Chris Hedges's Blog, page 35

Coalition of Green Groups Calls on Congress to Pass Pro-Labor PRO Act

More than 60 environmental groups on Wednesday urged Democratic lawmakers to support the sweeping pro-union PRO Act as a bold step towards advancing an economy supportive of “both people and the planet.”

Signed by organizations including ActionAid USA, NRDC, and Sunrise Movement, a new letter (pdf) supporting the legislation—set for a vote in the House Thursday—says increasing signs of the climate crisis and exploding wealth inequality are “parallel trends [that] reflect an economy built to serve the interests of a small group of the extremely wealthy and powerful, not people or the planet.”

Key to fixing that issue is “ensuring that working people have a voice in the economy and earn a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” says the letter. “There is no way to build a greener, more inclusive economy without strong, thriving labor unions.”

The legislation, formally called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would help ensure that happens. As noted in measure’s official summary, the act:

revises the definition of “employee” and “supervisor” to prevent employers from classifying employees as exempt from labor law protections;
expands unfair labor practices to include prohibitions against replacement of or discrimination against workers who participate in strikes;
makes it an unfair labor practice to require or coerce employees to attend employer meetings designed to discourage union membership, permits workers to participate in collective or class action litigation;
allows injunctions against employers engaging in unfair labor practices involving discharge or serious economic harm to an employee;
expands penalties for labor law violations, including interference with the National Labor Relations Board or causing serious economic harm to an employee; and
allows any person to bring a civil action for harm caused by labor law violations or unfair labor practices.

“Our planet and our communities are under enormous threat,” the letter adds. “We must act urgently to confront the dangers imposed by climate change, including by ensuring that working people are treated fairly and helping lead the transition to a fair, green economy. The PRO Act would help advance that goal and help us rebuild our economy to function for both people and the planet. Therefore, we urge you to vote in favor of the PRO Act.”

The green groups’ call to House Democrats comes just days after over 100 other progressive advocacy groups representing labor, racial justice, and environmental issues similarly urged lawmakers to pass the PRO Act to help workers more easily collectively bargain and organize.

“Protecting workers’ rights through the PRO Act is essential to empowering workers to organize themselves and their communities,” Jennifer Epps-Addison, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement Tuesday. “Unions are key mobilizers of people to fight back against corporate interests and make our government more responsive to the interests of all people.”

“Unions are good for our communities and good for our democracy,” she said.

The PRO Act currently has 218 co-sponsors. According to The Hill, it counts leading Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Joe Biden among its supporters.

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

Elizabeth Warren Is Inviting a Crackdown on the Left

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren recently introduced a plan to stanch the flow of “disinformation” during and after the 2020 election season. Citing alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election, the proposal outlines potential requirements for social media companies and actions she would take as president to prevent “inauthentic” messaging, from more stringent laws to data-sharing schemes.

Major press outlets have heralded Warren’s blueprint in no small part for its willingness to impose criminal penalties for “knowingly disseminating false information” about voting. Superficially, the plan appears to be a good-faith effort to combat voter suppression. But beneath its high-minded promises of transparency and justice lie a series of dangerous ideas.

The very premise of Warren’s plan provides tremendous cause for concern. The proposal takes at face value the DNC-led, and still unsubstantiated, allegation that the Russian clickbait firm Internet Research Agency (IRA) propagandized millions of online users in order to manipulate the 2016 election, and warns that this could happen again. Notably, one of the sources Warren cites, the University of Oxford’s Computational Project, actually contradicts her claims. In 2018, The Nation’s Aaron Maté examined the Oxford initiative’s report, noting that the political content, scale and sophistication were profoundly less significant than politicians and establishment media had indicated.

Still, the plan makes frequent use of these fearmongering maneuvers. Warren claims that Iran and China “have an interest in the outcome” of U.S. elections — a veiled accusation of intent to interfere in a future election, despite a complete absence of evidence. The corollary, under the guise of “national security” and “election integrity,” is a call for bellicose measures against official state enemies. In a particularly arresting example, Warren makes the following recommendation, with pointed regard to Russia: “Consider additional sanctions against countries that engage in election interference through disinformation.”

According to Warren, one of the most effective ways to combat election tampering is for tech companies, in concert with the federal government, to “alert users affected by disinformation campaigns,” such as IRA’s tweets. She also promises to deputize Google, Twitter and Facebook to label content created by “state-controlled organizations.” These companies, it should be noted, have already experimented with these disclaimers, consistently reinforcing a U.S.-centric ideological framework.

In 2018, YouTube, which is a property of Google, began to label state-sponsored news videos to help users “better understand” the sources. But the label templates are considerably different for countries that are and are not allied with the United States. For instance, videos uploaded by the news organization teleSUR, which is headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, read “teleSUR is funded in whole or in part by multiple Latin American governments.” A PBS or NPR video disclaimer, by contrast, states the organization “is an American public broadcast service.”

The following year, Twitter ceased to accept ads from what it deemed “state-controlled news media,” restricting content from countries like China and Iran while continuing to permit ads from Western sources like PBS and the BBC. Twitter’s criteria were derived exclusively from Western, U.S.-allied organizations, including the State Department-backed Freedom House. Relatedly, according to CNN, Facebook stated in October it would “distinguish between state-controlled and publicly-financed media, which likely include the BBC” when labeling media funding. (One might also ask why YouTube, Twitter and Facebook don’t identify, let alone restrict, private funding.)

This evokes a number of prior acts of censorship from U.S. tech companies. After the 2016 election and the ensuing panic about a Kremlin-helmed propaganda campaign, major tech firms — namely, the aforementioned three — cracked down on media they deemed “disinformation.” Rather than unearthing any real threat to election integrity, the move muzzled left-leaning media and activists, including racial justice and anti-fascist organizers. Google, Facebook and Twitter, similarly, have repeatedly removed accounts from Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela that challenge U.S. foreign policy narratives, rendering them “inauthentic.”

The plan at once exposes Warren’s commitment to parroting DNC scare tactics and renders hollow her adversarial stance toward Big Tech. By her own admission, she is critical of platforms like Facebook and YouTube because they aren’t sufficiently nationalistic: Apparently, they haven’t flagged enough IRA memes or labeled enough Iranian press outlets “state-controlled.” These companies have transgressed not because they apply a double standard to countries that bolster U.S. hegemony and those that don’t, but because they haven’t sufficiently maligned our nation’s enemies.

It’s not surprising that a DNC-approved, avowed capitalist like Warren would release such a hawkish policy plan. But that doesn’t mean her campaign’s proposal is beyond reproach. The federal government and the Silicon Valley firms that operate at its behest have already shown who benefits from “counter-disinformation” campaigns; those who suffer from them don’t need another reminder.

Split Senate Acquits Trump of Impeachment

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump won impeachment acquittal Wednesday in the U.S. Senate, bringing to a close only the third presidential trial in American history with votes that split the country, tested civic norms and fed the tumultuous 2020 race for the White House.

A majority of senators expressed unease with Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine that resulted in the two articles of impeachment. But the final tallies — 52-48 favoring acquittal of abuse of power, 53-47 of obstruction of Congress’ investigation — fell far short. Two-thirds “guilty” votes would have been needed to reach the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors to convict and remove Trump from office.

Related Articles


[image error]







Trump's Impeachment Defense Is Incoherent by Design



by Sonali Kolhatkar








[image error]







The Problem With Impeachment



by Chris Hedges








[image error]







Where Are the Impeachment Articles for Trump's Corruption?



by Bill Blum

The outcome Wednesday followed months of remarkable impeachment proceedings, from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House to Mitch McConnell’s Senate, reflecting the nation’s unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.

What started as Trump’s request for Ukraine to “do us a favor” spun into a far-reaching, 28,000-page report compiled by House investigators accusing an American president of engaging in shadow diplomacy that threatened U.S. foreign relations for personal, political gain as he pressured the ally to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of the next election.

No president has ever been removed by the Senate.

A politically emboldened Trump has eagerly predicted vindication, deploying the verdict as a political anthem in his reelection bid. The president claims he did nothing wrong, decrying the “witch hunt” and “hoax” as extensions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian 2016 campaign interference by those out to get him from the start of his presidency.

The Wednesday afternoon vote was swift. With Chief Justice John Roberts presiding over the trial, senators sworn to do “impartial justice” stood at their desks for the roll call and stated their votes — “guilty” or “not guilty.”

On the first article of impeachment, Trump was charged with abuse of power. He was found not guilty. The second, obstruction of Congress, also produced a not guilty verdict.

Only one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s defeated 2012 presidential nominee, broke with the GOP.

Romney choked up as said drew on his faith and “oath before God” to announce he would vote guilty on the first charge, abuse of power. He would vote to acquit on the second.

Both Bill Clinton in 1999 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after an impeachment trial. President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face revolt from his own party.

Ahead of voting, some of the most closely watched senators took to the Senate floor to tell their constituents, and the nation, what they had decided. The Senate chaplain opened the trial with daily prayers for the senators, including one Wednesday seeking “integrity.”

Influential GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring, worried that a guilty verdict would “pour gasoline on the fire” of the nation’s culture wars over Trump. He said the House proved its case but it just didn’t rise to the level of impeachment.

“It would rip the country apart,” Alexander said before his vote.

Other Republicans siding with Trump said it was time to end what McConnell called the “circus” and move on. Trump ally GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said it was a “sham” designed to destroy a presidency.

Most Democrats, though, echoed the House managers’ warnings that Trump, if left unchecked, would continue to abuse the power of his office for personal political gain and try to “cheat” again ahead of the the 2020 election.

During the nearly three-week trial, House Democrats prosecuting the case argued that Trump abused power like no other president in history when he pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, ahead of the 2020 election.

They detailed an extraordinary shadow diplomacy run by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that set off alarms at the highest levels of government. After Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine, Trump temporarily halted U.S. aid to the struggling ally battling hostile Russia at its border. The money was eventually released in September as Congress intervened.

When the House probed Trump’s actions, the president instructed White House aides to defy congressional subpoenas, leading to the obstruction charge.

One key Democrat, Alabama Sen. Doug Jones — perhaps the most endangered politically for reelection in a state where Trump is popular — announced he would vote to convict. “Senators are elected to make tough choices,” Jones said

Questions from the Ukraine matter continue to swirl. House Democrats may yet summon former national security adviser John Bolton to testify about revelations from his forthcoming book that offer a fresh account of Trump’s actions. Other eyewitnesses and documents are almost sure to surface.

In closing arguments for the trial the lead prosecutor, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., appealed to senators’ sense of decency, that “right matters” and “truth matters” and that Trump “is not who you are.”

“The president’s basic lack of character, his willingness to cheat in the election – he’s not going to stop,” Schiff told The Associated Press on Wednesday, predicting more revelations would become public. “It’s not going to change, which means that we are going to have to remain eternally vigilant.”

Pelosi was initially reluctant to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump when she took control of the House after the 2018 election, dismissively telling more liberal voices that “he’s not worth it.”

Trump and his GOP allies in Congress argue that Democrats have been trying to undercut him from the start.

But a whistleblower complaint of his conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy set off alarms. The call had been placed the day after Mueller announced the findings of his Russia probe.

When Trump told Pelosi in September that the call was perfect, she was stunned. “Perfectly wrong,” she said. Days later, the speaker announced the formal impeachment inquiry.

The result was the quickest, most partisan impeachment in U.S. history, with no Republicans joining the House Democrats to vote for the charges, though one GOP congressman left the party and voted for impeachment and two Democrats joined Republicans to oppose. The Republican Senate kept up the pace with the fastest trial ever, and the first with no witnesses or deliberations.

Trump’s legal team with star attorney Alan Dershowitz made the sweeping, if stunning, assertion that even if the president engaged in the quid pro quo as described, it is not impeachable, because politicians often view their own political interest with the national interest.

McConnell, who commands a 53-47 Republican majority, braced for dissent, refusing efforts to prolong the trial with more witnesses, arguing the House should have done a better job.

Some GOP senators distanced themselves from Trump’s defense, and other Republicans brushed back calls from conservatives to disclose the name of the anonymous whistleblower. The Associated Press typically does not reveal the identity of whistleblowers.

Trump’s approval rating, which has generally languished in the mid- to low-40s, hit a new high of 49% in the latest Gallup polling, which was conducted as the Senate trial was drawing to a close. The poll found that 51% of the public views the Republican Party favorably, the first time the GOP’s number has exceeded 50% since 2005.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Romney to Vote to Impeach Trump, Cites ‘Appalling Abuse of Public Trust’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is on the verge of acquittal by the Senate, bringing an end to only the third presidential impeachment trial in American history in a vote at the start of the tumultuous campaign for the White House.

A majority of senators have now expressed unease with Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine that resulted in the two articles of impeachment. But there’s nowhere near the two-thirds support necessary in the Republican-held Senate for the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors to convict and remove the president from office.

One key Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, announced on the Senate floor that he was breaking with his party. Romney appeared to choke up as he spoke of his deep faith and “oath before God” demanding that he vote for impeachment.

“The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust,” Romney said on the Senate floor. “What the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.”

The final outcome expected Wednesday caps nearly five months of remarkable impeachment proceedings launched in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House, ending in Mitch McConnell’s Senate and reflective of the nation’s unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.

No president has ever been removed by the Senate, and Trump arrived at the Capitol for his State of the Union address on the eve of the vote eager to use the tally as vindication, a political anthem in his reelection bid. Allies chanted “four more years!”

The president did not mention impeachment. The mood was tense in the House that impeached him. Pelosi tore up the speech when he was done.

The Wednesday afternoon vote is expected to be swift. With Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, senators sworn to do “impartial justice” will stand at their desk for the roll call and state their votes — “guilty” or “not guilty.”

On the first article of impeachment, Trump is charged with abuse of power. On the second, obstruction of Congress.

Few senators are expected to stray from party camps, all but ensuring the highly partisan impeachment yields deeply partisan acquittal. Both Bill Clinton in the 1999 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after an impeachment trial. President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face revolt from his own party.

Ahead of voting, some of the most closely watched senators took to the Senate floor to tell their constituents, and the nation, what they had decided. The Senate chaplain has been opening the trial proceedings with daily prayers for the senators.

“This decision is not about whether you like or dislike this president,” began GOP Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine centrist, announcing her resolve to acquit on both charges.

GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said that while he doesn’t condone Trump’s actions, he was not prepared to remove him from the ballot nine months before the election. “Let the people decide,” he said.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has floated the idea of censuring Trump instead, a signal of a possible vote to acquit.

One key Democrat, Alabama Sen. Doug Jones — perhaps the most endangered politically for reelection in a state where Trump is popular — announced ahead of the vote that after many sleepless nights he had decided to vote to convict on both charges.

“Senators are elected to make tough choices,” Jones said in a statement. He noted the “gravity of this moment,”‘ and said Trump’s actions were “more than simply inappropriate. They were an abuse of power. With impeachment as the only check on such presidential wrongdoing, I felt I must vote to convict.”

Most Democrats, though, echoed the House managers’ warnings that Trump, if left unchecked, would continue to abuse the power of his office for personal political gain and try to “cheat” again ahead of the the 2020 election.

During the nearly three-week trial, House Democrats prosecuting the case argued that Trump abused power like no other president in history when he pressured Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

They detailed an extraordinary shadow diplomacy run by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that set off alarms at the highest levels of government. Trump, after asking Ukraine’s president for “a favor” in a July 25 phone call, temporarily halted U.S. aid to the struggling ally battling hostile Russia at its border.

When the House probed Trump’s actions, he instructed White House aides to defy congressional subpoenas, leading to the obstruction charge.

Questions from the Ukraine matter continue to swirl. House Democrats may yet summon former national security adviser John Bolton to testify about revelations from his forthcoming book that offer a fresh account of Trump’s actions. Other eyewitnesses and documents are almost sure to surface.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Wednesday that Democrats are “likely” to subpoena Bolton but that a final decision hadn’t yet been made.

In closing arguments for the trial the lead prosecutor, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., appealed to senators’ sense of decency, that “right matters” and “truth matters”‘ and that Trump “is not who you are.”

“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake our country,” Schiff intoned. “He will not change. And you know it.”

Pelosi was initially reluctant to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump when she took control of the House after the 2018 election, dismissively telling more liberal voices that “he’s not worth it.”

Trump and his GOP allies in Congress argue that Democrats have been trying to undercut him from the start. Trump calls both special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the impeachment probe a “hoax” and says he did nothing wrong.

But a whistleblower complaint of his conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy set off alarms. When Trump told Pelosi in September that the call was perfect, she was stunned. “Perfectly wrong,” she said. Days later, the speaker announced the formal impeachment inquiry.

The result is a 28,000-page record from the House, based on testimony from 17 witnesses, including national security officials and ambassadors, in public and private depositions and House hearings.

The result was the quickest, most partisan impeachment in U.S. history, with no Republicans joining the House Democrats to vote for the charges. The Republican Senate kept up the pace with the fastest trial ever, and the first with no witnesses or deliberations.

Trump’s celebrity legal team with attorney Alan Dershowitz made the sweeping, if stunning, assertion that even if the president engaged in the quid pro quo as described, it is not impeachable, because politicians often view their own political interest with the national interest.

McConnell commands a 53-47 Republican majority and braced against dissent. Some GOP senators distanced themselves from Trump’s defense, and other Republicans brushed back calls from conservatives to disclose the name of the anonymous whistleblower. The Associated Press typically does not reveal the identity of whistleblowers.

Trump’s approval rating, which has generally languished in the mid- to low-40s, hit a new high of 49% in the latest Gallup polling, which was conducted as the Senate trial was drawing to a close. The poll found that 51% of the public views the Republican Party favorably, the first time the GOP’s number has exceeded 50% since 2005.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Radio Host Limbaugh Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

WASHINGTON — Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during the State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Limbaugh, 69, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, announced Monday he is battling advanced lung cancer.

Trump said the diagnosis was not good news, but added, “What is good news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet.”

A bearded Limbaugh, seated next to first lady Melania Trump, looked stunned as the president announced the award. He eventually stood and saluted Trump and offered a thumbs-up to Republicans in the House chamber.

Melania Trump presented the award to Limbaugh, placing the blue-ribboned gold medal around his neck.

Trump thanked Limbaugh for “decades of tireless devotion to our country” and said the award recognized the millions of people a day Limbaugh speaks to and inspires, as well as his charity work.

Limbaugh said Monday he intends to work as much as possible. He also said he had focused more “intensely” in the past two weeks on what he called his “deeply personal relationship” with God.

Limbaugh is widely credited as key to Republicans’ takeover of Congress in 1994 and has strongly supported Trump and other Republicans.

Limbaugh has frequently been accused of hate-filled speech, including bigotry and blatant racism through his comments and sketches such as “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song featured on his show that said former President Barack Obama “makes guilty whites feel good” and called Obama “black, but not authentically.”

His popularity has survived brickbats and thrived despite personal woes. In 2003, Limbaugh admitted an addiction to painkillers and entered rehabilitation.

A Working Theory of What Went Wrong in Iowa

The electronic system used by the Iowa Democratic Party for the first time to compile its 2020 presidential caucus results was only counting “partial data,” IDP Chairman Troy Price said in a statement Tuesday morning, giving the most specific clue about what went wrong.

That partial data—called a “coding error” in the most recent national press reports—was most likely tied to three different sets of figures that the IDP planned to release for the first time after the caucuses ended, but did not due to what the IDP called unspecified “inconsistencies.”

The IDP announced at midday that the “majority” of results will be released at 4 p.m. local time. (As of mid-afternoon, the IDP said it may be “half.”)

Those three sets of inconsistent figures—results details that the party has never released before—could only refer to steps in the process where the number of participants and the votes cast in two consecutive rounds of caucus voting did not all match.

The IDP has not said more about what went wrong with its tabulating system software, which was never tested before on the scale used Monday. But it is possible to identify one discrepancy in the numbers that would have been reported via the IDP’s app to its software and system and could have caused the “partial data” and “inconsistencies” in analyses.

A likely cause of “partial data” may have been the process itself, according to Voting Booth’s eyewitness observations and assessment (based on undertaking Iowa’s caucus chair training and numerous interviews with top party officials, including a demo of the app last week).

The “partial data” or data mismatch may have less to do with the app used by caucus chairs to report the winners in two consecutive rounds of voting and the resulting delegate allotments (although caucus chairs and campaign precinct captains had problems with getting online and logging into their reporting and tracking systems). Rather, not everybody attending a caucus voted in the second round if their top presidential choice was disqualified in the first round.

That pattern of drop-off voting could have produced the “inconsistencies” that were seen by the IDP boiler room. In the demo by IDP Executive Director Kevin Geiken, the app showed when too many participants were entered into its calculator (called an “overcount” on the app), but it didn’t report undercounting or intentional drop-offs in the second round.

This very scenario was seen in Polk County’s 57th precinct in Des Moines when 11 voters of the 385 attendees did not vote for another candidate in the realignment round—after their first presidential choice was eliminated.

These voters mostly came to vote for Joe Biden and were overheard saying that they could not vote for anyone else, especially after the race’s other centrist, Amy Klobuchar, also had been eliminated in the qualifying first round. They didn’t want to cast a vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the realignment.

In other words, they came. They voted. Their first choice lost (wasn’t viable in that room). They didn’t pick another candidate. Thus, there were gaps between the number of participants in the two rounds of voting. That could account for tabulation software in the IDP’s electronic backend seeking balanced totals—via an app on each of 1,678 chairs’ smartphones—reporting figures that didn’t match or balance out.

Or these same voter falloff numbers could have also appeared in called-in results that the state party was receiving if the caucus chairs could not connect with their app to the IDP’s backend. That also happened in Polk-57, where Caucus Chair John McCormally could not get his app to log in before and during the event, trying several times.

So McCormally ran the caucus using math, pens and paper, and then called in results. In his case, McCormally reported the results quickly (possibly because his wife was a volunteer at the IDP boiler room. But other chairs across the state encountered waits of 90 minutes before talking to the IDP.

This quagmire deepened inside IDP headquarters when it had to assess the growing problem. Top state party officials had to find a solution or use a backup plan, which party officials were bullish that they would not have to use a day before. That backup entails gathering the paper summary sheets from every caucus chair. Those summaries list the voting round totals and delegates won.

The summary sheets, which are signed by precinct captains from all the campaigns, were to be turned in to IDP county chairs (along with presidential preference cards filled out by voters), according to the caucus training materials. The county chairs, in turn, were to turn in all their paper records into IDP headquarters either physically or by mail.

Before caucus night, IDP Executive Director Kevin Geiken was asked about worst-case scenarios in a demo of the caucus app that only two reporters attended—including this writer. It might take a day or two to physically collect and recount the full paper vote record, should the electronic system be jettisoned for whatever reason. He emphasized there would be a reliable and accurate count, but it might not be as fast as expected.

The IDP announcement mid-day Tuesday that the “majority” of votes would be released (before updating this to “half” the votes later that afternoon) suggests that it made a dash to collect and count as many ballot summary sheets as possible.

When Voting Booth covered this ‘what comes next’ scenario before Iowa’s caucuses, few state and national party officials imagined that the reporting system would melt down. They expressed great confidence in the party’s voting system and its private contractors. Caucuses are not run by government election officials but rather use rented voting systems.

Even hours before the caucuses began, these officials downplayed reports that some precinct chairs were having trouble signing onto the IDP app and the possible consequences.

But voting technology experts predicted these problems. Reliability issues are to be expected when a new system debuts, especially one that has not been tested at scale and when its users encounter access issues (insufficient bandwidth and inability to log in) atop software glitches. That is why government election officials like to debut new voting systems in low-profile races.

Iowans and everyone else will get to see accurate results eventually. That is a silver lining. The IDP will be using a paper trail, and that paper trail will be more detailed than in any past caucus.

The only other silver lining might be the national media will realize that it may not be possible to report fast and accurate results on election nights. Many other states will be debuting new voting systems in caucuses and primaries.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

The New York Times’ Impeachment Coverage Is a Total Farce

Watching the actions of the Trump administration through the lens of the New York Times’ coverage has been by turns dumbfounding, disheartening and infuriating. While the white nationalists running our government have rolled out one attack after another on civil rights, civil liberties, the independence of the judiciary, procedural democracy, human rights laws and planetary survival, the “paper of record” has offered a soothing translation of these threats into the familiar language of Beltway politics—an anesthetizing stew of “he said, she said” false equivalences that juxtaposes claims and lies by Trump and Trumpsters with statements by others, often statements of fact, with no indication of the veracity of either side; an intense dedication to avoiding referring to anything as racist; and a general, unspoken pretense that Trump is just another president, which for the Times means extending to him its ever-reliable commitment to legitimating and stabilizing power. Never mind how dangerous this regime might be to the rest of us.

It’s as though the Times signed up to be part of the emperor’s entourage, reassuring itself and everyone around it that there is indeed a fine garment or government there, when in reality there is nothing but naked self-dealing, greed, deceit, unchecked bigotry and vulgar self-aggrandizement.

Related Articles


[image error]







The Problem With Impeachment



by Chris Hedges








[image error]







Alexander Hamilton Would Have Backed Trump’s Impeachment



by Bill Blum








[image error]







The Vile Message Democrats Are Sending With Impeachment



by Saif Ansari

Teen Vogue‘s warning (12/10/16) went unheeded by the New York Times.

Lauren Duca’s famous clarion call in Teen Vogue (12/10/16) to resist Trump’s gaslighting is as on-point today as it was in December 2016. But in the interim, the dogged determination by corporate media, with the New York Times leading the pack, to normalize all that should never be normalized has taken its toll.

In January 2017, thousands of people across the country flocked to airports to protest Trump’s Muslim ban when it was first decreed by executive order. But after three years of media headlines euphemistically referring to it as a “travel ban,” and the Supreme Court’s 2018 blessing of this fig leaf of respectability, the news last week that the Muslim ban was being expanded to six additional countries did not result in a similar outpouring of protest.

Outrage fatigue is perhaps inevitable, given the relentless pace of the outrages, but the function of journalism should not be to reassure us that everything really is OK when it simply is not.

Yet this is precisely what the Times’ coverage of the impeachment process has consistently done. Throughout, it has underplayed the danger to democracy, both of Trump’s obstruction of the process and the brazen resolve by Republicans to absolve him no matter what. How the paper covered the Senate’s refusal to allow witnesses in the trial is a case in point.

The administration’s efforts to keep evidence out of the impeachment proceedings ran the gamut, from defying subpoenas to smearing witnesses, in a successful effort to create the perfect circular argument: Because no eyewitnesses were allowed to testify, there was no corroboration of the charges, and hence the charges had not been sufficiently proven.

The New York Times (1/30/20) presented the exclusion of witnesses from the trial of the president as a “he said, she said” story.

But while everybody inside and outside of Washington knows that the GOP fought to keep witnesses out of both the House and Senate proceedings precisely because they could corroborate the existing evidence, the Times (1/30/20) ran an entire piece headlined “Why Block Impeachment Witnesses? Republicans Have Many Reasons” without ever stating as much. The supposed reasons ranged from “Witnesses were the House’s job” to “House prosecutors claim they already have an ironclad case.” The article’s straight-faced recitation of such GOP “arguments” and Democratic “counterarguments” about the battle in the Senate insulted its readers’ intelligence.

The last argument regurgitated by the Times asserted, “House prosecutors have produced no new information crying out for corroboration by witnesses,” an argument worthy of Leo Rosten’s classic definition of chutzpah: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Yet the Times described this as “an argument that thoroughly irritates Democrats,” as though that were somehow an unexpected response, and qualified the White House’s stonewalling as mere opinion on the Democrats’ part.

The article (1/31/20) reporting Friday night’s vote to refuse to consider witnesses did no better. The closest it came to stating the obvious reason for the stonewalling was in a comment on the Republicans’ strategy: “Senate Republicans made a wager…that it was better to withstand the short-term criticisms rather than to allow the proceeding to stretch on and risking damaging revelations.” (Emphasis added.)

The New York Times (2/2/20) pivots to the “not that big a deal” phase of normalization.

The witness battle lost, the Times (2/2/20) moved on unbothered to cover the GOP’s next move with equal credulity. “Republicans’ Emerging Defense: Trump’s Actions Were Bad, but Not Impeachable,” Sunday’s headline announced, and the accompanying article quoted multiple senators who basically all said, “Yeah, he did it, but it’s not that big a deal.”

No mention that Sen. Bob Portman, quoted here as considering Trump’s actions “inappropriate” but not “ris[ing] to the level of removing a duly-elected president from office,” had 20 years earlier considered a presidential blowjob as rising to that level. The word “hypocrisy” is nowhere to be found in this article.

The Republican shift to the “not such a big deal” defense was utterly predictable, especially in light of the Democrats’ failure to use the impeachment process to lay out the full scope of Trump’s crimes, from sexual assault to human rights abuses to self-dealing to obstruction of justice to the constant lying. It is clear now, as many of us predicted, that the Democrats’ decision to pursue a narrow prosecution was a huge political miscalculation that fundamentally failed to grasp the terms on which the Republicans are operating.

The corruption of the GOP in all this is, in fact, staggering. Hypocrisy only begins to describe their actions, and their willingness to go along with whatever Trump does so long as he continues to enable various right-wing agendas—from tax cuts for the rich, to extremist judicial appointments set to overturn LGBTQ rights and abortion rights, to mass detention of immigrants—represents the real constitutional crisis we are in. If Congress did its job in checking presidential power, this all would have been over years ago.

So now we are on the verge of the legislative branch’s blessing of the executive’s lawlessness, and all the New York Times (1/31/20) is willing to do is keep score of how each “side” is using the moment to their advantage:

His expected acquittal is also likely to leave the president emboldened. He will argue that Democrats, unelected bureaucrats and the mainstream news media have targeted him because of their disdain for his supporters, and that his fight for political survival is theirs as well. Democrats, too, planned to capitalize on the impeachment fight by urging voters to punish Republicans for refusing to demand a more thorough trial and for sticking with Mr. Trump despite evidence of his misdeeds.

And instead of seeing the “not a big deal” defense of Republicans as a green light to further executive abuses, and a signal that Trump is indeed above the law, the Times (2/2/20) seems to think that its repeated reminder that some Republicans were willing to criticize Trump even as they prepared to acquit him was reassuring:

The Republicans’ argument also stands starkly at odds with what Mr. Trump—who has deemed a phone call he had with Ukraine’s president “perfect” and has resisted any suggestion that he acted improperly — has demanded from his defenders.

If this is what counts as a congressional check on the presidency these days, then we’re screwed.

The New York Times (2/1/20) sticks to the neutral voice while contemplating Trump using “his power in ways that presidents since Richard M. Nixon considered out of line.”

The closest the Times (2/1/20) has come to acknowledging the growing threat of authoritarianism was, I’m sure, unintentional. The opening of a news analysis by White House correspondent Peter Baker, headlined “While Stained in History, Trump Will Emerge From Trial Triumphant and Unshackled,” borrows from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson famously said, ‘you must kill him.’ Mr. Trump’s foes struck at him but did not take him down.”

We don’t live in a monarchy. We live in a constitutional system that envisions checks on executive power that make regicide obsolete. But this analogy is more apt than the Times is willing to admit. Throughout this piece, and in the other pieces discussed here, the paper talks about an “emboldened” Trump. It notes:

He has already used his power in ways that presidents since Richard M. Nixon considered out of line, like firing an FBI director who was investigating him and browbeating the Justice Department to investigate his political foes.

Yet nowhere in this piece is there a hint of alarm at what this might mean for the US, and especially for the people who have been in Trump’s crosshairs throughout his presidency. It refers obliquely to his goal of “further restricting immigration,” for instance, but there is no concern anywhere about the possibility of escalating human rights abuses that this would entail. After all, the pre-emboldened Trump already brought us family separations, kids in cages, the asylum ban and “remain in Mexico.”

The final vote to acquit Trump is set for Wednesday, February 5. But once the witness fight was over, the New York Times was ready to move on. Saturday’s “Unshackled” piece was followed by a fluff piece on Sunday  (2/2/20), headlined “Impeachment All but Behind Him, Trump Celebrates and Keeps Focus on Bloomberg.” In it, the Times reports on the president’s victory lap at Mar-a-Lago and on Sean Hannity’s show right before the Superbowl, with generous coverage of his tweets thrown in.

An assessment of the damage of this impeachment process—the expansion of executive power, the impunity with which the administration obstructed the investigation, the complicity of the legislature in greenlighting presidential lawlessness—will have to be done elsewhere. The New York Times was content to cover it as a Washington drama and no more; its impeachment landing page even lists a “cast of characters.”

But this isn’t Shakespeare, though it is a farce.

The Most Appalling Moment From Trump’s State of the Union

In a moment observers described as a telling display of the bipartisan support for regime change that pervades Washington, D.C., congressional Democrats applauded along with their Republican colleagues after President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to praise Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who headed a failed U.S-backed coup against his country’s elected president last year.

Trump hailed Guaidó—who was in attendance for the address—as the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela,” a line that was met with a raucous standing ovation from members of both political parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the top Democrat in Congress.

As NPR reported, “Guaidó received an extended bipartisan standing ovation. It was one of the few times that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats stood to applaud during Trump’s speech.”

Watch:

I don’t give a shit that Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, her theatrics mean nothing. She stood up and applauded Trump’s fake regime change president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Both party’s leaders are rotten to the core pic.twitter.com/ggNegSwhaX

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) February 5, 2020

Keane Bhatt, policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tweeted in response to the show of unity that “there is no better distillation of Washington, D.C. than a State of the Union in which Nancy Pelosi—having just led the impeachment of Donald ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ Trump—twice joins in a rousing standing ovation of Juan Guaidó, Trump’s appointed ‘president’ of Venezuela.”

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin reacted with dismay to the bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, whose coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro quickly collapsed last year despite support from the U.S. and other nations.

“The Democrats, including Pelosi, just got up to applaud the self-proclaimed ‘president’ of Venezuela Juan Guaidó,” tweeted Benjamin. “Intervening in Venezuela’s internal politics is the one thing that is bipartisan! How sad.”

Buttigieg, Sanders Ahead in Early Iowa Results

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Latest on the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses (all times local):

4:15 p.m.

Initial data released by the Iowa Democratic Party shows Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders ahead in the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses.

The tally of state delegate equivalents released Tuesday shows Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar trailing behind.

Related Articles


[image error]







Bernie Sanders Can Silence His Critics in New Hampshire



by Norman Solomon








[image error]







Sanders Campaign Signals Victory Amid Iowa Fiasco



by








[image error]







Everything You Need to Know About the Presidential Primaries



by Robert Reich

The party released 62% of results from all 99 counties after a daylong delay sparked by technical problems. It was unclear when the remaining results will be released by the party, which says it is still verifying data from caucuses across the state.

Earlier Tuesday, Buttigieg claimed on “CBS This Morning” that his performance in Iowa was “phenomenal,” especially given the fact that he had started his presidential campaign with little name recognition.

___

4:05 p.m.

The Iowa Democratic Party is releasing initial and incomplete results of Monday’s Democratic caucuses after a daylong delay sparked by technical problems.

Three sets of results will be reported. They are the “first alignment” of caucusgoers, the “final alignment” and the number of “state delegate equivalents” won by each candidate.

The Associated Press will declare the winner of the Iowa caucuses based on the number of state delegate equivalents each candidate receives.

That’s because Democrats choose their overall nominee based on delegates.

While the other results provide insights into the process, state delegate equivalents have the most direct bearing on the metric Democrats use to pick their nominee.

___

4 p.m.

The chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party says the delay in caucus reporting results was “unacceptable.”

Troy Price said Tuesday that the party will conduct a “thorough, transparent and independent examination” of what caused the delays. He apologized for the breakdown in the process but says the results the party will begin to release on Tuesday are accurate.

The party has faced fierce criticism from presidential candidates who competed in Monday’s caucuses. The reporting delays, which were sparked by technical issues with an app, also revived questions about whether Iowa should hold the nation’s first contest.

Price says results from 62% of precincts from all of Iowa’s 99 counties will soon be reported.

___

2:10 p.m.

The company at the center of the Iowa caucus fiasco says it regrets that an app it designed had technical glitches that delayed the release of the results from the first nominating contest of 2020.

But while Shadow Inc. pledged on Tuesday to do better in the future, it stopped short of apologizing.

The company said in a series of tweets: “We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers.”

Monday’s first-in-the-nation Iowa contest was supposed to bring clarity to a muddled field of contenders with no clear front-runner. But instead, election officials across the state struggled to report the outcomes of individual caucuses using the company’s app. And the outcome of the race still wasn’t clear on Tuesday.

Campaign finance records show the Iowa Democratic Party spent about $60,000 on the app.

___

1:55 p.m.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is defending the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus status as Democrats struggle to get results released.

The Republican governor said Tuesday that the state must fight to remain first after a mobile app created to compile and report caucus results malfunctioned, delaying the count.

No results have been released yet. The Iowa Democratic Party says it will release a majority of the results later Tuesday.

Reynolds says that Iowa fights every year to stay first and that political leaders must demonstrate that adequate measures have been taken to ensure accurate results.

She says the parties worked together after the 2012 caucuses to maintain faith in the system after Republicans named Mitt Romney the winner, only to find out later that Rick Santorum had more votes.

___

1:30 p.m.

The campaign is back on.

As uncertainty reigns over the results of Iowa’s caucuses, Joe Biden is in New Hampshire criticizing his 2020 rival Bernie Sanders over “Medicare for All.”

During his first campaign stop of the day in Nashua, Biden said the Vermont senator has talked about single-payer health care for “30 years now.”

“Hasn’t moved it an inch,” the former vice president said Tuesday.

Sanders remains popular in New Hampshire and has touted his signature health care policy idea frequently during his campaign trips in the state. Supporters often point to his consistency on issues as a reason they plan to vote for Sanders.

“It’s not going anywhere now,” Biden said of Medicare for All. “The speaker of the House isn’t for it. Most Democrats in Congress are not for it. So how’s it going to pass? How’s it going to move? How does it get done? You can’t give a speech about it. It actually has to get done.”

New Hampshire is the second state in the nation to vote, holding its presidential primary on Feb. 11.

Democrats are still awaiting the results of Monday’s Iowa caucuses, which were besieged by technical issues. The Iowa Democratic Party says it will release a majority of the results later Tuesday.

___

11:50 a.m.

The Nevada Democratic Party is trying to quell fears it will face a chaotic reporting system at its Feb. 22 caucuses. The party says it can “confidently say” that the problems Iowa Democrats experienced with reporting their caucus results Monday “will not happen in Nevada.”

Nevada Democratic party chair William McCurdy II said in a statement Tuesday morning that Nevada will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus.

The party had previously announced plans to use an app to tabulate results at caucuses, as Iowa did, along with a second app that would be preloaded onto tablets available for voters to use at caucus sites during four days of early voting.

McCurdy said Nevada Democrats had already developed “a series of backups and redundant reporting systems and are currently evaluating the best path forward.”

The party did not respond to a follow-up message asking if the party had already planned to use a different app and vendor or if that was a change made in the wake of Iowa’s delayed results and technical problems.

___

11:35 a.m.

The Iowa Democratic Party says it plans to release at least 50% of results from Monday’s caucuses on Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m.

Party chairman Troy Price tells presidential campaigns on a conference call that “we are going to release the majority of results that we have by 4 p.m. today.”

Technical problems have delayed the release of results from the first-in-the-nation contest, leaving campaigns and the public in the dark.

Price says the party is collecting paper records from more than 1,600 caucus sites “to make sure we have all of the documented information in place.”

Price says results from about 50% of precincts should be released Tuesday. It was not clear when the final results would be available.

__

11:25 a.m.

New Hampshire’s top elections official says the state has “kept it simple” when it comes to elections and that he doesn’t expect New Hampshire to encounter problems in its Feb. 11 primary.

He says, “The more moving parts that you have in the election process, the more room there is for something to not function right.”

Bill Gardner’s remarks Tuesday came as the Iowa Democratic Party still hasn’t released the results of its caucuses the night before.

New Hampshire runs a primary, not a caucus. People will vote via paper ballots that about 85 percent of towns will count electronically. Gardner says, “you can’t hack a pencil.”

Gardner says he’s not worried about New Hampshire losing its status as the first primary state despite hand-wringing about the state’s lack of diversity. He says the same conversation happens every four years.

___

8:45 a.m.

The Iowa Democratic Party says delays in reporting the outcome of Monday’s caucuses were due to a coding issue that has been fixed. The party says it hopes to release results “as soon as possible.”

In a statement Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price says, “We have every indication that our systems were secure and there was not a cyber security intrusion.” Price says independent cybersecurity consultants tested the systems in preparation for the caucuses.

Candidates left Iowa Monday night for New Hampshire without the outcome of the contest being announced, a debacle that renewed criticism of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and the caucus format.

Price says as results came in Monday night from more than 1,600 caucus sites the state party ran them through “an accuracy and quality check” and “it became clear there were inconsistencies with the reports.” Price says it took time to investigate the cause, which was later determined to be a coding issue in the app precinct leaders were using to report some data.

Price says state party staff used “pre-planned measures and entered data manually,” which took longer than expected. He says the party has used required back-up paper documentation to verify data recorded in the app was accurate and to calculate delegate counts.

___

7:30 a.m.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has picked up the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy.

As the Democratic presidential hopefuls turn to New Hampshire, Kennedy called Biden the party’s “best bet to win the White House, keep the gains we made in the House, and put the Senate in play.”

The former ambassador to Japan announced her decision to endorse Biden in an opinion article Tuesday in the Boston Globe.

The endorsement comes the day after Iowa’s caucuses, which ran into technical problems that resulted in delays in results being released. Several Democratic candidates headed to New Hampshire, which holds its presidential primary next week.

___

7:20 a.m.

Pete Buttigieg is starting his day in New Hampshire visiting with a local mayor and drinking black coffee after an overnight flight from Iowa.

He told Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess, who endorsed him Tuesday morning, that the lack of timely Iowa results was “frustrating.”

But he claimed on “CBS This Morning” that his performance in Iowa was “phenomenal,” especially given the fact that he had started his presidential campaign with little name recognition.

“They said we shouldn’t even be here. And now, here we are, in the position that we are in, coming into New Hampshire for what we think will be another historic night a week from today,” he said.

Buttigieg has back-to-back events planned around the state on Tuesday. His supporters, including Donchess, say the New Hampshire primary will matter even more after Iowa was slow to report results.

Activist Dan Weeks told Buttigieg an oft-repeated phrase in the state: “Iowa picks corn. New Hampshire picks presidents.”

___

3:50 a.m.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren says her Democratic presidential campaign is built to compete across the country.

Stepping off a charter flight from Iowa to New Hampshire before dawn Tuesday, Warren said, “Our organizers in Iowa are now leaving there and going to all the other places where we’re on the ground.“

She says her campaign is active in 31 states and involves 1,000 people nationwide.

Warren says, “This is an organization that is built for the long haul.”

She didn’t answer a question about other candidates who declared victory in Monday night’s Iowa caucuses. Technology problems and reporting “inconsistencies” had kept Iowa Democratic Party officials from releasing results.

She says Iowa “was too close to call and it still is.”

___

12:15 a.m.

The Iowa Democratic Party says it expects to release data from the Iowa caucuses later Tuesday.

Chairman Troy Price says the party is manually verifying its data against paper backups but says systems are taking “longer than expected.” He said the delays were the result of a reporting issue, not a hack or intrusion.

Price addressed reporters shortly after the party updated presidential campaigns about the status of the delayed results in the kickoff caucuses. He did not take any questions in the call with reporters.

Even without official results, some candidates have tried to declare victory and claim momentum based on their own internal data. The Associated Press has not called a winner of Monday’s caucuses.

___

Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”

Noam Chomsky: ‘The Neoliberal Order Is Visibly Collapsing’

Since early Tuesday morning, when it became clear that the Iowa Democratic Party would not immediately release its 2020 caucus results, a range of conspiracy theories have bloomed on social media about the Democratic National Committee and Shadow Inc., the tech firm it enlisted to build its tabulating app. The simplest explanation remains the most plausible: Through a combination of incompetence and fealty to the consultant class, Democrats hired a for-profit company grossly ill-equipped to handle the demands of a byzantine, statewide contest.

If supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., remain skeptical, they are not without reason. Setting aside Shadow Inc.’s apparent ties to the Buttigieg campaign, the Democratic establishment has openly plotted against the Vermont senator, while corporate media have signaled they will pull out all the stops to prevent him from securing the nomination. For Noam Chomsky, none of these developments should come as a surprise; Sanders challenges not just the power structure of the Democratic Party but that of the country itself. As he tells Truthout’s C.J. Polychroniou:

“Even more threatening than Sanders’s proposals to carry forward New Deal-style policies, I think, is his inspiring a popular movement that is steadily engaged in political action and direct activism to change the social order — a movement of people, mostly young, who have not internalized the norms of liberal democracy: that the public are ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ who are to be ‘spectators, not participants in action,’ entitled to push a lever every four years but are then to return to their TV sets and video games while the ‘responsible men’ look after serious matters.

This is a fundamental principle of democracy as expounded by prominent and influential liberal 20th–century American intellectuals, who took cognizance of ‘the stupidity of the average man’ and recognized that we should not be deluded by ‘democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.’… Inspiring a popular movement that violates these norms is a serious attack on democracy, so conceived, an intolerable assault against good order.”

Chomsky also draws parallels between Sanders and British Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, offering a theory as to why both are subject to such widespread attack by corporate media and their country’s major parties. Again, he points to elites’ fundamental disdain for democracy and a larger politics of inclusion:

“As in the case of Sanders, I suspect that the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organization that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to far broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.”

The author and activist ends his interview, fittingly, with an allusion to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci.

“As the neoliberal order is visibly collapsing, it is giving rise to ‘morbid symptoms’ (to borrow Gramsci’s famous phrase when the fascist plague was looming),” he concludes. “Among these are the spread of authoritarianism and the far right. … More generally, what we are witnessing is quite understandable anger, resentment and contempt for the political institutions that have implemented the neoliberal assault — but also the rise of activist movements that seek to overcome the ills of global society and to stem and reverse the race to destruction.”

Read the interview in its entirety at Truthout.