Chris Hedges's Blog, page 282

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

Kirstjen Nielsen’s cruelty toward immigrants over the past year was apparently not enough for President Donald Trump. Nielsen, the Department of Homeland Security secretary who resigned under pressure Monday after holding her position for just over a year, left behind a legacy stained by the forced separation of thousands of migrant families. Under her watch at least 2,654 children were removed from their parents’ care.

What’s worse, Nielsen refused to acknowledge the reality of what she had done. After protesters confronted her with cries of “shame” at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., she tweeted that she would “work tirelessly until our broken immigration system is fixed, our borders are secure and families can stay together,” as if circumstances beyond her control were forcing her to take children away from their loved ones and all she was interested in was helping immigrant families. She repeatedly denied that DHS was separating families, saying, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

After an audiotape of a child crying for her parents was released to the public last summer, Nielsen claimed no knowledge of it. And when reporters asked her whether she wanted the U.S. to be known by images of kids in cages, she again shamelessly responded, “The image I want of this country is an immigration system that secures our border and upholds our humanitarian ideals.”

Earlier this year, she insisted to lawmakers that the chain link boxes used to hold immigrant children in border facilities were “not cages,” but instead were “areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed.” And even after the president, whose vision she claimed to be fulfilling, threw her under the bus on Sunday, Nielsen refused to show any remorse or regret for carrying out his cruel agenda, saying instead, “I share the president’s goal of securing the border.” Rather than expressing even a hint of a “mea culpa” for the monstrous role she has played in enacting Trump’s cruel agenda, Nielsen has shown herself to be coldly up to the task, embracing the inhumanity with open arms.

While she was willing imprison kids for her president, it is now apparent that Nielsen was not willing to fall on her sword and flout immigration laws for him, which is likely why she was forced to resign. According to CNN, sources revealed that Trump was “ranting and raving, saying border security was his issue,” and demanded that Nielsen shut down the El Paso, Texas, port of entry. When she explained that was not possible, he demanded that the U.S. disallow refugees from entering to request asylum—in violation of asylum laws. Again, Nielsen refused—not necessarily because she wanted to (though it is abundantly clear how morally bankrupt she is) but perhaps because Trump wants to break our asylum laws, and she may have been unwilling to be his accomplice.

Apparently angry that migrants fleeing violence and insecurity from Central America continue to ask for asylum in the U.S., Trump is considering reinstating the disastrous family separation policy—a practice that Nielsen repeatedly insisted was not government policy and that Trump finally ended via executive order last year after a massive public outcry. CNN reported that in recent weeks, “The President wanted families separated even if they came in at a legal port of entry and were legal asylum seekers.” This goes beyond what Trump did last summer. “He just wants to separate families,” a senior administration official told CNN.

When asked this week if he would reinstate the policy, Trump initially denied it, saying, “We’re not looking to do that, no,” but went on to boast about the success of family separation as a deterrent to immigration. “Once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic because, ‘let’s go to Disneyland,’ ” he said.

So, what is driving Trump’s latest anti-immigrant phase? One White House source told CBS that Nielsen’s departure “is a part of a massive DHS overhaul engineered and directed by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller.” Miller has developed a reputation for pushing a strongly white supremacist, nationalist and anti-immigrant agenda at the White House, all the more ironic because his ancestors benefited from asylum laws in order to emigrate to the U.S. in the early 1900s. After Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, also a beneficiary of asylum laws, rightly called Miller out for being a white nationalist, the president’s son Donald Jr. unabashedly accused her of “anti-Semitic bigotry“—because Miller is Jewish.

But Miller alone is not to blame for the current mess we’re in. Trump has shown his true racist colors so often that his virulent hatred of brown-skinned immigrants should no longer be in question. While Miller may supply Trump with a strategy of how best to slam the door shut on migrants, Trump well knows that his deeply loyal base is moved primarily by insecurity steeped in a fear of immigrants. He knows that the crueler he is to immigrants, the more assured his path to reelection is. He understands that even when he spews such lies as “The country is full,” his base nods along obediently. Even when his own business is found to rely on undocumented immigrants, his backers will be blind to his hypocrisy.

Over the past two years, much of the president’s anti-immigrant policy has faced opposition from the public and the courts. This means that Trump is likely to dig in his heels ever harder and do everything in his power to steamroll over the Constitution until he’s stopped. If Nielsen’s role in the mass kidnapping of vulnerable children, her calculating lies and euphemistic defenses of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda are the worst this country has witnessed in recent years, what’s coming next is likely a step beyond even her barbarity.

Still, there are such things as laws, and even Trump’s fascistic destruction of norms, ethical boundaries and laws cannot mow down all checks and balances. A federal judge on Monday blocked Trump’s policy of forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they apply. Judge Jon S. Tigar of San Francisco wrote, “Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

More importantly, his own party was perfectly happy with Nielsen’s savagery and seems to have an appetite to do her one better. Top ranking Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley on Monday warned the White House not to fire more DHS agency heads. In an interview with The Washington Post, Grassley said he was, “very, very concerned” about rumors that Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, would be the next to be fired. He told the paper, “One, those are good public servants. … Secondly, besides the personal connection I have with them and the qualifications they have, they are the intellectual basis for what the president wants to accomplish in immigration.” In other words, why isn’t Trump satisfied with Nielsen’s brutality, wonders Grassley?

Still, the purge has continued with Trump firing the head of the Secret Service (perhaps in retaliation for their tiff with Mar-a-Lago staff?) and the announced resignation of DHS’ acting Deputy Secretary, Claire Grady. Eventually, Trump will find shills willing to carry out his nefarious fantasy of barring all immigrants from the nation. When that happens, let us not look back on Nielsen’s tenure with nostalgia. We cannot allow Trump’s slippery slope into hell to distort our moral compasses.

Is Your Smart Speaker Listening in on You?

Almost a third of American households have a smart speaker, according to a study from National Public Radio and Edison Research. These devices play music, turn on lights, set alarms and perform numerous household tasks, all with a simple voice command.

The Google Home, Apple HomePod and Amazon Echo, among other smart speakers, are like having a personal assistant that happens to be inanimate. But for every voiced request, it’s difficult not to wonder if anyone is listening. As Matt Day, Giles Turner and Natalia Drozdiak write in Bloomberg, for users of Amazon’s Echo speaker, with its digital assistant, Alexa, thousands might be.

Amazon, as Day, Turner and Drozdiak report, employs thousands of voice reviewers, people around the world who help refine Alexa’s responses. As they explain: “The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.”

Bloomberg points out that Google and Apple also use human reviewers, but their processes appear to less robust.

For iPhone’s Siri assistant, Bloomberg says the recordings “Lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier, according to an Apple security white paper. After that, the data is stripped of its random identification information but may be stored for longer periods to improve Siri’s voice recognition.”

For Google’s Home, “Some reviewers can access some audio snippets from its Assistant to help train and improve the product, but it’s not associated with any personally identifiable information and the audio is distorted,” Google told Bloomberg.

Amazon’s process emphasizes the human role required to create effective algorithms. The Bloomberg article notes that Amazon’s marketing materials downplay that element, saying, “Alexa ‘lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter,’ but like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching.”

Bloomberg reports that Amazon has full-time and contract employees working across the globe—from Boston to Costa Rica, India to Romania, and they’ve all signed nondisclosure agreements. Reporters learned, however, that “They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon’s Bucharest office.”

Day, Turner and Drozdiak call the work largely “mundane,” explaining that “One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist.”

Occasionally a worker picks up private moments—like crying. Other times, what’s heard is significantly more serious:

Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.

In a statement to Bloomberg, an Amazon spokesman said, “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” emphasizing that “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience.”

Users may already be aware that someone, if not an Amazon worker, might be listening. Two reviewers told Bloomberg that users frequently ask: “Do you work for the NSA?” and “Alexa, is someone else listening to us?”

Despite these concerns, according to a 2019 report from Voicebot.ai and Voicify, the Echo, with its Alexa digital assistant, is the most popular speaker, with 61% of market share, a comfortable lead over Google Home at 24%. Overall, according to a similar study by Adobe Analytics, 71% of smart speaker owners use their device “at least daily.” As TechCrunch writes, “The overall trend is that Amazon Echo remains the smart speaker to beat.”

Researchers have not yet determined whether the Bloomberg article’s claim, that humans might actually be listening to Alexa users, will have an impact on sales. As it stands, Juniper Research, a U.K.-based firm, predicts that there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants by 2023.

Bernie Has to Do Better Than This

On a Sunday in early April, your favorite grumpy Jewish uncle and mine, Bernie Sanders, opened himself up to a renewed line of attack from those within the Democratic Party (and on the political left more broadly) who feel he is out of touch with issues of race and identity. At a public appearance in Oskaloosa, Ia., a member of the audience asked him about the logistics of so-called open borders, apparently under the mistaken belief that Sanders supported an open borders policy.

The candidate quickly corrected his questioner. “I do not think that’s something we can do,” he said. Instead, Sanders favors “comprehensive immigration reform.” As to open borders, he continued, the world is too full of extreme poverty, implying the United States could not afford to open its doors to the global poor.

It was inelegantly put and poorly framed, although as a matter of policy, it’s not necessarily different from any of the other major candidates’ in the ever-growing Democratic presidential field. Many of the hopefuls have remained deliberately vague on the issue, preferring high-flown rhetoric that focuses on Donald Trump’s stupid wall (which Beto O’Rourke, for example, said he’d tear down), on the gratuitous cruelty of family separation and on the plight of the “Dreamers,” who were brought into the U.S. as young children, and whose condition is therefore considered more sympathetic because they did not willfully violate any American laws.

What, precisely, the candidates would do about immigration—and by “immigration,” our discourse means almost exclusively the immigration of black and brown people from the broadly defined “global south”—remains unanswered. Most, like Sanders, seem generally to support some kind of reform to mitigate the worst inhumanities of the current administration and to provide relief to certain classes of apparently more deserving immigrants, while still leaving much of the architecture of existing American immigration policy in place.

“I think,”

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

I am sure government attorneys are skillfully doing what has become de rigueur for the corporate state, using specious legal arguments to eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. This is how we have a government—whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens—that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press legally permitted to publish classified information and a publisher sitting in jail in Britain awaiting extradition to the United States and a whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, in a jail cell in the United States.

Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.

The Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents leaked by Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, provided copious evidence of the hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks allowed us to see the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this they became empire’s prey.

U.S. government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both of which also published the leaked material from Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents. Manning was repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her detention and trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the material, something she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently in jail because of her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in front of the grand jury assembled for the Assange case. President Barack Obama granted Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence, clemency after she served seven years in a military prison.

Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s reputation.

Assange, who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon earned the ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, intent on blaming Russia for its election loss, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers, although James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

A haggard-looking Assange, as he was dragged out of the embassy by British police, shook his finger and shouted: “The U.K. must resist this attempt by the Trump administration. … The U.K. must resist!”

We all must resist. We must, in every way possible, put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching of Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.

Daniel Ellsberg on the Importance of Julian Assange

Editor’s Note: In light of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s recent arrest, Truthdig is re-posting a timely conversation between Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer and legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, both of whom have been vocal defenders of Assange and his work. A letter that Ellsberg co-signed outlines the Pentagon Papers author’s position on the attacks on Assange:

As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary … has tried to portray Assange’s exposure of classified materials as very different from — and far less laudable than — what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra “Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad.” He continues: “That’s just a cover for people who don’t want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

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Truthdig’s editor in chief has also written and spoken extensively about the importance of WikiLeaks and the courageousness that both Assange and Chelsea Manning have displayed throughout the years. In a 2010 piece, Scheer writes:

All you need to know about Julian Assange’s value as a crusading journalist is that The New York Times and most of the world’s other leading newspapers have led daily with important news stories based on his WikiLeaks releases … It is unconscionable to target Assange for publishing documents on the Internet that mainstream media outlets have attested had legitimate news value. As in the historic case in which Daniel Ellsberg gave The New York Times the Pentagon Papers exposé of the official lies justifying the Vietnam War, Assange is acting as the reporter here, and thus his activities must be shielded by the First Amendment’s guarantee of journalistic freedom.

… It is outrageous for any journalist, or respecter of what every American president has claimed is our inalienable, God-given right to a free press, not to join in Assange’s defense on this issue, as distinct from what increasingly appear to be trumped-up charges that led to his voluntary arrest on Tuesday in London in a case involving his personal behavior. Abandon Assange and you abandon the bedrock of our republic: the public’s right to know.

Writing to Truthdig staff members as news of Assange’s arrest broke Thursday, Scheer reiterated his unwavering position:

This is a freedom of the press case period. Assange is being punished for courageously doing his job as a journalist who is the subject of one of the most dangerous witch-hunts in U.S. history precisely because he revealed information that the American public had a compelling right and need to know revealing U.S. government war crimes.

Below is a January 2017 discussion about whistleblowers, as relevant today as it has been since before Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers.

In this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer interviews activist and former United States military analyst Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, delves into his reasons for becoming a whistleblower and explains why Richard Nixon didn’t use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War.

“The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

The conversation is a timely one, as Ellsberg’s newest book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” is a revelatory first-person account of the U.S. nuclear program in the 1960s. Ellsberg tells Scheer very little has changed since that era.

“We were being lied into a hopeless, desperate, aggressive war,” Ellsberg says of Vietnam, “as happened in 2002, [with] our attack on Iraq.”

Listen to the full conversation in the player above and read the full transcripts below, and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Full transcript:

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Daniel Ellsberg. And I want to preface this by saying, I’m trying in this series of interviews to talk to people I call American originals. That somehow, out of the crazy-quilt of American culture, our diversity, our immigrant melting pot and what have you, we have produced a really amazing range of unique, interesting people. You could go back to Tom Paine, or all sorts of people come up through, you know, the Martin Luther Kings and the lesser-known people. Where do these people come from? They are, in my view, the saving grace of the American experiment; they keep us honest, they inform us. And Daniel Ellsberg is certainly very high up on that list. And one of the things about you, Dan–I’ve known you for a long time–is that you represent, I don’t know if David Halberstam meant the title of his book on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, ironically or what have you–

Daniel Ellsberg: Ironically, yes.

RS: Ah, but by some standard, they were the best and the brightest, and you fall into that category. Why don’t we just begin there? You were highly educated–just take us back to where this starts.

DE: Well, I can’t begin there with that title, but what he was referring to was that McNamara, who had been a professor at the Harvard Business School, he brought in people from elite, Ivy League schools who had done well academically, who were good at taking tests, and were reassuring to their superiors in various ways, and had every prospect of promotion and being good staffers. I came from the Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard,; at Cambridge University, King’s College. I was, yes, highly educated; that didn’t prepare me for very wise judgment any more than it did the people I worked for.

RS: OK, but just to set the record, you did study at Harvard–

DE: I had a degree in economics from Harvard; I went to Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I was at the Harvard Society of Fellows after I’d come out of the Marine Corps. I spent three years in the Marine Corps during the Korean emergency, though I didn’t go to Korea. And then went to the RAND Corporation, which hired smart economists in the economics department.

RS: Under contract with the Air Force.

DE: They were, they did work for the Air Force. It was a nonprofit corporation, the original think thank, so-called, to do long-range research and development planning; the “R,” RAND, came from R&D, research and development.

RS: Yeah. Now you’re, of course, most famous for having gifted, I think, the American public through the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Pentagon Papers, which was an internal study that you worked on in the Pentagon about how the United States got into Vietnam and what the Vietnam War was all about, based on classified information, largely. But as I recall, at one point you believed in this war in Vietnam, right?

DE: Yes, I had become, in the late forties, a Cold Warrior, looking at the Berlin blockade and the takeover in Czechoslovakia, and then the Korean War, which I saw as aggression, and I was proud of the U.S. for rising to that challenge, it seemed to me after the Second World War, of opposing aggressors, as I saw it. I was even in the Marines when I extended my service there to go into the Mediterranean with my battalion. I was an operations officer, and I had been a company commander in that battalion, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines. And we expected a kind of war in, some sort of war in the Mediterranean at that time. Because Nasser, the dictator of Egypt, was expected to nationalize, or in fact during the summer did nationalize, the Suez Canal. And that expression of nationalism against the interests of the West, ah, evoked a British and French effort to overthrow Nasser, to regime change, essentially, by an invasion and by bombing. And I was proud of my president, though I hadn’t voted for him, President Eisenhower, the republican, who took on our closest allies, and pretty strongly intimated that he saw them as involved in aggression. And I was proud of a country that would oppose aggression even by its closest allies at that point, in 1956. We evacuated all the Americans from Alexandria on my ship when the harbor, Alexandria, was under air attack by the British and French. So I believed in the president, even when he was of a different party, even though he was a republican; I believed in what he was saying, but in particular I believed in a worldwide struggle against communist tyranny. And I was actually in domestic matters on the left side, definitely very much in favor of civil liberties, civil rights. I often thought that I would have been in the Freedom Riders had I not been working on this important anti-communist problem in Vietnam, which was quite diluted at that point. But I was working mainly on command and control of nuclear weapons at the RAND Corporation, and war planning, and that’s the subject of my forthcoming book in December, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. And there’s more confessions in that book than I envisioned when I started it; I thought of it as more of a rhetorical flourish, and then I realized that I had a good deal to confess during that period as to my involvement in nuclear war planning. But as a result of being in the Cuban Missile Crisis as a consultant in 1962, from the RAND Corporation, I did a study of nuclear crises and then–for the defense department and the state department–and then went into the defense department as a full-time employee, basically with the intent of seeing the government in crisis from the inside–my boss, former Harvard law professor, promised me. On the night of the Tonkin Gulf attacks, the alleged attacks on our destroyers, which historically here, you, Bob, were the one to show many years later that there had been no attack at all, to the commander, Commander Herrick, who always believed that there had been at least one torpedo. Well, the rest of us knew that there, were pretty sure there hadn’t been any torpedos, and that Herrick was wrong. But he, he believed that until, as I read in your work, by amazing investigative journalism you showed him that in fact there had been no torpedo, I remember the details of that, but we don’t need to go into those. But the point is that that very night, I was aware that the government was lying when they said that the evidence for an attack was unequivocal; in fact, it was extremely equivocal, and in fact misleading; there had been no attack at all. And that was pretty clear within a day or two, and yet the president lied to the Congress into what amounted to an undated declaration of war, as President Bush did many years later in terms of Iraq.

RS: Your role as a whistleblower, there’s two things that are interesting about it: how rare is the whistleblower; there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people who knew in real-time that that attack had not occurred. Certainly Lyndon Johnson and Secretary McNamara, Admiral Sharp who was head of the Pacific fleet, and many others. And we only learned about it, really, finally, we get the information two decades later. And meanwhile, a bloody war has been fought. And in the Ken Burns movie recently on PBS, that’s sort of looked over. You know, oh yeah, maybe there wasn’t an attack, or something. But it’s not–

DE: They don’t say?–I’ve forgotten, they don’t say absolutely there was no attack?

RS: Well, they do say–they say there was no, they say there was no evidence of the attack. But they don’t discuss when the administration learned this.

DE: Yeah. Right

RS: They don’t go into the deliberate lying to the American people. I know I’m putting a real fine point on it, but–

DE: It was the case that there was, of course, various kinds of eyewitness testimony of different kinds from radio operators, from sonar operators, from people supposedly seeing lights on the ship. Although, as the commander-in-chief Pacific later told me, Sharp, he said “You know, Marines on board ship at night can see just about anything,” as he put it to me. And the truth was that the preponderance of evidence was very clear day-by-day, within days of the attack. Now, the very night of the attack, it was very equivocal. But the preponderance suggested to most people that there had been an attack. I believe that there probably had been an attack, six to four, six to five or seven to five–now, that was wrong. Within a day or two, it came to be seven or eight to one, ten to one. But it wasn’t actually certain. And really, the last remaining piece of evidence, in a way, was Herrick’s, the commander of the Maddox, conviction. That the first sonar report of a torpedo had been correct. And literally, Bob, I’m talking to the person here–you’re the person who knocked down that last piece of evidence. And yet by that time, people were in no doubt that Herrick must have been wrong, as he was.

RS: OK. But to be fair to Herrick, the captain of that ship–and I did go interview him, and yes, we had a very good [Laughs] day-long exchange looking over the documents and everything else. In his report–and this is important. Because it really goes to the cynicism of people in power, their willingness to conceal the truth. Because in real time, before Lyndon Johnson ordered the attack on North Vietnam, in real time Herrick said: “I recommend that you hold off action because the facts are so uncertain.”

DE: Yes. No, he said recommend no action until daylight reconnaissance is possible, which was a few hours later, so that they could see if there were oil slicks or perhaps survivors in the wreck, because they thought they’d hit a couple of boats.

RS: Yeah. And there was no damage to the boat.

DE: Ah–no, that’s right. There was some evidence that there had been an attack, but it was very clearly contradicted by other evidence that indicated there was no attack. And what the American people were told, as a justification for actually carrying out acts of war against another country, 64 sorties bombing–the beginning of air attacks on the north. And there’d been nothing like that since the Korean War. The justification for that is not “we think there might have been an attack”; the justification was put as “there was unequivocal evidence of an unprovoked attack.” Just as we heard Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld later saying, you know, the evidence for WMD, for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is unequivocal, we not only know that they’re there, we know where they are. Well, we now know, first, that there were no WMDs at all; second, there was testimony to that effect, but it was–that there were–but it was very equivocal. It was by sources that the GErmans regarded as totally unreliable, for example. And other things. So what they presented, a very uncertain situation where the reality happened to be that in fact nothing had occurred of that sort.

RS: And it was fake news, which was reported faithfully by the American mass media, and not questioned in any way, in any serious way. And that brings me back to you role and the role of the whistleblower. Because you, as you said, had been hawkish; you had originally supported the war. And then you were working in the Pentagon. And I wanted to ask you about what turned you somewhat critical, and why you felt we should read the Pentagon Papers. And I know your, the person accused, your co-conspirator, Tony Russo, the late Tony Russo, who had worked in the RAND Corporation–he had a different vantage point on what was going on in Vietnam, because he was involved in reading the interrogation of Viet Cong prisoners. And I remember talking to him at the time, that he had very early come to recognize that we were party to torturing these prisoners. And he was offended by that, and I think it was one reason why he joined you in–

DE: Well, it’s the reason why he got fired from the RAND Corporation, which put him on the outside, and I think set him on a path that led him to say at one point, when I described the lying that had been going on, that I should put out the documents for that, which he didn’t have, actually. But he became quite radicalized, really, by reading these reports, because he began to identify with the earnestness, the patriotism, the courage and the responsibility of the Viet Cong prisoners and even defectors that he’d interviewed in–through an interpreter–in Vietnam. And he came to identify with them very much. Now, I never met such people. The people, the Vietnamese I met at great length were the ones fighting with us. Which is to say, fighting against the independence of their country from foreign control. He was fighting, he was talking to people who were fighting for the independence of their country.

RS: Basic to American foreign policy in this whole imperial march, including our treatment of Native Americans onward, has been a denial that other people have a claim on history. Basically a denial that they could possibly be motivated by sentiment and feelings that might be respected, certainly by them, maybe by others. And in the Ken Burns movie, that to my mind is its weakness; it is still America-centric. It’s our tragedy, it’s our war, it’s our sacrifice.

DE: Well, it also avoids a word that you just used, which was, I think, essential: you used the word “imperial.” And we are, I think, a covert empire in the sense where “covert” means an operation that is not merely secret, but it’s plausibly denial. It is denied that we are an empire. The means we use are secret and denied; “We don’t torture, we don’t assassinate”; actually, we do. But we not only do that secretly, but we deny that we do it. And you produce evidence. By the way, it gets into what we’ve been talking, in a way–you deliberately arrange for evidence that will support your denial, which is untrue. Cover identities, cover actions of various kinds, that seem to be suggesting that you were something other than what you are, like a spy. In particular, to protect the president from being recognized as the author of any of these criminal, murderous, and often hopeless actions to protect him from accountability. To imply that if it’s not American, it’s not even happening; but if it is happening, it’s not by us; if it’s by us, it’s not by the defense department, it’s some rogue element. And if you finally say, no, it was the defense department or the CIA–the president knew nothing about it, so don’t hold him accountable. I think the Burns-Novick movie never really comes entirely to grips with that. That what was motivating this other side was something we could recognize for ourselves, our own American revolution, a nationalistic independence, a desire not to be governed and rules and have your destinies determined by people thousands of miles away with a different–in our case it wasn’t even a different language, but it was in their case, different language, different culture, ethnicity and so forth. To free yourself of that is a very powerful motive, and one not to be destroyed, usually by bombing.

RS: Well, the main failing, I thought, in the Burns movie was at the very beginning when it is stated, “Our intentions were good.”

DE: Actually, the exact words were–it’s funny, they do always get quoted on intentions, actually. They didn’t use the word “intentions,” they say, “It was begun in good faith by decent men.” And I’ve asked myself, you know, first, who had–who could they identify as having good faith? Because supporting a French effort at reconquering an independent colony could hardly be a matter of good faith for America, which thinks of itself as anti-imperial, except for its own influence. And having been born in an anti-imperial revolution. And that’s why our imperialism has to be covert. Because it has to be denied, because it doesn’t go with our intentions. Well, that’s the opposite of good faith. You have to lie about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And what’s this, the decent men–I tried to think what they meant by that, given what we did, four times the tonnage of bombs on Indochina as of World War II entirely. I think decency has to be evaluated in that light, to some extent. All I can think of is, ordinary officials. They were not extraordinarily ignorant or ruthless; they were just ordinarily ignorant and ruthless.

RS: We assume the aura of innocence and decency as a matter of birthright. It goes to the whole mythology of the melting pot, which of course, we didn’t bring slaves over, we didn’t kill Native Americans, there was no conquest, there was no greed–

DE: Well, nobody says what you’re saying, you know. They just ignore it. Isn’t it a matter of ignoring it?

RS: No, it’s the leitmotif of the whole American story. That somehow this was a search for idealism, for inclusion, for individuality; this was the great march of manifest destiny. And we took the best from the rest of the tired, old world. And in fact, our founders were the people who wanted to resist that siren song, because they warned us about foreign entanglements; they warned us about how empire and republic are not compatible.

DE: Mm-hmm. Yeah. They were, however, slave owners.

RS: Yes, I’m not–

DE: And Indian killers.

RS: –I’m not challenging–

DE: And that wasn’t just a–we’re learning now, I think, how much we’ve denied to ourselves–

RS: I understand that, but any settler culture has the capacity to deny its brutality. It’s always done for its safety, it’s always done because it’s threatened. I understand that, but when I think back on this whole adventure, and what offended me about–can you give me the phrase again that–?

DE: Ah, it was done, “it was begun in good faith by decent men.”

RS: Yeah. Now, you and I know enough about this, and I think the Pentagon is quite clear about this, the Pentagon Papers report–it wasn’t done in good faith–

DE: No.

RS: –it was done in treachery. There was supposed to be an election in 1956.

DE: By the way, they–they attribute the lack of an election to Diem, President Diem, not to the Americans. Diem was supported by Eisenhower and kept in power because we knew he would resist an election, because we didn’t want an election; we preferred tyranny by Diem, or war, as concluded, to self-determination. To an election that would lead to a government that was independent of us.

RS: Well, Eisenhower in his book, in his memoir, Mandate for Change, said that Ho Chi Minh would have won the election with 80 percent of the vote.

DE: Yeah. They mention that, but they don’t mention that that’s why we put Diem in there. To keep, to prevent that election. They don’t show that as an American action.

RS: Diem was not just functioning in Vietnam, he was in a Catholic seminary in the United States, OK, in the northeast. That we brought him there–and then we end up presiding over his death, OK. Whether you call it an assassination or not, right–

DE: Yeah, I call it assassination.

RS: We were conscious–and this is in the Pentagon Papers–we were conscious that he was going to die.

DE: Yes.

RS: And that we had authorized it, or at least said we wanted that outcome, OK. So we killed the guy we called “the George Washington of Vietnam.”

DE: Yes. Yes, the day he was murdered was then celebrated by the government when I was working with it in the mid-sixties as national day, their national day was the day Diem was killed. When our puppet was killed was now their new national independence day.

RS: [omission] So this is a great opportunity for folks to understand, how does it work inside government. You were inside, and you were working on this study for the Pentagon about how this all happened. And there must have been a moment of revelation.

DE: The part that really changed my thinking very radically was reading the earliest part of the war–the earliest part of the study, I mean–which started in 1945. And by the way, it was internally, it was called “U.S. Decisionmaking in Vietnam, 1945 to ‘68.” Ended in ‘68, war had seven years to go, but people tended to think it was going to be over then–after ‘68 and after Johnson had bowed out of the election–wrongly. I went back, thinking the very, the very title was interesting there; it could have been classified, because most people would have said, what U.S. decisionmaking was there in ‘45 or ‘46 or ‘47? That was the French war. No, we were involved in aiding the French from the very beginning, bringing them back on transport planes and ships to reconquer their colony. And had supported it right from the beginning. When I’d read the earliest parts, which I left ‘til the end, ‘til 1969, I realized several things that I’d been totally misled on as an insider on a classified basis: one, what I just said; that there were two wars, a French war and then an American war–no, there was one 30-year war against the independence of Vietnam. In the first eight years, it was the U.S. and the French; and after that, it was the U.S. It was not that we were on the wrong side, as some people had come to feel when they looked at the relative merits of the Vietnamese fighting on one side or the other; we were the wrong side. To be fighting against independence was to be the wrong side. The other point was that we had never had good–well, not only good faith; we’d been lying all the time to our public, because the real motives could not have been sold very well, to fight against independence for this country in favor of the French or whoever, or ourselves. The cause I’ve described there, fighting what was from an American point of view not a noble cause, not a just cause, not a legal cause–it was aggression, it was wrongful cause, and unjust cause from the very beginning. And that meant to me, when I learned that in ‘69, late in the game now–I’d been, my first visit was ‘61, I went over, I started working on it full time in ‘64. For the first time, I realized that all the deaths in Vietnam–not just the civilians we were killing in great numbers, but the deaths of our troops, the deaths of Vietnamese altogether–were unjustified homicide. And that meant, to me, murder. And that that was something that had–I couldn’t cooperate with, and that I must somehow expose and resist, to the extent that I could. And the example of draft resisters who felt the same way, without having that specific information, but who understood intuitively and rightly by not believing their government–simply that–and looking at the facts freed of that delusion, they understood that it was worth their going to prison to warn their fellow countrymen that this was a wrongful war, that it was wrong to participate, and it must be resisted. Without the example of the draft resisters, no Pentagon Papers. For what that’s worth. Because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do something that I was sure would send me to prison for the rest of my life. And even if there had been Pentagon Papers, it took a lot of other people acting unusually, like Alex Butterfield exposing the tapes, Judge Sirica pressing the Watergate burglars, McCord breaking under that, John Dean taking on the White House. To save his own skin, yes; but doing it by fighting the White House, calling them liars. Not a safe thing to do. Richardson, Elliot Richardson refusing to fire the special prosecutor, Cox. Ruckelshaus, doing the same, and so forth. Each of those people were essential in bringing about something that no one imagined as a possibility. And that was, bringing Richard Nixon, the president, to the point of resignation, facing impeachment.

RS: Why only you and maybe Tony Russo–well, not maybe, definitely Tony Russo–a few others in positions to know, and yet didn’t tell us?

DE: I waited almost 40 years for someone else to put a lot of information out, and that was Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning. And then three years later, Ed Snowden. Had there been a Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden, both willing to risk their lives and certainly their freedom forever, in order to tell these truths about the war, which were–they were telling nothing that was unknown–what they were telling was known to hundreds to thousands of others, as you’ve said. That was also true of going into Iraq. Had they been at a high enough level to have that access–they didn’t have to be officials, they could be staff assistants, like myself, or researchers or whatever–or they could be officials who knew that we were being lied into a hopeless, desperate, aggressive war, as happened in 2002 to our attack on Iraq. Had they been at a high level and told us what was going on, I believe there would be no attack in Iraq, and the Middle East would look entirely different, and entirely less bad than it does now. But they don’t come very often. They do exist, and why not? People don’t ask themselves, what should I be doing about these lies that I know of? What should I be doing about this desperate–and they–should I be willing to risk my career?

RS: How dare we talk about “decent men” who knew it was based on a tissue of lies, that lots of people were getting killed including the almost 59,000 Americans, and that they had good intentions? Why didn’t they–

DE: Well, that’s absurd. Well, again, you can’t, good intentions–

RS: Why didn’t they tell the rest of us? Why didn’t they quit? Why didn’t they say my career has to move in another way? Why didn’t they–by the way, I happened to interview you at the time of your trial. And I remember, you were hoping McNamara would come out and say something in support of you.

DE: Yeah, I was, yeah.

RS: They didn’t. None of them did.

DE: It turns out to be, I–and I would guess not just Americans, but people, officials, people who identify with the government, who are privileged, who say “we” when they talk of the government. Something that’s even hard for me to get over 40 years later, it’s such an ingrained perquisite that you get, you know–what we do, and what we decide, and you’re talking about the executive branch of the president of the Oval Office. They’ll go along with anything to keep that, to keep from being fired.

RS: Anything.

DE: Anything, and I mean, nuclear war. And that’s everything.

RS: So they are the good Germans.

DE: Yes, we’re all good Germans, to a very good first approximation, and second approximation, and third approximation. That’s what “decent” means – decent Germans, decent Americans, ordinary people will–and I put it in terms of the government, but look at corporations. To keep their job, to keep their career, or just more generally to keep a privileged status, a membership. Like being white versus nonwhite, and to show, and to keep the sense that is superior. Or to be male versus womanly and unmanly. People will do, humans will do–almost all of them, not quite all–but almost all of them will do anything to avoid losing that membership and being ostracized.

RS: Let me end with a promo for your next book, which is coming out in December of ‘17. And in the beginning of the book, you describe that when you copied the Pentagon Papers, you were once asked, how many pages, and you didn’t give the pages. But the fact is, you copied other material that you had in your safe at the RAND Corporation, other classified material. And they concerned your work on nuclear weapons. And without, you know, people have got to read that book when it comes out, Doomsday. But just give us a prelude. What is–’cause you know, we went to sleep on the nuclear issue, we stopped thinking about it ‘til Korea came along, and now we think about it again. Can you give us the quick promo for this new work?

DE: One element in the book is that in 1969, Nixon was, like presidents before him, like the one he’d served, President Eisenhower when he was vice president, was threatening nuclear war to North Vietnam. That was a very big secret, which only a few people knew. And I knew only vaguely–Mort Halperin knew it in more precise, and he told me–very few people knew that. I think that would have been carried out, and we would have seen nuclear weapons used on humans for the first time since Nagasaki in November of 1969, actually. Which was when his ultimatum expired. Except for the fact that two million people on October 15th, did what was amounted to a general strike. They didn’t want to call it that, it sounded too radical, so they called it a moratorium, taking off from work, no business as usual. And from schools, and going into public squares, and rallies and everything, and asking for an end to the war. And when Nixon–they did not know that there was an impending nuclear strike that had been threatened, and which I believe would have been carried out. But when Nixon saw that many people in the streets, he knew: If I use nuclear weapons now, not just in threat but on people, the first time, we won’t see two million, we’ll see 20 million people or more in the streets. And the North Vietnamese will expect it, and they won’t give in, they will wait for that to have its effect. So he didn’t do it. And those people, without even knowing what they were doing, the effect they were having, almost virtually any of them–virtually any of them. And the next month, in November, were in fact prolonging the moratorium on the combat use of nuclear weapons by another 40 years and more. So, on the one hand it was unlikely that they would have that success, and they didn’t know they were even having it; but by resisting what they did see, which was a prolongation of the war that should not happen, they acted appropriately. Which is, they stopped business as usual. That could happen again. I think nothing less than that will protect us, actually, from war with North Korea, war perhaps in Syria or Ukraine. And war with Russia, which is a real possibility over Ukraine, should not be on the table. Because war with Russia is very different from war with Vietnam or Iraq or Iran. It means almost surely escalation to nuclear war, which leads–and this is another factor in my book–we now know leads to nuclear winter. The diminution of sunlight by the smoke from burning cities, which will kill harvests and starve nearly everyone on earth. So what the book shows is that our leaders, one of the things that they have needed to keep secret is that they have been consciously gambling with the possibility of ending most life on Earth all this time. And they should never have been doing that, and one instance of that was actually Vietnam. It also came up again three years later, in ‘72, when Nixon considered nuclear weapons and said to Henry Kissinger, No, I’d rather use the nuclear weapon, got that, Henry? You know, even Kissinger said, Oh–in ‘72–Oh, I think that would be just too much. He said, Too much? Does that bother you, Henry? I just want you to think big, for Christ’s sake! And that was the president of the United States. That was before the landslide election that brought him into reelection. That sentiment and that readiness did not keep him from being reelected. And that’s the danger, as we all know, we’re facing now with the current president.

RS: Well, that’s a chilling moment on which to end this interview with Daniel Ellsberg. [omission] Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Rebecca Mooney. Kat Yore and Mario Diaz provided the brilliant engineering work. And here at the Northgate Studio of the UC Berkeley journalism school, Chris O’Dea has been the engineer pulling this all together, and we want to thank him. Thanks for listening.

The Man Who Saw Trump Coming a Century Ago

Distracted daily by the bloviating POTUS? Here, then, is a small suggestion. Focus your mind for a moment on one simple (yet deeply complex) truth: we are living in a Veblen Moment.

That’s Thorstein Veblen, the greatest American thinker you probably never heard of (or forgot). His working life — from 1890 to 1923 — coincided with America’s first Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain, whose novel of that title lampooned the greedy corruption of the country’s most illustrious gentlemen. Veblen had a similarly dark, sardonic sense of humor.

Now, in America’s second (bigger and better) Gilded Age, in a world of staggering inequality, believe me, it helps to read him again.

In his student days at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and finally Cornell, already a master of many languages, he studied anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and political economy (the old fashioned term for what’s now called economics). That was back when economists were concerned with the real-life conditions of human beings, and wouldn’t have settled for data from an illusory “free market.”

Veblen got his initial job, teaching political economy at a salary of $520 a year, in 1890 when the University of Chicago first opened its doors. Back in the days before SATs and admissions scandals, that school was founded and funded by John D. Rockefeller, the classic robber baron of Standard Oil. (Think of him as the Mark Zuckerberg of his day.) Even half a century before the free-market economist Milton Friedman captured Chicago’s economics department with dogma that serves the ruling class, Rockefeller called the university “the best investment” he ever made. Still, from the beginning, Thorstein Veblen was there, prepared to focus his mind on Rockefeller and his cronies, the cream of the upper class and the most ruthless profiteers behind that Gilded Age.

He was already asking questions that deserve to be raised again in the 1% world of 2019. How had such a conspicuous lordly class developed in America? What purpose did it serve? What did the members of the leisure class actually do with their time and money? And why did so many of the ruthlessly over-worked, under-paid lower classes tolerate such a peculiar, lopsided social arrangement in which they were so clearly the losers?

Veblen addressed those questions in his first and still best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899. The influential literary critic and novelist William Dean Howells, the “dean of American letters,” perfectly captured the effect of Veblen’s gleeful, poker-faced scientific style in an awestruck review. “In the passionless calm with which the author pursues his investigation,” Howells wrote, “there is apparently no animus for or against a leisure class. It is his affair simply to find out how and why and what it is. If the result is to leave the reader with a feeling which the author never shows, that seems to be solely the effect of the facts.”

The book made a big splash. It left smug, witless readers of the leisure class amused. But readers already in revolt, in what came to be known as the Progressive Era, came away with contempt for the filthy rich (a feeling that today, with a smug, witless plutocrat in the White House, should be a lot more common than it is).

What Veblen Saw

The now commonplace phrase “leisure class” was Veblen’s invention and he was careful to define it: “The term ‘leisure,’ as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.”

Veblen observed a world in which that leisure class, looking down its collective nose at the laboring masses, was all around him, but he saw evidence of something else as well. His anthropological studies revealed earlier cooperative, peaceable cultures that had supported no such idle class at all. In them, men and women had labored together, motivated by an instinctive pride in workmanship, a natural desire to emulate the best workers, and a deep parental concern — a parental bent he called it — for the welfare of future generations. As the child of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen himself had grown up on a Minnesota farm in the midst of a close-knit Norwegian-speaking community. He knew what just such a cooperative culture was like and what was possible, even in a gilded (and deeply impoverished) world.

But anthropology also recorded all too many class-ridden societies that saved upper-class men for the “honourable employments”: governance, warfare, priestly office, or sports.  Veblen noted that such arrangements elicited aggressive, dominant behavior that, over time, caused societies to change for the worse. Indeed, those aggressive upper-class men soon discovered the special pleasure that lay in taking whatever they wanted by “seizure,” as Veblen termed it. Such an aggressive way of living and acting, in turn, became the definition of manly “prowess,” admired even by the working class subjected by it. By contrast, actual work — the laborious production of the goods needed by society — was devalued. As Veblen put it, “The obtaining [of goods] by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate.” It seems that more than a century ago, the dominant men of the previous Gilded Age were, like our president, already spinning their own publicity.

A scientific Darwinian, Veblen saw that such changes developed gradually from alterations in the material circumstances of life. New technology, he understood, sped up industrialization, which in turn attracted those men of the leisure class, always on the lookout for the next thing of value to seize and make their own. When “industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for,” Veblen wrote, the watchful men struck like birds of prey.

Such constant “predation,” he suggested, soon became the “habitual, conventional resource” of the parasitical class. In this way, a more peaceable, communal existence had evolved into the grim, combative industrial age in which he found himself: an age shadowed by predators seeking only profits and power, and putting down any workers who tried to stand up for themselves. To Veblen this change was not merely “mechanical.” It was a spiritual transformation.

The Conspicuous Class

Classical economists from Adam Smith on typically depicted economic man as a rational creature, acting circumspectly in his own self-interest. In Veblen’s work, however, the only men — and they were all men then — acting that way were those robber barons, admired for their “prowess” by the very working-class guys they preyed upon. (Think of President Trump and his besotted MAGA-hatted followers.) Veblen’s lowly workers still seemed to be impelled by the “instinct for emulation.” They didn’t want to overthrow the leisure class.  They wanted to climb up into it.

For their part, the leisured gents asserted their superiority by making a public show of their leisure or, as Veblen put it, their “conspicuous abstention from labour.” To play golf, for example, as The Donald has spent much of his presidency doing, became at once “the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement” and “the conventional index of reputability.” After all, he wrote, “the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.” In Donald Trump’s version of the same, he displayed his penchant for “conspicuous consumption” by making himself the owner of a global chain of golf courses where he performs his “conspicuous leisure” by cheating up a storm and carrying what Veblen called a “conspicuous abstention from labour” to particularly enviable heights.

Veblen devoted 14 chapters of The Theory of the Leisure Class to analyzing every aspect of the life of the plutocrat living in a gilded world and the woman who accompanied him on his conspicuous outings, elaborately packaged in constricting clothing, crippling high heels, and “excessively long hair,” to indicate just how unfit she was for work and how much she was “still the man’s chattel.” Such women, he wrote, were “servants to whom, in the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office of putting in evidence their master’s ability to pay.” (Think POTUS again and whomever he once displayed with a certain possessive pride only to pay hush money to thereafter.)

And all of that’s only from chapter seven, “Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” Today, each of those now-century-old chapters remains a still-applicable little masterpiece of observation, insight, and audacity, though it was probably the 14th and last chapter that got him fired from Rockefeller’s university: “The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” How timely is that?

The (Re)tardiness of Conservatives

As both an evolutionary and an institutional economist (two fields he originated), Veblen contended that our habits of thought and our institutions must necessarily “change with changing circumstances.” Unfortunately, they often seem anchored in place instead, bound by the social and psychological inertia of conservatism. But why should that be so?

Veblen had a simple answer. The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives.” That (re)tardiness — that time lag imposed by conservative complacency — stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport — you know the lengthening list today.)

Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were — and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump — as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.

Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:

“It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”

And privation always stands as an obstacle to innovation and change. In this way, the industrial, technological, and social progress of the whole society is retarded or perhaps even thrown into reverse. Such are the self-perpetuating effects of the unequal distribution of wealth. And reader take note: the leisure class brings about these results on purpose.

The Demolition of Democracy

But how, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had America’s great experiment in democracy come to this? In his 1904 book The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen zoomed in for a close up of America’s most influential man: “the Business Man.” To classical economists, this enterprising fellow was a generator of economic progress. To Veblen, he was “the Predator” personified: the man who invests in industry, any industry, simply to extract profits from it. Veblen saw that such predators created nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing of economic significance but seize profits.

Of course, Veblen, who could build a house with his own hands, imagined a working world free of such predators. He envisioned an innovative industrial world in which the labor of producing goods would be performed by machines tended by technicians and engineers. In the advanced factories of his mind’s eye, there was no role, no place at all, for the predatory Business Man. Yet Veblen also knew that the natural-born predator of Gilded Age America was already creating a kind of scaffolding of financial transactions above and beyond the factory floor — a lattice of loans, credits, capitalizations, and the like — so that he could then take advantage of the “disruptions” of production caused by such encumbrances to seize yet more profits. In a pinch, the predator was, as Veblen saw it, always ready to go further, to throw a wrench into the works, to move into the role of outright “Saboteur.”

Here Veblen’s image of the predatory characters who dominated his Gilded Age runs up against the far glossier, more gilded image of the entrepreneurial executive hailed by most economists and business boosters of his time and ours. Yet in book after book, he continued to strip the gilded cloaks from America’s tycoons, leaving them naked on the factory floor, with one hand jamming the machinery of American life and the other in the till.

Today, in our Second Even-Glitzier Gilded Age, with a Veblen Moment come round again, his conclusions seem self-evident. In fact, his predators pale beside a single image that he himself might have found incredible, the image of three hallowed multi-billionaires of our own Veblen Moment who hold more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans.

The Rise of the Predatory State

Why, then, when Veblen saw America’s plutocratic bent so clearly, is he now neglected? Better to ask, who among America’s moguls wouldn’t want to suppress such a clear-eyed genius? Economist James K. Galbraith suggests that Veblen was eclipsed by the Cold War, which offered only two alternatives, communism or capitalism — with America’s largely unfettered capitalist system presenting itself as a “conservative” norm and not what it actually was and remains: the extreme and cruel antithesis of communism.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, it left only one alternative: the triumphant fantasy of the “free market.” What survived, in other words, was only the post-Veblen economics of John D. Rockefeller’s university: the “free market” doctrines of Milton Friedman, founder of the brand of economics popular among conservatives and businessmen and known as the Chicago School.

Ever since, America has once again been gripped by the heavy hands of the predators and of the legislators they buy. Veblen’s leisure class is now eclipsed by those even richer than rich, the top 1% of the 1%, a celestial crew even more remote from the productive labor of working men and women than were those nineteenth-century robber barons. For decades now, from the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in the 1990s to the militarized world of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the self-proclaimed billionaire con man now in the Oval Office, the plutocrats have continued to shower their dark money on the legislative process. Their only frustration: that the left-over reforms of Veblen’s own “Progressive Era” and those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal still somehow stand (though for how long no one knows).

As Galbraith pointed out in his 2008 book The Predator State, the frustrated predators of the twenty-first century sneakily changed tactics: they aimed to capture the government themselves, to become the state. And so they have. In the Trump era, they have created a government in which current regulators are former lobbyists for the very predators they are supposed to restrain. Similarly, the members of Trump’s cabinet are now the saboteurs: shrinking the State Department, starving public schools, feeding big Pharma with Medicare funds, handing over national parks and public lands to “developers,” and denying science and climate change altogether, just to start down a long list. Meanwhile, our Predator President, when not golfing, leaps about the deconstruction site, waving his hands and hurling abuse, a baron of distraction, commanding attention while the backroom boys (and girls) demolish the institutions of law and democracy.

Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary who believed that no one could foresee the future, nonetheless felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart. He went on teaching at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and then the New School for Social Research, and writing a raft of brilliant articles and eight more books. Among them, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1920) may be the best summation of his once astonishing and now essential views. He died at the age of 72 in August 1929. Two months later, the financial scaffolding collapsed and the whole predatory system came crashing down.

To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that the Predators and Saboteurs, collaborating as they did even then with politicians and government lackeys, would increasingly amass more profits, more power, more adulation from the men of the working class, until one day, when those very plutocrats actually captured the government and owned the state, a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator. He would then preside over a new and more powerful regime and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism.

Michael Avenatti Charged With Embezzlement, Bank and Tax Fraud

LOS ANGELES — Attorney Michael Avenatti has been charged in a 36-count federal indictment alleging he stole millions of dollars from clients, did not pay his taxes, committed bank fraud and lied in bankruptcy proceedings.

Avenatti, 48, was indicted late Wednesday by a Southern California grand jury on a raft of additional charges following his arrest last month in New York on two related counts and for allegedly trying to shake down Nike for up to $25 million.

The attorney best known for representing porn actress Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump said Thursday on Twitter that he will plead not guilty to the California charges.

“I look forward to the entire truth being known as opposed to a one-sided version meant to sideline me,” he wrote.

The new charges do not include the New York extortion case alleging Avenatti demanded millions to stay quiet about claims he planned to reveal about Nike paying high school players. Avenatti has said he expects to be cleared in that case.

The 61-page Southern California indictment alleges Avenatti embezzled from a paraplegic man and four other clients and deceived them by shuffling money between accounts to pay off small portions of what they were due to lull them into thinking they were getting paid.

Avenatti, 48, is also charged with not paying personal income taxes, not paying taxes for his various businesses, including two law firms, and pocketing payroll taxes from the Tully’s Coffee chain that he owned, the indictment said.

Between September 2015 and January 2018, Global Baristas US, the company that operated Tully’s, failed to pay the Internal Revenue Service $3.2 million in payroll taxes, including nearly $2.4 million withheld from employees, the indictment said.

When the IRS put tax levies on coffee company bank accounts to collect more than $5 million, Avenatti had Tully’s employees deposit cash receipts in a little-known account, the indictment said.

Avenatti was also charged with submitting fraudulent tax returns to get more than $4 million in loans from The Peoples Bank in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2014. The tax returns he presented to the bank were never filed to the IRS, prosecutors have said.

The charges are the latest major blow to a career that took off last year when Avenatti represented Daniels in her lawsuit to break a confidentiality agreement with Trump to stay mum about an affair they allegedly had.

Avenatti became one of Trump’s leading adversaries, attacking him on cable news programs and Twitter. At one point, Avenatti even considered challenging Trump in 2020.

But back home, his business practices had come under scrutiny from the IRS and a former law partner who was owed $14 million by Avenatti and the Eagan Avenatti firm, which filed for bankruptcy.

The indictment said Avenatti made false statements in bankruptcy proceedings by submitting forms under penalty of perjury that under reported income his firm received.

The most glaring example of deception and fraud was described in the indictment as scheming Avenatti allegedly did to deprive clients of money they were due from legal settlements or sales of stock and the actions he took to cover his tracks.

In a case involving one client, Avenatti allegedly funneled a $2.75 million settlement into his bank accounts and spent $2.5 million on a private airplane, the indictment said.

Although Avenatti was due a portion of settlement funds for his work, the charges said he paid only a fraction of the money clients were due in some cases and strung them along while they waited to be paid.

Avenatti allegedly drained a $4 million settlement he negotiated in 2015 on behalf of Geoffrey Johnson, who was paralyzed after trying to kill himself in the Los Angeles County jail, the indictment said. Johnson was referred to as “Client 1” in the indictment, but was named at a recent court hearing involving the money Avenatti was ordered to pay his former partner.

Until last month, Avenatti had only provided $124,000 over 69 payments to Johnson, the indictment said.

Two years after the settlement was reached, Avenatti allegedly helped Johnson find a real estate agent to buy a house. But when Johnson was in escrow to purchase the property, Avenatti falsely said he had not received the settlement funds, the indictment said.

In November, when the U.S. Social Security Administration requested information to determine if Johnson should continue to receive disability benefits, Avenatti said he would respond, but didn’t because he knew it could lead to the discovery of his embezzlement, the indictment said. The failure to respond led to Johnson’s disability benefits being cut off in February.

After Avenatti was questioned about the alleged embezzlement during a judgment-debtor examination in federal court March 22, the indictment said he fabricated a defense for himself.

Avenatti had Johnson sign a document a day or two later saying he was satisfied with his representation, which the lawyer told him was necessary to get the settlement that had in fact been paid four years earlier, the indictment said.

When asked by The Associated Press last month about Johnson’s case, Avenatti said his client approved all transactions and accounting and had been kept in the loop.

“He has repeatedly thanked me for my dedication to his case and the ethics I have employed,” Avenatti wrote in an email response.

Sudan’s Military Overthrows President Amid Bloody Protests

CAIRO — Sudan’s military overthrew President Omar al-Bashir on Thursday amid increasingly bloody protests over his repressive 30-year rule and the deteriorating economy. But pro-democracy demonstrators were left angry and disappointed when the defense minister announced the armed forces will govern for the next two years.

Al-Bashir’s fall came just over a week after protests in Algeria forced the resignation of that North African country’s long-ruling, military-backed president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Together, the developments represent a second generation of street protests eight years after the Arab Spring uprisings that ousted a number of long-entrenched leaders around the Middle East.

But like those popular movements of 2011, the new ones face a similar dynamic — a struggle over the aftermath of an autocrat’s removal.

Protest organizers in Sudan quickly denounced the army’s takeover and vowed to continue rallies until a civilian transitional government is formed, raising the possibility of a clash with the military. Tens of thousands of demonstrators were massed at a sit-in they have held for nearly a week outside the military’s headquarters in central Khartoum, the capital.

After the televised announcement of al-Bashir’s arrest by Defense Minister Awad Mohammed Ibn Ouf — who is himself under U.S. sanctions for links to atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur conflict — many protesters chanted angrily, “The first one fell, the second will, too.” Some shouted, “They removed a thief and brought in a thief!”

Ibn Ouf said a military council that will be formed by the army, intelligence agencies and security apparatus will rule for two years, after which “free and fair elections” will take place.

He also announced that the military had suspended the constitution, dissolved the government, declared a state of emergency for three months, closed the country’s borders and airspace and imposed a curfew for one month.

Al-Bashir, whose whereabouts were not immediately known, came to power in a coup of his own in 1989, backed by the military and Islamist hard-liners. He kept an iron grip on power and brutally suppressed any opposition, while monopolizing the economy through allied businessmen.

Over his three decades in control, he was forced to allow the secession of South Sudan after years of war, a huge blow to the north’s economy. He became notorious for a deadly crackdown on insurgents in the Darfur region that made him an international pariah, wanted on genocide charges. The U.S. targeted his government repeatedly with sanctions and airstrikes for his support of Islamic militant groups.

Throughout, he was a swaggering figure known to dance with his cane in front of cheering crowds.

The street protests that erupted in December were met with crackdowns by the government that left dozens of people dead and eventually turned the military leadership against al-Bashir. Several times in the past week, Army troops trying to protect the rallies exchanged fire with security forces.

The protests were initially fueled by anger over the deteriorating economy but quickly turned to demands for the president’s ouster, and gained momentum last week after Bouteflika’s resignation in Algeria.

Word of al-Bashir’s removal emerged in the morning, when state TV announced that the military was about to make an “important statement,” and two high-ranking officials told The Associated Press that al-Bashir had been ousted. That prompted thousands of protesters to march toward the center of Khartoum, cheering, singing and dancing in celebration.

The announcement finally came hours later, from ibn Ouf, a key power figure in al-Bashir’s regime.

“I, the defense minister, the head of the Supreme Security Committee, announce the uprooting of this regime and the seizing of its head, after detaining him in a safe place,” he said.

He denounced al-Bashir’s government for “bad administration, systemic corruption, absence of justice,” adding: The poor became poorer and the rich became richer. Hope in equality has been lost.” He also said al-Bashir’s crackdown against protesters risked splitting the security establishment and “could cause grave casualties.”

Mariam al-Mahdi, a leading member of the opposition Umma, called the military’s takeover “a dangerous move.”

“Our demands are clear: We don’t want to replace a coup with a coup,” al-Mahdi said.

The protest movement has been a mix of young activists, students, professional unions and traditional opposition parties.

Security forces came down hard from the start, using tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition and batons. Al-Bashir banned unauthorized public gatherings and granted sweeping powers to the police after imposing a state of emergency last month.

After Bouteflika’s fall, the Khartoum protesters launched the sit-in, and the crackdown grew bloodier, with at least 22 people killed since Saturday.

Edward Snowden Leads Chorus Condemning Assange’s Arrest

Edward Snowden joined the chorus of advocacy groups, reporters, and critics as the NSA whistleblower described the arrest of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange Thursday morning as a “dark moment for press freedom” that could have grave implications for journalism across the globe.

“Images of Ecuador’s ambassador inviting the U.K.’s secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of—like it or not—award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books,” Snowden tweeted.

Assange’s arrest comes amid concerns that British authorities could be planning to extradite him to the United States.

The U.K. police confirmed that Assange was arrested in part due to “an extradition warrant on behalf of the United States authorities.”

US did not waste any time putting in extradition request for Assange. Terrible precedent if journalist/publisher ends up in US jail for Iraq war logs and state department cables.

— Ewen MacAskill (@ewenmacaskill) April 11, 2019

“If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a U.S. extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs and punish [WikiLeaks] for exposing war crimes,” tweeted The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald.

If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish WL for exposing war crimes.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2019

This is Assange’s lawyer, confirming he was arrested not just for bail-jumping in the UK (a minor offense) but also on a US extradition warrant issued by Trump DOJ in 2017 alleging a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning: it’s about pre-2016 publication of docs https://t.co/KNnNpZAGBA

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2019

“All of us in the press should read the charges made against Assange very carefully,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, “as this case has enormous potential ramifications for journalists everywhere.”

Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, called the arrest “an extremely dangerous crossing of the rubicon” when it comes to press freedoms. “All journalists,” he said, “should stand in fierce opposition.”

The continued imprisonment of @xychelsea is an utter disgrace. The arrest of Julian Assange represents an extremely dangerous crossing of the rubicon. This is an assault on journalism and a free press. All journalists should stand in fierce opposition.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) April 11, 2019

As Common Dreams reported last November, the Trump Justice Department accidentally revealed in an unrelated court filing that it has secretly charged Assange.

“Wikileaks material from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has become a unique, invaluable resource for investigative journalists and scholars around the world,” the U.K.-based Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) said in a statement Thursday.

“Whatever your view of its philosophy of radical transparency, Wikileaks is a publisher,” CIJ added. “Any charges now brought in connection with that material, or any attempt to extradite Mr. Assange to the United States for prosecution under the deeply flawed cudgel of the Espionage Act 1917, is an attack on all of us. Mr. Assange deserves the solidarity of the community of investigative journalists. The world is now watching.”

Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, warned in a statement that “prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for WikiLeaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations.”

“Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest,” Wizner added.

Journalists were quick to point out that major establishment newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post frequently publish classified information. Prosecuting Assange for doing the same, critics argued, would set an extraordinarily dangerous precedent.

This is the question, and the answer is clear: Publishers have a right to publish information in the public interest, period. If you follow this logic from Neera, the New York Times is criminal (and so am I, but I doubt that helps my case) https://t.co/yssBBs2lEV

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 11, 2019

In an editorial just two days ago, the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper made clear that while Assange may have some charges to answer for there is simply no defensible reason for the British government to extradite him to the U.S. to face a sealed indictment over his work as a journalist and publisher:

From first to last, the Assange case is a morally tangled web. He believes in publishing things that should not always be published—this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him. But he has also shone a light on things that should never have been hidden. When he first entered the Ecuadorian embassy he was trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and molestation. That was wrong. But those cases have now been closed. He still faces the English courts for skipping bail. If he leaves the embassy, and is arrested, he should answer for that, perhaps in ways that might result in deportation to his own country, Australia. Nothing about this is easy, least of all Mr. Assange himself. But when the call comes from Washington, it requires a firm and principled no. It would neither be safe nor right for the U.K. to extradite Mr. Assange to Mr Trump’s America.

Assange is reportedly set to appear in court as early as Thursday afternoon, according to WikiLeaks.

As he was being carried to a police van by British authorities Thursday morning, Assange shouted, “Resist this attempt by the Trump administration.”

Julian Assange Arrested at Ecuador Embassy in London

LONDON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was forcibly bundled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and into a waiting British police van on Thursday, setting up a potential court battle over attempts to extradite him to the U.S. to face charges related to the publication of tens of thousands of secret government documents.

British police arrested Assange after the South American nation decided to revoke the political asylum that had given Assange sanctuary for almost seven years. Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he took the action due to “repeated violations to international conventions and daily life.”

“The discourteous and aggressive behavior of Mr. Julian Assange, the hostile and threatening declarations of its allied organization, against Ecuador, and especially the transgression of international treaties, have led the situation to a point where the asylum of Mr. Assange is unsustainable and no longer viable,” Moreno said in a video released on Twitter.

Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail in Britain while facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations that have since been dropped.

But he has been under U.S. Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks’ role in publishing thousands of government secrets. He was an important figure in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe as investigators examined how WikiLeaks obtained emails that were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Democratic groups.

Assange had not come out of the embassy for almost seven years because he feared arrest and extradition to the United States for publishing classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks. Although Sweden has dropped the sexual assault case that first led to Assange’s arrest in Britain, U.K. authorities said he would be rearrested if he ever left the embassy because he skipped bail in the original case.

Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have also inadvertently disclosed the existence of a sealed criminal complaint against Assange, although no details have been publicly announced.

In Washington, a U.S. official said the Justice Department was preparing to announce charges against Assange. The official spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because no charges have yet been announced.

The exact nature of the charges was not immediately known.

Video posted online by Ruptly, a news service of Russia Today, showed several men in suits around Assange, pulling him out of the embassy building and loading him into a police van while uniformed British police officers formed a passageway. Assange sported a full beard and slicked-back grey hair.

Police said Assange had been arrested for breaching his bail conditions in Britain and in relation to a U.S. request.

WikiLeaks quickly drew attention to U.S. interest in Assange and said that Ecuador illegally terminated Assange’s political asylum “in violation of international law.”

“Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to de-humanise, de-legitimize and imprison him,” the group said in a tweet over a photo of Assange’s smiling face.

But Moreno appeared to suggest that a swift extradition to America was not likely.

“In line with our strong commitment to human rights and international law, I requested Great Britain to guarantee that Mr. Assange would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty,” Moreno said. “The British government has confirmed it in writing, in accordance with its own rules.”

Assange’s arrest came a day after WikiLeaks accused the Ecuador’s government of an “extensive spying operation” against him. WikiLeaks claims that meetings with lawyers and a doctor inside the embassy over the past year were secretly filmed.

In Quito, Ecuador’s government accused supporters of WikiLeaks and two Russian hackers of attempting to destabilize their country as its standoff with Assange intensified in recent weeks.

Ecuador Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo said a close collaborator of WikiLeaks had traveled with former Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino this year to several countries, including Peru, Spain and Venezuela, in an attempt to undermine the Ecuadorian government. She did not identify the person but said their name, as well as two Russian hackers working in Ecuador, would be turned over to judicial authorities.

She also said Ecuador’s embassy in Spain and other diplomatic missions abroad have received threats.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt thanked Moreno for breaking the impasse over the WikiLeaks founder, saying on Twitter that Assange “is no hero and no one is above the law.”