Chris Hedges's Blog, page 49
January 20, 2020
Oxfam Report Calls Extreme Wealth a Sign of a Failing Economic System
“I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble,” former Vice President Joe Biden told an audience at the Brookings Institute in 2018. It was a few months before he’d officially declare his candidacy for president, but Biden’s position was clear: “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
After Bernie Sanders said that “Billionaires should not exist” during a 2019 New York Times interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, himself worth approximately $80 billion, took pains to defend the supposed goodness of the ultra-wealthy, including in a live-streamed employee Q&A at Facebook and on Fox Business News.
Amid the evergreen insistence that the world’s richest deserve to stay that way, and just as the World Economic Forum—the annual gathering of political and economic elites—gets underway in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam, the global charity, has released its annual report on global wealth inequality. Its title could double as a demand to the likes of Biden and Zuckerberg: “Time to Care.”
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“Extreme wealth,” the authors say, “is a sign of a failing economic system.”
Using data from Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “Global Wealth Databook (2019)” and the 2019 Forbes billionaire list, Oxfam found that just 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people combined. The report also focuses on how sexism and other forms of discrimination exacerbate inequality. For example, the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
The authors also calculate that women and girls perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work, including caring for their families, “a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.”
As Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said in a statement ahead of the report’s release, “Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist.”
Behar will represent Oxfam this week at the World Economic Forum, whose guest list is wide enough to encompass both environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump. It’s the kind of place where attendees theoretically discuss the world’s greatest economic problems, but in practice, they often come by private jet to make deals that only enhance their exorbitant wealth.
As Dutch journalist and historian Rutger Bregman said, regarding a 2019 panel discussion he moderated at Davos, “I hear people talk in the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but then … almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share. I mean, it feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one is allowed to speak about water.”
Behar’s job will be to speak about the metaphorical water, to demand that attendees talk openly about inequality, and to advocate for Oxfam’s recommendation that governments worldwide raise taxes on the richest 1% of their citizens by 0.5% over the next decade. According to the report, it would be enough to create 117 million jobs, in fields such as education and health care.
The authors make additional recommendations, including investing in a national care system with set wages for caregivers of all kinds, plus health care and paid time off, all of which would require extensive government support and intervention. Oxfam believes that’s the only way to make change: “The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies,” Behar says, “and too few governments are committed to these.”
Read the full “Time to Care” report here.
7 Pointed Questions for Corporate Media About Their Biases
Why don’t you refer to our current health care system as a “corporate-run system”?
At Democratic presidential debates and elsewhere, network TV journalists have aggressively challenged the notion of “abolishing private health insurance” — without discussing what health insurance companies actually contribute to health care beyond bureaucracy and profiteering. At last June’s debate, NBC’s Lester Holt asked candidates to raise their hands if they would “abolish private insurance in favor of a government-run plan.” Over and over, when mainstream journalists refer to “Medicare for All” — wherein the government would be the provider of health insurance, while doctors and hospitals remain private — they mislabel it “government-run health care” or a “government-run system.” Yet they never call our current system “corporate-run health care.”
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Why don’t you provide actual data on the public’s attitudes toward health insurance firms?
A 2016 Harris poll found deep disdain for health insurance companies, with only 16 percent believing that these firms put patients over profits. In a 2018 Forbes article on “The Top 5 Industries Most Hated by Customers,” the health insurance industry was ranked fourth (after cable TV, internet providers and wireless phone) — based on American Customer Satisfaction Index rankings. Yet at Democratic debates, we’ve repeatedly heard from journalists about the millions of US consumers who supposedly relish private insurance. While I’ve yet to meet one of those satisfied customers, it’s a mantra from media outlets (which are often sponsored by health insurers). More to the point: I’ve yet to meet anyone who would refuse a plan with more complete coverage at less cost to him or her: “No, I want my beloved Aetna!”
Why do you so rarely care about the views of unions . . . unless they’re in conflict with environmentalists?
For more than 30 years, the media watch group FAIR has documented that the views and voices of labor unions have been marginalized by mainstream media. An exception occurred at the CNN-hosted presidential debate last week, when Bernie Sanders explained his reasons for opposing NAFTA 2.0. (Below is from the transcript.)
SANDERS: Every major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase “climate change” in it . . .
PANELIST: But, Senator Sanders, to be clear, the AFL-CIO supports this deal. Are you unwilling to compromise?
Why do you also invoke unions to cast doubt on “Medicare for All?”
While presidential debate panelists (and corporate Democrats like Joe Biden) have frequently brought up union-negotiated health benefits as an argument against Medicare for All, they rarely mention how US unions have sacrificed wage gains and other benefits to stave off employer cuts to their health care. As flight attendants’ union president Sara Nelson told Politico: “When we’re able to hang on to the health plan we have, that’s considered a massive win. But it’s a huge drag on our bargaining. So our message is: Get it off the table.” As Biden admitted last week, attaching health insurance to a job (whether unionized or not) is an iffy proposition for any worker.
Why do you interrogate politicians over the price tags of social programs but not war?
CNN devoted the first portion of last week’s debate to war, military deployment and foreign conflict — but not one of the 25 questions from CNN journalists asked about the price tag of endless war and militarism. This despite the fact that roughly 57 percent of federal discretionary spending goes to the military and Trump keeps lavishing more money on the military than the Pentagon asks for. When it comes to war spending, mainstream journalists don’t ask: “Can our country afford it?”
After CNN’s debate turned from war to progressive proposals for social programs benefitting the vast majority of the public, panelists turned from lapdogs to watchdogs on the issue of cost. Sanders was asked, “Don’t voters deserve to see a price tag [on Medicare for All]?” and “How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?” To pound home the bias visually, CNN’s banners across the bottom of the screen blared: “QUESTION: Does Sanders owe voters an explanation of how much his health care plan will cost them and the country?” And the absurd: “QUESTION: Sanders’ proposals would double federal spending over a decade; how will he avoid bankrupting the country?” There were no banners about military price tags.
Why do you probe the costs of reform while sidestepping the higher price tags of the status quo?
Despite CNN’s grandstanding claims that Sanders has not provided a price tag on his health plan, he repeatedly says that Medicare for All will cost $30 trillion or a bit more over 10 years. And he immediately adds another assertion that has provoked little media interest or rebuttal –– that persisting with the status quo will cost far more, according to federal government sources, perhaps $50 trillion or more. The higher cost is due to corporate profits, executive pay, bureaucracy, etc. Bias is stark when journalists obsess on the estimated cost of reform while ignoring the estimated cost of the status quo. It’s media propaganda by omission. Similarly, conservative media have savaged the jobs-creating Green New Deal proposal – which, indeed, will cost trillions — without acknowledging the far higher price tag of continuing the status quo.
Why do you ignore the 2016 presidential result in your incessant punditry on which Democrats are electable in 2020?
I’m unaware of a single serious analyst who asserts with a straight face that Hillary Clinton lost to a faux-populist in 2016 because voters perceived her as “too far left” or “too radical.” But she obviously did lose votes because she was seen as too status quo, too cozy with the corporate establishment. In key swing states, Clinton failed to energize voters of color, lost young voters to third parties, and lost working-class whites who’d voted for Obama and Sanders. Democrats have been defeated in six presidential elections since the Reagan era, but one would be hard–pressed to find a single defeat attributable to far-leftism.
Establishment journalists seem intent on ignoring this history as they cover Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Over the last year, corporate outlets have continuously portrayed progressive reforms as scarily left-wing, in the face of polls showing they are broadly popular (not just with Democrats) — such as increasing taxes on the rich (a new Reuters poll found most Republicans favor a wealth tax); free public college and cancelling student debt; Medicare for All; and the Green New Deal. News articles matter-of-factly denigrate these popular proposals as “shoot-the-moon policy ideas” (Washington Post) that may push the Democratic Party “over a liberal cliff” (New York Times). I sometimes wonder if the computer keyboards in certain newsrooms — besides letter and number keys — have a single key that spits out the 8-word phrase: “too far left to win a general election.”
Unfortunately, many Democratic voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere are unduly influenced by mainstream media, despite the punditocracy’s awful track record in 2016 and earlier on predicting who’s “electable” in a general election.
Elite journalists regularly quote their “expert” sources in the Democratic establishment who express worries that if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, he’ll lose badly in November.
Or do those who own or run corporate media (and corporate Democrats) have a different worry — that Sanders will win the general election, shake up the system and take away some of their wealth and power?
Jeff Cohen is cofounder of the online activism group RootsAction.org, founder of the media watch group FAIR, a retired journalism professor, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”
Illinois Governor Moves to Reinstate Thousands of Suspended Driver’s Licenses
This article originally appeared on ProPublica.
Some 55,000 motorists will regain their right to drive this year after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed legislation Friday that ends the practice of suspending licenses over unpaid parking tickets.
The law, known as the License to Work Act, goes into effect in July.
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“Tens of thousands of Illinoisans lose their licenses each year for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to drive,” Pritzker said at a news conference on Chicago’s West Side, an area of the city that’s been heavily hit by ticket debt and license suspensions. “If you’re living below or near the poverty line and you’re looking at a choice between your unpaid parking tickets or your kids’ medicine or your family’s next meal, well, that’s no choice at all.”
The new law ends license suspensions for a number of non-moving violations, including the largest category: unpaid parking, standing and vehicle compliance tickets. Previously, 10 unpaid tickets from those categories could trigger a suspension.
Friday’s bill signing caps the end of a three-year effort by a coalition of advocates who have argued that limiting impoverished residents’ ability to drive makes it difficult for many of them to get to work, much less pay off their ticket debt.
The issue gained traction after a February 2018 investigation by ProPublica Illinois found Chicago’s ticketing and debt collection practices disproportionately hurt black motorists, sending thousands of them into bankruptcy. Filing for bankruptcy was more affordable, ProPublica Illinois found, than signing up for onerous ticket payment plans. Bankruptcy also allows motorists to get their licenses reinstated and regain possession of impounded vehicles.
In a subsequent analysis, ProPublica Illinois found that license suspensions tied to ticket debt disproportionately affected motorists in largely black sections of Chicago and its suburbs. Later, ProPublica Illinois collaborated with WBEZ Chicago and found a variety of problems, including geographic disparities and duplicative ticketing, tied to violation for vehicles that lacked a city sticker.
A cash-strapped city employs punitive measures to collect from cash-strapped black residents — and lawyers benefit.
State Sen. Omar Aquino, a Chicago Democrat, said the reporting “shed the light on how, unfortunately, there were some practices in our own state that we should’ve been embarrassed about.” Advocates leading the demand for reform at the state level include the Chicago Jobs Council, Woodstock Institute, American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, Heartland Alliance and Americans for Prosperity-Illinois.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who campaigned on ending the city’s regressive system of fines and fees, has already ushered in a number of reforms, including debt relief, reducing some penalties, changing payment plans and ending the practice of seeking license suspensions over unpaid parking tickets. City Clerk Anna Valencia, one of the first public officials to publicly call for reforms, said Friday she plans to continue to push for more changes.
The change to state law couldn’t come soon enough, said Stephen Carpenter, a 38-year-old from Chicago who had been considering filing for bankruptcy for months. Carpenter’s license was suspended about two years ago over unpaid parking tickets. On Friday, he said he’d accrued about $19,000 in ticket debt, mostly for expired plates citations, in the southwest suburb of Palos Hills. He relies on rides from his wife or rideshare services, which he estimates costs him upward of $300 a month.
He called the legislation a “light at the end of the tunnel” and said he now won’t file for bankruptcy. “If I would have [done] that, that would prevent me from getting a house in two years the way we were planning to do,” said Carpenter, who fears ruining his credit. “I’m going to toughen it out until [the law goes into effect].”
The law does not address license suspensions for debt tied to red-light or speed camera tickets; five unpaid camera tickets can trigger a license suspension. Advocates said Friday they are considering proposing legislation to also end those suspensions. A June 2018 Woodstock Institute report found that motorists from low-income and minority communities receive a disproportionate share of red-light camera tickets.
Asked whether he would consider legislation to end license suspensions for camera ticket debt, Pritzker said the issue was “absolutely worthy of consideration. We have to look at the information and make sure we’re doing it in the right way.”
Trump Lawyers Urge Dismissal of “Flimsy” Impeachment Case
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s legal team asserted Monday that he did “absolutely nothing wrong,” urging the Senate to swiftly reject an impeachment case that it called “flimsy” and a “dangerous perversion of the Constitution.” The lawyers decried the impeachment process as rigged and insisted that abuse of power was not a crime.
The brief from Trump’s lawyers, filed before arguments expected this week in the Senate impeachment trial, offered the most detailed glimpse of the lines of defense they intend to use against Democratic efforts to convict the president and oust him from office over his dealings with Ukraine. It is meant as a counter to a filing two days ago from House Democrats that summarized weeks of testimony from more than a dozen witnesses in laying out the impeachment case.
The 110-page filing from the White House shifted the tone toward a more legal response. It still hinged on Trump’s assertion he did nothing wrong and did not commit a crime — even though impeachment does not depend on a material violation of law but rather on the more vague definition of “other high crimes and misdemeanors” as established in the Constitution.
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“It is a constitutional travesty,” the lawyers wrote.
The prosecution team of House managers was spending another day on Capitol Hill preparing for the trial, which will be under heavy security. Before the filing, House prosecutors made their way through crowds of tourists in the Rotunda to tour the Senate chamber.
In their own filing Monday, House prosecutors replied to Trump’s not guilty plea by making fresh demands for fair trial in the Senate, where the Republican majority aligned with Trump has not yet disclosed the rules.
“President Trump asserts that his impeachment is a partisan ‘hoax.’ He is wrong,” the prosecutors wrote in their reply.
They wrote that the president can’t have it both ways — rejecting the facts of the House case but also stonewalling congressional subpoenas for witnesses and testimony. “Senators must honor their own oaths by holding a fair trial with all relevant evidence,” they wrote.
The White House document Monday, much more fulsome than its weekend pleading, says the two articles of impeachment brought against the president — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — don’t amount to impeachment offenses. It asserts that the impeachment inquiry, centered on Trump’s request that Ukraine’s president open an investigation into Democratic rival Joe Biden, was never about finding the truth.
“Instead, House Democrats were determined from the outset to find some way — any way — to corrupt the extraordinary power of impeachment for use as a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 election and to interfere in the 2020 election,” Trump’s legal team wrote. “All of that is a dangerous perversion of the Constitution that the Senate should swiftly and roundly condemn.”
The impeachment case accuses Trump of abusing power by withholding military aid from Ukraine at the same time that he was seeking an investigation into Biden, and of obstructing Congress by instructing administration officials not to appear for testimony or provide documents, defying congressional subpoenas.
In a brief filed Saturday, House Democrats called Trump’s conduct the “worst nightmare” of the framers of the Constitution.
“President Donald J. Trump used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain,” the House prosecutors wrote, “and then attempted to cover up his scheme by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his misconduct.”
But Trump’s team contended Monday that even if Trump were to have abused his power in withholding the Ukraine military assistance, it would not be impeachable, because it did not violate a specific criminal statute. And it said that the White House was within its legal right to shield close advisers of the president from having to appear before Congress, saying that position has been taken by administrations of both parties.
Opening arguments are expected within days following a debate Tuesday over rules, including about whether witnesses are to be called in the trial.
Trump signaled his opposition to witnesses, tweeting Monday: “They didn’t want John Bolton and others in the House. They were in too much of a rush. Now they want them all in the Senate. Not supposed to be that way!”
That’s a reference to former national security adviser John Bolton, who was not subpoenaed by the House in its impeachment inquiry but has said he is willing to testify in the Senate if he is subpoenaed.
The White House brief argues that the articles of impeachment passed by the House are “structurally deficient” because they charge multiple acts, creating “a menu of options” as possible grounds for conviction.
The Trump team claims that the Constitution requires that senators agree “on the specific basis for conviction” and that there is no way to ensure that the senators agree on which acts are worthy of removal, because a single count contains multiple allegations.
Administration officials have argued that similar imprecision applied to the perjury case in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, who was acquitted by the Senate.
The Trump lawyers accused Democrats of diluting the standards for impeachment, an argument that echoed the case made Sunday by one of Trump’s attorneys, Alan Dershowitz, who contended in talk shows that impeachable offenses must be “criminal-like conduct.”
That assertion has been rejected by scholars, and Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called it an “absurdist position.”
The MLK Lesson America Needs Most in 2020
As we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., it’s natural to remember his courageous advocacy for racial equity. But before he was assassinated, King had also begun to broaden his efforts to unify the around economic justice.
That’s worth remembering today.
In December 1967, King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other conveners laid out their vision for the first Poor People’s Campaign. Seeing how poverty cut across race and geography, these leaders built the campaign into a multiracial effort including African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans aimed at alleviating poverty for all.
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The goal was to lead a massive protest in Washington D.C. demanding that Congress prioritize a massive anti-poverty package that included, among other things, a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and more low-income housing. And they wanted to pay for it by ending the Vietnam War.
“We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war,” King said, “and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.” Assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968 while organizing Black sanitation workers, King never made it to the Poor People’s March, but thousands did protest in Washington to honor King’s memory and to pursue his vision.
That vision remains to be realized. Today, 140 million Americans — over 40 percent of us — remain poor or low-income. As in King’s day, Black and brown Americans are especially impacted, but so are millions of poor whites.
Our country may be polarized by party. But the truth is, we have more in common to fight for than what divides us.
A December survey by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that 52 percent of American voters across party lines reported experiencing a serious economic problem in the past year. This tracks with other research, including the Federal Reserve Board’s finding that 40 percent of Americans don’t have the money to cover a $400 emergency.
The same CAP survey shows that strong majorities — including 9 in 10 Democrats, 7 in 10 independents, and 6 in 10 Republicans — support government action to “reduce poverty by ensuring that all families have access to basic living standards like health care, food, and housing if their wages are too low or they can’t make ends meet.”
Even at a time of stark partisan polarization, a majority of Americans support policies like raising the minimum wage — while opposing things like the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to federal nutrition assistance programs.
King and the Poor People’s Campaign promoted a vision of unity. But it wasn’t a unity that avoided conflict — it was one where poor and low-income overcame their divisions to fight for economic justice together.
To revive that vision, a new Poor People’s Campaign has emerged to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and militarism — and what they’re calling “the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” Over the past two years, this campaign has organized communities from all over the country to build lasting power for poor and impacted people.
“Poor and low-wealth people are seeing the need to galvanize themselves around an agenda, not a party, not a person, but an agenda,” said Reverend William Barber, one of the new campaign’s leaders. “What happens if a movement is able to help people see how they’re being played against each other? You could reset the entire political calculus.”
As we head deeper into a divisive election season — and as we remember Dr. King — it’s worth remembering that our real enemy is injustice, not each other.
The Gun Rights Showdown Brewing in Virginia
Truthdig photojournalist Michael Nigro is on the scene in Richmond, documenting the protests with live videos and photography that will comprise a photo essay. Below is a clip from Monday’s protests:
The Associated Press reports:
Thousands of gun-rights activists — some making deliberate displays of their military-style rifles — crowded the streets surrounding Virginia’s Capitol building Monday to protest plans by the state’s Democratic leadership to pass gun-control legislation.
Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary state of emergency days ahead of the rally, banning all weapons, including guns, from the event on Capitol Square. The expected participation of fringe militia groups and white supremacists raised fears the state could again see the type of violence that exploded at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Virginia’s current gun laws:
* Do not require a permit to purchase rifles, shotguns or handguns.
* Do not require firearm registration.
* Do not require licensing.
* Do not require a permit to carry a rifle or shotgun.
* Do not “regulate the transfer or possession of .50-caliber rifles or large-capacity ammunition magazines.”
* Do not require a background check before transferring a firearm between unlicensed people.
* Do not impose a waiting period before the sale of a firearm.
* Do not require owners to report lost or stolen guns.
There are several restrictions in place. For example, concealed carry is allowed, but requires a court-issued permit. Dealers must contact state police—which conducts a background check—before a sale. State police are also required to be at gun shows to conduct background checks “at the request of the parties to the transaction.”
Proposed changes in Virginia seek to:
* Ban assault weapons, silencers, high-capacity magazines and other “dangerous weapons.”
* Require background checks on all firearm transactions.
* Reinstate the law—repealed in 2012—allowing no more than one handgun purchase a month.
* Allow municipalities to enact “ordinances that are stricter than state law.” Among the examples cited: rules banning guns in libraries or municipal buildings.
* Require lost or stolen guns to be reported to authorities within one day.
* Allow law enforcement to “temporarily separate a person from firearms if the person exhibits dangerous behavior that presents an immediate threat to self or others.”
* Prohibit the subjects of protective orders from possessing guns.
* Toughen punishment for allowing access of a loaded, “unsecured” firearm to someone 18 or younger.
Chinese Confirm Human-to-Human Transmission in Virus Outbreak
BEIJING—The head of a Chinese government expert team said Monday that human-to-human transmission has been confirmed in an outbreak of a new coronavirus, a development that raises the possibility that it could spread more quickly and widely.
Team leader Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory expert, said two people in Guangdong province in southern China caught the virus from family members, state media said. Some medical workers have also tested positive for the virus, the English-language China Daily newspaper said.
Human-to-human transmission could make the virus spread more quickly and widely.
The late-night announcement capped a day in which authorities announced a sharp uptick in the number of confirmed cases to more than 200, and China’s leader called on the government to take every possible step to combat the outbreak.
“The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan and other places must be taken seriously,” President Xi Jiping said in his first public statement on the crisis. “Party committees, governments and relevant departments at all levels should put people’s lives and health first.”
Xi’s remarks were reported by state broadcaster CCTV.
The spread of the viral pneumonia comes as the country enters its busiest travel period, when millions board trains and planes for the Lunar New Year holidays. The outbreak is believed to have started late last month when people picked it up at a fresh food market in Wuhan, a city in central China.
Wuhan health authorities said Monday an additional 136 cases have been confirmed in the city, raising the total to 198. Three have died.
Authorities elsewhere also announced cases in other Chinese cities for the first time.
Five individuals in Beijing and 14 in Guangdong have also been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, CCTV reported Monday evening. A total of seven suspected cases have been found in other parts of the country, including in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in the southwest and in Shanghai.
Zhong said the two people in Guangdong had not been to Wuhan but fell ill after family members had returned from the city, the China Daily said.
The outbreak has put other countries on alert as millions of Chinese travel for Lunar New Year. Authorities in Thailand and in Japan have already identified at least three cases, all involving recent travel from China.
South Korea reported its first case Monday, when a 35-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan tested positive for the new coronavirus one day after arriving at Seoul’s Incheon airport. The woman has been isolated at a state-run hospital in Incheon city, just west of Seoul, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.
At least a half-dozen countries in Asia and three U.S. airports have started screening incoming airline passengers from central China.
Videos posted online show people in protective suits checking one-by-one the temperatures of plane passengers arriving in Macao from Wuhan. A man surnamed Yang who works for the Macao Health Bureau confirmed over the phone that such checks are taking place in the southern Chinese region.
Many of the initial cases of the coronavirus were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, which was closed as authorities investigated.
Since hundreds of people who came into close contact with diagnosed patients have not gotten sick, the municipal health commission maintains that the virus is not easily transmitted between humans.
China’s National Health Commission said experts have judged the current outbreak to be “preventable and controllable.”
“However, the source of the new type of coronavirus has not been found, we do not fully understand how the virus is transmitted, and changes in the virus still need to be closely monitored,” the commission said in a statement Sunday.
Coronaviruses cause diseases ranging from the common cold to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. SARS first infected people in southern China in late 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing nearly 800. The Chinese government initially tried to conceal the severity of the SARS epidemic, but its cover-up was exposed by a high-ranking physician.
“In the early days of SARS, reports were delayed and covered up,” said an editorial in the nationalistic Global Times. “That kind of thing must not happen again in China.”
“We have made great strides in medicine, social affairs management and public opinion since 2003,” the editorial said.
Xi instructed government departments Monday to promptly release information on the virus and deepen international cooperation.
China has notified and maintained close communication with the World Health Organization and other relevant countries and regions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular news briefing.
Wuhan has also adopted measures to control the flow of people leaving the city, Geng said.
The virus causing the current outbreak is different from those previously identified, Chinese scientists said earlier this month. Initial symptoms of the novel coronavirus include fever, cough, tightness of the chest and shortness of breath.
On the Weibo social media platform, which is widely used in China, people posted prevention advice such as wearing masks and washing hands. State broadcaster CCTV recommended staying warm, increasing physical activity, eating lightly and avoiding crowded places. Some people said they had canceled their travel plans and were staying home for Lunar New Year.
___
Associated Press researcher Yu Bing in Beijing and writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.
Thousands Turn Out to Protest Gun Control Bills in Virginia
Editor’s Note: Truthdig photojournalist Michael Nigro is on the scene in Richmond, Va. and will be reporting live from the gun control protests.
RICHMOND, Va.—Thousands of gun-rights activists — some making deliberate displays of their military-style rifles — crowded the streets surrounding Virginia’s Capitol building Monday to protest plans by the state’s Democratic leadership to pass gun-control legislation.
Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary state of emergency days ahead of the rally, banning all weapons, including guns, from the event on Capitol Square. The expected participation of fringe militia groups and white supremacists raised fears the state could again see the type of violence that exploded at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
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The protesters, who were mostly white and male, came out in strong numbers Monday despite to the chilly temperature to send a message to legislators, they said. Many wore camouflage; Some waved flags with messages of support for President Donald Trump.
“The government doesn’t run us, we run the government,” said Kem Regik, a 20-year-old private security officer from northern Virginia who brought a white flag with a picture of a rifle captioned, “Come and take it.”
The Virginia State Police, the Virginia Capitol Police and the Richmond Police had a strong presence. Police limited access to Capitol Square to only one entrance and have warned rally-goers they may have to wait hours to get past security screening.
Authorities were looking to avoid a repeat of the violence that erupted in 2017 in Charlottesville during one of the largest gatherings of white supremacists and other far-right groups in a decade. Attendees brawled with counterprotesters, and an avowed white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing a woman and injuring dozens more. Law enforcement officials faced scathing criticism for what both the white supremacist groups and anti-racism protesters said was a passive response.
An RV festooned with Trump material and selling Trump merchandise parked in front of the line to the square, but was booted by a police officer shortly after it parked Monday: “You got two minutes before it’s towed. Clock’s ticking.”
Monday’s rally was organized by an influential grassroots gun-rights group, the Virginia Citizens Defense League. The group holds a yearly rally at the Capitol, typically a low-key event with a few hundred gun enthusiasts listening to speeches from a handful of ambitious Republican lawmakers. But this year, many more were expected. Second Amendment groups have identified the state as a rallying point for the fight against what they see as a national erosion of gun rights.
The pushback against proposed new gun restrictions began immediately after Democrats won majorities in both the state Senate and House of Delegates in November. Much of the opposition has focused on a proposed assault weapons ban.
Virginia Democrats are also backing bills limiting handgun purchases to once a month, implementing universal background checks on gun purchases, allowing localities to ban guns in public buildings, parks and other areas, and a red flag bill that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others.
Jesse Lambert was dressed in mix of colonial era minute-man garb and cargo pants, with an colt rifle strapped across his back. He said he traveled from Louisiana to show opposition to the gun control bills. He said their efforts would unfairly punish law-abiding gun owners, particularly those who own AR-Style rifles.
“These are your average common people carrying firearms that are in common use,” he said.
The rally coincides with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which is typically a chance for everyday citizens to use a day off work to lobby their legislators. However, the threat of violence largely kept other groups away from the Capitol, including gun control groups that hold an annual vigil for victims of gun violence.
When that event was canceled, students from March for Our Lives, the movement launched after 17 were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, decided they had to do something.
A group of about 15 college students and one high schooler came to Richmond on Sunday and slept overnight in the offices of two Democratic lawmakers to ensure they could make it into the Capitol area safely. Del. Dan Helmer, who’s sponsoring a bill that would block the National Rifle Association from operating an indoor gun range at its headquarters, and Del. Chris Hurst, a gun control advocate whose TV journalist girlfriend was killed in an on-air shooting in 2015, camped out alongside them.
The students planned to spend the day lobbying.
Michael McCabe, a 17-year-old high school senior from northern Virginia, said he started lobbying at the General Assembly after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, when he was 11 years old.
In an interview in Helmer’s office, McCabe said the students wanted to be a voice for other gun-control advocates.
“Our main goal is not to engage with gun extremists today,” McCabe said. “We are really here to be present in the legislature to make our voices heard.”
A Circus Then, a Circus Now
Chris Hedges has the week off. Here, in this reposted column from Jan. 7, 2019, are his thoughts about the then-nascent presidential election campaign.
It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year’s football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.
It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices. Maybe Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces in the scramble for the presidency—Beto O’Rourke, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg?
It is a political version of the reality television show “Survivor.” Who will be the first knocked out? Who will make it into the semifinals and the finals? Who is the most devious and cunning? Who will come out on top? We get to vote for the contestants that appeal to us most, or at least vote against those we hate the most. The cable news shows, in a prelude to the nonstop idiocy to come, have spent the last few days speculating about whom Mitt Romney will endorse in the 2020 race. Now there’s a burning question of national importance.
To take power in 2021 in lieu of any real policy changes, the Democratic Party is banking on the deep animus toward President Trump. It has no intention of instituting genuine populist programs, rebuilding unions, funding universal health care, providing free college tuition or curbing the criminal activities of the corporations and the big banks. The war machine will continue to wage endless war and consume half of all discretionary spending. The vaunted new populist members of Congress will be no more than window dressing, trotted out, like Sanders, to trick voters into thinking the Democratic Party is capable of reform. Most voters, for this reason, are “voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody,” as journalist Matt Taibbi points out.
Working men and women especially despise the slick-talking politicians—including the Clintons and Barack Obama—and the “experts” and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress. Trump hangs on to the support of white working Americans because he expresses through his adolescent insults and dynamiting of political norms the legitimate hatred they feel toward the well-heeled, college-educated ruling elites who sold them out. The Democrats, at the same time, understand that it takes someone as revolting as Trump to fire up their lethargic base, a group in which millions do not vote. They cling to a tactic of “anybody but Trump” even though it did not work in 2016.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like. As for now, Warren—the only nationally known Democrat except Julian Castro to form an exploratory committee for a presidential bid—is not winning this popularity contest. A CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa poll—yes, polling in Iowa already has begun—puts her fourth, with only 8 percent of support among the Democrats surveyed, behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.
Our corporate rulers do not need to denounce democracy. Democratic laws, such as who can fund campaigns, have been subverted from within, their original purposes redefined by the courts and legislative bodies to serve corporate power. This managed democracy has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed theatrical productions. Politicians run on “moral” issues and use public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump, his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.
Politicians must stick to the script. They have well-defined roles. They express a suffocating, reality-defying positivism about the future of America. They are steadfast in their obsequious praise of the nation’s “heroes” in the military and law enforcement. They are silent about the crimes of empire. They ignore the plight of the poor; indeed the word “poor” is banished from their vocabulary. They pretend we do not live in a corporate oligarchy, although they acknowledge amorphous attacks on the middle class and promise to stem the assault. They exude a cloying feel-your-pain compassion that revolves around personal stories of the hardships they overcame in their own lives to become “successes”—the most ludicrous being Trump’s claim that he turned a “very small” loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar real estate empire. They telegraph to us that they are one of us. We can be like them. They trot out their wives, husbands and children, even when a spouse like Melania Trump looks as if she has been taken hostage, to portray themselves as family men and women. They claim they are outsiders, ignoring their long political careers and their status as members of the wealthy ruling elite. They are no different from the array of self-help gurus who ignore systemic injustice and social decay to peddle schemes for personal success. The formula is universal. It is the triumph of artifice, what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.”
Those who do not play this game, like Ralph Nader, or who like Sanders play it begrudgingly—Sanders refused corporate money, has called for reforming “the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual Pentagon budget” and addresses issues of class—are ridiculed and marginalized by a monochromatic corporate media that banishes qualification, ambiguity, nuance and genuine dialogue. Trump’s success as a candidate came, in large part, because of the constant media attention he received. Those like Sanders who attempt to defy the rules of the game are punished. The goal is entertainment. Politicians who are good entertainers do well. The poor entertainers do badly. The networks seek to attract viewers and increase profits, not disseminate information about political issues. Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
“At issue is more than crude bribery,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism.” “Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority. The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not those of the Nazis, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered feckless.”
This process, Wolin writes, has turned the electorate into “a hybrid creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and popular fantasies of the miraculous. It was no leap of faith from the camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the twentieth century to the politically savvy televangelist of the twenty-first century.”
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized. The corporate system is presented as sacrosanct and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism as natural law. The corporations are funding the show. They get what they pay for.
Sanders, it appears, will run again as a Democrat, despite the theft of the 2016 nomination by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party hierarchy. His next campaign, to quote Samuel Johnson, will be the triumph of hope over experience. The Democratic establishment and the media sharks will, if Sanders uses the old playbook, devour him. They have already severely diminished his stature by turning him into Clinton and Chuck Schumer’s barking seal.
The differences between the right-wing media and the liberal media are minuscule. As Taibbi writes in “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” they are “really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.”
“Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money,” Taibbi writes. “The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things.”
“They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about the money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants down or Mexican babies at an emergency room.”
The Republican strategy of playing to the lowest common denominator ensured that eventually the useful idiots would take over and elect one of their own, in Donald Trump. Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images. He, like tens of millions of other Americans, believes anything he sees on television. He does not read. He is consumed by vanity and the cult of the self. He is a conspiracy theorist. He blames America’s complex social and economic ills on scapegoats such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and of course the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, in turn, blames Trump’s election on Russia and former FBI Director James Comey. It is the theater of the absurd.
The childish gibberish Trump speaks is the new language of political discourse. His taunting tweets against his enemies are countered by his enemies with taunting tweets against him. These grade-school-level insults dominate the daily news cycle. The political process, captured by commercial interests, devolved to Trump’s imbecilic level. The presidential election of 2020 has begun. The circus, with its freaks, con artists and clowns, is open for business.
January 19, 2020
Trump’s Impeachment Defense, Prosecutors Dig In
WASHINGTON — Advocates for and against President Donald Trump gave no ground Sunday on his Senate impeachment trial, digging in on whether a crime is required for his conviction and removal and whether witnesses will be called.
But even as Trump’s defense team and the House prosecutors pressed their case on the television talk shows, mystery still surrounded the ground rules for the impeachment trial, only the third in American history, when it resumes Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was shedding no light on what will be the same as — and different from — the precedent of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999.
All sides agitated to get on with it, none more than the four Democratic senators running for president and facing the prospect of being marooned in the Senate heading into Iowa’s kickoff caucus on Feb. 3.
“The president deserves a fair trial. The American people deserve a fair trial. So let’s have that fair trial,” said Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, one of the seven impeachment prosecutors who will make the case for Trump’s removal.
But what’s fair is as intractable a showdown as the basic question of whether Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to help him politically merits a Senate conviction and removal from office. The stakes are enormous, with historic influence on the fate of Trump’s presidency, the 2020 presidential and congressional elections and the future of any presidential impeachments.
Whatever happens in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said, Trump will “be impeached forever.”
Members of Trump’s team said that if they win a vindication for Trump, it means “an acquittal forever as well,” Trump attorney Robert Ray said Sunday. “That is the task ahead.”
The House on Dec. 18 voted mostly along party lines to impeach, or indict, Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He is the third president to be impeached in U.S. history.
Trump denies both charges as the products of a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” and has cast himself as a victim of Democrats who want to overturn his 2016 election.
For all of the suspense over the trial’s structure and nature, some clues on what’s to come sharpened on Sunday.
The president’s lawyers bore down on the suggestion that House impeachment is invalid unless the accused violated U.S. law.
“Criminal-like conduct is required,” said Alan Dershowitz, author of a book about the case against impeaching Trump.
The argument refers to an 1868 speech by Benjamin Curtis, who after serving as a Supreme Court justice acted as the chief lawyer for President Andrew Johnson at his Senate impeachment trial.
In his speech before the Senate, Curtis argued that “high crimes and misdemeanors” must correspond to an actual law on the books at the time the offense was committed.
“There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor, without a law, written or unwritten, express or implied,” Curtis told the Senate. “There must be some law; otherwise there is no crime. My interpretation of it is that the language ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ means ‘offenses against the laws of the United States.’”
Johnson was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
Republicans have long signaled the strategy, which has, in turn, been disputed by other scholars.
“Rubbish,” said Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor and author of his own book about the history of impeachment for the Trump era.
“It’s comically bad. Dershowitz either knows better or should,” said Bowman, who said he had Dershowitz as a law professor at Harvard. “It’s a common argument, and it’s always wrong.”
He said Johnson was acquitted for multiple reasons but not because Curtis was right in his characterization of high crimes and misdemeanors. The proposition was “amply rebutted” by the House managers in the Johnson case, Bowman said.
Dershowitz on Sunday pushed another, more personal and perhaps difficult narrative. He described himself as something other than a full member of the defense team, merely a speaker about the Constitution. He refused to endorse the strategy pursued by other members of that team or defend Trump’s conduct. He noted he didn’t sign the White House’s brief for the trial.
He acknowledged that his argument really is against having new testimony introduced.
“There’s no need for witnesses,” he said.
Democrats strongly disagree, and a few Republicans said they want to know more before deciding. New information from Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is being incorporated in the House case. At the same time, Senate Democrats want to call John Bolton, the former national security adviser, among other potential eyewitnesses, after the White House blocked officials from appearing in the House.
With Republicans controlling the Senate 53-47, they can set the trial rules — or any four Republicans could join with Democrats to change course.
McConnell has said he has 51 votes to start the trial before making a decision on calling witnesses. But he hasn’t released the ground rules publicly, giving him and the White House more control over their Sunday remarks. McConnell has said he’s working closely with the president’s team.
“It’s telling that none of us have seen this resolution, except, I suppose, the White House lawyers,” said the lead impeachment prosecutor, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Crow spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Dershowitz was on CNN and ABC’s “This Week.” Ray was on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Schiff appeared on ABC’.
___
Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
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