Chris Hedges's Blog, page 293

Ukraine Presidential Vote Begins Under Bribe Claim Cloud

KIEV, Ukraine — Voters in Ukraine are casting ballots in a presidential election Sunday after a campaign that produced a comedian with no political experience as the front-runner and allegations of voter bribery.

Opinion polls have shown Volodymyr Zelenskiy who stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral, leading a field of 39 candidates. The polls also had Zelenskiy outpacing incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the other top candidates, by a broad margin.

“Zelenskiy has shown us on the screen what a real president should be like,” voter Tatiana Zinchenko, 30, who cast her ballot for the comedian, said. “He showed what the state leader should aspire for — fight corruption by deeds, not words, help the poor, control the oligarchs.”

If no candidate secures an absolute majority of Sunday’s vote, a runoff between the two top finishers would be held April 21.

Concern about the election’s legitimacy spiked in recent days after the interior minister said his department was “showered” with hundreds of claims that supporters of Poroshenko and Tymoshenko offered money in exchange for votes.

Campaign issues included endemic corruption in Ukraine, the struggling economy and a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east of the country of 42 million people.

Like the popular character he plays, Zelenskiy, 41, made corruption a focus of his candidacy. He proposed a lifetime ban on holding public office for anyone convicted of graft. He also called for direct negotiations with Russia on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

“A new life, a normal life is starting,” Zelenskiy said after casting his ballot in Kiev. “A life without corruption, without bribes.”

His lack of political experience helped his popularity with voters amid broad disillusionment with the current generation of politicians.

“There is no trust in old politicians. They were at the helm, and the situation in the country has only got worse — corruption runs amok and the war is continuing,” businessman Valery Ostrozhsky, 66, another Zelenskiy voter, said.

Poroshenko, 53, who was a confectionary tycoon when he was elected five years ago, pushed successfully for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be recognized as self-standing rather than a branch of the Russian church.

However, he saw citizen approval of his governing sink amid Ukraine’s economic woes and a sharp plunge in living standards. Poroshenko campaigned on promises to defeat the rebels in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 in a move that Ukraine and almost all the world views as illegal.

Speaking at a polling station Sunday, the president echoed his campaign promises of taking Ukraine into the European Union and NATO. He said holding a fair and free election was “a necessary condition for our movement forward, to Ukraine’s return to the European family of nations,” and was confident about the balloting despite the bribery allegations.

“I’m sure that the election was well-organized,” Poroshenko said. “The expression of the will of the citizens will be protected.”

The president’s priorities persuaded schoolteacher Andriy Hristenko, 46, to vote for his re-election.

“Poroshenko has done a lot. He created our own church, bravely fought with Moscow and is trying to open the way to the EU and NATO,” Hristenko said.

The former prime minister, Tymoshenko, shaped her message around the economic distress of millions of Ukrainians.

“Ukraine has sunk into poverty and corruption during the last five years, but every Ukrainian can put an end to it now,” she said after voting.

During the campaign, Tymoshenko denounced price hikes introduced by Poroshenko as “economic genocide” and promised to reduce prices for household gas by 50 percent within a month of taking office.

“I don’t need a bright future in 50 years,” Olha Suhiy, a 58-year old cook. “I want hot water and heating to cost less tomorrow.”

A military embezzlement scheme that allegedly involved top Poroshenko’s associates and a factory controlled by the president dogged Poroshenko ahead of the election. Ultra-right activists shadowed him throughout the campaign, demanding the jailing of the president’s associates accused of involvement in the scheme.

Zelenskiy and Tymoshenko both used the alleged embezzlement to take hits at Poroshenko, who shot back at his rivals. He described them as puppets of a self-exiled billionaire businessman Igor Kolomoyskyi, which Zelenskiy and Tymoshenko denied.

However, many political observers described the presidential election as a battle between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskyi, who was on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires with a net worth of $1.3 billion in 2014 before dropping off the following year.

Both the president and Kolomoyskyi relied on an arsenal of media outlets under their control to exchange blows. Just days before the election, the TV channel Kolomoyskyi owns aired a new season of the “Servant of the People” TV series in which Zelenskiy stars as Ukraine’s leader.

“Kolomoyskyi has succeeded in creating a wide front against Poroshenko,” said Vadim Karasyov, head of the Institute of Global Strategies, an independent Kiev-based think tank. “Ukraine has gone through two revolutions, but ended up with the same thing — the fight between the oligarchs for the power and resources.”

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Mstyslav Chernov in Kiev, Ukraine and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Trump Seeks to Cut Foreign Aid to 3 Central American Nations

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Taking drastic action over illegal immigration, President Donald Trump moved Saturday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources at the southern border.

The State Department notified Congress that it would look to suspend 2017 and 2018 payments to the trio of nations, which have been home to some of the migrant caravans that have marched through Mexico to the U.S. border.

Amplified by conservative media, Trump has turned the caravans into the symbol of what he says are the dangers of illegal immigration — a central theme of his midterm campaigning last fall. With the special counsel’s Russia probe seemingly behind him, Trump has revived his warnings of the caravans’ presence.

Trump also has returned to a previous threat he never carried out — closing the border with Mexico. He brought up that possibility on Friday and revisited it in tweets Saturday, blaming Democrats and Mexico for problems at the border and beyond despite warnings that a closed border could create economic havoc on both sides.

“It would be so easy to fix our weak and very stupid Democrat inspired immigration laws,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “In less than one hour, and then a vote, the problem would be solved. But the Dems don’t care about the crime, they don’t want any victory for Trump and the Republicans, even if good for USA!’

As far as Mexico’s role, he tweeted: “Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico!”

When reporters asked Trump on Friday what closing the border could entail, he said “it could mean all trade” with Mexico and added, “We will close it for a long time.”

Trump has been promising for more than two years to build a long, impenetrable wall along the border to stop illegal immigration, though Congress has been reluctant to provide the money he needs. In the meantime, he has repeatedly threatened to close the border, but this time, with a new group of migrants heading north, he gave a definite timetable and suggested a visit to the border within the next two weeks.

A substantial closure could have an especially heavy impact on cross-border communities from San Diego to South Texas, as well as supermarkets that sell Mexican produce, factories that rely on imported parts, and other businesses across the U.S.

The U.S. and Mexico trade about $1.7 billion in goods daily, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said closing the border would be “an unmitigated economic debacle” that would threaten 5 million American jobs.

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke out Saturday against cutting off aid to Central America, declaring that “foreign assistance is not charity; it advances our strategic interests and funds initiatives that protect American citizens.”

And a group of House Democrats visiting El Salvador denounced the administration’s decision to cut aid to the region.

“As we visit El Salvador evaluating the importance of U.S. assistance to Central America to address the root causes of family and child migration, we are extremely disappointed to learn that President Trump intends to cut off aid to the region,” said the statement from five lawmakers, including Rep. Eliot L. Engel of New York, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The President’s approach is entirely counterproductive.”

The Trump administration has threatened before to scale back or cut off U.S. assistance to Central America. Congress has not approved most of those proposed cuts, however, and a report this year by the Congressional Research Service said any change in that funding would depend on what Congress does.

Short of a widespread border shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the U.S. might close designated ports of entry to re-deploy staff to help process parents and children. Ports of entry are official crossing points that are used by residents and commercial vehicles. Many people who cross the border illegally ultimately request asylum under U.S. law, which does not require asylum seekers to enter at an official crossing.

Border officials are also planning to more than quadruple the number of asylum seekers sent back over the border to wait out their immigration cases, said an administration official. The official said right now about 60 migrants per day are returned and officials are hoping to send as many as 300 per day. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about internal plans and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Friday his country was doing its part to fight migrant smuggling. Criminal networks charge thousands of dollars a person to move migrants through Mexico, increasingly in large groups toward remote sections of the border.

“We want to have a good relationship with the government of the United States,” Lopez Obrador said. He added: “We are going to continue helping so that the migratory flow, those who pass through our country, do so according to the law, in an orderly way.”

Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, tweeted that his country “doesn’t act based on threats” and is “the best neighbor” the U.S. could have.

Alejandra Mier y Teran, executive director of the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce in San Diego, said the mere threat of border closures sends the wrong message to businesses in Mexico and may eventually scare companies into turning to Asia for their supply chains.

“I think the impact would be absolutely devastating on so many fronts,” said Mier y Teran, whose members rely on the Otay Mesa crossing to bring televisions, medical devices and a wide range of products to the U.S. “In terms of a long-term effect, it’s basically shooting yourself in your foot. It’s sending out a message to other countries that, ‘Don’t come because our borders may not work at any time.’ That is extremely scary and dangerous.”

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Merchant reported from Houston, Lucey from Washington. Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Mexico City, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Colleen Long, Catherine Lucey and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Judge Restores Obama-Era Drilling Ban in Arctic

President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean, a U.S. judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.

Judge Sharon Gleason in a decision late Friday threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.

Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated to the bench by Obama.

A message left Saturday for the Department of Justice was not immediately returned.

The American Petroleum Institute, a defendant in the case, disagreed with the ruling.

“In addition to bringing supplies of affordable energy to consumers for decades to come, developing our abundant offshore resources can provide billions in government revenue, create thousands of jobs and will also strengthen our national security,” it said in a statement.

Eric Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, welcomed the ruling, saying it “shows that the president cannot just trample on the Constitution to do the bidding of his cronies in the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our oceans, wildlife and climate.”

Earthjustice represented numerous environmental groups that sued the Trump administration over the April 2017 executive order reversing the drilling bans. At issue in the case was the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Wood said during a hearing before Gleason in November that environmental groups were misinterpreting the intent of the law written in 1953. He said it is meant to be flexible and sensible and not intended to bind one president with decisions made by another when determining offshore stewardship as needs and realities change over time.

In 2015, Obama halted exploration in coastal areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas and the Hanna Shoal, an important area for walrus. In late 2016, he withdrew most other potential Arctic Ocean lease areas — about 98 percent of the Arctic outer continental shelf.

The bans were intended to protect polar bears, walruses, ice seals and Alaska Native villages that depend on the animals.

In the Atlantic, Obama banned exploration in 5,937 square miles (15,377 square kilometers) of underwater canyon complexes, citing their importance for marine mammals, deep-water corals, valuable fish populations and migratory whales.

Thousands Rally in Gaza but Hamas Mostly Restrains Crowds

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip—Tens of thousands of Palestinians rallied in the Gaza Strip on Saturday to mark the first anniversary of their mass protests along the Israeli border, as the territory’s Hamas leaders largely restrained the crowds ahead of a hoped-for cease-fire deal.

Demonstrators largely kept their distance from the border, though small crowds of activists approached the perimeter fence and threw stones and explosives toward Israeli troops on the other side. The forces responded with tear gas and opened fire, killing two Palestinians and wounding 64.Hamas had pledged to keep the crowds a safe distance from the fence as Egyptian mediators were working to cement a deal that Hamas hopes will ease a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the crowded territory. Hamas officials say that Israel is offering a package of economic incentives in exchange for calm along the volatile border.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said the group had received “positive signs” from the Egyptians. He added that the Egyptian team was to return to Israel on Sunday to continue the talks. “We will continue our marches until all our goals are achieved,” he said.

Saturday’s protest comes at a sensitive time, with Israel and Hamas, bitter enemies that have fought three wars and dozens of smaller skirmishes, both having a strong interest in keeping things quiet.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking his fourth consecutive term in April 9 elections, but is facing a serious challenge from a group of ex-army chiefs who have criticized what they say is his failed Gaza policy. With a lack of alternatives, Netanyahu has been forced at times to rely on Hamas to maintain stability along Israel’s volatile southern front.

In the final stretch of the campaign, Netanyahu needs to keep the Israel-Gaza frontier quiet, without seeming to make concessions to Hamas. Netanyahu took heavy criticism this week for what was seen as a soft response to renewed rocket fire out of Gaza.

Hamas, meanwhile, faces growing unrest in Gaza as a result of worsening conditions after more than a decade of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade. The two countries imposed the blockade in 2007 after Hamas, an Islamic militant group that seeks Israel’s destruction, seized control of Gaza from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority.

The blockade has helped drive unemployment over 50 percent, led to chronic power outages and made it extremely difficult for Gazans to travel out of the territory.

Earlier this month, Hamas violently suppressed several days of public protests, staged under the slogan “We want to live,” over the dire conditions.

Speaking on the group’s Al-Aqsa TV station, Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Yehya Sinwar, praised the protesters. “With this big turnout, our people say, ‘We want to live!”

His use of the protesters’ slogan appeared to be aimed at diverting the recent criticism of his group. Hamas blames the blockade and punitive measures by its West Bank-based Palestinian Authority for worsening the living conditions.

The fence protests, which began exactly a year ago, have been aimed in large part at breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on Gaza, but haven’t delivered major improvements.

Saturday’s demonstrations were held at five rallying points along the border with Israel. Dozens of volunteers in fluorescent vests were deployed to restrain demonstrators, and cool rainy weather also appeared to affect enthusiasm.

But as the crowds swelled throughout the afternoon in response to Hamas’ calls for a large turnout, dozens of protesters approached the fence, unfurling Palestinian flags and throwing rocks and explosives toward Israeli soldiers. The Israeli forces responded with tear gas and live fire.

The Israeli military estimated 40,000 Palestinians were gathered at the marches.

“The rioters are hurling rocks and setting tires on fire. In addition, a number of grenades and explosive devices have been hurled at the Gaza Strip security fence,” it said in a statement.

In a statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu praised the army’s preparation and performance in maintaining “calm.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry said that a 17-year-old protester died immediately after being shot in the face in east Gaza City. In the evening, the ministry said another 17-year-old died hours after being shot in the chest in a different protest location.

While bloodshed was not avoided, it was far less than previous high-profile protests. Over 60 people were killed during intense protests on May 14, the day the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem.

As Saturday’s protest was winding down, organizers vowed to continue the marches and said they would gather again as usual next Friday.

The military released video footage showing large crowds of protesters gathered near the fence and hurling objects.

In one scene, a group of activists went up to the fence and hurled stones at the other side. In another scene, a youth could be seen trying to pull apart barbed wire along the fence.

The army also said it caught two young Palestinian children who had tried to cross the border with a knife. The children were returned to Gaza through a border crossing.

Earlier on Saturday, Gaza health officials said Israeli troops shot and killed a 21-year-old Palestinian man near the perimeter fence, hours before the mass rally.

The army said about 200 Palestinians “rioted during the night along the fence” and that the army used riot dispersal means against them.

The marches near were initially organized by grassroots activists who were calling for a mass return to ancestral homes in what is now Israel.

Hamas quickly took the lead in the protests, using the gatherings to call for an easing of the blockade.

The border marches routinely ended in confrontations, with some of the Palestinian demonstrators burning tires, hurling fire bombs or setting off explosives and Israeli troops firing live rounds and tear gas.

According to a Gaza rights group and a count by The Associated Press, 196 Palestinians were killed in the demonstrations over the past year, including 41 minors, and thousands were wounded by live fire. An Israeli soldier was also killed in the context of the marches.

Israel says the army has been defending the border. The army accuses Hamas of using the large crowds as cover and encouraging demonstrators to hurl explosives, incendiary balloons and grenades across the border. But Israel has come under heavy international criticism for the large number of unarmed people who have been harmed.

Egypt has repeatedly tried to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, stepping up efforts in recent days after a Gaza rocket struck a house in central Israel earlier this week, injuring seven Israelis and threatening renewed escalation.

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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Sanders Bets Big on Medicare-for-All

The 2019-model Bernie Sanders has aged well, looking as spry as he did four years ago. His speeches are the same, too. But where they were once dismissed as too radical, they are now mainstream, clearly focusing on the ills of an America that has grown more inequitable since he last ran for president.

Those were my impressions when I joined about 12,000 others last week and heard him speak at Grand Park, a big grassy space across from Los Angeles City Hall.

The ability of his organization to build such a crowd in a city accused—wrongly—of political apathy was impressive. Almost a year shy of the California presidential primary, Sanders’ team had assembled an email network and social media connections, recruited and deployed dozens of volunteers, relentlessly contacted lists of potential supporters, and moved them into long lines, patiently waiting to enter the park.

“Not only are we going to win California, we are going to win the Democratic nomination,” Sanders shouted. But one rally does not make a campaign.

Beyond the park, as well as beyond the city limits, are the millions of victims of an economy and society growing progressively more unequal. Draw a circle around Grand Park on a map of metropolitan Los Angeles and it will encompass all the ills of an inequitable America. To the east is skid row, with streets crowded with homeless people. Farther east and south and west are crowded neighborhoods where immigrants and native-born share poverty and send their children to public schools unable to equip them to earn a living wage in a cutthroat, competitive, technically oriented world. Bad health, inadequate diets, a shortage of physicians and nurses and the need to work two or three jobs to survive add up to insurmountable barriers.

Extend the imaginary circle to the entire country, and it will include urban centers and the unemployed and underemployed residents of rural counties in the grips of the epidemic of drug deaths and suicide.

The coming election is about these people. Some are Trump voters, some are not. Among them are the many victims of the huge gap between the rich elite on top and the growing number of poor people.

I’ve always thought that health care is the issue that encompasses every aspect of this inequality, a belief that has been strengthened each time I visited a county hospital or a clinic. Without the certainty of care, millions are a step away from financial ruin and death. “For the third straight year, life expectancy in America is in decline,” Sanders said at the rally. “We are going to change that.”

During the event, I talked to people about health care. I approached two women, Sandy Reding and Rebecca Prediletto, who were wearing the red shirts of the California Nurses Association. Their union was a major force behind Sanders four years ago, embracing a concept then ridiculed by cautious Democratic mainstreamers: Medicare-for-all. Earlier in the week, Sanders had spoken at a nurses union rally at UCLA, where the nurses had staged a one-day walkout in support of members in other parts of the state.

This particular Saturday was the day before the revelation of the report giving President Trump so-called exoneration in the Russian investigation. But, as the Democratic victories in last year’s House elections showed, health care means more to voters than the president’s relations with the Russians. The following week, Trump, scorning the election results, moved to kill Obamacare.

“We’ve been on the ground canvassing for Medicare-for-all,” Reding said. Their reception, both nurses said, was much different than it was four years ago. “It’s the difference between night and day, ” she said. “These are people who come out after they have done their research. Medicare-for-all is the fire-starter, the catalyst.”

It is a catalyst because guaranteed medical care, as represented by Medicare-for-all, would bring about a great improvement in American life on many levels. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, has already made life better. I saw that when community health care clinics for the poor began to expand immediately after President Obama signed the law that will always be identified with him. Just a few weeks before, these clinics had feared closure or sharp reductions.

The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities estimates that 20 million Americans have gained coverage by receiving Affordable Care Act subsidies since Obamacare became law. That’s in addition to young people who have been added to the rolls, the new eligibility of those with pre-existing conditions and recipients of Medicaid.

Obama made major compromises to win approval for his proposal. This left defects in the program. His efforts to remedy them failed because of Republican opposition and Democratic inability to agree on a fix.

Improvements have been proposed by congressional Democrats. A simple cure would be to increase the subsidy, leaving in place Obamacare’s complex system of private insurance, public “marketplaces” and a variety of plans with different costs and benefits. Even simpler would be to eliminate private insurance, including employer plans, and provide health insurance through a single government plan. That’s Medicare-for-all.

It would be a federal government-administered program providing coverage to all U.S. residents. “Medicare-for-all would result in a major shift in the way in which health care is financed in the U.S.—away from households, employers and states to the federal government and taxpayers,” the Kaiser Family Foundation says.

This would be a revolution, now impossible to accomplish with Republicans in control of the presidency and the Senate. In addition, those with employer-provided insurance might be reluctant to give it up. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats favor a two-track approach, making fixes in Obamacare while fighting for Medicare-for-all. Sanders wants to go all the way as soon as possible.

Trump’s alternative is brutal. It’s hard to imagine the harm it would do the country if he succeeds in killing Obamacare. “More than eight years after enactment, ACA changes to the nation’s health system have become embedded and affect nearly everyone in some way,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The numbers of people who could lose coverage if Trump succeeds are staggering. It would return control of health insurance to the insurance business, famous in pre-Obamacare days for whom it would not cover.

The Kaiser Family Foundation says 17 million poor Americans could lose Medicaid coverage and 15 million others could lose ACA subsidies that now help pay for policies. The foundation says 52 million people have pre-existing conditions that are now covered by Obamacare but would not be included if it is repealed. Higher rates for women could return. Preventative services mandated by the ACA could be lost, including screening for breast, colon and cervical cancer and pregnancy-related services, such as contraception. The requirement for insurance companies to pay for essential services could be lost. Among these are mental health and substance abuse treatment. Such illnesses, experts say, are largely responsible for Americans’ decreasing life expectancy.

Think of all these numbers as human beings. It’s easy to forget about them with the news media transfixed on finding out whether Trump and his shady team tried to cover up electoral and business wrongdoings. But these potential victims of Obamacare repeal were heard during last year’s election, when they helped the Democrats win the House.

Four years ago, even two years ago, these concerns were not a major part of the political debate. Growing income equality changed that. The poor, as well as members of the working class and middle-class, white-collar sectors, find themselves in the same boat, too many of them in the gig economy, working part-time, one illness or injury away from disaster.

“The ideas we talked about were considered by mainstream politicians as much too radical,” Sanders said at the Grand Park rally. “Well, brothers and sisters, a funny thing happened in the last two years. … Now it is our job to complete the revolution.”

I don’t know whether Sanders can win. With so many Democratic candidates floating around, it’s too early to talk about that. But in a Los Angeles park, filled with supporters, Sanders no longer looked too radical—and his victory didn’t seem so improbable.

The Liberal Betrayal of America’s Most Vulnerable

It’s no secret that the U.S. incarcerates a shocking number of swaths of its own people, primarily the poor and people of color. With 2.3 million Americans currently being held in prisons, the country has the largest prison population in the world. But even as awareness of mass incarceration grows, two crucial questions remain at the heart of the debate on prison reform: Why does the U.S. imprison so many people, and how do we change our toxic approach? These are the issues Tony Platt, author of “Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States,” and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer discuss in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.”

“When I started writing this book,” says Platt, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. “I was trying to answer the question: Why is it so difficult to make any kind of fundamental, decent, humane change in criminal justice institutions? Why are [our leaders] so resistant to this?”

Part of the reason, he argues, is that there has been a bipartisan, right-wing effort—that includes leaders from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton—to dehumanize large portions of American society, especially people of color. This demonization largely succeeded due to a penitentiary system designed to divide Americans, often along racial lines, both inside and outside of prisons.

“I think that tells us something about what’s needed in the future to have a successful reform movement, or a progressive movement. It’s going to have to have a movement that brings the people inside into a larger movement, and for people on the outside to develop those ties and relationships. A difficult thing to do; not easy, but necessary,” Platt says.

Platt believes that the country’s inability to find or implement solutions to its prison system is largely due to its unreasonable reticence to learn from other countries.

“You could go to any prison and institution in Scotland, in France, in Italy, and Germany for sure, and the Netherlands and Sweden and so on, and you’d find an effort to try to follow what the United Nations [says] prison should be, which is that prisons should approximate the conditions outside of prisons as much as possible.

“But the United States does not look to other countries to learn from them. The United States is always about exporting law and order, exporting corrections, exporting policing to other countries. Part of the foreign policy of the U.S. has been to do that, and very rarely does it stop and say, ‘Well, what should we be importing back to here?’ ”

As long as this is the case, regardless of the president or, it seems, the political party in power, the country will not be able to address the profoundly destructive issue of mass incarceration. There is, however, hope in the form of growing and widespread interest in the issue that is fueling activism across the country.

Listen to Scheer and Platt’s discussion to learn more about how a progressive movement could address the troubles plaguing our penitentiary system and ultimately put an end to mass incarceration. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence is expected to come from the guest. In this case, there’s no question about it: Tony Platt. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I think you’ve been the most important progressive voice dealing with the criminalization of a large part of the American population. And for people familiar with this debate–you know, tough love and what kind of policing is right and fair–there’s been a progressive wing, and there’s been a reactionary wing represented by James Q. Wilson. And unfortunately, the reactionary wing won; many liberals joined that crowd, including people like President Bill Clinton. And now there seems to be a swing. There’s conservatives who recognize imprisonment, incarceration, of 2.3 million people is not a great solution; it’s expensive. We have an enlightened governor of California; Gavin Newsom is really, in a matter of weeks as the new governor he’s said he’s not going to, no one’s going to be executed in California. There’s a moratorium; he’s disassembled the death penalty facility, and he seems to be talking more about rehabilitation. So let me just say, Tony Platt was a driving force in the thinking about criminology. From ‘68 to ‘75, critical years in American political life, he ran–was the driving force behind the study for criminology. And then, as is often the case in academia, you failed by succeeding. You were the most exciting teacher on this campus when I was here, functioning in Berkeley in graduate school. And then you suddenly were out of a job. You landed on your feet eventually; you ended up in the state college system. And you’re back here at Berkeley at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the very institution that you were fired from 40 years ago or so.

Tony Platt: Sort of a sweet justice.

RS: So what has happened to this field that you study? We have the largest prison population in the world, biased in favor of blacks and browns. And what have we seen over the last half century? And you, I should hasten to add, you are the author of Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States. And so, what is the gist of the book?

TP: Well, I started thinking about the book during the Obama years; I was encouraged by the new social movements that emerged during the Obama years. And I felt that was a good time to try to address some of the issues I’d thought about back in the seventies: the intractability of a repressive and racist criminal justice system, why was that the case. And it felt encouraging during the Obama years, though–because Obama set up commissions and task forces, and debated issues, and had his attorney general investigate wayward police departments and so on. But at the same time, very little changed during the Obama years. And so when I started writing this book then, I was trying to answer the question, why is it so difficult to make any kind of fundamental, decent, humane change in criminal justice institutions? Why are they so resistant to this? And then Trump came in, and we had a much more direct, up-front, law-and-order approach that recalled the old days of Nixon and law and order. And so I also had to ask the same question then, which was, how come this law and order perspective has persisted so long, been so effective, won over so many people, and is so hard to change?

RS: The cynical answer is because we regard a lot of the people who end up in prison as throwaway people. There has been a shift in the needs of the workforce; they’re an inconvenient truth. And there’s really something profoundly immoral about the functioning of America society now, that you’re just willing to lock up people, throw away the key, and in some sense of justice, they’ve had their chance. It’s amazing, because we feel superior to all these other societies in the world that lock up, even as a percentage of the population, fewer people.

TP: Well, there’s a tendency these days for people to say the United States proportionally incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. I don’t know if that’s true. I just don’t think we know what the real situation is in China and Russia, which are the big competitors in incarceration. I think the U.S. is in the ballpark; I think the U.S. is close. When you compare the U.S. with Canada or Australia or New Zealand, or France and England, then there’s no contest. There’s no other country that’s comparable to the United States in terms of its political economy that puts as many people away, that hires as many cops, and invests as much money in repression as this country does.

RS: So what does it say about the country? I mean, I want to combine it–full confession, I heard you speak the other day. And then combined with your new book, Beyond These Walls, I found one thing lacking. And that is the use of modern technology. I brought it up with you after your talk. And it seems to me the surveillance society that we’ve entered is the Orwellian society. That you can isolate people, you can do predictive policing, you can say these are the people we don’t need, they don’t have the skillset, and we’re going to lock them up and throw away the key. You have a group like Palantir, which that’s what they do. Our police force seems to have this predictive policing; it was a group started by the CIA, In-Q-Tel. And so I’m just wondering whether in fact we are moving to this Orwellian world, or is that an overused example to frighten young children?

TP: Well, I agree with you that surveillance systems are at the heart of what the carceral state does: regulates people, watches people, tracks people. Once people have been identified as being dangerous or troublesome or criminal, they sort of face a social death for the rest of their life. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. People in prisons and jails, or people arrested, have not always been expendable or just dumped into institutions. So one of the things the book does is to go back through a very long history, back to, really, after the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, to show how at different times, actually, prisons and jails play a pretty critical role in exploiting labor and using labor, killing labor and replacing labor as it did in the South in the 1880s and 1890s. And it wasn’t until really after World War II that there was a decline in the need for prison labor, and prisons and jails started to become more like dumping grounds, or places just to keep people who weren’t needed for the economy anymore. As for the technology, you like Orwell, I’m more partial to Kafka in terms of using literary references here. Orwell suggests that they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re in control, they’re tracking everybody rationally. And we know from the history of the FBI and other institutions that often they’re at odds with each other, often there’s contradictions within them; you see a lot of chaos. And I think you see that today. On the other hand, you’re right, there are surveillance systems that are in place now that we wouldn’t have imagined 20 or 30, 40 years ago. And there are global corporations, not just serving the U.S., but serving countries all over the world including China, Israel, Russia, who are coming up with ideas for how to track and surveil and control people, and are selling those products to the United States and to other governments. And also are, they’ve become like the right-wing think tanks of the world; they initiate ideas and programs and policies, and they sell those to different countries, too. The U.S. is certainly a recipient of that, but there are other countries that are recipients as well.

RS: So I want to ask you this question, though, in terms of who ends up in the jails. And we had this whole banking meltdown; I know it’s almost going to sound trite to say this. But these people did big crimes.

TP: Big.

RS: Big. And they changed the laws, sometimes, to make them not seem like crimes, or not be crimes. But even by the standard law. And almost no one went to jail, and certainly not the people who designed the schemes that cost people their houses and so forth. I’ve recently, I went into San Quentin to interview Kevin Cooper, who’s on death row. And his point was compelling. He said, look, there’s one common denominator, even bigger than race–it’s class, on death row. And it’s true largely of the prisons. The people who couldn’t get the lawyers, who didn’t have the families who could bail them out, and so forth. So as somebody who is dealing with criminology, you get to move in a lot of different circles. Who cares and what do the others think? And is there a liberal-conservative breakdown?

TP: Well, I think a lot of people care. I think a lot of people, when given the information what’s going on, when they hear about the inhumanity of a system that has 200,000 people in it that will never get out of prison in their lifetime–200,000 lifers, which is extraordinary. There’s no other country comparable to the United States that does that. But the right has been very successful, particularly since the Nixon years–and this is a bipartisan right, including the Clinton administration–in demonizing people who are arrested and go to jail and prison, and creating ways in which they’re totally separated from us. I think if you go back, as you’ll remember, to the Civil Rights Movement, one of the extraordinary strengths of that movement was the sense that the free and the unfree were part of a common humanity. That there but for the grace of God go I. We knew people that did time, we knew people that were arrested for political reasons, we knew people in prison and jail who became politicized there and fought for their rights and fought for larger issues. And that unity of free and unfree, I think, gave a sense to a very wide swath of American people that this was a common movement. And then since the seventies, and then particularly in the eighties, when they’d been arresting people and creating these very special kinds of institutions, and separate institutions that are high-tech, and they’re far away, and also the prisoners themselves are racially divided and kept apart from one another in solitary confinement–that’s been very successful in dividing the other, dividing the people in prison from people outside. And I think that tells us something about what’s needed in the future to have a successful reform movement, or a progressive movement; it’s going to have to have a movement that brings the people inside into a larger movement, and for people on the outside to develop those ties and relationships. A difficult thing to do; not easy, but necessary.

RS: And the invisibility of the prison population is, as you suggest, by design. I mean, everybody thinks now–you know, not everybody, but democrats and so forth; it’s, California is the deep blue state. But the fact is, we have a prison-industrial complex in California that you would know anytime you go up one of the major highways. And the economy of these towns, as I understand it whenever I’ve dropped off in these places, seems to be built around the prison.

TP: Not very effectively, though, but yes, they are.

RS: Well, tell me about that. Because I mean, it’s a startling aspect of life in what, again, many people think is the most enlightened liberal state. We have a backbone in this state of prisons.

TP: California, that now does have this progressive reputation, we tend to have amnesia and forget that the last administration, the Brown administration, resisted all efforts to reduce the California prison population. And it was only through prisoners’ organizations and their lawyers that it ended up in the Supreme Court, that forced the California government to reduce the size of the prison population. It wasn’t like they welcomed that or embraced it. And the previous governor, Jerry Brown, made a long career out of advocating law and order as part of his politics. And that reflected a whole shift that took place in the Democratic Party, particularly with Bill Clinton, and really the running out of the liberal wing of the party that stood for rehabilitation and community corrections, community policings, alternative to prisons, and so on. That was driven out of the Democratic Party as the democrats tried to get back into the White House and compete with the republicans. And from that point on, on issues of race, affirmative action, crime, prisons, jails, police, they didn’t really have any disagreements at all. So when we look back to understand how we got to this place, we can’t just look at Trump, and we can’t just look at Nixon and the republicans; we have to look at the serious role that democrats played in creating this massive carceral operation.

RS: You know, that’s–again, to take Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”–an inconvenient truth that many people I run into don’t want to consider. And I remember when Christopher Hitchens talked about his displeasure, his criticism of Bill Clinton; it was Bill Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to witness the death of a mentally retarded prisoner who didn’t even know that he wasn’t coming back to finish his pie after going to the death chamber. And I think this blind spot in the liberal consciousness is something–we’ll take a break now, but I want to visit this when we come back. [omission for station break] Tony, what I want to–Professor Platt, I should say–what I want to get at here is, you know, I look–I don’t have anything like your knowledge of this. But every time I look at this issue of crime and punishment and so forth, at least on the right-wing side of things, there’s some on the libertarian who feel this is not being done in a cost-effective way; there are also people who believe prisoners have a soul, you know. And so some of the push to have classes in prison, and rehabilitation, seems to come more from the evangelical right, particularly in the South. At least people can–you know, Gary Tyler, who got out after 44 years in Angola and had been on death row, he had a theater group. Why? He could put on the passion play. Right-wing Christians came to watch the play. The liberals have really been, I think, by and large absent. But talk to me about what happened with Bill Clinton, and his move toward this harsh law-and-order position.

TP: I think Bill Clinton represented a debate that took place within the Democratic Party. And the party at that time was very much split between the more conservative, centrist wing and the liberal wing. And the conservative wing, led by the Clintons and people that supported the Clintons, took the position that the Democratic Party needed to shift to the right on the big issues having to do with race, particularly welfare, imprisonment, jails and prisons, affirmative action. The Clintons, I think, were a part of the efforts to shift the Democratic Party to the right, a shift that they successfully achieved, and we’ve never really recovered from that. So under Clinton’s administration, the prison population expanded to a larger number than ever before. Under Clinton, 3 million impoverished families were taken off welfare, and welfare reform pretty much disappeared from the political agenda in Washington, D.C. forever. Also, under Clinton, affirmative action–what was left of it–was whittled away until it was pretty inconsequential. There was a 10-year period when affirmative action began to make a significant difference who went to university, who taught there, who got into the professions, who got the jobs at the post offices. But by the end of the Clinton administration, it was the end of the experiment of affirmative action.

RS: I want to get at the cynicism of people we’ve been close to. And again, California is kind of a good test tube. Kamala Harris may be the democratic candidate; she was attorney general, and she didn’t do much about easing these conditions or so forth. Jerry Brown is another example; you can go down the list. You’ve lived with these people, you’ve lived with liberal democrats. What do your colleagues in the universities say? How do–how do people approach this? I know where I teach, at USC, we get these daily crime reports–the iPhone was snatched, or this thing, and then you get this five-foot-ten Hispanic or six-foot-one African American, and they’re hauled off to jail. And you don’t care, or nobody seems to care, what happens to them. Who are they? Were they 18 years old? Were they 21? What kind of life did they have? We’ve lost any of that sense that these are human beings, right?

TP: It’s the sense of humanity and morality, which progressive forces have always fought for, and which we have to make strong again. I mean, it speaks to the success of the right in demonizing people that end up on the other side, and then making most people fear them and also think of them as being a different kind of human being. Which then goes back to the legacies of eugenics; Trump himself, I think, has been very fond of eugenics ideas, the notion of being a racial hierarchy, and some people being born inferior, and so on. So I think that has been compounded by a political system that has reinforced that. And also, living in a society where we’ve never had a progressive, oppositional party in national office. We’ve never had a labor party, or a socialist party, or even really a serious social democratic party at the top. So that we have no political institutions at the national level that really support progressive movements. We’ve never had a developed welfare state, which I think is a horror. And I don’t think you can talk about changing prisons and jails–which in a way is what the welfare state has become; it’s become a carceral state. We’ve never had those institutions, we’ve never had the same kinds of rights and opportunities that other post-industrial societies have all over the world. And we also have a massive operation of spending. We have more police than teachers, you know; we have five times more cops than social workers. We spend massive amounts of money, not just at the local level, but at the national level, on national security and homeland security and anti-terrorism. And that spills down to the local level, where a lot of the money and resources go. There’s no other country like the United States that puts these kinds of resources into a war economy at home. You have a war economy around the world, and we also have a war economy against people at home. I think that’s the root of the problem.

RS: You bothered to write a book. You’ve devoted your life to this issue. And then what I just got back was, OK, let’s blame the right wing, we don’t do this, we don’t do that. And I’m trying to understand, what is the difference? And why don’t we have the same parties or so that they have in much of Western Europe, that pushed for some of this? And it goes back to class, and who do you care about, it seems to me. And I just want to offer one example. You’ve got all these people now involved in the scandal of bribing so they could get their kids into school and so forth. And there was one woman, I forget what the state was, Ohio or something, she tried to get her kids into a slightly better public school by using her father’s address. She ended up doing jail time, prison time. So it’s that double standard, you know? It’s like, hey, they had their chance, he stole pizza twice, and then he went into a liquor store–three strikes, goodbye, we tried, you had your chance. So that judgmental thing that I find all the time when I talk to people–you know, “Oh, they’re in prison. Well, even if they were convicted incorrectly, they probably did ten other crimes. And they don’t really measure up. And you know, whether it’s eugenics as a philosophy or the convenience of thinking–you know, unless they happen to be your nephew or your uncle or something, then you get all concerned and worry about it–maybe they’re there because they couldn’t get proper legal counsel. Maybe they never went to a decent school. Maybe they were abused as a child until they were 17 or something. There’s none of that mentality anymore, that reformer mentality.

TP: This operation that you’re decrying, and that we’re all so concerned about now, raged about, is very longstanding. It’s very deep, and that’s one reason why it’s so hard to change it. And people need to understand that SWAT teams and military policing didn’t begin in the sixties; it began, really, when policing began in the early 20th century. Prisons and jails have always been there; racism in criminal justice has always been there. I mean, people have been killed and abandoned in jails and prisons for a long, long time. So one argument is that we need to understand the deep history of this. The second big argument is that we need to have a wide lens, and not just think about police and prisons, but we also need to look at the interrelationship between police, prisons, and welfare, and immigration courts and detentions, and expulsions. We need to also look at the history of programs like eugenics and sterilization that targeted working-class women. We need to look at the history of campaigns against gay men who were purged from jobs after World War II. We need to think much more broadly about policing to include private policing, which is even larger than public policing, and which gets very little attention. So those are the things we need to think about, and deeply. And then also, we need to understand the need for these extraordinary movements that are happening right now in the last few years–the #MeToo movement, the movement of young kids for gun control coming out of Florida. The climate change movement that is, people are demonstrating about that as we speak. The Black Lives Matter movements that are taking place in the streets against police violence. All the reform efforts to try to reduce the prison population. All of those movements tend to operate in separation from one another. And I think we need to be thinking about what it’s going to take to build an interrelated social movement that draws together those different kinds of movements. Because without that, I don’t think you can be successful in just making one change here or one change there. You get worn down, the system comes back to where it was before. But the potential of these new movements is quite extraordinary, and now we’re in a phase of history where we don’t have good models of leadership or exemplary political organizations from around the world. But I think that’s got to be built in the next period of time, and there’s got to be a sense of unity to the fight and passion that’s already there.

RS: OK. But the primer has to have one other chapter here.

TP: What’s that?

RS: And–how do you organize. And it strikes me, the alien–we live now in gated communities. Colleges are gated communities. Actually, it’s quite absurd in a place like Los Angeles or San Francisco–who’s in these tents? Who are these people dying there? It’s one manifestation of it. And then we contain it–no, they can’t be there, but they can be here. Prisons are this obvious manifestation of that containment. So I’m asking you to draw upon a half century of dealing with this issue. Now you’re, I’ve mentioned your nemesis, James Q. Wilson. He carried the day, he said, because our tough-love approach works. Right? These liberals, these lefties and everything, they’re bleeding heart, but it doesn’t work. And that’s always been the appeal. Well, I think your book would suggest that that tough love, even though it’s been around forever, hasn’t worked, or certainly doesn’t work in a social justice way. What is the hook? Somebody reading your book–what’s the hook? Is it the self-interest of the society that we have to solve this? Is it that it’s too costly? Is it that it’s inhuman? How do people get motivated on this issue? You’re a teacher. And I know there are a lot of young, lot of people out there working in this field of social justice who cite you. I run into them all the time–Tony Platt, I took Tony Platt’s class, I read Tony Platt, so forth. I’m asking you, at this sort of tail-end of your career, and you’ve written this opus–what’s the magic now? What’s the–

TP: There’s no magic. You know, I remember you once giving a talk–this was a long time ago–and somebody asked you the same question. You can tell me if my memory’s right here. But they asked you the same question, said what does it take to be an effective organizer? And I think you said, you need to be like somebody knitting. And I’ve used that metaphor a lot. The notion that you, it’s very steady work, you have to be very disciplined, you have to start very small, you have to imagine something big that’s going to happen at the end of it. And you have to be in for the long haul; you can’t just want to do this in an impatient way. Organizing is like that. And you also know well that, as we used to say, one spark can light the prairie fire. You never know when something is going to take off. I mean, we do a lot of organizing, which–where nothing happens. Even–you can have good ideas, committed to control the police, doing away with cash bail, trying to massively reduce the prison population–they’re all reasonable ideas and policies, but they don’t take off most of the time. In the same way that people who organize for joining unions, or the eight-hour day, or to end the war in Vietnam, started also very small. And so when you’re organizing and taking on these issues, you have to put out good ideas, you have to assume that people are open to hearing new ideas, and you have to be in it for the long haul. And maybe my long haul is getting to an end now as I get older, but you have to have that attitude. And you never quite know when something can happen. I mean, it was a total shock when the kids in this school in Florida started organizing against the NRA, you know, after the school shooting there. And they were so effective that they got a former Supreme Court justice to write an opinion piece calling for the abolition of the Second Amendment. I mean, that was a big deal, and totally unexpected that that happened. Or Obama inviting the Black Lives Matter organizers to come and meet in the White House with him when he was responding to all those street protests. So that’s it. It’s knitting. You just, you’ve got to do it steady and slowly, and you’ve got to have good ideas, and hope that people will respond. And one day, they will.

RS: So let me try to force an even more optimistic moment here. I would argue that there’s a widespread recognition that the system, broadly speaking, is not working. If it were working, you wouldn’t have Donald Trump be president. If it were working, you wouldn’t have so many people living in tent communities in our major cities. It’s not working even for Google hotshots who want to live in San Francisco; the city is becoming dysfunctional, as are many cities. On the other hand, the alternative of living on some island somewhere, that doesn’t work for anybody. Doesn’t work for Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or anybody. They want to live in a city, they want to live in a country, and so forth. And I do get the feeling–and I’ll let you have the last word on this–the reason I think people should read Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States. People do get killed by criminals. They do get robbed by criminals. There are real criminals. The lock ‘em up and throw away the key, the tough love, the killing of welfare, the not caring about our school system and what kids are learning–that all has failed. That has failed. I think that can be recognized, you know. And so it seems to me there’s a moment, I daresay, for beyond these walls, for thinking beyond prison, for thinking and being inspired by Tony Platt–tell me what other countries do that works. That we should be doing.

TP: Well, you can go to any country in Europe, as a I did a couple of years ago–I went around a prison in the Netherlands, and the director of the prison took me around. And as he’s taking me around and showing me, he’s asking me the questions that you’ve been asking me. Like, why does the United States incarcerate so many people? He wanted me to explain it to him; he just couldn’t understand it. And as we’re going around, he says that he has a meeting in half an hour that he has to go to, and he has to leave me. And I said, a meeting at four o’clock on Friday? He says, yes, I’m going to go and meet with all the people in solitary confinement. There are 12 of them in solitary confinement in this prison of 2,000 people, and I was the one that signed the order to put them in solitary confinement. They can’t stay there more than 14 days, but this is the weekend I want to go and meet with each one individually and see how they’re doing, to see if there’s going to be any problems on the weekend when I’m not working here, and to make sure that if there are any mental health issues, that there are people on hand to talk to them. Well, that was a total shock. And then he took me to, he said you want to see a typical cell? I said yes, I’d like to see a cell. He said, so, and then he knocked on the door of these two prisoners’ cell, and waited while they answered the door. And he said to them, would you mind very much if I have a visitor here, if he looked at your cell? And I mean, maybe that was just a public relations show for me, but then he took me into the kitchen, where the prisoners have total access to the kitchen. And they had a better set of knives than I have in my kitchen, you know, for cooking and so on. So you could go to any prison and institution in Scotland, in France, in Italy, and Germany for sure, and the Netherlands and Sweden and so on, and you’d find an effort to try to follow what the United Nations say prison should be, which is that prisons should approximate the conditions outside of prisons as much as possible. There shouldn’t be this huge difference between what people do inside. I mean, they’ve lost their freedom; they’re going to be off the streets and their homes for years or months. But the conditions of their daily life, being able to work, to read, to study, to talk, to have family members, should be as close as possible to life outside. But the United States does not look to other countries to learn from them. The United States is always about exporting law and order, exporting corrections, exporting policing to other countries. Part of the foreign policy of the U.S. has been to do that, and very rarely does it stop and say, well, what should we be importing back to here?

RS: You know, I think this last little bit was worth the price of admission. This idea that we can’t learn from others. It’s so profoundly stupid. So, tell me a little more, though. I mean, OK, you got that warden–what else works? And then we do have some examples here. As I mentioned, Gary Tyler, who had been on death row, he worked with the theater project; he did the passion play, and the rebirth of Christ, and that worked. But what do other countries do?

TP: Well, we don’t even have to go to other countries. Because one of the things I do in the book is look at the history of opposition movements within the United States, and what people have fought for and asked for. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. Here’s Eugene Debs in prison in the 1920s, the leader of the Socialist Party, a labor leader. He went to jail and prison many times. This time, he was in prison for telling people not to support the war, not support the United States entering World War I. He did a lot of time. And he wrote about that after he came out; he wrote a chapter of a book called “How I Would Manage the Prison.” And he had some really profound insights about what to do. One thing he said was that the guard and the prisoner can never be in a human relationship inside a prison. He was talking about the fundamental inhumanity of the institution–inhumanity to the guards, as well as to the prisoners. But he also made a case that most of what goes on in prison could be governed by prisoners themselves. You could set up a prisoners’ council; most of the work could be administered and done by prisoners inside. And that you’d need some specialists to come in, he said, to do certain things around health and other things. And when he got out, he said I’d be very willing to show people how to do this, and to set it up for people, and to consult people how to do it; you don’t have to pay me, I’ll do it for free with any state government that wants me to do it. And nobody took him up on that. There’s many, many different kinds of examples like that. Another example would be the Black Panther Party that we usually associate with, you know, fighting back on the streets, carrying guns, being violent, that whole image and so on. But they actually came out with a very reasoned proposal about how to reorganize and democratize policing. Police have always been militaristic; they’ve always been undemocratic. But he said, what if we recruited to the police force the kinds of people who would want to join the Peace Corps, rather than the Marines? A very different kind of person that you’d want to bring in, that would have a sense of wanting to mediate difference, support the community. Also, the Panther proposal was that police should live in the communities in which they work, and should serve those communities, and there should be elected boards. So this was a very detailed, thoughtful proposal, as was Debs’s proposal for how to reorganize the prison. We have lots of those kinds of examples, and one of the things I do in the book that people tend to forget, because if they remember any of the history they remember the struggles that took place in the sixties and seventies, you know–Malcolm X and George Jackson and the prison movement and so on. But there’s a much longer, deeper history of people who’ve done time and been on the other side of policing and so on, who’ve come up with some great ideas. And I want people to reconnect with those ideas and learn from them.

RS: You know, finally, we have Nelson Mandela. And it’s odd, you know; how does somebody survive jail? And a certain quality comes out. And so people say, well, his cause was just–well, when he was put in jail he was called a terrorist and communist and everything else, you know. And his cause was not thought to be just, even by respectable people in the U.S. Congress, most of them. But the fact is, he rose to a higher level. And you know, when you look at the prison reform movement, there are people who’ve come out of that and really have a higher consciousness about it. On the other hand, and I want to close with this, we mostly listen to people who have a very harsh, judgmental appraisal. A lot of people–well-intentioned people, at least they claim to be, particularly in the Democratic Party, but also what used to be moderate republicans–think there’s this tough love thing, it’s more realistic. And the bleeding heart is bogus, because you’re not helping anybody. There’s got to be an answer to that. That’s the argument. The argument is, you’re not doing the prisoner or our society any favor with your concern, your bleeding heart; that’s bogus. And so we go for tougher. And even now, the new surveillance movement of Palantir, they say we use technology, we use data collection, we use science, and we’re going to have win-win. And that’s the killer app now. That we, we’ll put ankle bracelets, we’ll monitor this, we’ll do predictive policing, we’ll use technology, we’ll–and it might even end up we’ll drop something in their stomach or something, that monitors–maybe it gets back to brain surgery. So it seems to me the way the debate is shaping up, it’s between your attitude that we’ve been discussing and that tough-love attitude.

TP: Well, the other side of the success of the James Q. Wilson right-wing Clinton ideas that have permeated the society for so long, the other side of that is that more than a million people bought and read Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, which is about racism in the criminal justice system; extraordinarily popular. We haven’t had a book popular like that since The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or the many books that came out in the seventies about criminalization in prisons and jails. That was a shock to her, and it was a shock that so many people wanted to read that, were hungry for an alternative view. And then you have Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, which has also been extraordinarily popular. And Angela Davis’s work on these issues is always widely read and supported. So there’s a real hunger out there for alternative ideas and alternative views. It’s the politics that’s usually the problem, the political system that has not been very hospitable to that. You know, Biden, a few weeks ago as he was preparing to think about his run for the presidency, said that he apologizes for some of the law and order policies that he supported. He said you know, we listened to the experts, and the experts got it wrong. Well that just, you know, that’s just a total lie; they knew exactly what they were doing, and Biden and the center of the Democratic Party led the law and order rush there. That would be my more positive side to what you say, the domination of right-wing ideas; there’s a profound hunger out there for people to read and to act and to do something differently. You cited Nelson Mandela as somebody who survived and came out and provided extraordinary leadership. There are many people that do that; there are a lot of other people who get destroyed doing time in solitary. They become mentally ill and broken people. So we shouldn’t romanticize it.

RS: Oh, I’m not romanticizing. I’m just saying why don’t we listen to the–

TP: We did. But you know, one of the things that Nelson Mandela said–and there are very few people who remember this; I mean, this was after he’d done all that time, and people in the African National Congress had been killed and hunted down and so on, and he became president of South Africa. He said, you know, what we’ve gone through has been an extraordinarily difficult struggle, and many people have lost their lives and sacrificed themselves, and it’s one of the most difficult things we’ve gone through. But he said, now, trying to build a multiracial democracy is going to be even harder. We have to be ready for this next stage. And I think that’s the sense of where we’re at now. We’ve got profound opposition and outrage and alienation all over the country. We have people reading and hungry for new ideas about what to do. Now we have to take on this struggle.

RS: And taking on the struggle really means becoming informed, because this can’t be barroom conversation, lock ‘em up, or cut ‘em loose, or whatever, you know, or you’re responsible for this murder or this crime. And the value of this book, Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States–it’s a long history. This does not start with Trump, you know, lock ‘em up on the border, sort of thing. And the people complicit come from across the political spectrum. Thank you, Professor Tony Platt, for taking us through this history. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. And here at the UC [Berkeley] Graduate School of Journalism, we have Topher Ruth as our engineer doing an excellent job. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

 

 

Matt Taibbi and Aaron Maté on How Russiagate Helped Trump

The claim that President Trump engaged in collusion with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election was so pervasive and unquestioned that only a handful of journalists demonstrated the healthy skepticism required by their profession. Last week, special counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report on the Trump-Russia investigation to the Justice Department, which then released a four-page summary written by Attorney General William Barr. While the full report is over 300 pages, and Mueller punted on the question of obstruction, he found no evidence of collusion. Despite this, the “Russiagate” truthers, if you will, are doubling down on the Russiagate narrative, moving the goalposts to focus on the possibility of obstruction of justice and conveniently ignoring that the collusion that was so central to their theory has not been established.

A sad irony is that the Russiagate narrative, which so many people clung to in an attempt to bring down Trump, only helped him. Actual occurrences that could have undermined Trump’s authority and damaged his reputation were ignored as much of the media and political class focused almost exclusively on a literal conspiracy theory that does not resonate with the voter base that stayed home on Election Day or the Obama-to-Trump voters. Surely, Trump has done awful things, coverage of which could get out the vote and galvanize opposition. But the Russiagate obsession perpetuated Trump’s narrative about being picked-on by a media that peddles fake news and a political elite that represents the status quo. Trump was able to come off, once again, as the outsider who takes on the establishment, which in turn persecutes him. And now that the Mueller report has said he didn’t collude with Russia, he’s celebrating.

In a recent episode of my podcast, I spoke with two journalists who pushed back on the Russiagate narrative: Aaron Maté, contributor to The Nation and former host and producer for “The Real News” and “Democracy Now!,” and Matt Taibbi, the award-winning Rolling Stone journalist and author of four New York Times best-sellers. They weighed in on the way Russiagate benefited Trump, undermined journalistic integrity and thwarted a real resistance.

Editor’s note: A transcript, lightly edited for clarity, follows the podcast player embedded below.

Katie Halper: Congratulations, by the way, to both of you, on your skepticism.

Matt Taibbi: Well, this is going to continue for years and years and years, so it’s a little early to be doing a touchdown spike, I think.

Aaron Maté: The only actual victory here is Trump’s. Because, as we’ve been warning for two years, focusing on this conspiracy theory was only setting up the resistance for failure, because the evidence wasn’t there. And eventually the facts had to come out. Mueller just did that with his verdict, and now, of course, Trump is understandably, and as we predicted, using this for his re-election campaign. So the only possible victory here for politics and journalism is if there’s accountability: on the journalism front, if we learn how to follow the facts, not a narrative that benefits ratings and gets us clicks; and in politics, it would be to actually learn to start becoming a real resistance, mounting opposition to Trump based on opposing his policies, not based on believing in this fairy tale.

KH: Where are we right now in the Russiagate investigation?

AM: Where we are is that the conspiracy theory has collapsed. For two years, the dominant narrative has been that Trump is in cahoots with Russia, engaged in a conspiracy with them, is compromised by them, and that Robert Mueller was going to uncover it. He was going to uncover the smoking gun. And Robert Mueller has just rendered his verdict, and he didn’t. He found no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy. That’s no surprise to those of us who looked at the available evidence, which is what journalism is supposed to do. You go based not on where your imagination takes you but what the actual facts tell you. And the facts from the beginning told us a very clear story: that the case for this Trump-Russia collusion theory was just not there.

KH: What were your predictions about what happens next?

AM: This result was not a surprise at all, based on the available facts and just the plausibility of the underlying theory to begin with—that this reality-TV show host who didn’t even look like he thought he was going to win [the 2016 presidential election] engaged in a conspiracy with Russia or that he was compromised by Russia. It just wasn’t there. It didn’t make sense as an idea, and it didn’t make sense based on the facts we knew. So my prediction was always that there would be zero indictments for the claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy but that Mueller might throw those who were hanging onto that idea a bone, especially because there was so much put on his shoulders. He was turned into such a revered thing. And he does come from the D.C. establishment, who does resent Trump, not for the reasons you and I do, and listeners might, based on his actual harmful policies, but because they think he’s a crude representative of the establishment.

KH: Given that Mueller found no evidence of collusion, can we still even revere him? Can we still even believe that he wears Brooks Brothers suits?

AM: That was part of the PR campaign to revere Mueller and paint him as this saintly figure and talk about what clothes he wears and his background. And that was at a time when everybody thought he was going to deliver a verdict that Trump had committed treason. Now that Mueller has delivered the opposite verdict, now that he’s not being glorified in this way, there’s even an article in The New York Times saying that some Democrats are reconsidering their act of putting him on a pedestal.

But my prediction was Mueller would throw them a bone. And I think—this is my theory here—that that’s what Mueller’s decision was when it comes to obstruction, because he didn’t make a decision on that. He basically left it open, which then leaves it open to speculation. It’s strange for a prosecutor to defer like this after a two-year investigation. I think that punting on obstruction was Mueller’s way of leaving something open that people could hang on to while still not giving them anything. Because, of course, if Mueller actually thought that Trump had committed obstruction, he could have alleged it.

KH: Some people think that if you question the Russiagate narrative, you’re somehow helping Trump or are trying to cover for Trump or to downplay how destructive he is.

MT: In March 2017, I wrote an article saying this story is a minefield for the Democratic Party and particularly for journalists, because Trump had made it such an important part of his message that journalists were out to get him, that they were representatives of the elite who would stop at nothing to undermine this presidency. And to me it seemed the only way we could possibly lose with the public in a contest with someone like Trump is if we completely abdicated the standards of the profession and did what he accused us of doing, which would be politicizing our jobs and using trumped-up evidence to try to make him look bad. That was the one option out of an infinite number of ways we could have pursued covering his presidency. That was the one thing that could have really helped him. And we did it. Not only did we do it, but we did it, basically, to the exclusion of everything else, for years.

KH: What were some of the important stories the public was deprived of?

AM: Literally everything. I remember watching Rachel Maddow the day that Congress had taken a huge step forward toward taking away the health insurance of millions of Americans. I think she gave it around 30 seconds and then moved onto some element of the conspiracy theory that ended up being debunked. MNSBC didn’t mention Yemen for I think about a year.

KH: Where in Russia is Yemen?

AM: At a time when the U.S. was taking part in a genocide and killing tens of thousands of people through the Saudi bombing campaign and the famine that that campaign was causing. And one of the most crucial things it ignored was the serious escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Russia that Trump was overseeing through carrying out policies that were far more hawkish than Obama, which we haven’t focused on, partly because they’re supported by the bipartisan foreign consensus in Washington, which the media generally goes along with, but also because to acknowledge those policies, to look at them seriously, would undercut this idea that everybody bought into that Trump was doing Putin’s bidding.

MT: There was a very telling story for me. Every year the Pentagon is responsible, under each year’s National Defense Authorization, to submit a memo that’s usually not made public on which countries we have active combat operations in. And I believe it was in early 2017 that they released one that said we had active operations in seven countries. So I did a little story basically saying, hey does anybody notice we’re at war in Niger and Somalia and Yemen and Syria and Afghanistan? Just the idea that we’ve started new military campaigns, and that this can fly completely under the radar with the public because of the Russiagate story, just speaks to the enormity of the story and how much oxygen it took up. It took up everything. We didn’t have time for anything else.

KH: There was a lot of goading and mocking of Trump by Democrats who claimed he was in bed with Putin politically or even his boyfriend. How much did this provide cover or even incentive for Trump to be more hawkish?

MT: One of the things I said in one of these pieces was that in terms of activism in the next four years, the most important thing is to keep Donald Trump away from any kind of decision that would involve nuclear combat. That would be the number one consideration that anyone should make. Even though Trump likes to think of himself as great at war, he does have this sort of natural reluctance to get into military conflicts politically.

So, he talked about getting out of Syria, and we should have been encouraging that. No matter what you think about Syria or what you think our policies should be there, the reality is that the commander in chief that we have is not the person you want to be sending troops into a combat zone where there are Russians on the other side. The Russian-American troops are sitting across the Euphrates River from each other, and a couple of bad drunken incidents could trigger nuclear combat.

KH: You have people saying that Trump is a megalomaniac with dementia who’s erratic. And the same people say that Putin is a megalomaniac and evil. And they both have their finger on the button. And these people want Trump to ratchet things up with Putin. So what is the endgame that they imagine?

AM: They imagine no endgame. This whole thing is incoherent. They were accusing Trump of doing Putin’s bidding while he consistently does the opposite: tries to overthrow Putin’s ally in Venezuela; bombs Putin’s ally in Syria twice; pulls out of the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty, basically setting off a whole new nuclear arms race. So basically, the actual endgame in real life is existential peril, because we are risking nuclear accidents and the threat of war based on these hawkish policies. But that doesn’t matter to those who profited off of the Russiagate narrative, like the failed neoliberal, Democratic elites, who needed an excuse to cover for the fact that they lost to Donald Trump; FBI intelligence officials who opened up this investigation on very specious grounds and who suspected Trump, in part, because he was saying nice things about Vladimir Putin. And whether you agree with that or not, to lay that as a predicate for a counterintelligence investigation is just extraordinary. Then there was the media, which, of course, got a lot of ratings and clicks by spinning this spy thriller.

MT: I think there was an element of Russiagate, and still is, that does have a logic to it. it’s a very dark logic. If you saw what happened in 2016, the political situation was that the ruling neoliberal consensus was under fire from all sides, from radical right movements both in the United States and in Europe; from leftist movements, both in the United States and Europe. The overwhelming voter sentiment everywhere had to do with the rejection of the international global consensus. You saw votes like Brexit, a complete repudiation of a number of things. But Russiagate as a political solution, as a response to that electoral phenomenon, has been extraordinarily effective. Because what it’s done is it’s completely changed the attitude of a huge portion of the population, which now sees the international security services, the global consensus, as the only saviors who are going to rescue them from the evil Trump. And therefore, we have to pursue this case and celebrate authoritarianism and celebrate the FBI and CIA and their heroism, and the European Union and NATO. This story has had some benefit from a propaganda perspective as well.

KH: So, is the idea that the intelligence community will act as the adults in the room and stop Trump from getting his finger on the button?

AM: Well, that was part of this narrative—that we’re supposed to revere and trust in these intelligence officials, forgetting their actual record, which includes giving us one of the biggest crimes in recent memory—the Iraq War. They’re the ones who spun the phony intel about [weapons of mass destruction]. And also promoting this notion that fundamentally undermines the idea of democratic government, where it’s the elected president, whether you like that person or not, who’s supposed to make the decision, not unelected intelligence bureaucrats.

And to illustrate Matt’s point about how this diverted liberal energy, let’s look at one of the biggest protests of the Trump era. It was not over Trump taking away health care, it was not over Trump and the GOP pushing through this tax cut that was, I think, the biggest upwards transfer of wealth in U.S. history. It was to protect Robert Mueller. We had marches in Times Square and D.C. and all over the country about protecting Mueller. Protecting Robert Mueller from this threat people perceived him to be under. That, all of a sudden, was one of the biggest causes for a massive national rally, instead of what Trump was actually doing?

Compare that to what we saw in the very first days of the Trump administration. We saw the Muslim ban. That was before Russiagate totally took over. We saw people going to airports, standing up to this very cruel Trump policy and doing something about it. Where was the energy ever since then? There’s a strong correlation between the rise of #RussiaGate throughout the resistance and the decline of the activism we saw right before Russiagate fully exploded.

KH: Who were the worst Russiagate players in the media?

AM: There are too many to name.

KH: We could have a 24-hour marathon where we go through all of them.

MT: The central figure is Rachel [Maddow], unfortunately. I knew Rachel going back [to] the Air America days. We used to be friends. I always thought she was smart, funny, skeptical. We had some things that we disagreed about, especially on things affecting the military. I’m more of a pacifist that she is. But this transformation where she became this character on television—it’s like something out of this Andy Griffith movie, “A Face in the Crowd,” like a modern-day Glenn Beck act. It’s been shocking to watch her embrace that role in the way that she has. It’s been very scary to me. I don’t know what you think, Aaron.

AM: I wrote a piece two years ago at The Intercept about how she covered Russiagate above everything else, in a way that was ignoring all the countervailing evidence that undercut her conspiracy theory. I noted what a tragedy it was, because I’ve always thought she’s a really gifted journalist. She was dubbed the smartest person on TV, and I think there was a time when I probably found that plausible. I used to be a fan of hers.

But you can’t ignore the reality that she’s become, which is just a straight-up propagandist who has not interviewed a single dissenting voice and not acknowledged any of the countervailing facts. I actually tuned into her show Monday night, her first show since the summary of Mueller’s findings were released, and after more than two years of promoting this idea of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, she gave the Mueller finding that there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy 30 seconds, and then she moved on to obstruction for the rest of the hour. Now, of course, obstruction is a thing that Maddow and everyone else who promoted the Russia conspiracy are going to cling to now in an attempt to cover up the fact that their conspiracy theory failed.

MT: The cable stations have played a very particular role in this, which has been to scare people. All propaganda works on multiple levels, but there has to be an emotional component in order for it to really sell. You have to be able to turn people’s minds off when it comes to this stuff. So the combination at work here was the emotional devastation of liberal audiences. People were crushed when Trump was elected. People likened it to 9/11 or losing a family member. It was a combination of that plus being told over and over again, “We are under attack … there are Russians in our midst … you may not even be aware of them … they may be working in your office … they may turn off your heat in the middle of the winter.” People on some level register this stuff, and it turns their minds off to alternative possibilities. And that is a particularly low form of media activity. And they didn’t just indulge in it; they turned it into an art form with this story. And that was shocking to watch, too.

AM: I’ll never forget Maddow did a segment where she’s talking about some alleged Russian trolls interfering on Bernie Sanders’ fan club page, and she called it international warfare against our country, and so on. And I’ll never forget Rob Reiner, who helped set up this neocon Hollywood group called the Committee to Investigate Russia. Rob Reiner on MSNBC said that the Russians are in our bloodstream. So there’s a huge psychological damage.

MT: The New York Times did an infographic online, and they expanded on that theme and described the Russian threat as a virus that was literally taking over your body at the cellular level and changing your body chemistry. It’s a very elaborate graphic. And even intelligent people will be moved by this stuff.

AM: This didn’t start in 2016. Russophobia is in the bloodstream of American political culture. For decades, it’s been the Russians invading us and manipulating us and turning our young people into dupes, planting propaganda in our heads. That’s why this Russiagate thing could not have happened with any other country. There’s a reason we don’t hear about “Israelgate” or “Saudigate”. It survives on this very entrenched Cold War mindset that way predates 2016.

MT: Which is another reason why there was a lot of conscious conflation of the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union that went on. You can still today go on the Mother Jones website and see images of Vladimir Putin, but it will have a hammer and sickle next to it. The Jonathan Chait story that claims that he’s been an agent since 1987, when it was a different country. Donna Brazile talking about how the communists are dictating the debate. They want us to forget the distinction, because they want us to remember those archaic fears we had back in the days when the day after was the big scare story.

KH: As if the problem is that Trump is being influenced by a communist, as we can see from the redistribution of wealth.

AM: It was actually a Jonathan Chait-Chris Hayes story. Because after Chait came out with his story about whether Trump  wasa Russian military intelligence agent, then Hayes put Chait on his program that night, and they discussed it as if this was a serious prospect.

KH: Aaron, you’ve never been on MSNBC. Matt, when’s the last time you were on MSNBC?

MT: You know what’s funny? The last time I was on MSNBC was with Malcolm Nance to talk about this issue on Chris Hayes. I said something that I thought was a completely anodyne conservative comment, but which was that there’s multiple versions of this story. There’s a scenario where there’s some kind of foreign interference that went on. There’s another scenario where it went on and Donald Trump was involved with it. And I said those two stories—and I didn’t really get into the fact that it hadn’t really been established that the Russians had done it, but I said those two stories are orders of magnitude different. And the media has to make an important distinction between the two—that one doesn’t prove the other. And I was never invited on again after that.

AM: And when was that, Matt?

MT: That was in, I think, January of 2017.

AM: If that’s the date, that means that January 2017, basically right as Trump was taking office, was the last time someone who was skeptical of Russiagate from the left was allowed on MSNBC, because in December of 2016, I remember Ari Melber interviewed Glenn Greenwald. But that was the last time for Glenn. And if that was the last time for Matt, then that means that basically, throughout this entire affair, throughout Trump’s presidency, MSNBC has not allowed on a single dissenting voice. That’s extraordinary.

KH: That we know of. Because, since it’s in our blood, we could have had some Manchurian candidates on without even knowing it.

MT: The group that has publicly talked about this is so small that you can count us on basically two hands. We all know each other. We’re in constant contact with each other because we have to be. And nobody’s going to invite us on television.

AM: And what does that say about a political media culture, that it’s somehow a fringe position to question the conspiracy between the president and Russia, that that position is so fringe that you can count it on one or two hands?

MT: The press is like wildebeests. If 51 percent of the wildebeests decide to go one way, they’ll all go that way. That’s why you see those seamless transitions from thinking one thing one day, and then the next day, the new point of emphasis is going to be we need to see the entire report from Mueller. Then, once the report’s in, the new point of emphasis will be, “Why is there no obstruction charge, despite the fact that Mueller says there was no underlying crime?” And then there are going to be calls for a new investigation. They’re not going to let this go. It’s going to continue in perpetuity.

AM: Yeah. These people have invested so much into it that they’re forced to double down, and they’re already doing it. They can’t claim to be taken seriously as journalists. They’re basically, at this point, propagandists on this issue. Hopefully they can have time to focus on real issues. But they’ve painted themselves into a real corner, and it’s going to be kind of both sad and hilarious to watch how they continue to try to wiggle out of it.

KH: I feel gaslit. You must feel especially gaslit. I just interview people like you, but you guys are actually doing all the research and you guys are dismissed as conspiracy theorists, which is really ironic because you guys are skeptical of the conspiracy theory. How does it feel doing the work that you’re doing?

MT: I had it pretty easy compared to others—what the people who work at RT have gone through, for instance, is horrible. I can’t even tell most of the stories I’ve heard. But, for instance, I know one very talented person who worked at RT briefly years ago, long before any of this, and now can’t get work because of that one blip on the resumé. For me, these last three years for sure have been the most unpleasant of my career. I was regularly accused of being a foreign agent. Threats are normal in this business, but there were some especially weird things with this. I had somebody from one of these self-described Russia-watching websites call me up—on my unpublished landline number, on a Sunday—and offer to escort me to the FBI so I could give my confession. I think my experience was probably a little different from Aaron’s, because I work for a massive corporate organization, where I had the support of editors, at least. Still, it was difficult operating within those parameters, because I’m pretty sure everyone assumed I was crazy.

One thing that I felt pretty clearly was that even people I knew pretty well seemed to suspect I’d become a secret Trump supporter and this was how I was expressing it. So suddenly I was like the kid with lice. All of this stuff drove me a little bit crazy, to be honest. Again, I can’t stress enough: Other people went through things that were a lot worse: losing work, being condemned by colleagues—the academic, Stephen Cohen, went through a very tough time for instance, being removed from internet platforms—I’m talking especially about small websites that in many cases were family businesses where people had invested their life’s savings into their sites. Some I talked to had paid tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote their businesses on platforms like Facebook, only to be removed abruptly one day for “coordinated inauthentic activity.”

Again, all of this is small beans compared to problems people face in the real world, and under this administration, where immigrant families were separated. I wouldn’t want to even begin to compare. But in the press, when everyone feels the same pressure to avoid saying certain things, the tragedy there isn’t necessarily how hard it is for the individuals, but what it does to the business overall. You’ll end up with a landscape where everyone is saying the same thing and audiences are only hearing one thing, which is totally dysfunctional.

AM: Ultimately, what matters in journalism are the facts, and the facts were always on our side. My feelings don’t matter. Even though all these people are trying to attack you and marginalize you, I never took them seriously. As Matt said, it was so unpleasant, but it also was kind of amusing. And I felt sorry for them—that they were so in it. And I have been surprised that even after Mueller collapsed the conspiracy theory—I mean, it’s one thing if you don’t want to acknowledge people who got it right—but I saw leftist pundits who I respect coming out of nowhere to take shots at me and my colleagues and disingenuously accuse us of helping Trump and saying we were the ones fixated on this issue. And meanwhile, not coincidentally, these were some of the same people who got the story wrong. As Matt said, there are incentives to going along with this and conforming. And I just really respect Matt and others who never thought twice about doing their jobs: being real journalists and following the facts.

KH: I get that you’re saying it’s just feelings, Aaron, and that feelings don’t matter as much as facts. But I think it’s important for people to know, when they’re assessing the media, that there are all these incentives against doing what you’re doing and all these incentives to do what the Rachel Maddows are doing. So we’d have a lot more people speaking and writing the way you both are if there weren’t these incentives.

Thank you, guys, so much for being so relentless and fearless.

 

Redacted Mueller Report Expected to Be Released by Mid-April

WASHINGTON — A redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation will be sent to Congress by mid-April and will not be shared with the White House beforehand, Attorney General William Barr said Friday.

Barr’s timeline, included in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, sets up a possible showdown with House Democrats, who are insisting they see the full report next week.

In his letter, Barr said he shares a desire for Congress and the public to be able to read Mueller’s findings, which are included in the nearly 400-page report the special counsel submitted last week.

Barr said President Donald Trump would have the right to assert executive privilege over parts of the report. But he noted that Trump “has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.”

Mueller officially concluded his investigation when he submitted the report last Friday. Two days later, Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress that detailed Mueller’s “principal conclusions.”

Mueller did not find that the Trump campaign coordinated or conspired with Russia, Barr wrote, and did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice. Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided on their own that Mueller’s evidence was insufficient to establish that the president committed obstruction.

Barr said he is preparing to redact multiple categories of information from the report and Mueller is helping the Justice Department identify sections that will be blacked out in the public version.

Those include grand jury material, information that would compromise sensitive sources and methods; information that could affect ongoing investigations, including those referred by Mueller’s office to other Justice Department offices and information that could infringe on the personal privacy and reputation of “peripheral third parties.”

“Our progress is such that I anticipate we will be in a position to release the report by mid-April, if not sooner,” Barr wrote.

Barr said last week’s letter detailing Mueller’s “principal conclusions” was not intended to be an “exhaustive recounting” of the special counsel’s investigation.

Barr described Mueller’s report as nearly 400 pages long, not including the tables and supporting materials, which he said sets forth Mueller’s analysis, findings and the reasons for his conclusions.

“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

Asked about Barr’s commitment to release a redacted version of Mueller’s report, Trump said he has “a lot of confidence” in Barr “and if that’s what he’d like to do, I have nothing to hide.” He spoke at Mar-a-Lago, his private estate in Florida.

Barr’s letter drew a quick — and critical — response from Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who had demanded the full Mueller report by April 2.

Nadler, D-N.Y., said that deadline still stands and called on Barr to join him in working to get a court order allowing the release of grand jury information to the committee, rather than spending “valuable time and resources” keeping portions of the report from Congress.

“There is ample precedent for the Department of Justice sharing all of the information that the Attorney General proposes to redact to the appropriate congressional committees,” Nadler said in a statement. “Again, Congress must see the full report.”

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said he appreciated Barr’s update and looked forward to the attorney general appearing before his panel on May 1.

Members of Congress will be in recess for two weeks beginning April 12, which could mean that lawmakers will be out of town when the report is delivered.

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Associated Press writers Chad Day and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Jonathan Lemire in Palm Beach, Florida contributed to this report.

Trump Threatens to Shut Down Mexico Border

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Threatening drastic action against Mexico, President Donald Trump declared on Friday he is likely to shut down America’s southern border next week unless Mexican authorities immediately halt all illegal immigration. Such a severe move could hit the economies of both countries, but the president emphasized, “I am not kidding around.”

“It could mean all trade” with Mexico, Trump said when questioned by reporters in Florida. “We will close it for a long time.”

Trump has been promising for more than two years to build a long, impenetrable wall along the border to stop illegal immigration, though Congress has been reluctant to provide the money he needs. In the meantime, he has repeatedly threatened to close the border, but this time, with a new surge of migrants heading north , appeared to be different as he gave a definite timetable.

A substantial closure could have an especially heavy impact on cross-border communities from San Diego to South Texas, as well as supermarkets that sell Mexican produce, factories that rely on imported parts, and other businesses across the U.S.

The U.S. and Mexico trade about $1.7 billion in goods daily, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said closing the border would be “an unmitigated economic debacle” that would threaten 5 million American jobs.

Trump tweeted Friday morning, “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week.”

In Florida, he didn’t qualify his threat with “or large sections,” stating: “There is a very good likelihood I’ll be closing the border next week, and that is just fine with me.”

He said several times that it would be “so easy” for Mexican authorities to stop immigrants passing through their country and trying to enter the U.S. illegally, “but they just take our money and ‘talk.’”

A senior Homeland Security official suggested Trump was referring to the ongoing surge of mostly Central American families heading north through Mexico. Many people who cross the border illegally ultimately request asylum under U.S. law, which does not require asylum seekers to enter at an official crossing.

Short of a widespread shutdown, the official said the U.S. might close designated ports of entry to re-deploy staff to help process parents and children.

Ports of entry are official crossing points that are used by residents and commercial vehicles. The official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, did not specify which ports the administration was considering closing, but said only that closures were “on the table.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump’s possible action would apply to air travel.

Trump’s latest declaration came after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his country was doing its part to fight migrant smuggling. Criminal networks charge thousands of dollars a person to move migrants through Mexico, increasingly in large groups toward remote sections of the border.

“We want to have a good relationship with the government of the United States,” Lopez Obrador said Friday. He added: “We are going to continue helping so that the migratory flow, those who pass through our country, do so according to the law, in an orderly way.”

Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday that 750 border inspectors would be reassigned to deal with the growing number of migrant families, and the DHS official said Friday that the department was seeking volunteers from other agencies to help.

In Florida, Trump was also asked about the two migrant children who died in U.S. custody in December. Is the administration equipped to handle sick children who are detained?

“I think that it has been very well stated that we have done a fantastic job,” he said, defending Border Patrol efforts to help the children.

“It was a very tough situation and that trek up, that’s a long hard trek,” he said. “It’s a horrible situation. But Mexico could stop it.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have fought over Trump’s contention that there is a “crisis” at the border, particularly amid his push for a border wall, which he claims will solve immigration problems, though a wall wouldn’t keep out families who cross at official points so they can surrender and be detained.

The president called on Congress to immediately change what he said were weak U.S. immigration laws, which he blamed on Democrats. The Department of Homeland Security wants the authority to detain families for longer and more quickly deport children from Central America who arrive at the border on their own. The department argues those policy changes would stop families from trying to enter the U.S.

Alejandra Mier y Teran, executive director of the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce in San Diego, said the mere threat of border closures sends the wrong message to businesses in Mexico and may eventually scare companies into turning to Asia for their supply chains.

“I think the impact would be absolutely devastating on so many fronts,” said Mier y Teran, whose members rely on the Otay Mesa crossing to bring televisions, medical devices and a wide range of products to the U.S. “In terms of a long-term effect, it’s basically shooting yourself in your foot. It’s sending out a message to other countries that, ‘Don’t come because our borders may not work at any time.’ That is extremely scary and dangerous.”

Charter Schools Are Scamming the U.S. Government

A new report issued by the Network for Public Education provides a detailed accounting of how charter schools have scammed the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) for up to $1 billion in wasted grant money that went to charters that never opened or opened for only brief periods of time before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, or fraud. The report also found many of the charters receiving grant awards that managed to stay open fall far short of the grant program’s avowed mission to create “high-quality” schools for disadvantaged students.

President Trump’s 2020 budget blueprint proposes increasing funding for the charter grant program by 13.6 percent, from $440 to $500 million, and education secretary Betsy DeVos praised this increase as a step forward for “education freedom.” But the report finds that increasing federal funds for this program would mostly continue to perpetuate academic fraud.

Of the schools awarded grants directly from the department between 2009 and 2016, nearly one in four either never opened or shut their doors. The federal program’s own analysis from 2006 to 2014 of its direct and state pass-through funded programs found that nearly one out of three awardees were not currently in operation by the end of 2015.

Since then, the federal program has continued to award charters with grant money, increasing the total amount awarded to over $4 billion. Should the department’s own 2015 study finding hold, that one in three of the schools awarded grants had closed, never opened, or were not yet opened, the likely amount of money scammed by bogus charter operators tops $1 billion. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federal grant-awarded charters was 39 percent. Of the 306 schools that received CSP money but are not open, 75 are “ghost” schools—that is, they received money but never began.

As a coauthor of the report, along with Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, I found an astonishing array of charter operators who ripped off American taxpayers with impunity, and generally suffered no adverse consequences for their acts. In fact, many are still actively involved in the scam. The scams varied from the brazenly open—such as the Michigan charter that isn’t a charter at all, it’s a Baptist church—to the artfully deceptive—like the Hawaii charter that received a grant in 2016 and still hasn’t opened, doesn’t have a location, and its charter hasn’t even been approved.

But perhaps my favorite scam artist to take advantage of the federal charter grant program was a Delaware company.

Anatomy of a Scam

In 2013, Innovative Schools Development Corporation applied for and received a three-year start-up grant eventually totaling $525,000 to open Delaware Met Charter School in Wilmington, DE. The school’s grant application promised to create an “Expeditionary Learning (EL) charter” to “maximize learning” for “elementary-aged Hispanic Latino English Language Learners in a high poverty community.” The school claimed to “be able to cater to each students’ [sic] career goals by personalizing their education,” a local reporter gushed. “The model is called ‘Big Picture Learning,’ and for lack of a better analogy, it’s kind of like Build-A-Bear for a high school education.”

The school didn’t open until August of 2015, but the company was already at work getting more grants from CSP.

In 2015, Innovative Schools applied for and received a three-year grant totaling $600,000 to support the Early College High School charter schools at Delaware State University in Dover, Delaware. The school would focus on “the development of college-ready students through an inquiry and project-based learning environment that engages students with a dynamic, rigorous STEM curriculum … to serve a diverse student population, focusing recruitment on first-generation college-bound students from low-income families.”

Then in 2016, Innovative Schools applied for and received a three-year federal grant totaling $609,000 to open the Delaware STEM Academy charter school. The school promised in its application to enroll 250 students for 9th and 10th grade in September 2016 and to add 150 students each year for 9th grade thereafter from the high-needs student populations in the Wilmington and New Castle County area of Delaware.

In the meantime, while the company was applying for and receiving grant money from the federal government, no one seemed to notice that its schools were quickly failing.

Delaware Met was closed just five months into its first school year, in January 2016. The state committee that recommended closing found the school struggled to maintain a safe campus, used lesson plans that didn’t fit the state’s academic standards, and was out of compliance on all 59 of its Individualized Education Plans for its students with disabilities.

In June 2016, Delaware’s Charter School Accountability Committee and the State Secretary of Education both recommended revoking Delaware STEM Academy’s charter two months ahead of its planned opening, due to low enrollment of just 30 students and uncertain funding due to an overreliance on external grants. Local news reports on the demise of the school noticed that New Castle County already had a heavy concentration of charter schools—20 of 27 charter schools statewide. Yet in its review of the application, the U.S. Department of Education’s reviewers complimented the application for its “detailed management plan including objectives, measures, targets” and including a full year for implementation.

The Early College High School has managed to stay open, but although the application said it would have a student enrollment that is 24.7 percent “economically disadvantaged,” the school is located in a district with a student population that is 70 percent economically disadvantaged. In other words, what was supposed to be a lifeline out of poverty for students more closely resembles a white flight academy.

In the meantime, Innovative Schools Development Corporation did fine, as it was budgeted to receive, just from the STEM Academy deal, $247,500 of the federal grant funds for management fees, with $147,500 coming in the first year alone.

At this writing, the Innovative Schools Development Corporation website has been taken down and it is unclear whether the company still exists.

An Inside Operation

Much of the fraud and malfeasance is due to the fact that in many ways the charter scam is an inside operation.

The Department of Education uses a slipshod process to conduct reviews of charter school grant applications that allows applicants to get away with making false and misleading claims about their academic programs. The review process does not allow the verification of applicants’ claims, and reviewers are instructed to accept what applicants have written as fact. And reviewers are not publicly identified by the department and are likely to be biased because of the department’s requirement that they have “a solid understanding of the ‘charter school movement.’”

Many of the worst abuses take place in the grant program that sends money to states. When state education agencies pass the federal funding on to charter schools, there is generally little to no accountability for how the money is used. The subgrantee schools often never open or close quickly, and the schools often blatantly discriminate, engage in outright fraud, and engage in related-party transactions that result in private individuals and companies pocketing huge sums of money at taxpayer expense. But once the monies are given to the state, the Department of Education maintains a “hands-off” policy.

One of these subgrantee charter schools recently made national headlines when the New York Times recently reported about East Austin College Prep in Texas, where raccoons and rats invade offices and classrooms. When it rains, the roof of the main building leaks. Yet for all this, the secondary school pays almost $900,000 in annual rent to its landlord who is also its founder, Southwest Key Programs, the nation’s largest provider of shelters for migrant children. The federal charter grant program gave the school a grant to start the school through its Texas state grant.

Shut It Down

There is only one way to deal with this blatant grift program for the charter school industry.

First, Congress must reject President Trump’s budget proposal for increasing funding for the charter school grant program. Then Congress must end funding for new charter grants coming from this program and demand thorough audits of previous grant awards and steps to ensure grant awards still under term are being responsibly carried out and that misspent money is returned.

And Congress also needs to consider the unintended consequences to districts caused by the unchecked expansion of charters. Resources are depleted for the students left behind, and public schools become more segregated and serve needier populations.

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