Chris Hedges's Blog, page 417

An American Tragedy: Awarding a War Criminal on Veterans Day

The whole charade plays best as farce. Absurdity incarnate. The sight of former President George W. Bush receiving a medal from Democrat Joe Biden—once an ardent opponent of Bush’s war policy—in Philadelphia for “his work with veterans,” on Veterans Day no less, induced nothing short of a gag from this veteran of two Bush wars—Iraq and Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, after all, led the U.S. military—to which I’ve dedicated my adult life—into two ill-advised perpetual wars, one of which was objectively illegal and immoral. In that war, in Iraq, some 7,000 American troops—including three of mine—were killed fighting in an unwinnable quagmire. Furthermore, though it slipped the attention of an American citizenry best known for its provincial inwardness, at least 250,000 Iraqis—mostly civilians—were killed. In a just world this would be labeled what it is—a war crime—but in this era of American hegemony, the populace simply sighs with apathy.

Now, we are told, it is time to congratulate Mr. Bush on his post-presidency work with the very veterans he created. Somehow, his choice to spend his retirement painting the faces of the misemployed, and often damaged, veterans he brought into being absolves him from the crimes of what this author is certain will be remembered as one of the worst presidencies in history. This fanfare is post-factual and illogical, but it certainly reflects our times.

Only in the era of Donald Trump could such a flawed and ignoble figure as George W. Bush appear gallant. Then again, we should have seen it coming. When a bipartisan consensus of warhawks turned out to share candy and venerate the militaristic legacy of Sen. John McCain—complete  with both Barack Obama and George W. Bush as keynote speakers—it was only a matter of time until Bush and his murderous administration were rehabilitated.

And it makes sense that it was Biden who bestowed the medal. “Smiling Joe” might have turned against that failing Iraq War by 2006, but let us remember that Biden—along with Democrats Hilary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid—voted for that very war in October 2002. The whole moment was shameful, and a farcical—if accurate—parody of the entire U.S. bipartisan warfare state. Biden’s boss, Barack Obama, after all, was the very man who chose not to investigate or indict the veritable war criminals in his predecessor’s administration. Obama claimed that he did so in the name of national unity; yet given his own militaristic record, it seems he did so only to perpetuate an American warfare state in the Middle East.

Shame on Joe Biden; shame on Barack Obama; shame on all the elite officials who play politics but refuse to forswear the tactics and policies of U.S. government militarism that has been in business since 9/11/2001. One group, at least, refused to bow to the—little reported—Bush award ceremony: About Face, Veterans Against the War, an organization I’m proud to be a part of, bravely chose to protest the farce in Philadelphia. As they blocked the entrances to the gala (for which tickets started at $1,000 each), these veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan chanted against the expansion of the warfare state and the shameful award bestowed upon Bush. As is so often the case in apathetic America, hardly anyone noticed, and the mainstream media quickly moved on.

This veteran, for one, did not avert his eyes. His eyes teared as he watched fellow veterans—victims of the Bush wars of choice—protest his absurd award ceremony. I thought of Sgt. Alexander J. Fuller, my favorite soldier, who died at the hands of Iraqi Shiite militias who should have been the natural allies of the United States in the “war on terror.” Only Bush—who famously didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Arabs—found a way to lead the U.S. Army into an illogical conflict with them, too.

I’ll never forgive George W. Bush, no matter how many portraits he paints. Perhaps if I was as “good” a Christian as he, I would. But I’m not that guy. Bush’s ill-advised wars stole my friends, my youth, my mental health and my trust in the American state. That can’t be replaced. In my younger years, an emotional 23-year-old version of myself probably wished ill on him and his. I no longer feel that way. I wish only the best for Mr. Bush, his wife and his family. But I, and no serious veteran and scholar of the Iraq wars, will ever countenance his rehabilitation or commemoration.

——

Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

The Signs of Creeping Fascism Are All Around Us

The talking heads I saw on cable news last week seemed baffled and disgusted by Donald Trump’s response to a black female reporter’s comment during his angry press conference following the midterm elections.

The reporter, the so-called Public Broadcasting Service’s Yamiche Alcindor, stated that the president had called himself a “nationalist” on the campaign trail last month. “Some people,” Alcindor said, “saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying. …”

Before she could finish, the visibly agitated president interrupted her. “I don’t know why you say that,” Trump interjected. “That is such a racist question.”

Alcindor remained cool and continued her question: “Some people say the Republican Party is now supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric.”

“I don’t believe it,” Trump retorted. Pointing his finger at Alcindor, he said, “Let me tell you, that’s a racist question. …You know what the word is? I love our country. I do. You have nationalists, you have globalists … but to say that, what you said, is so insulting to me. It’s a very terrible thing what you said!”

While I share the talking heads’ repulsion over Trump’s battering of Alcindor, I found his outburst—one of many dark moments in the president’s faceoff with those he calls “enemies of the people” (reporters)—neither surprising nor difficult to understand.

It helped that I’d just finished reading Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley’s new book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” a timely study of fascist politics past and present.

Stanley examines how modern authoritarian and nationalist—“fascist,” if you like (Stanley obviously does)—politicos have used and subverted purportedly democratic electoral politics to gain power. He finds 10 common themes animating fascist ideology and propaganda:

Invocation of a mythic national past marked by racial, ethnic, religious and/or cultural purity—a supposedly glorious history to which the nation needs to return.
Propagandistic use of outwardly virtuous ideals (including anti-corruption, democracy, liberty and free speech) to advance abhorrent ends that contradict those ideals.
An anti-intellectual assault on education, universities, science, expertise and language, accompanied by charges of Marxism and “political correctness” against liberal and leftist enemies and the advance of simplistic nationalist and authoritarian ideals. This is fertile soil for the deadly denial of climate change that has occurred and for such absurd claims as the notion that whites are now more damaged by racism than are black, Latinx and Native American people in the U.S.
An insidious attack on truth and on people’s ability to perceive and agree on truth. Regular and repeated obvious lying is combined with the advance of conspiracy theories and the promotion of “news as sports” and demagogic strongmen as “stars.”
An ugly faith in natural hierarchies of worth and a rejection of equality as dangerous, unnatural, Marxist and liberal delusion.
An aggrieved and counterfeit sense of victimhood among dominant “us” groups (racial, ethnic and/or religious) that feel threatened by having to share citizenship, resources and power with minority groups (“them”). This ironic victimology feeds an oppressive nationalism devoted to maintaining “natural” hierarchies and uniting “chosen” but supposedly oppressed racial, ethnic, religious groups (whites in the U.S., Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India, and so on.) against the supposedly false claims and unjust demands of “them”—those designated as “naturally” inferior others.
A stern embrace of law and order that targets minority others (“them”) as criminal threats to the safety and security of the majority (“us”).
Sexual anxiety about the threat supposedly posed by minority, criminal and alien others to “our” traditional male roles, status and family values.
A loathing of cities seen as racially and sexually corrupt, ethnically impure, sexually perverse, parasitic criminal zones loaded with a polyglot mass of some inferior, nation-weakening “them.” By contrast, the rural countryside is lauded as the noble wellspring of virtue, strength, self-sufficiency and racial-ethnic purity. The rural heartland/fatherland/motherland/homeland is the sacred and foundational “blood and soil” preserve of “us.” It is the noble native soil of the “volk”—the true ancestral people who embody the spirit of a once-grand nation that needs to be made great again through the defeat of liberal and supposedly leftist elites who have been giving the nation’s resources and power away to naturally inferior others (“them”).
A sense of the chosen-people majority (“us”) as hard-working, upright, virtuous and deserving, combined with the notion of demonized minorities and others (“them”) as lazy, dissolute, shifty and undeserving.

Trump’s response to Alcindor was a perfect match for the sixth of Stanley’s 10 fascist leitmotifs. How did the president turn the reporter’s mild query into a shameful expression of anti-white “racism”? Only by the possession or pretense of an oppressor-nationalist worldview that sees any suggestion of white racism as an infuriating affront to the supposed real victims of racism: white Americans. By denouncing Trump’s response to Alcindor as mere nonsense, CNN’s panelists missed the point.

It was just one of many episodes in which Trump has checked the boxes on Stanley’s list of core fascist themes. Consider Trump’s:

Three-year-old ballcap slogan, “Make America Great Again” (likely lifted from empowered Hungarian fascists’ call to “make Hungary great again”).
Claim to be “drain[ing] the swamp” while filling his administration with thoroughly corrupt swamp creatures.
Designation of his authoritarian racist and hate-filled campaign rallies—events where he denounces reporters as “enemies of the people” and even applauds repressive violence against them and others—as “free speech” demonstrations.
Climate-science denial and taste for conspiracy theories.
Relentless totalitarian mendacity and endless nonsensical assertions, utterly devoid of evidence.
Constant leveling of the charge of “fake news” against any reporting or commentary that questions his political agenda and purported greatness.
Absurd advance-pardon of a racist sheriff who built Nazi-like internment and work camps for Latinx arrestees.
Savage punitive separation of Central American children from their migrant parents at the southern U.S. border.
Defense of white supremacists who marched through the University of Virginia campus, chanting “Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us” (Heather Heyer, a young woman protesting the fascists, was killed at that 2017 event).
Obvious underlying belief that African-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and women are inherently inferior to white men and unworthy of respect and equality.
Repeated claims that leading black personalities are “low IQ,” “stupid” and the like.
Repeated and barely coded racist appeals to “law and order.”
Repeated false description of immigrants as rapists and other kinds of terrible criminals, not to mention “animals.”
Mad executive order claiming to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship to people born on U.S. soil.
Clear disdain and distrust of scientists, real expertise, intellectuals and independent judges and lawyers.
Repeated reference to the predominantly white and agrarian, small-town heartland as the real soul of the nation and his related special taste for holding demagogic, fascist-style rallies in heavily white, rural, red-meat, red state regions.
Regular false description of centrist and liberal corporate Democrats as “the left” and as “socialists.”

That’s just a short list of how Trump’s rhetoric and conduct has lined up with the noxious politics of fascism, which holds power in a shocking number of nations today. (Stanley might have added a special chapter on hypermasculinist militarism and misogyny, both major Trump themes. Perhaps, too, it is time to start thinking about eco-fascism—the special dedication fascists show for assaulting livable ecology.)

Many U.S. Democrats will read Stanley’s book with a sense of self-satisfied validation over his description of Trump and his party as fascists. That’s a shame, as well as a mistake. “How Fascism Works” should prompt Democrats to take a critical look in the mirror and at their party when it comes to how we got in this hot, neofascistic, political mess. Not content merely to describe fascist politics, Stanley seeks to explain its success, past and present. Fascism’s taproot, he finds, is harsh socioeconomic disparity:

Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality. … [T]he resentments bred by such divisions are tempting targets for demagogues. … Dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy … [such] inequality breeds delusions that mask reality, undermining the possibility of joint deliberation to sole society’s divisions. …

Under conditions of stark economic inequality, when the benefits of liberal education, and the exposure to diverse cultures and norms are available only to the wealthy few, liberal tolerance can be smoothly represented as elite privilege. Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is a fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.

Particularly perceptive is Stanley’s intimately related reflection on how the political culture of pseudo-democratic duplicity and disingenuousness that is generated by modern capitalist inequality and plutocracy creates space for fascistic politicians who appear to be sincere and signal authenticity by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such candidates, Stanley writes, “might openly side with Christians or Muslims and atheists, or native-born [white] Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks. … They might openly and brazenly lie … [and] signal authenticity by openly and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values.” Such politicians, Stanley argues, come off to many jaded voters as “a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy.” Fascist politicos’ “open rejection of democratic values” is “taken as political bravery, as a signal of authenticity.”

That is no small part of what has opened the door to malevolent far-right figures at home and abroad. The opening is provided by liberals and social democrats whose claims to speak on behalf of the popular majority and democracy are repeatedly discredited by their underlying commitment to dominant capitalist social hierarchies and oppression structures.

He does not say so (this is a problem with “How Fascism Works”), but Stanley surely knows that the neoliberal Democratic Party of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has partnered with Republicans in the creation of a New Gilded Age of spectacular democracy- and tolerance-disabling class disparity. The Democrats have participated for decades in the richly bipartisan making of plutocratic policies that have shifted wealth and income so far upward that three absurdly rich people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos) now possess as much wealth between them as the poorest half of Americans, while the top 10th of the upper 1 percent has as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent.

The inequality has come with remarkable doses of soul-numbing hypocrisy atop the Democratic Party, as well the Republican Party. Both have helped embody the cold and disingenuous manipulation of populism by elitism that Christopher Hitchens aptly called—in a 1999 study of Bill and Hillary Clinton—“the essence of American politics.”

When it has held significant measures of nominal power in America’s oxymoronic capitalist democracy, the Democratic Party has governed in accord with what David Rothkopf (a former Clinton administration official) once called “the violin model.” Under that model, Rothkopf said, “[Y]ou hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.” In other words, “you” gain and hold office with populace-pleasing, progressive-sounding rhetoric, even as you govern in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions and class hierarchies.

The Obama administration was a graphic violin lesson, to say the least. The first black president’s progressive-sounding “hope” and “change” presidency bailed out and protected the Wall Street financial institutions that collapsed the U.S. and global economy. It offered no remotely comparable bailout for working people and the poor. Barack Obama passed a Republican-inspired version of health insurance reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could truly love and abandoned his promise to pursue legislation to relegalize union organizing. Then he went after entitlements, offering Republicans bigger cuts to Social Security and Medicare than the right-wing part had dared to demand.

It was darkly consistent with the late, liberal-left, Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s 2008 reflection on what he called the “inauthentic opposition party.” “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied, they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.”

Wolin called it. A nominal Democrat was elected president, along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. The reigning system of corporate and imperial “inverted totalitarianism,” as Wolin designated it, was given a deadly, fake-democratic rebranding. The underlying rightward drift sharpened, fed by a widespread and easily Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal, as Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular base.

Then came the Hillary “Goldman Sachs” Clinton campaign, poisoned by the disconnect between her transparent elitist captivity to the nation’s top financial institutions. Clinton’s strikingly tepid populist pretense was undermined further when she called Trump’s “heartland” “flyover country” supporters a “basket of deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic progressive-neoliberal worldview) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.

The inauthentic, fake-progressive opposition problem—critical context for fascist political success—has lived on through the recent U.S. midterm elections. In response to the nativist, white-nationalist and totalitarian, reality-canceling, fascist-style politics of Trump and the ever more openly Orwellian Republicans, Democrats have not seen fit to follow Bernie Sanders’ progressive-populist lead to target the savage economic inequalities that Stanley rightly sees as an underlying cause of global fascism’s electoral march. Democrats’ moderately successful midterm strategy presented no threat to the masters of capitalist inequality. The party remains mired in the centrist progressive neoliberal formula that has reigned atop it since the 1990s: representational racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation diversity combined with an absence of any serious challenge to corporate and financial prerogatives. Its slight nods to populism are little more than calculating teases meant to keep more left-leaning and social-democratic voters on board without scaring off big campaign bankrollers and backers. The incisive leftist money-politics analyst Thomas Ferguson offered a telling reflection on Democrats’ persistent depressing captivity to the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money in a Jacobin interview published the morning of the midterms:

[T]he existing Democratic Party leadership is plainly trying to find ways to tap the burgeoning energy [provided by the Bernie Sanders democratic socialism insurgency] for purposes of increasing electoral turnout, while playing with the [Sanders] movement’s issues [single-payer and more] like a cat with a ball of yarn. … The hollowness of a much-touted Democratic reform proposal—that candidates should solemnly pledge to refuse corporate PAC money—is patent. It is a sham. … They know very well that big ticket donations from the 1 percent will still roll in, in several forms. … For Democrats to offer real solutions, the party has to break its dependency on big money. … If the Democrats are not to go the way of the social-democratic parties of continental Europe, they need to squarely address this question and offer real solutions.

As Nick Brana, a former Sanders staffer who heads the Movement for a People’s Party, noted one day after the midterms, the results are “a serious wake-up call for progressives” who continue to foolishly dream of gaining power by taking over the Democratic Party. By Brana’s account:

The four leading progressive organizations that emerged from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign endorsed Democratic candidates across 46 states. … Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed a combined 107 candidates for Congress this year. Forty-four of them won their primaries and only 12 won their general elections. Five of those 12 were already incumbents. Five more of them were longtime party politicians in line for higher office, rather than insurgent candidates. Only two of them were actually opposed by the party and unseated establishment Democrats in the primaries—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. There are 435 members of Congress.

It gets worse. Almost every candidate those groups endorsed for governor, lieutenant governor, and Senate, lost in the primary or the general election. That includes 13 candidates for governor, five candidates for [lieutenant] governor, and seven candidates for U.S. Senate. Incumbents Bernie Sanders and David Zuckerman were the only ones who won. … [T]he blue wave is a corporate wave that has swept in the same kind of Democratic politicians that drove working people into Donald Trump’s arms after eight years of Obama. When Democrats busy themselves serving the wealthy again, the result will be an even sharper lurch to the authoritarian right [emphasis added].

(Here I caution that Trump didn’t get anywhere near as many proletarian votes as many liberal and left observers keep saying. The main thing the dismal neoliberal Dems did in 2016 was demobilize the progressive base, not just push the white working-class into the arms of Trump.)

The main things distinguishing the new crop of largely moderate Democratic House members is how many of them are women and the remarkable amount of corporate money they raised, and not any noteworthy left progressivism. The centrist New Democrat Coalition endorsed 23 of the 29 Democrats who won in the House race.

The left historian Nancy Fraser’s 2017 argument that Clinton’s 2016 defeat marked “the end of progressive neoliberalism” (basically, corporate neoliberalism with a big overlay of metropolitan and bicoastal identity politics) and provided a great opportunity for anti-plutocratic progressives in the Sanders vein has not been born out. Under the cover of the “Moscow ate my homework” “Russiagate” narrative and the undeniable sheer horror of Trump and his party in power, establishment Democrats in the Clinton-Obama-Pelosi mode have kept the authentically progressive and oppositional insurgency within their own party’s ranks checked and contained.

Consistent with Brana’s take, the arch-neoliberal Democratic House leader and vanguard corporate Democrat Nancy Pelosi (regularly and absurdly described as a lead of “the left” in right-wing media) marked the “blue [corporate] wave” by promising Democratic cooperation with the white nationalist fearmonger-in-chief and claiming that it’s “a bipartisan marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong.” That’s a standard pragmatic promise of inauthentic opposition, appropriately enough from a leader of a party that has been voting Trump record defense budgets and chilling new surveillance powers even while (accurately) calling him a malignant narcissist, racist, sexist and even a fascist.

Hey, but who cares? The U.S. left media figure and Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara tells his readers and fellow DSA members to fight on trying to form a socialist caucus in the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party. Undeterred by political reality, Sunkara insists that boring from within the Democratic Party is the “most promising place for advancing left politics, at least in the short term.” No wake-up call from Jacobin.

Meanwhile, it seems clear that, as Ferguson says, “[T]he Republican Party is never going back to where it was before Trump, even if the establishment succeeded in putting Pence in his place. In politics, the ‘New Abnormal’ is, alas, the new ‘Normal.’ ” So it will remain, unless and until the creeping fascist party still mostly in power in the U.S. is seriously opposed by an actual and authentic popular opposition that goes after the extreme inequality that provides essential soil for the poisonous new fascist politics of the 21st century.

Robert Reich: The Time Has Come for ‘Medicare for All’

In the midterm elections, most Democrats who were elected or reelected to the House supported Medicare for All.

As Trump and Republicans in Congress try to undermine the Affordable Care Act and raise the costs of health care, the American people continue to push back.

Over 70% of Americans–and even 52% of Republicans–now support Medicare for All, a single-payer plan that builds on Medicare and would cover everyone at far lower cost than the current system.

Here are the facts:

Medicare for All is the cheapest and best direction for the country. Private for-profit insurers spend a fortune trying to attract healthy people while avoiding sick people, filling out paperwork from hospitals and providers, paying top executives, and rewarding shareholders.

And for-profit insurers are trying to merge like mad, in order to make even more money. This is why private for-profit health insurance is becoming so expensive, and why almost every other advanced nation–including our neighbor to the north–has adopted a single-payer system at less cost per person and with better health outcomes.

Administering Medicare is only 1.1 percent of its total costs; the rest goes directly into care. Even including Medicare Advantage, which involves private plans, total administrative costs are just 7 percent.

But private insurers spend about 12 percent of total costs on administration. Or put another way, Medicare’s 2016 administrative costs came to about $156 per person compared to over $594 per person with private insurance.

Medicare saves so much money for three simple reasons:

First, it has economies of scale. The more enrollees, the lower the cost per enrollee. Medicare for All would have even larger economies of scale, presumably lowering the per-person costs further.

Second, Medicare spends almost nothing on marketing and advertising, while for-profit insurers spend a fortune. 

Third, Medicare doesn’t have to earn profits.

Most Americans support expanding access to quality, affordable care through Medicare for All. Yet Trump and the Republicans continue to try to gut the Affordable Care Act and take away care from tens of millions.

The American public has a real choice here: expensive health care for the few or quality, affordable health care for the many. It’s time for Medicare for All.

Overheating Machines Complicate Florida’s Recount Battle

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida’s election recount drama is intensifying as lawyers return to court and tallying machines break down ahead of a Thursday deadline to complete reviews of the senate and governor races.

Much of the trouble centers on the Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach County, where tallying machines have overheated. That’s caused mismatched results with the recount of 174,000 early voting ballots, forcing workers to go back and redo their work with no time to spare.

A mechanic was flown in to fix the problems, but “we don’t have a lot of assurances,” Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher told WPTV Tuesday night. Bucher did not immediately respond to messages from The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Democrats planned to ask a federal judge on Wednesday to set aside the state law mandating that mailed-in votes be thrown out if the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the signature on file with election authorities.

The developments are sure to fuel frustrations among Democrats and Republicans as the recount unfolds more than a week after Election Day. Democrats have urged state officials to do whatever it takes to make sure every vote is counted. But Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have argued without evidence that voter fraud threatens to steal races from the GOP.

The state elections department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, both run by Republican appointees, have said they have seen no evidence of voter fraud. A Broward County judge challenged anyone who has evidence of fraud to file a report.

As it all plays out, the Republican candidates for governor and Senate, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott, still hold the narrowest of leads over their Democratic counterparts, Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson.

While the counting goes on, there are now four lawsuits pending in a Tallahassee federal court that seek to throw out ballot counting rules or extend the Thursday 5 p.m. deadline for recounts.

Marc Elias, a campaign attorney for Nelson, argued ahead of the looming court battle that “we should all be able to agree that the goal here is a legal and accurate count.” Republicans have responded by contending that Democrats want to bend or skirt existing election laws to alter the outcome.

“We got to keep the heat on these people to make sure they follow the law,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney to reporters on a recount update organized by Scott’s campaign.

At the Broward County elections center, about 30 workers kept around a dozen counting machines counting ballots on Wednesday morning. The process resembled feeding documents into a photocopier – they placed stacks into feeders, which run through about two or three ballots per second. Then workers grab another stack and repeat the process.

Trump on Tuesday called on Democratic Nelson to admit that he lost his re-election bid.

“When will Bill Nelson concede in Florida?” the president tweeted. “The characters running Broward and Palm Beach voting will not be able to ‘find’ enough votes, too much spotlight on them now!”

Presidents have historically sought to rise above the heated partisan drama surrounding election irregularities. Former President Barack Obama wasn’t so publicly involved when a recount and legal process in the 2008 election delayed a Democrat taking a Minnesota Senate seat until July 2009. Former President Bill Clinton struck a lower tone during the 2000 presidential recount, which also centered on Florida.

But this Florida recount has been personal for Trump. He aggressively campaigned in the state, putting his finger on the scales of the Republican gubernatorial primary this summer by endorsing DeSantis. After Election Day, Trump’s aides pointed to the GOP’s seeming success in the state as a validation that the president’s path to re-election remained clear — a narrative that has grown hazier as the outcomes have become less certain.

White House spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp said Tuesday the president “obviously has his opinion” on the recount.

“It’s been incredibly frustrating to watch,” she said.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump is attempting to bully Florida election officials out of doing their jobs. Schumer and Nelson, both Democrats, spoke with reporters Tuesday in Washington.

“It’s just plain wrong. It’s un-American.” Schumer said. “If he really wants an honest and fair election, President Trump will stop bullying, harassing and lying about the vote in Florida, and let the election proceed without the heavy hand of the president tipping the scale of justice.”

State law requires a machine recount in races where the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. In the Senate race, Scott’s lead over Nelson was 0.14 percentage points. In the governor’s contest, unofficial results showed DeSantis ahead of Gillum by 0.41 percentage points.

Once the machine recount is complete, a hand recount will be ordered in any race where the difference is 0.25 percentage points or less, meaning it could take even longer to complete the review of the Senate race if the difference remains narrow.

If the Senate race does go to a hand recount, the deadline for counties to finish is Sunday. But two of the pending four lawsuits ask that a federal judge delay the deadlines so that all counties can finish processing the crush of ballots.

Elias argued that there’s no need to rush, since the winner of the Nelson-Scott race won’t be sworn into office until January.

Fox News Is Really This Divorced From Reality

Once again proving they probably don’t realize just how popular such ideas have become, Fox News on Tuesday tried to ridicule and discredit key platform planks that progressive Democrats successfully ran on this election cycle but ended up just reminding people that these ideas actually make a lot of sense.

In a segment titled “Freshman Insurrection” on Tuesday night, right-wing host Laura Ingraham presented newly-elected House members—namely Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—as a cabal of nutty radicals hell-bent on upending Nancy Pelosi’s leadership as they advocate for “wacky” ideas like providing every, single person in the United States access to healthcare and saving the planet’s natural systems from destruction while providing quality, high-paying jobs to millions of people as the country makes a rapid transition to a renewable energy system.

As the left-leaning group People for Bernie [Sanders] pointed out:

This is the best agenda Fox News has promoted all week. pic.twitter.com/p8FXqMCtTu

— People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) November 14, 2018

Weird how the right says “nothing is free” but then give the Left wonderful free advertising like this.

— Giovanni Torre (@GiovanniTorre) November 14, 2018

“Fox really makes the best pro-progressives graphics,” said another as screenshots of Ingraham’s segment began to make the rounds on social media. The outlet has been caught doing the same multiple times in the last year (here, here, and here).

As it turns out, an increasing number of Americans support bold climate action, a Medicare for All plan, student loan forgiveness and tuition-free higher education, and a more humane immigration system. As these recent Common Dreams headlines attest:

Poll: Majority of Americans Believe in Climate Change—And Want Action
8 in 10 People Worldwide Fear ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Change: Poll
‘Incredible’: New Poll That Shows 70% of Americans Support Medicare for All Includes 84% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans
Shouldering More Than $1.5 Trillion in Debt, Majority of Young Americans Back Free College Tuition and Medicare for All

Meanwhile, Parker Malloy, editor-at-large for Media Matters for America, offered Fox News her graphic design skills so “wacky” Republicans in the House (albeit less of them in the coming Congress) do not feel left out:

My best attempt trying to envision their counter-argument: pic.twitter.com/hOtN3Ddv8x

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) November 14, 2018

The Injured Workers Tesla Doesn’t Want You to Know About

When a worker gets smashed by a car part on Tesla’s factory floor, medical staff are forbidden from calling 911 without permission.

The electric carmaker’s contract doctors rarely grant it, instead often insisting that seriously injured workers – including one who severed the top of a finger – be sent to the emergency room in a Lyft.

Injured employees have been systematically sent back to the production line to work through their pain with no modifications, according to former clinic employees, Tesla factory workers and medical records. Some could barely walk.

The on-site medical clinic serving some 10,000 employees at Tesla Inc.’s California assembly plant has failed to properly care for seriously hurt workers, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

The clinic’s practices are unsafe and unethical, five former clinic employees said.

But denying medical care and work restrictions to injured workers is good for one thing: making real injuries disappear.

“The goal of the clinic was to keep as many patients off of the books as possible,” said Anna Watson, a physician assistant who worked at Tesla’s medical clinic for three weeks in August.

Watson has nearly 20 years of experience as a medical professional, examining patients, diagnosing ailments and prescribing medications. She’s treated patients at a petroleum refinery, a steel plant, emergency rooms and a trauma center. But she said she’s never seen anything like what’s happening at Tesla.

“The way they were implementing it was very out of control,” said Watson, who was fired in August after she raised her concerns. “Every company that I’ve worked at is motivated to keep things not recordable. But I’ve never seen anybody do it at the expense of treating the patient.”

Workers with chest pain, breathing problems or extreme headaches have been dismissed as having issues unrelated to their work, without being fully evaluated or having workplace exposures considered, former employees said. The clinic has turned away temp workers who got hurt on Tesla’s assembly lines, leaving them without on-site care. And medical assistants, who are supposed to have on-site supervision, say they were left on their own at night, unprepared to deal with a stream of night-shift injuries.

If a work injury requires certain medical equipment – such as stitches or hard braces – then it has to be counted in legally mandated logs. But some employees who needed stitches for a cut instead were given butterfly bandages, said Watson and another former clinic employee. At one point, hard braces were removed from the clinic so they wouldn’t be used, according to Watson and a former medical assistant.

As Tesla races to revolutionize the automobile industry and build a more sustainable future, it has left its factory workers in the past, still painfully vulnerable to the dangers of manufacturing.

An investigation by Reveal in April showed that Tesla prioritized style and speed over safety, undercounted injuries and ignored the concerns of its own safety professionals. CEO Elon Musk’s distaste for the color yellow and beeping forklifts eroded factory safety, former safety team members said.

The new revelations about the on-site clinic show that even as the company forcefully pushed back against Reveal’s reporting, behind the scenes, it doubled down on its efforts to hide serious injuries from the government and public.

In June, Tesla hired a new company, Access Omnicare, to run its factory health center after the company promised Tesla it could help reduce the number of recordable injuries and emergency room visits, according to records.

A former high-level Access Omnicare employee said Tesla pressured the clinic’s owner, who then made his staff dismiss injuries as minor or not related to work.

“It was bullying and pressuring to do things people didn’t believe were correct,” said the former employee, whom Reveal granted anonymity because of the worker’s fear of being blackballed in the industry.

Dr. Basil Besh, the Fremont, California, hand surgeon who owns Access Omnicare, said the clinic drives down Tesla’s injury count with more accurate diagnoses, not because of pressure from Tesla. Injured workers, he said, don’t always understand what’s best for them.

“We treat the Tesla employees just the same way we treat our professional athletes,” he said. “If Steph Curry twists his knee on a Thursday night game, that guy’s in the MRI scanner on Friday morning.”

Yet at one point, Watson said a Tesla lawyer and a company safety official told her and other clinic staff to stop prescribing exercises to injured workers so they wouldn’t have to count the injuries. Recommending stretches to treat an injured back or range-of-motion exercises for an injured shoulder was no longer allowed, she said.

The next day, she wrote her friend a text message in outrage: “I had to meet with lawyers yesterday to literally learn how not to take care of people.”

Tesla declined interview requests for this story and said it had no comment in response to detailed questions. But after Reveal pressed the company for answers, Tesla officials took time on their October earnings call to enthusiastically praise the clinic.

“I’m really super happy with the care they’re giving, and I think the employees are as well,” said Laurie Shelby, Tesla’s vice president for environment, health and safety.

Musk complained about “unfair accusations” that Tesla undercounts its injuries and promised “first-class health care available right on the spot when people need it.”

Welcome to the new Tesla clinic

Back in June, on stage at Tesla’s shareholder meeting, Musk announced a declining injury rate for his electric car factory.

“This is a super important thing to me because we obviously owe a great debt to the people who are building the car. I really care about this issue,” Musk said to applause.

It wasn’t long after that that Stephon Nelson joined the company. Working the overnight shift Aug. 13, Nelson got a sudden introduction to Tesla’s new model of care.

He was bent over putting caulk inside the trunk of a Model X. Something slipped and the hatchback crunched down on his back. Nelson froze up in agonizing pain. He had deep red bruises across his back.

“I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even stand up straight,” said Nelson, who’s 30 and used to play semiprofessional football.

He asked for an ambulance, but the on-call Tesla doctor said no – he could take a Lyft to the hospital instead.

“I just felt heartbroken,” Nelson said. “What they was telling us in the orientation, that Tesla is a company that cares about their employees’ safety, it just seemed like it was just a whole reversal.”

No one was allowed to call 911 without a doctor’s permission, said Watson and two medical assistants who used to work at the clinic under Besh’s direction. Anyone who did so would get in trouble, they said.

“There was a strong push not to send anybody in an ambulance,” Watson said.

It’s unclear why there was such a focus on avoiding 911, though some former employees thought it was to save money. Also, 911 logs become public records. And first responders, unlike drivers for ride-hailing services, are required to report severe work injuries to California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, the state’s workplace safety agency. Besh said ambulance use is based on “clinical judgment only.”

The system was especially problematic on the night shift, as the factory continued churning out vehicles around the clock, but there were no doctors or nurses around, former employees said.

Two medical assistants who used to work there said they often were left on their own – one on duty at a time – and struggled to tend to all the injured. Both had to do things such as take vital signs, which medical assistants aren’t allowed to do without on-site supervision, according to the Medical Board of California. Reveal granted them anonymity because they fear speaking out will hurt their careers. Besh said no one works alone.

For a severely injured worker lying on the assembly line, it could take 10 to 15 minutes for a medical assistant to arrive and then contact on-call doctors, a medical assistant said. Getting a code for Tesla’s Lyft account was a drawn-out process that could take hours, she said.

The medical assistants said they were alarmed and uncomfortable with the doctors’ orders to use Lyft because they worried some patients could pass out or need help en route. One worker directed to take a Lyft was light-headed and dizzy. Another had his fingers badly broken, contorted and mangled.

Besh, who often serves as the on-call doctor, said anyone could call 911 in a life-threatening situation. He said he recommends using Lyft for workers who don’t need advanced life support.

Besh gave the example of a worker who had the top of his finger cut off. He needed to go to the hospital, but not by ambulance, Besh said. He likened the situation to people at home who get a ride to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance.

“We right-size the care,” he said. “Obviously, it’s all about the appropriate care given for the appropriate situation.”

It’s a doctor’s judgment call to use Lyft, but many on the factory floor found it inhumane. In some cases, including the worker with an amputated fingertip, factory supervisors refused to put their employees in a Lyft and instead drove them to the hospital, according to a medical assistant.

Injured workers sent back to work

In Nelson’s case, he called his girlfriend to take him to the hospital. But he said his supervisor told him that he had to show up for work the next day or Nelson would get in trouble.

Nelson needed the job, so he forced himself to come in. He shuffled slowly, hunched over in pain, to his department, he said. When it was clear he couldn’t do the job, he was sent to the Tesla health center, a small clinic on an upper level of the factory.

Workers too injured to do their regular jobs are supposed to receive job restrictions and a modified assignment that won’t make the injury worse.

But the health center wouldn’t give Nelson any accommodations. He could go home that day, but he had to report to work full duty the following day, he said.

By law, work-related injuries must be recorded on injury logs if they require medical treatment beyond first aid, days away from work or job restrictions. The clinic’s practices were designed to avoid those triggers, said Anna Watson, the physician assistant.

There was a clinic rule, for example, that injured employees could not be given work restrictions, Watson said. No matter what type of injuries workers came in with – burns, lacerations, strains and sprains – clinic staff were under instructions to send them back to work full duty, she said. Watson said she even had to send one back to work with what appeared to be a broken ankle.

Medical clinics are supposed to treat injuries and keep workers safe, she said, “and none of that’s happening. So at the most acute time of their injury, they don’t have any support, really.”

A medical assistant who formerly worked at the clinic remembered an employee who was sent back to work even though he couldn’t stand on one of his feet. Another employee passed out face down on the assembly line – then went back to work.

“You always put back to full duty, no matter what,” said the medical assistant.

Dr. Basil Besh said patients are given work restrictions when appropriate. He said those hurt at night get first aid and triage, followed by an accurate diagnosis from a physician the next day.

“There’s always going to be somebody who says, ‘No, I shouldn’t be working,’ ” he said. “But if you look objectively at the totality of the medical examination, that’s not always the case.”

Four days after Nelson’s injury, Watson herself sent him back to work with no restrictions, according to medical records he provided. Nelson said this happened repeatedly as he hobbled in pain.

But Watson did what she could to help: She referred him to Access Omnicare’s main clinic, about 5 miles from the auto factory. It was allowed to give work restrictions, Watson said. But most workers aren’t sent there, and it can take a while to get an appointment.

Eight days after his injury, the outside clinic diagnosed Nelson with a “crushing injury of back,” contusions and “intractable” pain. He finally was given work restrictions that said he shouldn’t be bending, squatting, kneeling, climbing stairs or lifting more than 10 pounds.

Even after that, the health center at one point sent Nelson back to his department in a wheelchair, he said.

“And I’m rocking back and forth, just ready to fall out of the wheelchair because I’m in so much pain,” he said.

In September, Nelson got a warehouse job at another company. It was a pay cut, but he quit Tesla right away. “I feel like it’s really not safe at all,” he said.

Besh said he couldn’t comment on a specific case without a signed release from the patient. But, he said, “a physician examined that patient and saw that there was not a safety issue.”

Besh was named chairman of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ Board of Councilors this year. A Tesla spokeswoman set up and monitored his interview with Reveal.

There’s been a “culture shift” at the health center since Tesla hired him to take over, he said.

“So culturally, there were folks in the past who were expecting that any time they come to the clinic, they would be taken off of work,” he said. “And when we told them, ‘No, we really want to do what’s best for you’ … it’s taking some time to get buy-in.”

In the end, Tesla counted Nelson on its injury logs, which is how Reveal identified him. That’s another reason the system didn’t make sense to Watson: Some workers whose injuries were so serious that they eventually would have to be counted still were denied proper care when they needed it most, she said.

Many more injured workers never were counted, she said. Tesla’s official injury logs, provided to Reveal by a former employee, show 48 injuries in August. Watson reviewed the list for the three weeks she was there and estimated that more than twice as many injuries should have been counted if Tesla had provided appropriate care and counted accurately.

Other ways Tesla’s clinic avoids treating workers

The clinic seemed geared toward sending workers away instead of treating them, Watson said. The culture of the clinic, she said, was to discount workers’ complaints and assume they were exaggerating.

The clinic would look for reasons to dismiss injuries as not work-related, even when they seemed to be, former employees said.

Watson recalled one worker who had passed out on the job and went to the hospital because of her exposure to fumes in the factory. Even though a work-related loss of consciousness is required to be counted, no such injury was recorded on Tesla’s injury logs.

Temp workers hurt on the production line also were often rebuffed by the clinic, said former clinic employees. At one point, there was a blanket policy to turn away temps, they said.

Tracy Lee developed a repetitive stress injury over the summer when a machine broke and she had to lift car parts by hand, she said. Lee said the health center sent her away without evaluating her because she wasn’t a permanent employee.

“I really think that’s messed up,” said Lee, who later sought medical treatment on her own. “Don’t discriminate just because we’re temps. We’re working for you.”

By law, Tesla is required to record injuries of temp workers who work under its supervision, no matter where they get treatment. But not all of them were. Lee said her Tesla supervisor knew about the injury. But Lee’s name doesn’t appear on Tesla’s injury logs.

Besh pushed back on the claims of his former employees.

He said the clinic didn’t treat some temp workers because Access Omnicare wasn’t a designated health care provider for their staffing agencies. About half of the agencies now are able to use the clinic, and the rest should be early next year, he said.

Besh said a physician accurately and carefully determines whether an injury is work-related and the clinic is not set up to treat personal medical issues. He said the clinic is fully stocked.

As for prescribing exercises, Besh said the clinic automatically was giving exercise recommendations to workers who were not injured and simply fixed the error.

These sample Work Status Reports, posted in Tesla’s health center, show how clinic staff were instructed to handle different situations. The document on the left, labeled “Work Related,” is marked “First Aid Only” and “Return to full duty with no limitations or restrictions,” scenarios that would mean Tesla wouldn’t have to count the injury. Those were the only options, says Anna Watson, a physician assistant who used to work there. One document for contract employees such as temp workers (center) and another for non-occupational injuries (right) both say to refer the patients elsewhere. Credit: Obtained by Reveal

 

Clinic source: Tesla pressured doctor

Access Omnicare’s proposal for running Tesla’s health center states that Tesla’s priorities include reducing recordable injuries and emergency room visits, according to a copy obtained by Reveal.

It says Access Omnicare’s model, with more accurate diagnoses, reduces “unnecessary use of Emergency Departments and prevents inadvertent over-reporting of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) recordability.”

Even before Access Omnicare took over the on-site health center in June, Tesla sent many injured workers to its main clinic as one of the automaker’s preferred providers.

Tesla exercised an alarming amount of pressure on the clinic to alter how it treated patients in order to keep injury rates down, said the former high-level Access Omnicare employee.

“There was a huge, huge push from Tesla to keep things nonrecordable,” said the former employee.

A Tesla workers’ compensation official routinely would contact the clinic to intervene in individual cases, said the former employee. Tesla would take issue with diagnoses and treatment decisions, arguing that specific workers should be sent back to work full duty or have their injuries labeled as unrelated to work. The clinic gave Tesla what it wanted, the former employee said.

For example, Bill Casillas’ diagnosis suddenly was changed by Access Omnicare after discussions with Tesla.

In December, Casillas was working in Tesla’s seat factory. When he touched a forklift, he felt an electric shock jolt him back. Later that shift, it happened again. He said he felt disoriented and found he had urinated on himself.

Casillas said he hasn’t been the same since. He struggles with pain, tingling and numbness. At 47, he’s unsteady, uses a cane and hasn’t been able to work, he said.

A doctor at Access Omnicare diagnosed a work-related “injury due to electrical exposure” and gave him severe work restrictions and physical therapy, medical records show.

Then, nearly two months after his injury, another Access Omnicare physician, Dr. Muhannad Hafi, stepped in and dismissed the injury.

“I have spoken again with (the workers’ compensation official) at Tesla and he informed that the forklift did not have electric current running. With that said, in my medical opinion, the patient does not have an industrial injury attributed to an electrical current,” he wrote.

Hafi, who’s no longer with Access Omnicare, didn’t respond to questions. Besh said he can’t discuss patient details.

The co-worker who was in the forklift during the second shock, Paul Calderon, said he disagrees with the Tesla official but no one asked him. He backed up Casillas’ account and said Tesla “tried to really downplay what happened to him.”

Hafi’s January report noted that Casillas said he was “miserable,” used a cane and had pain all over his body. But he discharged him back to work full duty, writing, “No further symptoms of concern.”

A Tesla safety team manager informed Casillas last month that his injury was not counted because it was “determined to not be work-related.” Casillas is still a Tesla employee, but he’s off work because of his injury. His workers’ comp claim was denied based on Hafi’s report, but his lawyer, Sue Borg, is seeking an independent medical evaluation.

Besh said Tesla does not pressure him to dismiss injuries.

“What Tesla pressures us on is accurate documentation,” he said. “What they want is their OSHA log to be as accurate as possible, so what they’ll push back on is, ‘Doctor I need more clarity on this report.’ And we do that for them.”

“They are not in the business of making clinical determinations at all,” he said. “We make those clinical determinations only based on what the patient needs.”

State regulators not interested

By late August, Watson, the physician assistant, reached her breaking point. She got into an argument with Besh, who fired her for not deferring to doctors.

Afterward, she filed a complaint to Cal/OSHA, California’s workplace safety agency.

“I just see the workers at Tesla as having absolutely no voice,” she said. “I do feel extra responsible to try to speak up for what’s going on there.”

Watson thought Cal/OSHA would put an immediate stop to the practices she witnessed. But the agency wasn’t interested.

Cal/OSHA sent her a letter saying it folded her complaint into the investigation it started in April after Reveal’s first story ran. The letter said it had investigated and cited Tesla for a recordkeeping violation.

But Cal/OSHA already had closed that investigation two weeks before Watson’s complaint. The agency issued a fine of $400 for a single injury it said was not recorded within the required time period. Tesla appealed, calling it an administrative error.

Reveal had documented many other cases of injuries that Tesla had failed to record. But the agency had only about six months from the date of an injury to fine a company. By the time Cal/OSHA concluded its four-month investigation, the statute of limitations had run out.

After Reveal reported that the time limitation makes it difficult to hold employers accountable, state legislators passed a bill giving investigators six months from when Cal/OSHA first learns of the violation. It was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, but it was too late for the Tesla investigation.

A Cal/OSHA spokeswoman said the investigation found four other “injury recording violations that fell outside of the statute of limitations.” Even if those other violations had been included, the spokeswoman said Cal/OSHA would have had to combine them in a single $400 citation.

Tesla, meanwhile, inaccurately cites Cal/OSHA’s investigation as vindication.

“We do get these quite unfair accusations,” Musk said on his October earnings call. “One of them was that we were underreporting injuries. And it’s worth noting that OSHA completed their investigation and concluded that we had  not been doing anything of the sort.”

Watson called Cal/OSHA officials to insist they investigate her complaint. She told them that she had detailed knowledge of a system that undercounted injuries by failing to treat injured workers.

But Cal/OSHA officials told her that it wasn’t the agency’s responsibility, she said. They suggested contacting another agency, such as the medical board or workers’ compensation regulators.

As Watson kept pushing and Reveal began asking questions, a Cal/OSHA spokeswoman said her complaint now is being investigated.

Watson has a new job at an urgent care clinic. She said she just wants someone to make sure that Tesla workers get the care they need.

“You go to Tesla and you think it’s going to be this innovative, great, wonderful place to be, like this kind of futuristic company,” she said. “And I guess it’s just kind of disappointing that that’s our future, basically, where the worker still doesn’t matter.”

Israeli Defense Minister Resigns Over Gaza Cease-Fire Deal

JERUSALEM — Israel’s defense minister abruptly resigned Wednesday in protest over a cease-fire reached with Gaza militants, in a move that rocked the Israeli political scene and seemed likely to bring about early elections.

Avigdor Lieberman said the cease-fire amounted to “surrender to terrorism” after two days of heavy fighting, and that he could no longer serve a government that endorsed it. Lieberman had demanded a far stronger Israeli response to the most intense round of rocket fire against Israel since a 50-day war in 2014, but appeared to have been overruled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

His resignation delivers a major blow to Netanyahu’s coalition government and sparked immediate calls for early elections. Lieberman said he hoped that in the coming days a date would be set for a new vote. The opposition parties joined his call.

The government still has a narrow one-seat majority in the Knesset without Lieberman’s nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu faction, but is unlikely to survive until the next elections, currently set for November 2019.

The party of another Netanyahu rival, Naftali Bennett, has already announced that if he is not appointed defense minister it will also quit the coalition — a move that would trigger early elections.

Given Bennett’s sometimes rocky relationship with Netanyahu, it is far from certain he will be given the powerful defense post. Yair Lapid, head of the opposition Yesh Atid Party, said “the countdown has begun” to the end of Netanyahu’s term in office.

Lieberman’s resignation will take effect in 48 hours and Netanyahu will take over the defense portfolio on an interim basis. Netanyahu currently also serves as Israel’s foreign minister.

Netanyahu had come under heavy criticism for agreeing to the cease-fire, especially from his own political base and in rocket-battered towns in southern Israel that are typically strongholds of his ruling Likud Party.

Angry residents took to the street Tuesday chanting “Disgrace!” at what they saw as the government’s capitulation to violence and its inability to provide long-term security. Many have openly vowed to never vote Likud again.

“We are third-class citizens here in Sderot and the communities on the border with Gaza,” complained David Maimon, a local resident. “It’s a shame. Instead of helping us and letting us live quietly, they let us suffer.”

Recent months have seen sporadic rocket attacks as well as militant infiltration attempts and a wave of incendiary kites that have destroyed Israeli crops.

Netanyahu presented the decision to step back from a full-blown conflict as a unified one made by his Security Cabinet and based on the military’s recommendations. But Lieberman and Bennett later expressed reservations, saying they favored a stronger response.

Netanyahu defended his actions at a memorial ceremony in the Negev desert for Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

“I see the big picture of Israeli security that I cannot share with the public,” he said. “Our enemies begged for a cease-fire and they know well why. I cannot detail our plans for the future. We will dictate the time and circumstances that are right for Israel and are right for the security of our people.”

“In times like these, leadership is not doing the easy thing. Leadership is doing the right thing, even if it is hard. Leadership is sometime facing criticism,” he added.

Lieberman said the cease-fire deal, coupled with a decision to allow Qatar to deliver $15 million in aid to Gaza last week, were too much for him to bear.

“We are buying quiet in the short-term at the cost of severe damage to our security in the long-term,” he said in his resignation announcement. “The weakness we displayed also projects itself to other arenas.”

A gleeful Hamas said Lieberman’s resignation marked a “political victory for Gaza.”

“Lieberman’s departure is recognition of defeat and failure to confront the Palestinian resistance,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement. “Gaza’s steadfastness sent a political shockwave.”

The Israel-Gaza frontier remained largely quiet overnight after the heavy fighting of recent days. But on Wednesday afternoon, Gaza’s fishermen’s union said a 20-year-old fisherman was fatally shot on the beach near the fence separating Gaza from Israel.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment, while Hamas also had no immediate reaction.

During this week’s fighting, Palestinian militants fired 460 rockets and mortars into Israel in a 24-hour period, while the Israeli military carried out airstrikes on 160 Gaza targets. Seven Palestinians, including five militants, were killed. In Israel, one person was killed in a rocket strike and three were critically wounded.

With air raid sirens wailing throughout southern Israel and the explosions of airstrikes thundering in Gaza, the two sides had appeared to be on the verge of their fourth war in a decade. Instead, Gaza’s Hamas rulers abruptly announced a cease-fire and Israel’s Security Cabinet ended a seven-hour discussion with a decision to hold its fire.

The latest round of violence was triggered by a botched Israeli raid on Sunday that left seven Palestinian militants and a senior Israeli military officer dead. Before the raid, Egyptian and U.N. mediators had made progress in reducing tensions.

In recent days, Israel had allowed fuel shipments to increase the power supply in Gaza, which suffers from frequent blackouts, and agreed to additional Qatari assistance to allow Hamas to pay the salaries of its thousands of government workers.

Hamas has staged near-weekly border protests since March in an effort to lift the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after the Islamic militant group seized control of the coastal strip in 2007. The blockade has ravaged Gaza’s economy, and Israel refuses to lift it unless Hamas disarms, a demand rejected by militant group, which is pledged to Israel’s destruction.

Demonstrators each week have approach the border fence, throwing firebombs, grenades and burning tires at Israeli troops. Israeli snipers have killed about 170 people, most of them unarmed. Israel says it is defending its border against attackers, but it has come under heavy international criticism for shooting unarmed people.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins Climate Protest Against Nancy Pelosi

Youth climate activists with the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats were arrested on Capitol Hill Tuesday for staging a sit-in at the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—who is expected to serve as the next speaker of the House—to demand that congressional Democrats back a “Green New Deal.”

BREAKING: we’ve begun a sit in inside @NancyPelosi’s office because @HouseDemocrats have failed our generation time and time again.

They offer us a death sentence. We demand a #GreenNewDeal. https://t.co/uSgzfQmLQu pic.twitter.com/eVM92i5hub

— Sunrise Movement

California Count Gives Democrats Another U.S. House Seat

LOS ANGELES — First-time candidate Josh Harder defeated four-term Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Denham Tuesday in California’s farm belt, giving Democrats their fourth pickup of a GOP House seat in California.

Harder, 32, a venture capitalist, had anchored his campaign to Denham’s vote against the Affordable Care Act, while arguing that he would push for universal health care in Congress. He also argued that Denham and other Washington Republicans ignored poverty and health care in the agricultural 10th District in California’s Central Valley.

“Washington is broken because our leaders have put party over country. I pledge that I will always put this community before anything in Washington,” Harder said in a statement.

As ballot-counting continued, Democrats gained ground in two undecided House races in Orange County, California, raising the possibility of a Democratic sweep of four closely contested congressional races in the one-time Republican stronghold.

In the 45th District in Orange County, Democrat Katie Porter jumped into a 261-vote lead over Republican Rep. Mimi Walters, after trailing the incumbent since Election Day.

And in the 39th District, anchored in Orange County, Democrat Gil Cisneros tightened the gap with Republican Young Kim.

Earlier, Democrats claimed the seats of Republican Reps. Dana Rohrabacher in the county’s 48th District and retiring Darrell Issa in the 49th District, which cuts through the southern end of the county.

With votes continuing to be counted, Harder’s edge has grown after Denham grabbed a slim lead on Election Day. After the latest update, Harder had a 4,919-vote lead out of about 185,000 votes counted, a margin too large for the congressman to overcome with remaining votes.

Denham’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 51-year-old Denham had depicted Harder as a liberal, Silicon Valley insider whose values were more closely aligned with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi than a district known for producing cherries and almonds. An ad he posted on Twitter labeled Harder “extreme.”

The contest was one of a string of showcase battles in California in Republican districts that were targeted by Democrats after Hillary Clinton carried them in the 2016 presidential election.

For state Republicans, Denham’s defeat marked another setback in a state where the party has been drifting toward irrelevance for years. Democrats hold every statewide office, a supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature and a 3.7-million advantage in voter registrations.

With Harder’s win, Democrats will hold at least a 43-10 edge in California U.S. House seats.

Denham had proved a durable politician in a district 80 miles (129 kilometers) east of San Francisco with a Democratic registration edge. The former legislator first elected to the House in 2010 is known for his involvement in water issues vital to agriculture. In a tilt to his district’s heavy Hispanic population, he pushed Congress to consider a pathway for citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and stayed here illegally.

Denham won by 3 percentage points in 2016.

The race this year attracted a torrent of campaign dollars: Harder pulled in over $6 million and Denham, $4.5 million. At least 26 outside groups spent another $10 million trying to influence the race, according to California Target Book, which analyzes campaigns.

Denham attributed the close race to money pouring in from outside the district. But he became another victim in a year when Democrats regained control of the House.

Other Republican incumbents in California to lose this year include Rep. Steve Knight in the 25th District, north of Los Angeles.

President Donald Trump was a factor in the GOP losses. He lost California by over 4 million votes in 2016, and many voters saw an opportunity to send a message to Washington when they voted for Democrats.

California is home to the so-called Trump “resistance,” which has stood in opposition to his policies on the environment and immigration.

Harder, a technology investor who was born and raised in the district, said voters were looking for a check against Trump policies that have “made things worse for most people in this community.”

Acting Attorney General’s Appointment Challenged in Court

WASHINGTON—Maryland is challenging the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as the new U.S. acting attorney general, arguing that President Donald Trump sidestepped the Constitution and the Justice Department’s own succession plan by elevating Whitaker to the top job.

The Tuesday filing sets up a court challenge between a state and the federal government over the legitimacy of the country’s chief law enforcement officer and foreshadows the likelihood of additional cases that present the same issues.

It comes as Democrats call on Whitaker to recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel’s Russia investigation because of critical comments he has made about it in the past and amid concerns over his views on the scope of judicial authority.

In their filing, lawyers in the office of Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh argue that the job should have gone to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein instead of to Whitaker.

They cite a statute governing the line of succession at the Justice Department that says that in the case of a vacancy in the attorney general position, the deputy attorney general may exercise “all the duties of that office.” If neither is available for the job, according to that statute, then the associate attorney general is supposed to be elevated.

Besides that, the lawyers say, the Constitution requires the duties of the attorney general — who, as a presidential appointee, is known under the law as a “principal” officer — to be carried out only by someone confirmed by the Senate for the underlying position.

The state argues that Congress always intended for an attorney general to be confirmed by the Senate given the national security and criminal justice powers inherent in the position, including the authority to control an investigation into the president. Without an established chain of command, according to the filing, presidents could select and then remove a series of attorneys general until they got their way.

“Absent the Attorney General Succession Act, the President could fire the Attorney General (or demand his resignation), then appoint a hand-picked junior Senate-confirmed officer from an entirely different agency, or a carefully selected senior employee who he was confident would terminate or otherwise severely limit the investigation,” the filing states.

A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment, though the department was expected to release later this week an opinion from its Office of Legal Counsel defending the legitimacy of Whitaker’s appointment.

Whitaker was appointed last year as chief of staff to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He became acting attorney general on Nov. 7 when Sessions was forced out.

The Maryland filing was made Tuesday in a legal dispute with the Trump administration over the Affordable Care Act. That lawsuit names Sessions as an individual defendant.

The state asks the judge to substitute Rosenstein as the defendant in place of Sessions, a move that would effectively declare him the proper attorney general.

The state’s lawyers say that in addition to their concerns over the line of succession, Whitaker has “expressed idiosyncratic views that are inconsistent with longstanding Department of Justice policy.”

They cite his criticism of the landmark Supreme Court opinion Marbury v. Madison, which ensured that courts had authority to strike down laws they considered unconstitutional.

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AP writer Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, contributed to this story.