Chris Hedges's Blog, page 367

Democratic Leaders Fail Their First Big Climate Test

The science on climate change is clear: All countries desperately need to restructure fossil fuels out of their economies.

Naturally, the Trump administration has recklessly ignored this evidence. In every way, it’s tried to make it easier to extract and burn fossil fuels — and harder to hold polluters of all stripes accountable.

But what about the other side in Washington? Unfortunately, Democratic leaders are also acting like they don’t understand the urgency of the problem.

After the election, youth activists occupied the offices of Democratic leaders to demand a special congressional committee to plan for a Green New Deal.

A Green New Deal means addressing climate change through a mobilization on the scale of the original New Deal, which helped end the Great Depression. It means tackling climate change alongside other social and economic inequalities — in part by creating jobs in solar and wind energy, efficient buildings, public transportation, clean water, and public health.

Climate change exacerbates our society’s inequalities. For instance, black Americans are 52 percent likelier than white Americans to be exposed to deadly heat waves caused by climate change. When the oceans rise from melting polar ice, everyone is eventually affected — but Native Alaskan communities are losing their homelands today.

Hurricanes intensified by warming oceans hurt everyone in their path, but are particularly devastating in places like Puerto Rico, with its 44 percent poverty rate.

A Green New Deal strategy tackles these inequalities directly, instead of treating climate as an isolated problem.

It’s also smart politics, because bringing down utility bills — and creating lots of good jobs — widens support for bold climate action. Energy efficiency and clean energy jobs already outnumber fossil fuel jobs by a wide margin. Imagine what could happen with a real movement.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to address these demands. But she hasn’t kept her promise. Instead of a real Green New Deal committee, she formed a toothless advisory body with no real power.

First, Pelosi’s committee doesn’t have a mandate to come up with a plan that matches the required scale and speed. That’s like easing off the gas but not hitting the brakes on a car speeding off a cliff.

Second, it doesn’t have language on race, income, gender, or other inequalities. When even wonky scientists address the unequal impacts of climate change, it’s galling that our elected representatives don’t see fit to acknowledge this reality.

Third, the committee doesn’t have the power to issue subpoenas. It can merely “recommend subpoenas and depositions” to other committees.

This is a serious omission. Powerful fossil fuel corporations have stymied climate action for decades by lobbying to weaken commonsense measures, funding disinformation campaigns, and bribing politicians to the tune of $78 million in spending on the last election alone — in spite of knowing the dangers of their own business model for decades.

It’s about time Congress conducted an investigation of this predatory industry, and how better to do it than through a committee dedicated to the climate crisis?

Finally, there’s no requirement that members of the committee don’t take fossil fuel money. So some of the recipients of that $78 million can sit on the committee and undermine it from within. What a great way to sabotage the committee before it even gets going!

This is a spectacular failure on the part of Pelosi and the Democratic leadership. Knowing what we know now about the urgency of climate action — the world’s top scientists tell us there’s only 11 years left to take preventative action — their proposal is nothing short of criminal negligence.

Kicking the can down the road appears to be a bipartisan sport in Washington. That’s why we need a powerful grassroots movement to compel our political leadership to address climate change with urgency, speed, and justice.

Robert Reich: America’s Tax System Is Perfectly Backward

The biggest untold story about how we pay for government involves a big switcheroo by America’s wealthy.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far higher than what it is today.

Now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money, and collecting interest payments on those loans, profiting when the rest of us pay them back.

Follow the money: As the debt continues to grow, interest payments are becoming huge. Taxpayers could soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt than we spend on the military or on Medicaid.

Interest on the debt is expected to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Who’s receiving these interest payments? Mostly Americans, not foreigners. And most of these Americans are wealthy investors who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts, and estates.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, which is more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together.

Which means a big chunk of the growing interest payments American taxpayers make on the federal debt is going to … rich Americans.

Now, keep following the money. One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts, starting with the Bush administration in 2001 and extending through Trump’s 2017 tax cut, have reduced government revenues by over $5 trillion.

The Trump-Republican tax cut will cause the debt to explode even further. Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget predicts an added $100 billion a year in deficits over the next decade, adding up to $1 trillion of additional debt.

Keep following the money: Most of the benefits from those tax cuts are going to the wealthy. 65 percent have gone to the richest fifth of Americans, 22 percent to the top 1 percent.

So you see the big switcheroo? The rich used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now, the government pays the rich interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on the rich. Which means a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are now paying the rich interest on those loans, instead of paying for government services everyone needs.

That’s wrong. America’s wealthy have never been wealthier. They should pay their fair share of taxes. The big switcheroo should be reversed.

These Countries Are Taking Climate Change Seriously

There are countries that are in earnest about the way humans are overheating the planet, the climate change resisters; and there are others that give what is one of the most fundamental problems facing the world only scant attention.

Annually over the past 14 years a group of 350 energy and climate experts from around the globe has drawn up a table reflecting the performance of more than 70 countries in tackling climate change.

Together this group of nations is responsible for more than 90% of total climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).

In the just published index looking at developments in 2018, Sweden, Morocco and Lithuania are the top performers in combatting global warming. At the other end of the scale are Iran, the US and – worst performer by a significant margin – Saudi Arabia.

The analysis – called the Climate Change Performance Index, or CCPI – is published by German Watch and the New Climate Institute, both based in Germany, plus the Climate Action Network, which has its headquarters in Lebanon.

The CCPI compares the various countries’ performances across three categories – GHG emissions, renewable energy, and energy use. The index also evaluates the progress made by nations in implementing the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Morocco comes in for particular praise in the index. “With the connection of the world’s largest solar plant and multiple new wind farms to the grid, the country is well on track for achieving its target of 42% installed renewable energy capacity by 2020 and 52% by 2030.”

India has risen up the performance league and is praised for its moves into renewable energy, though concerns are expressed about the country’s plans to build new coal-fired power plants. Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel.

The UK and the EU as a whole score reasonably highly in the index, but the CCPI compilers issue several caveats and leave the top three places in the league table blank.

Poor Saudi Record

“This is because no country has yet done enough in terms of consistent performance across all the indicators required to limit global warming to well below 2°C [3.6 F], as agreed in the Paris Agreement,” they say.

Russia, Canada, Australia and South Korea all score badly in the CCPI, with the US just one place off the bottom spot.

“The refusal of President Trump to acknowledge climate change being human-caused, and his dismantling of regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions, result in the US being rated very low for its national and international climate policy performance.”

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has over the years repeatedly come bottom of the CCPI.

“The country continues to be a very low performer in all index categories and on every indicator on emissions, energy use and renewable energy.”

Mideast’s Heightened Risk

The Saudis are also strongly criticised for their obstructionist tactics at climate negotiations.

At a recent international meeting on climate change held in Katowice in Poland, Saudi Arabia – together with the US, Russia and Kuwait – was accused of holding up proceedings and of refusing to acknowledge the vital importance of taking action on global warming.

The Middle East, and North Africa and the Gulf region in particular, are considered by scientists to be among the areas which are likely to feel the most serious impacts of climate change in the near future.

Already the region is being hit by ever-rising temperatures; climate researchers say that before too long it’s likely that people working outside in the intense summer heat in population centres such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha – including those repairing air conditioning and water systems, or overseeing emergency services – could be putting their lives at risk.

Has the Ruling Class Finally Had Enough of Trump?

As the United States lurches toward its 2020 presidential election cycle, it is useful to revisit the central tension of Donald Trump’s presidency. I’m speaking, of course, about his phony populism and the politico-financial establishment’s utter contempt for his political ascent. As the Democratic field slowly takes shape, the question now is whether the ruling class has finally had enough.

This is not to suggest that these elites dislike Trump for the same reasons a Truthdig reader might. Those who stand atop the nation’s power structures have long been comfortable with American corruption, patriarchy, racism and outright sociopathy. For evidence, look no further than the disparate presidencies of the so-called American century.

No, what’s different and problematic for our country’s oligarchs is that while the presidency has long served America’s imperial interests, it has typically done so while purporting to stand for something more noble. The U.S. government and, above all, its executive branch, are expected to masquerade as forces for “good”—democracy, liberty and peace, at least in the abstract, and an outwardly multilateralist management of world affairs.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Ivy League law school graduates, were skilled and telegenic masters of that ruse. Even the comparatively dimwitted George W. Bush had the basic courtesy to cover his hideous machinations in Iraq with the rhetoric of freedom. “Dubya” knew better than to openly and theatrically boast of U.S. arms sales to the murderous and absolutist rulers of Saudi Arabia.

Trump is a new and different kind of presidential animal. He makes no pretense of himself, the presidency or the United States being about anything more than mercenary and socio-pathological self-interest. He gives not one flip about racial and ethnic diversity, equality or the state of global affairs, much less the fate of our planet.

Trump openly mocks and assaults science, expertise and intellectual rigor, denying the obviously anthropogenic nature of our climate crisis. Openly assaulting the very notion of veracity, he repeats the same false statements long after they’ve been proven false by exhausted reporters.

The president adamantly refuses to pretend that he, his office or the nation he represents lay any special claim to the notions of dignity or integrity. He eschews civility and graciousness, instead basking in an Archie Bunker-like disregard for political correctness. And he continues to use his Twitter account to pounce on his perceived personal and political enemies, turning Washington into an “Apprentice”-style (un)reality show.

Trump embodies what we might call American unexceptionalism, behaving like one of the bizarre and petulant Third World dictators the U.S. has long sponsored around the world.

But beyond being bad for the brand, Trump brazenly flouts ruling-class institutions and conventions. He does not consult the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center or the Brookings Institution on foreign or domestic policy. He doesn’t read policy briefs or white papers from establishment think tanks.

Instead, he prefers to take advice from fellow wacky billionaires and right-wing media personalities with whom he regularly consults by phone late at night, alone in his bedroom, or via Fox News. He claims to know more about developments in other nations than his own top generals and spooks.

It is unimaginable that any previous U.S. president would have defied his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Or stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki to say that he believed the Russian president—and not the CIA—when he said that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Neither would any previous American president have deployed troops to the southern border in a transparent attempt to rally Republican voters on the eve of a midterm election. Or shut down the federal government, possibly “for years,” in Trump’s words, if Congress doesn’t give him the money to build a useless wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ultimately, Trump is the first man to ascend to the post-WWII U.S. presidency from outside the global consensus. In and of itself, that has been an incredible development, bothersome indeed to the United States’ economic and military establishment. (The bad news, for the rest of us, is that he emerged from the white nationalist right rather than the egalitarian and social democratic left.)

Still, there are real limits to the establishment’s discomfort with Trump, who has been useful to the nation’s rulers and owners in four key ways.

First, for all his talk of protectionism, Trump is a rapacious neoliberal who has rewarded the 1 percent with personal and corporate tax cuts, as well as deregulation designed to funnel wealth upward. The superrich and their retainers in Washington have been willing to tolerate his misbehavior because his policies have lined their pockets.

Second, the endless Trump circus functions to divert the masses from the corporate looting that his administration and much of Congress is advancing behind the scenes to devastating effect.

Third, even as he serves the moneyed elite, the mendacious mogul currently occupying the White House has been deceptively labeled a “populist.” His base is widely (and, for the most part, falsely) considered to be “the working class”—the white and “heartland” working class more specifically.

The ruling class especially likes that. It allows it to point out what happens when the rabble is allowed to run rampant in politics, without proper checks and balances from the top down. It also gives it cover to suppress the genuine populism it fears most—democratic socialism. Unlike the reactionary “populism” of the right, which directs its rage at vulnerable communities, Bernie Sanders and his ilk are seriously and substantively opposed to corporate plutocracy and its enablers in the professional class.

Fourth, Trump’s awfulness lowers the bar for whoever might replace him in the White House. “Anybody but Trump” is understandable, but it opens the door for millions of Americans to gratefully welcome a Wall Street Democrat like Joe Biden, a cipher like Beto O’Rourke or, perish the thought, Hillary Rodham Clinton herself. Anybody-but-Trumpism is hard to resist, given the creeping fascism of our current president, but it intensifies the deadly superficiality of a candidate-selection process that functions to elect presidents well to the right of actual majority-progressive public opinion. And it marginalizes a genuine progressive like Sanders, who would likely have defeated Trump in 2016.

So could the dual pressures of the working and corporate classes end Trump’s presidency before the 2020 elections, whether through impeachment, the 25th Amendment or resignation? Up until last year, I felt highly confident in saying, “Not a chance,” given the durability of his base and Republican control of the Senate, where 67 votes are required to remove a president following impeachment in the House.

But things have changed radically since November.

The Mueller investigation, which likely contains blockbuster findings, is finally coming to a head—this after guilty pleas from Trump’s former campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, his former national security advisor, his personal lawyer and a bevy of lesser players, all of whom have turned state’s evidence on their former boss. It is distinctly possible that the final report will reveal Trump has engaged in criminal and impeachable activities.
Longtime fixer Michael Cohen named the president as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in criminal payoffs meant to keep Trump’s sexual peccadillos out of the media on the eve of the 2016 election.
Robert Mueller’s inquiry has invited separate inquiries into Trump’s business practices, his administration and his associates. Subjects include obstruction of justice, money laundering, influence peddling by Gulf monarchies, and corruption in Trump’s inauguration committee. It’s about much more than just alleged collusion with Russia.
The midterm elections damaged Trump’s stature in Washington, with the record Democratic turnout a referendum on his chaotic presidency.
The new Democrat-controlled House will bombard the administration with subpoenas, document requests and hearings that will certainly produce new disclosures of corruption, both in the executive branch and the Trump organization.
Numerous key White House personnel, including a chief of staff and a secretary of defense, have all but quit in disgust, and Trump is finding it difficult to fill the vacancies.
Top Republicans who were once strong Trump backers have publicly criticized some of his recent actions, including his unflagging support of the Saudi kingdom after the gory murder of Khashoggi, as well as his abrupt decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. These Republicans have expressed open dismay over former Defense Secretary James Mattis’ resignation.
Trump’s approval rating has recently fallen to its lowest level since he infamously acknowledged “good people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017.
U.S. stock markets just had their worst December since the Great Depression, with top financial analysts reporting widespread concern that Trump’s trade policies—above all his trade war with China—could bring on a recession.
Economic turmoil seems ever more imminent, something that will sink Trump’s approval rating to new lows, making him more of a liability than ever to many Senate and House Republicans.
An unhinged, increasingly isolated Trump has opened the new year with a ridiculous and highly unpopular government shutdown that has left roughly 800,000 federal workers without paychecks—all in the name of a preposterous wall along the southern border.

All of this and more could convince the rich and Republican elites that Trump’s presidency poses clear and present dangers to their economic and political bottom lines, and that it is therefore time to unseat him before the next national elections. Whether he stays or goes, however, the American ruling class is likely to escape a long-overdue rebellion that transcends the narrow confines of U.S. electoral and constitutional politics.

Read Bernie Sanders’ Withering Response to Trump in Its Entirety

In the wake of pronounced calls for a boycott of President Donald Trump’s primetime immigration address Tuesday night—which every major corporate television network agreed to air despite widespread pushback—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivered a response to Trump’s Oval Office speech that was streamed live on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

“We do not need to waste billions on an unneeded wall so that Trump can appease right-wing extremists,” Sanders wrote on Twitter ahead of Trump’s speech, which—as critics predicted—contained a slew of fact-free, xenophobic claims about the necessity of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

During his post-address response, Sanders denounced the president’s litany of lies and dehumanizing rhetoric while slamming Trump and the Republicans for allowing the shutdown to occur.

“Let me be as clear as I can be,” Sanders declared: “This shutdown should never have happened.”

He added, “Sadly, what President Trump is trying to do is to create fear and hatred in our country. Instead of trying to bring us together as a people, he is trying to divide us up.  And, in the process, divert our attention away from the real crises facing the working families of this nation.”

Watch the response:

Accusing Trump of manufacturing “artificial crises” with his xenophobic fear-mongering and policies, Sanders called attention to “the real crises facing the working families of this nation,” from human-caused climate change to America’s disastrous for-profit healthcare system.

“President Trump, you want to talk about crises. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, tens of millions of workers in our country are earning starvation wages and are unable to adequately provide for their families,” Sanders said. “You want a national emergency? 30 million Americans have no health insurance and many more are under-insured.”

“And maybe, here’s the biggest crisis of all,” the Vermont senator added. “The scientific community has made it very clear in telling us that climate change is real and is causing devastating harm to our country and the entire planet. And they have told us that if we do not transform our energy system away from fossil fuel the nation and planet we will be leaving our kids and grandchildren may well be unhealthy and even uninhabitable.”

Read Sanders’ full remarks, as prepared for delivery, below:

Thank you very much for joining me.

President Trump has stated tonight, and, over and over again in recent weeks, that this country faces a national emergency. Well, he’s right. But it’s an emergency and a crisis that he himself has created.

As we speak, some 800,000 federal employees, people who are our neighbors, friends, and family members are going without pay. As working people, many of them are wondering how they will pay their mortgages, how they will feed their kids, and how they’ll be able to go to the doctor. These are people in the FBI, in the TSA, in the State Department, in the Treasury Department and other agencies who have, in some cases, worked for the government for years.

Let me just quote what one federal employee has said: “I’m a single mom and a federal employee. I have $100 to last me – and my vehicle payments will not be made this month. I live paycheck to paycheck and I can’t get a side job because I still have to go to my unpaid federal job.”

Our federal employees deserve to be treated with respect, not held hostage as political pawns.

Further, if this government shutdown continues, and Trump has indicated that he is prepared to shut it down for months, if not years, millions of Americans including the disabled, the children, and the elderly may not be able to get the Food Stamps they need to eat.

Pregnant mothers and their babies may go without the nutrition assistance they need to stay healthy as the WIC program is on the verge of running out of money.

Small businesses and farmers will not be able to receive the financial assistance they need – and some may go out of business.

Security at our nation’s airports could be threatened if TSA employees and air traffic controllers are not getting paid.

People who are buying or selling their homes may see significant delays because the Federal Housing Administration is unable to process and approve mortgage applications.

Let me be as clear as I can be: This shutdown should never have happened.

As many of you will recall, on December 19th, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to keep the government open. Unanimously. No Democrat or Republican opposed the bill that passed the Senate.

It was widely expected that the following morning, December 20th, the House would do the same – and the government would remain open.

Unfortunately, President Trump, who started receiving criticism from an assortment of right-wing ideologues, changed his mind about the agreement and said that he would not sign any bill unless it included $5.7 billion for a wall on the southern border. And, by the way, the total cost of that wall could run as high as $70 billion.

In terms of this shutdown, President Trump has made it very clear who is responsible. As you will all recall in a very public meeting he held in the oval office he said and I quote “I am proud to shut down the government … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you (Chuck Schumer) for it.”

On January 3rd, 2019, on their first day in the majority, the Democrats in the House passed legislation to re-open the government. This was exactly the same bill unanimously passed by the Senate.

Tonight, I urge Senate Majority Leader McConnell to allow that bill to come to the floor to get a vote. This is the same bill that he supported when it was unanimously passed in the Senate.

Senator McConnell: let’s vote to end this shutdown now in a bipartisan way.

President Trump tonight has told us why he believes we need the wall. It gives me no pleasure to tell you what most of you already know. President Trump lies all of the time – and in his remarks tonight, and in recent weeks regarding immigration and the wall, he continues to lie.

Just a few examples. Trump has told the American people several hundred times that Mexico would pay for the wall. That is a lie. If this wall were to be built, Mexico would not pay for it. American taxpayers would.

Trump said that thousands upon thousands of terrorists are entering the U.S. from the southern border. That is a lie.

According to a State Department report released in September, “At year’s end there was no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups have … sent operatives via Mexico into the United States.”

That is not Bernie Sanders opinion. That is a direct quote from Trump’s own State Department.

Trump recently said that some ex-presidents told him that they should have built a wall. That is a lie. All 4 living ex-presidents have stated clearly that they never talked to Trump about their desire to build a wall.

Trump said that we need a wall to prevent heroin, fentanyl and other illegal drugs from coming into the country. Another lie.

According to Donald Trump’s own Drug Enforcement Administration, the most common method Mexican cartels use to transport illegal drugs over the Southwest border is through legal ports of entry using passenger vehicles.

And on and on it goes.

In terms of immigration in this country, what we need to do is not to waste billions of dollars on a wall, but to finally address the need for comprehensive immigration reform – including improved border security. It is inhumane that tiny children at the border have been torn away from their parents. It is disgraceful that 1.8 million young people, raised in the United States, and who know no other country but the United States, have lost their legal protection under the DACA program because of Trump’s actions. It is heartbreaking that almost 11 million undocumented people living in this country, the overwhelming majority of whom are hard-working and law-abiding, worry every day about being deported and separated from their loved ones.

Sadly, what President Trump is trying to do is to create fear and hatred in our country. Instead of trying to bring us together as a people, he is trying to divide us up. And, in the process, divert our attention away from the real crises facing the working families of this nation.

President Trump, you want to talk about crises. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, tens of millions of workers in our country are earning starvation wages and are unable to adequately provide for their families.

You want a national emergency? 30 million Americans have no health insurance and many more are under-insured. Thousands die each year because they don’t go to a doctor when they should and our life expectancy is actually in decline. While the pharmaceutical industry makes tens of billions a year in profit, 1 in 5 Americans can’t afford the medicine they need. Now, that’s a crisis we should be working on right now.

And here’s another crisis. Too many of our seniors are living in desperate poverty, and about half of older Americans have no retirement savings. Hundreds of thousands of kids cannot afford to go to college and over 40 million are trying to deal with outrageous levels of student debt. What are we going to do about those crises?

And maybe, here’s the biggest crisis of all. The scientific community has made it very clear in telling us that climate change is real and is causing devastating harm to our country and the entire planet. And they have told us that if we do not transform our energy system away from fossil fuel the nation and planet we will be leaving our kids and grandchildren may well be unhealthy and even uninhabitable.

Mr. President, we don’t need to create artificial crises. We have enough real ones. Let us end this shutdown and bring the American people together around an agenda that will improve life for all of our people.

Earlier:

Sanders’ remarks will come immediately after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) deliver the Democratic Party’s official response to Trump.

After they demanded “equal time” to counter Trump’s “malice and misinformation,” major television networks agreed on Tuesday to carry the Democratic leaders’ rebuttal.

“The facts are clear: President Trump has the power to stop hurting the country by re-opening the government and ending the Trump shutdown,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement Monday night.

Trump will deliver his address Tuesday night as the government shutdown over his demand for over $5 billion in border wall funding continues into its third week.

As Common Dreams reported, Trump on multiple occasions has floated the possibility of declaring a “national emergency” to bypass Congress if his demand for wall funding isn’t met.  According to some legal experts, such a move would be an unconstitutional abuse of power.

Responding to Trump’s insistence that there is a “crisis” on the southern border, Sanders declared in a tweet on Tuesday, “There is no border crisis.”

“The real crisis,” the Vermont senator concluded, “is that 800,000 people don’t know how they’ll pay their mortgages, pay student loans, put gas in their cars, or put food on the table because of Donald Trump’s government shutdown.”

Trump Links Drugs, Violent Crime to Lack of Border Wall

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump urged congressional Democrats to fund his long-promised border wall in a somber televised address that was heavy with dark immigration rhetoric but offered little in the way of concessions or new ideas to break the standoff that has left large swaths of the government shuttered for 18 days.

Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued Tuesday night that the wall was needed to resolve a security and humanitarian “crisis,” blaming illegal immigration for what he said was a scourge of drugs and violence in the U.S. and asking: “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”

Democrats in response accused Trump appealing to “fear, not facts” and manufacturing a border crisis for political gain.

Using the formal trappings of the White House, Trump hoped to gain the upper hand in the standoff over his demand for $5.7 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He plans a visit to the border Thursday as he continues to pitch what was a signature promise of his 2016 presidential campaign.

He addressed the nation as the shutdown stretched through its third week, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay and some congressional Republicans growing increasingly jittery about the spreading impact of the impasse. Trump will visit the Capitol on Wednesday to meet with Senate Republicans, and has invited Democratic and Republican congressional leaders to return to the White House to meet with him later that day.

He claimed the standoff could be resolved in “45 minutes” if Democrats would just negotiate, but previous meetings have led to no agreement.

For now, Trump sees this as winning politics. TV networks had been reticent about providing him airtime to make what some feared would be a purely political speech. And that concern was heightened by the decision Tuesday by Trump’s re-election campaign to send out fundraising emails and text messages to supporters trying to raise money off the speech. Their goal: A half-million dollars in a single day.

“I just addressed the nation on Border Security. Now need you to stand with me,” read one message sent out after his remarks.

In their own televised remarks, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of misrepresenting the situation on the border as they urged him to reopen closed government departments and turn loose paychecks for hundreds of thousands of workers.

Negotiations on wall funding could proceed in the meantime, they said.

Schumer said Trump “just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.”

In his dire address, Trump ticked off a string of statistics and claims to make his case that there is a crisis at the border, but a number of his statements were misleading, such as saying the new trade deal with Mexico would pay for the wall, or suggesting through gruesome examples that immigrants are more likely to commit crime.

Trump, who has long railed against illegal immigration at the border, has recently seized on humanitarian concerns to argue there is a broader crisis that can only be solved with a wall. But critics say the security risks are overblown and the administration is at least partly to blame for the humanitarian situation.

Trump used emotional language, referring to Americans who were killed by people in the country illegally, saying: “I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible.”

The president often highlights such incidents, though studies over several years have found immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

Trump has been discussing the idea of declaring a national emergency to allow him to move forward with the wall without getting congressional approval for the billions he’s requested. But he did not mention that Tuesday night.

The partial government shutdown reached its 18th day, making the closure the second-longest in history. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are going without pay, and government disruptions are hitting home with everyday Americans.

Trump was nearly halfway through his 9-minute address before he ever mentioned the border wall, describing it as a request from law enforcement rather than his own longstanding political pledge. He also suggested that his proposal to build the wall from steel, rather than concrete, was a concession to Democrats, although they don’t see it that way.

Trump sought to put the blame on Democrats for the standoff, saying they “will not fund border security.” In fact, House Democrats passed legislation the day they took control of the House that offered $1.3 billion for border security. And Senate Democrats have approved similar funding year after year.

Seeking to keep up pressure on Trump and the Republicans, Pelosi said the House would begin passing individual bills this week to reopen some federal agencies, starting with the Treasury Department to ensure Americans receive their tax refunds. The administration says it will act on its own to ensure the refunds.

Ahead of the speech, the White House sought to shore up GOP support on Capitol Hill, where a growing number of Republicans have been expressing unease with the extended shutdown. But GOP lawmakers were still raising concerns Tuesday, talking about disruptions in payments to farmers and troubles for home buyers trying to get government-backed mortgage loans. Vice President Mike Pence met privately with House Republicans, urging them to “stand strong” and insisting the White House wants to negotiate, according to people familiar with the conversation.

He also told the group that Trump won’t retreat. “That pickup ain’t got reverse in it,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Alan Fram and Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

For AP’s complete coverage of the U.S. government shutdown: https://apnews.com/GovernmentShutdown

Recollections From Behind Bars: A Woman’s Tale

Editor’s note: Jamie Farthing is serving a life sentence with a 40-year stipulation at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. She was incarcerated in 1994, at the age of 18. She earned her associate degree, with honors, in prison and is finishing her Bachelor of Arts degree. What follows is an account of her experience working with inmates while she was incarcerated at the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, N.J.

I am sitting in a cheap plastic chair in the Bergen County Jail. The chair is the perk of having a dollar-a-day job watching suicidal inmates. The door clicks open. Automated lock system. I look up. I see an officer come in. I don’t see anyone behind her.

“Farthing, you working constant watch?” the officer asks. “Intake’s kicking. She’s going to cell one.”

“Come on, honey,” she says to the girl I still can’t see. “OK, take off all your clothes and put on this gown,” she says. “You’re on a constant watch until the psych clears you. You can’t have any property, just in case you try to hurt yourself with it. She’ll watch your stuff for you,” the officer adds, nodding to me. “Come on.”

The officer puts the girl’s clothes in a bag.

“Bra, panties, socks, too. Good God, honey, you’re skinny,” she says. “When’s the last time you ate? You hungry? Farthing—we got any bags out there?”

I look in the cooler for a lunch bag filled with milk, juice and a bologna sandwich.

“No, you have to ask the kitchen,” I say.

“I’m not hungry,” the intake girl says. “I’m sick. Is medical bringing me my methadone? I’m on a methadone program. They have to give it to me. I can’t kick. I’m pregnant.”

“Farthing, tell the officer in the bubble to call for a pregnant bag, and call medical to see if they have any medication coming up for the pregnant intake,” the officer says.

“I need my methadone,” the intake girl keeps repeating.

“Honey, all I can do is call,” the officer says. She walks out of the cell. The officer hands me the bag with the girl’s clothing and goes back into the glassed-in officers station known as “the bubble.”

I can see into the girl’s cell from where I sit. The girl curls up on the bed and rocks herself. I’ve seen a million junkies kicking. Pregnant ones, too. I’ve never seen one this skinny. She is a living Tim Burton nightmare. A pregnant skeleton. The officer clicks the door twice to let me know the pregnant bag is outside. I open the door. I pick the bag, which contains lunches for new intakes, off the floor. I bring it to the intake girl.

“Excuse me,” I say. “If you’re hungry, your bag came up.”

She uncurls and looks up.

“You got anything sweet?” she asks.

“I may have a candy bar,” I say.

Sometimes I buy Hershey bars for girls coming in kicking heroin. Sugar helps the kick.

“My name is Jamie,” I say. I give her the candy.

“Hey, do you know when they are bringing me my methadone?”

She is still rocking. I watch her eat the candy bar.

“I’ll ask,” I say. I turn away. It hurts to look at her. I wave at the officer and say, “Meds.” The officer shrugs.

“She doesn’t know yet,” I say. “How far along are you?”

“I don’t know.”

She curls back up and rocks.

I don’t take offense. She looks like she is in pain. I walk back to my chair.

***

We work eight hours a day. My watch is almost up. The overnight crew is coming on.

“It’s just one girl, pregnant, kicking,” I tell Natasha and Natalia, who come in for the overnight shift.

“Miss, I’m going off work,” I tell the intake girl. She doesn’t look up or stop rocking.

“Good night,” I say.

I walk across the baseball diamond-shaped pod. My cell is at the top of the steps. It’s the corner gate cell. Or third base on the baseball diamond. The corner cells are bigger. They don’t have solid doors, just bars. They make you feel less locked in. I grab my shower bag and walk to the shower.

“Yo, that new girl looked nasty,” says Crystal, my cellmate, when I get back from the shower. Crystal is a pretty, African-American girl with a head full of curls.

“I saw every bone in her chest. In the girl’s chest,” Crystal says.

“Aw, she was just out there too long on that stuff,” I say. I dry my hair. “But she is skinny, even for a junkie. Pregnant, too.”

“She’s pregnant?” Crystal says, her voice rising. “Who was screwing the crypt-keeper’s daughter? She looks like the mug shots, the ‘after’ shots of what crystal meth does to you. You seen those commercials? You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I feel bad for her. Kicking, pregnant.”

“Don’t feel sorry for her. Feel sorry for the baby. That is going to be the first thing that poor baby sees,” Crystal laughs.

I roll my eyes.

“If you’re on a methadone program on the streets, do they have to give it to you here?” I ask.

“What! The lady’s getting methadone!” Crystal says. “If she’s on a program in the streets and pregnant, I think so.”

She thinks for a minute. “I wonder if she’ll sell some?”

“You’re going to drink spit from the crypt-keeper?” I say. Some inmates attempt to collect their liquid methadone by quickly spitting it back up after swallowing it. Officers are supposed to watch you take your medications to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“It’s the crypt-keeper’s daughter, and if it gets me high, yes!” Crystal says.

“You gonna need Valtrex,” I say, referring to a drug used to treat the herpes virus. “Not all those sores were from picking her face while she was high.”

The next morning, I go to the shower, wrap my hair in a towel and grab my cup. One scoop of instant coffee. Crystal always leaves me half a carton of milk and sugar packets. I don’t get up for breakfast.

I go downstairs. The communal hot pot is bolted on the wall in the middle of the pod. I pour hot water into my cup and walk over to the tables, where I see the intake girl.

“Yeah, I know. And the bitch won’t bail me out,” she is telling the other girls.

“You’re feeling better?” I ask. “They brought you your methadone?”

“Yeah, last night and this morning,” she says. “They told me they were going to drop me down to five milligrams. Force me to kick. I told them pregnant people can’t kick or the baby will die. That’s a huge lawsuit. I already have the dudes who want to adopt it calling and threatening them. If they try to make me kick, someone is just going to have to bail me out.”

“They won’t force you to kick,” I say. “That’s dangerous.”

I pull a cigarette from my pack.

“Can I get one of them?” the intake girl asks. She holds out her hand.

I give her a hard look.

“If the heroin and crack didn’t kill it, I doubt the cigarettes will,” she says.

I hand her a cigarette.

“Can I get some coffee, too?” she says. “Nothing goes with cigarettes like coffee.”

She holds out her cup.

I pour half my coffee into her cup.

“You going to use those sugars?” she asks, looking at my packets.

“No,” I say, handing her two. “My name’s Jamie, by the way,” I say.

“I’m Christina.”

She smiles. Her smile freaks me out. She has odd-colored eyes. Brown and hazel green that overlap.

“So what I was saying is that I asked that bitch that wants this baby to bail me out, and she said no, because it was safer for the baby if I was in jail and not getting high,” Christina says, turning back to the group.

“I told her they are going to make me kick,” she says. “That they don’t care if I’m pregnant here. So if the baby dies it’s on her, not me.”

She tears open a sugar packet, pours half of the sugar into her mouth and chews the granules.

“I saw I was getting nowhere with this bitch, so I called Mark and Kevin,” she continues. “Same thing. Just try to wait it out until the baby’s born in a few more weeks. They don’t care what happens to me. They just want this baby.”

She pours the other half of the sugar into her mouth. Her teeth crunch it as she chews.

“You’re giving your baby to a woman and two guys?” I ask.

She pushes her dirty-blond, Farrah Fawcett hair out of her face.

“Like I would give a baby to fags to raise. God, no,” she says laughing.

“But do they think they are adopting it?” I ask. “The two gay guys?”

“They can think whatever they want,” she says. “I never signed anything. I’m not under any obligation.”

“Why not just tell them?” I ask.

“Because those gay guys take care of me, lovely,” she says. Her lips curl into a sneer. “I can’t even tell you how much money they gave me the last six months. They’ve bailed me out of jail three times. I even had one of them cop for me because I was ‘too sick.’ I wasn’t sick. I owed my dealer, Sam, a lot of money. He was looking for me. I got Kevin to use my name to buy me some drugs. Sam told Kevin he better pay up what I owed. Kevin got scared for the baby. The dude paid him to keep me safe. Sucker born every day. They even got me on this meth program to help me get off heroin, blah blah blah,” Christina says.

“They sound nice,” I say.

“Nice?” she snaps. “They don’t care about me. If I wasn’t giving them this baby, they wouldn’t do shit for me. Believe that. They only care about themselves and what they want. I’ll never hear from them again after this baby is born.” She is sneering again. “Can I get another cigarette?”

I hand one to her.

“Do you have any more coffee?” she asks. “This suicide gown is thin. I’m cold.” She picks up a blanket on the bench and wraps it around herself.

“Sure,” I say. I pour more of my coffee into her cup. I look at the clock. “It’s almost time for my shift.”

I get up and go back to my cell to collect my notebook, Walkman and two packets of instant coffee. I fill two cups and go back down. I give Christina a cup. The blanket is in a heap next to her.

“You can just pour it into your cup,” I say, but she is already drinking from my cup. Crystal is at the table, and she sees the look on my face. She knows how I feel about other people drinking out of my cups.

“Can I get another cigarette?” Christina asks. I give her another one. I light it.

“So you’re just using the gay guys?” I ask. “But the woman who won’t bail you out is really getting the baby?”

“No,” she says. “I can’t stand that bitch, either. She’s barely worth what I can get from her. Which is not much. I have to get it from her husband. And he’s just paying me because I blow him for 50 bucks.” She laughs again.

“So you’re using both of them?” I ask. “They both think you’re giving them your baby?”

“Them and another pathetic couple,” she says. “That lady is such a loser. She can’t have kids. She’s always staring at me, telling me what a blessing it is to be a life-giver. Like she’d know. She’s creepy. She made a room in her house for me. She pays me a hundred dollars to shower, eat this health crap and let her sing to my stomach. I just have to lay on this bean bag chair so she can sit on the floor next to me and sing to my stomach. She tried to touch me one day, and I was like, ‘Uh-uh, bitch, you want to touch me, it’s extra.’ She started crying, saying she only wanted to feel the baby move. Even for a hundred I could only stomach it once a week.”

She gulps down the last of her coffee and sets the cup on her desk. I don’t want it back.

Crystal is trying to get my attention, but I don’t look at her. I am fascinated by Christina, who goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t wash her hands. Then she goes to the officers station. I see her talking into the port in the window. She is asking about the next methadone delivery. I can’t hear the officers. Christina turns and walks back to the table.

“I need my meth,” she says angrily.

“Lindski, Bishop, Mason and Johnson—visit,” a voice on the intercom announces.

Christina walks toward the door. “Do I just go like this?” she asks.

“Farthing, give her a uniform to wear for visitation,” the officer says from the window port. “Make sure you get it back after.”

“Whoever is here better bail me out,” Christina says.

I wonder who came. What if all three couples showed up? I light a cigarette. The girl next to me wants a drag. I hand it to her. I go to the bathroom. When I come back, Christina is walking back inside. Visits are two hours. She was out there less than 30 minutes.

“That fucking bitch!” Christina screams. “Fuck that bitch!”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Farthing, you need us?” the officer asks through the window.

“Nah, we’re good,” I say.

Christina continues yelling.

“She has to get back in the gown now,” the officer says from the window port.

“You okay?” I ask Christina.

“Can I get a cigarette?” she says. “I’m so pissed. Bitch refused to bail me out. Why did she even come? We’re not friends. I don’t want to see her. She’s telling me I could give birth any day now and after that I could kick and get clean. I asked her if she knew how horrible it is in here and if this was where she wanted her baby to be. I asked her if she knew I was on suicide watch because I can’t take it. That shut the bitch up. I’m giving them my baby and they don’t want to bail me out? We’ll see after that visit.”

She grabs my cigarette. An officer taps the window.

“You have to put the gown back on real quick,” I tell her.

Christina balances the cigarette on her desk. She quickly strips out of the uniform. She is naked. She picks up the cigarette, puts it in her mouth and reaches for the gown. We all look at her emaciated body. Her stomach is the size of a volleyball. She has sores all over.

“God, you carry small for nine months,” I say softly.

“Yeah,” she says blankly. “I wish it was a little bigger. Some tricks go crazy for pregnant girls. Make a lot of money when I’m pregnant.”

She comes back to the table. “Days of Our Lives” is on the TV.

“How much money you make, girl?” Teri, a skinny, light-skinned crackhead asks.

“A hundred, three hundred, easy,” Christina says.

“Three hundred?” Carman asks.

“Yeah,” Christina says, taking a drag on the cigarette. “One of my tricks pays me $300 to finish on my stomach. He makes me shake my stomach. He likes that. The more it moves, the faster I get paid. There are some real sickos out there. But the real money is with those people that want this baby. Any sob story and their wallets fly open.”

“Lindski, meds up,” the officer says through the window port. The door clicks open. I bring down Christina’s methadone. She drains the cup.

“Can I get another cup of coffee?” she asks. “It’ll help bring the methadone on faster.”

I want her to keep telling me her story.

“Crystal, would you mind getting it for her?” I ask.

“It’s your coffee,” Crystal says with a shrug.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking all these questions,” I say. “But are you worried? What are you going to do when you have the baby and they’re all there to claim it?”

“Let them claim away,” she says. “It’s their problem. I’m just a junkie. The state will take it away.” She shrugs.

“Do you know the father?” I ask. “Does he care?” She laughs.

“Father,” she says. “Girl, it’s a trick baby. It’s just a way to get paid. I don’t care what happens after. And I’ll use the next one for what it’s worth, too.”

“You’re talking about a baby,” I say.

“No, a trick baby,” she says.

“Lindski, pack up,” an officer says through the intercom.

“I knew that bitch would cave,” she says. “I’m out of here.” She puts the uniform back on.

“What’s your name?” she asks me.

“Jamie,” I say.

“Jamie, can I get a cigarette to smoke outside? I know that bitch won’t give me one.”

The Lethal Threat That Hangs Over India’s Reporters

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Early last October, the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi made headlines worldwide. By the end of that month, two Indian journalists also were killed—one shot and the other beaten to death. And that’s just a small part of the story for journalists in India: An internationally acclaimed editor was gunned down in front of his office last June. In March, three reporters died within 24 hours when they were run over by vehicles in what were believed to be deliberate attacks.

The killing of journalists—whether by armed militants, right-wing extremists or corrupt officials—is a horrific upward trend in India. As the violence increases, it attracts little attention, and Indian officials refuse to join international authorities in addressing the issue.

The country’s journalists continue to report on corruption and other wrongdoing, but they work amid a cloud of threat, fear and uncertainty.

A democracy is only as good as its media. In this respect, the world’s largest democracy is resting on a dangerously shaky foundation because of the intense challenges that journalists must overcome to do their jobs.

Bloody October

On Oct. 29, Chandan Tiwari was abducted from his village in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India. Tiwari, a journalist working for a Hindi daily newspaper, was found the next day severely beaten in a forest a few miles away. He was dead on arrival at a local hospital.

On Nov. 1, the police identified three suspects in the case. One was a private contractor whose allegedly corrupt deals involving government funds had been exposed in articles by Tiwari. The contractor has been arrested and is awaiting trial.

Since last April, Tiwari had repeatedly urged the police to give him protection because he had received death threats. He never received that protection.

The day Tiwari died, another journalist was shot dead in the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh, where he was covering state assembly elections. Achyutananda Sahu, a cameraperson for the public broadcaster Doordarshan, was accompanying a police patrol when it was ambushed by a leftist extremist group that opposes elections and advocates the violent overthrow of the Indian state.

No arrests have been made for the killings of Sahu and two police officers in that attack.

The central Indian forests where Chhattisgarh is located have seen a violent battle between the state’s paramilitary forces and the Maoist Communist Party of India, which seeks the destruction of the Indian government. These forests are rich in coal and iron ore reserves. While the government encourages private corporations to mine these minerals, the Maoists resist such operations because they want to protect a traditional tribal lifestyle against the onslaught of capitalism.

Three Deaths

The three Indian journalists killed within a day last March were Navin Nishchal, Vijay Singh and Sandeep Sharma.

Nishchal and Singh worked for Dainik Bhaskar, a leading Hindi newspaper in the state of Bihar. On March 25, both died immediately when the motorcycle they were riding was run over by a sport utility vehicle that belonged to Mohammad Harsu, a local political leader.

Earlier that night, the two journalists had gotten into an argument with Harsu over articles written by Nishchal. Harsu had been upset about Nischal’s stories covering child marriage and other topics.

Observers say Harsu often pressured journalists to write pieces that supported him, and he had allegedly made verbal threats against Nishchal and other journalists in the past.

The police arrested Harsu and his son after the incident, but no charges have been filed.

The same day Nishchal and Singh were killed, Sandeep Sharma, a reporter at a local news channel in central India’s Bhind district, was killed when he was hit by a dump truck. Sharma was working on a story about illegal sand mining. (This mining is a lucrative industry because sand is in heavy demand as an ingredient in the concrete used in India’s current building boom. However, sand mining also presents a major environmental threat because it destroys beaches and waterways.)

Sharma’s death created a chilling effect in the region. Closed-circuit TV footage of his motorbike being crushed by a truck was circulated widely among local journalists, inciting fear among them. Like Tiwari, Sharma had unsuccessfully sought police protection. He had received threats after he reported on the alleged involvement of the state police in illegal sand mining operations.

No arrests have been made following Sharma’s death.

Ram Manohar, a freelance journalist, describes the stress—and despair—he and others face as they pursue their work.

“We write about the oppression of … people who live in our villages,” says Manohar, who lives and works in the crime-racked state of Haryana where handmade pistols known as kattas are widely available for less than $5.

“Can you imagine the pressure we work under?” Manohar says. “They (the muscle men in the villages) wield kattas! Our deaths will not even get a mention in national publications.”

Fighting State Repression

Although most of the murders are underreported, incidents involving high-profile Indian journalists have attracted more attention.

In the course of nine months in 2017 and 2018, two journalists of international repute—Gauri Lankesh and Shujaat Bukhari—were fatally shot.

On Sept. 5, 2017, two men killed Lankesh, editor of the Gauri Lankesh Patrike newspaper, outside her home in the southern city of Bangalore. Lankesh, widely admired for her support of progressive causes, had been a social activist and a vocal critic of right-wing Hinduism.

The Karnataka police initially arrested three members of a militant Hindu organization in connection with Lankesh’s murder. Authorities now believe the killing is linked to a larger conspiracy, and at least 13 more suspects over succeeding months.

In June 2018, three gunmen shot Bukhari in front of his office in the northern town of Srinagar. Bukhari, editor of Rising Kashmir newspaper, had survived previous assassination attempts and was accompanied by two security guards at the time of the killing.

Bukhari had supported peace and held balanced views on Kashmiri self-determination, and anti-India militant groups had opposed those views. One of the men accused of the murder was later killed by Indian security forces in a gun battle in Kashmir. The other suspects have not been found.

PEN International, an association that supports journalists and other writers in danger, issued a report on India in September. The report addressed the murders of Lankesh and Bukhari:

Both were targeted for their outspoken views on state repression. Both had a near cult-like following among their readers. Both were in their 50s. And both ran local newspapers in their hometowns, which had extremely limited subscriptions. Gauri Lankesh Patrike and Rising Kashmir sold merely a few thousand copies.

It was clear it was not only their newspapers which were swaying the masses (the two editors were, as well). Their individual personalities, with incisive views on religion, state repression and violence, were immensely influential. Both journalists’ Twitter handles, Facebook pages and fiery speeches in public rallies and conferences were seen as a threat to the powerful. They were attacked by the left and the right; the extreme right considered them to be too liberal and the extreme left thought they were too moderate.

’Getting Away With Murder'

Compounding the horror of attacks on Indian journalists is the fact that many assailants aren’t brought to justice.

In October, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released a report titled “Getting Away with Murder: CPJ’s 2018 Global Impunity Index spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free.” The index deals with journalist murders that took place between Sept. 1, 2008, and Aug. 31, 2018, and calculates the number of unsolved murders as a percentage of each country’s population. Fourteen countries with at least five unsolved murders each were included.

India had 18 unsolved cases in that period, and CPJ noted that the percentage of murders relative to India’s population had worsened since the publication of last year’s index.

Also, last year India failed to participate in UNESCO’s report on impunity, which requests and documents information on the status of investigations into the murder of journalists.

India also fares poorly when additional dangers to journalists are considered. The 2018 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders weighs factors such as censorship, hate speech and social media threats as well as physical violence against journalists. India currently ranks 138th out of 180 countries (with a lower ranking being worse).

Currently, Indian federal law provides no special protection for journalists, although one state, Maharashtra, passed such legislation last year.

Critics say the law looks good on paper, but they add that its implementation may be difficult because of the political climate and the glacial pace of the judicial system in the state. They compare this law to a similar law designed to protect Maharashtra doctors who are increasingly being assaulted by patients’ relatives. Passed in 2009, that law hasn’t resulted in any convictions.

Media observers also doubt whether laws alone will guarantee change. They say the threatening environment in which journalists work has grown worse since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Commentators have said Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party squelches dissenting opinions and even tacitly approves of the ominous social media threats regularly directed at journalists.

Journalists’ advocates offer some ideas to improve this dire situation. Proposals include forming an organization dedicated to press freedom in India and creating a legal defense fund to help journalists. Other recommendations involve putting international pressure on governments to protect journalists and using international resources to bolster investigations in cases of violence.

Persevering in the Face of Danger

Journalism in India seldom brings financial reward to employees or owners of publications. Journalists—especially those working for local publications—usually are forced to rely on other sources of income such as soliciting advertising for newspapers.

Many journalists face pressure from their families to leave a field that puts them in harm’s way and provides so little monetary benefit. The situation also puts tremendous emotional stress on family members.

“(When) my husband leaves home in the morning on his moped, I light a lamp for his safe return,” says Radha Devi, Manohar’s wife.

But whatever the cost, many continue to report on—and uncover—entrenched corruption, misconduct and injustice.

“Journalists who work in smaller towns and villages—and those journalists who are working to expose the powerful—are certainly not doing it for money, because there isn’t any,” says Sevanti Ninan, author of several books on the Indian media and founder of TheHoot.org, a website that tracks media developments in the country. “They are driven by the sheer will to build a better society.”

The media is considered the fourth pillar of democracy in India, after the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. That pillar seems to be trembling in the face of the grim statistics of violence and other threats to free expression. However, hope remains among journalists.

“How can [India] give up on trying to build a just society?” says Tameshwar Sinha, 23, a journalist from Chhattisgarh who reports on state repression and gender equality. “We have dreams we want to realize. The only way to do so is to ensure we speak truth to power.”

The Silver Bullet to Stop the Corporate State Pillage

Every year a certain number of our soldiers decide they’d rather not be involved in shooting people they don’t know so that ExxonMobil can have more oil or Lockheed Martin can make more cash or MSNBC / Fox News can give their hosts topics for their upcoming poetry books. Basically, these soldiers do something horrifying, something terrible, something often called “treasonous” … They — wait for it — think for themselves!

(Glass shatters. Woman screams. Baby cries.)

Nothing is more frightening for our endless war machine than a military grunt who thinks for him or herself. They’re supposed to do nothing more than follow orders. They’re supposed to ask a superior officer for permission to wear a different color pair of socks. That’s right — the biggest, toughest gladiators in our society have to get authorization to switch from boxers to briefs.

I’ll get to what this has to do with our inverted totalitarian corporate pillaging in a moment.

One of the more notable soldiers who stood up this year was Spenser Rapone — a second lieutenant discharged on June 18, 2018, for disparaging the U.S. war machine online and promoting a socialist revolution. (Clearly our enormous globe-spanning military complex can obliterate any possible enemies except independent thought, which promptly turns it to a mush akin to pea soup.) Apparently reading about the true story of Pat Tillman pushed Rapone toward the realization that he was a pawn in the middle of a massive lie.

“Pat Tillman showed me I could resist the indoctrination,” Rapone said. “I did not have to let the military dehumanize me and turn me into something monstrous. When I learned how his death was covered up to sell the war, it was shocking.”

To sell the war. Why is it they would need to sell a war? Oh, I know — because it’s completely unjustifiable. For activities people naturally agree with or enjoy doing, you don’t have to advertise them. Like you don’t see ads saying, “Hey, feed your kids. … Don’t forget.” Or a commercial saying, “Try having sex some time. It’s fun!” That stuff comes pretty naturally. But you do need promotion (Read: media propaganda) for our endless war games because it does not come naturally to most of us. War comes naturally to sociopaths, and then it’s sold to the rest of us, much like a used car or an ill-advised timeshare in Cleveland.

But the military is not the only place where conscientious objectors play a role. It might be the only one where walking away can get you locked up in prison spending your days sewing McDonald’s uniforms, but there are a lot of moments in our messed-up world when you can turn your back and do the right thing.

For example, fewer and fewer people are willing to do the job of killing millions of animals every year. A recent report “revealed that staff shortages at slaughterhouses [in the U.K. were] threatening Christmas sales. Some 10,000 positions are unfilled at major abattoirs. … The report explains that for most potential applicants, the industry’s low pay is not the problem but that ‘people simply do not want to do this work anymore.’”

Oh come on, you fragile snowflakes! “Ewww, I can’t handle chopping the heads off a thousand pigs a day. It hurts my feelings to end the life of hundreds of sentient beings who haven’t done anything to me to warrant such treatment. WAAH! I don’t like loading buckets of adorable chickadees into the grinding colander so they can be turned into a meat milkshake that will ultimately be served to a labradoodle or a puggle. BOO HOO HOO!” (I might have made up the term “grinding colander.”)

In all seriousness, working at the killing fields of a factory farm has life-long impacts that no one talks about. (And by “no one,” I mean the media and our politicians and most everybody else.) As the Guardian reported, “Slaughterhouse work has been linked to a variety of disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and perpetration-induced traumatic stress. One pig slaughterer said the ‘worst thing’ about the work is its ‘emotional toll’. … A worker at a chicken plant said one of his colleagues was ‘hauled off to the mental hospital’ after he ‘kept having nightmares that chickens were after him.’” (It’s tough to say what the chickens would’ve done with him had they caught him. Professional torture is made difficult by a lack of hands.)

These workers who have walked off the killing floors should be honored as conscientious objectors. They should be rewarded for realizing it’s better to get paid to hand out coffees at the coffeehouse than death sentences at the slaughterhouse.

And conscientious objection happens in the big tech world too. This past May, a dozen Google employees quit to protest the company’s role in drone-killing technology created for the Pentagon, and another 4,000 signed an internal petition to stop the partnership.

There have been many great objectors in our police forces, too. Captain Ray Lewis was in the Philadelphia police force for 23 years. Then he became an outspoken critic of police abuse, militarization, excess force and the inequality that has hollowed out our society like an aggressive virus. He shows up to protests in full uniform and stands on the front lines to help remind the other cops what they should be protecting — and it’s not oil pipelines or Wall Street banks. Perhaps most importantly, he does it all with a mustache that looks like it houses squirrels in the winter. It’s quite possible that without the facial hair, not a single police officer would give a shit. However, you can really reach a cop through his ‘stache. (Sorry, his or her ‘stache.)

Conscientious objectors even show up in the grand hallways of the famously lockstep mainstream media outlets. Just last week, veteran national security journalist William Arkin left his job at NBC and MSNBC and basically blasted them in an open letter “… for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war… and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism.” Of course, anyone who regularly reads independent outlets like Truthdig would probably say Mr. Arkin is roughly 30 years late to this realization. Yet it still takes nerve, gonads and a spine to turn against your employer while calling them out for manufacturing consent for hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. (Certain types of deep-water fish are made up of only nerves, gonads and a spine, and they’re constantly being insolent to their employers.)

The truth is, we the people may not have that much power. We don’t control our democracy anymore now that every decision is based on money. We can’t instantly change the entire system. But we have one very powerful tool — we have the power of our labor.

Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions worldwide, work for corporations or organizations that do evil every single day. This list includes:

People at the big banks that fund the destruction of our world
Officials sent to steal children from their mothers and fathers
People working at big oil companies, pushing papers while knowing we only have 11 years left to completely change our behavior
Soldiers told to drone bomb a guy they’ve never met before
Merchants in charge of selling Kid Rock T-shirts

The list is endless, and ALL of these people have the ability to say “I object. I will not help with your villainy.”

If they all objected — we would see a different world overnight.

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If you think this column is important, please share it. Also check out Lee Camp’s new comedy special at LeeCampComedySpecial.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”

New York Mayor Proposes Sweeping New Health Care Plan

The future of the Affordable Care Act and comprehensive health care coverage remains uncertain nationally. Republicans have made multiple attempts to repeal all or part of the law, and President Trump cut the advertising budget for the last open-enrollment period, although enrollment numbers were still higher than expected, as PBS reported in December. Amid these conflicting events, some states and cities have taken matters into their own hands, expanding Medicaid coverage, or, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday on his first day in office, unveiling plans to expand health care for undocumented immigrants and give California the power to negotiate drug prices.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, may have the most ambitious and wide-ranging plan to offer residents medical care. In a move that NBC New York called “historic,” de Blasio announced on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that the city will spend $100 million to provide comprehensive health care to both undocumented immigrants and any low-income New Yorkers who don’t have health insurance.

The New York Times suggests that making his announcement on national television may reflect de Blasio’s desire to position himself beyond New York, “as a progressive leader on issues like health care and as a bulwark against the policies of President Trump, particularly on immigration.”

His plan, called NYC Care, is aimed at better addressing the medical needs of low-income New Yorkers who use hospital emergency rooms as their primary source of health care.

During a press conference following his announcement, de Blasio told reporters that his plan will provide access to pediatric, geriatric, OBGYN, mental health and other services to the city’s roughly 600,000 uninsured.

According to NBC New York, de Blasio said that “patients who seek health coverage through NYC Care will receive a card that allows them to see a primary care doctor and seek specialty care services.”

He explained that residents will be able to access services through the city’s website or 311 phone line. Depending on income, residents will either pay for services on a sliding scale, or receive care at no charge.

The Times reports that the mayor’s office emphasizes that de Blasio’s plan “would not be a substitute for any universal health care at the state level or a national single-payer plan.” It’s also not entirely insurance, but a mix of insurance, direct spending for care and, as the Times notes, an extension of MetroPlus, an existing insurance program run by city hospitals that already covers over 500,000 New Yorkers. De Blasio’s new plan aims to expand that number and reach people who might not know they’re qualified.

The Times points out that the city’s hospitals remain under “severe financial strain,” noting that “the current financial plan for city hospitals projects budget shortfalls of over $156 million in 2018, increasing to $1.8 billion in 2022, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.”

De Blasio, however, remains optimistic, telling MSNBC, “This has never been done in the country in a comprehensive way. … Health care isn’t just a right in theory, it must be a right in practice. And we’re doing that here in this city.”

The program is expected to launch in the Bronx this summer and expand to the city’s four other boroughs through 2021.