Chris Hedges's Blog, page 232

Most American Women Prefer Socialism to Capitalism: Poll

Signs that socialism is gaining popularity in the United States are popping up everywhere. Publications such as The Economist, The Guardian and The New York Times have all been saying for some time that American millennials are more interested in socialism than capitalism these days, with one 2017 Guardian piece even framing it as a youthful love affair with a not-so-young idea. Then there was Bernie Sanders’ unexpected popularity among young voters during the 2016 primaries, with polls showing that the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist “won more votes from the under-30 crowd than Trump and Clinton combined.” Add to this the rise of figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and polls showing that Democrats are increasingly embracing socialism, and it’s clear the term no longer holds the misguided Cold War stigma it did for decades.

Now a new Harris poll conducted for the show “Axios on HBO” reveals 40% of Americans would take socialism over capitalism. Perhaps more significantly, the poll finds a whopping 55% of women between the ages of 18 and 54 would prefer to live under socialism. Given a lack of policies in capitalist America that benefit or protect women, these numbers should be unsurprising.

Related Articles











Want Better Sex? Consider Moving to a Socialist Country



by Ilana Novick

















What Makes Millennial Socialism Different



by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

















Can Socialism Save American Democracy?



by Jacob Sugarman

A system in which women are underpaid compared with their male colleagues, under which reproductive rights are consistently undermined, and which doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave or affordable child care is clearly not a system that takes women, who are most often the primary caregivers in American families, into consideration. It seems women aren’t just fed up with these conditions, but are taking their dissatisfaction directly to their local and national governments. As Axios’ Alexi McCammond commented regarding the findings, “We’ve seen this pattern of behavior where women are turning out in higher numbers as voters and as candidates than we’ve ever seen. They’re getting elected in higher numbers than before. They’re pushing the conversation in different ways.”

As Axios also points out, however, there’s some disagreement over what American socialism would look like. But when it comes to some of the key policies being put forward by progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez—such as single-payer health care, a living wage and tuition-free higher education—most Americans polled seem to agree:

Universal health care: 76%
Tuition-free education: 72%
Living wage: 68%
State-controlled economy: 66%
State control and regulation of private property: 61%
High taxes for the rich: 60%
State-controlled media and communication: 57%
Strong environmental regulations: 56%
High public spending: 55%
Government “democratizes’’ private businesses—that is, gives workers control over them—to the greatest extent possible: 52%
System dependent on dictatorship: 49%
Workers own and control their places of employment: 48%
Democratically-elected government: 46%

Given these numbers, and the fact that even Fox News viewers seem to support policies like Medicare for all, as evidenced by Sanders’ recent town hall on that cable news channel, at the same time Democratic 2020 hopefuls move further left on many of these very issues, it could be only a matter of time before American women get their wish to live in a socialist country.

Deal or No Deal, Asylum Seekers Wait It Out at the Southern Border

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP)—At the small migrant Juventud 2000 shelter near the border, a Honduran expressed disappointment Sunday over the agreement between Mexico and the United States to more aggressively curtail migration from Central America.

But Edwin Sabillon Orellana of Honduras said he and his family will stick with their effort to seek asylum in the U.S.

Sabillon said some migrants might decide that waiting in Mexico for the lengthy processing of asylum requests isn’t worth it, but he said he cannot take his family back to their home near San Pedro Sula, a crime-ridden metropolis that is Honduras’ second biggest city.

Related Articles











Trump's Threatened Tariffs on Hold After Deal With Mexico



by

“In my dreams I never had it in my mind to one day come to the United States,” the 30-year old assembly plant worker said, sitting near a large pot of half-made salsa ranchera awaiting a delivery of cooking gas to the shelter’s kitchen. “I had my job, my wife had her job. My daughter was in a bilingual school — my daughter speaks English. I didn’t have a reason to come here.”

That all changed in April when one of the street gangs plaguing Honduras and other Central American countries gave him a deadline of five days to begin paying a monthly extortion fee of about $120, Sabillon said. He said the gangsters thought he could pay because his daughter went to a good school, but she was on scholarship. The family earned enough only to keep food on the table and pay the utilities, he said.

Two days before the deadline, Sabillon slipped away in the middle of the night with his wife and 8-year-old daughter and left Honduras. It took them about two weeks to reach Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. They quickly crossed into the U.S. illegally near Tijuana’s beach and asked for asylum. After five days in detention they were sent back to Tijuana at night with an appointment to return later this month.

The mechanism that allows the U.S. to send migrants seeking asylum back to Mexico to await resolution of their cases has been running in Tijuana since January. One part of Friday’s agreement between Mexico and the U.S. to head off the threat of U.S. tariffs on all imports from Mexico was an expansion of that program along the entire border.

As of last week, about 10,000 asylum seekers had been returned to Mexico, according to Mexican officials. So far the program has been operating only in California and in El Paso, Texas. It is currently being challenged in U.S. courts.

Mexico has offered opportunities for Central American migrants like Sabillon to legalize their status so they can work while waiting or if they decide to stay in Mexico. But he is not interested.

Most Mexicans are good people, he said, but some curse migrants in the street. On Saturday, he took his family to hear Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador speak at a rally in downtown Tijuana. He wasn’t able to hear the president’s words about respecting migrants’ human rights because the crowd around him got worked up after a woman shouted, “Mexicans first and those from the caravan can go to …,” he said, not repeating the profanity.

“That hurts us a lot,” he said.

Sabillon is at least in the fortunate position of having his U.S. court date just a couple weeks away.

Nearby, at one of the city’s principal crossings to the U.S., dozens of migrants — mostly Haitians — waited in line for a number that would determine when they could cross to the U.S. to request asylum. On Sunday, U.S. border officers announced only two numbers and people who got their numbers in the past week were some 700 places away from the numbers being called, suggesting a wait of many months ahead.

Back at the Juventud 2000 shelter, Luis Torres and other parents killed time watching over the dozens of kids playing in the cramped space between tightly packed tents. The shelter, just one of many in Tijuana, is housing about 150 people, all families. Kids jumped rope and chased each other between tents.

Torres, 40, said that he and his 12-year-old son entered Texas from Reynosa, Mexico, last month. U.S. authorities then flew them to San Diego where they were detained for two weeks, he said.

Torres was confused about the status of his case, because he wasn’t sure whether he had requested asylum by signing documents that agents put in front of him without explaining. In any case he was given a date to return to the U.S. in September.

Torres, a carpenter, left because his neighborhood in Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, is dangerous and work is hard to come by. He sent his other four children to live with their grandmother outside the city. Torres said that he and his son did not encounter problems in Mexico during the 26 days they took to reach the U.S. border.

Torres had heard talk of the U.S.-Mexico agreement, which includes Mexico sending thousands of National Guard troops to target illegal immigration at its southern border. He said it would be better if each country stuck to its own policies rather than the U.S. pressuring Mexico to do more.

“We didn’t come so that they can play politics with us,” he said.

Case Open: Democrats Begin Public Airing of Mueller Report

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump says it’s “case closed.” But Democrats are just getting started with Robert Mueller.

House Democrats have scheduled a series of hearings this coming week on the special counsel’s report as they intensify their focus on the Russia probe and pick up the pace on an investigative “path” — in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that some of them hope leads to impeachment of the president. In doing so, they are trying to draw the public’s attention on the allegations that Trump sought to obstruct a federal investigation and they want to highlight his campaign’s contacts with Russia in the 2016 election.And they will lay the groundwork for an appearance from Mueller himself, despite his stated desire to avoid the spotlight.

The hearings will focus on the two main topics of Mueller’s report, obstruction of justice and Russian election interference.

Related Articles











The Real Russian Menace Is Just Hypercapitalism



by Jacob Bacharach

















Why Are Democrats So Scared of Impeachment?



by Bill Blum

















Trump Is Backing Congress Into a Risky Corner



by Marjorie Cohn

The House Judiciary Committee plans to cover the first topic at a Monday hearing on “presidential obstruction and other crimes.” The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday intends to review the counterintelligence implications of the Russian meddling. Mueller said there was not enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he said he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction.

On Tuesday, the House has scheduled a vote to authorize contempt cases against Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Donald McGahn for failing to comply with subpoenas from the Democratic-controlled House.

Barr defied a subpoena to provide an unredacted version of Mueller’s report, along with underlying evidence. McGahn, who is frequently referenced in the report, has defied subpoenas to provide documents and testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

Language in the resolution would make it easier for committee chairmen to take the Trump administration to court. Those chairmen could take legal action to enforce subpoenas in the future without a vote of the full House, so long as the chairmen have approval from a five-person, bipartisan group where Democrats have the majority.

With Trump pledging that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Democratic leaders want to avoid repeated floor votes on contempt resolutions that detract from their legislative agenda.

The procession of hearings and votes in the week ahead is partly designed to mollify anxious Democrats who have pushed Pelosi, D-Calif., to begin impeachment proceedings immediately . Pelosi has so far rejected that option , preferring a slower, more methodical approach to investigating the president, including the court fights and hearings.

During a meeting with the House Judiciary Committee chairman, New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, and other committee heads last week, Pelosi made the case that she would rather see Trump voted out of office and “in prison” than merely impeached, according to a report in Politico. A person familiar with the exchange confirmed the account to The Associated Press.

The latest approach appears to have temporarily satisfied the restless House Democrats.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who pleaded with Pelosi last month to start an inquiry, said the votes and hearings are going to be enough, for now, as they wait to see what happens in court.

“I am very satisfied that things are moving in the right direction,” Raskin said. “And I think the American people are getting increasingly educated and engaged about the lawlessness of the president.”

Rep. David Cicilline, a Judiciary Committee member who favors an impeachment inquiry, took pains to avoid separating himself from top Democrats such as Pelosi.

“We should never proceed with impeachment for political reasons. We should never refuse to proceed with impeachment for political reasons,” Cicilline, D-R.I., said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Educating the American public on what is in the Mueller report is a priority for Democrats, who believe Trump and his allies have created the public impression that the report said there was no obstruction of justice. Trump has made that assertion repeatedly, echoing Barr’s judgment that there was not enough evidence in the report to support a criminal obstruction charge. Mueller said in the report that he could not exonerate Trump on that point.

The special counsel did not find evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But the report details multiple contacts between the two.

California Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the goal of the Wednesday hearing will be to explain to the American people “the serious counterintelligence concerns raised by the Mueller report, examine the depth and breadth of the unethical and unpatriotic conduct it describes, and produce prescriptive remedies to ensure that this never happens again.”

Republicans are poised to defend the president at the hearings and challenge Democrats on the decision not to open impeachment hearings.

Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, sent Nadler a letter Friday calling the upcoming hearing a “mock impeachment hearing” and warning Democrats to be civil when speaking of the president.

Collins said in the letter that outside of impeachment proceedings, “it is out of order for a member of Congress, in debate, to engage in personalities with the president or express an opinion, even a third party opinion, accusing the president of a crime. The rules are clear on this point.”

Hoover Is Assassinating MLK’s Character From the Grave

For seven and half years from 1960 to April 4, 1968, I was privileged to serve Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a political adviser and subsequently as his personal lawyer and draft speech writer. With assistance from Jonathan D. Greenberg, co-founder with me of the University of San Francisco’s Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, the following is my response to the current publicized statements by author David Garrow about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Summary

J. Edgar Hoover is laughing in his grave today. After wielding the power of the FBI in a systematic effort to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hoover died knowing that every reputable newspaper and magazine reporter and editor in America had refused to publish the manufactured garbage he and his agents peddled in files, memos and audiotapes that were collected in a ruthless domestic surveillance program that is one of the most shameful episodes of 20th century American history. The journalists refused to publish stories based on the so-called evidence surreptitiously provided to them by FBI agents because they understood full well that the files and tapes circulated by Hoover’s FBI failed to meet the most basic, minimal standards of evidence; that any such “evidence” had been fatally tainted by bias, racism, and “dirty tricks” that were akin to those utilized by the secret police of an authoritarian state; and that Hoover was attempting use them for political purposes.

The journalists and editors who refused to publish hit jobs on Dr. King based on the FBI “information” were entirely correct in their analysis. The 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that the FBI’s campaign against Dr. King “grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority and failed to consider the possibility that actions threatening bodily harm to Dr. King might be encouraged by the program,” that the FBI investigation violated the constitutional rights of Dr. King and colleagues associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was “very probably felonious.”

Today, a British magazine called Standpoint published an article by David Garrow in which he gathers all of the dirt he could find from FBI files newly released by order of President Trump and presents them without even the most minimally necessary historical context, evidentiary scrutiny, or critical assessment of the biased nature of the sources. Nothing is new in this article except one incendiary claim: that Dr. King witnessed an alleged rape, and that that Dr. King allegedly “looked on, laughed and offered advice.” This claim is based entirely on a handwritten note scribbled in the margins of a document, in an obvious effort to embellish the salacious nature of what had been typed. Garrow had offered the article to a number of reputable media platforms in the United States, each of which turned him down. They refused to publish Garrow’s article for exactly the same reason that all reputable journalists in the United States refused to take the bait offered to them by Hoover and his agents during the 1960s: because the so-called evidence assembled to put forth claims fails to meet even minimal journalistic standards.

I read Garrow’s article with great sadness. Over the course of many decades, Garrow wrote and published books and articles notable for their high standard of quality and critical inquiry, qualities of professionalism that have been entirely abandoned in the Standpoint article. I do not understand why Garrow has forsaken the reputation for scholarly integrity and moral character to vindicate Hoover’s campaign of manufactured lies and character assassination against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe it is a personal tragedy for him. I can only hope and pray that Garrow’s article does not achieve its declared goals, which would be an untold tragedy for all of us.

I worked with Dr. King day in and day out throughout the civil rights struggle beginning in 1960. Martin King was my friend, and I loved him as a brother. I write the following response because he is not alive to respond or defend himself. Martin King was the person with the greatest moral integrity and human decency I have ever met. His legacy in the nonviolent struggle for social justice and peace is more important now than ever before. It is the moral obligation of all of us to sustain and further the work Dr. King began, and to refuse to allow his legacy to be tarnished by lies and falsehoods that were manufactured by a racist FBI campaign that sought only to destroy him and the black freedom movement in which he was a such an inspiring leader.

Related Articles











Remembering the Real Martin Luther King Jr.


















Just as MLK Warned, We're Headed Toward Economic Apartheid



by

















What MLK Would Make of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez



by

Introduction

On March 25, 1968, shortly before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the Rabbinical Assembly Convention. Abraham Joshua Heschel introduced him. “Where in America do we hear the voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel?” he asked. “Martin Luther King is a voice, a vision and a way… The whole future of America will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.” A half-century later, in a world infused with racism, ethnic nationalism and hate, Heschel’s words are especially prescient and haunting.

Today, after a half-century of acclaimed scholarship, the historian David Garrow has published disturbing claims concerning alleged sexual misconduct, lewd behavior, and bawdy language on the part of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. more than 55 years ago. Nearly all of this is a rehash of allegations and rumors that have circulated for more than five decades.

WHAT IS THE BASIS FOR GARROW’S NEW ALLEGATIONS, AND WHY NOW?

In 2017 and 2018, President Donald Trump ordered the public release of thousands of previously sealed FBI files identified as related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; for reasons that I do not understand, these include files summarizing audiotapes of FBI clandestine surveillance of hotel rooms rented by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and late-night parties and alleged sexual activities that took place there — files that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Kennedy assassination.

Among these newly released files, Garrow found a memorandum, seemingly prepared under the direction former FBI official William C. Sullivan dated Jan. 8, 1964, purporting to represent a summary of audiotapes taken by clandestine surveillance of a suite of rooms booked under Dr. King’s name at the Willard Hotel on the previous three nights (Jan. 5, 6 and 7). According to Garrow, a handwritten note written in the margins of the typed Sullivan memorandum presents an incendiary allegation that has never been made public before: that a Baptist minister named Logan Kearse raped a woman (allegedly a parishioner in Baltimore’s Cornerstone Baptist Church of which Logan was pastor) in one of the wiretapped hotel rooms, that Dr. King allegedly “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”

The allegation that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was present during a rape, and that allegedly he “laughed and offered advice” to the rapist while the crime was taking place, is by far the most disturbing claim Garrow makes in his new article. Everything turns on the credibility of the evidence Garrow offers to substantiate his claim. In turn, this evidence is limited to one phrase scribbled in pen or pencil in the margins of a typed summary file. Apparently, these scribbled words were drafted by William C. Sullivan, the architect of the FBI’s self-proclaimed “war” on Dr. King, or an agency subordinate reporting to him. The underlying document is full of such marginalia, much of which is almost indecipherable.

A GREAT DEAL IS AT STAKE HERE, FOR ALL OF US

On the one hand, if Garrow’s disturbing allegation is proven to be accurate, I would urge everyone to condemn Dr. King for reprehensible conduct that can never be justified or tolerated in our society. Silence or levity during the commission of rape, and failure to intervene to protect the victim, are morally unacceptable. Encouragement of a rape, egging on a rapist, is a moral crime; depending on the facts and the reliability of the evidence, it can form the basis of a criminal prosecution for “aiding and abetting” the sexual assault (although the FBI apparently did not believe that such credible evidence existed in this case; if they did, they presumably would have given it to the Washington, D.C. District Attorney, especially as Hoover wanted nothing more than for King’s public stature and leadership of the civil rights movement to be destroyed).

On the other hand, if this allegation is false (i.e. if the notes and summary drafted by FBI officers from audiotapes transcribed by lower-level agents include elements that are inaccurate, mistaken, inadvertently or deliberately misinterpreted, or purposely manufactured), Garrow would be responsible for perpetrating a terrible injustice upon the memory of Dr. King, upon Dr. King’s children and close friends, and upon Dr. King’s legacy in America today and going forward.

This issue here is not whether or not the alleged conduct can be justified if indeed it took place. It cannot. Rather, the issue is whether a necessary threshold measure of evidentiary reliability has been met in this case. The answer to this question is very clear: it has not. I have written this essay to explain why Garrow failed to meet the test of journalistic responsibility, and why it would be intellectually improper and morally unjust to conclude that the uncorroborated allegations he has published are true.

This essay seeks to provide the objective historical context for evaluating, discounting and rejecting the “evidence” upon which Garrow’s allegations rely. Still, I must confess that I see the publication of Garrow’s article as an unfortunate and tragic moment in the debate about Dr. King’s legacy in America. I am deeply saddened by it, and I wish that I did not have to write this response. The allegations that have been made have already tarnished Dr. King’s legacy, at least to some extent. He is not alive to feel wounded by this, nor can he defend himself. I feel wounded, at a personal level, because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was my friend. I am an only child, and Martin was my brother. I’ve lived for nearly nine decades, and I have never known a person of greater moral integrity, human decency and ethical behavior. I would have given my life for him, I loved him so much.

1. Following the publication trail

Garrow chose to publish his allegations in an essay (“The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King”) published on Thursday, May 30, in an obscure British publication called Standpoint Magazine. From the internet I learned that Standpoint is the magazine of a small libertarian-oriented thinktank called The Social Affairs Unit. The organization’s website, citing The Times of London, states that “The Social Affairs Unit is famous for driving its coach and horses through the liberal consensus scattering intellectual picket lines as it goes…”

Garrow has published previously in mainstream U.S. publications such as The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian U.S. Given the extraordinary nature of his claims, the newsworthiness of his conclusions, the stature of Dr. King in the United States and the relevance of Dr. King’s legacy to a U.S. readership, why didn’t Garrow submit his article for publication to these more prominent U.S.-based media platforms, with incomparably larger distribution and credibility among American readers?

The answer, according to Michael Mosbacher, editor of Standpoint and Director of The Social Affairs Unit, is that he did.

Mosbacher’s editorial introduction to the current Standpoint issue states that Garrow offered his article to each of those publications, and to other mainstream conservative as well as liberal publications, but he was turned down in each case. Why? Mosbacher implies that none of them had the courage to defy the liberal mob. Perhaps. But there is a far more likely explanation. I believe that the editors responsible for these serious publications rejected Garrow’s essay for exactly the same reason why the editors of the same magazines and newspapers and affiliated journalists with professional standards of excellence – reputable editors and journalists such as Ben Bradlee of Newsweek and The Washington Post, David Kraslow of the Miami Herald, and Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution — refused to publish stories based on allegations or tape recordings with similar content provided to them secretly by the FBI during Dr. King’s lifetime, without confirming evidence of any kind, pursuant to a massive FBI disinformation campaign designed to destroy Dr. King’s reputation.

These editors and journalists understood the obligation of any responsible journalist to reject any such allegations without confidence that the underlying evidence is accurate, without confirmation from eyewitnesses or others who can verify its veracity and authenticity, and without certainty that the interpretation of ambiguous data is correct.

They understood that it is extraordinarily dangerous to believe everything you read in FBI files, or to take their contents at face value.

Their concern as journalists is the same concern you should have as readers.

You should be especially concerned about the veracity of information generated in the toxic anti-democratic culture maintained under the authoritarian leadership of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from the bureau’s founding in 1935 until his death in 1972.

You should be highly critical of files generated in campaigns designed by Hoover and his deputies to produce and disseminate lies and disinformation for the purpose of discrediting political dissidents.

Rigorously question the content of files generated under Hoover’s direction using surveillance in violation of Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, especially if the transcripts to which those files refer were transcribed by nonprofessionals from garbled and often inaudible audiotapes.

Reject summary “conclusions” and handwritten comments produced by Hoover’s direct subordinates who understood full well the measure of success and failure of the operation: potential career-boosting rewards that would follow the “discovery” of “dirt” — rewards presumably to be bestowed in proportion to the degree of morally damaging kompromatmight offer — and the anxious expectation of dissatisfaction or reprimand for coming up empty-handed.

David Garrow, who spent decades perusing these files, should know. Nearly 40 years ago, in his book The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., he warned us to be very, very careful. Framing his 1981 book with an epigram from Goethe (“The most important things are not always to be found in the files”), Garrow applied this cautionary observation to the specific case of the FBI’s King files: “A healthy skepticism toward what one does find in the files is essential to any intelligent use of the Bureau’s own records.” He referred to the incisive analysis of distinguished civil liberties lawyer Frank J. Donner in his 1980 book The Age of Surveillance documenting the FBI’s egregious history of domestic spying and dirty tricks. “One must appreciate the warning, well-articulated by Frank J. Donner, that ‘the clandestine character of [the] intelligence process tends…to legitimate it. Information derived from clandestine sources is assumed to be intrinsically valuable… In the same way, the fact that the information is obtained secretly invites the inference that it is accurate.” Referring to “countless obvious errors,” and providing examples of dangerous falsehoods, Garrow wrote, “[s]imply because the Bureau holds certain data tightly does not mean that that information is accurate, and one must constantly guard against accepting as fact every statement contained in a once highly classified document.”

As readers of the FBI’s “secret files” I ask you to follow the advice Garrow provided in 1981. I wish he had followed the same advice in 2019.

2. The shameful history of Hoover’s FBI

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harbored the virulent racism of a KKK Grand Dragon, and wielded the immense power at his disposal like a mob boss. An American Savonarola, obsessed by perceived sexual deviancy and communist sympathies, trafficking in illegal surveillance and blackmail, Hoover abused his office to inflict immeasurable damage on our democracy and the lives of countless American citizens who sought to exercise their First Amendment rights.

Among the many despicable crimes perpetrated under Hoover’s leadership, the FBI engaged in rampant criminal behavior to malign and persecute American citizens who mobilized nonviolent protest to challenge the structure of legally sanctioned segregation. While Hoover denigrated African Americans generally, especially as they began to organize a nonviolent revolution against Jim Crow, he despised one man above all others: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover’s FBI began monitoring Dr. King in December 1955 when he assumed leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The FBI’s covert operations against Dr. King escalated following Dr. King’s increasing public criticism of the agency. (For example, in April 1964, Dr. King called Hoover’s bureau “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South.”) The 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the FBI campaign against Dr. King, which continued up until his assassination on April 4, 1968, was conducted outside the legal authority of the bureau and very probably felonious — a series of grave crimes for which there has never been legal accountability.

As reported by Garrow in his 1981 book, Hoover apparently didn’t even need to mention Dr. King’s name to indicate the target of his ire. To Hoover, Dr. King was simply “the burrhead,” and Hoover made it clear to deputies and associates that “the burrhead” needed to be “destroyed.” In this racist environment, Hoover’s subordinates understood that to suggest support for King and the civil rights movement he led would end any chance for professional advancement; rather, it would be a quick way to terminate an otherwise promising FBI career.

This is the context that cannot be forgotten or elided. Don’t believe everything you read in Hoover’s unpublished files maligning Dr. King. Use your critical intelligence to discount exaggerated accusations and reject claims that flow from felonious means.

In 1967, the FBI launched its secret “COINTELPRO” program “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings.” The Church Committee found that the goal of the FBI’s program was “preventing or disrupting the exercise of First Amendment Rights.”

The House Committee report found that “[t]he FBI campaign to discredit and destroy Dr. King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness.” Moreover, “[t]he depth of Director Hoover’s bitterness toward Dr. King, a bitterness which he had effectively communicated to his subordinates in the FBI, was apparent from the FBI’s attempt to sully Dr. King’s reputation long after his death.” All of this led to enormous personal suffering on the part of Dr. King and his closest associates, great harm to the SCLC as an organization and to the civil rights movement, which emerged victorious despite the FBI’s campaign of disinformation and persecution.

In sum, there is perhaps no set of files in the FBI’s secret stash that present greater danger, that suggest the likelihood of falsehood and manipulation, and that require the highest level of skepticism and critical scrutiny than the clandestine files Hoover kept on Dr. King, as documented in voluminous detail by the 1975 Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (generally known as the ‘Church Committee”).

Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota was a member of the Senate 1975 Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (generally known as the Church Committee). Following a session of hearings documenting the FBI’s criminal activities related to the surveillance of Dr. King, and the dissemination of lies with the intent to destroy his reputation, Senator Mondale emphasized the tragic reality that the FBI “took justice into its own hands by seeking to punish those with unpopular ideas.”

All of this I have learned the hard way, from direct personal experience. I was secretly wiretapped, without my permission, in violation of my privacy and my family’s privacy, for many years because of my close relationship with Dr. King, and our dear colleague and friend Stanley Levison. Decades later, when I read my own FBI files obtained pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I was struck by the mistakes and misinterpretations contained in the documents related to my work with Dr. King, and by the absurdity of my constant surveillance.

I hope that you never have to go through the same experience.

3. William C. Sullivan and the FBI “war” on Dr. King

There is an additional reason to doubt the veracity of the specific memo upon which Garrow relies. The author of this memo (and, apparently, the notes scribbled in the margin) was the only senior FBI official who persecuted Dr. King with an obsessive vehemence that echoed Hoover’s own obsession, who hated Dr. King with an arguably even stronger hatred, and who privately and publicly defended the use of dirty tricks in an effort to bring him down: William C. Sullivan, FBI deputy for domestic intelligence and surveillance.

Just days after Dr. King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech by the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, Sullivan sent Hoover a confidential plan of action. Echoing Hoover’s own views, Sullivan described Dr. King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” Dr. King’s influence must be neutralized, Sullivan argued, because “we are right now in this nation engaged in a form of social revolution.” He argued for FBI intervention “to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence so that he will no longer be a security problem and no longer will be deceiving and misleading the Negro people.” Sullivan offered Hoover a plan for the FBI to discredit Dr. King and “develop” a replacement leader for Negro Americans to follow who would be beholden to Hoover and the FBI. Sullivan’s memo advised Hoover that the threat posed by Dr. King is so severe, and his revered stature among black Americans so secure, that the FBI should not refrain from extrajudicial actions to bring him down, as “it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”

Years later, in his own testimony before the Church Committee, Sullivan explained how the FBI sought to “neutralize” Dr. King as a civil rights leader by waging a “war” against him, a war with Sullivan himself as Hoover’s top general. “No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.”

Hoover’s relentless disinformation campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used morally despicable and often illegal means to smear Dr. King’s reputation and assassinate his character. For years, FBI agents under Hoover’s direction manufactured disinformation, peddled lies, and disseminated garbage to media outlets, newspaper editors and thought leaders. They falsely claimed that Dr. King and his senior advisors and colleagues were communists under the direction or influence of the Soviet Union or the American Communist Party. They falsely claimed that Dr. King was guilty of financial misconduct. Hoover was always especially interested in sex. Dr. King’s adulterous relationships were a gold mine to be exploited for purposes of extortion, threats and pressure. The fact of his unfaithfulness was Hoover’s bonanza; alleged perversity was his stock in trade; unidentified sounds recorded by clandestine audiotape surveillance were the soundtrack for false or exaggerated accusations of all kinds.

Patriotism is a rough and tough business, as Sullivan testified to Congress. This was “war,” a domestic version of Cold War covert operations used to neutralize Soviet agents.

In 1964, the FBI sent an anonymous package containing the now-infamous tape recording presumably containing a compilation of the most prurient dirt that they had collected from hotel room surveillance, along with a note by an anonymous author identifying himself as a “Negro” threatening to make the tape public. The tape was obviously doctored, spliced, and manipulated, however crudely. “King, look into your heart,” the letter implored. The American people soon would “know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast…” The letter offered Dr. King only one alternative to avoid the resulting humiliation: to commit suicide. “There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal self is bared to the nation.” As confirmed in a detailed discussion set out in Garrow’s Standpoint article, the doctored tape was the brainchild of William C. Sullivan, who came up with the plan to threaten Dr. King with extortion, and provoke Dr. King’s suicide. Sullivan apparently authored the accompanying letter himself.

Conclusion

I read Garrow’s essay with great sadness. I see it as the tragic self-delusion of a person who had previously dedicated himself to a life of high-quality historical scholarship. What motivated him to abandon the caution he once demanded of any historian dealing with such tainted files? I cannot know. All I can do is tell the truth as I know it, because Dr. King is not with us to defend himself, nor is anyone alive who was an eyewitness to the alleged events and can testify to the accuracy of Sullivan’s handwritten note, or lack thereof. All I can do is beg readers to adopt the “healthy skepticism” in evaluating the content of Hoover’s secret files that Garrow demanded nearly 40 years ago.

I am 88 years old. While I still walk on this earth, I am unwilling to allow a tragic injustice to besmirch the legacy of my brother Martin. His legacy of nonviolence and love has greater salience, meaning and urgency today than ever before. The health and future of our democracy depend on it.

Garrow concludes the preface to his 1981 book with reflections on the nature of evil. As a younger man he viewed evil though the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But his study of FBI malfeasance in the persecution of Dr. King brought him closer to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the “banality” of evil. “The danger we all face is not the consequence of man unbound from the restraints of society. It is the surrender of independent and critical judgment by people who work in large organizations.” Garrow was referring to men like Sullivan, the author of the memo whose veracity he now asks you to assume. I agree with this judgment.

One need not work for a large bureaucracy to lose one’s moral compass in the quest for career advancement. Disinformation is poisonous precisely because it is so effective, especially when those accused of moral violations are not alive to defend themselves.

Each of us are at risk of succumbing to the banal temptations of self-promotion, the resulting surrender of critical judgment, and the self-deceptions that follow. Evil is banal when it is perpetrated by mundane, petty and all-too-human motivations. Banality is evil when it unjustly destroys the lives and reputations of good people, perhaps especially when the victims are the most morally courageous dissidents our nation has produced.

Edgar Hoover’s campaign of vilification and character assassination against Dr. King failed because countless honorable journalists and courageous editors refused to publish the garbage Hoover relentlessly peddled between 1963 and 1968. It would be a moral travesty to give Hoover’s racist, malevolent disinformation campaign a posthumous victory in 2019.

Massive Extradition Protest Fills Hong Kong Streets

HONG KONG—Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched through Hong Kong on Sunday to voice their opposition to government-sponsored legislation that would allow people to be extradited to mainland China to face charges.

The massive demonstration took place three days before the semi-autonomous Chinese territory’s government plans to bring the highly contentious bill to the full legislature, bypassing the committee process, in a bid to win approval by the end of the month.

Police estimated the crowd at 240,000, but organizers said more than 1 million took part.

The protest was one of the largest in recent Hong Kong history. It appeared to be even bigger than a massive pro-democracy demonstration in 2003 against a proposed national security law, according to Associated Press journalists who covered both events.

Late Sunday night, a group of demonstrators broke through barriers at government headquarters, where the march had ended. The crowd briefly pushed its way into the lobby, but police used batons and pepper spray, and the protesters were moved outside.

People of all ages took part in the march, some pushing strollers and others carrying canes, chanting slogans in the native Cantonese dialect in favor of greater transparency in government.

Kiwi Wong, 27, was among the throng, a member of the younger generation who’ve grown up enjoying relative prosperity but also growing insecurity about what many see as an erosion of the rights Hong Kong residents have enjoyed.

“If I didn’t come out now, I don’t know when I would have the chance to express my opinion again,” Wong said. “Because now we’ve got to this stage, if you don’t come out to try to do what you can, then it will end up too late, you won’t be able to say or do anything about it.”

Alex Ng, a 67-year-old retiree, said he joined the protest because “I think that there was never any public consultation about this law, and there are a lot of uncertainties.”

Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has pushed forward with the legislation despite widespread criticism from human rights and business groups. The amendments have been criticized as eroding Hong Kong’s judicial independence by making it easier to send criminal suspects to mainland China, where they could face vague national security charges and unfair trials.

“What can we do to get Carrie Lam to listen to us, how many people have to come out to make her reconsider listening to the public?” said Miu Wong, a 24-year-old office worker who was among the protesters.

Tommy Lam, a 29-year-old who is working on his master’s degree, said: “All these people coming out and marching sends a definite message. If the government doesn’t listen, there will be tension.”

The Hong Kong government said in a statement late Sunday that it respected the right of its opponents to protest.

“We acknowledge and respect that people have different views on a wide range of issues,” the statement said. “The procession today is an example of Hong Kong people exercising their freedom of expression within their rights as enshrined in the Basic Law and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance.”

Hong Kong was guaranteed the right to retain its own social, legal and political systems for 50 years following its handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997, the so-called “one country, two systems” framework. However, China’s ruling Communist Party has been seen as increasingly reneging on that agreement by forcing through unpopular legal changes.

Hong Kong currently limits extraditions to jurisdictions with which it has existing extradition agreements or to others on an individual basis under a law passed before 1997.

China was excluded because of concerns over its poor record on legal independence and human rights. In recent years, mainland authorities have gone after opponents by accusing them of dubious crimes such as tax evasion, crystallizing worries among critics and others.

Lam’s government argued that the revisions were needed to close legal loopholes, while opponents say that is merely an excuse to pursue China’s agenda of reducing Hong Kong’s legal independence.

Hong Kong’s Legislative Council plans to vote on the bill on Wednesday.

“The people of Hong Kong want to protect our freedom, our freedom of speech, our rule of law, our judicial system, and also our economic foundation, which is welcome to international investors,” activist Lee Cheuk-yan, a former Hong Kong legislator, said Sunday. “If international investors lose confidence in Hong Kong because of this evil bill, then Hong Kong, economically, would also be destroyed.”

___

Associated Press videojournalist Raf Wober contributed to this report.

Critics Blast Trump Backing of Israel’s Plan to Commit ‘War Crime’

A top Trump administration official signaled Saturday that the U.S. would welcome Israel’s reported plan to break international law by annexing parts of the West Bank, angering advocates for Palestinian rights.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman told the New York Times that Israel is “entitled to retain some portion” of the Palestinian territory where Israel has built settlements over the past two decades.

Related Articles











What Palestinians Really Think of Jared Kushner's Plan



by

















Did the Left Betray Israel and Zionism?



by Robert Scheer

Saeb Erakat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, wrote that the Trump administration’s blessing of Israeli’s plan to commit a “war crime” represents “the road to an endless conflict.”

That is not the path to peace , that is the the road to an endless conflict . https://t.co/It1DAtbl1R

— Dr. Saeb Erakat الدكتور صائب عريقات (@ErakatSaeb) June 8, 2019

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in April that he planned to begin annexation, drawing condemnation from U.S. progressive leaders including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), who accused Netanyahu of “undermining” peace efforts.

Late Friday, ahead of Friedman’s statement, lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) were among the lawmakers who introduced a resolution opposing any Israeli plan to annex parts of the West Bank and demanding a two-state solution that recognizes Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

“Unilateral annexation of portions of the West Bank would jeopardize prospects for a two-state solution, harm Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors, threaten Israel’s Jewish and democratic identity, and undermine Israel’s security,” reads the resolution.

“The United States needs to be an honest broker in the Middle East. We need to defend Israel’s right to live in peace and security, while at the same time, end the occupation and protect Palestinians’ right to security and self-determination,” said Sanders. “I am proud to cosponsor this resolution to make clear that a two-state solution based on international law remains the best path to achieving a just and lasting peace, and is firmly in the interest of the United States.”

The resolution won support from the progressive-leaning American Jewish advocacy group J Street, which praised the senators along with the lead sponsor of the resolution, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), for standing up to the Trump administration.

“A two-state solution remains the only viable way to secure Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people and to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people,” said Dylan Williams, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at J Street. “It’s absolutely vital that congressional leaders like Sen. Merkley are speaking out in defense of the two-state outcome—and making clear that any unilateral annexation of West Bank territory by the Israeli government would be disastrous for the long-term interests of Israelis, Palestinians, and the United States.”

“This resolution could not be more timely, given that the first stage of the Trump administration’s long-anticipated initiative related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—an economic workshop in Bahrain—is now set to take place at the end of June,” J Street added on Twitter.

This resolution could not be more timely, given that the first stage of the Trump administration’s long-anticipated initiative related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – an economic workshop in Bahrain – is now set to take place at the end of June. https://t.co/71dPlUvWOy

— J Street (@jstreetdotorg) June 7, 2019

In his interview, Friedman criticized Palestinian officials for urging business leaders not to attend the meeting in Bahrain. The administration is expected to offer incentives for business leaders at the meeting, suggesting they should support Trump’s peace plan—which is not expected to include a Palestinian state.

“It’s unfair the way the Palestinians have described this as a bribe or as an attempt to buy off their national aspirations,” Friedman told the Times.

Erakat tweeted that Friedman’s interview only furthered “the validity of our request” that business leaders decline to attend the meeting.

“Their vision is based on Israel’s right to annexation of the occupied territories, a war crime in accordance with international law,” Erakat said.

Facebook Is Still Letting Kids Get Duped

Facebook continues to put users at risk of being duped into spending money on games.

In January, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed how the company knowingly made millions of dollars between 2010 and 2014 from parents who didn’t realize their kids were being charged to play games such as Angry Birds, Ninja Saga and Barn Buddy.

Those details surfaced in January after a California court unsealed more than 150 pages of Facebook records. But the records did not answer a big question: Has Facebook changed its policy, or are users still bamboozled into spending money while playing its games?

Now, a Reveal review has found that despite widespread criticism from U.S. senators, advocacy groups and its own users, Facebook has not changed a key policy that got it into trouble.

The company still allows game developers to run incredibly high chargeback rates – a little-known industry term that describes when people are forced to ask their credit card company for help getting refunds.

Related Articles











Facebook Co-Founder Calls for Social Media Giant to Be Broken Up



by

















Facebook Partners With Notorious Far-Right Site The Daily Caller on Fact-Checking



by Ilana Novick

















Is Facebook Betting Big on Brexit?



by

High chargeback rates are a warning sign that a business might be defrauding its customers because so many people are seeking help to get refunds, according to the U.S. government. A chargeback rate of 1 percent is considered high, and anything over 2 percent is a “red flag” of deceptive behavior, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook’s payment policies show the company still permits game developers to run chargeback rates of 5 percent before it will penalize them. That is more than double what the government says should be ringing alarm bells for potential business fraud.

Facebook acknowledged that this 5 percent chargeback rate is the only guidance it gives developers about acceptable limits, but said that overall, it maintains a low rate and handles problematic game developers on a case-by-case basis.

“Chargebacks create a bad experience for people on Facebook and for us. We keep records of these transactions, and Facebook’s overall chargeback rate for in-app payment transactions is well below the 1% guidelines set by payment card networks,” Facebook said in a statement. “As our Payments Terms state, we follow up with and may enforce against individual game developers if their chargeback rates get too high.”

When a game does surpass a 5 percent chargeback rate, Facebook does not necessarily take any action against the developer. It penalizes them only by withholding money under certain circumstances, according to its payment terms.

“Once again, Facebook can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Facebook is aware of the damage this is doing to children and families,” said Jim Steyer, founder of the child advocacy group Common Sense Media. “They need to be held accountable.”

In February, a consortium of nonprofits led by Common Sense Media filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook based on details revealed in the unsealed court records. When told about Facebook’s 5 percent chargeback policy, Steyer called for immediate action from lawmakers and regulators.

Facebook has a long history with high chargeback rates. It was high chargeback rates that alerted Facebook employees in 2011 that its users were being unwittingly duped into spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on its games.

Eight years ago, Facebook employees launched an internal analysis that revealed underage users and their parents did not always realize they were spending money on in-game purchases for extra lives, virtual coins, magical swords and other virtual goods, internal documents show.

Some games did not make it clear to children that they were spending real money. And parents didn’t always know that Facebook had stored their credit card information and would let their children use it without entering a password or some other form of payment authorization.

Having learned that the company was profiting off the mistakes of children and their parents, Facebook’s employees designed a solution that would have helped stop the problem. But that solution came with one crucial drawback: It likely would hurt Facebook’s revenues, the unsealed documents show.

The company did not implement the solution, which other tech firms such as Apple already were using, according to the court documents. And Facebook continued to deny refunds to children and their parents, who kept being surprised to find hundreds or even thousands of dollars in charges on their credit card statements.

One 15-year-old girl accrued $6,500 in charges in just a few weeks. A boy in Arizona spent nearly $1,000 over the course of a weekend without realizing it. And one young mother described waking up from a short “pregnant nap” on the sofa to discover her toddler had spent nearly $250. Facebook denied them refunds.

Upset parents turned to their credit card companies, which clawed back money from Facebook. This pushed up chargeback rates for Facebook’s games.

Now Facebook is making a renewed effort to expand its gaming business. In December, it celebrated the second anniversary of its updated gaming platform, which the company calls Instant Games. The games are now highly integrated into Facebook’s many products, such as Messenger. And it’s paying off for Facebook and the third-party game developers. The number of people playing games on the new platform tripled in 2018, according to the company, and revenues for developers are up.

When players make in-game purchases, Facebook collects the money from users, often keeping 30 percent for itself, and then passing on the remaining 70 percent to the developer.

In January, Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., wrote a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing Reveal’s investigation and asked what changes the company had implemented to prevent children and their parents from being duped out of money while playing games. Facebook responded that it “streamlined” the refund process for children and their parents who believe they were cheated.

But despite the torrent of complaints this year, the company did not change its 7-year-old policy of allowing game developers to run sky-high chargeback rates.

Karisse Hendrick, a chargeback consultant for Fortune 500 companies, said it can be harder for online retailers to keep chargeback rates lower because fraudsters might order something with a stolen credit card or falsely claim that they never ordered something or that it didn’t arrive after receiving it.

But Hendrick was unfamiliar with any company that allowed chargeback rates of 5 percent as a matter of policy. When told about Facebook’s payment terms, she provided a one-word response: “Wow.”

Hendrick said Zuckerberg has the experience to know how chargebacks work.

“I worked with Mark Zuckerberg when they first started about 12 years ago because they had high chargebacks,” she said.

She said Facebook’s current 5 percent chargeback policy makes users vulnerable to being defrauded by unscrupulous game developers and the social media giant was not following best practices.

“It’s amazing they’re comfortable with 5 percent and that they’re putting it in writing,” Hendrick said. “I think that type of attitude is a symptom of a bigger problem at Facebook. It’s putting revenues over the care and trust of customers.”

 

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Nathan Halverson can be reached at nhalverson@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @eWords.

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

What Palestinians Really Think of Jared Kushner’s Plan

The Wall Street Journal recently trolled the Palestinians with a breathless headline that “some” Palestinians are giving up on having their own state.

Anyone who has been following the Palestine issue knows that for some time a plurality of Palestinians has swung behind a one-state solution and now want Israeli citizenship.

Related Articles











Critics Blast Trump Backing of Israel's Plan to Commit 'War Crime'



by

















The Latest Sign of Israel's Creeping Fascism



by

This result does not come from the dimming of nationalist aspirations but from the weary realism of a colonized people facing the best-armed army in the Middle East, which is backed by the world’s sole superpower.

Being stateless was defined by Hannah Arendt as forfeiting the right to have rights. Faced with the possibility of achieving the rights of citizenship in any state and remaining stateless, the Palestinians prefer the former, as anyone would.

But that is not the same as accepting the stateless Bantustans proffered by Kushner.

Here is some Palestinian polling on these issues.

Here is what Palestinians actually think about the Trump/Kushner plan:

An overwhelming majority (83%) believes that the Trump Administration is not serious about launching a new peace plan and 12% believe it is serious.

A large majority of 79% believes that if the US does indeed offer a peace plan, it will not call for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel; 15% believe it will.

A similar percentage (81%) believes that the plan will not call for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; 14% believe it will.

78% believe the Trump plan will not call for the borders of the Palestinian state to be based on the lines of June 1967 with minor mutual land swaps; 17% believe it will.

An overwhelming majority of 84% believes the plan will not call for a just solution to the refugee problem; 10% believe it will.

Similarly, 84% believe the plan will not call for the ending of the Israeli occupation and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the areas occupied in 1967; 11% believe it will.

79% believe that the Palestinian leadership should reject the US plan, if offered, and 14% believe it should accept it.

But if the Trump plan does indeed include all such items, such as a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, with borders based on the 1967 lines, a just solution to the refugees’ problem, and an Israeli army withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, a majority of 52% calls for rejecting it and 43% call for accepting it. Call for accepting the plan is higher in the Gaza Strip, standing at 55% while the call for rejecting it is higher in the West Bank, standing at 59%.

A majority of 64% is opposed and 23% is not opposed to a resumption of dialogue between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump Administration. Official contacts between the PA and the US government were suspended by the PA after the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. ”

That citizenship and basic civil rights are more important than nationhood per se for a lot of people is demonstrated by this opinion poll of Palestinian-Israelis, which shows high levels of satisfaction.

So no, WSJ, these poll findings do not support the Kushner plan, which again tries to substitute mere money for the rights of citizenship. They support a just and lasting settlement of the issue of Palestinian statelessness.

 

American History for Truthdiggers: Carter’s Cage of Crisis

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 32nd installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, who retired recently as a major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 32 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26; Part 27; Part 28; Part 29; Part 30; Part 31.

* * *

There would never have been a Democratic president in 1977, certainly not a President Jimmy Carter, were it not for Watergate, Richard Nixon’s disgrace and the public backlash against Tricky Dick’s Republican Party. Indeed, after the fall of Lyndon B. Johnson, a new era of Republican ascendancy had begun, with the GOP holding the presidency for 20 of the 24 years following Nixon’s 1968 election. Often remembered as one of America’s most feckless and uninspiring presidents, Carter in reality was neither as successful as his supporters had hoped nor as ineffective as his opponents later claimed. He was, ultimately, a transitional figure and a product of the 1970s, which were increasingly politically conservative although heavily colored by cultural liberalism, especially among the young. Though later portrayed by the right as a hopelessly left-wing liberal, Carter was actually quiet pragmatic and became the first of the three Democratic presidents who served between 1977 and 2017 to tack toward the right. In that sense, one could argue that Carter reflected and affected the prevailing conservative winds and started the country down the road toward the “Reagan Revolution” and a long-term rightward trend in American politics.

A Georgia peanut farmer, Naval Academy graduate and evangelical Christian, Carter was a complicated, multifaceted figure and supposedly a figurehead of the “new”—post-civil rights—South. He was an intelligent, inherently decent man, but given the inflation and unemployment of the era—much of which was beyond his control—he seemed doomed to be a one-term president. He could not stem the tide of economic stagnation as the U.S. emerged from its anomalous postwar affluence. Indeed, in retrospect, the American economic expansion that followed the Second World War could not have continued without interruption. However, telling the truth about this inevitable phenomenon was not popular among a populace that had grown spoiled and expected unlimited perpetual growth. Carter tried to rein in that impossible expectation and for his trouble was voted out of office.

If not quite a tragic figure, Carter was, to some extent, treated unfairly by the voters, punished for crises and downturns not wholly of his doing. Then again, few remember that it was Carter who first shifted toward economic austerity and increased military spending and deployments in the Middle East. It is odd that the legacy of a man who seemed so committed to peace should be the onset of what would become a 40-year, ongoing crusade for American dominance of the Greater Middle East. It is more ironic, still, that a president later remembered as too liberal should be the first in many decades to call for a balanced budget and initiate monetary policies that emphasized austerity in more traditionally conservative ways. Though their personalities could not have been more different, Carter and his successor as president, Ronald Reagan, pursued policies not totally dissimilar to one another. Indeed, one could argue that Carter was the first in a line of three centrist Democratic presidents who would abandon the social program spending boom that had defined liberalism ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 inauguration. It could be said, then, that Carter was the first conservative president of a Republican-dominated era.

The Carter Anomaly: the Election of 1976

Carter was a long-shot candidate in the 1976 presidential election, a virtual unknown, but he was the beneficiary of a tragedy that had occurred half a dozen years earlier. The politician whom many Democrats wanted as head of the party ticket in 1976 had announced in September 1974 that he would not run. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a figure of the traditionally liberal consensus, had seemed destined to one day carry the torch of his assassinated brothers, John and Robert. However, his presidential prospects were crippled because the national public never fully forgave him for the so-called Chappaquiddick incident.

Late one night in July of 1969, the senator drove a car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., then swam away. He did not report the accident to authorities until hours later. Left behind in the automobile was Mary Jo Kopechne, a former worker in Robert Kennedy’s campaign, who drowned there.

With Ted Kennedy not in the race, Carter gained the Democratic nomination with almost 40 percent of the popular vote in the primaries, defeating Jerry Brown, George Wallace, Mo Udall, Henry M. Jackson, Frank Church and others.

The former Georgia governor bested his Democratic rivals (including some other state-level politicians) and, eventually, Republican President Gerald Ford largely because voters saw him as being outside the Washington establishment, with which, after Watergate, Americans were increasingly disgusted. From his election on, arguably up to the present day, presidential candidates would run with and win with just such an “outsider” image.

The Republican Nixon had only recently, in 1972, trounced the Democrat George McGovern in one of the great landslides in American electoral history. It seemed unlikely then, at least until the Watergate scandal, that a Democrat would win in 1976. But times had changed. Americans, by and large, no longer trusted the federal government or establishment figures. The level of citizens who expressed faith in that government had dropped from 75 percent in 1964 to 25 percent in the late 1970s. What Americans wanted, in 1976, was someone new and fresh—essentially the anti-Nixon. They thought they had found that in the farmer from the tiny rural town of Plains, Ga.

Gerald Ford had become vice president when Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace in 1973 and then became president when Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. He had never won a nationwide election, and his campaign against Carter was shaky from the start. Though he confidently exclaimed that the “long national nightmare [of Watergate] was over,” most of the populace wasn’t so sure. And when Ford’s first act as president was to pre-emptively pardon Nixon he may have sealed his own political fate. As the editors of The New York Times wrote, “The pardon may be the final blow to [the people’s] faith in America.” Carter, the Cinderella-story candidate, rode that loss of faith in Washington, and particularly in the Republican Party, straight into the White House.

The 1976 election was a major coup for the Democrats, who picked up dozens of seats in the House and Senate, introducing a large freshman class dubbed the “Watergate babies.” The status quo, ostensibly, was the enemy of Carter and the young Democratic lawmakers. In style, if not always in substance, Carter would project an agreeable, more accessible figure. Seeking to distance himself from the “imperial presidency” of Richard Nixon, Carter even exited his limousine and walked among the people to the White House following his inauguration. In explaining the phenomenon of his out-of-nowhere victory, the new president said, “Our people were sick at heart, wanted leadership that could heal us, and give us once again a government of which we could feel proud.” At first, it seemed, Carter was just the man for this disillusioned moment. In addition to his man-of-the-people inaugural walk, Carter would seek to present a less regal presidency, ditching the Prussian-style uniforms Nixon insisted that his White House guards wear and even ending the tradition of playing “Hail to the Chief” upon his arrival at official events.

Carter’s morals, and devoted Christianity, also appealed to a nation becoming ever more religious. He was an evangelical churchgoer and a Sunday school teacher. Yet he was less forceful in his Christianity than a later host of Republicans who hailed from the growing “religious right.” As the journalist Robert Scheer noted after conducting a Playboy magazine interview with the then-candidate, Carter was “a guy who believes in his personal God and will let the rest of us believe whatever the hell we want.” Carter’s tolerance and lack of ideological dogmatism reflected his leadership style as well. He actually boasted he lacked ideology or fixed political positions, in contrast with the public proclamations of Nixon and Johnson. At election time in 1976, at least, Carter seemed just what the people desired: an honest, politically flexible outsider. Nevertheless, he had his weaknesses. Carter was seen from the outset of his term as bland and wonkish—certainly not inspiring.

For all the strengths that he did possess, and the short-term weakness of the disgraced GOP, Carter barely squeaked by to victory—probably a reflection of Americans’ rightward shift. He received just 50.1 percent of the popular vote in an election for which just 54.8 percent of voters—the lowest percentage since 1948—turned out. Thus, the new president hardly possessed a strong mandate to govern. Indeed, neither of the major-party candidates in the ’76 election seemed to excite voters. Both were weak public speakers. In fact, the liberal Democrat Eugene McCarthy, who ran for president as an independent in 1976, labeled Carter an “oratorical mortician” who “inters his words and ideas behind piles of syntactical mush.” Nonetheless, the “Man from Plains” entered office in January 1977 intent on broad systemic reform and with a goal to reinvest Americans’ trust in the presidency. As such, throughout his campaign, Carter had repeatedly proclaimed, “I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President. I will never lie to you.” That, of course, remained to be seen.

The Great Malaise: Carter’s Domestic Policy

Carter was far less progressive in domestic affairs than either LBJ or John Kennedy, and certainly FDR. During his lone term, the president consistently waffled between traditionally liberal policies, and—partly as a response to shifting popular will as well as his own fiscal conservatism—by the time he left office had edged the nation to the right.

President Carter inherited an economy in near free fall. Overspending and borrowing for the Vietnam War, domestic oil shocks caused by Mideast nations’ embargoes (in response to U.S. support for Israel) and the expanding economic competition of other, growing nations combined to cause the nightmare of “stagflation”—the once-thought-impossible combination of high inflation and rising unemployment. Carter never managed to overcome this economic downturn, and that failure ultimately doomed his hopes for re-election.

The new president tried everything and even changed course on the economy. After calling for more typical liberal stimulus spending, he shifted after 1978 to more anti-inflationary policies such as spending cuts and balanced budgets. Neither effectively solved the deep-seated problems, at least while Carter was in office. Toward the end of his term, a desperate Carter would appoint Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve Board, and Volcker took drastic anti-inflationary actions, choking spending, aggravating unemployment and causing a recession. Eventually, however, the measures worked and inflation was drastically reduced, but it wasn’t until the assumption of the presidency by Ronald Reagan that Volcker’s harsh measures bore fruit, and the Republicans were quick to take credit. Timing was never on Carter’s side.

To the approval of liberals, Carter granted a limited pardon to Vietnam draft evaders. He also fought hard for environmental protection and saw the necessity to craft an energy policy that would make the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels. He even had solar panels placed on the White House roof (which Reagan promptly removed). His national energy policy, largely crafted in secret, was eviscerated by corporate lobbyists and had little tangible effects. On energy, Carter was ahead of his time, but he misread the pulse of American life. He appeared on national television to speak truths that the gas-guzzling consumerist American people simply didn’t want to hear. “Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes,” he said, adding, “The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but will if we do not act quickly.” However right and prescient Carter proved to be, the public didn’t take kindly to his call for cutbacks in energy consumption and resented his paternalist tone.

Carter took right-leaning positions on a host of other issues. A fiscal hawk by nature, he eschewed liberal spending and promised a balanced budget, something neither Republican Nixon nor Republican Ford had called for. He also proclaimed the limits of government to do great things and improve life. In one decidedly illiberal speech he asserted, “We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we cannot answer all problems nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything.” This caution was a far cry from the liberal utopianism of LBJ’s faith in his Great Society to transform American life and end its social and economic ills. Though Carter did initially call for stimulus spending and universal health insurance, he was never able to square these standard liberal policies with his own penchant for balanced budgets and the international economic crisis he weathered throughout his term. As his adviser Stuart Eizenstat later recalled, “One always knew that [Carter] wanted to spend as little money as possible, and yet at the same time he wanted welfare reform, he wanted national health insurance.” This proved to be an impossibility, especially in a time when a majority of citizens had no stomach for increased taxes and higher federal spending. Carter could never find a stable middle ground.

Furthermore, with increased foreign competition eviscerating the Rust Belt, and decreasing power among unions, even the overall rising standard of living under Carter was offset by ballooning inflation and increased unemployment. Furthermore, as unions lost clout and high-paying manufacturing jobs left the country, a new income gap rose between the rich and the rest. As working-class wages decreased by 13 percent in the 1970s and ’80s, the compensation of CEOs rose by nearly 400 percent. A new Gilded Age kicked off during the Carter years and has only worsened since. Labor union weakness and America’s gradual shift to a service economy meant stagnant wages, fewer benefits and fewer hours of pay for workers. For this, Carter had no effective answer.

Carter also began the trend of economic deregulation that would define the 1980s and ’90s. “It is a major goal of my administration,” he said, “to free the American people from the burden of over-regulation.” This process placed the American economy on the road to the unregulated hyper-capitalism that would eventually produce the 2008 economic crash. When the imminent failure of Chrysler, one of America’s top employers, added to the economy’s woes, many on both the left and the right were reluctant to back intervention despite the potential dire consequences of not doing so. One could hardly imagine FDR or LBJ shrinking from bold action to save Chrysler’s 250,000 employees. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas voiced a common sentiment among conservatives when he asserted that “[i]n a nation that is sinking in a sea of debt, it is irresponsible for this Congress to be considering a measure that will add millions to that debt.” On the left, unexpectedly, consumer advocate Ralph Nader agreed: “Mismanagement at the company has been incredible, why should a subsidy solve Chrysler’s problems? Let them go bankrupt.” Eventually, the feds provided $1.5 billion in relief for Chrysler, but only at the expense of a weakened union, which was forced to accept a wage freeze and, eventually, wage cuts.

Again, Carter took to the airwaves to chastise profligate Americans, stating, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” America’s biggest problem—more detrimental than inflation or energy issues—was a “crisis of confidence,” he declared, and once again Americans resented his brutal honesty and his calls for personal cutbacks in spending. And, though he never used the term, pundits dubbed it the “malaise” speech. It won him few popularity points in the long term.

Other limits to Carter’s purported liberalism manifested in his momentous deregulation of the airlines. Indeed, his very rhetoric circumscribed his view of what government could accomplish. To the horror of his liberal base, Carter proclaimed in his second State of the Union address, “Government cannot solve our problems. … It cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities.” Such pessimism was a far cry from the boundless faith in government that infused the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and his immediate successors in the Democratic Party. Indeed, according to the historian and former JFK adviser Arthur Schlesinger, if Roosevelt had believed these things “we would still be in the Great Depression.” But here again, Carter reflected the new national mood, one mistrustful of government. He promised much less than Americans expected and made perhaps the fatal error of asking Americans to economically sacrifice, the kind of plea that rarely has proved to be a political winner.

Carter’s personal attributes further held him back and doomed grand endeavors such as his energy plan. He refused to work closely with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a fellow Democrat, and never developed close relationships with Congress. Instead, Carter relied on his small campaign staff from Georgia, refused to delegate, micromanaged, and occasionally displayed the arrogance so often inherent in loners and workaholics. He also alienated many on the left, especially the Congressional Black Caucus, with his fiscal conservatism and inherent distrust of unions (possibly a reflection of his upbringing in the notoriously labor-unfriendly South).

Beyond the domestic political problems caused by economic woes and Americans’ negative reactions to his chastising speeches, Carter was plagued by uncontrollable international events and criticism of his foreign policy. He would turn out to be the victim of tumultuous times in the international arena.

Schizophrenic Inconsistency: Carter and the World

Jimmy Carter is often remembered as particularly weak on foreign policy—soft on the Soviets and paralyzed by an inability to force revolutionary Iran to release hostages taken from the American Embassy in Tehran. Much of this criticism is wildly unfair. In point of fact, Carter had few options in ending the hostage crisis and was much more bellicose toward the Soviet Union (and supportive of increased military sending) than is now remembered. Carter may have failed in his foreign policies, leaving office with the Cold War frostier than ever and the world an arguably more dangerous place than he had found it, but this was certainly not because he was too soft or anti-military.

Carter was elected, purportedly, on a promise to re-inject morals and a concern for human rights into America’s tarnished, post-Vietnam foreign policy. He announced in 1978 that “[h]uman rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.” In some ways, especially early in his term, he attempted to decrease worldwide tensions and practice a rights-based foreign policy. At root, Carter was a Wilsonian internationalist idealist, at least in theory. He initially promised to cut aid to nations with poor human rights records, though he continued to back the brutal, but anti-communist, Shah of Iran. He also canceled the neutron bomb program and announced in his inaugural address, “We will move this year a step toward our ultimate goal—the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth.” To that end he negotiated the SALT II treaty with the Soviets to place limits on the total number of missiles and deliver systems for nuclear weapons that each power could possess.

In two other diplomatic coups, Carter officially recognized the People’s Republic of China, although this move upset conservative backers of the previously recognized Taiwan regime. Then, after many days of forced and closed negotiations, he negotiated the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Israel and its archenemy, Egypt. Israel even agreed, under pressure, to return the conquered Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Finally, Carter also signed an agreement to eventually return the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. This too raised the ire of conservative opponents—notably Ronald Reagan, who was particularly hawkish about the canal.

In the end, Carter failed to reduce tensions with the Soviets, and detente would die on his watch. Part of this was due to Soviet moves: placing new intermediate-range missiles in Eastern Europe and backing and using Cuban proxies in Angola and Ethiopia. Furthermore, new groups of American Cold War hawks—such as the alarmist Committee on the Present Danger—criticized Carter’s “cult of appeasement” and sought to increase bellicosity toward the Soviet Union. As for the SALT II treaty, it died in the Senate in the face of newly hawkish opposition from nearly all Republicans and a significant number of Cold Warrior Democrats.

Matters truly worsened when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan under what was in a sense a policy of defensiveness and insecurity rather than of inherent aggression—the Kremlin acted mainly to prop up a friendly communist regime. The United States had contributed to Soviet woes before the invasion by using the CIA to back Islamist rebels seeking to overturn the Afghan government, arming jihadists who would later coalesce into al-Qaida and the Taliban movements. In response to the Soviet invasion, the CIA only increased support, sending arms and cash to various rebel Islamist groups in an attempt to turn the Afghanistan War into the Soviets’ “Vietnam.” Carter and his advisers overreacted and came to (incorrectly) believe the Soviets had the intent and capacity to move through Afghanistan to conquer the Persian Gulf. Fearing a threat to American control of Mideast oil, Carter took serious steps to counter the Soviets. He embargoed grain shipments to Russia, reinstituted selective service and led an international boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

Carter also took to using alarmist rhetoric, referring to the Soviet invasion and purported threat to the Persian Gulf as the “most serious threat to peace since the Second World War.” He proclaimed what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine, announcing that the U.S. would use military force to oppose any threat to Mideast oil in the Persian Gulf. In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter said that “[the Middle East] contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. … Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Soon, Carter would even call for the creation of a new U.S. military command for the Mideast, later known as USCENTCOM. Thus, it was Carter’s overreaction that set the stage for a perpetual U.S. military presence—and several wars—in the Greater Middle East.

However, it was events in Iran that most embarrassed the Carter administration. For this there was an important backstory. The U.S. had long meddled in Iranian affairs, using the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected government that threatened to nationalize Iranian oil. In the place of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the U.S. backed the brutal dictatorial regime of the shah. Few Americans knew or thought much about American actions in Iran, but Iranians never forgave Washington for these transgressions. Thus, when a 1979 revolution overturned the shah’s regime, and Washington refused to turn over the shah (being treated in the U.S. for cancer) to the new Islamist revolutionary government, a crowd stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. Carter had few options to force the hostages’ release, and negotiations failed for over a year. Eventually, Carter allowed himself to be talked into a harebrained military rescue mission that ended in disaster and with several American deaths. In a final insult to Carter, the Iranian government waited until Reagan’s 1981 inauguration to release the hostages, a delay that contributed to Carter’s electoral defeat and fed the later (not wholly accurate) perception among Americans and others that a tougher and more bellicose Reagan was responsible for ending the Iran hostage crisis.

Carter’s foreign policy never lived up to his human rights-oriented rhetoric. It was Carter, not Reagan, who first increased U.S. military spending, began the shadow war with the Soviets in Afghanistan and buried the policy of detente. Carter may not have intended an increase in Cold War tensions, but he did allow himself to be pushed in a more combative and pugnacious direction by newly resurgent hawks in his administration and, especially, on Capitol Hill. Far from the dove he was pejoratively labeled as—then and now—Carter actually escalated America’s military buildup and helped usher in the last, but quite combative, final phase of the Cold War.

* * * 

Some justifiable conclusions about Carter: that his failings as president were largely the results of personal style and a troubled era of global strife and economic downturn, much of it inherited. And that, despite later assertions from Reagan Republicans, his shortcomings stemmed not from his being too liberal but often more from his halfhearted attempts to shift rightward. One can, in fact, sense the end of liberal, optimistic, big-government politics in the Carter administration, as much as, or more than, in the Nixon administration. After Carter, conservative positions on economics and cultural matters became ascendant and mainstream. In many ways they remain so, despite the new, contemporary grassroots resurgence of the progressive left.

The record must be corrected to reflect that Carter, not Reagan, began the national shift toward smaller government, austerity, the end of detente and increased tensions with both the Soviet Union and Iran. We live in the political space created during the Carter administration, and have for some 50 years. Most of all, Carter’s stillborn presidency demonstrated that being inherently decent is not enough to weather hard times or win popular support, that Americans don’t take kindly to hard truths or demands for cutbacks in energy consumption and that this country remains, at root, a center-right nation—more conservative than the rest of the industrialized Western World.

In times since, Republicans have trotted out the specter of a feckless Carter to scare voters rightward, and it works! Carter’s legend of incompetence, more than his actual complex presidency, has stuck, demonstrating once again that memory is often more powerful than reality. In this way, Carter was a tragic figure in American history. He taught Republicans how to win and showed Democrats how to lose. They’re both doing so still.

* * *

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• Gary Gerstle, “American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century” (2001).

• Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974” (2019).

• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).

• James T. Patterson, “Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore” (2005).

• Bruce Schulman, “The Seventies” (2001).

• Howard Zinn, “The Twentieth Century” (1980).

Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

Ginsburg Warns of More 5-4 Supreme Court Decisions Ahead

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested Friday that there will be sharp divisions among her colleagues as they finish their term, with decisions in high-profile cases about the census and the drawing of electoral maps expected before the end of the month.

The justice was speaking at a conference for judges in New York. According to prepared remarks made available by the Supreme Court, the justice noted that of the 43 cases the justices have announced decisions in since hearing arguments beginning in October, just over a quarter were decided by a 5-4 or 5-3 vote. Those are rulings that tend to split the court’s five more conservative justices from its four liberal members including Ginsburg.

“Given the number of most watched cases still unannounced, I cannot predict that the relatively low sharp divisions ratio will hold,” said Ginsburg, who knows the votes in the some two dozen cases remaining at this point, though the public does not. The court’s term runs from October through June.

In her remarks, Ginsburg drew a parallel between two cases involving the Trump administration: this year’s case involving the census and a case last year in which the court’s conservatives upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries over the dissent of their liberal colleagues.

In the census case, which was argued in April, the court is being asked to uphold a decision by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to ask every U.S. resident about citizenship in the 2020 census. Opponents of that plan say the question would discourage millions of Hispanics and immigrants from responding and being counted.

“Speculators about the outcome note that last year, in Trump v. Hawaii, the court upheld the so-called ‘travel ban,’ in an opinion granting great deference to the Executive. Respondents in the census case have argued that a ruling in Secretary Ross’s favor would stretch deference beyond the breaking point,” Ginsburg said.

Ginsburg also spoke briefly about cases in which the court is being asked to determine when electoral maps are too partisan. The court has two cases before it on that issue, one from Maryland and another from North Carolina.

“However one comes out on the legal issues, partisan gerrymandering unsettles the fundamental premise that people elect their representatives, not vice versa,” she said.

Ginsburg also noted one big difference between last year and this year, the absence of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired after the end of last term. Kennedy, who often held the pivotal vote when the court divided 5-4, was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose appointment is expected to result in the court becoming more conservative.

“It was, I would say, the event of greatest consequence for the current term, and perhaps for many terms ahead,” Ginsburg said of Kennedy’s retirement.

Ginsburg, who became the court’s second female justice when she joined the court in 1993, also used the speech to note a number of statistics. She said that about one in five attorneys who argue before the court is female. And she credited Kavanaugh with making history “by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew.”

“Thanks to his selections, the court has this term for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks,” she said.

Monday is the next day for opinions to be announced by the court.

___

Follow Jessica Gresko on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jessicagresko