Chris Hedges's Blog, page 436

The Fascist Threat Our Political Establishment Won’t Acknowledge

Marx was certainly right in arguing that the point is not to understand the world but to change it, but what he underemphasized was that the world cannot be transformed if one does not understand what is to be changed. As Terry Eagleton rightly notes “Nobody can change a world they didn’t understand.” Moreover, the lack of mass resistance to oppression signals more than apathy or indifference, it also suggests that we don’t have an informed and energizing vision of the world for which we want to struggle. Political struggle is dependent on the political will to change, which is central to any notion of informed agency willing to address the radical and pragmatic issues of our time. In addition to understanding the world, an informed public must connect what they know and learn to the central task of bringing their ideas to bear on society as a whole. This means that a critical consciousness must be matched by a fervent willingness to take risks, and challenge the destructive narratives that are seeping into the public realm and becoming normalized.

Any dissatisfaction with injustice necessitates combining the demands of moral witnessing with the pedagogical power of persuasion and the call to address the tasks of emancipation. We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the normalization of a fascist politics, oppose racist, sexist, and neoliberal orthodoxy.

As Robin D. G. Kelley observes we cannot confuse catharsis and momentary outrage for revolution. In a time of increasing tyranny, resistance in many quarters appears to have lost its usefulness as a call to action.  At the same time, the pedagogical force of civic ignorance and illiteracy has morphed into a national ideal. Tyranny and ignorance feed each other in a theater of corporate controlled media ecosystems and function more as a tool of domination than as a pedagogical outlet in pursuit of justice and the practice of freedom. Under such circumstances, when education is not viewed as central to politics itself, resistance withers in the faux language of privatized struggles and fashionable slogans. 

For instance the novelist Teju Cole has argued that “‘resistance’ is back in vogue, and it describes something rather different now. The holy word has become unexceptional. Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime, birds of many different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance. It is the most popular game in town.” Cole’s critique appears to be born out by the fact that the most unscrupulous of liberal and conservative politicians such as Madeline Albright, Hilary Clinton, and even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, are now claiming that they have joined the resistance against Trump’s fascist politics. Even Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist. Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is pre-fascism.”The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This tsunami of banal resistance and its pedagogical architecture was on full display when an anonymous member of the Trump’s inner circle published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he/she and other senior officials were part of “the resistance within the Trump administration.” The author was quick to qualify the statement by insisting such resistance had nothing to do with “the popular ‘resistance’ of the left.” To prove the point, it was noted by the author that the members of this insider resistance liked some of Trump’s policies such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”  Combining resistance with the endorsements of such reactionary policies reads like fodder for late-night comics.

The Democratic Party now defines itself as the most powerful political force opposing Trump’s fascist politics. What it has forgotten is the role it has played under the Clinton and Obama presidencies in creating the economic, political, and social conditions for Trump’s election in 2016. Such historical and political amnesia allows them to make the specious claim that they are now the party of resistance. Resistance in these instances has little to do with civic courage, a defense of human dignity, and the willingness to not just bear witness to the current injustices but to struggle to overcome them. Of course, the issue is not to disavow resistance as much as to redefine it as inseparable from fundamental change that calls for the overthrow of capitalism itself. Neoliberalism has now adopted unapologetically the language of racial cleansing, white supremacy, white nationalism, and fascist politics. Unapologetic for the widespread horrors, gaping inequality, destruction of public goods, and re-energizing of the discourse of hate and culture of cruelty, neoliberalism has joined hands with a toxic fascist politics painted in the hyper-patriotic colors of red, white, and blue. As I have noted elsewhere:

Neoliberalism’s hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism,  rabid misogyny and immigrant fervor come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the post-bellum U.S. and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany.  Fascism with   its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful strongman, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and th superiority of a select ethnic or national group has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, economic orthodoxy, and  ethical somnambulance a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.

While the call to resist neoliberal fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated rather than aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious, and educational forces that helped produce it. What many liberals and conservative calls to resistance have in common is an opposition to Trump rather than to the conditions that created him. In some cases, liberal critics such as Christopher R. Browning, Yascha Mounk,  and Cass R. Sunstein document insightfully America’s descent into fascism but are too cautious in refusing to conclude that we are living under a fascist political regime. This is more than a retreat from political courage, it is a refusal to name how liberalism itself with its addiction to the financial elite has helped create the conditions that make a fascist politics possible.

Trump’s election and the Kavanaugh affair make clear that what is needed is not only a resistance to the established order of neoliberal capitalism but a radical restructuring of society itself. That is not about resisting oppression in its diverse forms but overcoming it—in short, changing it. The Kavanaugh hearings and the liberal response was a telling example of what might be called a politics of disconnection.

While it is crucial to condemn the Kavanaugh hearings for its blatant disregard for the Constitution, expressed hatred of women, and its symbolic expression and embrace of white privilege and power, it is necessary to enlarge our criticism to include the system that made the Kavanaugh appointment possible. Kavanaugh represents not only the deep seated rot of misogyny but also as Grace Lee Boggs, has stated “a government of, by, and for corporate power.” We need to see beyond the white nationalists and neo-Nazis demonstrating in the streets in order to recognize the terror of the unforeseen, the terror that is state sanctioned, and hides in the shadows of power. Such a struggle means more than engaging material relations of power or the economic architecture of neoliberal fascism, it also means taking on the challenge producing the tools and tactics necessary to rethink and create the conditions for a new kind of subjectivity as the basis for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. We need a comprehensive politics that brings together various single interest movements so that the threads that connect them become equally as important as the particular forms of oppression that define their singularity.  In addition, we need intellectuals willing to combine intellectual complexity with clarity and accessibility, embrace the high stakes investment in persuasion, and cross disciplinary borders in order to theorize and speak with what Rob Nixon calls the “cunning of lightness” and a “methodological promiscuity” that keeps language attuned to the pressing the claims for justice. 

Outside of those intellectuals who write for CounterPunch, Truthout, Truthdig, Rise Up Times, Salon, and a number of other critical media outlets, there are too few intellectuals, artists, journalists willing to challenge the rise of an American version of neoliberal fascism. It is not enough to report in an alleged “balanced fashion” on Trump’s endorsement  of violence against journalists, the massive levels of inequality produced under neoliberalism, the enactment by the Trump administration of savage policies of racial cleansing aimed at undocumented immigrants, and the emergence of a police state armed terrifying new technologies aimed at predictive policing. The real challenge is to tie these elements of oppression together and to recognize the threads of state violence, white supremacy, and fascist politics that suggest the emergence of a distinctive new political order.

Shock and outrage in the midst of a fascist politics is now undermined by the mainstream press which is always on the hunt for higher ratings and increasing their bottom line. Rather than talk about fascism, they focus on the threat to liberal institutions. Rather than talk about the mounting state violence and the increased violence of neo-fascist thugs such as the Proud Boys, they talk about violence coming from the left and right. Rather than raise questions about the conditions and a society in which more and more people seem to prefer authoritarian rule over democracy, they talk about Trump’s eccentric behavior or keep tabs on his endless lying. This is not unhelpful, but it misses the nature of the true threat, its genesis, and the power of a corporate elite who are now comfortable with the fascist politics that Trump embodies.

An iPsos poll found that “a surprising 26 percent of all Americans, and 43 percent of Republicans, agree with the statement that the president “should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” In addition, a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum— 72 percent — think “it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information.”   Couple this with the fact that Trump has recently stated privately to his aids that he regrets reversing his policy of separating children from their parents at the border and you have a mix of fascist principles coupled with a dangerous demagogue who cannot bring the country fast enough to the fascist abyss. While it is true that the United States under Trump is not Hitler’s Germany, Trump has tapped into America’s worst impulses and as Jason Stanley and others remind us his ultra-nationalism, white supremacist views, and racist diatribes coupled with his attack on immigrants, the media, African-Americans, and Muslims are indicative of a politics right out the fascist playbook.   If the public and media keep denying this reality, the endpoint is too horrible to imagine. If we are to understand the current resurgence of right-wing populist movements across the globe, economic factors alone do not account for the current mobilizations of fascist passions.

As Pierre Bourdieu once put it, it is crucial to recognize that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” He goes on to state that left intellectuals have underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.” In part, this means that the left and others must make matters of culture and pedagogy central to politics in order to address people’s needs and struggles. And they should do so in a language that is both rigorous and accessible. Matters of culture and consciousness in the Gramscian sense are central to politics and only when the left can address that issue will there be any hope for massive collective resistance in the form of a broad-based movement.

Trump has emboldened and legitimated the dire anti-democratic threats that have been expanding under an economic system stripped of any political, social, and ethical responsibility. This is a form of neoliberal fascism that has redrawn and expanded the parameters of the genocidal practices and hate filled politics of the 1930s and 40s in Europe in which it was once thought impossible to happen again. The threat has returned and is now on our doorsteps, and it needs to be named, exposed, and overcome by those who believe that the stakes are much too high to look away and not engage in organized political and pedagogical struggles against a fascist state and an omniscient fascist politics. We live in an age when the horrors of the past are providing the language and politics of illiberal democracies all over the globe. This is a world where dystopian versions of a catastrophic, misery producing neoliberalism merge with unapologetic death dealing visions of a fascist politics. We live in an era that testifies to the horrors of a past struggling to reinvent itself in the present, and which should place more than a sense of ethical and political responsibility on those of us bearing witness to it. As my friend, Brad Evans, notes under such circumstances, we live in a time “that asks us all to continually question our own shameful compromises with power,” and to act with others to overcome our differences in order to dismantle this assault on human rights, human dignity, economic justice, equality, and democracy itself. 

Notes.

 Terry Eagleton, “The ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas-it is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present,” Red Pepper(October 13, 2013). Online: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/death-of-the-intellectual/

 Brad Evans, “A World Without Books,” Atrocity Exhibition: Life in the Age of Total Violence,(Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019). P. 177

 Robin DG Kelley, “Sorry, Not Sorry,” Boston Review,[September 13, 2018] Online: http://bostonreview.net/race-literature-culture/robin-d-g-kelley-sorry-not-sorry

 Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street have addressed this issue in a number of brilliant books and articles.

 Teju Cole, “Resist, Refuse,” The New York Times,[September 8, 2018] Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/ma...

 Michael Hayden, “The End of Intelligence,” New York Times (April 28, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-intelligence.html

 Anonymous, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” New York Times (September 5, 2018). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html?module=inline

 Ibid. Anonymous.

 Christopher R. Browning, “The Suffocation of Democracy”, The New York Review,(October25, 2018 | Vol. 65, No 16). Online at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/

Cass R. Sunstein, “It Can Happen Here,” The New York Books Review, [June 28, 2018] Online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/

 See, for instance, Jason Hirthler, “The Pieties of the Liberal Class,” Counterpunch (October 19, 2018). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/19/the-pieties-of-the-liberal-class/

 Michelle Alexander, “We Are Not the Resistance,” The New York Times,[September 21, 2018]. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/sunday/resistance-kavanaugh-trump-protest.html

 Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012), p. 36.

 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. X.

 Christal Hayes, “Nearly half of Republicans think Trump should be able to close news outlets: Poll,” USA Today(Aug 7, 2018). Online: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

 Editorial, “As Lincoln advised, this, too, shall pass,” Herald Tribune (August 16, 2018). Online: http://www.heraldtribune.com/opinion/20180816/editorial-as-lincoln-advised-this-too-shall-pass

 Kevin Liptak, “Trump says he doesn’t regret signing immigration order,” CNN Politics (June 25, 2018). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/trump-immigration-order/index.html

 See, for example, Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them(New York: Random House, 2018); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018); Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom(New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018);Brian Klaas, The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy(New York: Hot Books, 2017).

 Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review14 (March-April, 2002), P. 2

Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 11.

 Brad Evans, The Atrocity Exhibition (Los Angeles, LARB, in press).

Thom Hartmann: American Democracy Is on the Brink

The Republican Party is currently hoping to win nationwide using two simple elements: explicit and overt racism, and voter suppression.

No “ideas”; no pitch for tax cuts; no discussion of their “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act; no push for better schools, hospitals, airports, roads or bridges; no promise for more and better jobs—none of these staples of the 2016 presidential campaign can be found in pretty much any Republican advertising today.

Instead, the public Republican message is all about race or the subset of race, religion (“Muslim” stands in for “brown Arab” in GOP-speak) and “immigration” (aka brown people from south of our border). Republicans across the country are even recruiting white supremacist and neo-Nazi gangs to threaten or assault Democrats and their supporters, while President Donald Trump praises the criminal assault of reporters in the wake of jurnalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state across the nation are vigorously purging voters from the rolls (over 14 million, more than 10 percent of America’s active voters, in the past two years, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast).

Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.

In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.

In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are being turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands.

How did it come to this?

The problem for the GOP has deep roots. In the 1870s, when the Party abandoned its Lincolnesque position in favor of granting full citizenship rights to freed slaves, it rapidly slid into the role of being the party of the barons of rail, oil, coal, steel, and construction.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, largely threw its efforts—culminating in the New Deal in 1933 and the Great Society in 1967—in with working people, legislatively protecting unionization efforts, passing Social Security and Medicare, putting the minimum wage and unemployment insurance into law, and creating federal and state agencies to protect workers’ safety, children, and the environment.

This has led to a major problem for the GOP, since the very wealthy and CEOs only constitute a small part of the American voting public. In order to pass tax cuts and cut protective regulations for their rich owners, they needed political power, and—particularly since the disastrous “roaring 20s” leading straight to the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after WWII)—Republicans needed voters to put them into office.

And this was generally pretty tough for the GOP. In 1974, for example, the GOP only had outright control of seven states. The message of, “elect us and we’ll help the rich people out” just didn’t generally resonate with American voters. It’s the reason why, outside of the fluke elections of 1946 and 1952, Democrats outright controlled the House of Representatives for three generations, from 1933 to 1996, and controlled the Senate for most of that time.

Desperate to win the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon even went so far as to commit treason by torpedoing a peace deal that LBJ had worked out with the Vietnamese. According to the then-president of Iran, Reagan did the same thing by cutting a deal with Iran to hold the U.S. embassy hostages until after the election, destroying Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election.

In 2000, though, the GOP changed tactics. After President Ronald Reagan almost got busted for Iran/Contra (he testified that he “forgot” about details of the program over 80 times; he was saved by his growing Alzheimer’s from an indictment), they realized that getting busted for treason wasn’t worth the risk. They needed a “Plan B.”

And it was deliciously simple. If the majority of voters don’t like what you’re selling, then just don’t let them vote.

Paul Weyrich had promoted this idea back in 1980 when he was campaigning for Reagan (after co-founding the Heritage Foundation), and, indeed, many Republican luminaries (like William Rehnquist, who went from poll-intimidator in the 1960s to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) rose up through the ranks by participating in Republican-run voter intimidation schemes.

But it became the foundational go-to tactic for the GOP in 2000.

While they used smear and innuendo to attack Al Gore (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression crimes committed by his brother, then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Throwing somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls, they were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports here and here that were literally seen all over the world except on any American media.)

By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned their voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran in nearly 30 states like well-oiled machines. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than 2 million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than 2:1) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties. (And the Supreme Court ruled last year that they can keep it up; other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters.)

The New York Times noted that in Wisconsin, around 300,000 registered voters were turned away at the polls because they didn’t have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker’s ALEC-recommended new voter ID law (in Texas, the Times reported, the number was 900,000).

It’s symbiotic: billionaires and corporations spend hundreds of millions to fund Republicans, who pass laws and tax breaks that give billions to the corporations and billionaires, who then recycle a fraction of that, mere millions, back to the legislators they own. To keep the cycle going, both must prevent people who object to this system from voting.

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), funded by the Koch network and other billionaires and big corporations, has been at the forefront of these efforts, with the majority of voter suppressive state laws passed having been introduced by ALEC-affiliated Republican legislators. ALEC itself facilitated the production of voter suppressive “model legislation.”

Average American voters generally don’t like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the billionaires and their corporations have organized major efforts to keep those people from voting. Numbers are sketchy, because Republican Secretaries of State are unwilling to release purge numbers and details without being sued to do so.

Fortunately for America, investigative reporter Greg Palast is executing such lawsuits right now, and the purge lists he’s acquired in the past two weeks include over 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 just purged in Indiana. More are coming in virtually daily, as Palast continues his lawsuits, along with the NAACP and Rainbow Push.

True the Vote, the latest Astroturf group pushing for voter purges, is partly funded by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the group that spent millions to run nationwide TV ads for Judge Brett Kavanaugh disparaging Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony as a “sham.”

Without these major voter purges, and without the disenfranchisement of young people, old people, and poor people by voter ID laws, it’s a virtual certainty that America would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party would have a 7-3 or larger Democratic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

JCN, in turn, is funded by the Wellspring Committee that, according to investigative reporter Ken Vogel, was started by billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Their father, Fred Koch, was a founder and major funder of the John Birch Society, which ran “Impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren” billboards and ads across America in the 1950s and 1960s decrying the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation order in Brown v. Board, and funded publications and efforts characterizing the voter drives of Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist plot.)

Without these major voter purges, and without the disenfranchisement of young people, old people, and poor people by voter ID laws, it’s a virtual certainty that America would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party would have a 7-3 or larger Democratic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republicans, instead of helping working people, love to lecture Americans that only their elected officials and Federal and Supreme Court justices are actually channeling the “original intent” of the founders and framers of the Constitution. (“Originalism” is a scam run uniquely by Republican justices, for example.)

Like their rigged elections and their ads saying that they want to defend Social Security and protect us against insurance companies viz preexisting conditions, it’s a lie.

Although about half of the founders were slaveholders, practicing their own form of voter suppression, they nonetheless held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley case, and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United).

In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read in his Notes on the Convention) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy, run of, by, and for the rich. He noted that there are “two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”

He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by exactly that: the political power of concentrated money.

“In all the governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he said, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn’t end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that only the House of Representatives—the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that—should have the power to raise taxes or spend federal funds.

“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty, not less than justice, pleads for the policy here recommended.

“If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich]” he warned, the American citizenry will “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and dependence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first, by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes or spend money.

In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson noted, “It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

Fighting those instincts of human nature, he argued, was at the core of the American experiment. (Like George Washington and many of his peers, Jefferson died broke. America’s first millionaire came along in 1791—a shipping magnate—and none of the founders or framers were wealthy enough to leave an estate that lasted even to a second generation.)

If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.

In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependance (sic) for continued freedom.”

He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that is run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people “must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;… and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since Reagan.

And they’re using voting suppression to maintain a situation that’s so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan’s election in 1980.

Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, noted that, “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”

If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.

Those are our options.

This piece was originally published by the Independent Media Institute.

China-U.S. Ties Fraying Amid Acrimony Over Trade, Politics

BEIJING — “Both ignorant and malicious” was how the official China Daily newspaper recently described comments by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, offering a stinging insight into the current bitter tone of discourse between the countries.

The White House’s move to expand Washington’s dispute with Beijing beyond trade and technology and into accusations of political meddling has sunk relations between the world’s two largest economies to the lowest level since the Cold War.

A major speech by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Oct. 4 was the clearest, highest-level sign that U.S. strategy was turning from engagement to confrontation. Pence accused China of interfering in the midterm elections to undermine President Donald Trump’s tough trade policies against Beijing, warned other countries to be wary of Beijing’s “debt diplomacy” and denounced China’s actions in the South China Sea.

“What the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country,” Pence told an audience at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington.

Both sides are trading increasingly sharp accusations over human rights and global hegemony, exposing an ideological divide that pits the two on a path of confrontation with no clear resolution in sight.

While a military clash has not been ruled out, American-based analysts envision a continuing push-and-pull for dominance between Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, China’s most dominant — and repressive — leader since Mao Zedong. Xi’s aggressive foreign policy and authoritarian ways have altered views of China across the board.

“What has happened is a sea change in U.S. perceptions of China,” said June Teufel Dreyer, an expert on Chinese politics who teaches political science at the University of Miami. While Chinese officials privately say they’re concerned about the sharp deterioration in ties, especially given the massive links between the two in trade, immigration and education, it appears Beijing is more than willing to go toe-to-toe under the new circumstances.

Increasingly, the perception that as China grew more prosperous it would fall in line with global values and international law has been exploded. Into that breach has come hardening U.S. rhetoric toward Beijing and actions to counter, deter or defy China’s moves in the international sector, particularly its “Belt and Road” trade and infrastructure initiative that seeks to expand Beijing’s economic and political footprint from Cambodia to Cairo.

Trump’s first national security strategy, released last year, also labeled China a “revisionist power” alongside Russia.

Beijing’s outrage at Pompeo, meanwhile, was prompted by his recent warnings to Latin American countries about the dangers of accepting Chinese infrastructure loans that are a key aspect of Xi’s signature foreign policy project.

“U.S.-China relations have deteriorated to their worst point” since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in Beijing that were crushed by the Chinese military, said Michael Kovrig, senior adviser for Northeast Asia at the International Crisis Group.

“It may not be a clash of civilizations, but it is a long-festering conflict of national, political and economic interest and systems that has reached a point of rupture,” Kovrig said.

Xi has abandoned the strategy laid out by reformist leader Deng Xiaoping that China should bide its time and refrain from advertising its ambitions to become a world power. Instead, he has been accused of overreach by promoting China’s drive to become a global technology leader by 2025, including by compelling foreign companies to hand over their know-how, and pushing Chinese-financed energy and transportation projects that leave target countries with unsustainable debt.

On the military front, a Chinese destroyer last month maneuvered perilously close to the USS Decatur in the South China Sea. The Chinese also denied a request for a U.S. Navy ship to visit Hong Kong and rejects U.S. concerns over its policies toward other countries.

“The U.S. simply aims to drive a wedge between China and relevant countries with those remarks,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday. “It is meaningless and futile.”

The tart rhetoric is evident on both sides.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a speech last week that China’s government “is engaged in the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities that is straight out of George Orwell,” referencing the internment of Muslims in the country’s northwest in political reeducation camps.

This month, the United States went further by threatening to pull out of the Universal Postal Union because it says the treaty allows China to ship packages to the U.S. at discounted rates at the expense of American businesses.

Underlying the estrangement is the sense that Beijing lacks reciprocity, taking advantage of open markets and free societies to extend its interests, while denying the same benefits to companies, governments and individuals over which it has influence.

“My bottom line view is that Xi Jinping very much overplayed his hand taking advantage of the restrained and moderate (former President Barack) Obama,” said Robert Sutter, a China expert at George Washington University. “Now he has an enormous American series of challenges to deal with, with no easy solutions.”

While Chinese companies — often backed by easy credit from state banks — have been snapping up foreign assets, Beijing restricts such foreign purchases in key sectors such as energy, transport and telecommunications. Although China has loosened some joint-venture demands, including in the auto industry, that may be too little too late.

China is “not very willing to constrain itself under rules that it feels were forced upon it,” said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “This includes the international trading system, which is dominated by the U.S.”

Still, attempts to contain China along the lines laid out during the Cold War would be “difficult, if not impossible,” given the broad range of contacts across political, economic and personal spheres, Cheng said.

The U.S. has also reinforced ties with Taiwan — claimed by China as its own territory — building an impressive new de facto embassy there, approving a major sale of military parts and services, and authorizing companies to help the self-governing island democracy build submarines to defend itself from China’s threats to use force to bring it under Beijing’s control.

The tensions are underscored by political uncertainties in both countries. Trump faces a referendum of sorts on his policies in next month’s midterm elections, while Xi has come under rare criticism at home since he forced through a constitutional amendment in March to allow him to lead indefinitely.

Xi is also beset by a slowing economy, made worse by U.S. tariffs that threaten the jobs of millions of Chinese workers. While China has retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, the loss of American markets will likely be a major drag on growth.

All such factors appear to speak poorly for any immediate resolution to the frictions.

Michael Mazza, a foreign policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, said “competition will remain the norm” between the two countries unless China is willing to make significant changes in its domestic, economic and foreign policies.

“At this point, there is little reason to suspect that such a shift is in the offing,” Mazza said.

Turkish President Accuses Saudis of Plotting Khashoggi’s Murder

ANKARA, Turkey — Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate after plotting his death for days, Turkey’s president said Tuesday, contradicting Saudi Arabia’s explanation that the writer was accidentally killed. He demanded that the kingdom reveal the identities of all involved, regardless of rank.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also said he wants Saudi Arabia to allow 18 suspects that it detained for the Saudi’s killing to be tried in Turkish courts, setting up further complications with the Saudi government, which has said it is conducting its own investigation and will punish those involved. Saudi Arabia has described the suspects as rogue operators, even though officials linked to Saudi Arabia’s assertive Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have been implicated in the killing.

“To blame such an incident on a handful of security and intelligence members would not satisfy us or the international community,” Erdogan said in a speech to ruling party lawmakers in parliament.

“Saudi Arabia has taken an important step by admitting the murder. As of now we expect of them to openly bring to light those responsible — from the highest ranked to the lowest — and to bring them to justice,” said the Turkish president, who used the word “murder” 15 times in his speech.

CIA director Gina Haspel is in Turkey to review the case, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the trip and spoke only on condition of anonymity. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he’s not satisfied with the explanations he’s heard from Saudi Arabia about the death of the Washington Post columnist and critic of the kingdom.

Erdogan’s speech was previously pitched as revealing the “naked truth” about Khashoggi’s slaying. Instead, much of what he said confirmed reports and leaks citing anonymous officials in the days since the journalist walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Erdogan didn’t mention Prince Mohammed by name in his speech. However, he kept pressure on the kingdom with his demands for Turkish prosecution of the suspects as well as punishment for the plot’s masterminds.

“All evidence gathered shows that Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a savage murder. To cover up such savagery would hurt the human conscience,” he said.

Erdogan said 15 Saudi officials arrived in the country shortly before Khashoggi’s death and that a man, apparently dressed in the writer’s clothes, acted as a possible decoy by walking out of the consulate on the day of the disappearance.

“Why did these 15 people all with links to the event gather in Istanbul on the day of the murder? We are seeking answers. Who did these people get their orders from to go there? We are seeking answers,” Erdogan said. “When the murder is so clear, why were so many inconsistent statements made? Why is the body of a person who has officially been accepted as killed still not around?”

International skepticism intensified after Saudi Arabia said on Saturday that Khashoggi died in a brawl. The case has shocked the world and raised suspicions that a Saudi hit squad planned the writer’s killing after he walked into the consulate on Oct. 2, and then attempted to cover it up.

At a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, King Salman again stressed that Saudi Arabia would hold those responsible for Khashoggi’s slaying “accountable,” according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.

Before Erdogan’s announcement, top Turkish officials said Turkey would clarify exactly what happened to Khashoggi as pressure increased on Saudi Arabia, which is hosting a glitzy investment conference this week that many dignitaries have decided to skip because of the scandal.

“As we all know these are difficult days for us in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told attendees seated in an ornate hall during the opening of the conference in Riyadh.

“Nobody in the kingdom can justify it or explain it. From the leadership on down, we’re very upset of what has happened,” Al-Falih said

Saudi Arabia said it arrested suspects and that several top intelligence officials were fired over Khashoggi’s killing, but critics alleged that the punishment was designed to absolve Prince Mohammed, the heir-apparent of the world’s top oil exporter, of any responsibility. Any major decision must be signed off by the highest powers within its ruling Al Saud family.

On Monday, leaked surveillance video showed a man strolling out of the diplomatic post hours after Khashoggi disappeared into the consulate, apparently wearing the columnist’s clothes as part of a macabre deception to sow confusion over his fate.

The new video broadcast by CNN, as well as a pro-government Turkish newspaper’s report that a member of Prince Mohammed’s entourage made four calls to the royal’s office from the consulate around the same time, put more pressure on the kingdom. Meanwhile, Turkish crime-scene investigators swarmed a garage Monday night in Istanbul where a Saudi consular vehicle had been parked.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, meanwhile, said Tuesday the investigation into the killing of Khashoggi would produce the truth about what happened and that his country was committed to ensuring “that the investigation is thorough and complete and that the truth is revealed and that those responsible will be held to account.”

Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, in Indonesia, also pledged that mechanisms will be put in place so that “something like this can never happen again.”

Amy Schumer Supports Kaepernick, Sits Out Super Bowl Ads

Don’t look for Amy Schumer in any Super Bowl LIII commercials this time around. She’s sitting this one out as she stands with Colin Kaepernick and his take-a-knee protest against racism and police brutality.

The comedian and “I Feel Pretty” actress explained her stance at length Friday on Instagram, challenging white NFL players to kneel as well. Addressing them directly, she wrote: “Otherwise how are you not complicit?”

Of her plan to steer clear of Super Bowl ads, she said: “I personally told my reps I wouldn’t do a Super Bowl commercial this year. I know it must sound like a privilege ass sacrifice but it’s all I got.”

Diddy, Jessica Seinfeld and Christie Brinkley offered her support among more than 8,000 comments left on her post. It was not immediately clear whether she had been approached to appear in an ad during the big game.

In 2016, Schumer appeared with Seth Rogen in a political-themed campaign for Bud Light, “Raise One to Right Now,” during Super Bowl 50.

“Hitting the nfl with the advertisers is the only way to hurt them,” Schumer wrote of her ban. “I know opposing the nfl is like opposing the nra. Very tough …”

China Opens Mega-Bridge Linking Hong Kong to Mainland

ZHUHAI, China — China on Tuesday opened the world’s longest sea-crossing bridge linking Hong Kong to the mainland, a feat of engineering carrying immense economic and political significance.

Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over a ceremony in the city of Zhuhai to open the 55-kilometer (34-mile)-long bridge linking it to the semi-autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Digital fireworks exploded on a screen behind him as leaders of the three cities watched.

The $20 billion bridge took almost a decade to build while incurring major delays and cost overruns. It includes an undersea tunnel allowing ships to pass through the Pearl River delta, the heart of China’s crucial manufacturing sector.

Its opening will cut travel time across the delta from several hours to just 30 minutes, something China hopes will bind the region together as a major driver of future economic growth. Heavily regulated traffic using permits issued under a quota system will begin flowing on Wednesday.

The bridge forms a physical link between the mainland and Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub that was handed over from British to Chinese control in 1997 with the assurance it would maintain its own legal and economic system for 50 years.

That carries major political significance for Xi’s administration, which has rejected calls for political liberalization in Hong Kong, sparking fears Beijing will clamp down further on civil liberties before the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement in 2047.

The bridge’s opening also comes a month after the inauguration of a new high-speed rail link from Hong Kong to mainland China that runs along a different, shorter route. That line has vastly decreased travel times but also raised concerns about Beijing’s growing influence because mainland Chinese law applies within part of the line’s Hong Kong terminus.

To Claudia Mo, a Hong Kong democratic politician, the bridge’s political significance outweighs its practical usefulness.

“It’s not exactly necessary, because Hong Kong is connected to mainland China in every way already, by land, by air, by sea,” Mo told The Associated Press.

“But they still need it as a political symbol or icon to remind Hong Kong people … that you are connected to the motherland, with this very grand bridge. It’s almost like an umbilical cord.”

In Zhuhai, however, sentiments revolved around economic growth and national pride.

Airline pilot Liu Gang said he’d been eagerly anticipating the opening of the bridge, calling it a symbol of the mainland’s increasingly close ties with Hong Kong and Macau.

“It’ll bring us even closer together, make us more flexible, economically and in many other ways. We’re now one family,” Liu said Monday afternoon while strolling along a walkway and shooting photos of the structure.

Luo Fengzhi, who works in real estate, cited the bridge as evidence of China’s growing economic and engineering prowess.

“For Chinese people, this makes them feel proud,” she said. “I hope that every patriotic Chinese person can come and see this great feat of engineering, and I welcome foreigners to come and see for themselves as well.”

Robert Reich: Democrats Can’t Fall for Trump’s Trap

Donald Trump says the midterm elections are a “referendum about me.” Of course they are. Everything is about him.

Anyone who still believes the political divide runs between Republicans and Democrats hasn’t been paying attention. There’s no longer a Republican Party. The GOP is now just pro-Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing all he can to make the Democratic Party the anti-Trump Party. “Democrats,” he declares, are “too dangerous to govern.” They’re “an angry left-wing mob,” leading an “assault on our country.”

Never before has a president of the United States been so determined not to be president of all Americans. He’s president of his supporters.

Tyrants create cults of personality. Trump is beyond that. He equates America with himself, and disloyalty to him with insufficient patriotism. In his mind, a giant “Trump” sign hangs over the nation. “We” are his supporters, acolytes, and toadies. “They” are the rest of us.

When everything and everyone is either pro- or anti-Trump, there’s no room for neutral expertise, professional norms, good public policy or the rule of law.

Trump is reportedly on the brink of firing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whom Trump suspects “might be a Democrat.” Mattis’s real sin has been to believe the military should be neutral and professional. To Trump that smacks of disloyalty.

Trump calls military generals “my” generals. He expects the FBI director, the Attorney General, and the Justice Department to be “his.” He proudly points to “his” judges and justices.

Republican members of Congress are part of “his” government—unless, like Jeff Flake and the late John McCain, they’re not.

He believes the nation’s press is either for him or against him. Fox News is indubitably for him—now a virtual propaganda arm of the White House. The rest are against him even when they merely report the news.

We’re all being taken in by this Trumpian dichotomy—even those of us in the anti-Trump camp.

When Trump is the defining issue in America, he gets to set the national agenda. All major debate in this country revolves around him, his goals and the objects of his vilification.

The Trumpification of America hardly ends if Democrats take over the House or possibly the Senate. Trump will blame them for everything that goes wrong. He’ll make up problems they’re supposedly responsible for. He’ll ridicule them and call them traitors.

He’ll do the same to anyone who shows serious interest in running for president against him in 2020.

Naturally, Democrats will want to defend themselves. Naturally, they’ll also want to attack Trump.

If they flip the House, they’ll use their subpoena power to dredge up whatever dirt on him they can find—summoning his tax records, Robert Mueller, Mueller’s investigative findings—and perhaps even beginning impeachment proceedings.

Trump and his Republican enablers will fight back, condemning Democrats for weakening America, engaging in fishing expeditions and witch hunts. Trump and his lawyers will tie up the subpoenas in court, claiming executive privilege.

Aspiring Democratic candidates for president will join in the brawl.

Op-ed writers, editorial boards, and pundits will argue over the best ways for Democrats to proceed against Trump—going low or going high. Pollsters will tell us which Democratic candidate is seen as being most effective against him.

But all of this is a giant trap. It accepts and enforces Trump’s worldview–that nothing is more important than Donald Trump, that he embodies all that’s good (or bad) about America, and that our most significant choice is to be for him or against him.

It allows Trump to continue to dominate the news and occupy the center of the nation’s attention.

We’d talk about nothing else for two years. We won’t be discussing how to restore wage growth, get health insurance to all Americans, reverse climate change or get big money out of politics.

We won’t be envisioning how a new America can widen opportunity, expand voting rights, end racism, reduce poverty and work constructively with the rest of the world.

We won’t be aspiring to be more than we were before Trump. We’ll debate and dissect the damage done since Trump.

Of course, Democrats have to fight him. But they also have to lift America beyond him.

The central question shouldn’t be whether we’re pro- or anti-Trump, or whether we go low or high in fighting him.

The question is where America should go—and what we, together, can become.

Hurricane Threatens Western Mexico, Resorts

MEXICO CITY — Authorities rushed to evacuate low-lying areas and set up shelters as an “extremely dangerous” Hurricane Willa with winds of 145 mph (230 kph) headed toward a Tuesday afternoon landfall along a stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast dotted with high-rise resorts, surfing beaches and fishing villages.

Farther south, meanwhile, Mexican officials reported late Monday that there had been 12 deaths related to heavy rains from Tropical Storm Vicente.

Willa briefly reached Category 5 strength, then weakened a bit to Category 4. But the U.S. National Hurricane Center warned that it still was likely to bring “life-threatening storm surge, wind and rainfall” to parts of west-central and southwestern Mexico.

Workers taped up windows in hotels and officials ordered schools closed in a low-lying region where towns sit amid farmland tucked between the sea and lagoons. A decree of “extraordinary emergency” was issued for 19 municipalities in Nayarit and Sinaloa states, the federal Interior Department announced.

Officials said 7,000 to 8,000 people were being evacuated from low-lying areas, mostly in Sinaloa state.

The hurricane was expected to first pass over or near the Islas Marias, a group of islands about 60 miles (96 kilometers) offshore that include a nature preserve and a federal prison. Forecasters said Willa would then blow ashore in late afternoon somewhere along a 140-mile (220-kilometer) stretch from the resort city of Mazatlan to San Blas.

Enrique Moreno, mayor of Escuinapa, a municipality of about 60,000 people lying on Willa’s potential track, said officials were trying to evacuate everybody in the seaside village of Teacapan. He estimated 3,000 were affected but he expected some would try to stay.

“The people don’t want to evacuate, but it’s for their security,” he said.

About 60 miles (100 kilometers) up the coast in Mazatlan, with a metropolitan-area population of about 500,000, Mayor Jose Joel Boucieguez said officials prepared shelters and were closely monitoring low-lying areas. Mazatlan is a popular vacation spot and home to a large number of American and Canadian expatriates.

Late Monday, Willa was centered about 85 miles (140 kilometers) southwest of the Islas Marias and 195 miles (310 kilometers) south-southwest of Mazatlan. It was moving north at 9 mph (15 kph), but was forecast to make a turn to the northeast during the night.

Hurricane-force winds extended 35 miles (55 kilometers) from the storm’s core, and tropical storm-force winds were up to 125 miles (205 kilometers) out.

The U.S. hurricane center warned that Willa could bring 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 centimeters) of rain — with up to 18 inches (45 centimeters) in some places — to parts of Jalisco, Nayarit and Sinaloa states, with flash flooding and landslides possible in mountainous areas.

Farther to the south, a weakening Tropical Storm Vicente was expected to dissipate soon, but it still caused heavy rainfall that caused dangerous flooding in southern and southwestern Mexico.

Officials in Oaxaca state said seven adults and five children had lost their lives in drownings or mudslides.

‘The Price of Everything’ Confronts an Art World Awash With Cash

In Oscar Wilde’s satirical play “Lady Windemere’s Fan,” the shrewd Lord Darlington notes that a cynic is a “man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” From Wilde’s tip, filmmaker takes the title for his new documentary about an art market besieged by end-stage capitalism, “The Price of Everything,” in theaters beginning Oct. 19, and on HBO Nov. 12.

The rich and powerful have always dominated the art market, making wealthy men of artists like Rubens, Rembrandt and Michelangelo, who all ran bustling ateliers and raked in high commissions. What’s changed is the speculative market surrounding the art world. No doubt, many among the powerful and influential have commissioned works in the past with an understanding that the works would increase in value over time. But today’s market is driven by speculation, with buyers bidding on artworks as if from the floor of the stock exchange.

“Art has always shown us who we are. Art holds the mirror up to us and tells us to look at how our society is beginning to replace the price of something with its intrinsic value. And this is the darker edge of capitalism that I very much want to explore in this film,” Kahn tells Truthdig.

“Never before has there been this incredibly intense use of art as a financial instrument. We now live in a period where everything in our world is commodified,” Kahn adds about his latest outing, which features gallerists and curators as well as artists Larry Poons, Marilyn Minter, George Condo and Jeffrey Koons—a commodity broker turned creator of Mylar balloon animals reimagined in stainless steel who offers futures on his work. A collector may purchase the promise of a future work, which she or he can hold to maturity or sell to other interested parties.

Though Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, was able to demand unusually exorbitant prices for her husband’s work following his death in 1956, the market hit a turning point with the Scull auction of 1973, with a focus on living artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Franz Kline and others from the period. A taxicab impresario and backer of the Green Gallery, which under director Richard Bellamy had immediate connections to New York’s most prominent living artists, Robert Scull sold many artworks for exponentially higher prices than what he paid for them.

A painting by Cy Twombly, purchased for $750, sold for $40,000. And Johns’ “Double White Map” fetched $240,000, considerably more than its purchase price of only $10,200. Rauschenberg, whose “Thaw” combine was acquired for a mere $900, sold for $85,000, prompting the artist to confront Scull. In archival footage of the auction included in Kahn’s film, Scull good-naturedly tells Rauschenberg that high prices will eventually benefit the artist.

At one point, Scull looks at a painting by Larry Poons and notes that he hasn’t seen it since he purchased it, indicating he’s held it in storage for the amount of time he’s had it, which suggests the painting was purchased as an investment. “He brings it out and doesn’t really recognize how good it is until it’s being sold,” Kahn says. “This is the moment where things begin to get a little hairy. The idea of being a speculative instrument; that’s the key moment.”

Seen wandering through a gallery in the film, Gerhard Richter laments the rising prices of artworks, including his own. “It’s not good when this is the value of a house. It’s not fair,” he says. “I like it, but it’s not a house. Money’s dirty.”

Richter, whose “Abstraktes Bild” set a record for second highest price to a living artist in 2015 when it sold for $46.3 million, goes on to say he would prefer his works be donated to a museum, where the public might enjoy them. But with entry prices going up in places like MoMA and LACMA, the public is becoming increasingly alienated from the art world. Moreover, it is customary for museums to display a mere 5 percent of their collection at any given time.

“It’s a very socialist-democratic way of avoiding having to deal with rich people who want them,” is Sotheby’s Fine Arts Chairman Amy Cappallezzo’s response to Richter. She is shown prepping a big auction, and even taking bids over the phone. Practices called “irrevocable bids,” in which a party bids before the sale and, if the sales price is above that figure, receives a percentage, and “chandelier bids,” when an auctioneer acknowledges a bid that was never offered, have created profound skepticism around auction houses.

For many, that skepticism was further stoked when Banksy’s “” made headlines, selling for $2.1 million at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Auction coinciding with London Frieze, then proceeded to drop through the bottom of the frame in which a hidden shredder was embedded, leaving most of the work in canvas strips.

While many marveled at the anonymous street artist’s ability to change a work and its meaning on cue, others wondered why, if there was no forehand knowledge, the painting wasn’t placed on an easel, as per usual, but hung on the wall, facilitating the stunt. Never mind the fact that it seems unlikely that Banksy built the shredding frame in 2006 and it sat undetected for 12 years before being remotely activated at the point of sale, actually doubling the painting’s value.

To artist Marilyn Minter that represents “white heat,” which, in the film, she defines as “when a painting sells for over $1 million and you’re still alive.” It’s a point taken up by the Guerrilla Girls, an all-female anonymous protest group usually seen wearing gorilla masks. Since their formation in 1985, they have made a project of singling out the art-world patriarchy and the exclusion of women and artists of color.

“Don’t let museums reduce art to a small number of artists who have won a popularity contest among bigtime dealers, curators and collectors,” says Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz, a founding member who has taken the name of a 1920s German expressionist artist to protect her identity. “If museums don’t show art as diverse as the cultures they claim to represent, tell them they’re not showing the history of art. They’re just representing the story of wealth and power.”

Many of the most prominent collectors, like Eli Broad or Stefan Edlis, who is featured in the film, collect the usual white male artists—Koons, Warhol and Hirst. Frequently, they also serve on the board of major museums, playing an important decision-making role regarding which artists are acquired. The result is that museums, which are historical cultural repositories, reflect an unbalanced picture of which artwork matters and which do not.

“I really do worry when I see our cultural institutions manipulated by money. There is so much great art out there being made by artists who are either from places that are not being collected from by prominent collectors, or they don’t have the right gallery behind them or they don’t have the right advocates,” Kahn says. “Those voices are oftentimes not making it into our cultural institutions. These are voices that must be heard.”

And, to a limited degree, they are being heard. L.A.-based Nigerian artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby (featured in the film) sold “Bush Babies” at Sotheby’s earlier this year for $3.4 million. And the Hammer Museum, whose biennial “Made in L.A.” show spotlights emerging local artists, included an overwhelming majority of women, LGBTQ people and artists of color among the roughly 30 practitioners showcased in its most recent iteration.

“We’ve seen a lot of progress,” notes Kollwitz, who likens changing major art institutions to turning a battleship mid-ocean. “Certainly, at the entry level at galleries, and to some extent the museums, there are more women and artists of color than ever before. It’s happening,” she says. “The problem is, if you do the numbers, it’s not happening enough. I think many institutions have started to realize that the main problem for them is they’re stuck with their collection, which is all male white artists. They’re trying to rectify that.”

Kahn doesn’t worry about art; he worries about us. Art will continue reflecting who we are, for better or for worse. “Ultimately, we are the arbiters of what art will speak for us in our time. And people need to take back that power,” he says. “The film encourages people to go and look at art again, and trust their own feelings about it rather than what the paper says about what something is worth. Trust your own eyes and you decide what art is worth your time and your engagement,” he implores. “If you’re feeling alienated by the way art is being treated now, that’s a good sign. You should feel alienated. But art isn’t alienating. Money is distancing us from art. That’s art telling us that money is alienating us from our humanity.”

Reported Federal Plan Targeting Transgender People Sparks Fury

WASHINGTON — LGBT leaders across the U.S. reacted with fury Monday to a report that the Trump administration is considering adoption of a new definition of gender that would effectively deny federal recognition and civil rights protections to transgender Americans.

“I feel very threatened, but I am absolutely resolute,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Rights, said at a news conference convened by more than a dozen activist leaders. “We will stand up and be resilient, and we will be here long after this administration is in the trash heap.”

The activist leaders, speaking amid posters reading “#Won’tBeErased”, later addressed a protest rally outside the White House.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services was circulating a memo proposing that gender be defined as an immutable biological condition determined by a person’s sex organs at birth. The proposal would define sex as either male or female, and any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified through genetic testing, according to the Times’ account of the memo.

For LGBT-rights leaders, it’s the administration’s latest attack on transgender Americans. They also cite an attempt to ban them from military service; a memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions concluding that civil rights laws don’t protect transgender people from discrimination on the job; and the scrapping of Obama-era guidance encouraging school officials to let transgender students use school bathrooms that matched their gender identities.

President Donald Trump briefly addressed the latest controversy as he left the White House for a political trip to Houston, but left unclear how his administration plans to proceed.

“We have a lot of different concepts right now,” Trump said. “They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now — you know that as well as I do — and we’re looking at it very seriously.”

Trump added: “I’m protecting everybody.”

The Cabinet agency had acknowledged months ago that it was working to rewrite a federal rule that bars discrimination in health care based on “gender identity.” It cited a Texas-based federal judge’s opinion that the original rule went too far in concluding that discrimination based on gender identity is a form of sex discrimination, which is forbidden by civil rights laws.

The department said Monday it would not comment on “alleged leaked documents.” It did release a statement from Roger Severino, head of its Office for Civil Rights, saying his agency was reviewing the issue while abiding by the 2016 ruling from the Texas-based federal judge, Reed O’Connor.

LGBT activists, who pledged legal challenges if the reported memo leads to official policy, said several other courts had issued rulings contrary to O’Connor’s.

“For years, courts across the country have recognized that discriminating against someone because they are transgender is a form of sex discrimination, full stop,” said Diana Flynn, Lambda Legal’s litigation director. “If this administration wants to try and turn back the clock by moving ahead with its own legally frivolous and scientifically unsupportable definition of sex, we will be there to meet that challenge.”

Shannon Minter, a transgender attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the reported plan a “cynical political ploy to sow discord and energize a right-wing base” before the Nov. 6 election.

UCLA legal scholar Jocelyn Samuels, who ran the HHS civil rights office in the Obama administration, said the Trump administration would be going beyond established law if it adopted the policy in the memo.

“What they are saying is you do not get to decide your sex; it is the government that will decide your sex,” said Samuels.

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, said the proposed rule change appears to still be undergoing White House review. It would need to be signed off by the departments of Justice, Labor and Education, which are also involved with civil rights enforcement.

He said “the purpose of this rule is to erase transgender people from existence, to write them off from federal law, and to institute a definition that is contrary to case law, contrary to medical and scientific understanding, and contrary to the lived experience of transgender people.”

While social mores enter into the debate, medical and scientific experts have long recognized a condition called “gender dysphoria” — discomfort or distress caused by a discrepancy between the gender that a person identifies as and the gender at birth. Consequences can include severe depression.

Treatment can range from sex-reassignment surgery and hormones to people changing their outward appearance by adopting a different hairstyle or clothing.

According to an estimate by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, there are about 1.4 million transgender adults in the United States.

___

Crary reported from New York.