Chris Hedges's Blog, page 346

Teachers Are Rising Up to Resist Neoliberal Attacks on Education

Editor’s note: This article was initially published on Truthout.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” —James Baldwin

Hannah Arendt once argued that, “Thinking itself is dangerous to all creeds, convictions, and opinions.” In the current political climate, the institutions that nurture critical thinking are similarly seen as dangerous and threatening to our increasingly authoritarian social order. These institutions include public and higher education along with almost any form of progressive media.

As a result, purveyors of neoliberal ideology and policy have been working relentlessly to undermine public education in order to define it in strictly economic terms. Taking an instrumentalist approach obsessed with measurement and quantification, they have aggressively attempted to turn education into a business, faculty into devalued clerks and students into consumers.

Fortunately, teachers and students are refusing to participate in the destruction of US education. The historic strike initiated on January 14 by 33,000 teachers in Los Angeles — the nation’s second-largest school district — is the latest evidence of a nationwide trend in which public school teachers and students have increasingly gone on strike and engaged in walkouts.

A Wave of Resistance Against Neoliberal Approaches to Education

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This wave of resistance has emerged to counter the neoliberal market-driven approach to education, which historically has cut across mainstream party lines. Market-driven reforms have been supported since the Reagan administration by every president and by every established political faction since the 1970s.

Refusing to promote the relationship between education and democracy, critical thinking and active citizenship, and rejecting the connection between education and social and political change, the advocates of neoliberalism have weakened the power of teachers, attacked teachers unions, reduced teaching to training, and implemented a full-fledged attack on the imagination through methods such as teaching for the test and cutting back on funding for the most basic necessities of schooling. Public schools have been transformed into charter schools or sites that aid in the criminalization of poor Black and Brown students. Neoliberal leaders have, moreover, sought to strip schools of their anti-authoritarian and egalitarian potential to teach students to live as critical and informed citizens in a democracy.

The striking teachers in LA are not just fighting for smaller classes, more funding, regulation of charter schools and higher salaries. They’re also fighting for more services, less testing, full-time nurses in every school (80 percent of the LA schools do not have nurses), social workers, and more counselors, librarians and psychologists.

Teachers and students in LA are strongly rejecting the crude neoliberal assertion that education is strictly about the pursuit of the practical, or that it should be valued as the ultimate economic investment. They are also challenging how political power is concentrated at the top of school systems and fighting how formal education is overly influenced by billionaires such as Eli Broad and Reed Hastings who “spent an unprecedented 9.7 million in the spring of 2017 to ensure the election of a pro-privatization majority [to] the [Los Angeles] school board.”

This strike also echoes the fight educators are waging against big corporations and right-wing legislators who aggressively work to defund public education. In doing so, they are rejecting market and business values as the defining principles of education in favor of the broader considerations that focus on civic literacy, public values and critical thinking. They are also rejecting forms of pedagogical terrorism that aim to remove students from addressing important social problems, if not from politics itself.

What has become clear to educators across the country is that neoliberalism has not only achieved dominance over the economy, it has also become a fundamental organizing principle for shaping all aspects of education. At the public school level, it trains students in workplace discipline, lowers expectations and kills the imagination; at the level of higher education, it replaces nourishing students’ critical capacities with training them for careers while limiting their willingness to believe in something larger than themselves. Again at the level of higher education, meagerly compensated adjuncts replace tenured faculty, services are outsourced, the salaries of administrators have soared and students are viewed as customers.

The struggle against neoliberalism has to begin with a struggle for education as a democratic public good and the recognition that education is a moral and political practice that constitutes a struggle over knowledge, identities, agency and a particular notion of the future. If teachers do not have control over the conditions of their labor, and if students lack the ability to address how knowledge is related to power, morality, social responsibility and justice, they will have neither the power nor the language necessary to engage in collective forms of struggle against society’s efforts to write them out of the script of democracy. They will have no language to recognize the rise of authoritarianism in the governing institutions of society and in their own values.

If conservatives see pedagogy as the transmission of lifeless skills, striking teachers view pedagogy as the grounds by which students learn how knowledge is related to power and matters of self-definition and the basis for intervening in the world. Public school teachers and faculty in higher education are refusing to be complicit with educational institutions that insist on the importance of training and mind-numbing forms of teaching in a time of widespread violence. This is a crucial point — one that teachers across the country are beginning to understand and act upon. Not only do these teachers see education as deeply political, they also see it as a form of organized resistance.

Democracy’s gravediggers were long at work before the appearance of Donald Trump. Forces such as Republican Party extremists, right-wing billionaires, the financial elite, conservative media, nativists, white supremacists and right-wing evangelicals have done everything they can to consolidate control of the commanding institutions of US life in order to undermine the rule of law and separate issues of freedom and political power from the democratic traditions of equality and rule by the public. Neither Trump’s rise nor the emergence of right-wing populism happened in a vacuum. Trump built on a longstanding neoliberal project buttressed by an anti-democratic formative culture in which educational institutions have been used to shape market-based identities, modes of agency and collective subjects bound together by the notion that there is no alternative to an unfair and pernicious capitalist social order.

In response to this argument, the late radical blogger Mark Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism.” As he explains in his book on that topic, the term describes “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” For Fisher, capitalist realism functioned less as a crude form of quasi-propaganda than as a pedagogical, social and cultural machine that produces “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”

Hidden behind an unquestioned anonymity, neoliberalism appears less as an ideology than as a market-based rationality that by default rightly rejects any inquiry into its goal of governing all of social life. Neoliberalism’s unforgiving logic of globalization attempts to make its own power invisible while making people prisoners of its privatizing, commodifying, mutilating ode to self-interest and hyper-individualism.

The Normalization of Neoliberal Ideology

As neoliberal ideology, values, and social relations become normalized, they become more successful and difficult to name, understand and challenge. For instance, even as more and more people revolt in the current historical moment against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialized out of grievances against the government, privileged elites and the massive hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. In this instance, capitalist realism has asserted itself, especially among Trump’s followers, in a mix of ignorant faith and sheer exhaustion that has led to a need for simplistic solutions and a strongman who promises to “solve” the problems that haunt the current period.

For instance, Trump fuels a racist, anti-democratic, authoritarian populism in his call for building a wall on the southern border. He does so by stoking fear. For the last two years, he has equated the culture of immigrants with the culture of crime, argued that undocumented workers present the main threat of terrorism in the United States, and stated that they constitute a humanitarian crisis. What he refuses to acknowledge is that, rather than being a threat, many immigrants at the southern border are trying to seek asylum. At the same time, without any sense of irony, Trump claimed in his televised address from the Oval Office, that his proposed wall is some sort of humanitarian priority. As John Cassidy in The New Yorker points out, Trump tried to frame the wall as “a solution to a humanitarian crisis on the southern border, rather than what it is and has been all along: the holy grail of a nativist political movement that he has nurtured and cultivated ever since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower.”

Trump has used, both in his campaign and presidency, the language of pollution to describe undocumented Brown people as “thugs,” “rapists” and “murderers.” Human suffering is not something he intends to end; it is something he produces en masse on a number of fronts, both domestic and foreign. Neoliberalism thrives on the power to distract. The mainstream press supports this strategy of distraction by focusing on Trump’s shifting claims about whether the wall will be made of concrete or steel. What is missing from these arguments, as Sam Fulwood from ThinkProgress points out, is that “The wall is symbolic. It exists solely for the purpose of allowing the president to continually promulgate a steady stream of racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant fear mongering.”

Trump’s own racism is not only evident in his demonizing of people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups, it is also obvious in his silence regarding racist statements made by Rep. Steve King in a New York Times interview in which King said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, has referred to King “basically [as] an open white nationalist at this point.”

While some Republicans Party members have roundly condemned King for his remarks, they have failed to apply the same criticism to either Trump or their own policies, which extend from voter suppression to their support for heinous and morally repulsive border policies. Tellingly, when Trump was asked about King’s racist remarks on the South Lawn of the White House, he replied, “I don’t — I haven’t been following it. I really haven’t been following it,” even though the story has dominated the news.

All the while, Trump has continued to make racist comments of his own about undocumented workers. For instance, as CNN writer Maegan Vazquez observes, in the midst of the King affair, “Trump quoted a blatantly white nationalist column written by Pat Buchanan, the former communications director for President Ronald Reagan. Buchanan wrote: ‘The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes — the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America — the more dependably Democratic it will become. The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the US population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.’”

This is neoliberal fascism embracing the discourse of a white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, while sometimes hiding behind a language of humanitarianism and human rights. The willingness of a large segment of the US public to succumb to Trump’s embrace of what Wendy Brown calls “fomented nationalism, racism, xenophobia and desire for authoritarian rule” has its roots in a neoliberal culture of social disintegration. In this context, neoliberal reason hides the effects of its racist and toxic economic, social and political arrangements within a form of capitalist realism that undermines any hope for reclaiming a democratic project defined through the empowering logics of freedom, equality and self-rule.

What Fisher wisely understood was that any resistance to neoliberal capitalism will have to engage education in order to challenge neoliberal common sense and the pedagogical apparatuses that produce it. Borrowing from the work of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, C. Wright Mills and others, Fisher addresses this issue by expanding the meaning of education far beyond the notion of established schooling, and pointed to popular culture, the arts, science, film, journalism, social media and other sites of cultural production as the lens through which to both imagine an alternative to global capitalism and to mobilize individual and collective forms of resistance to it. In this instance, culture, if not the very notion of populism, becomes a site of struggle rather than a terrain grounded exclusively in the grip of domination.

In the current situation, as Chantal Mouffe observes, it is crucial to discard the notion that populism is simply another form of demagogy. On the contrary, she writes, “It is a way of doing politics which can take various forms, depending on the periods and the places. It emerges when one aims at building a new subject of collective action — the people — capable of reconfiguring a social order lived as unfair,” and in need of a defense of freedom, social justice and equality.

What does it mean to challenge the pedagogical assumptions that inform neoliberalism? Where will such struggles take place? What form will the language of criticism and hope look like if it is to address the everyday lives of people caught in the grip of neoliberal common sense?

Neoliberalism has created a crisis of agency, representation and resistance, and all of these elements must be addressed in terms of how they both function in a neoliberal order to undermine democracy and what it would mean to develop a language and mode of analysis capable of rethinking these issues as part of a comprehensive understanding of politics and collective struggles.

We must also ask how right-wing and demagogue politicians were able to colonize populist aspirations to regain some control over the political process and why the left failed. Shaming those who follow Trump is a failing political strategy. An effective political strategy must involve reclaiming the promise of a radical democracy. In the process, we must expose how the ideal of radical democracy is consistently undermined and attacked in a neoliberal order in which everything is privatized, commodified, deregulated and organized as part of the culture of commercialism subject to the dictates of finance capital.

Such a challenge would demand developing modes of education and critical analyses that examine how the ruling elite uses its power to exploit, exclude, dehumanize and undermine any viable mode of critical agency. It would call into question the methods through which the state, corporations and the financial elite use power to remove from peoples’ lives essential services such as health care, public transportation, free quality education, housing, a social wage, a healthy environment and other services that enable people to expand their capacities as critically engaged, joyful agents.

This raises further questions about how neoliberalism — disguised as the “liberal order” — became an incubator for the rise of Trump and a contemporary version of fascist politics. There is more at work here than the failure of liberalism to address the soaring issue of inequality in wealth and power. The writer Pankaj Mishra considers this issue in his critique of the established liberal order. He writes:

The obvious answer is that [the] much-cherished liberal order was the incubator for Trumpism and other authoritarianisms. It made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed. It propagated an ethos of individual autonomy and personal responsibility, while the exigencies of the market made it impossible for people to save and plan for the future. It burdened people with chronic debt and turned them into gamblers in the stock market. Liberal capitalism was supposed to foster a universal middle class and encourage bourgeois values of sobriety and prudence and democratic virtues of accountability. It achieved the opposite: the creation of a precariat with no clear long-term prospects, dangerously vulnerable to demagogues promising them the moon. Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise.

Following up on Mishra’s comments, it is crucial to rethink how capitalist institutions limit human agency, along with most people’s capacity to be critical and imagine the unimaginable as part of the collective struggle for a democratic future. This would suggest challenging neoliberal regimes of discipline, control and conformity with a pedagogical discourse in which it becomes clear that personal and political rights have to be matched by social and economic rights for any democracy to work. We need to tie the struggle for economic and social justice to new configurations of power and to new ways of understanding that are capable of recognizing and utilizing power in order to create a democratic socialist society.

Any viable notion of politics has to consider working through a variety of cultural apparatuses to activate a public imagination willing to fight for institutions and public goods capable of revitalizing social bonds, social responsibility and the capacity for experiences that go beyond the narrow notions of individualism and self-interest celebrated in the neoliberal worldview. It is both a political and pedagogical issue to imagine a future in which human needs take precedent over market considerations, while making clear how capitalism, with its concentration of wealth and power in few hands, produces modes of inequality and human misery. The agents and modes of resistance necessary for defeating capitalism and constructing a democratic socialist order will not emerge without the production of a formative culture that provides the knowledge, ideas, values and social relations central to creating engaged citizens.

Sites of such struggle include public and higher education, the arts, social services, social media, religious institutions, and other domains of cultural production capable of utilizing the work of public intellectuals. At stake here is the challenge for cultural workers to own up to the complexity of the problems capitalism produces, to write and speak to people in a narrative that they can understand and identify with, and to address what it means to make knowledge, images and ideas critical and emancipatory.

Creating a Pedagogy of “Profane Illumination”

At stake here also is another pedagogical challenge rooted in the necessity to turn common sense into what Walter Benjamin once called “profane illumination,” a process by which the dominant common-sense assumptions of a capitalist hegemony are subject to the process of denaturalization, critical analysis and the shock of new forms of recognition. This is a practice of making the familiar unfamiliar by treating it as a source of astonishment.

Such a project is imperative if the pedagogical task of raising consciousness is to be successful in challenging neoliberalism’s most powerful weapon — its claim that its worldview is self-evident and that any analysis of it is irrelevant. This is particularly important under a regime of neoliberalism in which the public collapses into the private, and personal experiences are removed from wider social forces “thereby turning social uncertainty into a personal failure that is divorced from any collective cause or remedy,” in the words of Nicholas Gane and Les Back.

In addition to employing Benjamin’s notion of “profane illumination,” a radical cultural politics must insist that rational thinking is not enough. The left and other progressives also need a new way of thinking about the misery and suffering faced by many people. Such thinking must be sensitive to rejecting any hint of moral righteousness and the colonizing stance of preaching the gospel to vulnerable populations. Dispossessed populations must not be denied the tools and spaces to narrate their own stories. We need an array of tools and platforms to consider and unmask how dominant power works and impacts on peoples’ lives. At the same time, these tools must do justice to the everyday experiences, events, emotions, modes of identification, and investments that people inhabit and experience in their daily lives.

Radical pedagogical practice should take its cue from C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination, in which he called for intellectuals and cultural workers to write, talk and act in ways that make connections between private troubles and public issues, systemic structures and the production of particular modes of agency. This suggests a pedagogical exercise in the service of joint recovery and dialogue, and entering into a politics, language and way of thinking that fully engages concrete everyday events — what Tracy K. Smith has described as “vulnerabilities … and actual ordeals life doles out to real people in fragile bodies.”

Central to challenging the objectifying language of pollution and disposability is the need to develop an alternative way of speaking, knowing and thinking, one in which, as Smith puts it, “language becomes a felt thing, a terrain to be crossed … a shifting and malleable possibility” capable of addressing a diverse audience. This is very different from the turgid prose and disembodied language used by many academics, a language that is reductively abstract and functions as what Rob Nixon describes in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Pooras “dead-on-delivery-prose,” incapable of speaking to people who would be central to developing a left populism.

The latter discourse functions largely as a form of verbal camouflage, creating barriers between universities and their public mission. This type of jargon often prevents academics from becoming border crossers, moving outside of their disciplines, and reaching across diverse forms of media in order to engage in the high-stakes pedagogical terrain of persuasion and belief in order to change the ways in which people see things. Arcane prose and reductive notions of professionalism also work to separate hard-thinking and rigorous scholarship from being relevant to addressing pressing social problems and a wider array of publics.

Dylan Moore is right in reminding us that “the first casualties of totalitarianism are the minds that would oppose it,” which suggests all the more importantly the need for academics, writers, journalists, artists and others to connect their work to the public and to expose the workings of lies, power, and the reifying politics of disposability and pollution. Making language accessible and rigorous in order to address concrete social problems for a wider audience is crucial if cultural workers in diverse sites are to address the crisis of representation and agency that is at the heart of neoliberal authoritarianism.

To raise public consciousness, the symbolic weapons of persuasion, passion and beliefs must be integrated into a politics of recognition and identification in which people can be moved to not only think critically, but to be passionate and energized about their ability to change the world in which they find themselves. The left needs a political language infused with a deeply moral commitment to democracy, equality and justice, especially at a time when violence, corruption and lawlessness have become normalized, opening the door for the emergence of a fascist politics in the US.

The issue of how ordinary Americans can be motivated to be self-reflective and moved by democratic values while embracing relationships marked by shared responsibilities begins with a language in which people can be moved emotionally to analyze their problems and their relationship to broader social forces. One task of such a language is to awaken people’s capacity to align themselves with collective identities steeped in communal bonds, develop a compassion for others and identify with the public good. Such a language has to replace state-sanctioned fear with a radical notion of what Ronald Aronson describes in his book, We: Reviving Social Hope, as “social hope” — a hope that moves people not only to imagine a different future but to individually and collective act on it.

The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can both call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. Culture has become a war zone, which under Trump has been aggressively militarized and commercialized. As civic culture collapses, the crisis of democracy in the United States is growing, power becomes more concentrated in the hands of ruling elites and casino capitalism is put on steroids.

Trump has put the government in a shutdown, and mainstream media outlets are focused on discussions of Trump’s wall, political infighting among Republicans and the takeover of the House of Representatives by the Democrats. Meanwhile nothing is being said about economic inequality, a government run by the ultra-rich, unrestrained corporate power and a military budget that is as outsized as it is unethical.

The ongoing assault on the body politic by extensive privatization, deregulation and economic growth disguised as progress as it destroys the planet is proceeding at breakneck speed. It does so just as historical memory has been undermined and the social fabric has been put at risk in the face of racism, white nationalism, repression and censorship. The space between crisis and catastrophe is closing and has terrifying implications for the future.

Since the 1980s, and particularly under Trump’s reign, a new political formation has come into fruition which echoes the horrors of a fascist past and is fueled by the toxic rhetoric of disposability and pollution. The mechanisms of power and ideology through which this emerging fascist politics asserts itself must be first challenged with a language that connects capitalism and human exploitation, exclusion and the destruction of the planet. Crucial to the task of pressing the claim for economic and social justice is the need to make clear that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous. We need to reverse the neoliberal claim that politics and democracy are the enemies of freedom. Moreover, any notion of resistance must rethink the process of democratization as a matter of fundamental systemic change that embraces a radical restructuring of society.

The deep-seated problems of capitalism are too severe, bottomless and profoundly destructive to be simply amended. Only a strong anti-capitalist mass movement can challenge them. As Fisher pointed out in his book, Capitalist Realism, Americans are in “a landscape … littered with ideological rubble,” and in response, we must offer an effective rival to capitalism rather than a reaction to it. Under the rule of neoliberalism, ideological repression works by stealth through forms of manufactured illiteracy produced by right-wing echo chambers and other cultural apparatuses that work aggressively to depoliticize people and make them complicit in their own oppression. The endpoint is the withering of civic attachments, the decline of public life and the evisceration of any notion of shared citizenship, all of which emboldens a fascist politics. Defenders of a radical democracy need to argue with great energy and passion that “freedom” under capitalism has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with entrapping millions in a web of reductive and punishing ideological and institutional constraints.

For a start, neoliberal ideology, public pedagogy and its assault on democratic institutions can be further challenged, in part, by combining Benjamin’s task of “profane illumination” and analytic rigor with what A.K. Thompson calls “premonitions,” which speak to the need to place isolated events within broader sets of connections that allow us to think in terms of a comprehensive politics and notion of totality. Thompson is worth repeating on this issue. He writes:

Premonitions are similar to illuminations and reflections in that, as forms of extrapolative reasoning, they reveal how a thing or event can be made to alert us to the broader social process from which it derives. The major difference is that, whereas Benjamin’s concepts placed emphasis on the resolution of accumulated tensions, “premonitions” direct our attention toward the future that will obtain should present dynamics be left undisturbed.

If the left and other progressives are to build on the failures of neoliberalism and create a new coalition of political agents, we need a new language, political story and understanding of politics in which a new socialist democratic order can be both imagined and struggled over. This means getting beyond the reductive notion that capitalism can only be understood as an economic system.

The economic crisis produced under neoliberalism has been matched by a crisis of ideas. This suggests that at the heart of neoliberal capitalism and its fascist politics is a crisis of representation, agency and memory. In part, this crisis was captured by the phrase attributed to both Fredrick Jameson or Slavoj Žižek that, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” This dystopian assessment challenges us to redefine and rethink the politics that produced it. Doing so would require not only interrogating the current crisis of neoliberal fascism, but also thinking about the promise of a radical democracy.

At the heart of any viable theory of resistance is the need to develop a language of critique that makes visible neoliberalism’s largely unchallenged narrative about how social life should be governed by market relations. We need a language that exposes neoliberalism’s celebration of a disembodied individualism, its elevation of the ethos of competition to a national ideal, and also its war against the welfare state, the environment and social bonds. This anti-democratic narrative cannot be simply written out of our political struggles. We need to create new stories that become integral to how we imagine our society, enabling us to open up, rather than close down, the future.

The famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the need for stories that went beyond reform, stories that inspired people to think and act outside of the old politics of the time. His words are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them down. They speak to a generation of youth, teachers, educators and progressives who refuse to dream the future within the stifling confines of the present. Douglass wrote:

It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks that, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that the morbid symptoms have arrived, but at the same time as they produce despair, they also present new challenges and the opportunity for revitalized struggles. The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values democracy and its future. The time has come for stories that merge public memory, everyday experience, public connections, and the space where the horizon of possibility connects with unexpected vantage points and broad-based social movements. We have no time to waste.

Supreme Court Halts Louisiana Abortion Clinic Law for Now

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court is temporarily keeping a Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics on hold.

Justice Samuel Alito says in a brief order Friday that the justices need more time to review arguments for and against the law, which requires doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law was set to take effect Monday, though clinics have asked the high court to block its enforcement.

The clinics say at least one and maybe two of Louisiana’s three abortion clinics would have to close if the law is allowed to take effect. A federal appeals court that upheld the law said it’s not clear that any clinic would close.

Extreme Cold in Northern U.S. Leaves More Than 2 Dozen Dead

CHICAGO—The dangerous cold and heavy snow that hobbled the northern U.S. this week has retreated, but not before exacting a human toll: more than two dozen weather-related deaths in eight states and hundreds of injuries, including frostbite, broken bones, heart attacks and carbon monoxide poisoning.

In Illinois alone, hospitals reported more than 220 cases of frostbite and hypothermia since Tuesday, when the polar vortex moved in and overnight temperatures plunged to minus 30 (minus 34 Celsius) or lower — with wind chills of minus 50 (minus 45 Celsius) or worse in some areas.

Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis normally sees around 30 frostbite patients in an entire winter. It admitted 18 in the past week, spokeswoman Christine Hill said Friday.

“I definitely saw more frostbite than I’ve ever seen in my entire career just in the last three days,” said Dr. Andrea Rowland-Fischer, an emergency department physician at Hennepin Healthcare.

Most of those patients, she said, had underlying problems that made it difficult for them to take care of themselves: the developmentally delayed, the mentally ill, the very young and the very old. They also included people with injuries related to drugs and alcohol — people who passed out or did not realize they were cold or injured.

“It’s heartbreaking when there are people who can’t take care of themselves and get exposed, just because they either escape from the care that they’re being given or because they’re not being supervised.”

Others got frostbite on their way to work after being exposed to the cold for a short time, often on their hands, feet, ears and face. That included people whose cars would not start or who got stuck outside for other reasons, as well as those who just did not think they could get frostbitten so quickly and went outside without gloves or other protective gear.

Several required “maximal treatment,” admission to the hospital’s burn unit for therapies that include drugs to restore circulation to try to avoid amputations. Some of them will probably still require amputations, a decision usually made by burn doctors four to 10 days after the injury.

Many people decided to stay home even when they were sick to avoid slippery roads and subzero temperatures. In western Michigan, a health care system’s online service saw a major spike this week.

More than 400 people over four days used Spectrum Health’s MedNow to see a nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant about non-emergency issues, such as aches, rashes, cold and flu, said Joe Brennan, MedNow senior director. Most used an app on their phone. The usual four-day volume is 250.

“We had soreness-and-sickness calls from people who were shoveling 2 ½ feet of snow,” Brennan said. “Instead of going to urgent care or an emergency department, they had an option to stay at home.”

Another danger was from carbon monoxide. A family of nine in Wheeling, Illinois, about 30 miles northwest of Chicago, was taken to local hospitals after heating their home with a charcoal grill. In Rockford, Illinois, four people were treated because they had warmed up cars in a closed garage or because a furnace vent became blocked by ice and snow.

The snow that accompanied the cold also caused problems.

In Raymond, New Hampshire, the driver of a state Department of Transportation vehicle was struck in the head Thursday after ice and snow flew off a truck ahead and broke through the windshield. The driver was hospitalized with a laceration to the head and other possible injuries.

In just a two-day period, Tuesday and Wednesday, Mercyhealth in Rockford treated 15 people for broken bones from falling on the ice, 10 people who were in car crashes caused by snow and eight people who complained of chest pain or shortness of breath from shoveling snow, hospital officials said.

Rockford broke recorded a record low of minus 31 degrees Thursday, but the hospital only treated two cases of frostbite, emergency physician Dr. John Pakiela said.

“It was Antarctica there for a few days … but I think people listened to professional advice and heeded warnings,” about staying indoors or bundling up, he said.

By Friday, the deep freeze had mostly abated, with temperatures climbing as high as the low 20s (minus 5 or 6 Celsius) in Minneapolis and Chicago. In western North Dakota, the temperature in Dickinson climbed above freezing (0 Celsius) by midmorning — a jump of nearly 60 degrees compared with Tuesday’s low of minus 17 degrees (minus 27 Celsius).

The weather was thought to be a factor in at least 27 deaths, including a 90-year-old Michigan woman who died of hypothermia after locking herself out of her home while feeding birds — one of at least nine people who were found outdoors. A motorist also died during a snowstorm Friday after striking a salt truck that had pulled off the side of Interstate 70 in central Indiana. Others died after freezing outdoors or in unheated homes or while shoveling snow.

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Karnowski reported from St. Paul, Minnesota. Associated Press writers Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; Blake Nicholson in Bismarck, North Dakota; and Ed White in Detroit also contributed to this story.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey Launches 2020 Bid

WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on Friday declared his bid for the presidency in 2020 with a sweeping call to unite a deeply polarized nation around a “common sense of purpose.”

The New Jersey Democrat, who is the second black candidate in a primary field that’s already historically diverse, delivered his message of unity amid an era marked by bitter political division. He announced his run on the first day of Black History Month, underscoring his consequential status as America’s potential second black president after Barack Obama.

“I believe that we can build a country where no one is forgotten, no one is left behind; where parents can put food on the table; where there are good-paying jobs with good benefits in every neighborhood; where our criminal justice system keeps us safe, instead of shuffling more children into cages and coffins; where we see the faces of our leaders on television and feel pride, not shame,” Booker said in a video message to supporters, subtly jabbing at President Donald Trump.

“It is not a matter of can we, it’s a matter of do we have the collective will, the American will?” he added. “I believe we do.”

Booker enters what’s shaping up to be a crowded presidential primary, with three of his fellow Democratic senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — already either declared or exploring a run. But he’s spent months telegraphing his intentions to join the race, visiting the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to build connections with key powerbrokers. He already has slated trips back to those states later this month.

Booker began reaching out to key constituencies on Friday, calling in to three radio shows popular with black and Hispanic listeners. He spoke in fluent Spanish during his interview with Univision, vowing to work closely with “the Latino community,” and discussed his support for marijuana legalization in another interview.

A former mayor of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, Booker spoke to reporters outside his home there on Friday and acknowledged that his optimistic tone may not resonate with some Democratic voters. But “love ain’t easy,” he added.

The senator also weighed in on strategies to achieve universal health care that have shaken up the early Democratic field, saying that he would not eliminate the private insurance industry outright — a stance his rival and friend, California Sen. Kamala Harris, recently took heat for appearing to endorse during a televised town hall.

Booker won a special Senate election in 2013 to replace Democrat Frank Lautenberg and then won a full Senate term in 2014. He will be able to run for a second full Senate term in 2020 while running for president, thanks to a law that New Jersey’s governor signed in November.

But that doesn’t mean the 49-year-old lawmaker’s path to the nomination will be easy. As many as five more Democratic senators could soon mount their own primary bids, creating a competition for voters’ attention, and several of Booker’s rival presidential hopefuls bring higher name recognition to a race that may also feature popular former Vice President Joe Biden.

The affable Booker, known for his fluency in connecting with voters during an age of selfies and social media, also could face some difficulty winning the hearts of the Democratic base due to his past financial ties to banking and pharmaceutical interests. Booker said he would stop taking contributions from pharmaceutical companies in 2017, the year that he partnered with potential presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on a bill that would allow importation of prescription drugs from Canada.

He also likely will stand alone as an unmarried candidate, and when he appeared on Friday on “The View,” a TV show popular with female audiences, one host asked how a committed vegan could win fans at the meat-and-butter-centric Iowa state fair. Booker noted that he enjoys “lots of deep-fried stuff” and underscored his family ties to that pivotal state: His grandmother was born there.

Booker’s mother, who attended the show’s live broadcast to support him, lives in another early-voting state, Nevada.

Despite those connections, Booker’s announcement largely emphasized his close connection to the urban city that he led as mayor and his commitment to inner-city issues of critical importance to black voters. That compelling personal biography could help elevate his message that “the only way we can make change is when people come together.”

“We’ve got to be a country that gets back to sharing a common sense of purpose about what we’re for and who we’re for,” Booker said during a satellite radio interview.

The senator’s father grew up in a low-income community in North Carolina, and Booker has recalled his family’s later struggle to settle in suburban New Jersey amid discrimination against black homebuyers. The senator has brought a heartfelt and passionate style to his achievements in the Senate, at times fusing his personal spirituality with policy proposals that focus on social justice. Booker played a key role in the bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that Trump supported last year, for example, helping strike that deal two months after sparring with Republicans during the battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

In his announcement video, Booker invoked the fight against slavery and the role of immigration in building the nation’s character.

“The history of our nation is defined by collective action; by interwoven destinies of slaves and abolitionists; of those born here and those who chose America as home; of those who took up arms to defend our country and those who linked arms to challenge and change it,” he said.

Born in the nation’s capital but raised in New Jersey, Booker made a name for himself as Newark mayor by personally shoveling the snow of residents. He has $4.1 million left in his campaign coffers that could also be used to assist his presidential run. Rather than opening an exploratory committee to test the waters, Booker took the direct step to open a campaign seeking the Democratic nomination.

When pressed on Friday about the packed field of Democratic hopefuls, Booker sounded a note of togetherness. He acknowledged during one radio interview that he’s “obviously not happy” about the potential spoiler effect of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s campaign if the billionaire and Democratic donor decides to run as an independent, but he added that “I have this faith in” Americans to choose a more viable candidate.

Booker is aligning with many other prominent Democratic White House contenders by forswearing all donations from corporate political action committees and federal lobbyists to his campaign, dubbed Cory 2020. A prominent Booker supporter, San Francisco attorney Steve Phillips, says he is working on millions of dollars in committed donations to a so-called super PAC that would boost the senator’s candidacy, but Booker’s campaign is openly against super PACs playing any role in the presidential race.

Booker visited his local congregation at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark on Thursday night for prayers ahead of his Friday announcement, a decision that underscores the role his faith will play in his campaign. He has attended service at the church since moving to Newark in 1996.

Booker’s campaign manager will be Addisu Demissie, who managed California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign last year and previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

___

Associated Press reporter Michael Catalini contributed from Newark, New Jersey.

Overthrowing Democratic Governments Is Practically an American Tradition

On September 15, 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger authorized the U.S. government to do everything possible to undermine the incoming government of the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Nixon and Kissinger, according to the notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to “make the economy scream” in Chile; they were “not concerned [about the] risks involved.” War was acceptable to them as long as Allende’s government was removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with $10 million as a first installment to begin the covert destabilization of the country.

U.S. business firms, such as the telecommunication giant ITT, the soft drink maker Pepsi and copper monopolies such as Anaconda and Kennecott, put pressure on the U.S. government once Allende nationalized the copper sector on July 11, 1971. Chileans celebrated this day as the Day of National Dignity (Dia de la Dignidad Nacional). The CIA began to make contact with sections of the military seen to be against Allende. Three years later, on September 11, 1973, these military men moved against Allende, who died in the regime change operation. The United States “created the conditions,” as U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger put it, to which U.S. President Richard Nixon answered, “that is the way it is going to be played.” Such is the mood of international gangsterism.

Chile entered the dark night of a military dictatorship that turned over the country to U.S. monopoly firms. U.S. advisers rushed in to strengthen the nerve of General Augusto Pinochet’s cabinet.

What happened to Chile in 1973 is precisely what the United States has attempted to do in many other countries of the Global South. The most recent target for the U.S. government—and Western big business—is Venezuela. But what is happening to Venezuela is nothing unique. It faces an onslaught from the United States and its allies that is familiar to countries as far afield as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The formula is clichéd. It is commonplace, a twelve-step plan to produce a coup climate, to create a world under the heel of the West and of Western big business.

Step One: Colonialism’s Traps. Most of the Global South remains trapped by the structures put in place by colonialism. Colonial boundaries encircled states that had the misfortune of being single-commodity producers—either sugar for Cuba or oil for Venezuela. The inability to diversify their economies meant that these countries earned the bulk of their export revenues from their singular commodities (98 percent of Venezuela’s export revenues come from oil). As long as the prices of the commodities remained high, the export revenues were secure. When the prices fell, revenue suffered. This was a legacy of colonialism. Oil prices dropped from $160.72 per barrel (June 2008) to $51.99 per barrel (January 2019). Venezuela’s export revenues collapsed in this decade.

Step Two: The Defeat of the New International Economic Order. In 1974, the countries of the Global South attempted to redo the architecture of the world economy. They called for the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would allow them to pivot away from the colonial reliance upon one commodity and diversify their economies. Cartels of raw materials—such as oil and bauxite—were to be built so that the one-commodity country could have some control over prices of the products that they relied upon. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960, was a pioneer of these commodity cartels. Others were not permitted to be formed. With the defeat of OPEC over the past three decades, its members—such as Venezuela (which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves)—have not been able to control oil prices. They are at the mercy of the powerful countries of the world.

Step Three: The Death of Southern Agriculture. In November 2001, there were about 3 billion small farmers and landless peasants in the world. That month, the World Trade Organization met in Doha, Qatar, to unleash the productivity of Northern agri-business against the billions of small farmers and landless peasants of the Global South. Mechanization and large, industrial-scale farms in North America and Europe had raised productivity to about 1 to 2 million kilograms of cereals per farmer. The small farmers and landless peasants in the rest of the world struggled to grow 1,000 kilograms of cereals per farmer. They were nowhere near as productive. The Doha decision, as Samir Amin wrote, presages the annihilation of the small farmer and landless peasant. What are these men and women to do? The production per hectare is higher in the West, but the corporate takeover of agriculture (as Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Senior Fellow P. Sainath shows) leads to increased hunger as it pushes peasants off their land and leaves them to starve.

Step Four: Culture of Plunder. Emboldened by Western domination, monopoly firms act with disregard for the law. As Kambale Musavuli and I write of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its annual budget of $6 billion is routinely robbed of at least $500 million by monopoly mining firms, mostly from Canada—the country now leading the charge against Venezuela. Mispricing and tax avoidance schemes allow these large firms (Canada’s Agrium, Barrick and Suncor) to routinely steal billions of dollars from impoverished states.

Step Five: Debt as a Way of Life. Unable to raise money from commodity sales, hemmed in by a broken world agricultural system and victim of a culture of plunder, countries of the Global South have been forced to go hat in hand to commercial lenders for finance. Over the past decade, debt held by the Global South states has increased, while debt payments have ballooned by 60 percent. When commodity prices rose between 2000 and 2010, debt in the Global South decreased. As commodity prices began to fall from 2010, debts have risen. The IMF points out that of the 67 impoverished countries that they follow, 30 are in debt distress, a number that has doubled since 2013. More than 55.4 percent of Angola’s export revenue is paid to service its debt. And Angola, like Venezuela, is an oil exporter. Other oil exporters such as Ghana, Chad, Gabon and Venezuela suffer high debt to GDP ratios. Two out of five low-income countries are in deep financial distress.

Step Six: Public Finances Go to Hell. With little incoming revenue and low tax collection rates, public finances in the Global South have gone into crisis. As the UN Conference on Trade and Development points out, “public finances have continued to be suffocated.” States simply cannot put together the funds needed to maintain basic state functions. Balanced budget rules make borrowing difficult, which is compounded by the fact that banks charge high rates for money, citing the risks of lending to indebted countries.

Step Seven: Deep Cuts in Social Spending. Impossible to raise funds, trapped by the fickleness of international finance, governments are forced to make deep cuts in social spending. Education and health, food sovereignty and economic diversification—all this goes by the wayside. International agencies such as the IMF force countries to conduct “reforms,” a word that means the extermination of independence. Those countries that hold out face immense international pressure to submit under pain of extinction, as the Communist Manifesto (1848) put it.

Step Eight: Social Distress Leads to Migration. The total number of migrants in the world is now at least 68.5 million. That makes the country called Migration the 21st-largest country in the world, after Thailand and ahead of the United Kingdom. Migration has become a global reaction to the collapse of countries from one end of the planet to the other. The migration out of Venezuela is not unique to that country but is now merely the normal reaction to the global crisis. Migrants from Honduras who go northward to the United States or migrants from West Africa who go toward Europe through Libya are part of this global exodus.

Step Nine: Who Controls the Narrative? The monopoly corporate media take their orders from the elite. There is no sympathy for the structural crisis faced by governments from Afghanistan to Venezuela. Those leaders who cave to Western pressure are given a free pass by the media. As long as they conduct “reforms,” they are safe. Those countries that argue against the “reforms” are vulnerable to being attacked. Their leaders become “dictators,” their people hostages. A contested election in Bangladesh or in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the United States is not cause for regime change. That special treatment is left for Venezuela.

Step Ten: Who’s the Real President? Regime change operations begin when the imperialists question the legitimacy of the government in power: by putting the weight of the United States behind an unelected person, calling him the new president and creating a situation where the elected leader’s authority is undermined. The coup takes place when a powerful country decides—without an election—to anoint its own proxy. That person—in Venezuela’s case Juan Guaidó—rapidly has to make it clear that he will bend to the authority of the United States. His kitchen cabinet—made up of former government officials with intimate ties to the United States (such as Harvard University’s Ricardo Hausmann and Carnegie’s Moisés Naím)—will make it clear that they want to privatize everything and sell out the Venezuelan people in the name of the Venezuelan people.

Step Eleven: Make the Economy Scream. Venezuela has faced harsh U.S. sanctions since 2014, when the U.S. Congress started down this road. The next year, U.S. President Barack Obama declared Venezuela a “threat to national security.” The economy started to scream. In recent days, the United States and the United Kingdom brazenly stole billions of dollars of Venezuelan money, placed the shackles of sanctions on its only revenue-generating sector (oil) and watched the pain flood through the country. This is what the United States did to Iran and this is what they did to Cuba. The UN says that the U.S. sanctions on Cuba have cost the small island $130 billion. Venezuela lost $6 billion for the first year of Trump’s sanctions, since they began in August 2017. More is to be lost as the days unfold. No wonder that the United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy says that “sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis in Venezuela.” He said that sanctions are “not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes.” Further, Jazairy said, “I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela.” He called for “compassion” for the people of Venezuela.

Step Twelve: Go to War. U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton held a yellow pad with the words “5,000 troops in Colombia” written on it. These are U.S. troops, already deployed in Venezuela’s neighbor. The U.S. Southern Command is ready. They are egging on Colombia and Brazil to do their bit. As the coup climate is created, a nudge will be necessary. They will go to war.

None of this is inevitable. It was not inevitable to Titina Silá, a commander of the Partido Africano para a Independència da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) who was murdered on January 30, 1973. She fought to free her country. It is not inevitable to the people of Venezuela, who continue to fight to defend their revolution. It is not inevitable to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Change’s friends at CodePink: Women for Peace, whose Medea Benjamin walked into a meeting of the Organization of American States and said: No!

It is time to say No to regime change intervention. There is no middle ground.

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

National Parks Rush to Clean Up Toppled Trees, Trash After Shutdown

SALT LAKE CITY—National park visitors cut new trails in sensitive soil. They pried open gates while no one was watching. They found bathrooms locked, so they went outside. One off-roader even mowed down an iconic twisted-limbed Joshua tree in California.

During the 35-day government shutdown, some visitors to parks and other protected areas nationwide left behind messes and repairs that National Park Service officials are scrambling to clean up and repair as they brace for the possibility of another closure ahead of the busy Presidents Day weekend this month.

Conservationists warn that damage to sensitive lands could take decades to recover. Even before the shutdown, national parks faced an estimated $12 billion maintenance backlog that now has grown.

Many of the parks went unstaffed during the shutdown, while others had skeleton crews with local governments and nonprofits contributing money and volunteers.

National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst in Washington, D.C., declined to provide a full accounting of the damage at more than 400 locations, saying it was isolated and most visitors took good care of the land.

But interviews with park officials and nonprofits that help keep parks running reveal a toll from people and winter storms when workers could not make fixes quickly.

President Donald Trump has said another shutdown could start Feb. 15 if he and Democratic leaders can’t agree on funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, compounding pressure on the park service to catch up on repairs.

Hiring seasonal workers who typically start in the spring as rangers, fee collectors and hiking guides also has been delayed.

“We’re kind of ready to just have a bit more stability,” said Angie Richman, a spokeswoman at Arches National Park in Utah.

Arches visitors left human waste outside a restroom, stomped out five trails in a permit-only area that was shut down and damaged an entrance gate to allow vehicles to drive on snow-covered roads when the park was closed after a storm, Richman said.

In some places, less oversight meant animals moved in.

A colony of elephant seals took over a Northern California beach in Point Reyes National Seashore without workers to discourage the animals from congregating in the popular tourist area. Rangers and volunteers will lead small groups of visitors to the edge of a parking lot starting this weekend to safely see the seals and their pups.

At Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, an off-road vehicle ran over one of the namesake trees and someone cut down a juniper tree, Superintendent David Smith said.

Several other Joshua trees were damaged, including one that was spray-painted, but the park has yet to determine the exact number, he said. Off-road vehicles also created extensive unauthorized trails, with wheel marks dug into the delicate desert soil nearly a foot deep in some spots, Smith said.

Employees at Death Valley National Park found human waste and toilet paper scattered in the desert and evidence people tried to kick in locked restroom doors, said David Blacker, executive director of the Death Valley Natural History Association.

A time-lapse video on Death Valley’s Facebook page showed how it took staffers two hours to clean a restroom overflowing with trash and splashed with waste. Crews also have to rake and replant vegetation to repair ruts from off-road vehicles, which delays work elsewhere in the 3.4 million-acre park.

“It became pretty depressing the kinds of things people will do when they are unsupervised,” Blacker said.

People in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park drove around locked gates and through meadows, spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said.

At Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddling the North Carolina-Tennessee line, visitors cut locks on some gates to closed roads and stole about $5,000 in maintenance tools, spokeswoman Dana Soehn said.

Officials at Zion National Park in Utah, Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado and Olympic National Park in Washington were fixing trails, roads and campgrounds damaged from winter storms. Mesa Verde wasn’t set to open until Monday, and some areas were still closed at Zion and Olympic.

Campgrounds, visitors centers and trails that seasonal workers help prepare could face delayed openings, and families planning spring break or summer vacations might think twice about visiting if they don’t think national parks are safe or fully staffed, said Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.

“There are a lot of impacts that will be felt in the future that aren’t being felt or even talked about now,” he said.

Meanwhile, the prospect of another shutdown looms.

Grand Canyon National Park could miss out on its main centennial celebration Feb. 26 and other related events.

Elizabeth Jackson, a spokeswoman for Guadalupe Mountains National Park on the Texas-New Mexico border, noted the stress on workers.

“It’s a way of life if you’re a federal employee,” Jackson said. “Not to be glib, but it’s something we face every year.”

____

Fonseca reported from Flagstaff, Arizona. Associated Press writers Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington, D.C.; David Warren in Dallas; Matt Volz in Helena, Montana; and Dan Elliott in Denver and contributed to this story.

12 Congressional Hearings That Are Shamefully Overdue

Earlier this month I wrote a column listing 12 major redirections or reforms that most people want for our country (see: “It’s Your Congress, People!” Make it work for you!). All of which require action by Congress—the gate-keeper.  Now Congress must hold informative and investigative public hearings to inform the media and to alert and empower the people.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) explains a congressional hearing as follows:

“A hearing is a meeting or session of a Senate, House, joint, or special committee of Congress, usually open to the public, to obtain information and opinions on proposed legislation, conduct an investigation, or evaluate/oversee the activities of a government department or the implementation of a Federal law. In addition, hearings may also be purely exploratory in nature, providing testimony and data about topics of current interest.”

Here are my suggestions for a dozen long-overdue hearings in the House of Representatives, now run by the Democrats:

Hearings on the corporate crime wave, which is often reported by the mass media. Yet Congress, marinated in corporate campaign cash, has ignored, if not aided and abetted, corporate criminals for many years. Hearings on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse must be a top priority (see more at corporatecrimereporter.com).
Hearings on the causes of poverty – e.g. the frozen minimum wage, tens of millions uninsured or underinsured for health care, unaffordable housing, criminal justice reform, and low utilization of tort law. These hearings will address public outrage about how our rich country treats the poor among us.
Hearings on the need to fund the small Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to provide in-house advice to Congress about big technological/scientific decisions – whether the boondoggle ballistic missile defense, electromagnetic or cyber-attacks, driverless car hype, runaway artificial intelligence, nanotech, biotech (see: Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us) and many other unassessed innovations— are key.
Hearings on the overwhelming tilt into speculation, rather than investment, by the financial markets (e.g. Wall Street). The focus on speculation can cause grossly unproductive investments in the form of stock buybacks and off-the-charts executive compensation, which weaken the economy and keep shareholders (who are not allowed to vote on such decisions by their own overpaid hired managers) powerless. These matters need Congressional Review.
Hearings on consumer protection – the myriad of recent controls and manipulation of consumers and their spending, savings and credit, along with the first real investigation of contract fine-print servitude or peonage. All topics neglected by Congressional Committees.
Hearings on fundamental reform of our tax laws. Aggressively examining our tax laws’ perverse incentives, unjust escapes, privileges and immunities, and estimated (by the IRS) $400 billion a year of uncollected tax revenue will enlighten taxpayers and members of Congress. A hearing on this is long overdue.
Hearings reviewing and evaluating our failed military and foreign policies – their costs, their boomerangs, and their unlawful violent impact on innocent peoples and communities abroad are vital.
Hearings on the planet’s environmental disruptions from the climate crisis to water usage, to soil erosion, deforestation, and the oceans’ pollution and deoxygenation could increase grassroots action.
Hearings on electoral reforms – dealing with campaign finance corruption to gerrymandering, to voter repression, ballot access obstruction, unequal treatments, and more might really help to “drain the swamp.”
Hearings on needed and unneeded government-funded and operated projects, including varieties of infrastructure or public works and how to make them more efficient and clean will make the case for rebuilding our communities.
Hearings on shifts of power from the few to the many, so long denied and abused will help empower the people to more easily band together as workers, consumers, small taxpayers, voters, litigants and as audiences of the public airwaves and cable channels.
Hearings on the benefits of opening up an increasingly closed Congress, with concentrated power in the four leaders of the House and Senate at the expense of committee and subcommittee chairs as well as individual members. Doing so will help make Congress more accountable for the people. When Congress cuts budgets for Committees and advisory institutions, such as the Congressional Research Service and the GAO, it becomes more reliant on corporate lobbyists. These lobbyists work as Congressional staffers before they return to their corrupt influence peddling (the so-called K Street crowd). See: “Why is Congress so dumb?” by Congressman Bill Pascrell in the Washington Post). It also needs to be emphasized that routine Appropriations hearings in both House and Senate must step up mightily to exercise far bolder their supervision of Executive branch departments and agencies.  (The Senate’s confirmation hearings on nominated judges and high officials must also be far more rigorous and open to more witnesses to testify).

There you have it—people, citizens, voters, students and teachers. We need these and other such Congressional hearings to make up for the years of deliberate inaction and avoidance. Send your Senators and Representative your suggestions and the above list. Demand more production from their $5 billion a year Congressional budget.

Roger Stone Heads to Court; Mueller Cites Potential Evidence Trove

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone is due back in court Friday in the special counsel’s Russia investigation as prosecutors say they have recovered “voluminous and complex” potential evidence in the case, including financial records, emails and computer hard drives.

Stone faces a status conference in federal court in Washington just three days after he pleaded not guilty to felony charges of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements.

The appearance is likely to be perfunctory, though prosecutors may seek an order that would prevent Stone — who held a news conference Thursday in which he proclaimed his innocence — from discussing the case against him. The judge overseeing Stone’s prosecution, Amy Berman Jackson, also presides over special counsel Robert Mueller’s case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and issued a similar gag order in that matter after a lawyer for Manafort addressed reporters after his first court appearance.

“Obviously I would adhere to any ruling of the court if they should do that. On the other hand, I would also have the right, as I understand it, to appeal,” Stone told reporters. He said he would have made a statement to reporters outside court after his arraignment Tuesday, but “that was obviously physically impossible given the pushing, the shoving, the shouting, the spitting.”

Stone has been outspoken since his indictment last week, repeatedly asserting his innocence and criticizing Mueller’s team for having him arrested before dawn. He made the rounds on television last weekend and held a news conference at a Washington hotel on Thursday where he said he was prepared to tell the truth to Mueller but that he had no derogatory information about Trump, his longtime friend.

“I have great affection and remain a strong and loyal supporter of the president,” Stone said.

He suggested that he was accused of “after-the-fact process crimes,” including lying to lawmakers investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, rather than any illegal collusion.

“I am not accused of Russian collusion, I am not accused of collaboration with WikiLeaks, I am not accused of conspiracy,” Stone said. He said there is no evidence or accusation that he knew in advance about the source or content of the WikiLeaks material.

In a court filing Thursday, prosecutors with Mueller’s office said the FBI seized physical devices from his home, apartment and office. They said multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information have been recovered, including bank and financial records and the contents of numerous phones and computers.

Corporate Media Want Nothing Less Than Permanent War

After “six days of some of the most serious Afghan peace negotiations to date,” US government and Taliban officials have agreed in principle to preliminary foundations of a deal, the “biggest tangible step toward ending” the war, the New York Times (1/28/19, 1/26/19) reported this week.

As described by US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a longtime neoconservative architect of Hamid Karzai’s installation as Afghan president following the US invasion in 2001, the Taliban would guarantee that Afghan soil would never again be used to plot a terror attack against the United States. The US would then fully withdraw its troops, in return for a ceasefire and direct negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan government. This framework agreement comes a month after President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 7,000, or about half, of US troops from Afghanistan. (Trump increased troops in Afghanistan from roughly 8,400 to 14,000 in 2017.)

Certainly this sounds like good news, a chance to end the United States’ longest overseas war, one that has cost nearly $1 trillion and some 100,000 lives—a war that, in its 17th year, even the foreign policy elite admit “cannot be won” (Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, Project Syndicate, 1/14/19).

Yet, just hours after news of the framework deal broke, corporate media jumped to sound the alarm, urging the US to maintain its occupation. The primary concern was over the Trump administration’s perceived “quick exit” or “speedy withdrawal,” a boogeyman notion that the New York Times has hyped up for years (e.g., 12/13/18,8/10/13, 6/22/11, 8/15/09, 1/14/09, 10/17/08, 11/6/01).

“Fearing What Could Follow a Quick Exit,” read a New York Times’ front-page headline  (1/29/19) on Tuesday. “A hasty American withdrawal, experts said, would erode the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government” and “could consign Afghanistan to a protracted, bloody civil war,” veteran national security reporters Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote.

The Washington Post’s editorial board (1/28/19) was similarly apprehensive at the prospect of US withdrawal. Lamenting what it considered a deal brokered “mostly on the enemy’s terms,” it proclaimed that “an end to the Afghan war is desirable, but not at the expense of everything the United States has helped to build there since 2001.”

Michael Hirsh, senior correspondent for Foreign Policy (1/29/19), asked, “Will Zalmay Khalilzad Be Known as the Man Who Lost Afghanistan?” He wrote that the framework deal “has raised fears that the United States is in a rush for the exits” because “it appeared to accede to at least a partial US withdrawal in exchange for no real concession from the Taliban.” Similarly, Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (1/29/19), warned, “Simply negotiating a speedy US withdrawal brings little joy to Afghanistan.”

While several of the eight “experts” interviewed by the New York Times (1/29/19) theoretically supported negotiating with the Taliban—couched behind “cautious optimism” about the talks—none advocated US withdrawal as prerequisite for a peace deal, a condition the Taliban have consistently demanded.

“Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the American officials, many with years of experience fighting the Taliban, is how the United States would enforce the deal and protect its counterterrorism priorities,” the Times reported:

Mr. Trump, who is hungry for a foreign-policy victory after the government shutdown, may not have the patience to wait for the diplomacy with the Taliban to bear fruit. And once the troops are gone, the ability of the United States to influence events will rapidly ebb.

Accepted without question by the Times is the idea that the US has a right to “enforce” a deal, or should have the “ability to influence events” in a country 7,000 miles away from its borders, or that doing so would materially contribute to the peace effort in Afghanistan.

Whenever Trump expresses an interest in reining in US troop deployments—albeit for his own self-serving, nationalist goals—the foreign policy establishment and its stenographers in corporate media have reacted with outrage, especially over US policy in Syria (FAIR.org, 1/11/19).

The obvious implication of media’s concern trolling over any withdrawal plan, in Syria and now in Afghanistan, is that the US should indefinitely occupy multiple countries to maintain as much “leverage” as possible. A permanent war state with an ever-expanding array of military bases across the globe ensures imperial hegemony and ensures record-breaking profits for private military contractors.

“These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot (1/30/19) wrote in an effort to reassure us:

Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600–1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s–1940s).

Conditions on the ground could certainly get worse after a US withdrawal, but that could easily be the case with or without American troops deployed throughout the region. Often forgotten among those who advocate for forever wars is that these very wars are the greatest contributor to chaos and instability in the first place, with Iraq (which the US occupied for nearly a decade) as a prime example.

Accordingly, media must grapple with a stark fact: The 17-year US war in Afghanistan has drastically escalated violence in the country. There is very little the US can do now to mitigate the suffering of Afghans beyond negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban and the national government, predicated on a full withdrawal of US troops. As the Taliban have made clear for years, the former is impossible without guarantees of the latter.

Despite media’s agonizing over a potential drawdown of American empire, it’s still unlikely that Trump will ever withdraw completely from Afghanistan. If he moves forward with his plans, he will likely leave a residual force of a few hundred or thousand troops to maintain US bases and an ability to strike al Qaeda and the Islamic State, analogous to US military presence in Yemen or Somalia. Meanwhile, massive American bombing of the country would continue. Although under these circumstances, Trump would likely claim credit for “ending” the US war in Afghanistan, this scenario would not constitute an actual end to US military intervention.

Corporate media needn’t worry: At least under a Donald Trump presidency, the US empire isn’t going anywhere soon.

The CIA’s Masterful Use of Fake News

In early 1954, writing in the magazine Encounter, F.R. Allemann slammed the ex-prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, for alleged abuses. In a “Letter from Teheran” titled “Persia: Land of Unrealities,” Allemann referred to Mosaddegh’s aborted term as a “pseudo-revolutionary pseudo-dictatorship” and claimed Mosaddegh could only cram laws through Iran’s Parliament by summoning thugs to street protests—that is, through demagoguery.

Allemann depicted Mosaddegh’s rallies as “terror campaign[s] of the political-religious secret societies” whose vocal support gave only the impression of a genuine mass movement. Lest the London-based magazine’s white, European readership miss these subtle cues to revile the out-of-office politician, Allemann, a Swiss journalist, offered his readers a buffet of Orientalist buzzwords. Rather than a rational leader elected by his people, Mosaddegh instead was a charismatic “dervish,” and “nobody was more inclined toward Munchausen escapades [like those of Mosaddegh’s incumbency] than the Oriental in general and the Persian in particular.”

Decades later, one must ask, where were Encounter’s fact-checkers? Contrary to the article, Mosaddegh was legally elected during a period of robust Iranian democracy, and he was known as a beloved leader and a fiery speaker. His was such an iconic voice for his people that he was voted Time magazine’s Man of the Year after being named prime minister. It was strange that such venom as Allemann’s should describe a popular democrat once praised by President Harry Truman. Was Allemann signaling some conflict between the respective interests of Mosaddegh and Encounter?

In fact, the magazine’s name signaled an “East-West Encounter”; it was intended to give its editors (and readers) wide cultural reach, from London and Western Europe all the way to Africa, India and East Asia. But what motive might Allemann have had to blame the out-of-office Mosaddegh for the nation’s current problems?

Mosaddegh was removed from office in an infamous 1953 coup that restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne, leaving the shah’s allies in key posts and Mosaddegh incarcerated and then condemned to house arrest. Soon after the restoration of the shah to the throne, the CIA sent a U.S. Army colonel to build the organization that would become the infamous SAVAK, a secret police service that could censor, blacklist, torture and arrest Iranian citizens without due process.

From this standpoint, Allemann’s “Letter from Teheran” comes into focus. It appeared in Encounter more than a decade before the magazine was exposed as a CIA and British intelligence asset, though there were rumors throughout its existence that it had ties to Western intelligence through its parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. When exposure came, a battery of solemn liberal intellectuals lined up to attest to the fact that—even if secret CIA subsidies had been necessary—Encounter, like the other highbrow CIA magazines, nevertheless did three things. First, it published great writers and writing. Second, it never censored. Third, the funding of intellectual work came, its defenders insisted, with no strings.

Although the first claim was true, as a perusal of the table of contents will show, what about the second and third? When it came to writers whose names had been tied to Encounter and the CIA’s cultural front, would they even know if editors had quietly censored views their bosses considered beyond the pale? And wouldn’t their bias in favor of the magazine’s excellence result from the very fact of their legacies now being tied to that presumed excellence? Strings indeed.

As relations between the U.S. and Iran again take on a hostile tone, it’s worth untangling the intricate braid of CIA claims and secret operations that knocked down rivals and labeled leftists and reformers in the U.S. and around the world as communists. The agency did this so that it could discredit, dehumanize, scare, oust and, in some cases, kill America’s perceived enemies in swift acts of force bolstered by bribes, blackmail, whisper campaigns, mass propaganda and, as we see in the case of  Allemann, subtle acts of erasure in sophisticated intellectual magazines like Encounter. In fact, all these decades later, impulses to falsify the cultural CIA’s record remain lazily de rigueur.

Whose Terror Campaigns?

In the story of the Iran coup as told in the West, the name “Kashani” is not usually mentioned. But in fact, Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqassem Kashani best signals how, as Robert Dreyfuss details in “Devil’s Game,” “[t]he very same cleric-led, right-wing Islamists that toppled the shah in 1979 were paid by the CIA in 1953 to support him.”

It all got started when Kashani and Mosaddegh were united in the belief that Iranian oil profits should go not to the United Kingdom but, shockingly, to Iranians. This was a fairly common view emerging among developing nations in the wake of World War II. They wanted Western powers to respect their sovereignty and leave them their resources. Mosaddegh had been elected to Parliament quite young, pre-Pahlavi, and re-elected in 1944, and had been associated with the Qajar dynasty. Though this created occasional bad blood between him and the Pahlavi shahs, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi appointed Mosaddegh prime minister in 1951 when the shah’s previous appointee, Gen. Ali Razmara, was assassinated. Both Mosaddegh and the shah were modernizers, and even the shah favored nationalization, sovereignty and independence, at least until the CIA made him an offer he was not permitted to refuse.

As prime minister, Mosaddegh was chairman of the Parliament’s oil commission and had created a coalition movement called the National Front. The National Front included a patchwork of Iranian nationalists, including members of the ulema, who favored a modern, independent and Islamic state. The nationalist impulses of these conservative ayatollahs embraced the front’s nationalization of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, also known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and, later, British Petroleum. Though there was some division, these members of the country’s conservative believers despised the shah’s infringement on their religious rights, while an added nationalism kept many of them in the coalition.

As the story of the coup is usually recounted, the British complained to the Americans about losing their oil monopoly, and American Democrats defended Mosaddegh, but when the prime minister wouldn’t promise the Americans their own concessions, Truman abandoned him. In came the Republicans under President Eisenhower. The British convinced the Eisenhower administration that Mosaddegh was as good as a communist and that his nationalization might send a message of American weakness to Soviet and international onlookers.

The Americans bought into the plot. The first step was to win over the shah, who annulled Mosaddegh’s rule in a royal decree. When this led to chaos, the shah fled to Italy, and was only convinced to resume his involvement through bribes and bullying by the CIA. One iconic visual for this is the infamous mink coat, which the CIA dangled before the shah’s twin sister to induce her to cajole her brother to sign onto the coup, after its initial failure had made him squeamish.

The next move was to pry apart Mosaddegh’s coalition, united around nationalization of territory and resources. This meant peeling off the mullahs from that coalition and justifying U.S. actions in the media. A secret marriage was consecrated between Western policymakers and the ayatollahs of the ulema, who were bribed to summon crowds against the legitimate government of Mosaddegh in order to bring it down. A marriage of convenience less than love, it would return in the annals of the CIA’s cultural Cold War, in contested places like Afghanistan, not to mention 1979 Iran.

The marriage between Western intelligence and ayatollahs gave rise, then, to exactly the sort of “terror campaign[s] of the political-religious secret societies” that Encounter falsely blamed on Mosaddegh. But before Encounter was enlisted to do post-coup cleanup, the plotters tapped journalist Kennett Love to do so in real time. In his New York Times obituary, Love was remembered for his role in the coup: “Mr. Love’s reporting [in the Times] may have played a small part in the [1953] coup,” the obituary writer gently conceded. “He and a reporter for The Associated Press wrote about decrees signed by the Shah that called for General Zahedi to replace Mr. Mossadegh. The release of the decrees, which helped legitimize the coup, was engineered by the C.I.A., though Mr. Love insisted later that he had been unaware of the agency’s involvement.”

But how did the Americans win over the ayatollahs? In the same way that the British had: by purchasing their loyalty through bribes. Bribed frequently by the British, the ayatollahs had even been teased by the shah’s sister, who wrote in her memoir that if you lifted one of their beards you’d see stamped on their necks the phrase “Made in England.” Funding and collaborating with hard-liners who would become the agency’s future adversaries was one link in a long chain of CIA blunders.

In fact, the same Ayatollah Khomeini who later overthrew the shah and thereby jettisoned so-called American interests used the very method the Americans had used, learned via his teacher and spiritual godfather, Kashani: throngs of zealous mobs flooding the streets aligned against Mosaddegh as Encounter’s “terror campaign[s] of the political-religious secret societies.” But Allemann’s revision of the facts—on the record but little noted for decades—raises important questions about the CIA’s respected intellectual magazines. If the magazines were run with no strings, how did the CIA keep leftists, America’s critics and others out of their pages? As an agency created to prosecute the Cold War, how did the CIA justify the outlay of money for culture without regularly engaging in disinformation, or what one critic called Encounter’s “paranoiac throb of genuine propaganda”?

Commissions, Omissions

In her landmark history of Encounter (which ceased publication in 1991) and the other CIA magazines, as part of the greater “cultural Cold War,” Frances Stonor Saunders found that some of Encounter’s creators were also plotters of the Iran coup, such as Christopher Montague Woodhouse, who in some cases wrote for the magazine. In “Who Paid the Piper?” she notes further that the tale of the magazine never censoring was itself a myth, contradicted in its editorial archives. In researching my book, “Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers,” I found the same official censorship at work in the archives of such magazines for the developing world as Combate and Cuadernos Para La Libertad de la Cultura, both for Latin America. The CIA ’s lauded intellectual magazines indeed routinely censored, a censorship explicitly built into the editors’ marching orders.

No small thing to find in an archive: a confession.

Saunders further cited the occasional example of Encounter’s trolling, apologetics or misinforming on behalf of Western geostrategic interests. But “Who Paid the Piper?” is better on the omission of censored articles than on these commissions, cases in which the magazines misinformed their readers, likely deliberately. Used selectively, lest it draw too much attention, this disinformation appears consistently in the magazines’ archives, presumably published to erase what really happened during the agency’s coups, ballot stuffing and other penetrations of countries far and near. Some examples follow.

The Guatemala Coup

A year after the Iran coup, the CIA decided to topple another elected leader. Jacobo Arbenz had been elected president of Guatemala in 1950. Affectionately nicknamed “the Swiss,” Arbenz represented the first successful democratic transfer of power from one elected leader to another, in what came to be known as the country’s “democratic spring.” But when Arbenz proposed to buy back unused land from the behemoth United Fruit Company, to distribute to farmers to grow the middle class and reboot the economy, the foreign policy officials who sat on its board flinched. Rather than countenance a possible drop in stock value, they lobbied Eisenhower to overthrow Arbenz. This was a path that, effectively, meant destroying Guatemalan democracy for decades to come.

To prepare for the coup, the CIA schemed to create chaos in the small Central American state. It set up fake-news radio stations that made the ragtag rebel movement appear much larger than it was. CIA planes dropped pamphlets on one pass over a village and strafed the villagers on the next, blaming Arbenz for the chaos. To win support within the United States, Arbenz needed to be made over into a communist stooge. When New York Times reporter Sydney Gruson denied that Arbenz was a communist, the CIA had him yanked from his post. At the same time, the intellectual magazines pitched in to mold elite opinion. The New Leader was not a CIA-created magazine, but the agency offered to fund it in the late 1940s so it could continue to rally the anti-communist cause. In the period between Arbenz’s election and the coup, the magazine ran Daniel James’ “Is Guatemala Communist?” (One edition of James’s biography of Che Guevara asks in the introduction, “Did the CIA encourage James to … attack the image of Che Guevara? … One cannot be sure, but it seems likely.”) The New Leader also took money directly from United Fruit, disguised through ads for such charities as the Red Cross. As a magazine published in the United States, The New Leader’s ties to the CIA were especially complex, largely because the agency’s charter prevented it from operating in the United States, alongside a ban on propaganda at home.

After the coup, just as Encounter’s Allemann had erased who was Iran’s democrat and who was its “quasi-dictator,” another CIA-paid intellectual helped give the new dictator a makeover. At least on one occasion, Julian Gorkin, editor of the CIA’s Cuadernos, gave the new Guatemalan dictator a platform by reading out his greeting and sanctioning it before a cultural congress. This was met with general skepticism. Why, Gorkin asked, did Latin Americans denounce Castillo Armas as a strongman “struggling against democratic legality represented by Arbenz,” rather than a liberator who had “freed his country from a communist dictatorship?”

The U.S. and Desegregation

In the summer of 1958, Encounter hired Scottish author D.W. Brogan to say something encouraging about segregation. Brogan did so in his review of “The Deep South Says ‘Never,’ ” a title weirdly at odds with Encounter’s image as a liberal bastion. In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the climate in the South and across the nation was dire. As described by Brogan, the book centered not on the voices of civil rights movement heroes or their constituents—who were being lynched and persecuted in retaliation for the decision—but instead on racist Southern whites, who bristled at the imposition of having to follow U.S. law.

Explicitly taking the side of this white spokesman for “the South,” Brogan warned white liberals, black Americans and civil rights leaders to slow down, insisting that the never-integrationist Southerner “will wear down the North; the North will learn as ‘the nigras’ pour in, the realities of the racial situation. …” Brogan added that there was “some justice in the gibe of a defender of white supremacy [who said]: ‘I think the Southern people have been very patient with our good Northern brethren. They’ve got the answer and we’ve got the problem.’  ” Brogan next called into question the sincerity of the “Northern egalitarian,” citing a hypothetical liberal lawyer, “who knows that, if he sends his children … to his neighbourhood public school, they will be swamped by Negro children three or four years behindhand … barely housebroken, and with, as adolescents, a habit of violence that arouses natural alarm.” In the end, writes Brogan, he “may decide that he doesn’t believe in desegregation as much as all that and send his children to a private school.”

Likewise, the CIA’s intellectual magazine for France—Preuves—was tapped in the 1950s to run a story called “Egalitarisme aux USA” to rebut a French left-wing journal’s report of links between the FBI and the Ku Klux Klan. Preuves’ brain trust sought Ernest van den Haag for the rebuttal. Van den Haag was a desegregation skeptic most notable for what he would write elsewhere during the period: “One need not be a psychologist to see that many, even of the previously indifferent or well-disposed, are likely to turn against the Negroes: Southern resentment … is likely to be shifted to those supposed to benefit from it.” It was as if the writers in Encounter and Preuves had been given the same conservative script, the latter going on to ask, “Is it less damaging for the Negro children to go to school together with resentful whites than separately?”

If you search the archives of Encounter for “desegregation,” you’ll find precious few examples of the topic recorded (only one in the 1950s). (Compare that with the phrases “fellow traveler” or “communist line,” of which there are dozens in the 1950s and ’60s alone.) America’s race contortions could hardly present the great democratic superpower in a decent light in its quest to remake itself as the savior of freedom. This makeover was the magazine’s self-defined first responsibility. With Preuves and Encounter aimed at European audiences, the topic would be especially taboo. But then why run apology pieces if these magazines were intended for liberal readers? Like Preuves, Encounter was distributed in the United States through the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s American annex. Legally, this was as problematic as The New Leader’s CIA ties.

Chile

By the time the CIA overthrew leftist President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s highbrow magazines had been exposed as an agency asset, and therefore less useful. But the agency was taking active measures against Allende a decade earlier, when Encounter was still a major player in the propaganda game. According to Evan Thomas, the CIA spent $3 million, paying a dollar per vote, as he put it, to fix Chile’s 1964 elections for Allende’s opponent, Eduardo Frei. U.S. taxpayers bought those votes largely through print and radio ads, but they also unwittingly purchased outright such outlets as the conservative mouthpiece El Mercurio. After 3 million thumbs on the scale proved decisive, Encounter tapped British journalist Brian Crozier to write “Latin American Journey,” a thinly disguised victory lap. Crozier was a savvy operator, described by The New York Times as a CIA contract agent, making his contribution to Encounter a manner of double-dipping for CIA cash.

Writing to lionize our man in Santiago, Crozier warms up by describing Allende as “round, vigorous, jowled and slightly shifty, and he bought his own badge as bogeyman when he accepted the Communists as allies. … That Sunday, he was out of form and short of temper.” Frei is sketched, on the other hand, as if he is being measured for a spot on Mount Rushmore: “Eduardo Frei Montalva, now President-elect of Chile, is the rising hope of Latin Americans who are Christian enough to feel for the ragged poor who cluster round the continent’s tiny islands of affluence, and western-minded enough to want to do something without putting dissidents or reactionaries behind barbed wire.” The irony was rich. In the pages of Encounter, a CIA contract agent praises his bosses’ Manchurian candidate who has just won a CIA-sponsored “democratic” victory with, obviously, no allusion to the U.S. role. (The irony was even better when Woodhouse, of Iran coup fame, reviewed Crozier’s 1960 book on rebellions and revolutions, spy reviewing spy for an Uncle Sam flagship propaganda rag.)

When, a year later, leftist journalists exposed a mass penetration of Chile’s universities by social scientists secretly on the U.S. Army payroll, The Public Interest ran an “autopsy” of the program by University of California professor Robert Nisbet. Co-founded in 1965 by Irving Kristol, the budding neoconservative mouthpiece was launched with a secret infusion of at least $10,000 in CIA seed money. Changing the subject from the illegal violation of Chilean sovereignty, Nisbet’s snarky acknowledgement of U.S. meddling pivoted to a brisk defense of the “behavioral sciences” as a tool for making U.S. interventions smarter. But lest he emphasize the interventionism as such, he praised the generous funding and import placed on said sciences, allowing it to do really “big things.” Meanwhile, Nisbet mocked Chilean outrage and its leftist media, suggesting that without revelations like this, the left-wing press in Chile was reduced to more dreary copy. And to make sure liberal Latin Americans read it, another CIA intellectual magazine, Mundo Nuevo, had the piece translated into Spanish and published it in full (read the English version reproduced here).

Indonesia: Two Coups

“It was an anti-Communist blood bath … American officials watched … at times even applauding the forces behind the killing.” Thus did The New York Times describe events in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, when half a million Indonesians were killed. But in “Indonesia Confronted,” a piece designed to blame Indonesia’s problems on its geography and culture, Encounter contributor Herbert Luthy fails to mention the U.S. role, which was secret, but he doubles down on the misdirection by describing the U.S. posture toward Indonesia as exceedingly charitable. Timed, as well, to blame the chaos on Sukarno (as Crozier had blamed Allende and Allemann had blamed Mosaddegh), Luthy interlaced his pan d’horizon of Indonesia’s struggles with more Orientalist buzzwords: “Together with these [other leaders] … the few brilliant administrators and economists Indonesia possessed … were eliminated in favour of crowd-mesmerising tribunes of the people. The decisive turning-point in 1956-57 was symptomatic of the choice between a ‘rational’ policy and a policy of national mystique.”

During the (first) 1958 coup, launched under Eisenhower, the U.S. armed tens of thousands of anti-communist Indonesians to rebel against their government. Without apparent irony, Luthy writes that “the United States were always ready to rescue Sukarno from every shipwreck.” The irony is that the U.S. bombed Indonesians literally to shipwreck; on one bombing run alone, on an April Sunday, one U.S. pilot allegedly managed to kill 400 civilians. When the U.S. denied it was involved, another pilot crashed; helpfully, he was carrying his ID and mission papers, so Sukarno was able to demonstrate the U.S. lie when it disclaimed involvement there.

While Luthy was writing, though, a second coup was unfolding under Lyndon Johnson’s leadership. U.S. officials were handing the Indonesian military lists of suspected leftists, and the military was committing wholesale murder of, on average, as many as 80,000 Indonesians per month, with students, labor leaders and ethnic Chinese among the victims. Two months into a military slaughter that would last for six months, and would see Sukarno furloughed and then deposed, Luthy saw fit to note: “The element of vaudeville is never entirely absent from the Indonesian scene.” Nor are the ironies of secret publishing absent from the archives of Encounter, which ran ads in its Indian magazine Quest that read, “Time and again you will find that your own problems, the problems of the Far East, are illuminated by articles in Encounter.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, which grew out of the Iranian Revolution. Pictures from the protests show signs in English that say the “Shah is a U.S. Puppet. Down with the Shah!” reminding us how the shah returned to power in the first place. One former participant described the revolution as a conscious response to the CIA’s 1953 coup. But the lessons from all these decades of bellicosity against the Islamic republic appear to have been lost on Democrats as well as Republicans.

Not only were the actions themselves a kind of operational blowback, The New York Times noted that the propaganda could be exposed abroad while being believed in the United States. Officers who created the propaganda “said they had been concerned about but helpless to avoid the potential ‘blowback’—the possibility that the C.I.A. propaganda … some of it purposely misleading or downright false, might be picked up by American reporters overseas and included in their dispatches to their publications at home.” Evidence suggests this was rampant, if not as passive as those former officers describe.

Such covert actions as the 1953 coup, the 1954 coup, the Bay of Pigs, the Indonesian coups, the Vietnam War and countless others tended to start and close with propaganda that was effectively fake news. In the beginning is a monster we must overthrow; in the end, anything questioning our motives or our results must be written off to operational mishaps or falsified outright. This was the case even when the propaganda itself was exposed. And if even sophisticated magazines aimed at the liberal noncommunist elite got so much of the history wrong, no wonder Americans are confused about our role in the world. No wonder intellectuals have so often played the role of cheerleaders for U.S. interventions.

Clearly, Barack Obama’s Iran deal was better than what Donald Trump has already done, and may yet do. Most recently, national security adviser John Bolton secretly asked the military for plans for an invasion. But if Trump’s hawkishness is the problem in Iran—as is the spirit embodied by the pushback to it, and rightly so—why was there so little protest among liberals over Obama’s interventions in South and Central Asian countries where alleged radicals were droned regularly? Or over his escalations and surges in Yemen, Afghanistan, Honduras and elsewhere?

In fact, it was under the Obama administration that a defense authorization bill passed that rescinded the decades-old ban on domestic propaganda, resulting in the 2016 election being the first since before the Cold War when propaganda by American officials aimed at American audiences was legal.

Was this why the 2016 election—with its fake cries over fake news on the right by the latest Fox News president, and with the wide circulation and whispering over intelligence ops like the Steele dossier among Democrats—felt so unprecedented? Not unprecedented overseas, where we made its equivalent happen many times over, but here.

The answers may be (at least partly) illuminated by articles in Encounter, where, in tandem with their more hawkish and blatant conservative collaborators, liberals, too, learned to lie for the cause.