Chris Hedges's Blog, page 416

Part of Migrant Caravan Reaches Tijuana

TIJUANA, Mexico — Exhausted migrants in a caravan of Central American asylum-seekers napped on mattresses in a converted municipal gymnasium, while men played soccer and exchanged banter on a crowded, adjoining courtyard. A woman dabbed her crying, naked toddler with a moist cloth.

Nearly 2,000 caravan migrants had reached the U.S. border in Mexico’s northwestern corner by Thursday, with more coming in a steady trickle of buses. The city of Tijuana, with its privately run shelters operating well above their capacity of 700, opened the gymnasium and gated sport complex for up to 1,000 migrants, with a potential to expand to 3,000.

With U.S. border inspectors processing only about 100 asylum claims a day at the main border crossing with San Diego, prospects grew that migrants would be stuck waiting in Tijuana for months.

Francisco Rueda, the top deputy to Baja California state Gov. Francisco Vega de la Madrid, said about 1,750 migrants from the caravan had reached Tijuana so far.

“This is not a crisis,” he told reporters, though he agreed that “this is an extraordinary situation.”

Rueda said the state has 7,000 jobs available for its “Central American migrant brothers” who obtain legal residence status in Mexico.

“Today in Baja California there is an employment opportunity for those who request it, but it order for this to happen, it has to regulate migrant status,” he said.

The city’s thriving factories are always looking for workers, and several thousand Haitian migrants who were turned away at the U.S. border have found jobs and settled in Tijuana the last two years.

Police made their presence known in a city that is suffering an all-time-high homicide rate. A group of about 50 migrants, mostly women and children, walked through downtown streets Thursday from the city shelter to a breakfast hall under police escort.

As buses from western and central Mexico trickled in, some families camped inside the bus terminal and waited for word on where they could find a safe place to sleep.

Oscar Zapata, 31, reached the Tijuana bus station at 2 a.m. Thursday from Guadalajara with his wife and their three children, ages 4, 5 and 12, and headed to the breakfast hall, where migrants were served free beef and potatoes.

Back home in La Ceiba, Honduras, he sold pirated CDs and DVDs in the street and two gangs demanding “protection” money threatened to kidnap his daughter and force her into prostitution if he didn’t pay. When he heard about the caravan on the TV news last month, he didn’t think twice.

“It was the opportunity to get out,” Zapata said.

Zapata said he hopes to join a brother in Los Angeles but has not yet decided on his next move. Like many others, he plans to wait in Tijuana for others in the caravan to arrive and gather more information before seeking asylum in the United States.

Byron Jose Blandino, a 27-year-old bricklayer from Nicaragua who slept in the converted gymnasium, said he wanted to request asylum but not until he could speak with someone well-versed in U.S. law and asylum procedures.

“The first thing is to wait,” Blandino said. “I do not want to break the laws of any country. If I could enter in a peaceful manner, that would be good.

To claim asylum in San Diego, migrants enter their names in a tattered notebook held together by duct tape and managed by the migrants in a plaza outside the entry to the main border crossing. On Thursday, migrants who registered six weeks ago were getting their names called. The waiting list has grown to more than 3,000 names and stands to become much longer with the new arrivals.

Dozens of gay and transgender migrants in the caravan were already lining up Thursday to submit asylum claims, though it was unclear how soon they would be able to do so.

Rueda, the governor’s deputy, said that if all migrants from the caravan currently in Tijuana were to register to seek asylum in the U.S., they would likely have to wait four months at current processing rates. For that reason, the state has asked Mexican federal authorities to encourage people in other caravans to go to other border cities.

There are real questions about how the city of more than 1.6 million will manage to handle the migrant caravans working their way through Mexico, which may total 10,000 people in all.

“No city in the world is prepared to receive this number of migrants,” said Mario Osuna, Tijuana’s social development director. He said the city hopes Mexico’s federal government “will start legalizing these people immediately” so they can get jobs and earn a living.

The caravan has fragmented somewhat in recent days in a final push to the border, with some migrants moving rapidly in buses and others falling behind.

On Thursday, hundreds were stranded for most of the day at a gas station in Navojoa, some 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) from Tijuana.

“We were dropped here at midnight … in the middle of nowhere, where supposedly some buses were going to come pick us up, but nothing,” Alejandra Grisel Rodriguez of Honduras told The Associated Press by phone. “We are without water, without food.”

After about 12 hours, seven buses began arriving to collect the migrants, Rodriguez said, but they quickly filled up.

“We would need at least 40 or 50,” she said.

___

Associated Press writer Maria Verza in Culiacan, Mexico, contributed to this report.

The #MeToo Movement Is Here to Stay

On Saturday, hundreds of sexual assault survivors and their allies marched and rallied in Hollywood, Calif., for the second annual #MeToo survivors’ march and rally. From noon to 3 p.m. that day, the mostly black and brown female activists spoke, marched and made impassioned calls for justice. What made the action unique was its intersectional approach to sexual assault, focusing on the experiences of low-income women of color.

Ahead of the march, Brenda Gutierrez, founder of the #MeToo March International organization, said in an emailed press release: “We’ve all read the headlines about the rich, famous, and powerful men accused of sexual assault and harassment. What about the survivors from marginalized and underserved communities whose stories have not been told and who’ve have been forced to stay silent?” It was the voices of those women (and even some men) that were raised at the Saturday march.

So much has happened in the 13 months since the #MeToo movement gained steam after the high-profile revelations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein made headlines. Women who had spent years speaking out about their experiences began to be taken more seriously, including law professor Anita Hill, known for her testimony regarding sexual harassment by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas more than 25 years ago. Other women, who had been shamed into silence—perhaps because of the denigration women like Hill suffered through—began speaking out. Among them was Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused our newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were both in high school.

Although Kavanaugh, like Thomas, was ultimately confirmed to the top court, women have not given up on speaking out and seeking justice. The incredible electoral successes women enjoyed in the 2018 midterm races are part of a growing movement that has the power to reverberate beyond our current political moment and, in time, shape a framework friendlier to sexual assault survivors. Notably, brown and black women especially broke representation records in many states, as did Muslim women, indigenous women and LGBT candidates.

At Saturday’s march, nonwhite women took center stage, purposefully taking up space in a tourist-thronged central location in Hollywood—the heart of where white male supremacist ideals of beauty are perpetuated. Hollywood is the birthplace of an industry that has focused on men and their stories for far too long, and where women and people of color are routinely depicted, if at all, as tangential foils and props. In this space, Gutierrez, who is a sexual assault survivor, told me that the choice of the location was to “let Hollywood know that [sexual assaults have] happened in Hollywood, but it’s happening in our communities as well.”

One of the rally speakers, Karla Estrada, is an undocumented immigrant registered with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. She is also the founder of Undocutravelers and is an immigration paralegal. She explained to me that it is crucial for American feminists who identify with the #MeToo movement to show solidarity with female refugees in the Central American refugee caravan that President Donald Trump has so deeply politicized. “Those women are fleeing persecution, sexual violence and domestic abuse,” she said. “Where is the Me Too movement in that?”

Estrada also addressed the disturbing way in which undocumented women in the U.S. have become fearful of reporting sexual violence with the Trump administration in power. “Our demographic is more likely to get assaulted and raped, and less likely to report it to the authorities,” she said. As a paralegal, Estrada deals with many undocumented women navigating the legal system and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. She says she has learned that “women get raped in ICE facilities, not only by other inmates, but by the agents themselves.” She related cases in which women told her, “My kid was molested by an ICE agent and they told me, ‘Why are you coming to my country if you didn’t want that to happen to your kid?’ ” Estrada says that while she has managed to find resources to help her deal with her own experiences of sexual assault, many undocumented women lack such access.

Transgender women and men, while well represented at Saturday’s event, are nearly invisible in society as survivors of rape and assault. The Human Rights Campaign cites shocking statistics, noting: “Studies suggest that around half of transgender people and bisexual women will experience sexual violence at some point in their lifetimes.” Miliana Singh, who works as the health care and transgender services coordinator for the LGBT Center, also spoke at the #MeToo march as a survivor of sexual assault. She explained that among the challenges transgender women like her face is that they’re often not allowed into women-only spaces to speak about their traumas. But the movement she has witnessed blossoming around her spurred her into action. “Everything that’s happened with the Me Too movement has really moved me to come forward, because I recently just came out about my sexual assault,” Singh said.

Another demographic that is disproportionately affected by sexual violence is disabled Americans. Engracia Figueroa who has a spinal-cord injury and uses a wheelchair, said she was assaulted when she was in her 20s during her hospital recovery. She said that disabled people are vulnerable to rape and sexual assault because “predators know their prey.” She explained that “those who are in institutions, facilities or hospitals are very vulnerable to abuse.” Worse, she said, “Many people will not even believe them” when they say they have been abused. When I asked her what justice would look like, she said, “When you’re finally able to speak out about it and not feel that humiliation, not feel that shame, the pain gets lessened—because there will never be enough compensation.” She added, “Justice is when you feel that you’re finally able to speak out, and that maybe no one else will go through it.”

Although men are less likely than women to be sexually violated, male victims of sexual violence are relatively invisible in our culture. Civil rights attorney Hussain Turk marched Saturday and spoke on behalf of the many sexual assault survivors he has worked with who are seeking justice. But he also represented himself, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. “It’s more challenging for male victims to come forward,” he said. “The toxicity of masculinity tells us that we can’t be weak, we can’t be vulnerable and we can’t be victims.” Turk sees himself as part of the #MeToo movement on two levels: as a survivor and as a male ally. “As a man who has male privilege in a system that benefits from and depends on sexual violence against women and other marginalized people, I have the obligation to use the privilege and power that I have to create space and to enable other people to step up and talk about their experiences and heal,” he said.

Recording artist and social justice activist Keyanna Celina, who performed at the rally, expressed her optimism for the growing movement, saying, “This is just the beginning. I see this becoming not just a movement, but a revolution that sweeps the globe.”

Wildfires Are Destroying California, and Utility Customers May Be Stuck Paying for Damages

Wildfires are heavily afflicting California for the second year in a row. The most destructive, called the Camp Fire, is the worst in the state’s history in terms of deaths; it has killed at least 63 people while burning roughly 140,000 acres in and near the town of Paradise, 90 miles north of Sacramento. Now, as firefighters attempt to contain the blaze and residents pick up the pieces of their lives, one of the state’s largest utility companies is facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities for those fires. It’s more money, The New York Times reported Thursday, than the company’s insurance would cover, potentially leaving customers responsible for the bill.

Though investigators haven’t determined the cause of the Camp Fire, the utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), disclosed in a regulatory filing that “an outage and damage to a transmission tower were reported in the area shortly before the fire started last week,” the Times reports.

Citigroup estimated that the company already owes approximately $15 billion for fires in 2017, and may owe another $15 billion if its equipment is found to have caused the Camp Fire. Some fear these billions could be passed on to consumers.

PG&E, which has 16 million customers in California, saw its stocks tumble 52 percent this week, according to Marketwatch.

PG&E is defending its record, saying it blames global warming for the wildfires. Tim Hynes, head of North American research at Debtwire, accepts this argument, telling Marketwatch, “The company has been around for more than 100 years and its equipment has not caused wildfires like this in the past.”

However, Marketwatch points out, “PG&E is already facing liabilities from wildfires that raged in 2017, destroying more than 245,000 acres.”

The Times concurs, pointing out that “[s]tate officials have determined that electrical equipment owned by PG&E, including power lines and poles, was responsible for at least 17 of 21 major fires in Northern California last fall. In eight of those cases, they referred the findings to prosecutors over possible violations of state law.”

PG&E’s detractors allege that “poor maintenance of power poles and failure to trim vegetation around power lines is a major cause of fires,” the Times reports. The company’s safety initiatives are under investigation by California’s Public Utilities Commission.

The burden of the wildfires’ costs will go far beyond PG&E, the Times says: “Manufacturing companies could choose to move their businesses out of the service area or even the state. Residential customers within the utility’s territory then could be left to cover the costs.”

California state legislators have already allowed for this possibility. They’ve passed a bill—Senate Bill 901—protecting PG&E and similar companies from legal action, “allowing them to pass the expense on to ratepayers.”

The bill allows utility companies to sell bonds to cover liability costs, which they would pay off over time. The cost to the average consumer might be $5 a year for every $1 billion in bonds, according to PG&E. A spokesperson for the legislation’s sponsor, state Sen. Bill Dodd, did not elaborate on the reasoning behind it, telling the Times, “We were focused on 2017 and protecting the ratepayers from that fire.”

The new law applies to some of the 2017 fires and any starting in 2019. Praful Mehta, an analyst at Citigroup, told the Times that this legislative intervention might be the last. “It is unclear whether the political will exists, because it might be seen as a bailout.”

Federal Courts Rule Against Voter Suppression in Florida and Georgia

Federal courts in Georgia—and now Florida, on Thursday—are ordering election officials in both states to count thousands of ballots that previously had been rejected because of how voters signed and dated them.

In the past 24 hours, a fourth federal court ruling was issued in Georgia that will ensure an entire category of ballots must be counted—those cast by mail that had been rejected based on examining the absentee ballot envelope.

“Judge [Steven C.] Jones [of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia] is the fourth Federal judge in the past three business days to find that portions of the Secretary of State’s administration of the 2018 election violate the United States Constitution,” a statement from the Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Stacey Abrams said.

Abrams is hoping that as previously uncounted ballots trickle in, she will get enough votes to trigger a recount or a runoff with the GOP candidate who is leading, ex-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. While Judge Jones has opened the door a bit on counting more absentee ballots, he did not order more leniency on provisional ballots. Those are given to voters not on polling place lists, which was the other pool of uncounted votes eyed by Abrams.

“Hampered by shoddy record keeping as orchestrated by Brian Kemp, counties simply did not maintain the documentation that would have been necessary to ensure that every eligible vote cast was a vote counted,” said the campaign’s statement, which did not note how many additional votes were needed to trigger a recount or runoff.

(The campaign did reply to a request for updating those figures, where the counting will continue through Friday, based on a ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg earlier this week.)

First Federal Court Ruling in Florida

A similar scenario is unfolding in Florida, where Democrats in top races—led by Sen. Bill Nelson, who trails GOP Gov. Rick Scott by 12,500 votes—hope to enlarge the universe of rejected ballots that can be counted.  These absentee and provisional ballots were disqualified because the signatures on their envelopes did not appear to match records from voter registration files or signing pollbooks in past elections.

Early on Thursday, Chief Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court’s Northern District in Florida, ordered the state to allow voters whose absentee or provisional ballots had been rejected to return to county election offices with identifying information to allow those ballots to now be counted. He extended the deadline for this “cure” through Saturday at 5 p.m.

“What this case comes down to is without procedural safeguards, the use of signature matching is not reasonable and may lead to unconstitutional disenfranchisement,” Walker’s injunction said.

“Let this Court be clear: it is NOT ordering county canvassing boards to count every mismatched vote, sight unseen,” the Court order said. “Rather the county supervisors of election are directed to allow these voters who should have had an opportunity to cure these ballots in the first place, to cure their vote by mail and provisional ballots now, before the second official results [from ongoing statewide recounts] are fully counted.”

Walker’s ruling came hours before all Florida counties are slated to finish the first round of three statewide recounts by 3 p.m. Thursday—in races for governor, senator and agriculture commissioner. If the winning margins in any of those races (or other county-level races) are less than 0.25 percent, which will be the case in Nelson’s race, then the recount process goes to round two. There, ballots with no votes for Senate (called under-votes) or multiple votes (over-votes) will be manually examined, to further refine totals until a winner is officially declared.

This first ruling by Walker is very significant because he has more than a half-dozen federal lawsuits before him that challenge details of how Florida is counting its votes. On Wednesday, he held a five-hour-plus hearing that touched on many more issues than whether or not Florida’s signature-matching standards amounted to state-managed voter suppression.

The bottom line for trialing Democrats, however, whether Sen. Nelson or gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, is that there does not appear to be a deep reserve of uncounted ballots—in unopened absentee and provisional ballot envelopes due to signature mismatches—based on figures from top Florida election officials during Wednesday’s hearing.

Maria Matthews, the Florida Division of Election director, said there were 3,688 rejected absentee and 93 rejected provisional ballots in 45 of Florida’s 67 counties. Her data didn’t include some of the most populous counties, namely Miami-Dade and Duval (Jacksonville). Palm Beach County, where there are 31,000 ballots with no votes cast in the Senate race—possibly due to a confusing ballot design—reported 931 rejected ballots.

“It is 3,000? Is it 50,000? The people of Florida ought to know,” Walker asked from the bench, frustrated that the state officials did not have more complete figures. While lawyers for Florida’s Attorney General and its Secretary of State told Walker they would file updated numbers, his Thursday ruling did not include that accounting—which would be a revealing lens into the likelihood of Democrats prevailing.

“It would be nice if people actually know what we were talking about,” the judge said in his closing remarks to the Republican lawyers after a five-hour hearing. “We hear all kinds of misinformation that undermines faith in our democracy.”

What Next in Florida?

Walker’s ruling—which Republicans said they would appeal—suggested that he would only intervene when there are specific vote-counting practices that prevent all eligible voters from casting ballots that count.

“Here, the injury [to voters] is the deprivation of the right to vote based on a standardless determination made by laypeople that the signature on a voter’s vote by mail or provisional ballot does not match the signature on file with the supervisor of elections,” he wrote. “There are dozens of reasons a signature mismatch may occur, even when the individual signing is in fact the voter. Disenfranchisement of approximately 5,000 voters based on signature mismatch is a substantial burden.”

What Walker would not do was upend the state’s vote-counting timetable, even though Nelson’s lawyers argued that the process should be delayed for at least several weeks. (In response, the Republicans said that could leave the state without a new governor in January 2019.) Walker looked past the hyperbole from both sides to see where small adjustments could be made.

“I don’t understand how a handful of people in 67 counties can’t show up with proof in the next few days, can’t show up with proof and cast a ballot,” Walker replied to the GOP lawyers’ concerns and objections to making any change in the current process. “You are counting military ballots anyway.”

Walker is referring to civilian and military ballots from overseas, which federal law allows to be counted up to 10 days after Election Day—as long as they are postmarked by November 6. Just like rejected absentee and provisional ballots, they are segregated and handled separately, which is not a big administrative burden.

But most telling, Walker repeatedly raised the shadow of the 2000 Florida presidential recount, where the U.S. Supreme Court changed the rules in the middle of the process—to stop the count—and declare George W. Bush the winner in its infamous Bush v. Gore ruling.

He repeatedly asked Democrats if they wanted a federal court to tear apart and rewrite Florida’s vote counting laws in the middle of close elections—a clear reference to other lawsuits on his desk filed by Nelson’s campaign and other interest groups.

“Isn’t it a bad idea to have a federal judge rewrite the entire election code as the votes are being counted?” he asked. “This just seems like a really bad way to do this.… Years ago, we were choosing the leader of the free world. Now we are choosing a senator and a governor? What do you say to that, Mr. [Uzoma] Nkwonta (the lead lawyer arguing for Democrats)?”

Walker’s subsequent ruling showed his Court was sensitive to ensuring that as many uncounted ballots as possible be vetted and counted—while putting some of that burden on voters to return to county election boards to “cure” whatever identity verification issues prompted their ballots to be rejected.

While adding potentially several thousand more votes to Florida’s totals on Saturday may not be enough to re-elect an incumbent U.S. senator or a new Democratic governor, Walker’s ruling suggested he would order Florida election officials to make small adjustments to their counting timetable.

“You all have these competing interests, but when is the error [in not counting votes] big enough that it is a structural problem?” he asked in Wednesday’s hearing. “Last time I checked, 500 votes selected the leader of the free world… sent troops into Afghanistan.”

Outside the courtroom, Walker’s ruling will set in motion a scramble by the Democrats to identify and urge their absentee and provisional voters to see if their ballots were rejected, and, if so, go to county offices with needed IDs. That chase is exactly what the Georgia Democratic Party and Abrams campaign has been doing for days.

In both states, the federal courts are opening the door for more votes to be counted. But whether that will be sufficient to elect Democrats is not just an open question. So far, based on the available data on uncounted votes, the odds of success appear to be steep for Democrats in both states.

Nonetheless, federal courts are ruling that these two GOP-run states have election rules that are suppressing votes.

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

The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep

Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.

Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party’s mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources—endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.

Pelosi has earned a reputation as an excellent manager, and she has certainly managed to keep herself in power atop Democrats in the House. She’s a deft expert on how Congress works, but she seems out of touch—intentionally or not—with the millions of grassroots progressives who are fed up with her kind of leadership.

Those progressives should not reconcile with Pelosi, any more than they should demonize her. The best course will involve strategic confrontations—nonviolent, emphatic, civilly disobedient—mobilizing the power of protest as well as electoral activism within Democratic primaries.

Such well-planned actions as Tuesday’s “Green New Deal” sit-in at Pelosi’s Capitol office serve many valuable purposes. (Along the way, they help undermine the absurd right-wing Fox News trope that portrays her as some kind of leftist.) Insistently advocating for strong progressive programs and calling Pelosi out on her actual positions despite nice-sounding rhetoric can effectively widen the range of public debate. Over time, the process creates more space and momentum for a resurgent left.

There is much to counter at the top of the party. Pelosi still refuses to support single-payer enhanced “Medicare for all.” As on many other issues, she—and others, such as the more corporate-friendly House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer—are clinging to timeworn, Wall Street-friendly positions against powerful political winds generated by years of grassroots activism.

Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, “The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.” The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members.

Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi’s current embrace of a “pay-go” rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump’s major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.”

Whether our concerns involve militarism, social equity, economic justice, civil liberties, climate change or the overarching necessity of a Green New Deal, the Democratic Party must change from the bottom up. That means progressives across the country should run candidates from precinct levels upward and maintain pressure on all elected officials, including the congressional Democrats with progressive records.

Newly elected House members will raise the total membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to about 90. A dozen caucus members are in line to chair House committees in the new Congress; another 30 are set to chair subcommittees. The Progressive Caucus is now co-chaired by Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, two of the strongest progressive lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The contrasts between their advocacy and the meanderings of the caucus’s more tepid members are sometimes striking.

During the Obama years, by deferring to top-tier party leaders, many in the Progressive Caucus showed themselves to be unreliable advocates for progressive causes when push came to shove—during the 2009 health care debate, for example. Yet the left-leaning tendencies in the caucus can now be strengthened and reinforced—if constituent pressure is insistent. When necessary, that insistence should include credible threats of launching primary challenges.

While the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee, gave ground this year on such matters as internal party democracy (disempowering superdelegates in the process), senior Democrats have retained a firm hold on such powerful mechanisms as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It is emblematic of a larger problem that in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, an unrelenting series of DCCC emails to millions of recipients featured appeals from such standard party figures as James Carville, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer—none of whom supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. The emails reflect how lopsided and corporate the power structures of the DCCC and top-ranking Democrats in Congress remain.

In sync with such corporate sensibilities, some of the party’s big mainline names are now mobilizing to pressure incoming Democrats to support Pelosi for speaker. “Democratic Party luminaries are calling members-elect on Pelosi’s behalf,” Politico reported this week; they include New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Vice President Al Gore and former Secretary of State John Kerry.

This year, many progressive individuals and organizations have moved beyond the false choice of either building movements or seriously trying to win elections. We can and must do both—simultaneously, not sequentially—to the benefit of both parallel tasks. The Republican Party’s loss of the House was largely due to decisions by substantial numbers of people on the left to engage with the electoral process as never before. Moving forward, we need to strengthen social movements, as well as electoral capacities, so we can end Republican rule and replace it with genuinely progressive governance.

 

The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves

In September 2016, the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught on fire. Originally built in 1928 and last renovated in 1982, the bridge carries more than 50,000 vehicles a day and serves as a main commuter link between the city’s central business district and its populous southern suburbs. Long in a state of questionable repair, it had been an object of particular concern after the spectacular and deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007. Pennsylvania had—and still has—one of the highest percentages of “structurally deficient” bridges in the nation, and the prospect of a failure of the Liberty Bridge, whose main span is nearly 45 feet above the Monongahela River, was terrifying to contemplate.

Nevertheless, it took six years after the I-35W disaster for Pennsylvania’s perennially Republican state legislature to pass a transportation spending bill to free up repair funds. In the interim, increasingly drastic weight restrictions had been imposed in order to prevent, or at least mitigate against, a Liberty Bridge failure or collapse.

Even after legislative approval, funding delays pushed the start of the project to 2015, and it was expected to last 30 months. The blaze that engulfed the bridge burned so hot it buckled one of the main support beams, and an investigation determined that the contractor had failed to follow proper fire safety protocols. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined it several thousand dollars. It faced a more substantial penalty of $3 million from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, but then the PennDOT decided to simply waive the fine.

There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with “good” insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”

This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world.

But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call “economics.” The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who’s compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or who’s watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida.

Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe, too, although this past summer’s tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be the closest continental analogue to our own United States. American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.

The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million people in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in less than two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the process. Imagine a commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier place on paper. Well, its supposedly liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.

To be fair, New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot build a single mile of subway for less than $2 billion.

Elsewhere, the con artists running America’s military-industrial complex are worried that the hundreds of billions we sink every year into planes that cannot fly in the rain and ships that cannot steer have left the United States virtually unable to win any wars. The United States spends perhaps a trillion dollars every year on its military and wars.

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.

I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers at someone else’s church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot basement room and into the cold rain. There were only three voting machines. One was broken, and one seemed to be working only intermittently. A young woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After we’d waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Can you believe this is how we do this?” she said. “In 2018.”

I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, “Yes. I can believe it.”

Northern California Fire Death Toll at 56; 130 missing

MAGALIA, Calif.—As the scope of a deadly Northern California wildfire set in, the sheriff said more than 450 people had now been assigned to comb through the charred remains in search for more bodies. The blaze has killed at least 56 people and authorities say 130 are unaccounted for.

Many of the missing are elderly and from Magalia, a forested town of about 11,000 to the north of Paradise.

The one major roadway that runs through the mostly residential town is dotted with gas stations, a pizza shop, a hair salon and Chinese restaurant and convenience stores. There is no Main Street or town center. Resident Johnny Pohmagevich says a Rite Aid on the main road is as much of a center as the town has.

“When I say downtown I mean Paradise,” said Pohmagevich, who opted to stay in Magalia even as fire closed in.

Pohmagevich, an 18-year Magalia resident who works at Timber Ridge Real Estate and lives just up the road from many burned homes, said he stayed to protect his employer’s property from looters and to prepare some cabins and mobile homes so business tenants can live if they come back.

“If this town does recover, it’s going to take many, many years,” he said.

A week after the deadly Camp Fire struck, police teams drive around Magalia searching for those still in their homes, checking if they need any food and water. Crews from Pacific Gas & Electric are also in the area. With the death toll at 56, it is the deadliest wildfire in a century. There were also three fatalities from separate blazes in Southern California.

As officials raised the loss of homes to nearly 8,800 Wednesday, Sheriff Kory Honea said the task of recovering remains had become so vast that his office brought in another 287 searchers Wednesday, including National Guard troops, bringing the total number of searchers to 461 plus 22 cadaver dogs. He said a rapid-DNA assessment system was expected to be in place soon to speed up identifications of the dead, though officials have tentatively identified 47 of the 56.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke joined California Gov. Jerry Brown Wednesday on a visit to the nearby leveled town of Paradise, telling reporters it was the worst fire devastation he had ever seen.

“Now is not the time to point fingers,” Zinke said. “There are lots of reasons these catastrophic fires are happening.” He cited warmer temperatures, dead trees and the poor forest management.

Brown, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump’s policies, said he spoke with Trump, who pledged federal assistance.

“This is so devastating that I don’t really have the words to describe it,” Brown said, saying officials would need to learn how to better prevent fires from becoming so deadly .

It will take years to rebuild, if people decide that’s what should be done, said Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“The infrastructure is basically a total rebuild at this point,” Long said.

While most of the town of Paradise was wiped out, in Magalia, a sharp dividing line marks those that survived and those that did not.

“Magalia has so many trees. I honestly can’t believe it just didn’t get leveled,” said Sheri Palade, an area real estate agent.

For some, the areas left untouched offered a ray of hope.

Tom Driver, the office manager and elder at Magalia Community Church, said he had heard the church survived the blaze, though he did not know the status of his own home.

“I’ve been able to account for all of the congregation,” said Driver, who is staying with family in Oakland. “They’re all over the place but they got out in pretty good time.”

Driver said many residents of Magalia work at the university in Chico or out of their homes. When the blaze spread into Paradise, residents there drove down and faced horrendous traffic. Driver said he and some others in Magalia were able to escape north on a winding narrow road that put them ahead of the fire, not behind it.

Kim Bonini heard someone on a bullhorn two blocks over on Thursday urging people to leave. The power in her home had gone out that morning, leaving her only with her car radio to tell her if she needed to leave.

“My cell didn’t work, my house phone didn’t work, nothing. Nothing except for me crawling into my car,” Bonini said from her daughter’s home in Chico on Wednesday. “If I wouldn’t have heard them two blocks down I wouldn’t have known I had to evacuate.”

The cause of the fire remained under investigation, but it broke out around the time and place that a utility reported equipment trouble.

___

Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco, Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California and Andrew Selsky in Salem, Oregon, also contributed to this report.

Why Amazon Wants a Piece of Our Political and Financial Capitals

Amazon made its long-awaited announcement this week, revealing where it will site its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The selection process pitted over 200 cities against each other, vying for the prospect of hosting the new corporate campus with its promised 50,000 well-paying, white-collar jobs. Politicians prostrated themselves before the online behemoth and its CEO/founder, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, as they competed to lavish the company with as many enticing public subsidies and tax breaks as possible. The winning city would flourish, they hoped, with increasing tax revenues and the emergence of a vibrant tech hub to rival Silicon Valley. In the end, Amazon announced that HQ2 would be divided into two smaller locations, one in Queens, New York, and the other in Crystal City, Virginia. While the details of the publicly financed subsidies remain shrouded, what is known so far is enough to confirm the worst fears of Amazon’s many critics: The HQ2 auction was, at best, a boondoggle, yet another example of corporate welfare, transferring wealth from working-class taxpayers to a massive corporation and its billionaire owner.

“I am absolutely outraged that New York, under Governor Cuomo, is willing to give away up to $3 billion of taxpayers’ money without any consultation,” progressive Democratic New York state Assembly Member Ron Kim said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, the day after Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio released details of New York City’s winning bid for the scaled-down HQ2. “I’m introducing legislation to claw back this deal,” he continued. “What’s the point of having a majority progressive Democrat state Senate, that we worked so hard for in the state of New York, if we can’t stop one man from transferring $3 billion of taxpayers’ money to the richest man on this planet?” Kim was referring to last week’s Democratic Party takeover of the New York state Senate for only the third time in the past half-century. Along with the Democrat-controlled Assembly in which he serves, Kim is optimistic that the generous subsidies can be rescinded.

Time magazine calculated that it takes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos only nine seconds to earn $28,000, what the median Amazon worker earns in a year. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First has long watchdogged what he calls “persistent megadeals” like New York and Virginia’s courting of HQ2. “It’s another example of Amazon getting paid to do what it would have done anyway,” he said on “Democracy Now!” “It wanted to be in the financial capital of the world and the political capital of the country, so no surprises about its location. We’re massively subsidizing, yet again, a company to do what it wants to do anyway.”

In response to de Blasio’s claim that HQ2 will provide opportunities “for tens of thousands of New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers, kids who come up through our public schools, kids who go to our community colleges and our four-year colleges,” LeRoy says that “four out of five, typically, of the new job takers at a project like this will not be current residents of New York or Arlington [Virginia]. They will be people moving to the area from outside. That means a lot of growth getting induced, a lot of schools having to be expanded and infrastructure built and public services provided.” All these paid for by the taxpayers, not by Amazon.

LeRoy also notes that Amazon “is the biggest cloud computing company in the world. It has roughly a 40 percent market share. And among its most lucrative clients in that space are the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies.” That’s why the other HQ2 is planned for Crystal City, Virginia — as LeRoy says, “very close — literally, practically a stone’s throw from — the Pentagon.”

“Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market — It Wants to Become the Market,” read a headline for a Nation article written by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “It’s now capturing one out of every two dollars that Americans spend online,” she said on “Democracy Now!” Additionally, it kills small businesses. “We’re losing about two retail jobs for every one job created in an Amazon warehouse,” she said. The central threat, she added, is that “Amazon is about controlling the essential infrastructure that other companies need to use in order to reach the market … if you’re any company producing or retailing anything, increasingly, if you want to be able to reach consumers, you have to become a seller on Amazon’s platform. And what that means is that Amazon now controls your business.”

Jeff Bezos originally called his company “Cadabra,” as in “abracadabra,” but, legend has it, his lawyer told him it sounded too much like “cadaver.” Will Amazon’s HQ2 spark a magical, high-tech age in Queens, or will it kill small businesses, drive up rents and leave the cadaver of a working-class neighborhood in its wake?

Wildfire Is Called Deadliest in U.S. in a Century

Wildfire experts say the Northern California wildfire that has killed at least 56 is the deadliest in a century.

California officials say the fire burning in a rural area far north of San Francisco killed more people than any blaze in the state’s recorded history.

But the U.S. government doesn’t closely track civilian casualties and records from long ago are incomplete.

Stephen Pyne, a regent professor at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and author of “Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America,” and Crystal Kolden, a professor at the University of Idaho and expert in fire science, said 1918 was the last time more people were killed in a wildfire.

“For the modern era, this is definitely going to go down as the deadliest on record for the U.S.,” said Kolden, who has studied wildfires for 20 years since she worked as a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service.

A century ago, the Cloquet Fire broke out in drought-stricken northern Minnesota and raced through a number of rural communities, destroying thousands of homes and killing an estimated 1,000 people. The fire helped prompt the federal government to start developing firefighting practices and policies.

Pyne, who was a firefighter before he began researching wildfires in 1977, said U.S. government agencies still don’t keep good statistics on civilian casualties from wildfires.

“Fire statistics are not very good because they’re remotely generated,” he said. “It’s very hard to find out even how many houses burned in a year.”

Post-9/11 War Costs Approaching $6 Trillion

Spending associated with U.S. military operations since Sept. 11, 2001, is on track to reach $5.9 trillion by 2019, according to a new report from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The study, a part of the Costs of War project, also noted that the U.S. is involved in counterterrorism operations in 76 countries but that without any exit strategies in sight, global security is at risk.

The study estimated that the Department of Defense will have spent $822 billion in Iraq since 2003 and $975 billion in Afghanistan since 2001. The U.S. is on track to spend an additional $808 billion across all military operations by 2023 for a cumulative cost of $6.7 trillion.

“In sum, high costs in war and war-related spending pose a national security concern because they are unsustainable,” wrote the study’s author, Neta C. Crawford, a professor of political science at Brown. “The public would be better served by increased transparency and by the development of a comprehensive strategy to end the wars and deal with other urgent national security priorities,” she added.

A large military budget stands in direct opposition to fighting climate change, the study argues, because money that goes to the Department of Defense—which uses more oil and petroleum products than any other entity in the world—would be better allocated toward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, operations overseen by the Pentagon released an average of 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year between 2010 and 2015. Additionally, during that same period, the Pentagon purchased 102 million barrels of fuel per year, on average.

To arrive at the total cost of $5.9 trillion, Crawford tallied spending by the Department of Defense, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as national costs associated with health and disability care for veterans, interest on military debt and anti-terrorism initiatives.

“The fact that the US keeps spending huge sums for wars that, at least in Afghanistan, are in a stalemate, and in Iraq and Syria, are unresolved, is a long-term budgetary problem which will affect future generations,” Crawford wrote.