Chris Hedges's Blog, page 239

Democrats Must Choose Between Teachers and Charter Schools

For years, the safe havens for education policy debate in the Democratic Party have been expanding pre-K programs and providing more affordable college, but in the current presidential primary contest, another consensus issue has been added to the party’s agenda: salary increases for K–12 classroom teachers. Kamala Harris has gotten the most press for coming out strongly for raising teacher wages, but other frontrunners including Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders have also called for increased teacher pay.

But what will happen when a consensus issue like teacher salary increases comes into conflict with a lightning rod issue like charter schools? That’s a scenario currently playing out in Florida.

A recent law passed by the majority Republican Florida state legislature and signed by newly elected Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will force local school districts to share portions of their locally appropriated tax money with charter schools, even if those funds are raised for the express purpose of increasing teacher salaries in district-operated public schools. (Charter schools in Florida, as in many states, do not receive funds that are raised through bond referendums, mill levies, or other forms of local funding initiatives.)

Florida teachers have openly opposed the new law, and local school districts have taken it to court to have it overthrown. But given this new law, it’s not at all hard to imagine a scenario, even at the national level, where Democrats pushing to increase funds for teacher pay will have to confront an expanding charter school industry—and now voucher programs—that would claim their portion of that money to use as private institutions for whatever purposes they wish.

“An Effort to Redefine Public Schools”

“The problem with charter schools isn’t that they’re competing with public schools; it’s that they’re supplanting public schools,” says Justin Katz in a phone call. Katz, who is president of the Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association, recently helped organize a rally in West Palm Beach where more than 200 teachers and public school advocates showed up to voice their opposition to distributing funds raised by local tax increases to charter schools.

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Charter Schools Are Scamming the U.S. Government



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The protest “was very specific, local, and personal,” Katz explains, because voters in the county had approved $200 million in funding for their schools in a measure that specified increases could be used for teacher raises in traditional public schools and not for funding charter schools.

The referendum was overwhelmingly approved by more than 72 percent of voters. But under the proposed new law, a proportional share of 10 percent, or about $20 million a year, would have gone to the county’s 49 charters. Only a final hour amendment in the state’s Senate averted the loss, when the bill was altered to apply to future bond referendums only.

The language of the referendum that was passed was “crystal clear,” Katz says, that money raised by the bond efforts would not go to charter schools. But the loophole being used to argue for charters to get their share is the use of the term “public schools.”

The new law is “an effort to redefine what are public schools,” he says, in order to give charter schools a right to claim a portion of any publicly raised education funds, regardless of the intent for raising the money. He fears that once charters claim that right, private schools in the state’s school voucher programs will claim it too.

What Katz fears aligns to Governor DeSantis’ recent comment that “if the taxpayer is paying for education, it’s public education,” which seems to mean that virtually any education provider—charter schools, private schools, and even homeschooling—is “public education” and therefore has rightful claim to public funds meant for teachers, local schools, and any initiative voters approve, regardless of the intent.

Public Money to “Non-Public” Schools

“Our objection to sharing bond referendum money with charter schools is that it’s not what the money was intended for,” says Anna Fusco, the president of the Broward Teachers Union.

Broward, the county immediately to the south of Palm Beach, also recently passed a local referendum that raised $93,000, enough funding to boost teacher salaries by as much as $8,000. Like the Palm Beach initiative, the Broward referendum funds were intended not to go to charters, although the language was not as specific. Broward has over 90 charter schools educating 45,919 students, over 20 percent of the district’s students.

Fusco says, “it was fair to not include charters in the referendum” for several reasons. Because nearly half the charter schools in the state are managed by for-profit companies, new funding voters had approved for teachers could instead be used to expand profits for charter management companies.

Fusco also believes many charter schools are “non-public” because they “get to choose their students.” Studies have shown Florida’s charter schools, compared to public schools, serve significantly lower percentages of low-income students, students with disabilities, and students who struggle with English.

She also points to other recent legislation that gave charter schools access to state funding for building leases and executive pay and big new loopholes for bypassing local school boards and employing uncertified teachers. She contends the law undermines the charter industry’s argument for needing local referendum money. And because of the new loopholes, bond referendum money would now go to charter schools even though they can bypass the very school boards that pushed for the bonds, and even if the money was earmarked for wage hikes for certified teachers, charters could use the money to hire uncertified teachers who lower the status of the teaching profession.

A “Long Game People Haven’t Noticed”

“This is part of an incremental and deliberate effort to take apart our public school system,” says Karen Castor Dentel in a phone call. Castor Dentel is a board member of Orange County Public Schools and former Democratic member of the Florida House of Representatives. A native of Florida and graduate of the state’s public schools, she taught in an elementary school last year, and her mother was Florida Education Commissioner from 1987 to 1994.

Castor Dentel sources the assault on the state’s public schools to former Governor Jeb Bush, who initiated a series of reforms he called the A+ Plan that included imposing a school grading system based on test scores. Gradually the test-based system was used to evaluate teachers too—including evaluating teachers based on the scores of students they don’t even teach.

Bush’s plan also called for changing teachers’ salary increases from a traditional step plan based on seniority and continuing education to a system of bonuses and merit-pay schemes based on test scores and other measures. The most preposterous of these schemes based teacher bonuses on scores they earned on their college entrance exams. Districts are now rushing to abandon these plans.

“The purpose of this was to shame schools and teachers,” Castor Dentel insists. “We already knew which students needed help and which schools and teachers needed more support. But it’s easier to label schools and teachers failing and hand everything over to a private charter operator than it is to do what these schools and communities actually need.”

While Bush’s plan cracked down on teachers, it loosened the regulatory environment for charter schools and provided them with new funding sources. By the time Bush left office in 2007, charter schools across the state had grown from a modest 30 to well over 300. Today there are 655.

The educational success of the A+ Plan continues to be hotly debated, but it’s undeniable that the welfare of public school teachers in the state suffered significantly under its regime.

The state has dropped to 46 on a national scale of average teacher salaries, and at least one credible analysis has deemed the state the fifth worst state in the nation to be a teacher.

Due to low pay, deteriorating employee benefits, and demoralizing working conditions, Florida teachers have refused to work beyond school hours, increasingly called in sick, and are leaving their jobs at higher rates. The state now has an acute teacher shortage and struggles to fill vacant positions. And in what’s being called a “silent strike,” experienced teachers are leaving the profession early, and people who would be highly qualified for teaching are choosing other employment opportunities.

In the meantime, charter schools have flourished and now account for nearly all the state’s growth in student enrollment.

“It’s been a long game,” Castor Dentel says. “The agenda has been imposed so slowly over the past 20 years that people don’t notice. It’s a cancer that started in Florida and is now spreading everywhere.”

Have Democrats Found Their Way?

If the Florida model for education is a disease, Democrats have certainly been infected. Much of what was in Bush’s A+ Plan formed the policy agenda of the Obama administration, which also pushed for evaluating schools and teachers based on test scores and expanding charter schools.

“Democrats have been promoting a conservative ‘school reform’ agenda for the past three decades,” education historian and bestselling author Diane Ravitch observed. “Whatever the motivations, the upshot is clear: The Democratic Party has lost its way on public education.”

But because presidential hopefuls are rallying around teacher salary increases, have Democrats found their way back?

No doubt, what got Democrats to pay attention to the plight of school teachers was the series of teacher protests staged across the country last year and into this. The highly visible strikes emboldened candidates running in 2018 midterm elections to campaign for increasing investments in public schools. The teacher uprisings also took the schools issue away from Republicans and made it less about “accountability” and more about the massive cuts political leaders in both parties have enacted to the system.

In Florida, teachers are forbidden to strike by law and the state constitution. “Any teachers engaging in such action would endanger their professional status,” explains Fusco. “They could lose their licenses and jobs for life and lose their pensions too. Our union will never, ever encourage a walk out.”

However, the laws haven’t stopped teachers from speaking out against efforts to divert local tax dollars for teacher pay to charter schools. Their protest messages are about educating voters on the impact of charters rather than opposing them outright.

Teachers who protested in Palm Beach County, according to Castor Dentel, “made their protests more about the responsible use of tax dollars.”

“Parents and voters are just starting to get engaged, but they aren’t always clear on the issues,” she says. “They don’t understand that charter schools aren’t really like public schools.”

“For now, our effort to push back has to rely on educating people on what these bills in the state legislature are really doing,” says Fusco. “We hope people who aren’t in education and don’t even have children in schools listen to us.”

“This obsession with crushing public schools to promote privately operated things that are being called ‘public’ is not universally accepted,” says Katz, “and people are just starting to sour on it.”

Maybe Democrats will too.

To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.

Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Judge’s Order Means Missouri Clinic Can Keep Providing Abortions

ST. LOUIS — A judge issued an order Friday ensuring Missouri’s only abortion clinic can continue providing abortions, acting just hours before the St. Louis Planned Parenthood facility’s license was set to expire.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services had said it would not renew the clinic’s license, citing concerns with “failed abortions,” compromised patient safety and legal violations at the clinic. Agency officials also insisted upon interviewing additional physicians at the clinic as part of an investigation.

With the license set to expire at midnight Friday, Planned Parenthood pre-emptively sued this week and argued that the state was “weaponizing” the licensing process. Planned Parenthood had said that absent court intervention, Missouri would become the first state without an abortion clinic since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized the procedure nationwide.

St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer issued a temporary restraining order preventing Missouri from taking away the clinic’s license. He said Planned Parenthood “has demonstrated that immediate and irreparable injury will result” if its abortion license is allowed to expire.

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Abortion Bans Are Backfiring Spectacularly Across the U.S.



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The clinic’s license “shall not expire and shall remain in effect” until a ruling is issued on Planned Parenthood’s request for a permanent injunction, according to Stelzer’s ruling. A hearing is set for Tuesday morning.

The nearest clinic performing abortions is just across the Mississippi River in Granite City, Illinois, less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis. Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic in the Kansas City area is in Overland Park, Kansas, just 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the state line. State figures show a handful of Missouri hospitals also perform abortions, but those are relatively rare.

The fight over the clinic’s license comes as lawmakers in conservative states across the nation are passing new restrictions that take aim at Roe. Abortion opponents, emboldened by new conservative justices on the Supreme Court, are hoping federal courts will uphold laws that prohibit abortions before a fetus is viable outside the womb, the dividing line the high court set in Roe.

Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio have enacted bills barring abortion once there’s a detectable fetal heartbeat, as early as the sixth week of pregnancy. Missouri lawmakers recently approved an eight-week ban on abortion. Alabama’s gone even further, outlawing virtually all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. None of the bans has taken effect, and all are expected to face legal challenges.

“Today is a victory for women across Missouri, but this fight is far from over,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America CEO Dr. Leana Wen said in a statement. “We have seen just how vulnerable access to abortion care is here — and in the rest of the country.”

The number of abortions performed in Missouri has declined every year for the past decade, reaching a low of 2,910 last year. Of those, an estimated 1,210 occurred at eight weeks or less of pregnancy, according to preliminary statistics from the state health department.

Missouri women also seek abortions in other states. In Kansas, about 3,300 of the 7,000 abortions performed in 2018 were for Missouri residents, according to the state’s health department. Illinois does not track the home states of women seeking abortions.

Abuse of Migrant Children in U.S. Custody Goes All but Unpunished

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom based in New York. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

From 2009 to 2014, at least 214 complaints were filed against federal agents for abusing or mistreating migrant children. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s records, only one employee was disciplined as a result of a complaint.

The department’s records, which have alarmed advocates for migrants given the more aggressive approach to the treatment of minors at the border under the current administration, emerged as part of a federal lawsuit seeking the release of the names of the accused agents.

Last month, attorneys for DHS argued before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that disclosing the names of the federal agents would infringe on their right to privacy. A district judge had earlier ordered the department to make the names public.

The fact that only a single case of discipline apparently resulted from more than 200 complaints of child abuse clearly worried the district judge, John Tuchi, of Arizona, who ruled on the matter in the spring of 2018. In his order demanding the release of the names, Tuchi faulted DHS for failing to vigorously investigate claims of misconduct, stating that “completed investigations were almost nonexistent.”

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In Trump's America, Even Nielsen Wasn't Cruel Enough



by Sonali Kolhatkar

DHS declined to comment for this story.

The ongoing legal battle stretches back to 2014, when American Civil Liberties Union chapters in Arizona and Southern California began seeking details about the alleged mistreatment of minors apprehended and detained by Customs and Border Protection, an agency within Homeland Security. Using the Freedom of Information Act, attorneys with the ACLU approached DHS with a request for copies of all records regarding the verbal, physical and sexual abuse of minors by Customs or Border Patrol personnel.

The ACLU’s fact-finding initiative came as the federal government struggled to deal with a massive spike in the number of children — many from violence-plagued Central American countries, many unaccompanied by parents — crossing the southern border into the U.S.

Hoping to speed the release of the documents, the ACLU later filed suit. While the federal government eventually turned over some 30,000 pages of heavily redacted records, including 214 allegations of child abuse by agents, it has balked at disclosing the names of the Border Patrol and Customs personnel alleged to have harmed minors.

ACLU attorney Mitra Ebadolahi said that without the names of Customs and Border Protection employees — or some other way to identify them, such as tracking numbers — it’s impossible to divine basic facts about the agency’s handling of children. “We don’t know the total number of complaints submitted by a child or on behalf of a child,” Ebadolahi said in an interview, noting that there are likely far more than 214 complaints. “We don’t know the number of agents implicated. Is it a handful of agents? Are they clustered in a certain sector? Were any of those agents disciplined?”

The single disciplinary record released by DHS involved an employee with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who verbally abused a minor.

DHS maintains that the records it has already shared offer a detailed picture of the abuse allegations — including date, location and the substance of the complaint — as well as the government’s efforts to investigate them. For the public, there’s little value in “knowing the names of specific individual agents who have been subject to allegations of misconduct,” said DHS attorney Laura Myron during oral arguments before the 9th Circuit on May 16. Myron stressed that the privacy rights of Border Patrol and Customs employees would be violated by the release of their names in connection with the abuse complaints.

Myron disputed Tuchi’s view that DHS had failed to thoroughly investigate the allegations, saying his statement was not supported by the evidence presented in the case, or the documents turned over to the ACLU.

In court, Judge Sandra Ikuta expressed concern that the ACLU would “harass” the employees and endanger their lives by publishing their names.

“We would accept some alternative [to the release of the names] that would allow the public to look at the records that we’ve obtained and make sense of them, Ebadolahi responded. “There are cases where agencies have done that.”

The complaints unearthed by Ebadolahi and her colleagues, though redacted, offer glimpses of troubling patterns of behavior within the ranks. One boy told investigators “that during his apprehension by Border Patrol agents he was hit on the head with a flashlight. … He sustained a laceration to his scalp that required three (3) staples.” The boy’s story was buttressed by the fact that he had three clearly visible staples closing a fresh wound on his head. Other children reported being punched, shocked with Tasers, and denied food and medicine. Many described being bludgeoned with flashlights.

In one memo, from June 2014, a DHS investigator suggested shutting down an investigation into a minor offense because the department was deluged with a “huge amount of more serious complaints.”

Republican Plot to Entrench White Power Revealed

What follows is a conversation between Executive Director of Common Cause North Carolina Bob Phillips and Marc Steiner Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.

Voting rights goes to the heart of our very democracy. Using race to abridge those rights was commonplace in our country and gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise another political party is as old as the republic itself. Now, North Carolina Republicans have gerrymandered their legislative and congressional districts to ensure that Democrats cannot control the state’s political future, despite the fact that Democrats are in the majority. Common Cause took them to court in Common Cause v. Lewis to challenge the gerrymandering of those districts. In the course of their case, they’ve discovered documents that clearly show that Trump’s administration lied when pushing for a citizenship question on the 2020 census. It may seem disconnected; they’re not. What seems separate, is really connected, and the future of our voting rights are on the line.

We are joined by Bob Phillips, Executive Director of Common Cause North Carolina. And Bob, welcome. Good to have you with us.

BOB PHILLIPS Thank you, Marc. A pleasure to be with you too.

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The Reluctant Activist



by Chris Storm

MARC STEINER So let’s talk about this. For just for our viewers, very quickly describe your original court case and this discovery that was made in the course of your fighting for a totally different, not disconnected issue of gerrymandering in North Carolina.

BOB PHILLIPS North Carolina has been number one. We like to think of ourselves as number one in basketball, but in this case too we’re number one in gerrymandering, and we’ve actually got two cases— Common Cause v. Rucho, which was argued before the US Supreme Court will get a decision later this month, connected to a similar gerrymandering case out of Maryland. Where, as we were saying, one is in our case, Republicans gerrymandering Democrats; the Maryland case, Democrats gerrymandering Republicans, but Common Cause v. Lewis is very similar. It is a challenge of our state constitution, saying that lawmakers engaged in extreme partisan gerrymandering on the legislative maps.

We are in discovery. We don’t go to trial until mid-July and in the course of discovery, we were fortunate enough to get the 75,000 files from the mastermind, a guy named Thomas Hofeller, who had really gerrymandered maps all around the country, but also in North Carolina. And recently, we, our attorneys discovered this memo that, sort of, linked Hofeller to the census and the citizenship question, and so that’s kind of how this thing has today hit the news in a big way. We are seeing that the man who was rigging maps for partisan advantage was behind the same, I guess, kind of, effort to rig the census for a partisan advantage.

MARC STEINER Well, let’s cover this for a bit here because there’s a number of interesting aspects to this. First of all, his daughter, Stephanie Hofeller Lizon, really was estranged from her father. So, she inherited all of his files, went through his files, found this information, and brought it to you. I guess, A—it shows you better stay close to your children, [laughs] wonder what they might discover about you and tell the world. But so, that’s literally what happened, right? She found these files and gave it to you all in the course of your work working around the gerrymandering issue. Is that right?

BOB PHILLIPS Marc, it was really the day after the holiday break in early January, the phone rings in my office, and on the other end of the line is Stephanie Hofeller. I didn’t know who she was, and even when she made the connection, I wasn’t sure why she was calling. And honestly, she was calling really about another legal matter. She lives outside of North Carolina, her mother still living here, and she was in need of some legal help and felt like there was no one in this town whom she could trust because, as you’ve mentioned, she was estranged from her father. It led to multiple conversations. We were actually trying to assist her just, as you know, being nice people, if you will. Over the course of several conversations, we learned she had these files and then was willing to share with us. The lesson I, kind of, took out of this was, always pick up the phone even if you don’t know who’s on the other end of the line. [MARC laughs] It’s worth picking it up and answering the call. And so, that’s what we did.

MARC STEINER So let’s go through some, just a little bit of what her files, the files she gave you that her father had. They really, I mean, and we showed a bit of this, but let me read some of this that we just showed. We can put that back up and let people see it. What they showed was that when they testified in court, that they lied, that the Trump administration people, Attorney General Gore and others, lied on the stand. They testified that they drafted this initial letter to request citizenship in October, early November in 2017. It was actually done before that. He testified that Dr. Hofeller said, when they asked him a question about the citizenship question in January 2017, he said Mark, you need to make sure that we take a good census, that the administration doesn’t skimp on the budget, is all he said Hofeller had done when, in fact, Hofeller ghostwrote the Neuman Department of Justice letter that outlined it all.

And, there’s so many other things here— that he was one of the people, that they relied on Hofeller for expertise on voting rights when that was not, and they denied doing that; that Hofeller told him that citizenship question would maximize representation for the Latino community when in reality what Hofeller wrote was the opposite, that we can dampen down and make sure that white people have the vote and Latinos and blacks don’t. So, I mean, these were out-and-out lies that were told. I mean, it’s just mind-blowing that this stuff was revealed, so what does that mean? Where will this take you?

BOB PHILLIPS Well, you know, it’s pretty serious when you’re committing perjury before Congress, which indeed it looks like this could be very well the case, and this was what was filed in a brief today at the New York District Court where this citizenship case originated. You know, you want to say it’s shocking and in today’s world, who knows really how people are reacting, but it’s outrageous. I’m angered by it, as every American really should be, that this was not about what the officials in the Justice Department and Commerce Department had been saying, that it was about a better enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. It was all a sham, a plan to try to reduce, dilute the voting strength of in this case Latinos and other minorities who, you know, granted, might be intimidated by this question of “are you a citizen?” on the census— something we’ve never done.

We’ve never asked every person living in this country that question. It’s been done in small samples, but never done to the entire universe of people, so it’s terrible. Certainly, our hope is that the United States Supreme Court—And my understanding is that a filing was going to be made earlier today to provide them this evidence, and even though that case has been heard— the oral arguments were made April 23rd— still, this is very relevant information. My understanding is that the US Supreme Court can certainly take this in, and maybe it alters the opinion they come out with, or maybe one of the Justices decides to peel away from where they are now. I mean, all that’s speculative but, again, for those of us who were deeply concerned about this, you know, our hope is that maybe this might change what a lot of people have been anticipating as a 5-4 decision that would come in favor of the Trump administration, so we just have to wait and see.

MARC STEINER So, I mean, that was one of the questions I was going to ask is, we just don’t know how this will play out. I mean, they could very well say that the arguments have closed and we can’t take this new evidence in, but this new evidence, it would seem to me if the Supreme Court had to hear it, could affect a ruling in favor of the citizenship question on the 2020 census. I mean, this is one of the most critical findings I’ve heard about in a long time, and you literally stumbled across it.

BOB PHILLIPS We literally did. I mean, my understanding is this information, you know, kind of, came to light within the last week. So timing-wise, you know, we were not able to provide it in a timely fashion because we didn’t know about it. We didn’t realize it was there but still, you know, this case has not been rendered by the high court and they have certainly time. Again, I’m just saying this as a citizen. I don’t know any inside information and I’m not an attorney, but to take this evidence, thoughtfully take it in, as they ultimately make that decision.

MARC STEINER So, one last question because I’m really curious about how you all think about this, what your internal conversations were about. I mean, if you take this case, the one that you have pushed in North Carolina around gerrymandering that pushes black folks and minorities and Democrats into districts where they cannot gain representation because of how they redistricted the state itself; and then you take this case about the citizenship question on the US Census, which could in fact mean, as Hofeller himself has said, which is why he did it, to ensure that Latinos don’t vote and they’re not counted, which can change the nature of districts so that the Democrats and others will not have their do in Congress and other places, as Republicans would— I mean, this to me, if you combine these things, can go to the very heart of our democracy, the heart of what voting means. It’s like turning all the struggles around voting rights on its head, as they attempted to do when they used the Voting Rights Act to justify using the citizenship question. So, I think what’s happening here is monumental in terms of what the future could hold.

BOB PHILLIPS They are linked. I mean, the census is all about an accurate count for apportionment as well as the distribution of federal dollars. And to think that this was some plan crafted perhaps right here in Raleigh. I mean, this is where Thomas, Dr. Hofeller, lived. And again, that he was responsible for the manipulation and the rigging of district maps across the country, and then had a hand in this kind of a plan to rig again the census for the purposes of an advantage with redistricting to a particular party, is again very disturbing, very frightening, and again we hope it harnesses some outrage across the country.

MARC STEINER Well, this is certainly eye-opening, and we look forward to following this and talking to you all more down line as this unfolds, especially as we see the Supreme Court takes up the evidence you all have discovered. Bob Phillips, Executive Director of Common Cause North Carolina, thank you so much for joining us here on The Real News. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.

BOB PHILLIPS Thank you, Marc. Great talking to you, as well.

MARC STEINER And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us. Take care.

Did the Left Betray Israel and Zionism?

Israel and the Zionist ideology that its founding is based on have been topics at the heart of global politics for decades. On the left, progressives, especially Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, have become increasingly critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. At the same time, the self-defined Jewish state has lurched further right with each election. The plight of Palestinians is moving center-stage in global human rights discussions, and the questions of Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution are continually debated on all sides of the political spectrum.

In her recent book, “The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky,” New York University professor Susie Linfield traces the history behind what she views as a leftist abandonment of Zionism. Acknowledging that the occupation of the West Bank is part of the reason leftist thinkers are critical of Israel, the Jewish cultural journalism scholar tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer that she believes “there is more to the story.”

“What I was really interested in was getting beyond just a discussion of the occupation—although that’s important, but that is written about, and still written about, including by Israeli journalists, a tremendous amount,” Linfield says in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “[I was] trying to understand why the idea of Zionism—which I identify as a democratic state for the Jewish people, not a Jewish religious state—[has] always really been such a thorny, thorny issue for left-wing intellectuals.”

Scheer, a Jewish journalist who himself has been critical of the Israeli occupation, disagrees strongly throughout the discussion with Linfield’s extreme condemnations of Chomsky, Arendt, I.F. Stone and others he views as having presaged the contradictions inherent in Zionism at an early stage.

Linfield’s explorations led her to a number of questions regarding Israeli nationalism, while setting aside the central issue of an occupation that began after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, also known as the Six-Day War, which has resulted in the proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements as well as the vast abuse of Palestinians by the Israeli government and military. While Linfield argues that the left has supported other nationalist countries, such as Cuba and Vietnam, Scheer counters that it is precisely nationalism combined with occupation that led to progressives’ warnings about the future of Israel, and later to their criticism.

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Israel Is Captive to Its 'Destructive Process'



by Chris Hedges

“These Jewish intellectuals … rejected the Israeli state at different points,” Scheer tells Linfield. “Most of them supported it quite enthusiastically. But they had a prediction that this nationalism—and this is true of nationalism throughout the world, including American nationalism—it has a destructive impulse. And when it turns to conquering other people, or having control over other people, it becomes quite evil.”

Linfield posits that during at a time when many Israelis were prepared to support a two-state solution, the Palestinian Liberation Organization did not work toward that objective. Now, it seems, the tables have turned, and it is embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies and followers who are disinterested in anything but a one-state solution. While in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, there was a broad discussion about the implications of occupation, and there was a strong left in Israel, the nation’s left has been diminished and the ideology that has won out, as Linfield points out, is a right-wing “combination of religious Zionism and security Zionism.”

Listen to the full discussion between Linfield and Scheer as they come to grips with the historical events and various ideologies that have led to the current breaking point in Israeli politics. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Susie Linfield, a professor or teacher of cultural journalism at NYU. She’s worked for The Washington Post and other leading publications. And she’s written a book for Yale University Press which I think should help get a really good debate going, and not just–well, let me give the title, The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. Two obviously famous names, but there are others here, the legendary American journalists I.F. Stone, Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler; Fred Halliday, the British journalist; and others. I’m going to let you state the theory of the book, but basically, it’s about the abandonment by leftist, Jewish intellectuals of a standard that they would apply to other people, the right to protect their own, to have a state, to have an identity. And their, I guess you would say, war or resistance with Zionism. So why don’t you give me the thesis of this very well-documented, lengthy encounter with these people?

Susie Linfield: OK, thank you for having me. Well, when I wrote my last book, The Cruel Radiance, which was about political violence in photography, I had a chapter on Robert Capa, the great antifascist documentary photographer of his era; very famous photographs, especially from the Spanish Civil War. And Capa in 1948 was very, very pro-Israel. He really exulted in the founding of the state, he goes to photograph it, he brings his friend I.F. Stone, they do a book together. Capa actually thought about settling in Israel. And other photojournalists and journalists of that time, of the left, of the antifascist left, were very, very supportive of Israel. And they really regarded the Arab nations and Britain as the imperialist powers, not Israel. Obviously, the left right now tends to be very, very, very, very anti-Israel. And part of that, of course, is the occupation, the repression of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So that–and also the way that Israel itself has really moved from being a social democratic country to being a right-wing one. But it occurred to me, when I started thinking about it, I was thinking well, but there are other countries that are much more repressive than Israel, especially in the Arab world. And the left, especially of the sixties, seventies, eighties, were very supportive of those countries in the Third World, the Third World liberation movements, et cetera. So I started to think, hmm, there must be more to this story than just the change in Israel itself. And it also, I also knew that even before ’67, even before the occupation, there was tremendous, tremendous debate, and especially among Marxists, often real hostility to the very idea of a state for the Jewish people. So, what I was really interested in was getting beyond just a discussion of the occupation–although that’s important, but that is written about, and still written about, including by Israeli journalists, a tremendous amount. But trying to understand why the idea of Zionism, which I identify as a democratic state for the Jewish people, not a Jewish religious state, why that’s always really been such a thorny, thorny issue for left-wing intellectuals. And that there’s a kind of obsession with Israel, really going back way before the founding of the state, and an obsession with Zionism. And why is this particular issue sort of a poke in the eye for leftists? One of the things I was trying to explore is that of course Zionism is a form of nationalism, or of national liberation. And Marxists especially have tended to be very critical, of course, of nationalism. You know, you have people like Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky saying, you know, I have no nation, I am a socialist. But again, the left has been, especially in the sixties, seventies, very, very, very supportive of extremely, extremely nationalistic movements: China, Vietnam, and we can–Cuba. We can go through a whole list. So again, that there has to be something about Zionism itself that is really so hard for leftists to sort of wrap their heads around. And one of the things that I was interested in is that all the people in my book–and they have various politics, from really hard-core communism, like Maxime Rodinson, he was a member of the French Communist Party for a long time, very pro-Soviet, to Isaac Deutscher, who was a Trotskyist. Albert Memmi was a socialist but not a communist. So they have, they have different politics.

RS: Well, you should mention Arthur Koestler, who’s one of the people who was certainly the strongest voice of anti-communism at some point.

SL: Arthur Koestler–well, Arthur Koestler was a super communist, and then a super anti-communist. He was a super Zionist, and then he was a super anti-Zionist. He, you know, all his life, he described his politics as absolute-itis. And that’s really true. He would have these very, very abrupt changes. But they all agreed on certain basic principles: anti-colonialism, anti-fascism, socialism most of them, although not all of them. And yet on Israel and on Zionism, they just disagreed so vehemently. So the book is really–and it is not an attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; I don’t have a solution. I would have the Nobel Peace Prize if I did, I’m sure, but I certainly do not. It’s not an attempt to solve the conflict; it’s really an attempt to explore what I think is a kind of neglected, buried, but in my view very, very interesting intellectual history. And really, the history of a debate through these very, almost all of them, each in their way, extremely, extremely learned people, and people who were so fervently, fervently involved in the political struggles and in the crises of their time.

RS: Well, OK. So this is a lot of history we have to deal with, and within a fairly short space of time. But one point that your book makes in, I think, a compelling way, is that Zionism, prior to the rise of German-inspired fascism, was not a popular movement among Jews. Whether they were of the left, center, or right. And–that’s correct, right?

SL: Yeah, Zionism—

RS: That it took the Holocaust to make Zionism a viable and significant force in Jewish life, right?

SL: Yeah, Zionism is not at all a, much less the, major movement among politically active Jews. Many, many, many more were drawn to socialism or drawn to communism. You have the Bund in Russia, which believes very strongly in Jewish identity, but is anti-Zionist. So it’s really a very, very small number of Jews who begin going to Palestine–this is also especially after the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia. They were, in fact, socialists; they were socialist Zionists. But that was really, really, really a minority position. And far, far more Jews, you know, believed in socialist revolution or socialist, social democratic politics. And of course many Jews just, from Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived at the time, many of them just want to come to America, there, you know. And they become, some of them become very involved in the union movement, et cetera. So this is really a minority. Interestingly, Hannah Arendt in 1933, as soon as Hitler comes to power, she becomes a Zionist. And I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the Holocaust; I would say it’s more the rise of Hitler. And of course the Holocaust wasn’t really understood to be such, really, until after the war. But I’d say with the rise of Hitler, you have a rethinking of the anti-Zionism, or at least the indifference to Zionism. But nonetheless, it is still a minority position. And yeah, it’s really with the fuller understanding of the Holocaust, which doesn’t really come until the camps are liberated, as the Soviets and the Americans, et cetera, are liberating the camps, that I would say, especially in America, that that’s when that really becomes a majority, a major position among American Jews.

RS: OK. So let me just, without getting lost in the history–and full disclosure, I’m only here in the United States because my mother was in the Jewish socialist Bund in Russia. And when Lenin, after two of her sisters were killed, as also members of that movement, by activities against the czar and so forth, and they had, when Lenin denounced the Jewish socialist Bund, my mother had to flee, then the new Soviet Union. So I know a little bit about the history; on the other hand, my mother’s close sister, mind you, was a Zionist even at an early period. So I’ve actually lived with this history. But the reason I’m bringing it up is really, to go to your question about nationalism, I think this group of Jewish intellectuals that you’re describing didn’t so much embrace nationalism in other countries, but certainly in the case–well, I think in all of their cases, feared nationalism on the part of some big powers and colonial powers. And were trying to explain why it was, what you were fighting were not inherently subversive movements, as in the case of China, but actually nationalist movements, which was something more familiar. And in some ways, not necessarily expansionist, and that has turned out to be the case. Vietnamese nationalism, Chinese nationalism, Cuban nationalism, Russian nationalism, however problematic they are, do not add up to an international conspiracy to destroy the United States. So that was really kind of the argument in the Cold War era. I don’t know that it was an embrace of the wonders of nationalism, because clearly a lot of them, right or left or just militaristic, were unattractive. But I want to get to this key point of Zionism as a survival, a necessity, as your book very eloquently describes. That even these people that you end up criticizing, in the case of I.F. Stone, very much embraced the original notion that after the Holocaust, there was no denying that the Jewish people needed a sanctuary. That, right? I.F. Stone–and I’m picking on I.F. Stone because first of all, I knew him, and published him at one point at Ramparts. But also because he’s sort of the outstanding, along with Chomsky, the two names that most people listening to the show might identify with American left, rather than the other people, famous as they may be. And in I.F. Stone’s case, you very eloquently in your book describe his commitment to these refugees and to the formation of the state of Israel. And then you talk about his changing that point of view. So why don’t we take that as our talking point, and really let me raise what I think is the basic question–and let’s take I.F. Stone as an example. Was he being prescient in predicting the contradiction between this Jewish nationalism and the needs of, say, the Palestinians or other people? Or was he in fact misjudging it, and therefore came to be hostile, ultimately, to the state? That seems to me the critical question.

SL: So I think that he was both prescient and misjudging it. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. I.F. Stone goes to what was then Palestine after the wars; it was still owned, you know, still part of the British mandate. And first off–and this was true of Arendt also, and I think this is something that’s sort of forgotten–is that he just exults in what he sees is being built. The kibbutzim, the industry that’s being built, the farms, this and that. And he says Palestine is the only place where a Jew can walk around and not worry about whether he’s a problem. He can just be a Jew. So he really exults in this. Arendt was also very, very, very impressed with the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community. And he originally thinks that there can be either–that there can be a binational state, but he changes that position. He says, I can’t find any Arab leader, or any Arab that I speak to, who supports that. Binationalism, I think a lot of people forget, was a Jewish idea. It was not a joint idea, it was an idea of Jewish left-wing intellectuals. So he says, well, there can’t be a binational state because none of the Arabs agree to this. So he thinks that partition–he becomes a supporter of partition, which of course the UN votes in 1947. And once Israel declares independence, he goes with Robert Capa, they do a book called This is Israel; he really exults in the state. But from the beginning, he’s very, very worried; and not just worried, but really tormented by the question of the Palestinian refugees. Although he points out that there’s a refugee problem precisely because the Arab states didn’t accept the partition, they invade Israel, they lose the war; this is what creates the refugees. If there hadn’t been a war, there would have been two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state. But he sees this as a kind of explosive within the state, and he becomes very, very worried that Israel is not paying enough attention to that problem and to the hostility of the Arab state. So he’s also very clear about the fact that these Arab states are, you know, reactionary, completely reactionary states.

RS: Let me just say, because I know we’re going to run out of time here, and I think this detail is the strength of the book, and it’s great in there. But I want to, if I can be, just press this argument a bit more about what happens with the Six-Day War, and where we are now. Because that’s the power of this book, and the reason people have to read it. Israel is very much on the map, it’s not going anywhere; it’s the strongest military power in its region. And we have a U.S. president, Donald Trump, who seems to be quite supportive of the current leadership of Israel. So I just want to take two seminal points: one is the Six-Day War, which I happened to witness; I was there at the end. And I published I.F. Stone in Ramparts, and at that time I had gone to Israel. And I had that same feeling, by the way, that he had, walking around Tel Aviv; I had been in Egypt, and was in Israel. And yes, it felt very familiar. I stayed at a left-wing kibbutz, and so forth. But what I found, what I would take issue with in your book, is the identification of the Palestinian with the Arab, and the Arab leadership. Because the fact is, the governments that all attacked Israel–and we can argue about how the Six-Day War happened, and what caused it, and so forth–the fact of the matter is, they all made peace with Israel. The only people that didn’t make peace were the Palestinians, and the Palestinians were actually occupied by these Arab governments. In Gaza they were occupied by Egypt, it was a foreign government; and Jordan occupied the West Bank, and Syria occupied the Golan Heights. And when I visited this area right after the end of the Six-Day War, there was no question, this was basically an occupied people, whatever–that weakened PLO was not the PLO of Arafat. But whatever that claim of PLO leadership, the fact is the Palestinian people were basically strangers in their own land, occupied by Arab governments that really were not very sympathetic to them. And the question really is, what happened then? Because the people in the Labor Party that I interviewed–Ya’alon and Moshe Dayan and so forth–all said, if you keep this occupation, we will not be Israel that we respect. We have to work out an accommodation. That didn’t happen. And is it fair to blame that on the Palestinian people, rather than the Arab governments that Israel seems to have been getting along with quite well?

SL: Well, yeah, at that time, they weren’t getting along well. And I should say Syria still, Syria and Israel still obviously haven’t made peace. I think that what happens in 1967 is a–complicated. The Arab states are defeated; this is a huge, huge, huge humiliation in the Arab world. If you read various Arab intellectuals, they are stunned by this. And there were a few very brave Arab intellectuals who said, you know, we need to look at ourselves; we need to look at our countries. You know, this isn’t just a military defeat; it’s a social defeat for the kind of countries we have. But I would say that the reaction in most of the Arab world was not that. It’s after the ‘67 war that you really have the ascension, or the, at least the consolidation, of the worst dictatorships in the Arab world–Assad in Syria, Saddam in Iraq; I mean, Gaddafi in Libya–these, just, you know, terrible, terrible dictatorships. Now, you’re absolutely right; when the Arab–when Egypt owns Gaza, and Jordan owns the West Bank, they’re horrible to the Palestinians. They keep them in these wretched camps; Lebanon doesn’t give them, none of these places, none of the countries give them citizenship. They’re not allowed to work, they’re not allowed to study. And none of these nations try to establish any sort of Palestinian state. So that’s absolutely true. I think what happens in Israel is really complicated, because yes, absolutely, you have this war. And Israel, you know, many Israelis, whatever the objective situation was, there’s no doubt that many Israelis feared, this is it; we will be exterminated if we don’t win this war. And that was certainly the rhetoric of the Arab countries. So they win the war very, very quickly. And there is a big, big, big debate in Israel over what to do with these lands. And you have various positions, absolutely; you have the left-wing camp saying, we don’t want to be occupiers of another people. What are we–you know, what are we going to do with this huge population of Palestinians? Or they were mainly called Arabs then; it’s really after ‘67 that they get the, more of the identity of Palestinians. So yeah, you definitely have that tendency. You have another tendency that says, woah, we have been attacked too many times; we need to hang on to these lands as a buffer zone, as security. You have a beginning, which would have shocked the original Zionists, of religious Zionism. Because Zionism was originally very secular. So you have the beginning of religious Zionism, messianic Zionism, which is, you know, God gave us these lands; you know, the fact that we won in six days is a sign from God, and we have to settle these lands, God has endowed us with them. So you have these different tendencies. You also have, in the Arab world, very soon after the ‘67 war, the Arab League meets in Khartoum, Sudan, and they put out what’s called the Khartoum Resolution, in which they say we’ll never accept Israel, we’ll never negotiate with Israel, we will exterminate Israel. Which obviously didn’t really help the peace camp much. But so you have all these different tendencies going on, and I think–not “I think,” it’s obviously very, very, very, very obvious that the tendency that won out was the combination of the religious Zionism and the security Zionism. That those two, that those two tendencies won out, and there is still the occupation. Although I would say–yeah, go ahead.

RS: I want to pick up on that. Because I did a podcast with Tom Dine, who had been head of AIPAC, but he was definitely, is definitely a liberal, maybe even on the liberal left, worked for Senator Ted Kennedy and so forth. But he was head of AIPAC for a long time, over a decade. And he is very critical of the current state of Israel. And in terms of figuring out, you know, who caused all this, this problem, you have a state now that is very nationalist in the worst sense of the word. Also, you know, by the way, these original refugees, as you point out, all were using Yiddish; most of them were, you know, they were not particularly interested in the language of the Bible, and the religious influence in Israel, and the right-wing influence. And so there’s an elephant in the room now, which is actually Netanyahu is probably the foreign politician–if he didn’t interfere most in the election, coming to attack Obama in the U.S. Congress for his Iran peace deal, he certainly got the most out of this election. The American president now, under Donald Trump, a right-wing figure, supports Israel in an uncritical way. And if we go to war with Iran, and in terms of the singling out Iran and not Saudi Arabia, is really consistent with Israel policy. So there’s–Tom Dine might have been right when he warned about what really is the end of the, with the death of Rabin, the end of any real Israeli–and now the Labor Party–sentiment towards negotiation–the Labor Party, I think, got seven, eight percent of the vote in the last election.

SL: Yeah, I just want to–

RS: And they’re not even a force.

SL: I just wanted to say one other thing about ‘67. The other really important aspect is that after the ‘67 war, the PLO maintained this for 20 years until basically it was defeated, the PLO still maintained its program of annihilating Israel. That was actually its word, “annihilation,” “extermination.”  And you do have, yes, you have the peace treaty with Egypt; you have the peace treaty with Jordan. There’s never any peace treaty with Syria or with Lebanon or with Iraq. But what you have, I think, on both sides is what I call irredentism. You have the increasing refusal of many Israelis to acknowledge that the Palestinians are a people who deserve, like all other peoples, a state. But you also have the irredentism of the Palestinians, many of whom still refuse to accept or even recognize Israel’s right to exist. And in my view, the kind of, the tragedy of the whole–

RS: You mean before Camp David.

SL: Yeah–well, no–

RS: Because after that, there is a recognition, right?

SL: Well, there’s the recognition–

RS: Then the stumbling block is on the other side, that there isn’t really an Israeli government support for a two-state solution.

SL: Not exactly. Because you have Oslo, et cetera, but then that’s also when Hamas emerges. And Hamas, of course, is completely irredentist; they will not recognize Israel, they believe–

RS: But they were supported by Israel at the beginning, to be preferable to the PLO.

SL: That may be, but nonetheless, Hamas is exactly the–worse, I think, the settlers in reverse, they believe that Allah has given all of this land to the Muslim people, and that no Jew is allowed to be in the Middle East. So you have irredentism on both sides. I just want to say, in my view, the tragedy is, is that in the years even beyond ‘67–I would even say up to Oslo, when I think a lot of Israelis would have accepted a Palestinian state if they believed that their security was guaranteed and that it wouldn’t be a terrorist state, you have the PLO and the Arab world absolutely refusing that. Once, by the time the PLO and some parts of the Arab world accept Israel, Israel by then had moved very far to the right. So that these two tendencies were completely, completely, completely out of whack. And I think that there were some moments around Oslo when perhaps they were aligned, but of course we know that that was very brief. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish settler, the suicide bombings by Hamas began. So you have these two, these two that are really misaligned, tragically so. And now you have a situation, yeah, where the right wing is very much in power in Israel. I think that many, many Israelis have almost weirdly, I wouldn’t say lost interest in the conflict, but just sort of accept that this is, this is the sort of existential state that is going to be, state of affairs.

RS: So we’re going to run out of time, and to be fair to the book, the book is The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. It’s very well-documented; it raises very interesting points, particularly about the life of Jewish intellectuals. Putting myself in that category just for a second–I would be remiss if I didn’t bring this up–

SL: You are a Jewish intellectual.

RS: [Laughs] When I was there at the end of the Six-Day War, and I was on a kibbutz, but I went over into the West Bank. And I was taken there by an Israeli Arab Palestinian, Ibrahim Shabat, who was the mayor of Nazareth, as I recall. Anyway, he had contributed blood to the Israeli army. The Palestinian population living in Israel prior to the war was interesting in two respects that seem to be left out of the discussion. And I found this a bit over on the West Bank. First of all, in terms of the ones who lived on the Israel side, there was support for Israel as a state. And there, you know, I don’t think it was just done out of intimidation; there were Israeli Palestinians living on the Israeli side who actually did have loyalty. You know, the Israeli army wouldn’t accept them–

SL: I think that’s still true, I think that’s still true.

RS: Yeah. So on the other hand, what comes through in some of this discussion that we’re having is the denial of a Palestinian people. And the thing that hit me, as Palestinians that I interviewed and spent time with on both sides, the ones who were living in Israel and the ones who were in the West Bank and in Gaza, was I identified them as having had a diaspora experience in the Arab world very similar to Jews. In other words, they were restricted from certain occupations; they were not welcome in some of these Arab countries. They were locked into certain positions of being advisors, or financial advisors, accountants, or traders, or merchants. And there’s a long history of that. But the real issue was, is there a Palestinian identity as well as a Jewish identity that would warrant the state, would warrant consideration. And what I found, what I was surprised at in reading your book, is why was Edward Said not one of your chapters? Because he was actually more important as an American leftist, admittedly of Palestinian origin, taught at Columbia University, and in my life on the left in America, I would say Edward Said was the main person influencing certainly my thinking and a lot of other people’s. Why is he not an example of the American left, and what he brought to the debate, someone that you centered on?

SL: Yeah, I write about Said a tiny bit. He, Said is actually not a big influence on me. Said was not, in fact, a supporter of two states, because he was always an advocate of the so-called right of return, which is the opposite of two states. I’m very–

RS: Why is that, by the way? If the Jewish people have a right of return, why don’t the Palestinians, who have so many people living out in the diaspora?

SL: Well, because the right of return refers to the idea that the entire Palestinian diaspora can go to Israel, which would make it an Arab state.

RS: Well, we have the right that the entire Jewish diaspora can go to Israel, even if they’re—

SL: Yes. I believe that the—

RS: —suspect people from Las Vegas. They’re still welcome, even when they’re on the lam from the law.

SL: I believe that the Jewish people have a right of return to Israel, and that there should be a Palestinian state to which the Palestinians have a right of return.

RS: Oh, OK. Well, that’s fair enough. Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m glad we cleared that up. So there is consistency there. Then they need a physical area.

SL: Absolutely.

RS: And there’s–sadly, you and I may be two of a very small minority that still believes in a two-state solution. I assume you do.

SL: Yeah, I mean, I totally believe in a two-state solution. I’m not so sure–I think at this point it’s not a question of people not believing in it. I think a lot of people think, for good reason, that it’s very hard to get from here to there. On the other hand, I think that a one-state solution that’s just sort of crushing these two peoples who have been at war for a hundred years, who have killed each other’s children, who have suffered extreme trauma at each other’s hands, is even less, is even less realistic. I think it would make the wars in, you know, Yugoslavia or whatever, or in Lebanon, look mild compared to what it would be. So I totally remain a believer in the two-state solution; I also think it’s the only way for each people to develop themselves politically and culturally. But like everybody else, or like most other people, I should say, I despair of how to get from here to there. You have a very, very right-wing government; you have Hamas, which is a terrorist group and terrorizes its own population in Gaza; you have the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is extremely corrupt and is sort of about to topple. So it’s a, it is not a–it’s a terrible situation. And on the other hand, I believe in not–you know, David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, his son was killed in the 2006 war, in the last days of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. And he said, you know, that despair is a luxury that no one can afford. So I also believe that.

RS: So we’re going to wrap this up. And as I say, there’s no–this is not an alternative to reading the book, The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. We haven’t really had the time to explore it in depth; it deserves such an exploration, and I’m heartily recommending that people do that. So I’m not offering this as a substitute. I do want to end, however, on the question that I began with. Is that these Jewish intellectuals–and they are a varied bunch; Arthur Koestler and Noam Chomsky, obviously. But they seem to be, this issue that I raised at the beginning–they rejected the Israeli state at different points. Most of them supported it quite enthusiastically. But they had a prediction that this nationalism–and this is true of nationalism throughout the world, including American nationalism–it has a destructive impulse. And when it turns to conquering other people, or having control over other people, it becomes quite evil. And whether we’re doing it by torturing people in Iraq or anywhere else, you know, empire has its human-rights price. And so I really want to say, right now, we can’t ignore the fact that the forces of peace in Israel and in Palestine are quite limited, and that you have a–you know, most of the people I know who hate Trump, you know, still admire Israel. So let me give you the last word on that. What do we do now with an Israeli state that is Trumpian in its rhetoric, and actually in its actions?

SL: In terms of us being, you know, there is a limit to what we as Americans can do. Israel is obviously a sovereign state. I think the most important thing that we could do is to make sure that Trump and his gang are defeated, and that a democratic administration, capital “d” and small “d,” will be elected in 2020 that will begin to put pressure on Netanyahu.

RS: OK. Well, that’s one way of thinking about it. And I want to thank you, Susie Linfield, the author of The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. That’s it for this edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Sebastian Grubaugh has been the engineer. The producer of Scheer Intelligence is Josh Scheer. Back next week with another edition. Bye.

Amid Report of North Korea Purge, Reasons for Caution

SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean newspaper reported Friday that North Korea executed a senior envoy involved in nuclear negotiations with the U.S. as well as four other high-level officials. But as ever with North Korea, a country that closely guards its secrets, there are reasons to be cautious about the purported purge.

While North Korea hasn’t used its propaganda services to comment, the report in the conservative Chosun Ilbo daily could be true. North Korea has previously executed scapegoats to atone for high-profile political flops, and the most recent summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump ended in failure, leaving Kim embarrassed on the world stage.

But it’s important to note that both South Korean media and the government in Seoul have a history of reporting scoops about the inner workings of North Korea that turn out to be wrong. Supposedly executed officials have later appeared trotting alongside Kim on state TV.

Friday’s report is based on a single, unidentified “source who knows about North Korea” — with no details about where that source got its information. The report so far hasn’t been matched by any major media in Seoul or confirmed by government officials, even anonymously.

The newspaper’s source said that senior envoy Kim Hyok Chol was executed at the Mirim airfield with four other officials from the North’s Foreign Ministry for betraying Kim Jong Un after being won over by the U.S. Kim Hyok Chol led working-level negotiations as North Korea’s special representative for U.S. affairs ahead of February’s summit between the U.S. and North Korean leaders in Hanoi, Vietnam.

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A Victory for Sanity in World Politics



by Robert Scheer

The source also said that Kim Yong Chol, who had worked as North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator and met with Trump at the White House while setting up the summits, was sentenced to hard labor and ideological re-education.

That the report has been snapped up by global media reflects the hunger for any details about what’s going on in North Korea as diplomatic efforts falter between Washington and Pyongyang, which tightly controls its media and both local and foreign access to information.

Negotiations have hit a stalemate because North Korea wants an end to crippling sanctions, but Washington says Pyongyang is not providing enough disarmament to allow that to happen.

There is now growing concern that the diplomacy that has blossomed since early 2018 could be replaced by a return to the animosity that in 2017 caused some of the most realistic fears of war in years as North Korea staged a string of increasingly powerful weapons and Kim and Trump traded intensely personal threats and insults.

Since the Hanoi nuclear summit ended in failure, North Korea has again tested weapons and boosted its belligerent rhetoric toward American and South Korean officials. Analysts believe this indicates Pyongyang is trying to show displeasure for the current impasse without destroying the diplomacy.

Seoul’s spy service said it could not confirm Friday’s report, while the presidential Blue House said that “it’s inappropriate to make hasty judgments or comments.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in Berlin that he had seen the report and the U.S. was “doing our best to check it out.”

In Washington, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to comment on intelligence “one way or another.”

“We’re monitoring the situation and continuing to stay focused on our ultimate goal, which is denuclearizaton,” she said.

North Korea’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Thursday called out unspecified “betrayers, turncoats who demonstrate their loyalty to (the supreme leadership) only in words, and, even worse, change their colors by the flow of trends” and said they would come under the “stern judgment of the revolution.”

“To pretend to serve the suryong while dreaming different dreams when turning around is to commit anti-party and anti-revolutionary actions that abandon the moral loyalty for the suryong,” the newspaper said, referring to a revered title reserved for North Korean leaders.

If Friday’s report is wrong, it would not be the first time for South Korean media and officials.

South Korean intelligence officials in 2016 said that Kim Jong Un had Ri Yong Gil, a former North Korean military chief, executed for corruption and other charges. North Korea’s state media months later showed that Ri was alive and in possession of several new senior posts.

In 2013, the Chosun Ilbo reported that Hyon Song Wol, a famous North Korean artist the newspaper described as Kim’s “ex-girlfriend,” was executed in public along with several other performers over accusations that they filmed themselves having sex and selling the videos.

Hyon, the leader of Kim’s hand-picked Moranbong all-female band, was very much alive and later emerged as a key member of Kim’s government, accompanying him in his meetings with Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

South Korea does sometimes get it right.

While many questioned the competence of the South Korean spy service after it failed to learn of the 2011 death of Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, before Pyongyang’s state TV announced it, the intelligence agency saved face in 2013 by releasing its finding that Kim’s powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek, was purged, days before North Korea announced his execution.

Elton John Soars as Pop Phoenix in ‘Rocketman’

“Rocketman,” the imaginative and entertaining jukebox musical about Reg Dwight before and after he becomes Elton John, opens with Himself clomping down a corridor wearing platform heels and trailing a flurry of marabou and sequins. His horned headdress and angel wings suggest he is both devil and angel. Yet the horns and tangerine unitard also suggest that he is one of Maurice Sendak’s amiable monsters disguised as a Vegas showgirl. This is also a reasonably accurate description of John’s personality and fashion sense.

At first boisterously and then buoyantly incarnated by Welsh actor Taron Egerton, the pop star looks dressed for a gig at Madison Square Garden. But his actual destination is a 12-step meeting in which he will narrate his meteoric rise, pyrotechnic fall and glittering rebirth.

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In group therapy he confesses not only to alcohol addiction, but also to compulsive cocaine use. The list doesn’t stop there: He’s additionally a sexaholic, shopaholic, bulimic, pothead and prescription drug abuser with anger-management problems. (As the film was produced by John and his husband, David Furnish, it is an authorized account.)

In Fletcher Dexter’s affectionate, and frequently affecting, movie, the feathered one recalls the musical facility that made him and the parental neglect that made him unsure of himself as a man and a sexual being. Some have photographic memories; John has a phonographic memory; i.e., he has the ability to remember and replicate music he hears, from Franz Schubert to Jerry Lee Lewis. In therapy, the adult John reconnects with his youthful selves (marvelously incarnated by the pre-teen Matthew Illesley and teenage Kit Connor), remembering who he was before someone gave him the bad advice to kill the person he was born in order to become the one he wants to be. Therapeutically, this helps Screen Elton to integrate who he once was with who he now is. It’s also a convenient way to fill in biographical blanks for the audience.

Dexter, who replaced Bryan Singer as director of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” relies on a script from Lee Hall (“Billy Elliott”) as a means of framing this musical, punctuated by nearly two dozen songs from the Elton John/Bernie Taupin songbook. With two exceptions, the music and musical numbers neither lyrically nor literally reflect where Elton John was, biographically speaking, at a chronological moment. Rather, impressionistically they evoke a certain mood or energy and propel the pop opera forward at warp speed.

Jamie Bell, the gifted actor best known for “Billy Elliott,” nicely underplays the role of lyricist Bernie Taupin, seen here as the fulcrum of a seesaw relationship. Bell and Egerton’s rapport as Taupin and John, longtime partners who sustain a half-century-long platonic bromance, is an unexpected surprise and deeply touching.

The sequence in which John first reads Taupin’s lyrics to “Your Song” and immediately sets them to music suggests that it reflects the joyous intimacy between a gay man and a straight man. “Your Song” becomes Their Song … and ultimately, Everyone’s Love Song.

Equally great as this sequence, is that of John’s 1970 U.S. debut at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. (Here, he gets slightly better advice, that the secret to rock immortality is to put on a great show and don’t mess with drugs.) Clad in a black T-shirt festooned with stars and white overalls embroidered with sequins, he performs a bouncy rendition of “Crocodile Rock” (a song not written until 1973, for sticklers for historical accuracy).

Dexter imagines that when John, standing before the piano, sings “Crocodile Rockin’ is something shockin’ when your feet just can’t stand still,” his weightless body floats horizontally above the keys and stops time. And that his mesmerized audience levitates a few feet above the club floorboards. The scene perfectly captures the gravity-defying feeling of a great rock performance.

But not every sequence of “Rocketman” is so thrilling. There is the obligatory second act replete with excess, involving blackouts and attempted suicide as John’s first male lover (and manager) John Reid (a snakily seductive Richard Madden) preys on the insecurities of his client and live-in partner. And there are John’s respectively prickly and painful encounters with his divorced mother (Bryce Dallas Howard) and father (Steven Mackintosh), who act like the bad guys in Victorian melodrama.

Still, by the finale (ending some time before its frontman becomes Sir Elton), the movie feels of a piece. Like the Elton John it presents, it’s about forgiveness. Love is love is love. Watching so many plume-festooned costumes take wing, you’re inclined to believe that hope really is the thing with feathers.

Louisiana’s Democratic Governor Signs Abortion Ban Into Law

BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana’s Democratic governor signed a ban on abortion as early as six weeks of pregnancy Thursday, a move that puts him squarely in line with the leaders of other conservative Southern states while provoking anger from members of his own party.

With his signature, Gov. John Bel Edwards made Louisiana the fifth state to enact a law prohibiting abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, joining Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia. Alabama’s gone further, outlawing virtually all abortions .

Louisiana’s law doesn’t contain exceptions for pregnancies from rape or incest.

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The bill’s signing, however, won’t limit the state’s three abortion clinics anytime soon. Louisiana’s law takes effect only if the law in neighboring Mississippi, which was recently blocked by a judge , is upheld by a federal appeals court.

Edwards, a Catholic running for reelection this year, didn’t hold a public bill signing, instead announcing his action through his office. He had repeatedly said he intended to sign the measure, citing his faith and saying his views match those of people in his conservative, religious state, who he described as “overwhelmingly pro-life.”

Louisiana legislators overwhelmingly supported the ban , with a 79-23 House vote and 31-5 Senate vote.

Lawmakers in conservative states across the nation are striking at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationally. Abortion opponents are pushing new restrictions on the procedure in hopes that a case will make its way to the high court and two new conservative justices appointed by President Donald Trump could help overturn Roe.

None of the abortion bans enacted this year has taken effect, and all are expected to face legal challenges that will delay any enforcement of the prohibitions against the procedure.

Opponents of the so-called heartbeat bills said they would effectively eliminate abortion as an option before many women realize they are pregnant and would violate constitutional privacy protections. Several hundred pink-clad Planned Parenthood supporters filled the Louisiana Capitol to protest the ban ahead of the bill signing.

“The unprecedented and extreme attacks on abortion we’re seeing across the country, including here in Louisiana, are dangerous to patient health and wellbeing,” Petrice Sams-Abiodun, with Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said in a statement.

Louisiana’s law includes an exception from the abortion ban to prevent the pregnant woman’s death or “a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” — or if the pregnancy is deemed “medically futile.” But it does not include an exception for a pregnancy caused by rape or incest, drawing criticism that the law forces continued trauma on women who have been victimized.

Under the bill, a doctor who violates the prohibition could face a prison sentence of up to two years, along with medical license revocation.

The abortion-rights debates that divide state Capitols across the nation cause fewer ripples in the Louisiana Legislature. It is one of the country’s most staunchly anti-abortion states, with a law on the books that immediately outlaws abortion if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. State lawmakers annually enact new regulations seeking to curb access with bipartisan support.

Louisiana’s latest abortion ban won support from many Democrats and was sponsored by Democratic Sen. John Milkovich, from northwest Louisiana.

Although Edwards is rarity in the national Democratic Party, he’s consistently run as an anti-abortion candidate. When he ran for governor in 2015, his campaign had a prominent TV ad that showed his wife, Donna, describing being advised to have an abortion because of their daughter’s spinal birth defect. The Edwardses refused, and the ad showed a grown-up Samantha.

The bill signing from Edwards, who faces two Republicans on the ballot this fall, is expected to help shore up his position with some voters at home, even if it puts him at odds with national Democratic Party leaders and donors.

Still, the governor faced an outcry of anger on social media from Democrats who objected to his support for the abortion ban.

The chair of Louisiana’s Democratic Party, Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, has been regularly slamming the bill. She’s posted opposition messages on Twitter, such as: “Roe vs. Wade should be respected not undermined! Right to privacy!” But she hasn’t directly criticized Edwards by name, and the party is supporting him for reelection.

___

Senate Bill 184: www.legis.la.gov

Oregon, Awash in Marijuana, Takes Steps to Curb Production

SALEM, Ore. — Oregon is awash in pot, glutted with so much legal weed that if growing were to stop today, it could take more than six years by one estimate to smoke or eat it all.

Now, the state is looking to curb production.

Five years after they legalized recreational marijuana, lawmakers are moving to give the Oregon Liquor Control Commission more leeway to deny new pot-growing licenses based on supply and demand.

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The bill, which passed the Senate and is now before the House, is aimed not just at reducing the huge surplus but at preventing diversion of unsold legal marijuana into the black market and forestalling a crackdown by federal prosecutors.

“The harsh reality is we have too much product on the market,” said Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who intends to sign the bill if it wins final passage as expected.

Supply is running twice as high as demand, meaning that the surplus from last year’s harvest alone could amount to roughly 2.3 million pounds of marijuana, by the liquor commission’s figures. That’s the equivalent of over 1 billion joints.

Oregon has one of the highest such imbalances among the 10 states that have legalized recreational marijuana since 2012, in part because it had a big head start in the weed business.

With its moist climate and rich soil, Oregon has a long history of pot growing. When it became legal, many outlaw growers went legitimate, and others jumped into the business, too.

They are now all cultivating weed in a multitude of fields, greenhouses and converted factories, with 1,123 active producer licenses issued by the OLLC over the past three years.

The legislation could be a lifeline to some cannabis businesses that are being squeezed by market forces.

Retail prices in Oregon for legal pot have plummeted from more than $10 per gram in October 2016 to less than $5 last December. At the same time, smaller marijuana businesses are feeling competition from bigger, richer players, some from out of state.

Officials worry that some license holders will become so desperate they will divert their product into the black market rather than see it go unsold.

“We’re a very young industry,” said Margo Lucas, a marijuana grower and vendor in the Willamette Valley who is hoping the measure will give her business breathing room.

She noted that growers can’t seek federal bankruptcy protection — pot is still illegal under federal law, and banks avoid the industry — and that many owners have taken out personal loans to finance their businesses.

“So when we go out of business, we’re going to go down hard,” Lucas said. “Many of us will lose our homes. … You’re going to have a lot of entrepreneurs in this state that are pretty unhappy with the way that this ends if we don’t get some support with this bill.”

Opponents say the proposed law will drive growers who are denied licenses into the illegal market, if they’re not there already.

“This current track seems like a giant step backwards toward prohibition, which has always been a disaster,” Blake Runckel, of Portland, told lawmakers in written testimony.

As of January, Oregon’s recreational pot market had an estimated 6½ years’ worth of supply, according to an OLCC study .

To prevent excess pot that is still in leaf form from spoiling, processors are converting some into concentrates and edible products, which have longer shelf life, OLLC spokesman Mark Pettinger said.

U.S. Justice Department officials have said they won’t interfere in states’ legal marijuana businesses as long as the pot isn’t smuggled into other states and other standards are met. Oregon officials want to let federal authorities know they’re doing everything they can to accomplish that.

The bill to curtail production could “keep the feds off our back,” Rob Bovett, legal counsel for the Association of Oregon Counties, told lawmakers.

Oregon puts no cap on the number of licenses that can be issued. Last June, the OLCC stopped accepting applications so it could process a monthslong backlog. But under current law, it has no specific authority to say no to otherwise qualified applicants, Pettinger said.

The longer-term hope is that the federal government will allow interstate commerce of marijuana, which would provide a major outlet for Oregon’s renowned cannabis.

“We will kind of be like what bourbon is to Kentucky,” said state Sen. Floyd Prozanski.

Plastic Is Just as Destructive to the Climate as Oil and Gas

The phenomenon of climate change invokes images of black smoke billowing out of smokestacks, emissions from exhaust pipes on an endless highway of bumper-to-bumper traffic, or the insect-like cranes of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and drilling operations dotting the landscape. We do not view our plastic shopping bags as part of the climate crisis — but we should. And just as the thirst for fossil fuel energy is an ugly symptom of runaway capitalism, so is plastic production and use. Both arise from the same problematic system, and both contribute to the same existential crisis humanity faces.

Plastic pervades every aspect of our modern lives. From the keys that I tap on my laptop as I write this piece to the lid on my coffee shop latté, the packaging of the individually wrapped cookies on the countertop, and even the lenses on my sunglasses. While we may worry about the pollution that plastic — especially the disposable variety — creates in clogging our landfills, choking our marine life, entering our food chain and disrupting our endocrine systems, we are likely not considering the role of plastic production and disposal on climate change. There is indeed a direct link between the devastating tornadoes in the Midwest this week and the 128 billion plastic bottles that Coca-Cola churns out every year.

Manufacturers churn out 448 million tons of plastic a year, a large part of which is disposable, intended for packaging products. Perhaps we imagine the containers holding our fresh organic berries or the sturdy bubble-wrapped packages our Amazon orders are delivered in are easily transformed into new packaging once we toss them into our recycling bins. But only about 10% of all plastic waste in the U.S. is ever recycled, and now that percentage has likely dropped even more. Malaysia announced this week it will be sending back hundreds of tons of plastic waste to their countries of origin — including the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia. Malaysia’s move comes a year after China decided to stop accepting plastic waste for recycling and is the latest in a disturbing trend of a world filling up with unwanted plastic at the same time that manufacturers are ramping up production.

Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), explained to me in an interview that “plastics are simply fossil fuels in another form. Ninety-nine percent of what goes into plastics are oil, gas and, to a lesser extent, coal feed stocks.” As a result, “the processes that produce plastics begin at wellheads and at frac pads across the United States and around the world.” According to Muffett, every step in the production of the plastic we casually use and toss away has an impact on the climate, from the emissions released during extractive processes like fracking to the transporting of the raw materials to plants and beyond. Because ever fewer plastics are getting recycled, many communities across the globe are also burning their plastic trash as fuel, adding more emissions into our already saturated atmosphere. And the plastic that is not recycled or incinerated itself emits potent greenhouse gases like methane and ethylene, as a 2018 study has alarmingly shown.

CIEL recently published a report called Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet, which found, among other things, that “the production and incineration of plastic will produce more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases — equal to the emissions from 189 500-megawatt coal power plants.”

In spite of these alarming statistics, Muffett says that “the infrastructure for making new plastics is growing incredibly rapidly.” Instead of ramping down plastic production and use, the fossil fuel industry is accelerating its growth. The International Energy Agency (IEA) found last year that petrochemicals, the raw materials from which everyday plastics are created, “are becoming the largest drivers of global oil demand, in front of cars, planes and trucks.” Calling it a “blind spot” of the global energy system, the IEA found petrochemicals “account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050, adding nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day by then.”

Muffett pointed out, “As global recognition of the need to transition away from fossil fuels for energy and transportation increases, the oil and gas companies — who are also not coincidentally the same companies that make plastics such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Total — those companies are increasingly relying on petrochemicals and plastics to make their long-term business models add up.” In other words, the fossil fuel companies are repackaging the same climate-change-causing product in a different form and selling it to us in the hope that we won’t notice how little difference there is between the two.

A perverse aspect of the industry is the vast extent to which taxpayers subsidize fossil fuel corporations. Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund estimated fossil fuel subsidies globally add up to $5.2 trillion a year, with the U.S. second only to China in scale. As Muffett noted wryly, “We as a society are being forced to subsidize our own destruction.”

If we begin to see plastic production and use as part of the fossil fuel industry’s deadly means of turning profits, we may be able to tackle head on the drive to ramp up production. The climate crisis is deeply linked to the plastics crisis. There is a massive supply of oil and gas in our economy, and fossil fuel companies want to make the most of their easily available raw materials in spite of the destructive nature of the products.

Alongside our demand to transition to a new, clean, green economy has to be a call to dramatically cut the production and use of plastics. According to Muffett, the single-use disposable plastic packaging of the kind that most of our products come wrapped in are “actually the major driver for the build-out of new plastic infrastructure.” And although plastics producers like to assert they are simply responding to consumer demand, Muffett says that research has shown that “plastics, to a far greater extent than virtually any other product, is actually a matter of supply driving demand.”

CIEL’s report on plastics calls for an end to the production and use of single-use, disposable plastic and the curtailing of new oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure. As oil and gas companies build out new processing plants to transition from producing fuel to producing plastic, that infrastructure needs to be stopped in its tracks. As many in the climate justice movements have done, rather than just calling for a transition to renewable energy sources, the way forward is a rallying cry to leave all fossil fuels in the ground.