Chris Hedges's Blog, page 344

Beware the Moderate Democrat

The “moderate.”

Such a soothing political word. It conjures up a reasonable, considerate person who seeks the middle ground between ideological extremists: Works well with others, crosses the aisle to make good policy, knows how to win incremental change rather than issuing jarring proclamations that jump too far ahead of the electorate. A moderate is pragmatic, gets things done and doesn’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Oh, in these troubled times, aren’t such moderates—beloved as they are by right-wingers like Bret Stephens—desperately needed?

Get ready to hear more and more of that from mainstream media pundits as the Democratic Party moves more towards the kind of progressive populism put forward by the Sanders/AOC wing of the party. We’ll be asked by centrist journalists to take a careful look at more reasonable moderates like Gillibrand, McAuliffe, Bloomberg, Biden, Booker, Landrieu and many more (e.g. “Is There Room in 2020 for a Centrist Democrat?” and “The Loneliness of a Moderate Democrat”).

But what is the substance of all this centrism and moderation?

First and foremost, these moderates are united by their unwillingness to take on Wall Street. And because of that unwillingness, they are unable to confront the defining problem of our era—runaway inequality.  They cannot face up to the fact that the wages of the average worker have been stagnant for an entire generation. Meanwhile the pay gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker has risen from 40 to 1 in 1980 to an obscene 800 to 1 today.

The centrists run away from this problem in large part because they are in a desperate race to win the very first primary—the fundraising primary. And it is no secret that victory goes to the candidate who garners the most financial support from Wall Street/corporate Democrats.

Rather than discussing runaway inequality and ways to ameliorate it through Medicare for All, free higher education, and higher taxes on the super-rich, these moderates instead will stress enhancing “opportunity,” and “removing barriers” to race/gender advancement.  Rather than confronting billionaire oligarchs they want to “partner with business” and, in some vague way tame their excesses while also building a robust and fair economy with “opportunity for all.” No conflict needed. No diatribes against the billionaire class. Hear the melodious tones of moderation.

From this coziness with Wall Street flows the trope about being “socially liberal” and “fiscally conservative.”  The moderate centrists, and their Wall Street donors, support LBTQ rights, the advancement of women in business, immigration and criminal justice reform, gun control, and abortion rights.  At the same time, they believe the entire progressive runaway inequality platform is an affront to economic reason: High taxes on the rich will discourage initiative and innovation; single-payer health care and free higher education will bankrupt the country; breaking up the big banks will cripple investment and jobs.

Of course, the moderates must ignore the reams of data from all over the world that show that these progressive reforms would reduce inequality and enhance the well-being of nearly everyone, though it is true that reducing inequality would harm—at least to some extent—the precious privileges of the very few. The super-rich would have to pay more. They would no longer be able to financially strip mine the rest of us through wasteful stock buy-backs.  Their billions would be reduced a bit. But most alarming would be their deflated egos: No longer could they bask in the false narrative that what is so very good for them is good for all of us.

But do “moderates” represent anyone other than their Wall Street donors? Is there a mass base for the kind of moderation they are putting forward?

Let’s take a look at the eye-popping data from the 2016 presidential election, put together by the Voter Survey Group, which polled 8,000 Americans (a very large sample which is eight to fifteen times larger than most of the surveys we usually see in the news.) A study of these voters showed that they could be divided into four major groups.  (See Lee Drutman, “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond.” Note: the title names used below are mine not his.).

The first group, Left Populists, are those who are both social and economic progressives. They support immigration, women and minority equality, LBGTQ rights and immigration. They also worry about rising inequality and support proposals that would attack it.
The second group, Nativist Populists, also worry about rising inequality and support proposals that attack it. But they are more comfortable with traditional gender roles, have qualms about abortion, see immigration as a problem and are not particularly supportive about LBGTQ rights.
The third group are the Arch Conservatives who are not interested in reversing economic inequality or social inequality.
And finally we have the Socially Liberal/Fiscal Conservatives. This is the home base for the “moderate” politicians who are wooing Wall Street and see themselves as the sensible alternatives to the extremist populists.

So more or less, that’s who we are.  If the electorate were equally divided among these four groups, the “moderates” might have an argument. The facts tell a different story:

Left Populists account for 44.6 percent of the electorate according to this study.
28.9 percent are Nativist Populists. This means that nearly three-quarters of all voters fear runaway inequality and want to reduce it. But these economic populists are divided on identity issues.
Arch Conservatives account for another 22.7 percent.
And that leaves a minuscule 3.8 percent for the Socially Liberal/Fiscal conservatives.

How pathetic is that? It goes to show how out of touch these billionaires and their accolades are from political reality. They have no base. Nada. There’s no one there… except very rich Wall Street/Corporate funders and centrist pundits who feel compelled to find a judicious balance between left and right.

Danger Ahead

The data shows why Trump’s nativist, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing base-building makes some electoral sense. If he can hold both the Nativist Populists and the Arch Conservatives he can win again. And he can do that most easily against a candidate with virtually no natural base—the “moderate”—the Socially Liberal/Fiscally Conservative Democrat.

Given enough financial support, a “moderate” might be able to buy her or his way through the Democratic primaries, especially if many candidates split the progressive populist vote. One could imagine one of the “moderates” becoming a media darling of the center, which might further enhance his or her status.

But should one of them squeak through to become the nominee, we might have a Democratic debacle. The nativist economic populists on the right might flock back to Trump along with the arch conservatives who will never leave him. Trump may look incredibly weak now, but a Wall Street-backed Democratic “moderate” with a natural base of 3.8 percent could give the worst president in American history a real chance.

Jim Hightower, the great Texan populist, turned a phrase that comes to mind every time a Wall Street “moderate” is touted.

“There’s nothing in the middle of the road,” he famously quipped, “but yellow stripes and dead Armadillos.”

2 Reasons 2019 Could Be the Planet’s Worst Year Yet

Stand by for a year in which global warming can only get worse as human carbon emissions climb still further. British meteorologists warn that although 2018 broke all records for greenhouse gas emissions, 2019 will see even more carbon dioxide take up long-term residence in the planetary atmosphere.

And it will happen for two reasons, both of them nominally at least under human control. The overall release of carbon dioxide from power stations, factory chimneys, cement quarries, car exhausts and so on will continue to rise with fossil fuel combustion, even though there has been greater investment than ever in renewable resources such as wind and solar energy.

And those natural “sinks” that absorb extra carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it as living timber in the forests, or bones and shells in the oceans, are expected to under-perform.

This is largely because of natural cyclic variation in the tropical climate, but also partly because humans continue to degrade grasslands and fell or burn the forests that naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and return oxygen for the animal world to breathe.

Hawaii’s unique record

Climate scientists know what is going to happen because they can see the future already written in a unique 60-year-old cycle of data recorded high on a mountaintop in Hawaii, in the Pacific, far from any heavy industry or city pollution that might distort the local chemistry of the atmosphere.

“Since 1958, monitoring at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has registered around a 30% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Richard Betts, of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre.

“This is caused by emissions from fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production, and the increase would have been even larger if it were not for natural carbon sinks which soak up some of the excess CO2.

This year we expect these carbon sinks to be relatively weak, so the impact of record high human-caused emissions will be larger than last year.”

“Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased to around 8,000 square kilometres in 2018, equivalent to losing a football pitch of forest every 80 seconds”

At the heart of the diagnosis is the increasing understanding of the role of the world’s great oceans in managing planetary weather patterns.

A year ago the tropical Pacific was relatively cool, rainfall increased and land-based ecosystems flourished, soaking up atmospheric carbon. In a relatively warm cycle, many regions become warmer and drier, which in turn limits plant growth.

Carbon dioxide ratios in the global atmosphere for most of human history, until the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of the steam age and the internal combustion engine, oscillated at around 280 parts per million (ppm). In the last decade, the ratio reached 400 ppm, and in 2018 peaked at 414.7 ppm in May, before beginning to fall in the northern hemisphere growing season, to rise again in September.

El Niño distortion

Overall, the average for 2018 was 411 ppm, with an uncertainty factor of 0.6 ppm. In 2019, the average is likely to be 2.75 ppm higher still. This would be one of the largest annual rises on record.

The rises in 2015-2016 and in 1997-1998 were higher, but these years’ readings were distorted by the arrival of a dramatic but natural Pacific warming called El Niño, always associated with a sudden and often damaging shift in regional climate patterns far away.

Climate scientists have continued to hope for a global response to such predictions: these are the people who are professionally most aware of the big picture of global change.

Julienne Stroeve of University College London called the news “discouraging, for sure. Last year the extra CO2 was equivalent to melting about 110,000 square kilometres of Arctic Sea ice, or roughly three times the area of Switzerland. Sea ice loss is directly tied to increases in atmospheric CO2.”

Damage to forests

And Jos Barlow, of Lancaster University’s Environment Centre, warned that forest clearance in the tropics continued as a hazard.

“Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased to around 8,000 square kilometres in 2018, which is equivalent to losing a football pitch of forest every 80 seconds. This alone would result in CO2 emissions that exceed those of the UK over the same time period.”

Professor Betts called the Mauna Loa record of atmospheric carbon dioxide a “thing of beauty” and a stark reminder of human interference with the planetary climate.

“Looking at the monthly figures, it’s as if you can see the planet ‘breathing’ as the levels of carbon dioxide fall and rise with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere. But each year’s CO2 is higher than the last, and this will keep happening until humans stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere.”

The U.S. Is Orchestrating a Venezuelan Coup in Plain Sight

As Venezuela’s second president, Simon Bolivar, noted in the 19th century, the US government continues to “plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty.”

From engineering coups in Chile and Guatemala, to choreographing a troop landing at the Bay of Pigs intended to establish an exile government in Cuba, to training Latin American strongmen at the School of the Americas in torture techniques to control their people, the United States has meddled, interfered, intervened and undermined the democracies it claims to protect.

Now, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and the infamous Elliott Abrams are working with opposition groups in Venezuela to carry out a coup d’état.

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration, through the CIA, aided and abetted an attempted coup, according to attorney Eva Golinger, an award-winning author and journalist. Golinger, a close confidante of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, obtained evidence of US intervention from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, which she discusses in her new book, Confidante of ‘Tyrants’: The Inside Story of the American Woman Trusted By the US’s Biggest Enemies.

There is a major difference, however, between the 2002 coup attempt and the Trump administration’s current effort to change the regime in Venezuela, Golinger says. She told Truthout that unlike the situation in 2002, “when the Bush administration worked behind the scenes to back a coup d’état against Chávez with multimillion-dollar funding and political support to the opposition, the Trump administration is now pursuing regime change in Venezuela in plain sight.”

US Aided and Abetted 2002 Coup Attempt

Golinger came to Chávez’s attention after her investigation revealed proof of US involvement in the 2002 attempted coup. Since Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, the United States tried overtly and covertly to overthrow his “Bolivarian Revolution” by furnishing opposition groups working for regime change with millions of dollars, Golinger writes. Chávez used Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to eradicate illiteracy and poverty, and to provide education and universal health care.

After Chávez’s death in 2013, Nicolás Maduro was elected president after promising to carry on the Bolivarian Revolution. But the punishing sanctions President Obama imposed in 2015, combined with corruption, mismanagement and autocratic leadership, caused economic hardship. Falling oil prices in 2016 led to hyperinflation two years later, and Venezuela’s economy collapsed.

Nevertheless, Maduro was re-elected in 2018. The opposition’s boycott of the election and the US government’s support of that boycott resulted in Maduro’s victory over Henri Falcón.

Team Trump Is Engineering Regime Change in Venezuela

Elliott Abrams is a disturbing, but not surprising, choice to serve as US special envoy to Venezuela. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal and later pardoned by George H.W. Bush. The new envoy supported General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan dictator who directed the torture and mass murder of Indigenous people in the 1980s, and was later convicted of genocide. Moreover, Abrams was linked to the 2002 attempted US coup in Venezuela.

“The naming of notorious ‘dirty war’ expert Elliott Abrams to oversee the Venezuela operation, the public threats against Venezuela of ‘consequences’ should they defy the US made by Trump’s hawkish John Bolton, and Trump’s own multiple statements that a military option is ‘on the table’ for Venezuela, clearly show that the table is set,” Golinger told Truthout.

The “US is not just ‘behind’ this coup,” Ben Norton wrote in a series of tweets. “The US is openly leading the coup.”

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported that on January 22, Pence called Juan Guaidó and “pledged” US support “if he seized the reins of government from Nicolás Maduro.” Guaidó was a little-known player whom the United States had long cultivated to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. Guaidó swore himself in as “interim president” of Venezuela the following day.

“That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret over the preceding several weeks, accompanied by talks between U.S. officials, allies, lawmakers, and key Venezuelan opposition figures, including Mr. Guaidó himself,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “Almost instantly, just as Mr. Pence had promised, President Trump issued a statement recognizing Mr. Guaidó as the country’s rightful leader.”

“Opposition leaders have already met in the White House with Pence, and Trump himself telephoned Guaidó to express US support for his de facto regime. If this is what they are doing overtly, we can only imagine the depth of their covert ops in Venezuela,” Golinger told Truthout.

In fall of 2017, Trump broached the subject of invading Venezuela with top White House officials, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then National Security Ddviser HR McMaster. Although they tried to dissuade him, Trump was “preoccupied with the idea of an invasion.” He raised the issue with the president of Colombia at a private dinner during a UN General Assembly meeting. McMaster finally talked Trump out of it.

But as recently as a few weeks ago, Trump reportedly asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), “What do you think about using military force?”

Bolton held a yellow legal pad with the words “5,000 troops to Colombia” prominently written on it at a January 28 press briefing. Although Bolton didn’t mention sending troops to Colombia, which shares a border with Venezuela, his well-placed prop serves as an ominous warning.

Sanctions Hurt the Venezuelan People

On January 28, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Venezuela that amount to an oil embargo. They forbid Venezuela’s state-owned oil company from doing business with most US companies (except Chevron and Halliburton).

These penalties are projected to deprive Venezuela of $7 billion in assets, resulting in $11 billion in export losses during the next year. That’s on top of the $6 billion that Trump’s August 2017 financial sanctions cost Venezuela in one year.

The new sanctions against Venezuela “could turbocharge what is already the world’s worst inflation, worsening fuel shortages and compromise the state’s ability to buy and distribute food,” the New York Times reported.

“[A] problematic idea driving current US policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to ordinary Venezuelans,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist, wrote in Foreign Policy. “That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine.”

As a result, Rodríguez, added, “Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.”

The United States used the same flawed strategy in 1960 when the Eisenhower administration imposed an embargo on Cuba. A State Department memo had proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Fidel Castro] government.” Although the embargo continues to hurt the Cuban people, it failed in its stated goal.

In addition to the oil sanctions, the US State Department turned over control of Venezuela’s property and bank accounts in the United States to Guaidó, in what The New York Times called “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”

Regime Change and Sanctions Are Illegal and Unwanted

Forcible regime change in Venezuela is illegal under international law.

“The shocking aggression and illegal interference against a sovereign nation by the Trump administration is a blatant violation of the charters of the United Nations and Organization of American States, which recognize the principles of national sovereignty, peaceful settlement of disputes, and a prohibition on threatening or using force against the territory of another state,” the National Lawyers Guild said in a statement.

Moreover, the organization states, “directly fomenting a coup in a sovereign nation is not only illegal and outright shunned by the international community, it fundamentally undermines any pretextual concern about interference by other nations in U.S. elections.”

Indeed, the United Nations Charter requires that countries settle their disputes peacefully and forbids the use or threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another country. Military force is only permissible in self-defense or with the assent of the Security Council. Further, the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) says no country can intervene, for any reason, in the internal or external affairs of another country.

US imposition of economic sanctions against Venezuela is also illegal. The OAS Charter proscribes the use of coercive economic or political measures to force the sovereign will of another country and obtain any advantages from it.

“Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state,” said Idriss Jazairy, a UN special rapporteur concerned with the negative impact of sanctions. “The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” Jazairy also noted that, “Precipitating an economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes.”

Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred-Maurice de Zayas says the United States is waging “economic warfare” against Venezuela. In his report to the Human Rights Council, de Zayas recommends that the International Criminal Court investigate whether “economic war, embargoes, financial blockades and sanctions regimes amount to geopolitical crimes and crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.”

Moreover, in order to impose sanctions under US law, the president must declare a national emergency and state that Venezuela constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. That claim is patently false.

De Zayas is a signatory to an open letter released last week, signed by 70 experts and academics who condemned the US-backed coup attempt against the Maduro government.

Although ostensibly aimed at helping the Venezuelan people, Team Trump’s sanctions and threats of military invasion are overwhelmingly unpopular in Venezuela. Eighty-six percent of Venezuelans oppose US military intervention and 81 percent are against sanctions.

It’s the Oil, Stupid

Why is the United States so intent on regime change? Because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, and the United States is its biggest customer.

Within two days of his self-inauguration as “interim president,” Guaidó began a process to restructure and privatize Venezuela’s oil industry for the benefit of multinational corporations.

Drawing a parallel with George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) tweeted, “It’s about the oil … again.” Indeed, Halliburton, exempted from the new sanctions against Venezuela, is once again benefitting from regime change, like it did in Iraq.

Bolton didn’t pull any punches when he stated at a press conference that, “We’re in conversation with major American companies now. … It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot of stake here.”

The Trump administration appears intent on privatizing Venezuela’s oil in order to maximize the profits of US oil companies at the expense of the Venezuelan people and the rule of law.

Anti-Fascists Take a Victory Lap as White Supremacist Rally Collapses

Near Atlanta, beyond the incessant hype and big-monied bluster of Super Bowl LII, another confrontation roiled over the weekend. White supremacists ultimately failed to hold a planned, armed “white power” rally titled Rock Stone Mountain II when an anti-racist coalition organized to oppose them. Truthdig reported live from Stone Mountain Park, Georgia, where the planned white nationalist rally gave way to a counterprotest that focused on the need to end fascism by all means necessary.

PHOTO ESSAY | 15 photosDispatches From the Anti-Fascist March at Stone Mountain (Photo Essay)

About 15 miles outside of Atlanta, Stone Mountain Park, according to its website, is “Georgia’s most-visited attraction” replete with over 3,000 acres of hiking trails, golf, amusement park rides and accommodations. It also is, as the New York Times dubbed it in an October 2018 headline, “The Largest Confederate Monument Problem in the World.” On Friday, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association made the decision to close the park on Saturday because of planned protests.

Carved into the north face of Stone Mountain is the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture. It depicts three Confederate Civil War leaders, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Considered a “sacred site” to the Ku Klux Klan and a place where cross-burnings have taken place every Labor Day for more than 50 years, the monument has been the subject of widespread controversy. More recently, during last year’s highly contested gubernatorial race, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams called for its removal. Abrams, who narrowly lost the race, was the first black woman to be nominated by a major party for the governorship.

In April 2016, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan group announced its intentions to host a white power rally at the monument—hence the first iteration of the white-power Rock Stone Mountain Rally—which resulted in clashes among protestors, counterprotesters and various law enforcement agencies.

The lead-up to Rock Stone Mountain Rally II was riddled with internal strife within the ranks of far-right activists. For starters, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association denied the pro-white rally a permit. According to the Atlantic Journal-Constitution, the rally collapsed amid apparent infighting and organizers’ fears for their personal safety.

“The event was undermined by people who were supposed to be on my side,” said John Michael Estes, a white supremacist and one of the main organizers of the rally. “All I can say is short of me showing up by myself, there is no hope of an event.”

Neo-Nazi and Rock Stone Mountain II spokesman Michael Carothers (aka Michael Weaver) circulated a statement to the media officially canceling the rally. The aforementioned Estes, however, then advocated for “guerrilla warfare” and “a leaderless resistance” for his white supremacist cause.  In a Facebook thread, Estes also replied harshly to those critical of him for canceling the rally: “I am entirely willing to take a suicidal stance, and since you think I should, you should do it with me” and, also proclaiming, “I shall die fighting.”

Counterprotesters did not back down and called for an all-day anti-Klan action Saturday. In a statement from the FLOWER (FrontLine Organizations Working to End Racism) Coalition, the group of approximately 50 organizations publicized their plan to protest and “counter the Klan.”

Andrea McDonald, a FLOWER spokesperson, said, “The Stone Mountain Memorial Association made the right decision in denying the Rock Stone Mountain organizers their permit, but since that point, their decision-making process has been opaque and deeply irresponsible. They have failed to publicly alert the surrounding area to the threat posed by violent white supremacists and their planned armed invasion of the park.”

Despite “Rock Stone Mountain II” being in disarray, white supremacists may still attempt a presence at Stone Mountain Park this Saturday.

Show up & stop them! https://t.co/y7vQ8rzsst

— Atlanta Antifascists (@afainatl) January 31, 2019

Anti-racist demonstrators showed up Saturday at Stone Mountain Village outside the closed park to protest as planned, while the NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center and White Rose anti-fascist group also gathered in Piedmont Park, Atlanta, to address voter suppression and Georgia’s “continued racist policies.”

First Two Muslim Women in Congress Defend BDS Movement

In their first month in office, Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, have endured scrutiny, in part over their stance on Israel and Palestine. While many progressives are putting pressure on the U.S. to cut military ties to Israel, the growing awareness around Palestinian rights is threatening to politicians aligned with the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee and pro-Israel donors.

The Senate is likely to pass legislation drafted by Florida’s Marco Rubio, a top recipient of pro-Israel money, that would allow states and local governments to cut business ties with companies that participate in the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which aims to put economic pressure on Israel to recognize Palestinians’ human rights. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that boycotts are constitutionally protected speech, 26 states have passed similar legislation targeting the BDS movement.

Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York targeted Omar last week when he posted an anti-Semitic voicemail and asked whether she agreed with the caller’s ideas. Omar responded that she too receives hate mail, inviting him to share Somali tea and discuss a way to “fight religious discrimination of all kinds.”

“Zeldin’s Twitter rant was a classic racist dog whistle,” Jessica Schulberg wrote at HuffPost. “It was a wink and nod to all his pals who hate seeing a woman of color wearing a hijab in a position of power.”

Schulberg isn’t the only one who believes that attitudes toward Omar and Tlaib are rooted in bigotry.

“I see this as an Islamophobic attack against two outspoken women of color who are shaking things up by boldly standing for crucial issues,” said Yousef Munayyer, director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a coalition of groups focused on a change in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. “Palestine is increasingly becoming part of the progressive politics of justice for all,” he said.

The increasingly personal attacks on ⁦@RashidaTlaib⁩ & ⁦@IlhanMN⁩ are absolutely inappropriate & very unprofessional. As first two Muslim American women elected to Congress, they bring critical lived experience to the chamber. Respect, please. https://t.co/DWG9Ob5GHs

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) February 2, 2019

Make no mistake about it, If @RashidaTlaib and @IlhanMN called to boycott and impose sanctions on other countries – but not Israel – for gross human rights violations, they would be warmly welcomed and hailed as human rights champions. https://t.co/nvICTx7Gsx

— Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) February 2, 2019

Tlaib and Omar have been prominent defenders of the BDS movement. On Friday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported on Tlaib’s perspective in The New York Times:

“This respect for free speech does not equate to anti-Semitism,” Ms. Tlaib wrote, defending economic boycotts as peaceful and constitutionally protected. “I dream of my Palestinian grandmother living with equal rights and human dignity one day, and would never allow that dream to be tainted by any form of hate.”

Ms. Omar sought to turn the tables on Republicans. “Especially at a time when white supremacist violence is on the rise,” she wrote, “we all need to condemn hate against any religious group — something the current President has shamefully failed to do.”

Defenders of the women warn that their critics are entering dangerous territory by conflating anti-Zionism, hostility toward Israel as a Jewish state, with anti-Semitism, hostility toward Jews — a trend that Jeremy Ben Ami, the president of J Street, the liberal Jewish advocacy group, said he found “disturbing.” J Street did not endorse Ms. Omar and rescinded its endorsement of Ms. Tlaib after she declined to publicly support a two-state solution with Israel and a Palestinian state existing side by side.

Even so, Mr. Ben Ami said the two are “opening up a discussion that is absolutely needed on American policy,” and are helping to pull the Democratic Party more toward the view espoused by J Street and “younger liberal Jews” who believe that “you can be sympathetic to the state of Israel and also sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people.”

Hunger for Socialism Is Giving Centrist Democrats Cold Feet

Amid warnings within progressive circles that the “moderate Democrat” remains a serious obstacle to the kind of transformative change many rank-and-file party members and voters in general say they want, new reporting by Axios on Saturday shows that it might be the centrists who are getting cold feet as they register just how hungry the electorate has become for policy solutions like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, tuition-free higher education, and taxation that targets the nation’s wealthiest.

Citing informed sources, Axios reports that both “Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace “Medicare for All,” big tax increases and the Green New Deal. Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out.”

In addition, internal polling taken by what Axios describes as one “prominent 2020 hopeful” discovered Democratic voters in Iowa, one of the key early caucus states in the presidential primaries, “has moved sharply left.”

Venezuela Crisis Resonates Loudly in Battleground Florida

As Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro clings to power, many of the loudest American voices urging on the Trump administration in its campaign to push Maduro out are concentrated in one place: Florida.

Florida has a large number of anti-Maduro Venezuelans and Cubans and is also likely to be a critical battleground state in the 2020 race for the White House. As a result, the crisis in the South American country is reverberating politically thousands of miles away in the U.S.

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Overthrowing Democratic Governments Is Practically an American Tradition



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“Foreign policy is domestic policy in South Florida,” said Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who lives in Weston, one of the Florida communities that have seen a Venezuelan influx.

Florida is home to an estimated 190,000 Venezuelans, many of whom arrived in the past decade as their homeland slid into economic and political crisis under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

They have found common cause with Cuban-Americans, who see parallels between what has happened under the socialist government in Venezuela and what has gone on under communism in Cuba. Cuban-Americans — a potent voting bloc in Florida — are also angry about Venezuelan support for Cuba over the past two decades.

“It’s the same cancer,” said GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American who represents the Miami-area city of Doral, which has so many Venezuelans that some have nicknamed it Doralzuela.

News about Venezuela is a near-constant in South Florida. Videos of Maduro feasting on a steak dinner prepared by a celebrity chef prompted a midday protest in September outside the chef’s Miami restaurant. In 2017, a former member of Venezuela’s government was loudly confronted by a group of exiles when he was spotted at a local restaurant.

Many Venezuelan exiles can be seen wearing baseball caps with the colors and stars of their homeland’s flag. There are also many bumper stickers with messages such as “Pray for Venezuela.” A lot of Uber drivers will make small talk and tell you they were architects, pilots or even mayors back in Venezuela, blaming Maduro for the troubles that made them leave.

“If you live in Florida, you probably have met people or personally know people who have been impacted by it,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who has played a leading role in urging President Donald Trump to clamp down on Maduro. “You can’t ignore it.”

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, contends that what’s happening in Venezuela could destabilize the entire region, thereby affecting American interests.

Christopher Sabatini, an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, joked that Rubio “acts like the assistant secretary of state for Latin America.”

Trump has not shied away from making friends with authoritarian leaders in other regions, but he has taken a hard-line stand against Maduro, calling him a dictator. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions against the regime and backed Venezuelan Congress leader Juan Guaido, who has proclaimed himself interim president.

“Never in 20 years have we had such support like we are having now,” said Ernesto Ackerman, an anti-Maduro Venezuelan exile who is based in Miami and head of Independent Venezuelan American Citizens.

What happens in Latin America looms large in Florida. Nearly 17 percent of its registered voters are Hispanic, a group that includes Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Colombians and Nicaraguans. In a state that Trump won by 113,000 votes in 2016, the support of some of these voters can prove pivotal.

One administration official rejected any suggestion that politics is driving the president’s stance, but acknowledged that Florida officials are powerful voices in Trump’s ear on the subject and that those pushing on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition have highlighted to Trump the number of Venezuelan expatriates in the crucial state. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Vice President Mike Pence traveled Friday to a Miami suburb where he met with Venezuelan exiles and community leaders and assured them Washington was working toward a “peaceful transition” so that Guaido rises to power.

“This is no time for dialogue,” Pence said at a church in Doral, prompting loud cheers among exiles. “It is time to end the Maduro regime.”

While some Democrats from other parts of the country have been critical of Trump’s stand, that’s not the case in Florida.

“There is no daylight between Democrats and Republicans on our approach to Venezuela and the illegitimate presidency of Maduro,” said Wasserman-Schultz, recounting how Venezuelans have told her about property being confiscated, family members threatened with arrest, and fears of kidnappings.

Rubio said that any political implications associated with a hard line against Venezuela are overstated, and that it is only logical that he and other Florida politicians would try to help their constituents on an issue of concern to them.

“There could be electoral rewards,” he said, “but that’s the leverage the people have over their elected officials.”

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller in Washington; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; and Adriana Gomez in Doral, Florida, contributed to this story.

Immigrant Hunger Strike Grows; ICE Detainee Details Force-Feeding

EL PASO, Texas—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed there are now nine men—up from six last week—being force-fed under court order in a detention center in El Paso.

One of the hunger strikers, a 22-year-old man from India who called The Associated Press on Friday, described being dragged from his cell three times a day and strapped down on a bed. He said a group of people force-feed him by pouring liquid into tubes pushed through his nose.

The man, who AP is identifying only by his last name Singh out of family concerns for his safety, stopped eating more than a month ago. In mid-January, ICE obtained court orders to begin non-consensual hydration and feeding, and so for weeks they’ve had nasal tubes inserted in their noses and IVs in their arms.

The AP first reported on the force-feeding Wednesday.

“They tie us on the force-feeding bed, and then they put a lot of liquid into the tubes, and the pressure is immense so we end up vomiting it out,” said Singh. “We can’t talk properly, and we can’t breathe properly. The pipe is not an easy process, but they try to push it down our noses and throats.”

Speaking through an interpreter, Singh said he has lost 50 pounds (23 kilograms) since he began his hunger strike. He said he is refusing food to protest guards’ unfair treatment of him and other detainees from Punjab. He said they are being denied bond while detainees from other countries were allowed out.

In a statement, ICE said it fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference.

“ICE does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers. ICE explains the negative health effects of not eating to our detainees. For their health and safety, ICE closely monitors the food and water intake of those detainees identified as being on a hunger strike,” the agency said.

The AP’s reports on the force-feeding have garnered international headlines and angry responses from policymakers and human rights advocates.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, visited some of the men after the initial reports, tweeting afterward that their situation is “unacceptable.”

“El Paso and our country are better than this,” she said.

Human Rights Watch published a dispatch Friday describing force-feeding as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

Hunger strikes among immigrant detainees are uncommon, and court orders authorizing force-feeding are rare, said an ICE official, noting that once force-feeding is approved, detainees have in the past given up their hunger strikes. The official spoke anonymously because the official had not been authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Although the agency doesn’t keep statistics on this, attorneys, advocates and ICE staffers who AP spoke with did not recall a situation at an immigration detention site where it has come to this.

Detainees, their attorneys and advocates have said that up to 30 men have been on hunger strikes over the last month. According to ICE, 10 detainees from India and Nicaragua who are being held at the El Paso detention site have refused nine consecutive meals — the immigration agency’s benchmark for when to start calling refusal to eat a hunger strike.

Last week AP heard from Cubans in the facility who also said they were refusing food.

Another four detainees are on hunger strikes in the agency’s Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco areas of responsibility, agency spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa said. She did not say whether they were being force-fed.

Singh said he came to the United States in August of last year along with his cousin, seeking to escape violence in his home state of Punjab in India. Court records show he was arrested for illegally entering the U.S. near El Paso and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. His uncle, Amrit Singh, said that his asylum claim had been denied.

A volunteer who has visited the facility said that the men have been requesting pillows to elevate their heads when the liquid nutrition is administered through their noses because the material backs up and causes them pain.

Nathan Craig, a volunteer with the nonprofit group Advocate Visitors with Immigrants in Detention, told the AP that one of the men he spoke with has a thyroid condition and has not been receiving his medicine.

“Both of the men I spoke to personally have visible trouble walking, they are frail and they are receiving by IV liquids, something like three times a day,” Craig said after an earlier visit.

Singh said they’re not getting the help they’ve requested.

“We keep asking them on a daily basis for the pillows, but we don’t have the pillows yet,” Singh said. “They don’t give us wheelchairs, despite the fact that we are so weak. They drag us on our feet.”

The force-feeding of detainees through nasal tubes at Guantanamo Bay garnered international blowback. Hunger strikes began shortly after the military prison opened in 2002, with force-feeding starting in early 2006 following mass refusals to eat. There have also been high profile cases in a high security federal prison.

The International Red Cross, American Medical Association and World Medical Association condemn force-feeding hunger strikers as unethical.

The Harrowing Prison Report Mass Media Chose to Ignore

The United States, by all metrics, has one of the cruelest prison systems in the world.

In addition to having 25 percent of the world’s prison population (with just 5 percent of the world’s people), U.S. prisons use tortuous solitary confinement, tolerate widespread sexual violence, host massive racial disparities, and routinely abuse children, among other human rights violations.

The idea that the U.S. is “too soft” to people in prison is something even right-wingers rarely bother to argue anymore.

So it may come as a shock that ostensibly mainstream outlets like USA Today, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and NBC News thought it newsworthy to report that prisoners at Coleman federal prison in Wildwood, Florida got a routine holiday meal — steak — that was slightly above their normal, bottom-of-the-barrel provisions.

This “outrage” was contrasted with prison guards not receiving paychecks due to President Donald Trump’s “government shutdown.” How dare those hardened criminals live it up, the stories seemed to ask, while correction officers work for free?

Worse were the racist stereotypes about greedy, lazy prisoners — like the Post’s headline, which quoted a prisoner saying “I Been Eatin’ Like a Boss.”

The quote was allegedly taken from a prisoner’s personal mail by a guard and selectively leaked to the Post — which not only published it without any context, but led the whole story with it, African-American vernacular and all.

Is it standard for guards to comb though prisoners’ personal mail to leak to newspapers?

And what images did papers use to convey these luxurious “steak” dinners? Professionally done stock photos of steaks from gourmet restaurants — like a “flat iron topped with hotel butter from St. Anselm Restaurant in Washington” in the Post (price: $24).

If they showed what actual “steak dinners” look like in prison — think Salisbury, not filet mignon — it might accidentally solicit pity towards people in prison.

Numerous studies have shown prison food is barely edible and causes high rates of illness. “Lapses in food safety have made U.S. prisoners six times more likely to get a foodborne illness than the general population,” The Atlantic reported in 2017. Indeed, one of the primary demands for last fall’s multi-state prison strike was for higher quality and more nutritious food.

It gets worse.

“Adding to the staffers’ bitter feelings,” NBC added, “the working inmates were still drawing government paychecks for their prison jobs, which include painting buildings, cooking meals, and mowing lawns.”

NBC didn’t note that prisoners make slave wages — 23 cents to $1.40 an hour. The guards, prison reform expert John Pfaff notes by contrast, will get full back pay after “the showdown” ends.

For decades, the single uniting theme in white supremacist propaganda has been the idea that African Americans live high off the government hog while “working class” whites struggle to survive. It was the subtext of Ronald Reagan’s infamous 1976 speech accusing a “strapping young buck” of using food stamps to buy T-bone steak.

The narrative being advanced by the Post and others here is simply an updated version of this. By reinforcing caricatures of prisoners living it up while others suffer, these outlets reinforced deeply racialized notions of “welfare.”

My guess is the stories were fed by prison guards. After all, they started coming out less than 48 hours after the release of a federal report that showed rampant abuse and sexual violence in federal prisons — including 524 cases at the very same Coleman prison.

Too many outlets overlooked this story in favor of inflammatory clickbait. Clickbait that’ll soon be forgotten after these guards have gotten their back pay, and the prisoners in question go back to eating barely edible Nutraloaf the other 364 days a year.

Food Shocks and Mass Famine Are Our Shared Future

More than ever, the world’s ways of keeping hunger at bay are taking a pounding as food shocks become more frequent. Potatoes are being baked in heat waves. Corn is being parched by drought. Fruit is being bitten by frost.

And a long-term study suggests that for the world’s farmers and graziers, fishing crews and fish farmers, things will get worse as the world warms. Australian and US scientists report in the journal Nature Sustainability that they examined the incidence of what they call “food shocks” across 134 nations over a period of 53 years.

They found that some regions and some kinds of farming have suffered worse than others; that food production is vulnerable to volatile climate and weather changes; and that the dangers are increasing with time.

The researchers looked at cases of dramatic crop failure, harvest loss and fishing fleet failures between 1961 and 2013, as recorded by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and other sources, and then mapped shock frequency and co-occurrence.

In their database of 741 available time-series of food production, they found 226 cases of food shock: dramatic interruption of supply.

Hunger increases

Agriculture and livestock emerged as slightly more vulnerable to shock than fisheries and aquaculture. South Asia suffered most from crop damage or loss; the Caribbean for livestock, and Eastern Europe for fisheries; some of these regions were hard hit in more than one sector.

“The frequency of shocks has increased across all sectors at a global scale,” the authors report. “Increasing shock frequency is a food security concern in itself. Conflict-related shocks across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East since 2010, combined with adverse climate conditions, are responsible for the first uptick in global hunger in recent times.”

More than half of all shocks to food production were climate-related, and drought was the biggest factor. Extreme weather accounted for a quarter of shocks to livestock, and disease outbreaks another 10%, but the biggest single factor for pastoral farmers arose from geopolitical conflict and other crises.

Fisheries seemed better protected, and the worst shocks to fish landings could be traced to overfishing. Disruption to fish farming – a relatively new form of food production – has grown at a faster rate and to a higher level than in any other sector.

Climate scientists and agricultural researchers have been warning for years that food security is at hazard from global warming and climate change, both driven by profligate human use of fossil fuels and unthinking destruction of forests and natural grasslands and wetlands.

While the number of food shocks fluctuates from year to year, the long-term trend shows they are happening more often.

Heat extremes can harm cereal yields almost anywhere, but Africa and South-east Asia are particularly at risk from changes in precipitation patterns.

The latest study is a reminder that, in some ways, the future has already arrived: the forewarned rise in climate extremes such as flood, heat and drought can be detected in the annual harvest tally around the globe.

And although a high percentage of the food supply damage can be linked to social conflict or political stress, climate change seems increasingly to be a factor in civil and international violence.

A new study for the UN security council – co-incidentally released on the same day – confirms the picture. Hunger and conflict are in a persistent and deadly partnership that threatens millions.

Mass famine

The number of food shocks fluctuates from year to year, the Nature Sustainability authors say. That is because factors such as social conflict and climate change can in synergy create a number of shocks across different sectors at different times. At least 22 of the 134 nations experienced shocks in many sectors over the same five-year time period.

In some cases, these shocks ended with more than just empty shelves. The collapse of the Soviet Union late in the last century removed some economic support from North Korea: subsequent floods precipitated a famine that killed 200,000 people.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and the subsequent Gulf War, devastated agricultural land and cost Kuwait’s commercial fishermen their livelihoods. Drought in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 decimated cereal yields, pastoralists lost fodder for their cattle and animal disease incidence soared.

“While the number of food shocks fluctuates from year to year, the long-term trend shows they are happening more often,” said Richard Cottrell of the University of Tasmania, who led the study.

“Globalised trade and the dependence of many countries on food imports mean that food shocks are a global problem, and the international community faces a significant challenge to build resilience.”