Chris Hedges's Blog, page 255

Integrity Forged in Cages

Chris Hedges gave this talk to 27 graduating students who were formerly incarcerated—several of whom he taught in prison—and their families at Rutgers University on Friday. The ceremony was held by the Mountainview Program at Rutgers, which helps students complete their degrees at Rutgers after they take college courses inside prisons through the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP) program.

My fellow college graduates: Integrity is not an inherited trait. It is not conferred by privilege or status or wealth. It cannot be bequeathed by elite schools or institutions. It is not a product of birth or race or gender. Integrity is not a pedigree or a brand. Integrity is earned. Integrity is determined not by what we do in life, but what we do with what life gives us. It is what we overcome. Integrity is the ability to affirm our dignity even when the world tells us we are worthless. Integrity is forged in pain and suffering, loss and tragedy. It is forged in the courtrooms where you were sentenced. It is forged in the shackles you were forced to wear. It is forged in the cages where you lived, sometimes for decades. It is forged in the cries of your children, those who lost their mothers or their fathers to the monstrosity of mass incarceration. It is forged in the heartache of your parents, your brothers, your sisters, your spouses and your partners. Integrity is forged by surmounting the hell around you to study in a cramped and claustrophobic cell for the college degree no one, perhaps not even you, thought you would ever earn. Integrity is to refuse to become a statistic. Integrity is to rise up and shout out to an indifferent universe: I AM SOMEBODY. And today no one can deny who you are, what you have achieved and what you have become—college graduates, men and women of integrity who held on fiercely to your dignity and your capacity to exert your will, and triumphed.

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Several of you are my former students: Boris, Steph, Tone, Hanif and Ron—although to be honest it is hard for me to use the word “former.” To me you always will be my students. I have spent many hours with you in prison classrooms. I know the scars you bear. You will bear these scars, this trauma, for life. Own your suffering. Do not deny it. And know that healing comes only by reaching out to others who suffer. It is to say to those thrown aside by society: “I too was despised. I too was where you are. I too felt alone and abandoned. But like me, you can and will endure.” I am not romantic about suffering. I saw a lot of it as a war correspondent. Suffering can make some people better. Others, it degrades and destroys. But those who surmount suffering, who hold fast to compassion and empathy, can become what Carl Jung called “wounded healers.” Thornton Wilder, in his play “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” wrote, “Without your wounds, where would your power be? … The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.” And there was something else I learned as a war correspondent: Education is morally neutral. The highly educated can be as cruel and sadistic as the illiterate. This is why so many human predators who profit from the misery of the poor in corporations such as Goldman Sachs have been groomed in Ivy League universities. This is why James Baldwin wrote that “brilliance without passion”—and by this he means moral passion—“is nothing more than sterility.”

In Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” he writes of the suffering and demonization of gay men with AIDS, not unlike the suffering and demonization many of you have felt as members of the criminal caste.

“In your experience of the world. How do people change?” Harper asks.

“Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice,” the Mormon mother answers. “God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.”

“And then get up,” Harper says. “And walk around.”

“Just mangled guts pretending,” the Mormon mother affirms.

“That’s how people change,” says Harper.

Trauma is not static. It is dynamic. It is written on your flesh. These scars will keep you honest if you use them to see your own face in those who are demonized—women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, Muslims, poor people of color. If truth is to be heard, as Theodor Adorno wrote, suffering must be allowed to speak. Flannery O’Connor recognized that the moral life always entails confrontation with the world. “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

There are people in this room who committed crimes, but there are no criminals here today. Not that criminals do not exist. Is it not criminal to allow more than 12 million children in the United States to go to bed hungry every night while Amazon, which earned $11 billion in profits last year, paid no federal taxes? In fact, in our system of corporate welfare, Amazon received a $129 million tax rebate from the federal government. Is it not criminal that half of all Americans live in poverty, or near-poverty, while the three richest men in America, including the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, have combined fortunes worth more than the total wealth of the poorest half of Americans? Is it not criminal that millions of factory jobs, which once allowed families to earn a living wage with health and retirement benefits, have been shipped to places like Monterrey, Mexico, where Mexican workers in GM plants earn $3 an hour without benefits? Is it not criminal that our families have been sacrificed to feed the mania for corporate profit, left to rot in violent and post-industrial wastelands such as Newark or Camden? Is it not criminal to harass and terrorize the poor on the streets of our cities for petty activities, such as selling loose cigarettes or “obstructing pedestrian traffic,” which means standing too long on a sidewalk, while Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs have never been held accountable for trashing the global economy, wiping out 40 percent of the world’s wealth through fraud? Is not criminal that, as poverty has gone up and crime has actually gone down, our prison population has more than doubled?

George Bernard Shaw got it right:

Poverty is “the worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities, spreads horrible pestilences, strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then. What do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime; we all fear poverty.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said of society that “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” The crime of poverty is a communal crime. Our failure, as the richest nation on earth, to provide safe and healthy communities, ones where all children have enough to eat and a future, is a communal crime. Our failure to provide everyone, and especially the poor, with a good education is a communal crime. Our failure to make health care a human right and our forcing parents, burdened with astronomical medical bills, to bankrupt themselves to save their sick sons or daughters are communal crimes. Our failure to provide meaningful work—in short, the possibility of hope—is a communal crime. Our decision to militarize police forces and build prisons, rather than invest in people, is a communal crime. Our misguided belief in charity and philanthropy rather than justice is a communal crime. “You Christians have a vested interest in unjust structures which produce victims to whom you then can pour out your hearts in charity,” Karl Marx said, chastising a group of church leaders.

If we do not work to eliminate the causes of poverty, the greatest of all crimes, the institutional structures that keep the poor poor, then we are responsible. There are issues of personal morality, and they are important, but they mean nothing without a commitment to social morality. Only those who have been there truly understand. Only those with integrity speak the truth. And this is why I place my faith in you.

My first student to get out of prison, nearly four years ago, Boris Franklin, is graduating today. I met him with his mother at the gate. He had spent 11 years inside. His first words to me were “I have to rebuild my library.”

Boris was part of the class in East Jersey State Prison that wrote the play “Caged.” He and I devoted hundreds of hours over the last four years editing and rewriting it for the stage. It was performed a year ago at the Passage Theatre in Trenton, with Boris taking one of the pivotal roles. It was sold out nearly every night, attended by families who knew too intimately the pain of mass incarceration.

In that class we read August Wilson’s play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” The conjurer Bynum Walker tells traumatized African Americans emerging from the nightmare of slavery and lynching that they each have a song, but they must seek it out. Once they find their song, they will find their unity as a people, their inner freedom and their identity. The search for one’s song in Wilson’s play functions like prayer. It gives each person a purpose, strength and hope. It allows a person, even one who has been bitterly oppressed, to speak his or her truth defiantly to the world. Our song affirms us, even if we are dejected and despised, as human beings.

Boris was as determined as I to make that song, your song, heard outside the prison walls, to lift up that truth, to affirm the integrity of those the world has forgotten and demonized. Your song is vital. It must be heard. I do not know if I could have endured what you have endured and become who you have become. Boris once told our friend Michael Nigro that he did not understand why people like me went into the prison, that in the ’hood when somebody did something for you, he or she usually wanted something. But you should know, my students, what you have given me. It cannot be quantified monetarily. It is one of the most precious things I possess. It is your friendship. And that is why today I am the most blessed among you.

San Francisco Journalist Vows to Protect Source After Police Raid

SAN FRANCISCO—A freelance journalist is vowing to protect his source after San Francisco police raided his home and office while keeping him handcuffed for several hours as part of a criminal investigation, according to a newspaper report.

Bryan Carmody told the Los Angeles Times that officers banged on his door Friday and confiscated dozens of personal items including notebooks, his cellphone, computer, hard drives and cameras. A judge signed off on search warrants, which stated officers were investigating “stolen or embezzled” property, the newspaper reported Saturday

Authorities said the raid came during an ongoing probe into who leaked a confidential police report about the Feb. 22 death of San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.

Carmody said investigators had asked him a few weeks earlier to identify the source that provided him with the report. The reporter said he politely declined.

While he was shackled, officers got a second warrant to search his newsroom, where police seized a thumb drive, CDs and, inside a safe, the leaked police report about Adachi’s death, the Times said.

Carmody, 49, said he has not shared the name of his source with anyone, and no markings on the document could be traced to the person who provided it.

To Carmody and his attorney, the raid smacks of impropriety and an invasion into the work of a professional reporter.

“It’s designed to intimidate,” said his lawyer, Thomas Burke. “It’s essentially the confiscation of a newsroom.”

Meanwhile the incident provided a new twist in the story of the unexpected death of Adachi, who left behind a legacy of championing civil rights.

Initial reports said the 59-year-old elected public defender had been traveling when he had a heart attack.

Carmody said while trying to figure out exactly where Adachi died, salacious details began emerging that were difficult to confirm. “There were leaks happening all over the place,” he recalled. He ultimately obtained an incident report that detailed Adachi’s final moments.

The San Francisco Chronicle also obtained a copy of the report, but not from Carmody.

The document, as reported by KGO-TV in San Francisco, detailed that shortly before his death, Adachi had dinner with a woman named “Caterina” who was not his wife, then returned to an apartment he arranged to use for the weekend. The woman called 911 for emergency medical help, and Adachi was taken to the hospital, where he died. Later that night, officers went to the apartment and found “alcohol, cannabis-infused gummies and syringes believed to have been used by the paramedics,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Photos of the apartment circulated online by KTVU-TV and other news outlets.

Carmody told the Chronicle that he sold his news package on Adachi to three TV stations.

City officials criticized police for allowing the details of a confidential report to end up in the headlines. The police launched an internal investigation into the report’s leaking, which led to Friday’s raid at Carmody’s home.

“The citizens and leaders of the City of San Francisco have demanded a complete and thorough investigation into this leak, and this action represents a step in the process of investigating a potential case of obstruction of justice along with the illegal distribution of confidential police material,” police spokesman David Stevenson said in a statement Saturday to the Times.

The affidavits that police used to search Carmody’s home were filed under seal, so it’s unclear what investigators told the judge to secure the warrants.

Carmody is insisting on protecting his source’s identity. And he swears he never paid the person for the police report. “No,” he told the Times, “not even a cup of coffee.”

Washington State to Offer Nation’s First ‘Public Option’ Health Insurance

SEATTLE—Washington is set to become the first state to enter the private health insurance market with a universally available public option.

A set of tiered public plans will cover standard services and are expected to be up to 10% cheaper than comparable private insurance, thanks in part to savings from a cap on rates paid to providers. But unlike existing government-managed plans, Washington’s public plans are set to be available to all residents regardless of income by 2021.

The Legislature approved the plan last month, and Gov. Jay Inslee is scheduled to sign it into law Monday.

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The move thrusts Washington into the national debate over the government’s role in health care, with a hybrid model that puts the state to the left of market-only approaches but stops short of a completely public system.

Instead, the state will dictate the terms of the public option plans but hire private insurance companies to administer them, saving the state from having to create a new bureaucracy — and guaranteeing a role for the insurance industry in managing the new public option.

Lawmakers in at least eight other states including Colorado and New Mexico have proposed their own public option measures. But so far none have passed legislation implementing a public option.

Backers acknowledge the rate caps at the heart of the plan risk creating coverage gaps in rural areas. But they hope to persuade doctors to accept lower rates by bringing the state’s purchasing power to bear. The savings would be used to sell the plans at a competitive price.

Inslee, who is also running for president, embraced the idea based on early work by a state legislator and later officially requested the public option bill.

Its sponsor, Seattle Sen. David Frockt, a Democrat, said the hybrid system was a compromise.

“What’s important about this plan is that the government is coming in and taking a more aggressive role in regulating the cost drivers of health care,” Frockt said.

The core proposition of Washington’s plan, dubbed Cascade Care, is that it will save consumers money by capping payments to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers.

The cost cap is central to the program’s long-term survival: Set it too high, and there will be no savings to pass along. Set it too low, and the state runs the risk of providers declining the plan, leaving it to wither as consumers seek alternatives that provide more choice, said Jennifer Tolbert, director of the Kaiser Foundation’s state health care analysis program.

The question is especially critical in Washington’s rural counties, many of which were already hit hardest by health care cost increases.

To attract providers, Washington lawmakers chose a relatively high figure to start: The plan caps payouts at 160 percent of federal Medicare rates.

That’s more than other states have proposed. In New Mexico, lawmakers considered using Medicaid rates, among the lowest paid to doctors and hospitals by any insurance plan. Lobbying firm Manatt estimated that could have translated into cost savings for consumers of more than 20% compared with similar private plans on the individual market.

By comparison, Washington’s higher pay rate for doctors is estimated to save participants only 5 to 10%, according to Jason McGill, Inslee’s senior policy adviser on health.

But even at the higher rate, the plan risks leaving coverage gaps in the least-populated counties, said Democratic Rep. Eileen Cody, an early architect of the plan who chairs the House Health Care and Wellness committee.

The state has already had problems guaranteeing private coverage in those areas. Two counties were recently at risk of having no insurers offering individual plans, and others have only a single hospital or hospital network, allowing providers to drive up costs.

The result has been rural areas bucking the state’s broader trend of moderate cost increases: A quarter of Washington counties, mostly rural, have seen triple-digit increases in the cost of premiums for a benchmark bronze-level plan in the last year alone, with some rising by as much as three times the increase seen in King County, home of Seattle, according to data from the Kaiser Foundation.

Another unique aspect of Washington’s plan is its hybrid management model.

Despite its name, the public option won’t be provided by the state itself, and state employees won’t deal directly with patients.

Instead, the measure directs state health care authorities to hire one or more private insurance companies: The state will determine the broad outlines of the public plans, but private companies will handle day-to-day administration, including enrolling patients and paying out claims.

“It’s an attempt to keep the insurance companies in the game,” said Aaron Katz, a University of Washington professor who teaches health policy and has studied U.S. health care markets.

Like earlier decisions to have private companies administer parts of the Medicare and Medicaid systems in some states, Washington’s hybrid model tries to preserve some competition while fixing problems like stability and coverage gaps, Kaatz said.

But it also has the effect of weaving insurance companies further into the fabric of public health care — potentially creating a barrier for later efforts to move to a completely public system.

“The size of the business that we are giving to private insurers makes it ever more difficult to ever extract ourselves from those dependencies,” Katz said.

It’s also a departure from public option proposals that have cropped up in other states, where lawmakers have mostly tried to broaden eligibility for programs like Medicaid, said Emily Blanford of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Still, a hybrid model theoretically has some advantages, Blanford said, including allowing the state to start from scratch designing rates and provider networks without needing a new program and staff.

Alyssa Milano’s Call for Sex Strike Ignites Social Media

Actress Alyssa Milano has ignited social media with a tweet calling for women to join her in a sex strike to protest strict abortion bans passed by Republican-controlled legislatures.

The former star of “Charmed” and current cast member of “Insatiable,” which is filmed in Georgia, urged women in her Friday night tweet to stop having sex “until we get bodily autonomy back.” Her tweet came days after Georgia became the fourth state in the U.S. this year to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant.

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“We need to understand how dire the situation is across the country,” Milano told The Associated Press on Saturday. “It’s reminding people that we have control over our own bodies and how we use them.”

She noted that women have historically withheld sex to protest or advocate for political reform. She cited how Iroquois women refused to have sex in the 1600s as a way to stop unregulated warfare. Most recently, she noted that Liberian women used a sex strike in 2003 to demand an end to a long-running civil war.

Milano received support from fans and fellow actress Bette Midler joined her in also calling for a sex strike with her own tweet. But both liberals and conservatives also lampooned her idea, with conservatives praising her for promoting abstinence and liberals saying she was pushing a false narrative that women only have sex as a favor to men.

Milano said the criticism didn’t bother her and that her tweet was having her desired effect, “which is getting people to talk about the war on women.”

She said she fears one of the laws could eventually be decided by the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court, which Republicans hope will overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

“That is absolutely horrifying to me,” Milano said. “Anyone who is not completely and totally outraged by this and doesn’t see where this is leading, I think is not taking this threat seriously.”

Milano said people have to determine for themselves how long the sex strike should last. For her part, she hasn’t decided yet how long she will forgo sex.

“I mean I don’t know,” she said. “I sent a tweet last night I haven’t really thought much past that this morning.”

We Finally Know When Humans Started Changing the Climate

Our influence on the Earth’s environment has lasted for a century: the human impact on droughts and moisture patterns began at least 100 years ago, researchers now say.

US scientists used new analytic techniques and almost a thousand years of tree-ring data to build up a picture of drought and rainfall worldwide for the last century. And they report in the journal Nature that they have identified the human fingerprint upon climate variation as far back as the first days of the motor car and the infant aircraft industry.

The pattern of change, in which regions prone to drought such as the western US became more arid, grew visible between 1900 and 1949. The researchers saw the same pattern of drying in those decades in Australia, Europe, the Mediterranean, western Russia and southeast Asia.

At the same time more rain and snow fell in western China, much of central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia and central Canada.

Clear signal apparent

Kate Marvel of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who led the research, said: “It’s mind-boggling. There really is a clear signal of the effects of greenhouse gases on the hydroclimate.”

And Benjamin Cook of both the Nasa Institute and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said: “We asked, does the real world look like what the models tell us to expect? The answer is yes.

“The big thing we learned is that climate change started affecting global patterns of drought in the early 20th century. We expect this pattern to keep emerging as climate change continues.”

For four decades it has been a given of climate change research that average planetary warming will intensify all the extremes of weather: in particular, drought and flood.

“All the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places”

The problem has been that droughts and floods have always happened. But could scientists identify the signature of human change – the clearing of the forests, the intensification of agriculture, the growth of the cities and the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels to dump ever more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in any one flood or drought? Until this century, researchers were unwilling to name the guilty party.

No longer. In recent years researchers have done more than just blame overall warming on human activity, and in particular the increasing hazard of extremes of heat, drought and flood.

They have linked human behaviour with drought in California and with record temperatures in 2013 in Australia.

The Nasa-led research is not quite the first to claim to have detected very early evidence of climate change. A team led by Chinese scientists reported in April in the journal Nature Sustainability that tree ring evidence from the Tibetan plateau suggested that humans may have begun altering the pattern of seasonal temperatures – that is, the differences between winter and summer – as early as the 1870s, at least in the northern hemisphere.

Puzzle solved?

But the latest study from Dr Marvel and colleagues identifies such evidence on a wider scale, and may even have resolved the puzzle of the extremes that did not happen.

The research found three distinct periods of change. The first was marked by more drought in some places, more precipitation in others in the first half of the 20th century. But by the height of the Cold War, and the space race mid-century, it became harder to see a pattern, and climate events seemed more random, and climates cooler.

The researchers now think the huge volumes of aerosols from power stations, factory chimneys and vehicle exhausts between 1950 and 1975 altered weather patterns in different ways, affecting cloud formation, rainfall and temperature, to mask the effect of greenhouse gas increases.

These were the years of choking smog, grime and soot, sulphurous droplets, acid rain, corroding historic buildings and urban respiratory disease on an epidemic scale.

Stronger pattern expected

And then developed nations started introducing clean air legislation and other pollution controls. Round about 1981, tentative evidence of the impact of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions began to show again in the climate record, although not as boldly as in the first half of the century.

If the researchers have got it right, the pattern of increasing drought, matched elsewhere by increasing precipitation, will continue to become stronger.

“If we don’t see it coming in stronger in, say, the next 10 years, we might have to wonder whether we are right,” Dr Marvel said. “But all the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places.”

And the researchers warn that the consequences for humankind, especially in North America and Eurasia, could be severe.

More ‘Heartbeat’ Abortion Bans Advancing in South, Midwest

If a new Mississippi law survives a court challenge, it will be nearly impossible for most pregnant women to get an abortion there.

Or, potentially, in neighboring Louisiana. Or Alabama. Or Georgia.

The Louisiana legislature is halfway toward passing a law—like the ones enacted in Mississippi and Georgia—that will ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many women know they’re pregnant. Alabama is on the cusp of approving an even more restrictive bill.

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State governments are on a course to virtually eliminate abortion access in large chunks of the Deep South and Midwest. Ohio and Kentucky also have passed heartbeat laws; Missouri’s Republican-controlled legislature is considering one.

Their hope is that a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court will approve, spelling the end of the constitutional right to abortion.

“For pro-life folks, these are huge victories,” said Sue Liebel, state director for the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion advocacy group. “And I think they’re indicative of the momentum and excitement and the hope that’s happening with changes in the Supreme Court and having such a pro-life president.”

For abortion rights supporters, meanwhile, the trend is ominous. Said Diane Derzis, owner of Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization: “I think it’s certainly more dire than it ever has been. They smell blood and that’s why they’re doing this.”

Already, Mississippi mandates a 24-hour wait between an in-person consultation. That means women must make at least two trips to her clinic, often traveling long distances.

Other states have passed similar, incremental laws restricting abortion in recent years, and aside from Mississippi, five states have just one clinic — Kentucky, Missouri, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia. But the latest efforts to bar the procedure represent the largest assault on abortion rights in decades.

Lawmakers sponsoring the bans have made it clear their goal is to spark court challenges in hopes of ultimately overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Those challenges have begun. Derzis’ attorneys are scheduled to go before a judge on May 21, seeking to prevent Mississippi’s heartbeat law from taking effect July 1.

A judge in Kentucky blocked enforcement of that state’s heartbeat ban after the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on behalf of the clinic in Louisville.

Similar legal action is expected before bans can take effect in Ohio and Georgia, where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the latest heartbeat bill into law Tuesday. Kemp said he welcomed the fight, vowing: “We will not back down.”

Georgia’s ban doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1. But the impact was immediate.

An abortion clinic operated by The Women’s Centers in Atlanta began receiving anxious calls from patients soon after Kemp signed the law. Many callers had plans to travel from outside the state for abortions. Georgia’s heartbeat ban would have a wider impact because the state has 17 abortion clinics — more than the combined total in the other four Southern states that have passed or are considering bans.

“On a typical day we will see people from North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina — all over the region,” said Dr. Lisa Haddad, the Atlanta clinic’s medical director. “And my thought is we’re not going to see those people coming here because they assume it’s already illegal in Georgia.”

Dr. Ernest Marshall, co-founder of Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic in Louisville, said in an email that banning abortions before most women know they’re pregnant would “have a disproportionate impact on poor women and communities of color throughout the South.”

Advocates for abortion rights expect judges to halt enforcement of any new bans while lawsuits work their way through the courts. That could take years.

“These laws are blatantly unconstitutional,” said Elisabeth Smith, chief counsel for state policy and advocacy for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which also has filed suit over Mississippi’s ban. “But if they were allowed to go into force, they would have devastating consequences for the residents of all of these states.”

If heartbeat bans are upheld, many women who are poor and have limited means to travel would have few options other than to try to terminate their own pregnancies, Haddad said, possibly using abortion drugs purchased online.

Others would have to drive or fly across multiple states, said Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

“People would go to Florida, people would continue to go to Memphis,” Nash said. “How many states do you have to cross before you can access abortion services? It exacerbates all the issues we’ve already seen around taking time off from work and having the money to travel.”

Proposed heartbeat bans failed to pass this year in several Republican-led states, including Texas. There, GOP lawmakers lost ground to Democrats in the 2018 elections, and some abortion foes were wary after courts struck down prior abortion restrictions in the state. Such efforts also fell short in Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Alabama lawmakers postponed until next week a vote on a proposal that would make performing nearly all abortions a felony. The measure has passed the state House, and the Senate suspended debate Thursday amid a heated dispute over whether exemptions for rape and incest should be stripped from the bill.

“You can’t put a price on unborn life,” Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, said Wednesday, as a legislative committee heard testimony on the state’s proposed ban. “What you have to do is protect the people that live in this state and that includes unborn children.”

But Jenna King-Shepherd told Alabama lawmakers she believed the abortion she had at age 17 allowed her to finish college. She said her father, a part-time Baptist preacher furious about her pregnancy, drove her to the abortion clinic because he trusted her to make the right choice.

“I’m not asking you to support access to abortion,” King-Shepherd said. “I’m only asking you to let women, their families, their physicians and their God make this decision on how they want to start their families in private and trust them to do that.”

____

Associated Press writers Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; and Bruce Schreiner in Frankfort, Kentucky; contributed to this report.

Lobbyists Are Working Overtime to Quash Medicare-for-All

As nurses, doctors, and ordinary Americans ramped up their nationwide effort to build support for Medicare for All at the grassroots level and in Congress, staffers for some of America’s top Democratic lawmakers reportedly attended a “luxury” retreat hosted by corporate lobbyists working to undermine the growing push for single-payer.

According to The Intercept‘s Lee Fang, who first reported on the swanky gathering on Saturday, “around four dozen senior congressional staffers decamped for a weekend of relaxation and discussion at Salamander Resort & Spa” on April 5-7 in Middleburg, Virginia.

Hosted by the group Center Forward—whose board, Fang noted, “is made up almost entirely of registered corporate lobbyists”—the retreat was attended by the chiefs of staff for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), as well as many other staffers for centrist Democrats and Republicans.

Wendell Potter, an insurance industry executive-turned-whistleblower, told The Intercept that any “congressional staffer serious about finding solutions wouldn’t touch that retreat with a 10-foot pole.”

The gathering, Fang reported, “featured a lecture from industry lobbyists leading the charge on undermining progressive healthcare proposals. Center Forward was originally known as the Blue Dog Research Forum, a think tank affiliated with the conservative Blue Dog Coalition of House Democrats; the coalition has pressed the caucus to oppose social welfare spending, taxes on the wealthy, and regulations on business.”

“Center Forward’s big idea on Medicare Part D, for instance, is to maintain lobbyist-authored provisions of the law that bar the government from bargaining for lower prices for medicine,” wrote Fang. “Such restrictions cost taxpayers and patients as much as $73 billion a year while boosting the profits of drugmakers.”

Fang continued:

The schedule shows that the health care discussion was led by Center Forward board member Liz Greer, a lobbyist at Forbes Tate; the firm manages the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future coalition designed to undermine Medicare for All. Paul Kidwell, a lobbyist from the Federation of American Hospitals, and Larry Levitt, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, also spoke. No proponents of Medicare for All were included.

News of the luxury retreat comes around two weeks after Medicare for All received its first-ever congressional hearing before the House Rules Committee, which single-payer proponents hailed as a historic moment in the fight for a just healthcare system.

With comprehensive Medicare for All bills now introduced in both the House and Senate, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have intensified their campaigns against single-payer, launching misleading attacks in the media and working to stop Medicare for All behind the scenes.

According to Sludge, healthcare industry lobbyists have increased their donations to the DCCC—House Democrats’ campaign arm—as progressive lawmakers work to expand support for Medicare for All within the Democratic Party.

Potter—who is now president of the Business Initiative for Health Policy, which supports Medicare for All—told The Intercept that the Virginia retreat was part of the ongoing campaign by private healthcare interests to stop the momentum of single-payer, which poses a major threat to industry profits.

“This event wasn’t about fixing the healthcare system. It was about protecting the healthcare industry, no matter the cost to patients, families, workers, or employers,” said Potter. “The industry is the root cause of our healthcare crisis.”

Trump Is Backing Congress Into a Risky Corner

This piece originally appeared on Truthout. 

After the redacted Mueller report was made public, Donald Trump tweeted, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” But when the House Judiciary Committee asked to see Mueller’s full report, Trump said no way.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority to check and balance the executive branch. That includes the power to issue and enforce subpoenas. In the 1927 Teapot Dome scandal case about government corruption, the Supreme Court held that Congress’s “power of inquiry — with process to enforce it — is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.” Justice Willis Van Devanter wrote for the unanimous Court that when the Constitution was adopted, “the power of inquiry, with enforcing process, was regarded and employed as a necessary and appropriate attribute of the power to legislate — indeed, was treated as inhering in it.”

Yet Trump has defied nearly all of the nine subpoenas and requests for testimony and/or documents that House committees have issued.

Barr Refuses to Produce the Unredacted Mueller Report

On April 19, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler issued a subpoena ordering Attorney General William Barr to produce the unredacted Mueller report and evidence undergirding it by May 1.

Instead, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd sent a letter to Nadler on May 1, stating that Barr was refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoena.

On May 8, Boyd notified Nadler that “the President has asserted a protective assertion of executive privilege over the entirety of the subpoenaed materials.”

Trump has not actually asserted executive privilege yet. A protective assertion means he is reserving the right to assert it in the future after reviewing the requested materials. “[A] formal executive privilege claim requires scrutiny of the precise documents and information withheld to determine whether 1) that material fits within a component of executive privilege and 2) Congress’s need for the information is not sufficiently weighty to overcome the privilege,” Jonathan Shaub wrote at Lawfare. Barr claimed that the judiciary committee had “not allowed sufficient time” for Trump to decide whether to make a “conclusive assertion” of executive privilege.

After Barr’s refusal to comply with the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena to produce the unredacted Mueller report and supporting documentation, the committee voted to issue a contempt citation against Barr on May 9.

Now the full House of Representatives will decide whether to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. In the likely event that occurs, there are four possible avenues to enforce the congressional contempt citation.

First, the House could ask the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., to initiate a criminal prosecution of Barr. But the U.S. attorney answers to Barr, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, making it less likely that the U.S. attorney would actually pursue the prosecution.

Second, the House could order the sergeant-at-arms to take Barr into custody until he complies with the subpoena. There is a jail in the congressional building. This procedure, known as the power of “inherent contempt,” was last used in 1935.

Third, the House could file a civil lawsuit to enforce the subpoena. However, this type of suit could take years. And, as Adam Liptak noted in The New York Times, even if the House were to prevail, it “is not clear that the Trump administration would comply with any eventual court order.”

Fourth, if the House convenes an impeachment proceeding, it would bolster the chances of receiving testimony and documents. “Judges have repeatedly ruled that Congress has a greater claim to sensitive government documents and personal information when it can point to an ongoing legal matter, instead of just a congressional investigation or legislative debate. And impeachment would give lawmakers that legal matter,” Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein wrote at Politico.

Trump Defies All Subpoenas

Of the nine subpoenas and requests that House committees have issued, Trump is resisting nearly all of them.

Trump declared to reporters outside the White House, “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.”

Even John Yoo, author of the most egregious torture memos and champion of the “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, said:

The thing that’s unusual is the blanket refusal. It would be extraordinary if the president actually were to try to stop all congressional testimony on subpoenaed issues. That would actually be unprecedented if it were a complete ban…. He’s treating Congress like they’re the Chinese or a local labor union working on a Trump building.

On May 2, the day after his withering appearance at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Barr refused to appear at a scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Then, on May 9, the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena for Barr to produce the unredacted Mueller report and underlying documentation.

After the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify and produce documents, Trump asserted executive privilege to prevent McGahn from testifying.

Meanwhile, both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary have subpoenaed Robert Mueller to testify before them. The 10 Democrats who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a letter to committee chair Lindsey Graham, asking that the committee hold a hearing with Mueller. They listed 60 unanswered questions they wish to ask Mueller.

Barr said he had no objection to Mueller testifying. Trump then tweeted, “Bob Mueller should not testify.” A few days later, however, Trump stated, “I’m going to leave that up to our very great attorney general. He’ll make a decision on that.”

What About Impeachment?

Nearly 800 former federal prosecutors, both Republicans and Democrats, signed a statement saying that if it weren’t for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion that a sitting president can’t be indicted, Trump would be charged with multiple felonies. They wrote, “Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

Ten million people have signed a petition calling for the House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings.

The Democratic-controlled House would have the votes to impeach Trump. The case would then move to the Senate for trial, where two-thirds of the senators must agree to convict Trump and remove him from office. That is nearly impossible, as the Republicans control the Senate.

And so, even if Trump were to be impeached, he would be acquitted in the Senate and Trump would claim victory. Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate garnered sympathy for the president. Although there is strong sentiment for impeachment, the procedure is politically risky for Democrats. However, it is possible that televised evidence of Trump’s crimes could turn GOP senators against him, as happened during the Watergate hearings.

James Reston Jr. wrote in The New York Times about the “power of the televised [Watergate] hearings of the House Judiciary Committee” in 1974. “Far from being politically divisive, they proved a dignified and appropriate response to egregious presidential misconduct — enough to persuade seven out of the committee’s 17 Republicans to vote in favor of at least one of the articles of impeachment.”

The articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon included obstruction of justice, abuse of power and refusal to comply with eight congressional subpoenas regarding the Watergate scandal.

Will Trump follow a Nixon-like path, with television — ironically — becoming the site of his downfall? Or will he manage to strong-arm his way to legal impunity?

Politico’s Veiled Attempt to Dig Up Dirt on Bernie Sanders Fails

Politico magazine (5/3/19) was apparently “startled” by what they found in Bernie Sanders’ 1980s TV show, Bernie Speaks.

Politico magazine  (5/3/19) took a deep dig into Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “bizarre, charming and, at times, startling cable-access TV show,” Bernie Speaks With the Community—produced in the 1980s when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. While the article and accompanying video are relatively friendly to the senator—remarking on his humor (“who knew?”) and other agreeable personality quirks—writer Holly Otterbein’s description of certain clips as “startling” was more eye-opening than anything Sanders actually said.

Rather than explicitly condemning any of Sanders’ statements from the episodes, the piece used the dodge that other people (not us!) might use against the presidential hopeful. Even though Politico literally paid for all 51 tapes of the show to be digitized, the piece disingenuously noted:

Whatever good it did for Bernie Sanders at the time, Bernie Speaks With the Community is now 1,667 minutes of material for opposition researchers, healthcare insurance companies and Trump’s reelection campaign to pick through.

In other words: We’re just gonna leave this here, with absolutely no motives, after spending hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars digitizing it for anyone who wants to watch. People are using it to attack a Democratic 2020 candidate we just happen to red-bait? Oops! So sorry, Bernie!

Otterbein went on to construct a road map of Sanders’ apparently damaging statements for a hypothetical “30-second” attack ad by “his opponents”:

The Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega “happens not to be a Communist.” Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations who had recently visited Sanders, might have gotten cancer because of the “tremendous grief and suffering that’s going on in her own country” caused by the war. The Soviet Union’s economy is being “devastated” by military spending. And perhaps, as he proposed to a classroom of small children, Burlington should develop an exchange program with communist and socialist countries around the world. “I would like to see families—your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe—go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here,” he says. “If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what’s going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot. And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown.”

Is it a coincidence that all of the things Politico picked out in their “short, and surely incomplete,” list of supposedly damning Sanders quotes have to do with improving relations with countries the US government and corporate media have stopped at nothing to divide and conquer?

Sanders explained that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega “happens not to be a Communist” (Bernie Speaks,  4/19/88)—an accurate observation that Politico imagined would show up in an attack ad.

That Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega “happens not to be Communist”…happens to be true. As Jim Naureckas noted in Extra! (6/05), “Nicaragua under the Sandinistas had a mixed economy, multiple opposition parties and a vocal opposition press, features that were not found in actual Communist countries.” If you actually watch the clip, Sanders’ larger point is that corporate media repeat endless lies about Nicaragua—like the claim that Ortega is a dictator, regurgitated tirelessly by corporate media from the ’80s unto the present day, despite his repeated victories in internationally recognized elections (Extra!, 10–11/87, 1–2/07; FAIR.org, 11/17/08, 8/23/18).

The article might have flagged Sanders’ comment that “grief and suffering” could cause cancer for being a bit wacky. (Can stress cause cancer? Evidence is “weak,” says the National Cancer Institute.) But there’s also a suggestion that it’s absurd, or at least impolitic, to suggest that the US could be responsible for said grief or suffering; a similar suggestion is made elsewhere when Otterbein puts scare quotes around Sanders’ reference to the “immorality” of the US-backed Contra war. FAIR (4/11/16, 3/5/19) has previously shown how corporate media performatively frame Sanders as a red menace for defending—and refusing to denounce—leftist countries targeted by US imperialism.

In this case, Sanders was defending the Nicaraguan people, who suffered immeasurable harm in the Contra war to oust the Sandinista government—the product of a popular revolution that overthrew the murderous US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. The “immorality” Sanders was talking about, and Politico calls into question, is the tens of thousands of Nicaraguans killed by US-trained, armed and financed Contra death squads. Maybe Politico has an editorial rule against referring without irony to war crimes as immoral when the perpetrators are backed by Washington.

And because you can’t do a proper red-bait without a Russia connection, Otterbein includes Sanders’ contention that military spending “devastated” the Soviet economy in the list of no-nos. Oddly, the position that Sanders is being attacked for is the conventional wisdom on why the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR. As AP (6/5/04) reported when Ronald Reagan died in 2004:

His famed “Star Wars” program drew the Soviets into a costly arms race it couldn’t afford…. He is vividly remembered in Russia today as the force that precipitated the Soviet collapse.

“Reagan bolstered the US military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal,” said Gennady Gerasimov, who served as top spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry during the 1980s….

Even though Reagan’s “Star Wars” never led to the deployment of an actual missile shield, it drew the Soviets into a costly effort to mount a response. Many analysts agree that the race drained Soviet coffers and triggered the economic difficulties that sped up the Soviet collapse in 1991.

But underscoring the US’s hand in another country’s economic demise conflicts with the narrative of the natural collapse of socialism, in which corporate media are heavily invested. Corporate outlets systematically overlook the fact that when the United States wages economic warfare, for whatever reason, it produces catastrophic effects on the economies and people of its “enemy” targets.

Politico deemed it scandalous that Sanders (Bernie Speaks, 11/6/87) told Burlington schoolchildren, “Boy, you could learn a whole lot” from exchange programs with leftist nations.

Regarding Sanders’ more lighthearted desire for leftist/capitalist nation exchange programs, as Branko Marcetic pointed out, they already existed long before the 1987 clip. Even if they didn’t, though, what’s so scandalous about cultural exchanges that ameliorate interactions between hostile nations? If anything, exchanges might humanize foreigners who the US government and media have often dehumanized, and dispel the lies they push about nations to justify imperial aggression.

Let’s sum up the fresh dirt Politico so helpfully prepared for anti-Sanders campaign consultants:

Sanders is against the media lying about countries targeted by the US government.
Sanders is against the US backing crimes against humanity.
Sanders is against economic warfare and coercion.
And Sanders is for exchange programs that would ease hostility between the US and other countries.

Now, I haven’t watched all the tapes. It’s very possible that Bernie Sanders said something “startling” in the 51 episodes of Bernie Speaks—but if he did, Politico didn’t find it. Instead, the publication showed us its own failure to dislodge from the corporate media’s anti-Communist, neo-Cold War worldview. In a Sanders story that tried to play nice—a rare find in establishment outlets—Politico nonetheless gave us a peek at US media jingoism that was past its sell-by date nearly three decades ago.

Anyway, thanks for the funny tapes, Politico.

The U.S., Not Iran, Has Done Nothing but Sow Chaos in the Mideast

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told NBC that Iran is an active threat to US interests and “sowing chaos” in the Middle East.

It strikes me that exactly the opposite is true. The Islamic Republic of Iran has in recent years, despite its heritage in the 1979 revolution, acted as an Establishment, status quo power.

I don’t agree with Iranian policy, e.g. its Syria intervention; I’m just acting as a dispassionate analyst and asking if it is really destabilizing. I conclude, not so much.

In contrast, the United States (and more especially the Republican Party) has sown enormous amounts of chaos in the Middle East just in the past 20 years.

The Bush administration probably had to try to overthrow the Taliban, given that that organization in Afghanistan sheltered al-Qaeda, which hit the US on 9/11/01. But instead of putting the Northern Alliance in charge and withdrawing, the Bush administration unwisely attempted to establish a long term foreign military presence (many Pushtuns would see it as an occupation). This brilliant policy, which may have aimed at surrounding Russia, has failed so badly that the Taliban, once hated, came back to take over half the country (at least).

This year, US and US-backed forces in Afghanistan killed more innocent civilian bystanders than did the Taliban. Now that is sowing chaos.

Bush also invaded and occupied Iraq, an action Trump himself ran against, but which current National Security Adviser John Bolton supported so strongly he lied to get it. The American war on that country displaced 4 million people from their homes (out of then 26 million), killed hundreds of thousands, wounded millions and left millions widowed and orphaned. Sowing chaos.

As a result of US policies in Iraq favoring the Shiites, Sunnis were alienated from the new order. Fringe groups like the so-called Islamic State in Iraq grew up, and ultimately it became the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant– Daesh or ISIL, and took over 40 percent of Iraqi territory in 2014. Many Iraqi Sunnis were taken hostage by the well-armed, well-funded group, and ISIL took over 40% of Iraq.

Sowing chaos, indeed.

The Obama administration Syria policy was a mess, but John Kerry admitted to having seen ISIL take over northeast Syria and to having done nothing because he thought it would put pressure on Bashar al-Assad, whom Washington wanted to step down. Ash Carter later used leftist Kurdish militias to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, a huge revolution in Syrian affairs since it empowered the Kurds. Turkey is still furious.

While Defense supported the Kurds, the CIA sent money and arms through Saudi intelligence to 40 “vetted” guerrilla groups aiming to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The Lord knows to whom the Saudis gave the money, but we know they backed the hard line Salafi Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam). Some of the CIA-backed groups had links to al-Qaeda or had al-Qaeda-linked groups as battlefield allies.

The US almost certainly prolonged and made the Syrian Civil War more deadly by its split-personality policies there. On several occasions the Pentagon proxies fought a battle with the CIA proxies.

The Syrian Civil War displaced 11 million people and left hundreds of thousands dead.

So the US has been the bull in the China shop, sowing chaos in the eastern reaches of the Middle East. Now the US power elite has set its sights on destabilizing Iran.

Trump in breaching the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed with members of the UN Security Council and Iran has destabilized the whole region in a bid to vastly weaken or destroy the Islamic Republic. That is not a status quo action leading to calm.

The completely one-sided support of the US for the right wing government of Israel in their occupation and human rights abuses against the Palestinians has destabilized the Levant. Trump’s unilateral recognition of all of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel contains the kernel of decades of turbulence.

So let us consider Iran. It was a mainstay in helping Iraq roll up ISIL and put the radical Sunni genie back in the bottle.

Iran joined Russia in propping up the status quo in Syria and helping to defeat the al-Qaeda affiliate and ISIL there.

Iran has warm relations with the Ghani government in Kabul and tries to use its influence among Afghan Hazara Shiites (some 22% of Afghanistan) to contain the hyper-Sunni Taliban, against whom Iran almost went to war in the late 1990s.

The US blames Iran for supporting Hizbullah. But Hizbullah began by attempting to expel Israel troops from southern Lebanon, which they had illegally occupied. Recently Hizbullah has mainly been fighting Sunni extremists in Syria that you’d have to have your head examined to want to rule Damascus. It has been acting as a status quo power.

It is not clear that Iran very heavily supports Hamas in Gaza any more, since Hamas dumped Tehran for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2012-2013. Even if it does, Hamas was elected into power in US-supported election in 2006, so Tehran would be supporting a status quo.

So Iran has been shoring up Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The US either deliberately or covertly has taken steps that have the effect of destablizing the eastern reaches of the Middle East, including Trump’s destruction of the Iran deal itself.

Who is sowing chaos?