as a soldier I’m glad they did what they did!

Manning’s leak exposed serious war crimes, including U.S. Army helicopters shooting and killing Reuters journalists. Now, at first glance one would think soldiers should abhor the airing of their institution’s dirty laundry. But dig a bit deeper and my position makes more sense. See, such atrocities as Manning leaked and Assange published ultimately put US service members in grave danger. Abu Ghraib, the Blackwater massacre, and other atrocities feed terrorist and insurgent recruitment, increasing the likelihood that American soldiers will be killed. Thus, such war crimes must be exposed, grappled with transparently, and punished so as to discourage future counterproductive barbarism.

As for me, there was one aspect of the WikiLeaks revelations that was most vindicating. You see, all through 2006 and 2007–when I was serving a brutal 15-month tour in Iraq–senior army generals and just about every Cretan in the Bush administration repeatedly denied that the country had descended into a sectarian civil war. “The country is not awash in sectarian violence,’’ the senior General in Iraq, George Casey, claimed during the height of the maelstrom. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld asserted that UN and media accounts of massive bloodshed constituted “exaggerated reporting,” and that Iraqi forces “were taking the lead in controlling the situation.”

The thing is, that was a lie, and they both knew it! Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange exposed what we on the ground already knew to be true. My platoon and hundreds just like it, spent much of 2006 and 2007 discovering and counting the victims of the civil war unfolding around us. It was not uncommon to find the detritus of sectarian violence on a morning patrol – teenage bodies bound and with a bullet in the back of their heads. The images haunt me still and demonstrated, once and for all, that America’s illegal, immoral, and ill-advised invasion had unleashed a chaotic centrifugal civil war. That’s why countless Iraqis, even once oppressed Shia, told me time and again that life had been better under Saddam Hussein. The lies of Casey, Rumsfeld, and scores of other Bush apologists understated, and thus insulted, the complex turmoil we troopers had to manage. I for one was pissed!

See, I take it personal, the lies Washington told about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was 27 months of my life stolen, eight of my soldiers killed, so much of my conscience forever bruised. Thus I choose to stand with the lawbreakers this time around. After all, my oath was to the Constitution not to any specific legal statute or any individual president. Personally, I have my own reservations about Assange in particular, but that hardly matters now. Military men ought to be thanking both he and Chelsea Manning for exposing some of the most damning aspects of the unwinnable, unnecessary wars they had to fight.

What’s truly scary is the precedent that’d be set should the Justice Department successfully prosecute a publisher like Assange. After all, mainstream papers have long printed leaked classified documents they deemed newsworthy. In fact, The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other prominent newspapers reported on the documents that Manning leaked and Assange published. How, then, can we be sure that such mainstream news outlets won’t be the next targets should they again publish future leaked information? The short answer is we can’t. That’s why the mainstream media had best put aside personal beefs with Assange and Manning and come to their spirited defense. Only I wouldn’t count on it. The left eats its own; it always has. Still, let me assure you: the media will regret such a decision in the near future.

The U.S. government is waging, and escalating, a veritable war on whistleblowers, a war on press freedom itself. It’s a bipartisan effort too. President Obama, the supposed liberal, was absolutely awful on this issue. He used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more times–seven–than all other presidents combined. But even Obama the prosecutor-in-chief stopped short of actually charging the publications that printed the leaked material. Trump has no such compunctions. His Justice Department is about to drive a monster truck through the chasm in press freedom that Obama opened with his precedent-setting oppression.

Now is a time for solidarity. Media outlets running the gamut from Fox News to MSNBC, from The National Review to The Washington Post had better close ranks and raise the alarm. Otherwise an increasingly apathetic public will hardly notice, or remember, the day the First Amendment died. The press must remind the American people of all the stunning revelations they’d never have known about were it not for whistleblowers and their publishers. The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, the CIA torture program, and mass surveillance – we have leakers to thank for each of these scandals and countless others.

So forget about whether you like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, or WikiLeaks itself. This is no longer about John Podesta’s emails, Russia-gate, or any specific story WikiLeaks broke. It is about what is left of our ostensible civil liberties. About whether or not there is to be any check on government power. About whether we want to live in an increasingly Orwellian world. And it isn’t looking good, folks.

So consider this a desperate plea from a career soldier: pay attention! Defend those who subvert the military and government’s secrecy regulations. In such times real patriotism involves breaking the rules.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor toAntiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Drug Charges Dropped in Alleged Setup of Russian Journalist

MOSCOW—In a surprising turnaround, Russia’s interior ministry dropped drug-dealing charges against a prominent investigative reporter Tuesday and promised to go after police officers who allegedly tried to frame him.

Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev stunned the nation when he announced that all charges against Ivan Golunov were dropped after police found “no proof of his part in a crime.” Golunov was arrested Thursday.

Kolokoltsev said he would ask the Russian president to dismiss two senior police officials and suspend the officers who detained the journalist Thursday. Among those who are likely to be dismissed is the anti-drugs chief of the Moscow police.

“I believe that the rights of any citizen, whatever his professional affiliation, ought to be protected,” the minister said.

Golunov, who works for the independent website Meduza, had been facing drug-related charges that could have put him in prison for up to 20 years.

Prominent journalists and politicians welcomed the decision to abandon the case.

Mikhail Fedotov, a presidential adviser and chairman of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, hailed the announcement as a “victory of common sense.”

He urged the police to investigate those responsible for what looked like an attempt to discredit Golunov by setting him up to look like a professional drug dealer.

“We are convinced that this story should not stop here because those who are guilty of making mockery of the law ought to face justice,” Fedotov said in a statement.

Golunov was stopped by police on a Moscow street and taken into custody. His defense team alleges he was beaten and denied a lawyer for more than 12 hours.

On Saturday, he was released from jail and put under house arrest following a public outpouring of support, including from high-profile journalists for state-owned media.

Many have questioned the alleged evidence in the case.

Police on Friday released several photos, reportedly from the journalist’s home, of what appeared to be a drugs lab. They later retracted the statement, saying that the pictures were taken elsewhere. In a separate statement later, the police said they found cocaine at his place.

The speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament was the first top official on Tuesday to raise concerns about the case.

Valentina Matviyenko, who is Russia’s third most senior official after the president and prime minister, said the law enforcement agencies’ “mistakes and violations … have given rise to distrust in the investigation.”

“People are either being unprofessional, or sloppy, or preparing a setup,” she said in comments carried by Russian news agencies. “I don’t know right now what to call it.”

Some expressed hope the case would push Russian authorities to confront abuse of power by police.

“I think this will lead to a major reshuffle in law enforcement in relation to those who plotted this setup,” Pavel Gusev, chairman of the Moscow chapter of the Russian Union of Journalists, told the Interfax news agency.