Chris Hedges's Blog, page 362

EPA Criminal Action Against Polluters Hits 30-Year Low

WASHINGTON—The Environmental Protection Agency hit a 30-year low in 2018 in the number of pollution cases it referred for criminal prosecution, Justice Department data show.

The EPA said in a statement that it is directing “its resources to the most significant and impactful cases.”

But the 166 cases referred for prosecution in the last fiscal year is the lowest number since 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president and 151 cases were referred, according to Justice Department data obtained by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility advocacy group and released Tuesday.

“You don’t get closer to the core of EPA’s mission than enforcing the law,” Jeff Ruch, PEER’s executive director, told The Associated Press. “We’re reaching levels where the enforcement program is lacking a pulse.”

EPA efforts to prosecute polluters reached 592 criminal referrals under President Bill Clinton in 1998. Criminal referrals have been on a downward trajectory since then, especially under the Trump administration.

A supporter of deregulation, President Donald Trump as a candidate called for doing away with all but “little tidbits” of the federal environmental agency.

Asked for comment, EPA spokesman John Konkus pointed to the civil settlement of about $800 million with Fiat Chrysler over claims the automaker rigged its diesel-powered Ram and Jeep vehicles to cheat on emissions tests.

The agency said its actions in fiscal year 2018 led polluters and potential polluters to take care of 809 million pounds (370 million kilograms) of waste and pollutants, a 40 percent increase from 2017.

EPA referrals resulted in 62 federal convictions in fiscal year 2018, the fewest since 1995.

Scott Pruitt was the agency’s head for most of fiscal year 2018, resigning in July amid ethics scandals over his spending and allegations of favor-seeking in office. Pruitt rankled many by insisting on an unusual round-the-clock security detail, which required drawing agency special agents from regional offices for stints guarding him.

Andrew Wheeler, whose nomination to succeed Pruitt as the agency’s chief goes before a Senate committee Wednesday, stopped the 24-hour guard when he was named Pruitt’s acting replacement.

Congress in 1990 mandated that the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division deploy at least 200 special agents.

PEER said the number had fallen to 140 special agents by last April.

“They’re being gutted,” said Michael Hubbard, a former special agent who led the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division regional office in Boston.

With so few EPA special agents to investigate polluters around the country, “as leads come in, they can’t be followed up on,” Hubbard said. “You end up saying ‘no’ to potential leads routinely because you just don’t have the wherewithal to investigate them.”

Justice Department figures show the agency’s referrals for criminal prosecution slowing even more in the first two months of fiscal year 2019, to 24, under Wheeler.

Wheeler, like Pruitt, at times emphasizes giving states more say in regulation of polluters within their borders. Wheeler also has continued a centralization of enforcement action and decision-making within the agency. Critics say that could discourage enforcement.

Tens of Thousands of L.A. Teachers Cut Class to Strike

On an average day in Los Angeles, a mere hint of drizzle can throw the whole city disproportionately out of whack, to put it mildly. Not so on Monday, when even heavy showers couldn’t deter some 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) public-school instructors from cutting class and taking to the streets in the first teachers’ strike the city has seen in 30 years.

The L.A. strike is the latest in a series of collective actions orchestrated over the last 11 months by educators around the country,  which thus far have included statewide teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, as well as walkouts in Colorado, Washington, Kentucky and North Carolina. Last summer, 98 percent of LAUSD members were spurred to vote in favor of striking after failing to reach agreement with district officials about issues such as inadequate pay, overflowing classrooms and a glaring lack of full-time nurses and librarians and other key staffers in L.A.’s public schools.

More to the point, as one striking member of the LAUSD put it in a Huffington Post piece, “We’re walking out because we feel like we’re part of a rigged game set up to undermine public education.” This take on the state of the nation’s educational system may be bleak, but it’s apparently not rare—and projections are looking dire for teachers, their students and other members of the extended public-school community. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that “[t]eachers and other public education employees, such as community college faculty, school psychologists and janitors, are quitting their jobs at the fastest rate on record,” according to government data.

Monday’s marchers converged at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles before making their way to a triangular high-rise building at Third Street and Beaudry Avenue where the LAUSD’s administrative offices are located. Many strikers managed to keep the mood light despite the heavy cloud cover and the gravity of the stakes in play. Take, for example, this scene from downtown Los Angeles, in which a group of LAUSD members chanted about “striking in the rain” in front of the school district’s headquarters:

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/rainstrike.mp4

 

That footage was shot by L.A.-based music teacher Bainbridge Scott, who told Truthdig that she is responsible for more than 1,200 students at five different LAUSD schools—“some years six or seven schools.” She teaches nine classes per day, and her class sizes run well over their designated limits.

What’s more, Scott faces in her daily routine a host of challenges that have become all too familiar among her colleagues: “Not enough supplies [or] instruments, copies are limited but no materials provided, auditoriums with no heat or air conditioning,” she said.

To that list she added the pervasive and detrimental overemphasis on standardized testing on the part of district leaders and the palpable encroachment of for-profit charter schools into her teaching space, literally and figuratively. “I just lost my music room to a charter school at Albion Elementary School,” she said, describing an uneasy cohabitation structure, which she said demoralizes students by segregating them into different schools operating on the same campus.

Plans were underway Monday afternoon for the strike to continue Tuesday with pickets at schools around the city and a rally set for 10:30 a.m. at the California Charter Schools Association’s L.A. headquarters on First Street. At the close of the first day of the LAUSD strike, Scott said teachers were “immensely enthusiastic about this historic day,” remarking how “tons of parents dropped off donuts but not their kids,” allowing their children to stay home as a show of solidarity.

Addressing her district leaders, Scott kept her message simple and optimized for all learning levels. “Game on,” she said.

 

Number of No-Shows Jumps Among Airport Security Screeners

ATLANTA—The number of airport security screeners failing to show up for work around the country is soaring as the partial government shutdown goes into its fourth week.

No-shows among screeners jumped Sunday and again Monday, when the Transportation Security Administration reported a national absence rate of 7.6 percent compared with 3.2 percent on a comparable day a year ago. Monday marked the first business day after screeners did not receive a paycheck for the first time since the shutdown began.

At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest, some passengers waited more than an hour to get through checkpoints. The airport reported the long lines on its website Monday morning, showing the hour-plus waits at all three checkpoints in the domestic terminal.

“It’s chaos out here,” passenger Vincent Smith said as he stood in a line that snaked through the Atlanta airport’s atrium and baggage claim areas. “This line, I’ve been here about 15 minutes and it has moved 2 feet.”

TSA is working with the Atlanta airport and airlines “to maximize all available operational resources at the airport,” TSA spokesman Jim Gregory said.

The agency is working with airports and airlines nationwide to consolidate operations and get the most out of resources, Gregory added. He declined to provide absentee figures for Atlanta or other airports, saying that would compromise security by exposing possible vulnerabilities.

“Screeners will not do anything to compromise or change their security procedures,” he said.

But Smith said he could relate to government workers who don’t show up so they can find other ways to make ends meet.

“If I was a government worker, yes, I would probably call in and try to do something else because creditors don’t care if you’re furloughed or not,” Smith said. “They just want to get paid and with a family of six, you have to do what you have to.”

Atlanta’s wait times stretched well beyond what the TSA says most passengers have encountered since the shutdown began.

Delta Air Lines, the dominant carrier in Atlanta, and other airlines said they were advising passengers to get to the airport at least two hours before domestic flights and three hours before international trips. A Delta spokeswoman said airline employees were pitching in by helping manage TSA lines.

TSA said that it screened 1.97 million people on Sunday and that 99.1 percent waited less than 30 minutes, and 93.1 percent less than 15 minutes. Precheck lines for people who pay a fee for expedited screening averaged less than five minutes, TSA said.

A combination of a busy Monday travel day combined with some security lines being closed led to the long lines, airport spokesman Andrew Gobeil said. He said he didn’t know how many security lines were down.

A statement from TSA attributed the long waits in Atlanta to “anticipated high volume.”

Meanwhile, TSA said it would move officers around the country to deal with local shortages. A few airports are making changes to deal with the shortage of screeners.

At Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a security checkpoint and ticket counter that were shuttered Sunday afternoon in Terminal B will remain closed through Tuesday, a spokesman said.

The terminal handles United Express flights. Passengers must go through checkpoints in other terminals, then walk or take a train to planes parked at Terminal B. A spokesman for United Airlines said flights were not affected.

Miami International Airport closed one of its concourses for part of Saturday and Sunday, shifting about a dozen afternoon and evening flights each day to other concourses so that TSA workers could adequately staff the other checkpoints. Airport spokesman Greg Chin said TSA was staffing the Concourse G checkpoint on Monday, but airport officials were monitoring the situation and would make more adjustments if necessary.

An official with the union representing TSA workers said TSA canceled employees’ vacation requests about a week ago.

“Since nobody is getting paid, (TSA officials) don’t want them to take annual leave,” said Cairo D’Almeida, president of a government workers’ union local in Seattle. He said he was asking local food banks if they can help the workers.

Gregory, the TSA spokesman said that was not a TSA decision. Under guidelines from the federal Office of Personnel Management, paid time off is canceled for employees, including the airport screeners, who are exempt from certain federal labor laws.

In Atlanta, Monday’s long wait times come with less than three weeks remaining before the city hosts one of the world’s biggest sporting events. Super Bowl 53 on Feb. 3 is expected to bring hordes of travelers to Atlanta for the game and days of concerts and related events.

“We’re confident that we will be as efficient and as welcoming as people expect the city of Atlanta to be here at Hartsfield-Jackson for the Super Bowl,” Gobeil said.

___

Koenig reported from Dallas. Associated Press writer Sarah Blake Morgan contributed from Atlanta.

China Sentences Canadian to Death, Raises Diplomatic Tension

BEIJING — A Chinese court sentenced a Canadian man to death Monday in a sudden retrial in a drug smuggling case that is likely to escalate tensions between the countries over the arrest of a top Chinese technology executive.

The court in northeastern Liaoning province announced that it had given Robert Lloyd Schellenberg the death penalty after rejecting his plea of innocence and convicting him of being an accessory to drug smuggling. It gave no indication that the penalty could be commuted, but Schellenberg’s fate could become intertwined in diplomatic negotiations over China’s demand for the top executive’s release.

Schellenberg was detained more than four years ago and initially sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2016. But suddenly last month, an appeals court agreed with prosecutors who said the sentence was too lenient, and scheduled Monday’s retrial with just four days’ notice.

The Chinese press began publicizing Schellenberg’s case in December after Canada detained Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, on Dec. 1 at the request of the United States.

Since then, China has arrested two Canadians in apparent retaliation for Meng’s arrest.

It arrested both Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, on suspicion of endangering national security. A Canadian teacher was detained but released.

Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo, said his client now has 10 days to appeal.

The court said it ruled Monday that Schellenberg was involved in an international drug smuggling operation. It said he was recruited to help smuggle more than 222 kilograms (488 pounds) of methamphetamine from a warehouse in Dalian city to Australia. A Chinese person convicted of involvement in the same operation was earlier given a suspended death sentence.

Fifty people, including Canadian diplomats and foreign and domestic media, attended Monday’s trial, the court said in an online statement.

In 2009, China executed a Briton, Akmal Shaikh, on charges of smuggling heroin despite his supporters’ protest that he was mentally ill.

Majority of Americans Blame Trump for Shutdown, Polls Find

Last month, President Trump said he would be “proud” to shut down the government if Democrats didn’t vote for a federal budget that included money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. “I will be the one to shut it down,” he said in a Dec. 11 meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Ten days later, he abandoned that promise. In a video tweet, Trump said, “Call it a Democrat shutdown. Call it whatever you want.” Now, 24 days into the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, a new poll suggests that despite his attempts at deflection, most Americans blame the president.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed say they believe Trump is at least partially responsible, according to the latest HuffPost/YouGov tracking poll—an increase from the 49 to 51 percent who said the same thing in the early weeks of the shutdown. And the longer the shutdown continues, the more those polled see it as a danger. The portion of respondents who believe the shutdown is “very serious” jumped to 50 percent last week, up from 29 percent in the version of the survey taken right before Christmas.

A quarter of respondents believe that the shutdown will affect them personally, but reports of missed paychecks for federal workers make the harm feel real. As one respondent from Arizona explained, “[Our son] is an essential federal worker with a 1-year-old and no way to buy diapers or baby food.”

Two other recent polls found similar results, in terms of whom Americans blame for the shutdown.

A CNN/SSRS poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed named Trump as responsible, while 32 percent blamed congressional Democrats. Another poll by ABC and The Washington Post found 53 percent blame the president.

In terms of partisan divides among those surveyed, CNN reports that “Democrats are more unified in their blame for the president (89 percent blame Trump) than the Republican rank-and-file are in blaming the Democrats (65 percent of Republicans blame the Democrats in Congress, 23 percent blame Trump).”

Democrats are not off the hook, however: Respondents in the HuffPost/YouGov poll indicate they believe both sides are handling the situation poorly, even as they assign more blame to Trump (44 percent of respondents believe Democrats are at least somewhat responsible). In addition, more Americans believe that Republicans are choosing politics over the needs of the American people in allowing the shutdown to continue.

As Ariel Edwards-Levy writes in HuffPost, “Americans say by a 23-point margin that Republicans are playing politics rather than working in good faith to end the shutdown. They say the same of Trump by a 19-point margin and of Democrats by a 14-point margin.”

Americans, the HuffPost/YouGov poll indicates, also are not a fan of Congress in general:

Americans are 45 percentage points likelier to disapprove than to approve of the performance by Congress as a whole. They disapprove of congressional Republicans by a 29-point margin, of Trump by a 17-point margin and of congressional Democrats by a 13-point margin. Members of the public are close to evenly split on how they feel about the performance of their own representatives.

The political implications of the shutdown remain unclear. Edwards-Levy called shutdown effects in the recent past “ephemeral,” adding, “The 2013 government shutdown sent ratings for the Republican Party falling to historic lows, but faded quickly from public memory and didn’t prevent the GOP from claiming victory in the midterms a year later.”

Radical Changes Are Coming to the Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa Democratic Party is preparing to implement the most sweeping and radical changes to its first-in-the-nation caucuses in 50 years, including potentially adopting online elements that could increase participation by upward of 100,000 voters, according to party leaders.

“We have spent many, many months and thousands of hours of conversations with a whole lot of different folks about what is the best solution. And we’re in the process right now, literally this month, of crafting that into a draft of a delegate selection plan,” Iowa Democratic Party executive director Kevin Geiken said Thursday.

“We’re down to about three choices,” he said. “We’re down to an absentee ballot system. We’re down to a proxy system. We’re down to a tele-caucus system. I would venture to say that we are even down to two potential solutions, because the absentee ballot process is so complicated logistically that I just don’t think that is a viable solution for us.”

Iowa party officials have not formally decided what options to pursue, he emphasized. But a detailed discussion with Geiken and Democratic National Committee officials is strongly pointing to the likelihood that Iowans will be able to participate in 2020’s caucuses using online tools.

Iowa’s 2020 caucuses were already going to be historic and pose logistical challenges for party officials, given a field of a dozen or more candidates. But implementing the new DNC 2020 Delegate Selection Rules—which articulate broad goals such as same-day registration and remote participation without specifying how to accomplish those requirements—adds layers of election administration complexity for the Iowa party. (The party is not a state or federal government agency routinely running elections.)

Geiken said the party is hoping this month to complete its report assessing these options and then move toward working out the considerable details to implement their plan at caucuses to be held in Iowa’s 1,679 precincts. The DNC must approve each state’s procedures.

In 2016, there were 171,500 participants in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses—out of 629,000 registered Democrats in the state. Iowa has similar numbers of independents (no declared party) and Republicans. Iowa’s GOP uses a straw poll for its presidential nominating process.

The mix of offering same-day registration to any voter willing to join the party and an ability to remotely caucus will pose unprecedented outreach, organizing and turnout possibilities for Democratic candidates. When asked if the 2020 participation rates could double or triple, Geiken didn’t blink.

“I absolutely think it’s realistic,” he replied. “Because we will have the non-present participation and we will have solved that [means of doing so] by then. I think it will open it up for another 100,000 people to participate right there.”

The changes coming to Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses will be the first big makeover in a half-century. After 1968’s violence-plagued national convention in Chicago and electoral rout that fall, the DNC made Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary their lead-off contests. In 1976, a relatively unknown Georgian, the state’s ex-governor, Jimmy Carter, won Iowa after spending months traveling the state and speaking to locals. Presidential contenders have followed that same template ever since.

The biggest challenge is not what will likely draw the early headlines: that Iowa likely will be conducting online voting in 2020’s caucuses. Nor will it concern what online technology, vendor, security and authentication would be used. Instead, the party will have to create a counting process where the votes coming into its 1,679 caucus sites are electronically tabulated in an open and coordinated fashion with each round of voting in the caucus sites—where participants break off into groups for each candidate.

Under Iowa’s caucus rules, presidential candidates with less than 15 percent of the votes are excluded from subsequent voting rounds. The caucus ends when all of the remaining contenders are above that threshold. In a typical caucus, supporters of the apparently marginal candidates realign with others, literally by moving across the room to join other groups as the voting continues. To keep this event’s spirit alive, which the Iowa party and DNC say is crucial, the participation and tabulation of voting has to be sequential, coordinated, transparent and verifiable.

“That’s a big challenge, and I think you are further ahead in thinking about this than most people who are caucus participants,” Geiken told this reporter. “Certainly not further ahead than we are of thinking about the problems that we have to solve. I don’t know what the actual answer will be with how this manifests on February 3 or earlier, if we start the [remote] participation process earlier. But those are the considerations we are putting into this.”

Geiken cited one example of the details associated with caucusing online.

“Let’s say we do a tele-caucus or an online caucus and we have it available starting the week before February 3. Just as an example here,” he said. “In order for us to feel comfortable going down that path, we would have to make sure there is a provider out there, a vendor out there, that can do that in a way that allows pre-registration, so we can see who is planning to participate on February 1, for example, at 7 p.m., versus February 1, at noon.”

Geiken said the process has to screen for people trying to vote more than once, keep track of who may have participated in early voting, make sure no one who participates is a Republican (unless they join the Democratic Party) and make sure the technology is secure. “That it is an unhackable” process, he said, “and I don’t know if there’s ever anything that’s unhackable.”

And all of these details are preludes to tabulating the votes, including what’s likely to be untold thousands of first-time caucus participants.

The DNC’s 2020 Rules

In late December, the Democratic Party released their 2020 Delegate Selection Rules to encourage greater participation in 2020’s presidential caucuses and primaries.

The guidelines came after a two-year “Unity Reform” process triggered by the contentious 2016 race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. For caucuses, the rules require voting by mail and/or online for voters who are not physically present. The rules also require same-day registration to lift participation. The DNC is leaving it up to state parties to figure out what specific protocols and technologies would be used. State parties are to submit their plans later this spring to be approved by the DNC.

For example, the Iowa party will have to design some kind of ballot or an interactive template for remote participants. That design, in an Iowa-style caucus, would likely resemble ranked-choice voting, several officials said. The DNC rules also leave to state parties to orchestrate the counting, which, in a modernized caucus, could involve multiple voting systems. The rules also require a capacity to audit and undertake recounts.

National party officials say there are precedents for caucus states to use online voting or absentee ballots. Michigan used online voting in its 2004 caucuses. In 2016, Utah Republicans used online voting in the state’s presidential caucus. That year, Washington state and Nebraska used mail-based voting in their Democratic caucuses.

While the DNC is bullish about their 2020 reforms, government officials with experience administering elections are skeptical that so many changes can be well executed the first time they are introduced. A Florida election supervisor—now retired after decades of running elections in that state’s capital county—had a one-word reply when asked what could go wrong: “Everything!” he said. The first concern cited by a former state election director from a blue state was “authentication,” which refers to confirming voter identity and is part of the foundation for ballot security and custody.

There are recent examples of Iowa presidential contests naming a disputed winner. The top example is not 2016’s virtual tie between Sanders and Clinton—with the party announcing Clinton won 700.47 delegate equivalents to the process’s next stage, compared to 696.92 for Sanders, but not releasing raw votes. In 2020, the caucus totals will be released.

In 2012, the early results of the Republican straw poll declared that Mitt Romney had won, until it emerged that Rick Santorum actually had more votes. By then, however, Romney had grabbed the momentum, including invaluable coverage that he was the GOP’s frontrunner. (Notably, a straw poll is simpler than what the DNC is asking of its caucuses in 2020.)

Nonetheless, top DNC officials are committed to reforming caucuses.

“Let me tell you how I think about that working,” said James Roosevelt III, the longtime co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, which issued the 2020 rules. “Again, this is speculation, because states are going to have to innovate and figure out how they [will] do this. But the way I think about this, you have a first round of voting in Iowa City. The people [who are there] in person vote, at least as I have seen it on C-Span, by all going to different corners of the room and so on. The organizers will also have ballots that will have come in. I think that they’ll need one single [counting] method.”

“They either need to have printed out the electronic ballots [from voting online] and count them on paper, or they digitize the mail ballots, and do them all that way,” he said. “But they will, again, count the number one choices toward that total for the first round. What happens after the first round, as you know, is people who don’t reach the threshold reallocate themselves. The same thing will have to be done with the paper or digital ballots. They will have to be reallocated to number two choices.”

Roosevelt said that the new DNC rules do not require using ranked-choice ballots, which is where voters select candidates in descending order, which is simple. Tabulating ranked choice contests is more complex, however, as ballots must be carefully scrutinized when the top choices are no longer relevant and other candidates are disqualified.

“It is possible to have a computer program to do this [tabulation], because that is what we do in Cambridge,” Roosevelt said. “After 40 years of doing this by hand, Cambridge converted to a computerized process that does seven or eight rounds in about two hours. However, Maine, which did not spend the money on the computerized process, did it by hand. And that works too.”

Iowa’s Options

Geiken, the Iowa Party’s executive director, recounted the pluses, minuses and challenges in every approach to bring remote participation to the 2020 caucuses. There are three main pathways: using some form of absentee balloting or voting via the mail; having voters who are not present sign some version of a proxy allowing someone else who is present to cast their vote; or having an online platform where voters can participate remotely.

“To be completely honest, none of these potential solutions is perfect,” Geiken said. “There’s going to be some challenges with each of them—with the execution. We are now looking at which solution checks all the boxes—leads to transparency, efficiency, fairness, matches the spirit of the caucus, maintains the spirit of the DNC rules, and creates the least amount of fallout problems.”

Voting by mail raises red flags, Geiken explained. To start, the state party must pass what he called “a New Hampshire test,” which means the caucus cannot be turned into a primary election—as New Hampshire is as strongly committed to being the first primary state as Iowa is committed to being the first caucus state. That means the Iowa party cannot urge every registered Democrat to request an absentee ballot to caucus by mail.

Going a bit deeper, even if the Iowa party wanted to offer that option—and Geiken said that county election officials have been telling him this is not easy to administer—there is the question of ballot design. What does that ballot look like so that it gives participants a way to revise their choice in sync with the successive rounds of caucus voting? Also, tabulating mail ballots with the in-person numbers generated in 1,679 caucus sites across Iowa is quite a logistical challenge.

“The feedback we have gotten from a lot of county auditors [who run Iowa’s elections] is to avoid absentee ballots as much as possible,” he said. “They talk about the horrors they have seen. They have perfected it [their process]. But they have the whole support of the state and state government behind them. We don’t.”

The second option for remote participation would be some form of proxy. There are two possible approaches, Geiken said. Either the attendee holding another Democrat’s proxy is “restricted” with who they can vote for, or they are “unrestricted.” However, as soon as the voting goes into successive rounds, it’s inevitable that an attendee holding multiple proxies will be expected to be in more than one candidate’s camp—which is physically impossible.

There are other complications with using proxies, he said. The party has thought about limiting how many proxies an attendee can hold. Geiken said he could envision campaign volunteers going door-to-door to collect proxies and then show up at caucuses. There is some possibility of undue pressuring of people to sign over their votes, he said. There’s also a potential to create different classes of caucus-goers—literally super-voters.

“What you are doing in the caucus room is you are creating different levels of caucus-goers,” he said. “There’s the quote-unquote regular caucus-goer who is representing him or herself. But now there is the person who is representing two votes or maybe 20 votes. And from a campaign advantage, what will the campaigns do to use this to their individual advantage?”

Logistically, proxies present other challenges—even if they are restricted and akin to a ranked-choice ballot, Geiken said. “If you carry my proxy, you sign in [at the caucus site]. You give them the proxy piece of paper. If it’s a ranked-choice system, that can happen on paper now. But the thought of doing that in 1,679 precincts… now you’re devoting at least two volunteers [at each site] to shuffling paper around for the hour.”

The third option for remote participation is using an online platform, Geiken said. While there are many coordination issues to be worked out surrounding authentication of voters, the sequencing of votes, tabulation and balloting records (for transparency and recounts), it was becoming clear that some version of an online interface offered the most flexibility for users and party officials —and that interactivity matches the pace and caucus process.

“The tele-caucus system is most in line with the spirit of the caucus,” he said. “You show up. You still participate. But we are now opening up the opportunity to participate to the Friday before at 5 p.m. Or maybe Wednesday at 2 a.m. for the second shift workers or the third shift workers, so they can participate. But it still relies on them participating. We can then see it. We can then control it. The technology is there even now to have people put on their webcam and show them caucusing. There’s a potentially nice visual element for that.”

While there are many critics of online voting, there is one central feature in caucuses that makes the security challenges somewhat more manageable and akin to online banking. That key feature is Iowa’s caucus participants are not casting anonymous votes—unlike the November election. Thus, there are many tools available to confirm a voter’s identity and track online voting choices while guarding against electronic ballot box stuffing.

However, integrating the online tabulations with the rounds of physical voting at every caucus site will be challenging—requiring a sophisticated infrastructure. In election administration, generally speaking, new systems are not first deployed in the most high-profile and high-stakes races, because unintended errors are inevitable.

Iowa’s Democratic Party doesn’t have any comparable contest for test runs, a technical expert with Iowa’s Secretary of State office said. (That office is currently in GOP hands and does not have a history of assisting the state Democratic Party in administering caucuses.)

Geiken said the manpower and training challenges present an opportunity, because large numbers of Iowa Democrats are uniquely dedicated to their presidential caucuses. But that is further down the road. The next stage of this planning process—after the state party formally decides what remote voting pathway to take—is working with vendors to customize the needed technology. The DNC has set goals and the state must meet them, he said.

“That’s exactly where we are,” Geiken said. “But it is the right thing to increase participation.”

Even Roosevelt, who has been DNC Rules Committee chair for more than two decades, said the 2020 rules were “uncharted territory.” The DNC hasn’t been talking to private vendors or technical consultants, he said, because that is up to the states—as Iowa will soon do.

“We have not really talked to those people because it is up to the states to explore what methods they want to use,” Roosevelt said. “I would say that we are in somewhat uncharted territory here. We might end up for the next cycle having best practices that we have learned from various states in this issue. It’s probably true that Iowa is going to be the test of this, one way or another, since they are the truest caucus operation. I know that they are thinking actively on how to do this.”

Roosevelt said the DNC would encourage caucus states to do test runs, but elections, despite the best of intentions, inevitably have hiccups. However, there are few contests in the American political world that are as high profile and have as high stakes as the Iowa presidential caucuses.

“We did test runs on electronic voting when we chose the DNC chair two years ago. The test runs were all great. When we got to it [the actual vote], we had to go to paper ballots because the electronic system didn’t work when everybody was online,” he said, then laughing.

“We know, from all IT [information technology], we’ll get to a point where there’s a version that really works the way we envisioned it. But it probably isn’t 1.0 or 2.0.”

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

Corporate Media Are Already Blowing the 2020 Democratic Primary

After having been a mainstream TV news pundit, I’m unfortunately addicted to cable news (mostly MSNBC and CNN) and all the blather and repetition—laughably overhyped as “breaking news.” Even when it’s the same news that’s been breaking… and breaking… for hours or days.

But I’m more bothered by the repetition of pundits and the narrowness of discussion, resulting in a number of unexamined clichés. Although the Democratic race for president has barely launched, mainstream media bias is already in orbit.

As everyone in politics knows—and mainstream pundits acknowledge—the Democratic Party is seriously divided in two. The conflict today may be as intense as during the 2016 primary battle:

On one side is the party establishment, allied with corporate donors – preaching pragmatism, caution and incrementalism.
On the other side is much of the party’s activist base, animated by issues and allied with elected officials like Bernie Sanders and a young crop of insurgent Congress members – calling for transformative change to protect the planet and people from corporatism and greed.

Strange thing: only the corporate Democratic side is regularly represented on MSNBC and CNN, and in mainstream media at large.

(Actually it’s not so strange, given the powerful economic forces that own and sponsor mainstream news: Comcast, Time Warner, Jeff Bezos, etc.)

The now daily MSNBC and CNN discussions of the Democratic 2020 race—which usually include mainstream print reporters and Democratic operatives singing the same tune—feature a chorus of corporate Democratic talking points (standards like “go moderate”), while the progressive wing of the party is often alluded to but rarely heard from.

During the Hillary vs. Bernie battle of 2016, CNN made a fleeting attempt to add a few pro-Bernie voices to balance the many on-air Clintonites. That effort faded when the primaries did—and you could almost sense the relief among network executives now that calls for taxing the rich, breaking up big banks, Medicare for all, and free public college were once again muted.

The absence of pundits firmly allied with the progressive wing of the party leads to un-rebutted establishment clichés, such as: “Democrats who are too progressive can’t win the votes of moderate and swing voters.” This line persists despite Hillary Clinton, the candidate of supposed moderation and realism, having lost the White House to the most disliked candidate in the history of polling. And despite Clinton’s  narrow losses in Michigan (by 11,000 votes), Wisconsin (23,000 votes) and Pennsylvania (44,000 votes)—with survey data indicating that the number of voters who supported the unabashedly progressive Sanders in primaries and then voted for Trump in the general—was far larger than Clinton’s margin of defeat: 48,000 voters in Michigan, 51,000 in Wisconsin and 117,000 in Pennsylvania.

It’s not hard to find these swing voters. I co-produced a soon-to-be-released documentary, “The Corporate Coup D’Etat,” and our film team easily located and interviewed working-class people in Ohio who voted for both Obama and Bernie . . . and then chose Trump over Hillary in November 2016. Watch the trailer:

If genuinely progressive pundits were present in mainstream media, they’d argue that anti-corporate, populist candidates are often better positioned to win a large portion of swing voters. By definition, swing voters are not heavily political, partisan or ideological; they are assuredly not activists for feminism or Black Lives Matter. But in 2016, Bernie never shrank from his strong support of civil rights, abortion rights and gay rights (arguably stronger than Hillary on those issues), and he was capable of winning swing votes that Hillary could not.

Yet in major news outlets, the truism remains that “moderate Democrats” (meaning corporate-cozy, non-populists) have a better chance of winning in swing states or districts.

Let’s be clear: One reason mainstream journalists were so wrong about the 2016 election is because they are largely divorced from poor and working-class voters of all races. They seem especially clueless about “non-college-educated whites.” Which may explain their obsession with a group of swing voters they can better relate to: “moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

On last Friday’s “Meet the Press Daily,” MSNBC host Chuck Todd brought on Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos for a segment largely pooh-poohing Bernie Sanders’ chances in 2020. That’s not an unusual topic for Todd or Markos. But in introducing the segment, Todd confusingly described Moulitsas as the publisher of an outlet that represents “the same part of the Democratic Party that embraced Sanders early on in the 2016 campaign.” A more accurate and helpful introduction would have been: “Markos is a longtime skeptic and critic of Bernie Sanders, beginning early on in the 2016 campaign.”

Unlike Moulitsas, who wants to bridge the party’s competing factions, there are genuine advocates for the progressive wing of the party and they’re easy to find. As mainstream media accelerate their discussions of Democratic strategies and candidates in 2019, how hard would it be to include advocates for both the establishment and progressive wings of the party? How hard for MSNBC and CNN to add a progressive to balance regular Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, a fervent Clinton loyalist and militant foe of the Democratic left? Tanden is now waging a war against progressive critics of Beto O’Rourke—just as she did in 2016 against criticism of Clinton’s flawed candidacy.

When it comes to assessing which Democrat is “electable” in a general election, the last group I’d rely on would be the current narrow array of mainstream pundits who dominate the TV networks. If they were reliable, we’d now be awaiting Hillary Clinton’s second State of the Union address.

This Is How American Democracy Ends

“If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it, go over it, go around it. But get to the other side of that wall.” —Donald Trump, 2004 commencement address, Wagner College, Staten Island, N.Y. (unearthed by “The Daily Show”)

For the time being, President Trump has toned down his threat to declare a national emergency to pay for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Addressing a White House roundtable Friday afternoon, Trump continued to insist that he has the “absolute right” to issue an emergency decree. But, he added, “I’m not going to do it so fast.”

While Trump’s announcement is welcome news to anyone concerned with human rights and rational immigration policy, it’s important to remember that our 45th commander in chief can’t be trusted. As long as the president’s lips move, there’s a good chance he’s lying.

Even if he wasn’t prevaricating on Friday, he could change his mind in a moment, egged on by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh over the airwaves, and encouraged by GOP senatorial apparatchiks such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who has become one of the president’s loudest enablers.

The problem, however, isn’t just that we have a mendacious crypto-fascist in the White House who looks to other crypto-fascists for counsel and succor. The problem is that the National Emergencies Act (NEA), passed in 1976 and which Trump would invoke to get his way, makes it easy for any president to declare emergencies. Trump’s threat to deploy extraordinary powers to counter a fake crisis on our southern boundary should spark a clarion call to reexamine, repeal and replace the NEA.

The NEA was designed to place congressional checks and balances on the emergency authority of the president, and to restore the separation of power between Congress and the executive branch. The act may have been well-intentioned as a post-Watergate reform, but in practice it has been a dismal failure.

Historically speaking, there is nothing new in Trump’s emergency posturing. Prior to the adoption of the NEA, American presidents issued scores of emergency orders, dating back to George Washington’s 1794 proclamation. Aimed at suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion (a rural uprising against the nation’s first excise tax) in western Pennsylvania, the first U.S. president’s declaration facilitated the mobilization of state militias.

In succeeding decades, other presidents invoked more sweeping powers. At the start of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans. In the midst of the Korean War, Harry Truman attempted to seize the country’s steel mills to avert an industrywide labor strike.

Apart from the Supreme Court’s decision in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952), which invalidated Truman’s takeover bid, federal courts have been reluctant to overturn presidential emergency declarations. In 1944, to cite perhaps the most egregious instance of judicial abdication, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s Japanese internment order in Korematsu v. United States. It wasn’t until last year—in its decision affirming Trump’s Muslim travel ban, ironically—that the high court officially repudiated the Korematsu case.

By the early 1970s, Congress had enacted some 470 statutes, delegating extraordinary powers to the president in times of crisis on issues ranging from public health, natural disasters and land management to national defense and security. A 1934 law still on the books even allows the president to shut down or take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” (arguably, the internet in the digital era) upon his proclamation “that there exists a state or threat of war … or other national emergency.”

As Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, writes in The Atlantic, the NEA was passed to “rein in this proliferation.”

Problematically, the act doesn’t define what constitutes an emergency. “The president,” Goitein explains, “still has complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration—but he must specify in the declaration which [statutory] powers he intends to use, issue public updates if he decides to invoke additional powers, and report to Congress on the government’s emergency-related expenditures every six months. The state of emergency expires after a year unless the president renews it, and the Senate and the House must meet every six months while the emergency is in effect ‘to consider a vote’ on termination.”

Thirty-one states of emergency are in effect today, according to Goitein. Many, such as the freeze on Iranian government assets imposed in 1979, have been regularly renewed. Goitein also notes that “during the 40 years the law has been in place, Congress has not met even once, let alone every six months, to vote on whether to end them.”

While there is little question that Trump has the legal authority to declare a state of emergency, it remains to be seen whether doing so will actually get him the money he wants for the border wall. It also remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will step in, as in the Youngstown Steel case, to stop him.

Under the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, Congress controls the power of the purse. It alone among the three branches has the authority to appropriate funds.

As a result, to secure funding for his wall, Trump will have to redirect federal funds that have already been appropriated for other purposes, but have not yet been spent. Some legal experts expect that Trump will attempt to tap into the Defense Department’s budget, invoking federal statutes governing military construction projects. The president might also try to withdraw relief funds earmarked for Puerto Rico, Texas, California, Florida and other states hit by recent natural disasters.

Any legal challenge to such maneuvers will face several obstacles, beginning with the question of “standing”—the requirement that a plaintiff must allege personal harm or injury in order to bring a lawsuit.

One possibility, according to University of Texas Law School professor Robert Chesney, is that House Democrats might establish standing as a legislative body, arguing that any border-wall emergency declaration and redirection of federal funds would violate the Appropriations Clause and undermine the role of Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Landowners along the border, following the lead of the steel companies in the Youngstown case, might also have standing to challenge Trump’s emergency order if the administration tries to seize their property to construct the wall.

Assuming that standing requirements are met, the challengers would have to persuade federal judges—and ultimately the Supreme Court—that conditions along the southern border don’t amount to a real emergency. Unlawful border crossings have dropped precipitously since 2000, most drugs enter the country through ports of entry, and border communities are among the safest in the nation.

Unfortunately, however, there is no binding legal definition of a national emergency.

The closest the Supreme Court has come to defining an emergency occurred in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell, dealing with mortgage lending and foreclosures. In the 1934 case, the court characterized the Depression-era emergency in housing and homeownership as a sudden, unanticipated disaster akin to a natural calamity like a fire or flood.

Because there are already crossing stations, walls, fences and other barriers along 654 miles of the 1,954-mile-long southern border and because immigration has long been a topic of high-level policy debate, the situation at the border cannot, objectively, be described as an emergency.

Getting the Supreme Court to agree, however, will prove a daunting task, especially in light of last year’s genuflection in the court’s travel ban ruling.

Worse still is the prospect that after pressing the emergency button for the border wall, Trump’s appetite for even more outrageous initiatives will expand exponentially until he destroys our democracy piece by piece, one phony national emergency at a time.

Our Government’s Insane War Machine Is Headed for Space

If you think our government’s war policy has become out-of-this world cuckoo, consider the spaciness being proposed by the cosmonauts on Spaceship Trump.

Spending $700 billion a year on maintaining the five branches of the U.S. war machine (not counting the costs of actually fighting all the wars they get into) isn’t enough, they now tell us. So prepare to soar — militarily and budgetarily — into a boundless war theater where none have gone before: Yes, outer space!

It seems that Captain Trump himself woke up one morning and abruptly announced that he was bored with the fusty old Army, Air Force, etc., so he wanted a shiny new sixth military branch to play with.

Queue the space music sound effects — we’re getting a “Space Force” to carry America’s war-making power to a cosmic level.

Trump’s loyal lieutenant, Mike “Yes-Man” Pence, promptly saluted, calling Trump’s whim “an idea whose time has come.” America’s military leaders rolled their eyes at this folly, but they’ve since snapped to attention and are preparing to launch Cap’n Trump’s grandiose space dreams.

In a melodramatic speech, Pence declared that the new Space Command will “seek peace, in space as on Earth.” Hmmm… that’s not very comforting.

However, he says he’s thrilled that Trump’s Space Force will be led by a four-star general, have its own bureaucracy with a multibillion-dollar budget, have a separate division to funnel money to corporate war contractors, and have its own snappy uniforms. Won’t all that look great if Trump ever gets that big showy military parade he’s been demanding as a tribute to his leadership as a cocktail-room warrior?

The Trumpeteers gush that this extraplanetary extravagance will attract “America’s best and bravest” to serve as “warfighters.” Of course, their privileged families won’t have to fight in any of the space wars they’re dreaming up for other families to fight.

John Bolton Aims to Plunge Us Into Another Generation of War

National security adviser John Bolton lied his face off when he told Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on his recent Mideast junket that he was sure Iran’s leaders are dedicated to acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons. Nuclear security expert Joe Cirincione shredded Bolton over his false assertion, which is contradicted by U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence.

Bolton made sure to tell Netanyahu this so that Netanyahu could quote Bolton in his own fantasy-filled and inflammatory speeches urging an attack on Iran.

Some eight years ago, Netanyahu tried to attack Iran himself but was stopped by his own intelligence officials and officer corps, who saw the step as a catastrophe. Meir Dagan, former head of the Mossad, publicly questioned Netanyahu’s competency to govern in light of his loony fixation on attacking Iran, and I think by “competency” he meant “sanity.”

Axios is reporting that former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was disturbed last September when Bolton asked the Department of Defense for a contingency plan for an airstrike inside Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bolton asked for the plan after a pro-Iran Shiite militia fired mortars into Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy is located. The blast walls around the Green Zone have now been removed, but since the U.S. invasion in 2003, it has been one of the few parts of the capital safe from car bombings. It has occasionally taken mortar fire. The mortars last September did not cause any deaths or destruction.

Mattis reportedly felt it would have been legitimate to strike back against the Iraqi militia inside Iraq, but unwise to initiate a cross-border conflict involving a state.

Ironically, when Mattis first met Bolton, he joked that he had heard that he was “the devil.” He appears to have been making fun of normal people concerned about Bolton’s excesses. Then, toward the end of his tenure, Mattis found out that we weren’t wrong about Bolton, and he had been foolish to be so insouciant.

American policymakers’ stalking of Iran is not because the country is powerful, but because it is weak. They can’t do anything about powerful countries like China or Russia, so they don’t tangle with them militarily. Iran is an annoyance but is weak, and so a career might be made in D.C. as an Iran hawk. The whole policy fixation is bizarre. Iran does not have an air force worth mentioning and its military budget is on the same order as that of Singapore or Norway. It is not a militarily aggressive state, though it has taken advantage of the chaos caused by the U.S. in Iraq and Syria and by Israel in Lebanon to extend its influence in the Fertile Crescent. But Iran’s help was invited by Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut, not imposed from Tehran.

Americans are always complaining about Hizbullah, but it is a small self-defense force for Lebanese Shiites from Israeli aggression (the Israelis occupied Shiite territory in south Lebanon for two decades and are not known for giving things back without a fight after occupying them). Lebanon’s citizen population is about 4 million and there are probably only 1.3 million Shiites in the country, and I doubt the community can field more than about 25,000 Hizbullah volunteer fighters. Iran does back Hizbullah, but to the extent that it has stopped any further Israeli attempts to annex parts of Lebanon, and has bolstered the beleaguered government of Bashar Assad in Damascus, it should be seen as a status quo rather than a radical force. Its major paramilitary engagements since 2013 have been against al-Qaida affiliates in Syria. (Whether the rotten status quo should have been upheld is a different argument, but overturning it, as Hillary Clinton wanted to, would have been the radical act, not upholding it).

Trump picked up Bolton for the post of national security adviser from the Gatestone Institute, a known hate group—which he chaired—dedicated to spreading disinformation about Muslims and Islam. Trump may as well have appointed David Duke his national security adviser.

Bolton has been agitating for a war on Iran for two decades. He is an attorney who helped George W. Bush steal the Florida election in 2000 and was rewarded by being made undersecretary of State Arms Control and International Security.

He used his office to help lie the U.S. into the $6 trillion boondoggle of an Iraq war that destabilized the Middle East and led to the rise of Islamic State.

While he served in that capacity, he made up ridiculous stories, such as one about a Cuban-Iranian joint biological weapons program (Communists just love them some anthrax ayatollahs). He also managed to withdraw the U.S. from having anything to do with the International Criminal Court. Bolton hates the international rule of law the way the devil hates holy water.

Bolton pioneered some of the typical Trump techniques of making stuff up and then trying to push policy on the basis of his dark fantasies.

Bush tried to shoehorn him in as ambassador to the United Nations, but Congress would not confirm him because he is a horrible, angry person who viciously mistreated his aides and tries to fume at people around him until he can intimidate them into taking orders from him on the basis of his crackpot theories. He is another example of psychopathocracy.

Bolton has strong ties to and has taken a lot of money from the People’s Jihadis (MEK), an Iranian cultlike organization founded in the 1970s that mixes Marxism with Shiite Muslim fundamentalism. The group has, at times, been on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations, and it certainly has engaged extensively in terrorism, i.e., has killed civilians for political purposes. It more deserves the appellation than does Lebanon’s Hizbullah, which mainly had fought in self-defense or against al-Qaida.

The People’s Jihadis are enormously well-funded, but it is not clear where the group—which has no support inside Iran and mostly flourishes in the hothouse of expatriate coffee-shop plots in Paris and Los Angeles—gets its funding.

NBC at one point reported that U.S. officials told it that the Mossad funded the MEK.

More recently, there have been allegations of Saudi funding for the People’s Jihadis.

It is a measure of how putridly corrupt U.S. politics is that politicians such as Rudy Giuliani and Bolton have more or less been on the MEK payroll and therefore potentially in the back pocket of Israel’s Likud Party and Saudi Arabia.

No wonder so few care that Trump might be a Russian mole. Apparently. it is par for the course for our political leaders to be foreign moles.

Bolton seems to be a disturbed person who, if he hadn’t gotten into Yale, might well have ended up an inwardly seething, lower-middle-class white guy who would have been open to the blandishments of white supremacist hate groups such as the neo-Nazis. As it is, he has the credentials and connections to parade as a normal person, despite having actually run a hate group and having mysterious and deep links to a violent Iranian cult.

I’m not sure exactly what the Democratic House can do to forestall Bolton’s peculiar Iranomania from plunging us into another generation of war and instability and bankruptcy. But it should do what it can to get the madman out of office.