Chris Hedges's Blog, page 295

Venezualan Government Bars Guiado From Public Office for 15 Years

CARACAS, Venezuela—The Venezuelan government on Thursday said it has barred opposition leader Juan Guaido from holding public office for 15 years, though the National Assembly leader brushed off the measure and said it would not derail his campaign to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

The announcement by state comptroller Elvis Amoroso, a close ally of Maduro, cited alleged irregularities in Guaido’s financial records and reflected a tightening of government pressure on an opposition movement backed by the United States and its allies.

Guaido, who was elected to the assembly in 2015, has taken 90 international trips without accounting for the origin of the estimated $94,000 in expenses, Amoroso said. He also accused the opposition leader of harming Venezuela through his interactions with foreign governments, dozens of which support Guaido’s claim that he is interim president of the country.

“We’re going to continue in the streets,” Guaido said soon after Amoroso’s statements on state television. He dismissed the comptroller’s announcement as irrelevant because, in his view, Maduro’s government is illegitimate.

The power struggle between Maduro and Guaido has intensified the sense of crisis in Venezuela, which suffered its worst blackouts earlier this month and then another round of power outages that paralyzed commerce this week.

Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said Thursday that electricity had been restored in most of the country, though some areas remained without power.

Schools and public offices were still closed, but there was more traffic in the streets of Caracas and many people were able to make electronic payments for the first time in days.

Both the opposition and the government plan demonstrations on Saturday as they try to project resolve in a debilitating standoff in what was once one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries. More than 3 million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years, escaping dire economic conditions that left many without adequate food or medicine.

Maduro, who is backed by Russia, says he is the target of a U.S.-led coup plot and has accused Washington and Guaido of sabotaging Venezuela’s power grid. Both the U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition, as well as many electricity experts, believe neglect and mismanagement are the cause of the country’s electricity woes.

Venezuelan authorities this month arrested Guaido’s chief of staff, Roberto Marrero, and accused him of involvement in a “terrorist” scheme to overthrow the government.

The United States was the first nation to recognize Guaido as interim president, asserting that Maduro’s re-election last year was rigged. It has stepped up sanctions and other diplomatic measures in the hopes of forcing him to give up power.

Facebook Charged With Discrimination for Targeted Housing Ads

WASHINGTON—Facebook was charged with discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of its ad-targeting system.

HUD said Thursday that Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map and giving advertisers the option of showing ads only to men or only to women. The agency also claims Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude people that the social media company classified as parents; non-American-born; non-Christian; interested in accessibility; interested in Hispanic culture or a wide variety of other interests that closely align with the Fair Housing Act’s protected classes.

HUD, which is pursuing civil charges and potential monetary awards that could run into the millions, said that Facebook’s ad platform is “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” because it allows advertisers to exclude people who they don’t want to see their ads.

The claim from HUD comes less than a week after Facebook said it would overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement with a group that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Fair Housing Alliance and others.

The technology at the heart of the clashes is what has helped turned Facebook into a goliath with annual revenue of close to $56 billion.

It can offer advertisers and groups the ability to direct messages with precision to exactly the crowd that they want to see it. The potential is as breathtaking as it is potentially destructive.

Facebook has taken fire for allowing groups to target groups of people identified as “Jew-haters” and Nazi sympathizers. There remains the fallout from the 2016 election, when, among other things, Facebook allowed fake Russian accounts to buy ads targeting U.S. users to enflame political divisions.

The company is wrestling with several government investigations in the U.S. and Europe over its data and privacy practices. A shakeup this month that ended with the departure of some of Facebook’s highest ranking executives raised questions about the company’s direction.

The departures came shortly after CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new “privacy-focused” vision for social networking. He has promised to transform Facebook from a company known for devouring the personal information shared by its users to one that gives people more ways to communicate in truly private fashion, with their intimate thoughts and pictures shielded by encryption in ways that Facebook itself can’t read.

However, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said Thursday that there is little difference between the potential for discrimination in Facebook’s technology, and discrimination that has taken place for years.

“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” Carson said. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

Pelosi and McConnell Are Inching Us Closer to Nuclear War

When Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell teamed up to invite NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to address a joint session of Congress, they had every reason to expect the April 3 speech to be a big hit with U.S. media and political elites. The establishment is eager to affirm the sanctity of support for the transatlantic military alliance.

Huge reverence for NATO is matched by how dangerous NATO has become. NATO’s continual expansion — all the way to Russia’s borders — has significantly increased the chances that the world’s two nuclear superpowers will get into direct military conflict.

But in the United States, when anyone challenges the continued expansion of NATO, innuendos or outright smears are likely.

Two years ago, when the Senate debated whether to approve bringing Montenegro into NATO, the mud flew at Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky after he showed up to object. An infuriated Sen. John McCain declared on the Senate floor: “I have no idea why anyone would object to this, except that I will say — if they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin, and I do not say that lightly.”

Moments later, when Paul said “I object,” McCain proclaimed: “The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

With those words, McCain conveyed the common madness of reverence for NATO — and the common intolerance for anything that might approach a rational debate on whether it’s a good idea to keep expanding an American-led military alliance to, in effect, push Russia into a corner. Doing so is understandably viewed from Russia as a dire threat. (Imagine a Russian-led military alliance expanding to Canada and Mexico, complete with some of the latest missile systems on the planet.)

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and the quickly broken promises by the U.S. government in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” — NATO has been closing in on Russia’s borders while bringing one nation after another into full military membership. During the last three decades, NATO has added 13 countries — and it’s not done yet.

NATO members “have clearly stated that Georgia will become a member of NATO,” Stoltenberg asserted days ago while visiting the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. He added: “We will continue working together to prepare for Georgia’s NATO membership.” For good measure, Stoltenberg tweeted on March 25 that he was “delighted to observe the joint NATO-Georgia exercise” and “honored to meet veterans & serving soldiers,” adding that “Georgia is a unique partner for #NATO & we are stepping up our cooperation.”

Very few members of Congress can be heard raising any concerns about such reckless expansion. The Senate is key, because adding a country to full NATO membership requires Senate approval.

My colleagues at RootsAction.org have just launched a constituent email campaign on this issue. In every state, people are contacting their senators with individual emails urging them to oppose NATO expansion. Such constituent pressure needs to escalate.

But lobbying is only part of what’s needed. As NATO marks its 70th anniversary next week with a range of activities — including a White House welcome for Stoltenberg on Tuesday, his speech to Congress the next day and an official “celebration” on April 4 — counter-actions including forums and protests as part of a “No to NATO” week will be happening in Washington.

A statement from the campaign says that “NATO and a just, peaceful and sustainable world are incompatible…. It is an unjust, undemocratic, violent and aggressive alliance trying to shape the world for the benefit of a few.” Such evaluations of NATO in the real world are a far cry from the adulation that will be coming from mass media next week.

Trump’s decision to roll out the White House red carpet for NATO’s secretary general is consistent with the administration’s actions during the last two years. Media narratives that fixate on occasional warm rhetoric from Trump about Russian President Vladimir Putin have fueled illusions that Trump isn’t pursuing aggressive anti-Russian policies.

While many Democratic politicians and U.S. media outlets have portrayed Trump as soft on Russia and uncommitted to Western militarism, such claims don’t hold up to facts. Trump and his top deputies have repeatedly affirmed a commitment to NATO, while his overall policies (if not always his rhetoric) have been dangerously bellicose toward Russia.

In an email message to the D.C. area encouraging participation in “No to NATO” events next week, RootsAction pointed out: “Trump has evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles practically on Russia’s border, sent weapons into Ukraine, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals, left the Iran agreement, torn up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia’s offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyberwar, expanded NATO eastward, added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, demanded and successfully moved most NATO members to buy significantly more weapons, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, overseen the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century, condemned all proposals for a European military and insisted that Europe stick with NATO.”

When NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg gives his speech to the assembled members of Congress next Wednesday, you can count on the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader to be right behind him. The bipartisan enthusiasm will be obvious — in tribute to a militarized political culture that is vastly profitable for a few, while vastly destructive in countless ways. Only public education, activism, protests and a wide range of political organizing have the potential to disrupt and end the reflexive support for NATO in Washington.

America’s Menacing Defiance of International Justice

Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone! The Senate agrees with the House that the United States should stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen (and Mitch McConnell calls this attempt to extricate the country from cooperation in further war crimes “inappropriate and counterproductive”)! Whoosh! Gone! Twelve Republican senators cross party lines to overturn Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, followed by the president’s veto! Whoosh! Gone! Delegates to the March 2019 U.N. Environment Assembly meeting agree to a non-binding but important resolution drastically reducing the production of single-use plastic. The United States delegation, however, succeeds in watering down the final language lest it “endorse the approach being taken in other countries, which is different than our own”! Once again, the rest of the world is briefly reminded of the curse of American exceptionalism and then, whoosh! Gone!

Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be surprising if you had missed the Associated Press report about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcing that the United States “will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel seeking to investigate alleged war crimes and other abuses committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” In fact, said Pompeo, some visas may already have been denied or revoked, but he refused to “provide details as to who has been affected and who will be affected” (supposedly to protect the confidentiality of visa applicants).

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National Security Advisor John Bolton had already signaled such a move last September in a speech to the Federalist Society. In what the Guardian called an “excoriating attack” on the International Criminal Court, or ICC, Bolton said, “The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.”

By “unjust prosecution,” he clearly meant any attempt to hold Americans accountable for possible war crimes. An exception even among exceptional nations, the United States simply cannot commit such crimes. Hence, by the logic of Bolton or Pompeo, any prosecution for such a crime must, by definition, be unjust.

In calling it “this illegitimate court,” Bolton was referring to the only international venue now in existence for trying alleged war criminals whose countries cannot or will not prosecute them. By “our allies,” Bolton appeared to mean Israel, a supposition Pompeo confirmed last week when he told reporters, “These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis.”

And when it came to threats, Bolton didn’t stop there. He also suggested that the U.S. might even arrest ICC officials:

“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”

This is a dangerous precedent indeed, as the director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Human Rights Project, Jamil Dakwar, told Democracy Now.It’s outrageous, he pointed out, that the U.S. would prosecute “judges and the prosecutors of the ICC for doing their job and for doing the job that the United States should have done — that is, to investigate, credibly and thoroughly, war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed in the course of the war in Afghanistan.”

What’s all this about?

The story goes back to December 2017, when Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, announced an investigation into the possibility that U.S. military and CIA personnel had committed war crimes during America’s Afghan War or in other countries “that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan.” These included some of the countries that hosted the CIA’s so-called black sites, where, in the earlier years of the war on terror, detainees were held incommunicado and tortured. Specifically, the ICC opened an investigation into the possible commission of “war crimes, including torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape, and other forms of sexual violence by U.S. armed forces and members of the CIA on the territories of Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.”

When Bensouda made her announcement, it looked as if at least some Americans might finally be held accountable for crimes committed in the post-9/11 “war on terror” launched to avenge the criminal deaths of 3,000 souls in New York City and Washington, D.C. That never-ending war has seen the United States illegally invade and occupy Iraq; directly kill at least 210,000 civilians (not to mention actual combatants) in Iraq and Afghanistan; torture an unknown number of prisoners; and continue to detain without trial or conviction 39 men at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba.

But wait. Aren’t U.S. personnel immune from ICC prosecution, because Washington never ratified the treaty that created the court?

That’s true, but the alleged crimes didn’t take place in the United States. They were committed in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, all of which have ratified the treaty. Note that Thailand, site of egregious CIA abuses, doesn’t appear on the ICC’s list, nor does Iraq (the site of the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison, among other things), presumably because neither is a signatory to the treaty.

However, before it could prosecute such crimes, the ICC would have to investigate any potential charges, interview possible witnesses, and gather the evidence necessary to prepare an indictment. That would undoubtedly require its investigators to visit the United States. This, say Bolton and Pompeo, will never be permitted.

What Is the International Criminal Court and Why Does It Matter?

The ICC’s origins go back to the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. In 1943, the leaders of the Allied powers — England, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union — met in Tehran, Iran. One subject on the table: how, once the war was won, the Allies would deal with Nazi war criminals. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is said to have proposed simply lining up and executing 50,000 Nazis. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly tried to break the resulting tension by jokingly suggesting that 49,000 might be sufficient.

Two years later, at war’s end, confronting evidence of barbarism on a scale previously unseen in history, the war’s victors found themselves responsible for bringing accountability to the perpetrators of genocide and some modicum of justice to its victims. It was decided then to establish a tribunal, a court, where such criminals could be tried. The problem the Great Powers now faced was how to create a process that the world would consider something more than vengeance masquerading as righteousness, something more than “victors’ justice.”

The solution was to demonstrate that their prosecutions had a basis in the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties — in, that is, the already existing laws of war. In the process of designing those prosecutions, they consolidated and advanced the meaning and power of international law itself, a concept particularly needed in a postwar world of atomic weapons and a looming U.S.-Soviet conflict. Three-quarters of a century and many wars and weapon systems later, enforceable international law still remains humanity’s best hope for adjudicating past war crimes and preventing future ones — but only if great nations like the United States do not declare themselves exceptions to the rule of law.

In addition to the verdicts rendered, the Nuremberg tribunal produced other enduring results, including the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, commissioned and adopted by the new United Nations. Those principles established that actions violating international law were punishable crimes, whether they violated any specific country’s domestic laws or not. Even heads of state or other high government officials were not considered immune from prosecution for such war crimes or crimes against humanity. And no one could be exonerated for them on the sole grounds of following the orders of a superior.

In the end, however, was Nuremberg really anything more than victors’ justice? There were those who said that was all it was, invoking what was called the “tu quoque” (Latin for “you did it, too”) argument. After all, hadn’t the allies also committed war crimes? Hadn’t the British and Americans, for example, firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing 25,000 civilians in one night and destroying 75,000 homes? Indeed, it’s been argued that, because the Allies didn’t want to answer for Dresden, they excluded the earlier German air war against England from the charges brought at Nuremberg.

Nevertheless, many observers there believed that, after rendering verdicts for Nazi crimes, a more permanent tribunal would turn its attention to the crimes of the Allies. It might even, for example, have taken up the legality of the U.S. use of the world’s first atomic weapons to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, of course, never happened.

Nor has any court ever prosecuted those responsible for the U.S. firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. Those lesser-known attacks killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and reduced many of that country’s largely wooden urban areas to ashes. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and an architect of American policy in Vietnam), described those attacks in Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War. Reflecting on his own actions in World War II when, as an Air Force captain, he served in the Office of Statistical Control (where he analyzed the efficiency of bomber aircraft), he told Morris: “What one can criticize is that the human race, prior to that time — and today! — has not really grappled with what are called the rules of war. Was there a rule that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death a hundred thousand civilians in one night? [General Curtis LeMay, who oversaw the firebombing campaign in Japan] said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

What does any of this have to do with today’s International Criminal Court? The ICC is itself an outgrowth of the Nuremberg process. Even during the original Nuremberg trial, observers expected that the newly established United Nations would create a permanent war crimes court as one of its earliest actions.

In the end, it took more than half a century, but in 1998, at a United Nations General Assembly convention in Rome, 120 countries adopted the “Rome Statute,” which established the court at The Hague in the Netherlands and described its jurisdiction and rules of operation. (Among the 148 votes, there were 21 abstentions and seven “no” votes, including the United States.) The ICC officially opened in 2002, when 60 nations ratified the Rome Statute. It took up its first prosecution in 2005. Today, about 120 member states back its role on this planet.

(A side note: The ICC is often confused with the International Court of Justice, commonly called the World Court. The ICC deals with the criminal prosecution of individuals. The World Court deals with civil disputes between nations. Unlike the ICC, the United States is a member of the World Court, although its record of abiding by that court’s decisions is spotty at best.)

The United States and the ICC — a Strange Dance

Despite having participated in the work of formulating the Rome Statute, the United States never ratified it or joined the court. The first administration to deal with it would take a confusing and contradictory stance. In 1999, President Bill Clinton signed a Foreign Relations Authorization Act that included language prohibiting federal funding for the ICC and the extradition of any U.S. citizen to a country that might surrender him or her to that court for prosecution.

The following year, however, Clinton actually signed the Rome Statute, the treaty creating the ICC. In fact, the United States had been instrumental in drafting the court’s procedures, rules of evidence, and definitions of various crimes. In spite of that Foreign Relations Authorization Act, it looked as if the U.S. was on the way to future full participation in the ICC. The year 2000, however, saw the election of George W. Bush. In 2002, the Bush administration rescinded Clinton’s signature and notified the United Nations that the United States would not ratify the treaty. It was hardly a surprising move given that the Bush-Cheney administration had already begun torturing detainees in its newly born war on terror. (Torture techniques would even reportedly be demonstrated to some of those officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in the White House.)

It was John Bolton, then Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who sent the notification letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and personally trekked to U.N. headquarters in New York City to “unsign” the Rome Statute. That, of course, is the very John Bolton who now is Donald Trump’s national security advisor and who attacked the ICC at the Federalist Society last September. This was hardly surprising, since his record of opposing any international constraints on Washington has been long and consistent. In fact, when George W. Bush tapped him as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, the Senate refused to confirm him. It took a recess appointment to get him the job. The Senate’s reluctance was reasonble, given Bolton’s contempt for the institution. (He’d once said that if its headquarters building “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”)

In 2002, Bush signed the American Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA), which, as the American Bar Association explains, contained “several provisions meant to prohibit or otherwise complicate U.S. cooperation with the ICC.” These included “restricting U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and prohibiting use of any appropriated funds to support or cooperate with the Court.” They also included a provision authorizing the use of military force “to liberate any American citizens held by the Court,” leading it to be dubbed by critics “the Invade The Hague Act.”

And yet even the ASPA demonstrated an American ambivalence towards the ICC. It had an amendment allowing the U.S. to cooperate with the court in order to bring “other foreign nationals accused of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity” to justice. In other words, the ICC was considered good enough to try other countries’ accused war criminals, just not ours.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States began a rapprochement with the court, opening diplomatic relations and starting to attend meetings of its Assembly of States Parties as an observer, which it continues to do today. In 2011, the U.S. sent a delegation to an ICC meeting in Kampala, Uganda, where important language was adopted defining the crime of aggression.

Making an aggressive war was the first of the three categories of crimes under which Nazi leaders were charged at Nuremberg. At the time, Washington officials strongly advocated for the position that all other Nazi atrocities sprang from that initial crime. The same could well be said of the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Cooperation with the ICC continued under Obama, who also signed a law providing rewards of up to $5 million for the capture of individuals indicted by the court.

It should be noted that the ICC is not without its critics. African nations in particular have rightly complained that the only people who have stood trial so far are from that continent, leading some to threaten to withdraw. In 2017, Burundi did leave, but so far no other African members have followed suit. Nonetheless, the ICC remains a court of last resort when it comes to bringing war criminals to justice.

Reversing Course Under Trump

Given Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, it should hardly be surprising that the ICC is among the international organizations he and his top foreign-policy officials particularly despise. As a result, his administration has already rolled back Obama’s rapprochement and then some. In view of the president’s lack of attention to detail (not to mention his short attention span), it seems likely that John Bolton is the true architect of this latest move. It’s the State Department that grants (or doesn’t grant) visas, so Mike Pompeo made the official announcement, but this approach fits Bolton’s M.O.

The poison now seeping out of Washington continues to spread. On March 18th, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines became the second country to leave the ICC, where it, like the U.S., is being investigated for possible crimes — in its case, against its own people. As the Washington Post reports, the country is “under preliminary examination [by the ICC]for thousands of [domestic drug war] killings since Duterte rose to the presidency in 2016.”

In its menacing rejection of the court, the Trump administration is turning its back on the system of international law and justice the United States helped establish at Nuremberg. The rule of law must not hold only, as hotelier Leona Helmsley once said about taxes, for “the little people.” If Donald Trump had truly wanted to “make America great again,” he would have recognized that international law is not just for the little countries. The greater a world power, the more consequential is its submission to the rule of law. The attacks of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo on the ICC, however, simply represent a new spate of lawless actions from a lawless administration in an increasingly lawless era in Washington.

The Americans Being Decimated by the Opioid Crisis

Drug overdoses killed 700,000 people in the United States between 1999 and 2017, and more than two-thirds of those deaths were the result of opioids. This week, the state of Oklahoma won a landmark $270 million settlement against one of the world’s largest manufacturers of prescription opioids, Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family. While the Sackler name doesn’t appear on Purdue’s pill bottles, it does adorn many prestigious museums and academic buildings around the world. Aggressive marketing of Purdue’s products, including its signature addictive drug, OxyContin, made billions of dollars for the Sacklers, some of which they gave to places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Tate museums in London. Now, the tide is turning, thanks in part to legal action like the one in Oklahoma — the lawsuits against Purdue and the Sacklers now number close to 2,000 — and creative protest campaigns at some of the museums that the Sacklers have funded.

Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic has continued to grow, expanding from prescription opioids like OxyContin to include heroin and now fentanyl. The epidemic knows no boundaries, affecting people across class and race lines. But, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, two of the leading risk factors for becoming addicted to opioids, and potentially dying of an overdose, are living in a rural area and being poor. Native American reservations in the United States meet both criteria. It is no surprise that the opioid epidemic has hit indigenous populations especially hard.

“The number one disease that our people suffer from is anonymity or invisibility,” Stacy Bohlen, citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and CEO of the National Indian Health Board, said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “You’re looking at very vulnerable populations of people, very vulnerable health care systems, that are funded below 50 percent of need.” According to the CDC, drug overdoses among rural Native Americans and Native Alaskans, between 1999 and 2015, increased by 519 percent, more than twice the national average. That number itself is likely too low, as native people are often miscategorized ethnically or racially.

The Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, has filed a federal lawsuit against Purdue Pharma and several other opioid manufacturers. The devious and corrupt business practices detailed in the complaint are staggering, and reminiscent of the tactics used by the tobacco industry in order to deceive the public about the harms posed by cigarettes. The suit alleges Purdue and the other companies “intentionally flooded the market with opioids and pocketed billions of dollars in the process,” repeatedly making “false statements designed to persuade both doctors and patients that prescription opioids posed a low risk of addiction.”

“This threat to tribal communities across the United States, not just in South Dakota, is really an existential one … we’re talking about some of the most strained economies in the country, where you’ll see unemployment rates of 80 percent,” attorney Brendan Johnson, representing the Oglala Sioux, said on “Democracy Now!” “What is different here,” he added, “is that tribes do have a seat at the table, have been very aggressive in their claims, because oftentimes [with] the state and the state attorney generals, the tribal communities are forgotten. Here, that won’t be the case.”

As this case and close to 2,000 others make their way through the courts, people are taking action against Purdue Pharma. Artists and activists in New York City lined The Guggenheim Museum’s famous climbing spiral walkway, hurling into the vast atrium thousands of fake prescription pad pages bearing messages critical of the Sacklers. The action was inspired by a statement from the 1990s by Purdue co-owner Richard Sackler, that the launch of OxyContin would be “followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that would bury the competition.”

Artist Nan Goldin, one of the organizers of the protests, who herself had been addicted to OxyContin, tweeted, after details of the Oklahoma legal settlement were announced: “The Sackler family paid $75 million in the Oklahoma settlement today which admits their culpability. By the way, that’s only 0.2 percent of the $35 billion in profits they made from OxyContin.” To date, the Guggenheim and the Tate museums, as well as Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, have stopped accepting Sackler family funds, and other institutions are considering doing the same.

As the Sackler family name is stripped from elite art institutions, appearing more frequently in court proceedings, they must now answer for the ravages of the opioid epidemic from which they so handsomely profited. The anonymity they enjoyed, hiding behind Purdue Pharma, must end. But the anonymity of their victims must end as well: those who have died, and those who, addicted to opioids, still struggle to survive.

How the U.S. Navy Made Tom Dooley a Tool to Sell the Vietnam War

Dr. Tom Dooley, whose best-selling book “Deliver Us From Evil” helped create a favorable climate of opinion for U.S. intervention in South Vietnam, has long been linked to legendary CIA officer Edward G. Lansdale and his black operations in Vietnam between 1954 and 1955. But the real story about Dooley’s influential book, which has finally emerged from more recent scholarly research, is that it was engineered by an official of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command, Capt. William Lederer.

Lederer is best known as the co-author, with Eugene Burdick, of the 1958 novel “The Ugly American,” which was turned into a 1963 movie starring Marlon Brando. Far more important, however, is the fact that from 1951 through 1957 Capt. Lederer was on the staff of the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), Adm. Felix Stump.

Pacific Command’s interest in Dooley was a function of the fact that the Navy had the greatest stake in the U.S. military in the outcome of the conflict between the communists and U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes in Vietnam and China. And it was directly involved in the military planning for war in both cases.

Adm. Arthur Radford, the former CINCPAC and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the senior officials pressing President Dwight D. Eisenhower to approve a massive U.S. airstrike against the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. And between 1954 and 1955, Adm. Stump called for increasing the size of the Nationalist Chinese raids on the Chinese mainland from offshore islands. He also pushed for a U.S. attack on the mainland, including the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend those same offshore islands.

Capt. Lederer met Dooley in Haiphong, Vietnam, in 1954 after the Navy launched “Operation Passage to Freedom” to help transport more than 300,000 Vietnamese civilians, soldiers and members of the French Army from the French-controlled North to Saigon. A CIA psychological warfare team led by Lansdale had slipped into Hanoi and Haiphong to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh government takeover and to spread propaganda to provoke fear among Catholics and other residents.

The key tactic of the Lansdale team was to print a series of “black propaganda” leaflets—designed to appear as though they came from the Viet Minh—to frighten residents of the North into leaving for South Vietnam. The most dramatic tactic involved spreading the rumor that the U.S. military was going to bomb Hanoi, a story that was further promoted by leaflets showing concentric circles of destruction of the city by an atomic bomb.

Lt. Tom Dooley, a young Irish Catholic Navy doctor, was “loaned” by the U.S. Navy to Lansdale for that operation, although Dooley apparently thought the team’s function was to gather intelligence. Dooley’s job was ostensibly to manage medical supplies needed for the movement of North Vietnamese to the South, but in fact Dooley functioned as the team’s propagandist, briefing visiting news media and sending out reports that supported the CIA’s anti-Viet Minh mission.

Lederer quickly recognized Dooley as a potentially valuable propaganda asset because of his connection with Vietnamese Catholics and his penchant for telling tales of Viet Minh atrocities. It was Lederer who suggested that Dooley write a book. The Navy gave him a leave of absence to write it, and Lederer became Dooley’s handler for the project. Dooley was a charismatic public speaker but needed Lederer’s help with writing. Lederer also introduced Dooley to Reader’s Digest—by far the most popular magazine in America, with 20 million readers. Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke officially embraced the book and even wrote the introduction to it.

Reader’s Digest published a highly condensed 27-page version of the book in its April 1956 edition, and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy immediately published the full-length version. It became a runaway bestseller, going through twelve printings.

The book;s constantly reiterated theme of “Deliver Us From Evil” was that the Ho Chi Minh government was determined to suppress the Catholic faith in Vietnam and used torture and other atrocities to terrorize Catholics into submission. That was a grotesque distortion of actual Viet Minh policy. The Ho Chi Minh government had worked hard from the beginning of the war to ensure that there was no interference with Catholics’ exercise of their faith, even establishing severe legal penalties on any infringement of that freedom.

But Dooley’s book was full of lurid descriptions of North Vietnamese Communist atrocities against Catholics that Dooley claimed to have known about from treating the victims. It told of the Viet Minh having partially torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them dangling—supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord’s Prayer.

And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums. The children, he wrote, had been accused of “treason” for having attended a religious class at night. As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.

But it was widely recognized within the U.S. government that the book contained disinformation. Several U.S. Information Agency officials who had been in North Vietnam during that period, as well as former Navy corpsmen who had worked in the Haiphong camp with Dooley, all said they had never heard of any such events. And in 1992 Lederer himself, who had made 25 fact-finding trips to Vietnam since 1951, told an interviewer, “[T]hose things never happened. … I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.”

Many years later, in an interview with scholar Edward Palm, Lederer disclaimed any significant influence on the content or tone of Dooley’s book, even though Dooley had credited Lederer with helping put the book in final form. Lederer also told Palm he didn’t remember any such stories appearing in the first draft of the book he read.

But Palm, who obtained the first draft of the manuscript from Dooley’s papers, confirmed to this writer that the first draft did contain those stories of atrocities. And Palm’s monograph documented the fact that the last draft chapter was dated the end of July 1955 and that communications from both men at the time indicated that Lederer had met repeatedly with Dooley during June and July to help him finish the draft.

Palm also quoted from Dooley’s first draft to show that it concluded with a call for Americans to be ready for a U.S. war against communism. If negotiations with the Soviet Union failed to bring “lasting peace,” Dooley’s draft warned, “Communism will have to be fought with arms … it must be annihilated….”  Dooley concluded, “[T]here can be no concessions, no compromise and no coexistence.”

Palm pointed out that the published version of the book dropped that rabidly warlike rhetoric and instead introduced a new character named “Ensign Potts” to represent the view that America must be ready to fight a war to destroy communism. The role of the “Potts” character was to be converted to Dooley’s argument that service to the ordinary Vietnamese would be the most effective way to prevail in the Cold War—after Dooley’s tearful recounting of the story of the Viet Minh puncturing the Catholic youths’ ears with chopsticks, reduced “Potts” to tears as well.

That, of course, was the view that Lederer and Burdick popularized in “The Ugly American” and that infused Lederer’s own Reader’s Digest article in March 1955. Lederer told Palm in a 1996 interview that he had suggested that Dooley model his book on that article.

But Lederer had obviously approved Dooley’s portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as an alien horde terrorizing the Catholics. Catholics were the fastest-growing religious denomination in America from 1940 to 1960, during which time their numbers doubled, and Dooley’s message was an obvious way of mobilizing American Catholics to support Adm. Stump and the Navy’s agenda for Vietnam.

Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, who was detailed to the CIA during much of his career and knew Dooley during the writing of his book, told fellow former Marine Palm in a telephone interview, “Dooley was programmed toward  a particular end”—and he meant getting the United States into Vietnam.

While on a nationwide book tour, Dooley was one of the featured speakers at the first conference of The American Friends of Vietnam—later known as the “Vietnam Lobby”—in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1956. The meeting was held at a crucial moment in U.S. Vietnam policy. Eisenhower was still supporting the election for a government throughout Vietnam as called for by the 1954 Geneva Agreement, with strict conditions for a free vote. Meanwhile, hardliners in the administration were pushing for opposing that election outright on the ground that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win it, regardless of conditions.

Dooley’s contribution was to describe “Communism” as an “evil, driving, malicious ogre” and recount the “hideous atrocities that we witnessed in our camps every single day.” And he retold the story of the Viet Minh punishing the schoolchildren by puncturing their eardrums.

A few weeks after the meeting, Eisenhower reversed his position on supporting the Vietnamese, opening the path to deeper U.S. political and military intervention in Vietnam.

Dooley had just learned that his secret life as a gay man in the Navy had been discovered by Naval intelligence, and he was forced to quietly resign. At Lansdale’s suggestion, Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee helped him establish a primitive medical clinic near the Chinese border in northern Laos. But Dooley had to agree to cooperate with CIA in Laos by allowing it to smuggle arms into the site of the clinic to eventually be distributed to local anti-Communist militiamen.

The Dooley Clinic helped make him a hugely popular celebrity, with two more best-selling books, feature stories in popular magazines and network television appearances. By the time Dooley died of cancer in 1961, a Gallup Poll found that Americans viewed him as the third most admired person in the world, after Eisenhower and the pope. But his role in the larger tragedy of U.S. war in Indochina was to serve as the instrument of a highly successful campaign by the U.S. Navy to create the first false propaganda narrative of the conflict—one that has endured for most of Dooley’s fans for decades.

Fighting Fascism in an Era of Lies

This article was originally published in Counterpunch.

We do not live in a post-truth world and never have. On the contrary, we live in a pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive. As one of the primary currencies of politics, lies have a long history in the United States. For instance, state sponsored lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the U.S. into wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis of 2008. Under Trump, lying has become a rhetorical gimmick in which everything that matters politically is denied, reason loses its power for informed judgments, and language serves to infantilize and depoliticize as it offers no room for individuals to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. While questions about truth have always been problematic among politicians and the wider public, both groups gave lip service to the assumption that the search for truth and respect for its diverse methods of validation were based on the shared belief that “truth is distinct from falsehood; and that, in the end, we can tell the difference and that difference matters.” It certainly appeared to matter in democracy, particularly when it became imperative to be able to distinguish, however difficult, between facts and fiction, reliable knowledge and falsehoods, and good and evil. That however no longer appears to be the case.

In the current historical moment, the boundaries between truth and fiction are disappearing, giving way to a culture of lies, immediacy, consumerism, falsehoods and the demonization of those considered disposable. Under such circumstances, civic culture withers and politics collapses into the personal. At the same time, pleasure is harnessed to a culture of corruption and cruelty, language operates in the service of violence, and the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized. How else to explain President Trump’s strategy of separating babies and young children from their undocumented immigrant parents in order to incarcerate them in Texas in what some reporters have called cages.  Trump’s misleading rhetoric is used not only to cover up the brutality of oppressive political and economic policies, but also to resurrect the mobilizing passions of fascism that have emerged in an unceasing stream of hate, bigotry and militarism. Trump’s indifference to the boundaries between truth and falsehoods reflects not only a deep-seated anti-intellectualism, it also points to his willingness to judge any appeal to the truth as inseparable from an unquestioned individual and group loyalty on the part of his followers. As self-defined sole bearer of truth, Trump disdains reasoned judgment and evidence, relying instead on instinct and emotional frankness to determine what is right or wrong and who can be considered a friend or enemy.  In this instance, Truth becomes a performance strategy designed to test his followers’ loyalty and willingness to believe whatever he says. Truth now becomes synonymous with a regressive tribalism that rejects shared norms and standards while promoting a culture of corruption and what former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called an “epidemic of dishonesty.” Truth is now part of a web of relations and world view that draws its elements from a fascist politics that can be found in all the commanding political institutions and media landscapes. Truth is no longer merely fragile or problematic, it has become toxic and dysfunctional in an media ecosystem largely controlled by right wing conservatives and a financial elite who invest heavily in right-wing media apparatuses such Fox News and white nationalist social media platforms such as Breitbart News.

At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance, and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape, and sustain ideas, desires, and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a ‘war of all against all’ replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others. The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which as Gramsci observed “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while hyping a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.

Trump’s lying is the mask of nihilism and provides the ideological architecture for a form of neoliberal fascism. Under such circumstances the state is remade on the model of finance, all social relations are valued according to economic calculations, and the dual project of ultra-nationalism and right-wing apocalyptic populism merge in an embrace of a toxic and unapologetic defense of white supremacy. Unsurprisingly, Trump views language as a weapon of war, and social media as an emotional minefield that gives him the power to criminalize the political opposition, malign immigrants as less than human, and revel in his role as a national mouthpiece for white nationalists, nativists, and other extremist groups.  Unconcerned about the power of words to inflame, humiliate, and embolden some of his followers to violence, he embraces a sadistic desire to relegate his critics, enemies, and those considered outside of the boundaries of a white public sphere to zones of terminal exclusion.  In this instance, truth when aligned with the search for justice becomes an object of disdain, if not pure contempt.

The entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin of history, particularly the proto fascist era of 1930s and 1940s. They are with us once again producing dystopian fantasies out of the decaying communities and landscapes produced by forty years of a savage capitalism. Angry loners looking for a cause, a place to put their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have found one in Trump for whom the relationship between the language of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil” has moved to the center of power in the United States. While campaigning for the mid-term 2018 elections, President Trump reached deep into the abyss of fascist politics and displayed a degree of racism, hatred, and ignorance that sent alarm bells ringing across the globe. Blind to public criticism, Trump has refused to acknowledge how his rhetoric, rallies, and interviews fan the flames of racism and anti-Semitism.  Instead, he blames the media for the violence he encourages among his followers, calls his political rivals enemies, labels immigrants as invaders, and publicly claims he is a nationalist emboldening right-wing extremist groups. Incapable of both empathy and self-reflection, he can only use language in the service of vilification, insults, and violence. Trump is the endpoint of a neoliberal culture of hyper-punitiveness amplified through a fascist politics that enshrines militarization, privatization, deregulation, manic consumerism, the criminalization of entire groups of people, and the financialization of everything.

Fascism first begins with language and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate violence against entire groups — Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and others considered “disposable.” In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains,”describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,” and has become a national mouthpiece for violent nationalists and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. Using a rhetoric of revulsion as a performance strategy and media show to whip up his base, Trump employs endless rhetorical tropes of bigotry and demonization that set the tone for real violence.

Trump appears utterly unconcerned by the accusation that his highly charged rhetoric of racial hatred, xenophobia and virulent nationalism both legitimates and fuels acts of violence. He proceeds without concern about the consequences of lending his voice to conspiracy theorists claiming that George Soros is funding the caravan of migrant workers, calling CNN anchor Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television,” or referring to the basketball star, LeBron James as not being very smart. While Trump insults a variety of public figures, his attacks on African-Americans follows the standard racist stereotype of calling into question their intelligence. Meanwhile, this inflammatory invective offers a platform for inducing violence from the numerous fascist groups that support him.

Trump thrives on promoting social divisions that amplify friend/enemy distinctions, and he often legitimates acts of violence and expressions of radical extremism as a means of addressing them. He has stated that the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were “very fine people,” declared in 2016 “I think Islam hates us,” lied about seeing Muslims celebrate the September 11 attacks, refers to immigrants on the southern border as invaders, all the while repeatedly using the language of white nationalists and White supremacists. Moreover, he has stated without shame that he is a nationalist. In one of his rallies, he urged his base to use the word nationalism stating “You know … we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I am a nationalist, Okay? I am a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.”  Not only does Trump’s embrace of the term stoke racial fears, it ingratiates him with elements of the hard right, particularly white nationalists. After his strong appropriation of the term at an October 2018 rally, Steve Bannon in an interview with Josh Robin indicated “he was very very pleased Trump used the word ‘nationalist.’” Trump has drawn praise from a number of white supremacists including David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys–a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brown Shirts-and more recently by the alleged New Zealand shooter who in his Christchurch manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump’s use of the term is neither innocent nor a clueless faux pas. In the face of a wave of anti-immigration movements across the globe, it has become code for a thinly veiled racism and signifier for racial hatred. 

In the alleged era of post-truth, language is emptied of substantive meaning, actions are removed from any notion of social responsibility, and truth is detached from the search for justice. One consequence is the growing influence of a neo-fascist-type spectacle modeled after the emptiness and cheap pleasures of game shows, reality TV, and celebrity culture. All of which provide further opportunities for Trump to harness the public’s “free-floating anger, despair and apathy” into a celebration of militarism, hyper-masculinity, and spectacularized violence that mark his “frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies,” which serve largely as a  cauldron of race baiting and anti-Semitic demagoguery.

There are historical precedents for this collapse of language into a form of coded militarism and racism — the anti-Semitism couched in critiques of globalization and the call for racial and social cleansing aligned with the discourse of borders and walls. Echoes of history resonate in this assault on minority groups, racist taunts, twisted references that code a belief in racial cleansing, and the internment of those who do not mirror the twisted notions of white supremacy. As Edward Luce reminds us, we have heard this language before. He writes: “Eighty-five years ago on Thursday, Heinrich Himmler opened the Nazis first concentrating camp at Dachau. History does not repeat itself. But it is laced with warnings.”

In an age when civic literacy and efforts to hold the powerful accountable for their actions are dismissed as “fake news,” ignorance becomes the breeding ground not just for hate, but for a culture that represses historical memory, shreds any understanding of the importance of shared values, refuses to make tolerance a non-negotiable element of civic dialogue and allows the powerful to weaponize everyday discourse. While Trump has been portrayed as a serial liar, it would be a mistake to view this pathology as a matter of character. Lying for Trump is a tool of power used to discredit any attempt to hold him accountable for his actions while destroying those public spheres and institutional foundations necessary for the possibility of a democratic politics. At the heart of Trump’s world of lies, fake news, and alternative facts is a political regime that trades in corruption, the accumulation of capital, and promotes lawlessness, all of which provides the foundation for a neoliberalism on steroids that now merges with an unabashed celebration of white nationalism. The post-truth era constitutes both a crisis of politics and a crisis of history, memory, agency, and education. Moreover, this new era of barbarism cannot be understood or addressed without a reminder that fascism has once again crystalized into new forms and has become a model for the present and future.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism, and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This is a dystopian imagination marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion, and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. What we are witnessing is a shrinking of the political and moral horizons and a full scale attack on justice, thoughtful reasoning, and collective resistance.

Trump’s aversion to the truth resembles Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in that it provides a bullhorn for violence against marginalized groups, journalists, and undocumented immigrants, all the while disseminating its lies through a massive disimagination tweet machine. This dystopian propaganda apparatus is also fueled by a language of silence and moral irresponsibility couched in a willingness on the part of politicians and the public to look away in the face of violence and human suffering. This is the worldview of fascist politics and a dangerous nihilism— one that reinforces a contempt for human rights in the name of financial expediency and the cynical pursuit of political power.

In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mind set has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the facts, ethics, and human weakness. Trump is a 21st century man without any virtues for whom success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness, and state sanctioned violence. His approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein rightly argues, Trump “approaches everything as a spectacle” and edits “reality to fit his narrative.”

Under the current reign of neoliberal fascism, politics extends beyond the attack on any vestige of truth, informed judgments, and constructive means of communication. There is more at work here than the need to decode and analyze Trump’s language as a tool for misrepresenting reality and shielding corrupt practices and policies that benefit major corporations, the military, and the ultra-rich.  There is also a worldview, a mode of hegemony, which comes out of a fascist playbook, and translates into dangerous policies and practices. For instance, there is his attack on dissent evident and his support of violence against journalists and politicians who are critical of his views. For example, in criticizing members of the Democratic Party that he labels as the radical left, he suggested one response to their opposition might be violence. He stated “O.K.? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” There is more at work here than infantilizing school yard threats. We have seen too many instances where Trump’s followers have beaten critics, attacked journalists, and shouted down any form of critique aimed at Trump’s policies — to say nothing of the army of trolls unleashed on intellectuals and journalist critical of the administration.

A few weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, a number of Trump’s outspoken critics, all of whom have been belittled and verbally attacked by Trump, were sent homemade pipe bombs in the mail. Cesar Sayoc — the man who was charged in connection with the bombings — is a strong Trump fan whose Twitter feed is littered with right-wing conspiracy theories along with an assortment of “apocalyptic, right-wing dystopian fantasies.” Trump’s fans include a number of white nationalist and white supremacists who have been involved in recent killings in both Pittsburgh and New Zealand. Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric, he also provides legitimation to a number of white nationalist and right-wing extremists groups who are emboldened by his words and actions and too often ready to translate their hatred into the desecration of synagogues, schools, and other public sites as well as engage in violence against peaceful protesters, and in some cases commit heinous acts of violence.

Without a care as to how his own vicious and aggressive rhetoric has legitimated and galvanized acts of violence by an assortment of members of the “alt-right,” neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Trump refuses to acknowledge the growing threat of white nationalism and supremacy, even as he enables it with his discourse of walls, alleged invading hordes, and celebration of nativism. Trump remains silent about the fringe groups he has incited with his vicious attacks on the press, the judiciary and his political opponents. That is, he refuses to criticize them while shoring up their support my claiming he is a nationalist and surrounding himself with people like Stephen Miller who leaves little to the imagination regarding his white supremacist credentials. Trump told reporters after the Christchurch massacre that white nationalism both in the United States and across the globe was not a serious problem. In this instance, he appears clueless and incapable of empathy regarding the suffering of others, all while accelerating neoliberal and racist policies that inflict massive suffering and misery on millions. Violent fantasies are Trump’s trademark, whether expressed in his support for ruthless dictators or in his urging his followers at his rallies to “knock the crap out of” protesters. We have seen this celebration of violence in the past with its infantile appeal to a hyper-masculinity and its willingness to further engage in genocidal acts.

Trump is the endpoint of a malady that has been growing for decades. What is different about Trump is that he basks in his role and is unapologetic about enacting policies that further enable the looting of the country by the ultra-rich (including him) and by mega-corporations. He embodies with unchecked bravado the sorts of sadistic impulses that could condemn generations of children to a future of misery and in some cases state terrorism. He loves people who believe that politics is undermined by anyone who has a conscience, and he promotes and thrives in a culture of violence and cruelty. Trump is not refiguring the character of democracy, he is destroying it, and in doing so, resurrecting all the elements of a fascist politics that many people thought would never re-emerge again after the horrors and death inflicted on millions by previous fascist dictators. Trump represents an emergence of the ghost of the past and we should be terrified of what is happening both in the United States and in other countries such as Brazil, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary. Trump’s ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing, his love affair with some of the world’s most heinous dictators, and his hatred of democracy echoes a period in history when the unimaginable became possible, when genocide was the endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the camp. The world is at war once again and it is a war against democracy and Trump is at the forefront of it.

Trump represents a distinctive and dangerous form of American-bred authoritarianism, but at the same time he is the outcome of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed, and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has Trump “normalized the unspeakable” and in some cases the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and, yes, courage itself.  In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship, and justice that has real substance.  One challenge is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. There will be no real movement for change without, as David Harvey has pointed out, “a strong anti-capitalist movement,” At the same time, no movement will succeed without addressing the need for a revolution in consciousness, one that makes education central to politics. As Fred Jameson has suggested such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the “impossible present.” Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues.

What is needed is also a language of militant possibility and a comprehensive politics that draws from history, rethinks the meaning of politics, and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. We need what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined futures,” one that “can snap us out of present-day socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives, build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic commitment.” Such a language has to create political formations capable of understanding neoliberal fascism as a totality, a single integrated system whose shared roots extend from class and racial injustices under financial capitalism to ecological problems and the increasing expansion of the carceral state and the military-industrial-academic complex. Nancy Fraser is right in arguing that we need a subjective response capable of connecting diverse racial, social and economic crises and in doing so addressing the objective structural forces that underpin them. William Faulkner once remarked that we live with the ghosts of the past or to be more precise: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Such a task is all the more urgent given that  Trump is living proof that we are not only living with the ghosts of a dark past, which can return. But it is also true that the ghosts of history can be critically engaged and transformed into a radical democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime is more than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from the past and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses to democracy.  The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective action in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy.

Notes

See Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Ed. & Trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p.275-76.

I take up the issue of neoliberal fascism in Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).

See Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).

Jeremy Peters, “How Trump-Fed Conspiracy Theories About Migrant Caravan Intersect With Deadly Hatred,” New York Times (October 29, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/politics/caravan-trump-shooting-elections.html

Wajahat Ali, “The Roots of the Christchurch Massacre,” New York Times (March 14, 2019). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/new-zealand-mosque-shooting.html

Karen Garcia, “Apocalypse Casts Shadow Over Midterms,” Sardonicky (October 29, 2018). Online: https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/10/apocalypse-casts-shadow-over-midterms.html

Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made 9,014 false or misleading claims over 773 days,’ The Washington Post (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/04/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.6e791f431791

Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough (Canada: Random House, 2017), p. 55.

Jonathan Chait, “Trump Threatens Violence If Democrats Don’t Support Him,” New York (March 14, 2019). Online: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/trump-threatens-violence-if-democrats-dont-support-him.html

Christopher Hayes, “Nearly half of Republicans think Trump should be able to close news outlets: poll,” USA Today (August 7, 2018). Online: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/07/trump-should-able-close-news-outletsrepublicanssay-poll/925536002/

Sasha Abramsky, “How Trump Has Normalized the Unspeakable,” The Nation (September 20, 2017). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-trump-has-normalized-the-unspeakable/

Gregory Leffel, “Is Catastrophe the only cure for the weakness of radical politics?” Open Democracy, [Jan. 21, 2018]. Online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/gregory-leffel/is-catastrophe-only-cure-for-weakness-of-radical-politics

Gregory Leffel, “Is Catastrophe the only cure for the weakness of radical politics?” Open Democracy (January 21, 2018). Online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/is-catastrophe-only-cure-for-weakness-of-radical-politics/

For an analysis of the origins of fascism in American capitalism, see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).

Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond”, American Affairs,(Winter 2017 | Vol. I, No 4)Online at: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/20...

Ralph Nader: Americans Should Be Demanding Trump’s Resignation

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent almost two years to produce a $25 million report that is a flat tire. Still unreleased in full to the American people, Trump’s acolyte, Attorney General William Barr, a longtime friend of Republican Mueller, gave us what Trump long craved—by stating that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” during the 2016 election. As for obstruction of justice by Trump, Attorney General Barr cryptically burped, that “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”—whatever that means. Give people the whole report now, as the House of Representatives voted 420 to 0 to do.

What a farce and distraction this whole exercise turned out to be! Mueller’s assigned subject was Trump. So, does this prosecutor demand to interview Trump, to subpoena Trump? No. Does this special investigator conclude with any legal recommendations at all? No. He just wants to be forgotten as he slinks away into deliberate silence (unless he is made to testify before the House Judiciary Committee).

Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?

The assignment to Mueller was doomed from the start. Its charge was far too narrow and proof in such matters is very difficult to find. Intent to collude requires direct examination of the President himself. But why would Trump have to collude at all? The Russians interfered in his favor in various ways to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and all he had to do was accept such foreign largess.

An inquiry into Trump and all his business deals and business proposals with various governments point to Trump’s disregard for the law. By the way, whatever happened to the IRS audit that Tricky Donald kept using as an excuse in 2016 for not releasing these voluminous tax records depicting suspicious relations that Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has written about for years (see his book The Making of Donald Trump)?

The endless speculation and successful prosecutions of Trump’s associates largely focused on ancillary lies and thefts not leading directly to the White House.

Trump couldn’t have distracted the mass dittohead media any better from his true crimes. Those include unlawful war-making, corruption, wasting public funds, and unlawfully handcuffing or firing the federal “cops” whose job is to save the lives, health, safety, and economic assets of all the American people from big corporate predators across the land.

Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump’s cruelty and viciousness from his brazen “deregulation,” or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions.

These policies have directly harmed innocent children, the elderly, patients, consumers, and workers and have wreaked environmental ruin, polluting the air, water, and soil with lethal toxins. He proudly took away protections leaving defenseless humans to suffer more deadly coal dust, coal ash, and coal pollution.

He has blocked our government’s responses to the climate crisis looming everywhere.

He has gotten away with massive federal deficits caused by his tax holidays for corporations and the rich, including the Trump family. Take that, next generation of Americans!

He backs for-profit colleges who have committed serial crimes against their impoverished students while heavily subsidizing these corporations with your tax dollars.

He is pushing to weaken or eliminate modest controls over imperial Wall Street, upsetting even Wall Streeters like Timothy Geithner, setting the stage for another Wall Street collapse on the economy, causing workers to lose their pensions and savings, before they, as taxpayers, are required to again bailout the Wall Street speculators and crooks.

He lies repeatedly about current realities, falsely brags about conditions he is actually worsening. He opposes any increase in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and does not adequately enforce fair labor standards. He has hired and personally profited from many undocumented workers while attacking their presence in the U.S.

He pays more attention to one golf ball than he does to the estimated $60 billion in annual wage theft or $350 billion a year in the health industry’s computerized billing fraud, or the gouging drug prices he falsely promised the people he would reduce.

Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump’s victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly.

Enough of lying Trump’s slimy bigotry and his snarling, hateful, bullying speech always directed at the powerless. Enough of his destructive impact on millions of children imitating his coarseness toward siblings and parents who, when admonished, blurt out that the President says this and does that. That daily acidic intrusion into family life—a cultural time bomb—has yet to properly interest the media.

Cheating Donald J. Trump has gotten away with everything in his failed businesses and his Electoral College-caused Presidency. In so doing, he has taught us much about ourselves, how much we tolerate with chronic indifference to the flaying of the rule of law, and the principles of decency, helpfulness, peace, and justice.

He has taught us about the costs of not doing our political homework, of staying home civically and electorally. He has taught us that if we do not look ourselves into the mirror, the three horsemen of fascism, lawless plutocracy, and oligarchy will run our beloved country into the ground, if not over the fiscal cliff.

Theresa May Says She’ll Step Down if Brexit Deal OK’d

LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May offered up her job in exchange for her Brexit deal Wednesday, telling colleagues she would quit within weeks if the agreement was passed and Britain left the European Union.

May’s dramatic concession that “there is a desire for a new approach—and new leadership” was a last-ditch effort to bring enough reluctant colleagues on board to push her twice-rejected EU divorce deal over the line.

It came as lawmakers sought an alternative to May’s unpopular deal after wrestling control of Parliament’s agenda away from her Brexit-weakened government.

May has been under mounting pressure from pro-Brexit members of her Conservative Party to quit. Many Brexiteers accuse her of negotiating a bad divorce deal that leaves Britain too closely tied to the bloc after it leaves.

Several have said they would support the withdrawal deal if another leader took charge of the next stage of negotiations, which will determine Britain’s future relations with the EU.

In a packed meeting of Conservative legislators described by participants as “somber,” May finally conceded she would have to go, although she did not set a departure date.

“I am prepared to leave this job earlier than I intended in order to do what is right for our country and our party,” she said, according to a transcript released by her office.

Anti-EU lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has clashed with May throughout the Brexit process, said she had been “very clear” that if Britain leaves the EU as foreseen on May 22, she will quit soon after.

He said the prime minister had been “very dignified.”

“She put her case well, and reiterated that she had done her duty,” he said.

It was unclear whether May’s offer to resign would be enough to win backing for her deal, which was defeated by 230 votes in January and by 149 votes earlier this month.

High-profile Brexiteer Boris Johnson announced soon after May’s statement that he would support the agreement, which he has previously called a “humiliation.” Johnson is a likely contender to replace May as prime minister.

But other hard-liners said they would continue to reject the deal, and Northern Ireland’s small but influential Democratic Unionist Party was also maintaining its opposition to a deal it has called “toxic.”

Two years ago, Britain triggered a countdown to departure from the EU that ended Friday, March 29, 2019. With that date approaching and no Brexit deal approved by Britain, the EU last week granted a delay. It said that if Parliament approves the proposed divorce deal this week, the U.K. will leave the EU on May 22. If not, the government has until April 12 to tell the 27 remaining EU countries what it plans to do: leave without a deal, cancel Brexit or propose a radically new path.

With May clinging to her Plan A — getting her deal approved — lawmakers this week seized control of the parliamentary timetable for debate and votes Wednesday on a range of Brexit alternatives, in a bid to stop the country from tumbling out of the bloc within weeks with no exit plan in place.

They were voting on eight widely varying options that underscored the divisions in Parliament — and the country — over Brexit. These included leaving the EU without a deal, staying in the bloc’s customs union and single market, putting any EU divorce deal to a public referendum, and canceling Brexit if the prospect of a no-deal departure gets close.

Lawmakers were being asked to vote yes to all of the options they could accept. The plan is for the most popular ideas to move to a second vote Monday to find an option that can command a majority. Parliament would then instruct the government to negotiate it with the EU.

May has said she will consider the outcome of the votes, although she has refused to be bound by the result.

The government condemned lawmakers’ move to seize control because it upends the usual practice in which the government sets the timetable for debate and votes.

But Conservative lawmaker Oliver Letwin, one of those behind Wednesday’s votes, said “this is not an insurgency.”

“This process has come about as a result of the increasing concern that many of us have had across the House of Commons that we were heading not towards an approval of the prime minister’s deal, but alas towards a no-deal exit,” he said.

May, meanwhile, still hopes to bring her deal back for another vote by lawmakers.

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he had introduced a motion to have Parliament meet Friday if needed for a vote.

But it remained unclear whether it would go ahead. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said he would not accept another vote on the twice-rejected deal unless substantial changes were made.

Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, said the parliamentary votes could boost support for May’s deal by convincing pro-Brexit lawmakers that a withdrawal might be delayed or abandoned.

Rees-Mogg, who has sought a complete break from the bloc, said May’s deal is still a bad one, but “legally leaving is better than not leaving at all. Half a loaf is better than no bread.”

Wednesday’s votes could potentially produce conflicting and inconclusive results. But they could push Britain in the direction of a softer Brexit that keeps Britain closely tied economically to the EU.

That would probably require the U.K. to seek a longer delay, although that would mean participating in May 23-26 European Parliament elections.

Many EU officials are keen to avoid the messy participation of a departing member state.

But the chief of the European Council told European lawmakers that the EU should let Britain take part if the country indicated it planned to change course on Brexit. Donald Tusk said the bloc could not “betray” the millions of Britons who want to stay in the EU.

“They may feel they are not sufficiently represented by the U.K. Parliament but they must feel that they are represented by you in this chamber. Because they are Europeans,” Tusk said.

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Gregory Katz and Tobie Mathew in London and Raf Casert in Strasbourg, France, contributed.

No Brexit Alternative Receives Parliament Majority

LONDON — The Latest on Brexit (all times local):

9:50 p.m.

British lawmakers have voted on eight different possible Brexit options, but none received the majority support that would clarify the U.K.’s course.

Parliament is trying to find an alternative to Prime Minister Theresa May’s twice-rejected EU divorce deal.

Lawmakers voted Wednesday on options that included leaving the European Union without a deal, staying in the bloc’s customs union and single market, putting any EU divorce deal to a public referendum, and canceling Brexit if the prospect of a no-deal departure gets close.

The strongest support was for a plan to stay in a customs union with the bloc after Brexit, which was defeated by eight votes: 272-264.

Lawmakers plan to narrow the list of options down and hold more votes on Monday.

Britain has until April 12 to find a new plan — or crash out of the EU without a deal.

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8:55 p.m.

A Northern Ireland party that props up Prime Minister Theresa May’s government says it won’t support her Brexit divorce deal, a blow to May’s hopes of winning approval for the agreement in Parliament.

The Democratic Unionist Party said Wednesday it won’t support the deal because of a provision designed keep an open border between EU member Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland after Brexit.

The pro-British Unionist party opposes the provision because it fears it would weaken the bonds between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

DUP leader Arlene Foster said, “We cannot sign up to something that would damage the Union.”

May wants to try again to get her twice-rejected Brexit deal through Parliament. Many pro-Brexit lawmakers have said they will back it, but only if the DUP agrees.

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7:25 p.m.

Britain’s former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, a longtime foe of Prime Minister Theresa May’s EU divorce deal, now plans to vote for it.

Conservative lawmaker Conor Burns, an ally of Johnson’s, said the former foreign secretary told a meeting of pro-Brexit lawmakers that he would back the deal.

The shift came soon after May told Conservative Party lawmakers that she will step down if her twice-rejected deal is approved and Britain leaves the European Union. Johnson is highly likely to be a contender in any Conservative leadership contest that follows May’s departure.

Johnson is among pro-Brexit lawmakers who have opposed the deal because they think it keeps Britain too closely tied to the bloc. In a newspaper column on Wednesday, he said the deal was a “constitutional humiliation.”

Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer tweeted: “I wonder what it is about the pending Tory leadership contest that made Boris change his mind?”

—

6 p.m.

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May told lawmakers she is prepared to step down “earlier than I intended” in order to win passage of her divorce deal from the European Union.

May told lawmakers from the 1922 Committee of Conservative lawmakers that she wanted to do what was right for the country.

The comments marked the first time May signaled she was prepared to quit in order to secure the necessary votes for the passage of the Brexit divorce deal she has negotiated with the EU but which has been rejected heavily on two occasions by lawmakers.

She says, “I know there is a desire for a new approach — and new leadership — in the second phase of the Brexit negotiations, and I won’t stand in the way of that.”

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5:40 p.m.

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has told Conservative Party lawmakers that she will quit once the country has left the European Union — but she didn’t set a date.

Conservative lawmaker James Cartlidge told reporters as he left the 1922 Committee of Conservative lawmakers that May told the gathering “she would not remain in post for the next phase of the negotiations.”

Those will deal with Britain’s future relationship with the EU.

Britain was due to leave the EU on March 29 but May has got a short delay after her divorce deal with the EU was rejected overwhelmingly by lawmakers on two occasions.

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4:45 p.m.

Britain’s Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay has put down a motion to have Parliament sit on Friday — the clearest sign yet the government plans to bring Theresa May’s European Union divorce deal back for a third vote.

Lawmakers in the House of Commons can sit on Fridays if they agree to do so.

He says “while I appreciate it may cause some inconvenience, I hope all members would agree that it’s better to have it and to not need it, than to need it and not have it.”

But it remains unclear whether the measure will be proposed. Commons Speaker John Bercow said Wednesday he would not accept another vote on the twice-rejected deal unless substantial changes were made.

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3:35 p.m.

British lawmakers will get to vote on eight widely differing options for the U.K.’s departure from the European Union.

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow selected the motions on Wednesday from 16 proposals submitted by lawmakers.

The ones to be considered include calls to leave the EU without a withdrawal deal, to stay in the EU’s customs union and single market, to put any EU divorce deal to a public referendum, and to cancel Brexit if the prospect of a no-deal Brexit gets close.

The “indicative votes” are intended to reveal if any kind of Brexit plan can command a majority in Parliament. Lawmakers have twice rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the bloc.

The government has promised to consider the outcome of the votes, but not to be bound by them.

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1:20 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has faced more calls to resign during a bruising question-and-answer session in the House of Commons.

Before a vote by lawmakers on alternatives to May’s twice-rejected Brexit deal, opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn accused May of being “unable to compromise and unable to reunite the country.” He told her she must “either listen and change course or go.”

May is also facing calls from inside her Conservative Party to quit so that another leader can take over the next stage of Brexit negotiations. She is due to meet Conservative backbenchers later Wednesday.

Asked whether she would be resigning in order to get her Brexit deal approved, May said: “It is my sense of responsibility and duty that has meant I have kept working to ensure Brexit is delivered.”

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9:45 a.m.

The leader of the House of Commons says Britain’s government still hopes to bring Prime Minister Theresa May’s European Union divorce deal back to Parliament for a vote this week.

Andrea Leadsom told the BBC on Wednesday that there is a “real possibility” the agreement will be considered on Thursday or Friday.

She says “we’re completely determined to make sure that we can get enough support to bring it back.” She added that the deal is the only way to guarantee Britain leaves the EU.

Some opponents say they may now vote for the deal amid fears parliamentary deadlock will lead to Brexit being delayed or abandoned.

Brexit supporter Jacob Rees-Mogg says May’s deal is still a bad one, but “the risk is, if I don’t back it, we don’t leave the EU at all.”

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9:10 a.m.

The chief of the European Union’s Council says the bloc should be open to welcome Britain at the European Parliament’s May 23-26 election even as it prepares to leave.

Referring to recent protests and petitions by pro-EU groups in Britain, EU Council President Donald Tusk told legislators Wednesday: “They may feel they are not sufficiently represented by the UK parliament but they must feel that are represented by you in this chamber. Because they are Europeans.”

He said it is “unacceptable” to think, as some do, that Britain should not take part in EU business as the country prepares to leave.

“You cannot betray the 6 million people who signed a petition to revoke Article 50 — the one million people who marched for a people’s vote or the increasing majority of people who want to remain in the European Union.”

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8:45 a.m.

British lawmakers are preparing to vote on alternatives for leaving the European Union as they seek to end an impasse following the overwhelming defeat of the deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May.

The House of Commons is scheduled to debate the various alternatives Wednesday, after which lawmakers will be asked to vote for all of the options they could accept. The most popular ideas will move to a second vote on Monday in hopes of finding one option that can command a majority.

The debate comes two days after lawmakers took control of the parliamentary agenda away from the government amid concern May was unwilling to compromise.

May has said she will consider the outcome of the “indicative votes,” though she has refused to be bound by the result.