Chris Hedges's Blog, page 240

Democrats’ 2020 Policy Blitz Largely Lacking on Immigration

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential contenders are in a feverish battle to one-up each other with ever-more-ambitious plans to beat back global warming, curb gun violence, offer universal health care coverage, slash student debt and preserve abortion rights. Largely left out of the policy parade: immigration.

The field of 24 candidates is united in condemning President Donald Trump’s support for hard-line immigration tactics, particularly his push to wall off as much of the U.S. border with Mexico as possible, roll back asylum rights for refugees and since-suspended efforts to separate immigrant children from their parents. But only two contenders — ex-Obama Housing Secretary Julián Castro and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke — have released detailed, written policies addressing the future of the immigration system.

The dearth of formal policy plans signals the challenge that immigration could pose for Democrats. White House hopefuls can easily rally their party’s base with broad, passionate attacks on what they see as Trump’s failures, but it’s riskier to grapple with the complexity of the immigration system. Trump, meanwhile, has tapped into fervor around immigration to energize his own supporters and has worked to seize on it as an issue of strength — territory Democrats risk ceding to him ahead of 2020 if they don’t find a way to go deeper.

“For the most part, the Democrats aren’t even trying to make the case to a centrist voter of what a reasonable immigration plan would look like,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the Washington-based National Immigration Forum, which works with faith leaders and law enforcement to promote the value of immigration. Undecided voters “know that Trump’s simplistic approach to this isn’t working,” Noorani said, “but they’ve got nowhere else to go.”

The issue isn’t likely to recede as the presidential campaign intensifies. Much of the Democratic field is heading this weekend to California — it borders Mexico and is home to the largest Hispanic population in the U.S. — for a state party convention. Meanwhile, the U.S. Border Patrol has said it plans to fly hundreds of immigrant families out of Texas as it struggles to process the large numbers of Central American families that are reaching the U.S. border with Mexico and asking for asylum.

Castro called in April for ending criminalization of illegal border crossings entirely. O’Rourke didn’t go that far in a plan he unveiled Wednesday , instead pledging to use an executive order to mandate that only people with criminal records be detained for crossing into the U.S. illegally. O’Rourke also promised to send thousands of immigration attorneys to the border to help immigrants with asylum cases while wiping out Trump polices separating immigrant families and banning travel to the U.S. from several mostly Muslim countries.

Other 2020 hopefuls have mostly focused on criticizing Trump rather than offering deeply articulated alternatives. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the early Democratic front-runner, has called Trump administration immigration policies an example of the president’s “demonization” of entire groups of people, but he hasn’t made the topic a top issue.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has laid out a case for “comprehensive immigration reform” on her campaign website while Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California have all previously voted for or sponsored plans to loosen immigration rules.

Then there’s Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has issued a steady stream of sweeping plans on such issues as forgiving nearly all student debts and offering free tuition at public universities, but she hasn’t released a written immigration proposal. Spokesman Chris Hayden noted Wednesday that Warren has previously praised Castro’s plan and said the senator supports an immigration overhaul that creates a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally, including those who came to the U.S. as children.

The Trump administration has proposed its own overhaul that would bolster border security while creating a “merit-based” immigration system prioritizing people with in-demand job skills rather than relatives of people already in the U.S. But that was largely seen as symbolic, and the president has repeatedly returned to his calls for extending the U.S.-Mexico border wall and imposing stricter immigration policies to excite supporters.

Feelings on the issue, meanwhile, are far from settled. About 54 percent of national voters said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration policies, compared to 45 percent who approved, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the 2018 national electorate.

Tyler Moran, who was a senior policy adviser to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, said that the primary campaign is still in an early phase and that candidates shouldn’t feel pressured to rush out policy positions on such a complicated issue.

“They have all said that they reject Trump’s approach and his vision of America and that we can do better,” Moran said. “Not everybody has packaged it together yet, but I think it’s coming, and I think every single one of them is prepared to answer the question of what they see as the plan on immigration.”

Is Britain Headed for a Hard Brexit?

What follows is a conversation between professor Leo Panitch and Greg Wilpert of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

GREG WILPERT It’s The Real News Network, and I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore.

It’s official: Theresa May is stepping down as Britain’s prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party on June 7. There are already eleven declared candidates to succeed her. She announced her resignation amidst the chaos that Brexit, Britain’s decision to exit the European Union, has caused. She spent three years trying to manage the Brexit process, but never managed to get her own party in line to agree on the Brexit deal that she had hammered out with the EU. The deadline for leaving the EU has been extended now from March 29 to October 31 of this year. Here’s what Theresa May had to say about her resignation.

THERESA MAY I am today announcing that I will resign as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party on Friday the 7th of June so that a successor can be chosen. I will shortly leave the job, that it has been the honor of my life to hold. I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.

GREG WILPERT And here’s what the Opposition Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, had to say.

JEREMY CORBYN Her description of the country is something that I don’t recognize, and I think we’ve got to recognize there is a need for a change of direction in this country. And she’s not offered it. And I’d be very surprised if any of her successors offered it. But the reality is a new Conservative leader isn’t going to solve the problem. There has to be another opportunity for the people of this country to decide who they want to be in their government, how they want the government to be run, what the long-term strategy is of that government. I think we need a general election.

GREG WILPERT Further complicating matters for Brexit and for the government is that European parliamentary elections took place last Sunday, and the Conservative Party lost 15 percentage points in the popular vote. Meanwhile, the anti-EU Brexit party led by Nigel Farage jumped from nothing to 30 percent of the vote.

Joining me now to analyze the state of Britain’s political landscape is Leo Panitch. Leo is senior scholar and professor emeritus of political science at York University. Also, he’s the author of the book The Socialist Challenge Today: Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn. Thanks for joining us today, Leo.

LEO PANITCH Glad to be here, Greg.

GREG WILPERT So given this political situation, with May’s resignation, the Conservative loss of votes in the EU parliamentary election, and the sizeable win for the new Brexit party, where do you see Brexit heading now? A hard Brexit, since that’s what Farage and some of the potential successors to Theresa May favor?

LEO PANITCH Well, it appears that’s the only way it can go, given that the Tory party will continue to reject the general election, which might be won by Corbyn, who would then try to negotiate, as he’s been proposing, a soft Brexit, a customs union. The closest thing to a single market that would allow for some control over capital and labour flows. Some version of the arrangement that Norway has with Europe, except a little more control over capital labour.

But yes, it would appear that’s the way it’s going, not least because there’s no majority in this existing parliament for a second referendum. Even if Labour were to turn in that direction fully, there’s enough opposition from the Tories that would make it very difficult to get it through, as well as a number of Labour MPs. So it would appear it’s going in that direction. On the other hand, one needs to recognize that after all, the City of London, financial capital, the Confederation of British Industry is, beneath all of these referenda and political maneuvering, still an enormously powerful force in Britain. And they will do all they can to prevent the type of exit from the European Union that would be extremely disruptive.

GREG WILPERT Now, Labour did not do well in this EU election, either. The Labour Party lost 10 percent in the popular vote. Why is that? And what does this mean for Jeremy Corbyn’s approach towards Brexit?

LEO PANITCH Well, what Labor was trying to do, what Corbyn in particular was trying to do, was to put forward a balanced rational response all along. I mean, his position is, you know, I’m seven out of ten for the EU. The EU does have all kinds of problems. It has been a vehicle for US austerity. And it’s precisely the accommodation to that austerity that brought down the Labour centre right, finally, and allowed Corbyn from the left, the socialist left of the party, to take the leadership. He was trying to take a somewhat compromising position on the polarities, which, on the one hand, see the European Union as the best thing since sliced bread, without any problems, and those who are ridiculously blaming the European Union for Britain’s woes and want to establish, even more ridiculously, some throwback to the old British Empire.

So yes, this does appear to be very problematic. That said, it’s very difficult to see a way forward that doesn’t involve trying to replace the toxic air and false polarity of stay in Europe/go out of Europe completely, with instead trying to define the real issues in terms of inequality, class power, the climate crisis, et cetera.

GREG WILPERT Now, what’s next for British politics? Is there a chance that there could be early elections? And does Labour still have a chance of winning them?

LEO PANITCH Well, certainly, the Tories knowing that they’re in such disarray will put them off calling for a new election, especially since by virtue of something that was adopted from Canada’s Harper government less than a decade ago, they don’t now have to have an election even if they lose a vote of confidence in parliament until 2022. That said, if someone like Boris Johnson becomes leader, it is conceivable that enough existing Tory MPs will break from this. Although, you know, they’d be doing so with the danger that they would lose their own seats.

So you know, things are very, very iffy. There is a possibility of a challenge to Corbyn’s leadership from inside the Labour Party, especially from those who are wholly on the side of Remain, and don’t give a damn about the working class vote that has voted repeatedly, first in 2014 European elections, for Farage’s Brexit party then, the UKIP party, and now for his new largely internet party now. So it’s conceivable there’ll be a challenge to Corbyn. And if that were to succeed, that would remove the impetus, the momentum, that the left had in Britain so marvelously in the last three or four years. For the first time there appeared to be a socialist alternative to austerity, neoliberal global capitalism, which virtually nobody on the continent is offering. It’s not as if the EU provides an easy avenue to that, as the Greeks learned to their great cost.

GREG WILPERT What would have to happen, or what would Corbyn have to do, to prevent this kind of a challenge and maintain his position, and then go on to win the general election?

LEO PANITCH This is the very difficult question. Trying to triangulate between those who were enthusiastic about the European Union and those who are xenophobically opposed to it, you know, does not, in an atmosphere of polarization, go over well. Corbyn is not the most charismatic of figures. In fact, his honesty, which endears him to so many people, makes him speak in a way that shows that he doesn’t have his finger in the air for which way the wind is blowing. But when there’s polarization, that leaves someone like him in the political netherworld. He would have to find a way of articulating a clear alternative to a xenophobic, reactionary Brexit in a way that convinces those people who wanted to give a kick to the status quo by voting for Brexit. As he did in the [2017] general election, which focused around the class struggle; for the many, not the few. He would have to be able to articulate that directly in relation to the question of Brexit. And that might involve being prepared to say, look, because the hard Brexit is so reactionary, it’s in your own interests to allow for a second referendum, perhaps with one that allows for three choices: Staying in; the type of softer Brexit that he and more socially progressive one that Labour is advancing under his leadership; or the hard Brexit. At least that could be put forward as a political alternative, even if it doesn’t turn out to be a political reality.

GREG WILPERT OK. Well, we’re going to leave it there for now, but I’m sure we’re going to come back to you very soon. I was speaking to Leo Panitch, senior scholar and professor emeritus of political science at York University. Thanks for joining us today, Leo.

LEO PANITCH Always good to talk to you, Greg.

GREG WILPERT And thank you for joining The Real News Network.

The Real ‘Troika of Tyranny’ Is Made Up of U.S. Allies

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

American foreign policy can be so retro, not to mention absurd. Despite being bogged down in more military interventions than it can reasonably handle, the Trump team recently picked a new fight—in Latin America. That’s right! Uncle Sam kicked off a sequel to the Cold War with some of our southern neighbors, while resuscitating the boogeyman of socialism. In the process, National Security Advisor John Bolton treated us all to a new phrase, no less laughable than Bush the younger’s 2002 “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). He labeled Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny.”

Alliteration no less! The only problem is that the phrase ridiculously overestimates both the degree of collaboration among those three states and the dangers they pose to their hegemonic neighbor to the north. Bottom line: in no imaginable fashion do those little tin-pot tyrannies offer either an existential or even a serious threat to the United States. Evidently, however, the phrase was meant to conjure up enough ill will and fear to justify the Trump team’s desire for sweeping regime change in Latin America. Think of it as a micro-version of Cold War 2.0.

Odds are that Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both unrepentant neocons, are the ones driving this Latin American Cold War reboot, even as, halfway across the planet, they’ve been pushing for war with Iran. Meanwhile, it’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump gets his own kick out of being a “war president” and the unique form of threat production that goes with it.

Since it’s a recipe for disaster, strap yourself in for a bumpy ride. After all, the demonization of Latin American “socialists” and an ill-advised war in the Persian Gulf have already been part of our lived experience. Under the circumstances, remember your Karl Marx: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

And add this irony to the grim farce to come: you need only look to the Middle East to see a genuine all-American troika of tyranny. I’m thinking about the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military junta in Egypt, and the colonizing state of Israel—all countries that eschew real democracy and are working together to rain chaos on an already unstable region.

If you weren’t an American, this might already be clear to you. With that in mind, let’s try on a pair of non-American shoes and take a brief tour of a real troika of tyranny on this planet, a threesome that just happen to be President Trump’s best buddies in the Middle East.

America’s Favorite Kingdom

The Saudi royals are among the worst despots around. Yet Washington has long given them a pass. Sure, they possess oodles of oil, black gold upon which the U.S. was once but no longer is heavily dependent. American support for those royals reaches back to World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt took a detour after the Yalta Conference to meet King Ibn Saud and first struck the devilish deal that, in the decades to come, would keep the oil flowing. In return, Washington would provide ample backing to the kingdom and turn a blind eye to its extensive human rights abuses.

Ultimately, this bargain proved as counterproductive as it was immoral. Sometimes the Saudis didn’t even live up to their end of the bargain. For example, they shut the oil spigot during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to express collective Arab frustration with Washington’s favoritism toward Israel. Worse still, the royals used their continual oil windfall to build religious schools and mosques throughout the Muslim world in order to spread the regime’s intolerant Wahhabi faith. From there, it was a relatively short road to the 9/11 attacks in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals (and not one was an Iranian).

More recently, in the Syrian civil war, Saudi Arabia even backed the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda franchise. That’s right, an American partner funded an offshoot of the very organization that took down the twin towers and damaged the Pentagon. For this there have been no consequences.

In other words, Washington stands shoulder to shoulder with a truly abhorrent regime, while simultaneously complaining bitterly about the despotism and tyranny of nations of which it’s less fond. The hypocrisy should be (but generally isn’t) considered staggering here. We’re talking about a Saudi government that only recently allowed women to drive automobiles and still beheads them for “witchcraft and sorcery.” Indeed, mass execution is a staple of the regime. Recently, the kingdom executed 37 men in a single day. (One of them was even reportedly crucified.) Most were not the “terrorists” they were made out to be, but dissidents from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority convicted, as Amnesty International put it, “after sham trials that… relied on confessions extracted through torture.”

During the Arab Spring of 2011, the Saudi royals certainly proved anything but friends to the budding democratic movements brewing across the region. Indeed, its military even invaded a tiny neighbor to the east, Bahrain, to suppress civil-rights protests by that country’s embattled Shia majority. (A Sunni royal family runs the show there.) In Yemen, the Saudis continue to terror bomb civilians in its war against Houthi militias. Tens of thousands have died—the exact number isn’t known—under a brutal bombing campaign and at least 85,000 Yemeni children have already starved to death thanks to the war and a Saudi blockade of what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. The hell unleashed on Yemen has been dubbed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It has already produced millions of refugees and, at present, the world’s worst cholera epidemic.

Through it all, Washington stood by its royals time and again, with The Donald far more gleefully pro-Saudi than his predecessors. His first foreign excursion, after all, was to that kingdom’s capital, Riyadh, where the president seemed to relish joining the martial pageantry of a Saudi “sword dance.” He also let it be known that the cash would keep flowing from the kingdom into military-industrial coffers in this country, announcing a supposedly record $110 billion set of arms deals (including a number closed by the Obama administration and ones that may never come to fruition). Son-in-law Jared Kushner even continues to maintain a bromance with the ambitious and brutal ruling Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

In other words, with fulsome support from Washington, sophisticated American weapons, and a boatload of American cash, Saudi Arabia continues to unleash terror at home and abroad. This much is certain: if you’re looking for a troika of tyrants, that country should top your list.

America’s Favorite Military Autocracy

The U.S. also backs—and Trump seems to love—Egypt’s military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. At a press conference at the White House in September 2017, the president leaned toward the general and announced that he was “doing a great job.” Hardly anyone inside the Beltway, in the media, or even on Main Street batted an eye. Washington has, of course, long supported Egypt’s various tyrants, including the brutal Hosni Mubarak who was overthrown early in the Arab Spring. Cairo remains the second largest annual recipient of American military aid at $1.3 billion annually. In fact, 75% of such aid goes to just two countries, the other being Israel. In a sense, Washington simply bribes both states not to fight each other. Now, that’s diplomacy for you!

So, how’s Egypt’s military using all the guns and butter the U.S. sends its way? Brutally, of course. After Mubarak was overthrown in 2011, Mohammed Morsi won a free and fair election. Less than two years later, the military, which abhors his Muslim Brotherhood organization, seized power in a coup. Enter General al-Sisi. And when Morsi supporters rallied to protest the putsch, the general, who had appointed himself president, promptly ordered his troops to open fire. At least 900 protesters were killed in what came to be known as the 2013 Rabaa Massacre. Since then, Sisi has ruled with an iron fist, his personal power, winning a sham reelection with 97.8% of the vote, and pushing through major constitutional changes that will allow the generalissimo to stay in power until at least 2030. Washington, of course, remained silent.

Sisi has run a veritable police state, replete with human rights abuses and mass incarceration. Last year, he even had a show trial of 739 Muslim Brotherhood-associated defendants, 75 of whom were sentenced to death in a single day. He also uses “emergency” counterterrorism laws to jail peaceful dissidents. Thousands of them have gone before military courts. In addition, in U.S.-backed Egypt most forms of independent organization and peaceful assembly remain banned. Cairo even collaborates with its old enemy Israel to maintain a stranglehold of a blockade on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which the United Nations has termed “inhumane.”

Yet Egypt gets a hall pass from the Trump administration. It matters not at all that few places on the planet suppress free speech as effectively as Egypt now does—not since it buys American weaponry and generally does as Washington wants in the region. In other words, a diplomatic state of marital (and martial) bliss protects the second member of the real troika of tyranny.

America’s Favorite Apartheid State

Some will be surprised, even offended, that I include Israel in this imaginary troika. Certainly, on the surface, Israel’s democracy bears no relation to the political worlds of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Still, scratch below the gilded surface of Israeli life and you’ll soon unearth staggering civil liberties abuses and a penchant for institutional oppression. After all, so extreme have been the abuses of ever more right-wing Israeli governments against the stateless Palestinians that even some mainstream foreign leaders and scholars now compare that country to apartheid South Africa.

And the label is justified. Palestinians are essentially isolated in the equivalent of open-air prisons in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—not unlike the bantustans of South Africa in the years when that country was white-ruled. In the impoverished, refugee-camp atmosphere of these state-lets, Palestinians lack anything resembling civil rights. They can’t even vote for the Israeli prime ministers who lord it over them. What’s more, the Palestinian citizens of Israel (some 20% of the population), despite technically possessing the franchise, are systematically repressed in a variety of ways.

Evidence of an apartheid-style state is everywhere apparent in the Palestinian territories. In violation of countless international norms and U.N. resolutions, Israel imposes its own version of a police state—functionally, a military occupation of land legally possessed by Arabs. It has begun a de facto annexation of Palestinian land by building a “security wall” through Palestinian villages. Its military constructs special “Jewish only” roads in the West Bank linking illegal Israeli settlements, while further fracturing the fiction of Palestinian contiguity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not only refused to withdraw those settlements or halt the colonization of Palestinian territory by Jewish Israelis, but during the recent Israeli election promised to begin the actual annexation of the West Bank in his new term.

Israeli military actions are regularly direct violations of the principles of proportionality in warfare, which means that the ratio of Israeli to Palestinian casualties is invariably absurdly disproportionate. Since last spring, at least 175 Palestinians (almost all unarmed) have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers along the Gaza Strip fence line, while 5,884 others were wounded by live ammunition. Ninety-four of those had to have a limb amputated. A staggering 948 of the wounded were minors. In that period, just one Israeli died and 11 were wounded in those same clashes.

Life in blockaded Gaza is almost unimaginably awful. So stringent are the sanctions imposed that one prominent official in a leaked diplomatic cable admitted that Israeli policy was to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.” In fact, back in 2012, one of that country’s military spokesmen even indicated that food was being allowed into the blockaded strip on a 2,300 calories a day count per Gazan—just enough, that is, to avoid starvation.

Through it all, with President Trump at the wheel, Netanyahu can feel utterly assured of the near limitless backing of the United States. The Trump team has essentially sanctioned all Israeli behavior, thereby legitimizing the present state of Palestinian life. Trump has moved the U.S. embassy to contested Jerusalem—admitting once and for all that Washington sees the holy city as the sole property of the Jewish state—recognized the illegal Israeli annexation of the conquered Syrian Golan Heights, and increased the flow of military aid and arms to Israel, already the number-one recipient of such American largesse.

Sometimes, in the age of Trump, it almost seems as if “Bibi” Netanyahu were the one guiding American policy throughout the Middle East. No wonder Israel rounds out that troika of tyranny.

Wag the Dog?

Beyond their wretched human rights records and undemocratic tendencies, that troika has another particularly relevant commonality as the U.S. reportedly prepares for a possible war with Iran. Two of those countries—Israel and Saudi Arabia—desperately desire that the American military take on their Iranian nemesis. The third, Egypt, will go along with just about anything as long as Uncle Sam keeps the military aid flowing to Cairo. Think of it as potentially the ultimate “wag the dog” scenario, with Washington taking on the role of the dog.

This alone should make Washington officials cautious. After all, war with Iran would surely prove disastrous (whatever damage was done to that country). If you don’t think so, you haven’t been living through the last 17-plus years of this country’s forever wars. Unfortunately, no one should count on such caution from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, or even Donald Trump.

So settle into your seats, folks, and prepare to watch the empire swallow the republic whole.

King Salman Urges World Effort to Thwart Iran

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — The Latest on developments related to tensions in the Persian Gulf (all times local):

11:50 p.m.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman opened a summit of Gulf Arab leaders in the holy city of Mecca with a call on the international community to confront Iran to stop its regional interference and threatening policies.

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Neocons Won’t Stop Until They Get Their War With Iran



by Sonali Kolhatkar

















Saudi Arabia Couldn't Ask for Better Coverage From Corporate Media



by

Speaking at a gathering of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, the Saudi monarch noted the alleged sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and a drone attack on a key Saudi pipeline earlier this month as just the latest examples of what he described as acts that show “the Iranian regime’s behavior and it’s threat to regional security are a blatant challenge to international norms.”

Attending Thursday night’s summit were the leaders of Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as senior officials from the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar.

___

5:45 p.m.

President Donald Trump says that if Iran wants to talk, he’s available.

Trump says that Iran’s economy is suffering from U.S. sanctions and that the country is becoming a “weakened nation.”

As tensions between Washington and Tehran escalate, Trump claims Iran wants to make a deal.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says, however, that negotiating with the U.S. would bring nothing but harm.

He said Wednesday that his country will not negotiate on issues related to its military capabilities. He insists that Iran isn’t looking to acquire nuclear weapons — not because of sanctions or the United States, but because they are forbidden under Islamic Sharia law.

At the White House on Thursday, Trump told reporters: “If they want to talk, I’m available.”

___

7:20 a.m.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister says Muslim nations must confront recent attacks blamed on Iran with “all means of force and firmness.”

Ibrahim al-Assaf made the comments early Thursday at a meeting of foreign ministers of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Jiddah ahead of a series of summits in the kingdom.

Al-Assaf said the alleged sabotage of boats off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and a drone attack on a Saudi oil pipeline by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels required the region to “make more efforts to counter the terrorist acts of extremist and terrorist groups.”

Iran has denied being involved in the attacks, which come amid heightened tensions between Tehran and the U.S.

Robert Reich: American Oligarchy Has Returned

What Does Oligarchy Mean?

“Oligarchy” means government of and by a few at the top, who exercise power for their own benefit. It comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.”

Even a system that calls itself a democracy can become an oligarchy if power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few very wealthy people – a corporate and financial elite.

Their power and wealth increase over time as they make laws that favor themselves, manipulate financial markets to their advantage, and create or exploit economic monopolies that put even more wealth into their pockets.

Modern-day Russia is an oligarchy, where a handful of billionaires who control most major industries dominate politics and the economy.

What about the United States?

According to a study published in 2014 by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page, although Americans enjoy many features of democratic governance, such as regular elections, and freedom of speech and association, American policy making has become dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.

The typical American has no influence at all.

This is largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth. In a 2019 research paper, Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman determined that the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s up from 25 to 30 percent of the nation’s wealth in the 1980s.

The only country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is … Russia.

America has had an oligarchy before – in the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1880s until the early 20th century.

Teddy Roosevelt called that oligarchy the “malefactors of great wealth,” and fought them by breaking up large concentrations of economic power–the trusts–and instituting a progressive federal income tax.

His fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, further reduced their power by strictly regulating Wall Street, and encouraging the growth of labor unions. The oligarchy fought back but Roosevelt wouldn’t yield.

“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob,” he thundered in 1936. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

But the American oligarchy has returned. We are now in a second Gilded Age. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

We must, once again, make the correct choice and reduce the economic and political power of the American oligarchy.

Elizabeth Warren’s Green Imperialism Isn’t the Answer

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced a plan to “green” the U.S. military. After cataloguing some of the threats to our “readiness” posed by climate change—including floods and hurricanes compromising Air Force bases—the proposal quickly pivots to the “thousands of people [forced] to migrate from their homes,” conflating the fates of the most vulnerable people on Earth with that of the world’s largest military.

It goes on like this, arguing that by reducing its carbon emissions, the U.S. military can help “fight climate change.” The plan rightly acknowledges that America’s armed forces use a downright obscene amount of energy. (According to Common Dreams, “The Pentagon’s carbon footprint is 70 percent of total U.S. emissions … [using] more oil than 175 smaller countries combined.”) And after pitching the need to develop technologies capable of curbing this usage, Warren calls on the Pentagon to “produce an annual report evaluating the climate vulnerability of every U.S. military base at home and abroad.” This is her plan to eliminate its carbon emissions, to “harden the U.S. military against the threat posed by climate change.”

Although her plan’s introduction does shine a light on one of the most under-discussed causes of global warming, it neglects to acknowledge that U.S. foreign policy, past and present, is predicated on securing land and natural resources—namely oil—and that the need to do so will only intensify as the planet continues to deteriorate. These are resources that must stay in the ground to avoid exacerbating a climate emergency that is already wreaking havoc throughout the world. While Warren believes “accomplishing the mission depends on our ability to continue operations in the face of floods, drought [and] wildfires,” perhaps our “mission” must ultimately end—or at the very least be severely constrained.

Whatever its merits, Warren’s proposal ultimately fails to confront American imperialism’s foundational belief that the military exists to benefit the United States domestically. What’s more, those who live under the boot of the U.S. empire have been stripped of the self-determination and resources necessary to combat climate change themselves. The Massachusetts senator’s record has been far from progressive when it comes to issues of foreign policy and military spending, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that she has taken this tack.

This month, Warren introduced a separate plan to rein in Pentagon grift, threatening the more-than-cozy relationship between contractors—whose shareholders demand the pelf of endless war—and the federal government by closing the revolving door that separates the two. The proposal also demands a better paper trail for an institution that can’t account for $8.5 trillion. But it too refuses to grapple with America’s global hegemony, because while it would be naive to suggest all of its foreign policy commitments are rooted in the extraction of resources, it’s hardly a stretch to say the United States and the empire it has constructed are built on this very bedrock.

America owes its very existence to land theft and genocide. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” the first militia, founded by the Pilgrims in 1676 (a full century before the Declaration of Independence) sought to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy or subdue the enemy.” Scholars ranging from Aziz Rana to Greg Grandin to Daniel Immerwahr have argued that this colonial conquest via frontier settlements would ultimately guide the United States’ expansion beyond its borders.

In “How to Hide an Empire,” Immerwahr recalls that in the 1850s, due to an agricultural and economic crisis, Eastern farms desperately needed fertilizer. As luck would have it, uninhabited Pacific Islands were rich with guano, a natural manure, which led Congress to pass the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The law allowed any American citizen to claim its lands for the United States as long as they were unclaimed and uninhabited. After its passage, the bill helped create a legal precedent for future U.S. acquisitions.

Once the United States was mostly settled, President Theodore Roosevelt continued to look West in the hopes of extending the American frontier. Wars in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines followed, binding notions of citizenship to the empire by providing social rights like housing and education in exchange for military service. As the U.S. has grown, so has its influence in the world: America now “has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, a number that could exceed 1,000 if you count troops stationed at embassies and missions and so-called ‘lily-pond’ bases, with some 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe,” according to The Nation.

With such vast influence, perhaps the most urgent question facing the country is not “how fast can we green the military,” as Warren’s plan suggests, but who is most threatened by climate change, America’s armed forces or the people subjugated by them? Many U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have already suffered humanitarian disasters in the age of climate catastrophe. But as Hurricane Maria so clearly demonstrated, these crises are born of limited access to resources rather than a lack of preparedness on the part of our military. (Today, Puerto Rico is saddled with a monstrous debt that threatens its ability to rebuild in the storm’s aftermath, to say nothing of its autonomy.)

Perhaps Warren’s biggest blind spot, however, is the United States’ plundering of fossil fuels, independent of their use by the U.S. military. I remember learning as a bewildered teen that the George W. Bush administration initially called the Iraq War “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” the acronym of which spells “oil,” before quickly rebranding to the more noble-seeming “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” FOIA requests soon revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney had targeted Iraqi oil assets in March 2001, a full six months before the attacks of 9/11. During the Obama administration, more records revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (with the assistance of Vice President Joe Biden) used her department to pitch fracking throughout the world on behalf of oil giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. More recently, national security adviser John Bolton has admitted the Trump administration is “looking at the oil assets” of Venezuela. “We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” he told Fox News in January. “I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here.”

Warren is right to highlight the connection between militarism and climate change. But even if her plan were enacted tomorrow, and the world’s largest polluter rendered carbon neutral, the contradictions of such a policy would remain. If anything, they would only become more pronounced. Climate change demands that we dismantle the military industrial complex once and for all, and no amount of triangulating will suffice.

Israel Heads to Election as Netanyahu Fails to Form Government

JERUSALEM—Israel’s parliament voted to dissolve itself early Thursday, sending the country to an unprecedented second snap election this year as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition before a midnight deadline.

The dramatic vote, less than two months after parliamentary elections, marked a setback for Netanyahu and sent the longtime leader’s future into turmoil.

Netanyahu, who has led Israel for the past decade, had appeared to capture a fourth consecutive term in the April 9 election. But infighting among his allies, and disagreements over proposed bills to protect Netanyahu from prosecution stymied his efforts to put together a majority coalition.

Rather than concede that task to one of his rivals, Netanyahu’s Likud party advanced a bill to dissolve parliament and send the country to the polls for a second time this year.

“I didn’t spare any effort to avoid unnecessary elections,” Netanyahu said after the vote, lashing out at an ally-turned-rival, Avigdor Lieberman, who refused the prime minister’s offers to join the government.

He said the country was being forced to hold “unnecessary, wasteful elections because the people had their say. They didn’t have their say enough for what Mr. Lieberman wants.”

Had the deadline passed without the vote, Israel’s president would have given another lawmaker, most likely opposition leader Benny Gantz, an opportunity to put together a coalition.

After the vote, Gantz angrily accused Netanyahu of choosing self-preservation over allowing the country’s political process to run its course.

Gantz said that Netanyahu opted for “three crazy months” of a new campaign and millions of wasted dollars over new elections because he is “legally incapacitated” by looming indictments. “There is no other reason,” Gantz said.

The country now plunges into a new election campaign that will last at least three months under Israeli law. With much of the country on vacation in late August, a tentative date of Sept. 17 was set.

The campaign looks to complicate Netanyahu’s precarious legal standing. Israel’s attorney general has recommended pressing criminal charges against him in three separate corruption cases, pending a hearing scheduled for October.

Even if Netanyahu wins the election, it is unlikely he will be able to form a government and lock down the required political support for an immunity deal before an expected indictment. That would force him to stand trial and put heavy pressure on him to step aside.

The political uncertainty could also spell trouble for the White House’s Mideast peace efforts. The U.S. has scheduled a conference next month in Bahrain to unveil what it says is the first phase of its peace plan, an initiative aimed at drawing investment into the Palestinian territories.

With the Palestinians, who accuse the U.S. of being unfairly biased toward Israel, opposed to the plan, and Netanyahu preoccupied with re-election, it remains unclear how the Americans will be able to proceed. President Donald Trump’s top Mideast adviser, son-in-law Jared Kushner, was in Israel and scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Thursday.

That Netanyahu struggled to secure a majority coalition in the 120-seat parliament was a shocking turn of events for the country’s dominating political figure.

In the April 9 vote, Likud and its hardline nationalist and religious parties captured a majority of 65 seats.

The immediate cause of the crisis was his dispute with Lieberman, a former aide who leads the small Yisrael Beitenu faction.

The men had clashed over Lieberman’s demand to subject ultra-Orthodox religious males to the military draft, which is compulsory for most Jewish males. Without Lieberman’s five Knesset seats, Netanyahu had no parliamentary majority.

But the deeper issue is connected to Netanyahu’s legal troubles. Facing a likely indictment, he had pushed his coalition partners to pass legislation that would grant him immunity and curb the powers of the country’s Supreme Court.

Opposition parties strongly oppose granting Netanyahu immunity, robbing him of any alternatives to Lieberman as he tried to form a coalition.

For the past two decades, Lieberman has alternated between being a close ally and a thorn in the side of his former boss. He has held a number of senior Cabinet posts, including defense minister and foreign minister.

Lieberman’s base of support is fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and he takes a hard line toward the Palestinians but also is staunchly secular.

He has demanded that the parliament pass pending legislation that requires young ultra-Orthodox men to be drafted into the military. Years of wide exemptions for religious men have generated resentment among the rest of Jewish Israelis, who are required to serve.

“I am not against the ultra-Orthodox community. I am for the state of Israel. I am for a Jewish state but against a Halachic state,” Lieberman wrote on Facebook early Wednesday, using a term that refers to a Jewish state governed by Jewish law.

The ultra-Orthodox parties consider conscription a taboo, fearing that military service will lead to immersion in secularism, and insist the exemptions should stay in place. Netanyahu, dependent on the parties’ political support, says they have compromised enough and refuses to press them further.

Netanyahu maintained contacts with Lieberman and other parties in hopes of forging a deal as a parliamentary debate took place. Many of the Likud speakers lashed out at Lieberman, accusing him of forcing an unnecessary election.

But as a parliamentary debate stretched toward midnight, it became clear there would be no compromise.

A bitter Netanyahu claimed after the vote that Lieberman “had no intention” to compromise and made unrealistic demands. “He is dragging the entire country for another half a year of elections,” he said.

Venice Biennale Artists Foresee a World on the Brink

VENICE, Italy—Before a backdrop of rising global tensions and increased anxiety surrounding political change and inertia, the 58th international Venice Biennale fulfills its goal of delivering an aesthetic temperature reading of the world in 2019. The central exhibition’s title, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” is an ersatz ancient Chinese curse that uncannily reflects our present struggles with fake news and colliding cultures. But whereas the biennale’s institutional framework fails to deliver constructive alternatives in much the same way our governments have, the artists themselves occasionally offer hopeful glimpses of something better.

Known as the Olympics of the art world, the Venice exhibition (on view until Nov. 24) is host to 90 national pavilions, a curated international exhibit of 79 invited artists, 21 official “collateral events” and myriad unofficial satellite events.

The exhibit’s title, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” is attributed in its press release to a speech by British politician Austen Chamberlain in the late 1930s amid the rising tide of fascism in Europe. Curator Ralph Rugoff tempers the provocative reference later in his introduction, asking us “to acknowledge at the outset that art does not exercise its forces in the domain of politics […] cannot stem the rise of nationalist movements […] nor can it alleviate the tragic fate of displaced peoples across the globe.” Rather, he suggests, it may act as an indirect guide to living and thinking “in interesting times.” It’s a modest, if somewhat convenient, admission that in recent years would be taken as a realistic acknowledgement of the limitations of art—a check on the self-congratulatory, grandiose rhetoric that often litters art exhibition press releases. But in the same year the Tate and Guggenheim museums have rejected charitable donations from the Sackler family and the opening of the Whitney Biennial in New York is accompanied by a campaign to remove a tear gas-purveying board member, Rugoff’s modest concession comes across as a rather curious dodge—burying his head in the sand, even though his chosen artists engage the political with an array of methods.

The Venezuela pavilion remains empty due to delays caused by political turmoil in the South American country. (David Matorin / Truthdig)

While art’s direct political powers may remain a point of debate for panels and lecture programs throughout the city, confrontations with the tangible effects of political concerns are unavoidably encountered throughout the biennale. In 2019, it is impossible to separate them from the viewing experience—from the vacant Venezuelan pavilion, which was forced to postpone its participation amid political upheaval at home, to the recurrent reminders from various artworks and the walks along the canals between them that rising sea levels threaten to submerge the host city beneath the waves before another century arrives.

Inside the empty Venezuela pavilion. (David Matorin / Truthdig)

The Golden Lion for best national pavilion—the top prize at the prestigious exhibition—went to Lithuania for an operatic performance sung in swimsuits about the impending catastrophes of climate change. “Sun & Sea (Marina)” was staged continuously throughout opening week on an artificial beach installed in a warehouse of the city’s military marina. “We had the idea of the singing beach like five years ago,” playwright Vaiva Grainyte explained after the opening weekend’s performances. “We just had this vision of people lying down and singing and the audience watching them from above—these half-naked, mortal bodies enjoying the earth’s resources. And there’s this parallel between our bodies and the fragile body of the earth, so it came together very naturally.”

Grainyte and her collaborators, director Rugile Barzdziukaite and composer Lina Lapelyte, debuted their project at the National Gallery of Arts in Vilnius in 2017. Originally performed in Lithuanian, it was translated into English for the biennale. By turns irreverent and severe, the work steers clear of didacticism in favor of an oblique strategy that makes its message that much more effective by disappearing into a nuanced performance suffused with joy. Sung by the whole cast in harmony, the “Vacationer’s Chorus” ironically extolls, “You are strongly advised to stay on shore. You should not leave your children unobserved. Just build castles in the sand, walk the beach collecting stones, shells, amber, and baby teeth.”

Lithuanian artists Lina Lapelyte, far left, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite hold the Golden Lion prize for best national pavilion, awarded for their installation “Sun & Sea (Marina).” (David Matorin / Truthdig)

“These issues are crucial today and no artist, curator or citizen can ignore them,” Martha Kirszenbaum, the 36-year-old curator of the French national pavilion said by email, “I think our generation feels particularly concerned with climate change and the migration crisis because we feel powerless and too late to resolve it.”

The French pavilion’s entrant, “Deep See Blue Surrounding You,” a highly lauded film and installation by artist Laure Prouvost, is a hallucinatory road movie that, like “Sun & Sea (Marina),” embeds its dire themes within a sensual, enveloping experience. “Laure’s work never frontally addresses political or social issues,” Kirszenbaum explained, “but for ‘Deep See Blue Surrounding You,’ they definitely appear as under-layers of an oneiric and utopian exhibition. We conceived a project based on the representation of France today, a road trip from the suburbs of Paris all the way to Venice. The trip begins near housing projects built in the 1960s and 70s to accommodate immigrants coming from the former French colonies. Then we filmed in [an Algerian] Kabyle café in Roubaix, and of course Marseille, facing the Mediterranean Sea that has become the cemetery of our contemporary migrations in the past decade.”

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The installation at the French pavilion is titled”Deep See Blue Surrounding You.” (Giacomo Cosua)

The film succeeds above all else in implicating the viewer in the present moment. It concludes with material shot in Venice itself, at times in the very pavilion where the audience watches the film. A whispered voiceover intones in French, English and Arabic: “We pulled you along to Venice. I will show you how to get in without a ticket. You are the person sitting next to you. They are arriving. They are coming. You are here.”

In the Giardini, the site of the permanent national pavilions, some official expressions of soft power are more successful than others. The French and Ghanaian pavilions have been among the most critically touted. The American and Russian entries met largely with mild indifference. Beside the empty Venezuelan pavilion stands the Russian exhibit, curated by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. “Lc. 15:11-32” is a somewhat ponderous collection of sculptures and video created in homage to Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” a prized asset of the museum’s collection. The accompanying wall text, which at times reads like a travel ad for the Hermitage, includes the biblical passage cited in the title and something approaching a trolling mea culpa from filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, a Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, who was perhaps too out of his element presented here as a contemporary artist. “It is possible that the weakness of the idea behind this show is excessive seriousness,” reads his printed quote, “an unambiguousness with no digression or compromise. Perhaps the project could have benefited from a more ironic take, a more light-hearted approach, a more superficial treatment—the way things are done sometimes with exhibitions of this magnitude, or European art installations […] but how does the public react when it’s spoken to in this manner, at arm’s length?”

Scattered throughout the city, non-state actors in the form of privately funded foundations draw biennale viewers to concurrently running shows that can often outshine the pavilions and disrupt or complicate official agendas from cultural ministries. The V-A-C Foundation was founded in Moscow in 2009 with a mission to support emerging artists from Russia and the former Soviet republics through international shows of mixed Russian and non-Russian artists. “Time, Forward!,” its curated show coinciding with the biennale, featured a three-day public event in front of its palazzo residence facing the Grand Canal. Staged by the Milan-founded, New York/Berlin-based artist collective Alterazioni Video, “The New Circus Event” featured a motley assortment of street performers, domestic artists and industrial equipment presented as wild circus animals.

“The New Circus Event” was staged by Alterazioni Video. (David Matorin / Truthdig)

A companion remarked that the spectacle was reminiscent of scenes witnessed in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when ordinary people stood in squares and streets to display whatever skills or possessions they had to sell in acts striking for their public intimacy. From the V-A-C’s garden bar, Alterazioni Video founding member Paololuca Barbieri explained that “The New Circus Event” was meant to commemorate the 100th year since Lenin made circus the official Russian state art. “Before this happened, circus was closer to medieval carnival, a moment of anarchy and horizontal power structures. Circus was nomadic; it would travel from place to place and people would just join in,” Barbieri said. “Then they began to build buildings, and that killed it. It became institutionalized and became something different.”

By bringing this homage to the Russian circus to the Venetian esplanade, V-A-C curator Teresa Mavica intended to inject some populism into the biennale festivities. “This was an important point to Tereza,” Barbieri said. “The spirit behind it was to create an event where Venetian people, passersby, tourists, could experience this idea of circus. Circus started as a party. Art people were not our main concern. This was a public event for the people of Venice.”

The V-A-C’s populist agenda is perhaps complicated further by its source of funding, which comes entirely from billionaire collector Leonid Mikhelson. The major shareholder of Russian gas provider Novatek, Mikhelson is one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, known, among other things, for his $150 million luxury yacht, Pacific. The V-A-C Foundation opened its permanent location in Venice two years ago and maintains others in Moscow and London. The Venice gallery is unique among art institutions in the city for being free and open to the public at all times. But it begs the question (a perennial one, relevant throughout the art world): What circumstances constitute art as a civic good when it so often comes married to such extreme concentrations of wealth?

Beside the harbor of the Arsenale, one of two locations of Rugoff’s international group effort, Swiss-Icelandic artist Cristoph Büchel’s “Barca Nostra” attracts selfies and the most criticism of any work in the biennale. As the BBC reported, a fishing vessel that left Tripoli for Italian shores in 2015 collided with a Portuguese ship and capsized, killing at least 700 migrants crowded onboard. The wreckage was recovered by the Italian government and taken to a NATO base in Sicily the following year. The artist transported the rusting hulk to Venice for the biennale with support from the Sicilian city of Augusta, which plans to permanently install the wreckage as a monument in its city center.

There’s something undeniably grotesque about the spectacle of the ship’s display. It sits by the harbor in sight of a café where biennale visitors chat and sip aperitifs. Many pass by without knowledge of the boat’s provenance or that it is presented as an artwork at all, as wall text and signage has intentionally been omitted by the artist. The exhibition catalog states, “ ‘Barca Nostra’ is dedicated to the victims and the people involved in its recovery,” but the work has managed to stir ire on both ends of the political spectrum, with critics decrying its exploitative insensitivity and such anti-immigrant politicians as Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini denouncing the artwork as “political propaganda.” Philippe Bischof, director of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetica, commented through his press office that “Büchel lets his installation speak for itself without any explanation and invites the viewers to their own reflection on it.” He compared “Barca Nostra”—“a functional object with a tragic history, whose installation is declared an artistic intervention”—to the Swiss pavilion’s representatives, the artistic duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. “We are dealing with two very different types of art. While Boudry and Lorenz accompany their work with texts and address themselves directly to the audience, both [they and Büchel] consciously act politically and explain their work as a reaction to political and social conditions.”

The installation “Moving Backwards,” by artists duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, at the Switzerland pavilion. (PRO HELVETIA/KEYSTONE/Gaetan Bally)

Boudry and Lorenz’s project, a video installation accompanied by a publication of essays and letters, titled “Moving Backwards,” was inspired by a story relayed through Kurdish family connections to Boudry. The anecdote described how women fighting in the snowy mountains of Kurdistan would wear their shoes the wrong way round to confuse their tracks, making it unclear whether they were coming or going. This literal backtracking as symbolic resistance culminated in the duo’s deftly executed, human-scale performance video (also titled “Moving Backwards”), which melds dance and cinematic language. Music, bodies and cameras move backwards and forwards. An ambiguous directionality emerges and explodes into a celebratory dance party where androgynous bodies, misaligned soundtracks and costumes come together in a subversively magical experiment. In one of the exhibition’s published correspondences, Tehran-based curator Azar Mahmoudian describes how, in the early 1980s Iranian suppression of leftist dissidents, “moon walking” became an act of coded rebellion. It brings to mind another apocryphal quotation—like the biennale’s title—that is often misattributed to anarchist Emma Goldman and could serve as a maxim for most of the biennale’s best works: “A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.”

The 2020 Election Hinges on Health Care

Last week, I visited the Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles near a public housing project in a poor neighborhood. Two days later, I drove to a South Los Angeles area where pollution from the freeway—not to mention mold, rat droppings, dust and cockroaches—infest crowded apartments, causing asthma that sends children to the nearby St. John’s Well Child and Family Center.

I visited St. John’s and the Venice clinic while trying to make sense of the health care debate, which should be dominating the presidential campaign but has so far failed to do so. I was angry that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan, and other Democratic contenders’ plans for health care reform, are being lost in campaign news dominated by the ever-present, ever-bombastic Donald Trump. Unbelievably, this demagogic liar and foe of democratic values, is calling the shots in the presidential campaign.

To me, the clinics are a ray of hope in the gloomy political scene. I had first visited them before President Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Both were strapped for money back then, with staffs and community supporters spending much of their time drumming up contributions to support care for their predominantly Latino and African American patients. Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—pushed through by then-President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2010, changed the lives of the clinics’ employees and their patients.

In both St. John’s and the Venice Family Clinic, most of the working poor—defined as a family of four earning $26,000 a year or less—now receive good medical care thanks to the Affordable Care Act. At St. John’s, Chief Executive Officer Jim Mangia told me how Obamacare had permitted expansion of Medi-Cal, the state’s program for medical help to the poor, expanding it to include those who have jobs but can’t afford a doctor, a dentist or an optometrist. The number of immigrants enrolled at St. John’s doubled within two or three years of Obamacare’s passage. In addition, several thousand more have purchased health insurance policies through the Covered California exchanges created by Obamacare. “We doubled in size,” Mangia said.

With $24 million from the Affordable Care Act, St. John’s grew from nine clinics to 18, plus four new health centers in public schools. St. John’s added vision care, endocrinology and podiatry (the latter two fields badly needed for the diabetes that is prevalent among that hospital’s patients). Mangia said doctors are seeing increased signs of better health—lower blood sugar counts, lower blood pressure levels, fewer children with asthma. “Our patients are learning to use the health care system. People are getting a handle on their health,” he said. Patients are exercising, eating healthy foods, taking their medicines. Family health habits are improving, meaning that the children being treated at the clinic now will likely become healthy adults.

At the Venice Family Clinic, I met Dr. Rita Evazyan, one of the clinic’s dentists, who sees an average of 20 patients a day. In addition, there are dental hygienists who go to about 20 schools. “You’re busy,” I said. She agreed. Dental services have tripled in size, said Elizabeth Forer, the clinic’s chief executive officer.

Forer showed me low sinks where children learn proper tooth-brushing techniques. The result is there are now 19- and 20-year-olds among their patients who don’t have cavities.

She showed me the kitchen, where parents and their children learn to cook healthy foods. Fighting obesity and food education go together. In the clinic’s modern facility, parents and children learn to cook healthy meals and are educated about how good nutrition improves all aspects of life. Feeling good, Forer said, encourages exercise and helps children pay attention at school.

Throughout the nation, the need for government-financed health care extends beyond the poor into the middle class. As it stands, more than 27 million Americans are without health insurance. Another 156 million, almost half of the United States population, have health insurance from employers, and their combined situations worsen every year.

In a May 2 article in The Los Angeles Times, Noam N. Levey reported that “soaring deductibles and medical bills are pushing millions of American families to the breaking point, fueling an affordability crisis that is pulling in middle-class households with health insurance, as well as the poor and uninsured. In the last 12 years, annual deductibles in job-based health plans have nearly quadrupled and now average more than $1,300.”

In a survey taken with the Kaiser Family Foundation, the paper said one of six who get insurance through work say they have had to make “difficult sacrifices” to pay for health care, and one in five said health care costs have used up all or most of their savings. Those losing a job probably lose insurance, too.

These fears resonate among audiences of Americans following the current presidential campaign.

The Des Moines Register recently sent reporters to 46 events in Iowa featuring presidential candidates for the state’s January caucuses, the nation’s first contest of the 2020 campaign. “As it did during the 2018 (midterm) election, health care dominated” the audience questions, the newspaper reported. In an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll taken between April 28 and May 1, respondents said health care should be government’s top priority.

These reactions repeated the pattern of the 2018 congressional elections when Democrats won the House and found that the voters were deeply concerned about health care.

It is possible, by looking closely, to find differences on the health-care issue among the current crop of candidates.

The most generous plan is that advanced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The best known is Sen. Sanders’ Medicare-for-all, a phrase he popularized when he ran for president in 2016. At the time, it was considered the height of out-of-touch radicalism.

Sanders would put the present Medicare and Medicaid schemes into a new universal government health plan that would supplant Obamacare. It would replace most private health insurance, including plans negotiated by unions, whose members may not want to give them up. It would cover hospital visits, as well as primary care, medical devices, laboratory services, maternity care, prescription drugs and vision and dental care. There would be none of the fast-rising deductibles or out-pocket expenses. Rep. Jayapal embraces these provisions but would add government funding for long-term nursing care.

Presidential candidates Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren are co-sponsors of the Sanders bill. Sen. Amy Klobuchar favors the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, with government-sponsored insurance plans—the public option—added to Obamacare.

All this would be financed by higher taxes on the rich and large businesses. Sanders, for example, has proposed a series of options that would tax offshore profits, impose a special tax on the very rich, raise the estate tax, limit tax deductions for the wealthy and impose tax increases that would hit the middle class.

Higher taxes for all might be enough to sink the Sanders plan, but he argues that the elimination of payments to insurance companies would more than make up for the higher tax levies.

I talked to Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic political consultant who organized focus groups for his client Sen. Diane Feinstein’s successful reelection campaign in 2018. “These were middle-class people,” he said. “They were not inclined to all-out opposition for Medicare-for-all, they just didn’t think it would become law. But they were very much interested in saving Obamacare.” They wanted provisions assuring coverage for pre-existing conditions and a chance to buy into Medicare at an earlier age. And they wanted government-sponsored insurance policies offered on the Obamacare exchanges—the public option.

That option had been killed during Obamacare’s rocky road to passage but would offer an alternative to the increasingly expensive policies, with their high deductibles, available on the exchanges. “Interestingly,” he said, “nobody wanted the government to take over health insurance.”

I saw Obamacare at work in the clinics I visited. It helps a lot but needs fixing. The middle class, oppressed with increasing deductibles and higher premiums, needs immediate help. Many more middle-class people should be eligible for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges. And the insurance industry, now profiting from Obamacare, requires tough regulation.

That’s what the Democratic presidential candidates should be advocating rather than letting the buffoon in the White House bully them into defeat and low-grade health protection.

Israeli Leader Uncharacteristically Quiet Over Gulf Crisis

JERUSALEM—Israel’s prime minister has been a vocal critic of Iran over the years, accusing the Islamic Republic of sinister intentions at every opportunity. But the outspoken Benjamin Netanyahu has remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the current crisis between the U.S. and Iran.

While Israel has welcomed Washington’s pressure on Tehran, the crisis has nonetheless put Netanyahu in a delicate position, not wanting to be seen as pushing the Americans into a military confrontation and wary of being drawn into fighting with Iran’s powerful proxy, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

“In recent developments, Israel has taken the backseat. There’s one reason for this: it’s not in Israel’s interest to take the lead,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank, and former Iran analyst in the prime minister’s office.

It’s a new look for Netanyahu, who has made Iran his top priority during his decade-long tenure.

Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons — a charge it denies — and criticized its support for anti-Israel militants, development of long-range missiles and frequent calls for Israel’s destruction.

He has compared the Islamic Republic to Nazi Germany, and famously gave a speech to the U.S. Congress against the U.S.-led international nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. The speech infuriated then-President Barack Obama, and remains a sore spot with U.S. Democrats.

Since President Donald Trump was elected, things have shifted in Netanyahu’s favor. The Israeli leader strongly encouraged Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the nuclear deal. He also has welcomed the renewal and tightening of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

The U.S. pullout from the nuclear deal, which gave Iran relief from painful economic sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear activities, lies at the root of the current crisis.

Echoing Israel’s arguments, Trump has said the deal failed to sufficiently curb Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear-weapons capability and did not address Tehran’s support for militant groups and its missile program. The renewed sanctions, meanwhile, have sent Iran’s economy into freefall.

In recent weeks, tensions have soared as the U.S. beefed up its military presence in the Gulf in response to a still-unexplained threat from Iran.

The U.S. also has accused Iran of being behind a string of incidents, including alleged sabotage of oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and a rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, while Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels have launched a string of drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia.

Iran in turn has announced it is quadrupling its production capacity of low-enriched uranium, making it likely the country will soon exceed stockpile limits set by the nuclear accord. Iran also gave Europe a July 7 deadline to set new terms for a nuclear deal or it will enrich uranium at higher levels, closer to weapons grade.

If Iran begins ramping up uranium enrichment, all eyes will turn to Israel, which in the past has issued veiled threats to strike and carried out similar assaults on Syrian and Iraqi nuclear facilities.

Earlier in this decade, Israeli officials strongly considered attacking Iranian nuclear installations, though doing so would be a difficult task. Iran, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from Israel, has a sophisticated air defense system and has spread out its nuclear facilities, building some underground or in the side of a mountain.

All of this has made Netanyahu’s low profile especially noticeable. In a recent speech, he repeated his longstanding position that Israel will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Otherwise, he and other officials have said little, trying to portray the standoff as a U.S.-Iran dispute.

Israeli Cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi, who is close to Netanyahu, said earlier this month that he sees two potential outcomes of the crisis, both of which he described as good for Israel. The Iranians, he said, will meet U.S. demands, return to negotiations and reach a new and improved agreement, or there will be a conflict.

“I don’t really believe that the Iranians or the Americans are currently seeking a conflict,” Hangebi told the Army Radio station. If there is one, Iran stands no chance against a superpower like America, he said.

Guzansky, the Tel Aviv researcher, said Israel has to be careful about being seen as encouraging the U.S. to attack Iran. In 2002, a year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu, as a private citizen, testified to Congress that toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be a “good choice” that would benefit the region.

“Israel cannot risk being seen as the one who led the U.S. and Iran to a confrontation, in the case of a loss of American lives. The price in U.S. public opinion and in world leaders’ opinions would be too high,” Guzansky said.

He said the fact that Israel has become a “very partisan” issue — with support much stronger among Republicans than Democrats — added to the risk.

For now, Israeli officials believe the risk of a direct confrontation with Iran remains unlikely. Instead, they believe the biggest immediate threat is the possibility of Iran unleashing its regional proxies along Israel’s borders — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip — as retaliation for a U.S. attack.

Even that scenario seems distant. Israeli officials say the situation on the ground has not changed fundamentally. Israel has closely monitored Hezbollah and its other enemies for years, and occasionally acts against them.

Israel has acknowledged carrying out hundreds of airstrikes against Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria in recent years. On Monday, for instance, the Israeli military said it struck an anti-aircraft position in Syria after it fired at an Israeli warplane.

“We monitor,” said an Israeli military official. “We’re not looking to escalate.” He spoke on condition of anonymity under army protocol.

But it may be difficult for Israel to keep its distance if fighting breaks out between the U.S. and Iran.

Yaakov Amidror, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, said the biggest threat to Israel, by far, is Hezbollah, a powerful militant group that fought Israel to a stalemate during a 2006 war. Since then, Hezbollah has gained valuable battlefield experience fighting alongside government troops in Syria’s civil war and is believed to have amassed a vast arsenal of missiles aimed at Israel.

“We’d have to face 130,000 rockets and missiles. It would lead to a devastating war,” Amidror said. “Israel would be in the direct line of fire and the burden would fall on our shoulders directly.”

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Associated Press writers Ilan Ben Zion and Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem contributed to this report.