Chris Hedges's Blog, page 52

School Lunch Debt Is an American Travesty

A Google search for “paying school lunch debt” reveals a long list of recent news stories about good Samaritans paying off the school lunch debt of children whose families cannot afford it.

A Fredonia, New York man paid off $2,000 in school lunch debt in his area, helping 140 families. A Rigby, Idaho tattoo shop raised $1,200. Nationally, a charity called School Lunch Fairy has raised nearly $150,000 to pay off the school lunch debt of children in need.

These stories are heartwarming, and the people who donate are angels. But let’s look at the bigger picture: Why is there school lunch debt in the first place?

In 2008, Mark Winne wrote in his book Closing the Food Gap that he knew how to end hunger. I was impressed. What could it be? I figured the answer must be terribly complex.

But it wasn’t. End poverty, Winne wrote.

This ties back to the work of Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics who found that hunger was not due to a lack of food, but a lack of a right to food. If you lack the ability to buy food or grow your own food, and nobody gives you food, then in a capitalist economy, you are not legally entitled to food.

Or, in this case, if your parents cannot afford food, then children are not legally entitled to eat at school.

Let’s divide this into two distinct issues, a moral one and a more practical one.

Letting children go hungry in the richest country on earth is wrong. Period. That’s the moral one.

Now, speaking practically, providing free and reduced cost lunch to children of low-income families serves several purposes at once.

It provides for children’s physical needs as an end in itself, while helping them focus on learning while at school. It provides jobs in food service for adults. It even creates demand for commodities to help keep prices up for farmers.

Going one step further, the National School Lunch Act was actually passed as a matter of national security after the Great Depression and World War II. Lawmakers considered undernourishment a liability if it meant young people weren’t healthy enough to fight the next Hitler.

Whatever the reason, ensuring children have enough to eat during the school day is also an economic stimulus and a matter of public good. We all do better if we live in a nation where children grow up healthy, educated, and well nourished.

But we already have the National School Lunch Program, which offers children of low-income families free and reduced price lunch. So why is there still an epidemic of school lunch debt?

For one thing, qualifying for free or reduced price lunch usually involves some burdensome paperwork, so families who should qualify for it don’t always receive it. In other cases, bureaucratic errors can saddle families with thousands in debt for lunches they thought were covered.

The Trump administration is actually making that problem worse by no longer automatically enrolling children in families that qualify for SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, for school lunch assistance.

We live in a nation where food is plentiful but millions of children experience hunger and food insecurity. Feeding our kids shouldn’t fall only to kind strangers and acts of charity.

Instead, a nationwide epidemic of school lunch debt points to a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. Our kids deserve universal school lunch — and real plans to end poverty in the richest country on earth.

The Questions No One’s Asking About the Border Wall

A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We’re talking about a long, skinny territory — a geographic gerrymander — that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless, save for the law of the gun. But that old West was lawless for want of government. This one is lawless because of it.

The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. Predictably, the Endangered Species Act is among the fallen. So are the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, laws restricting air and water pollution, and measures protecting wildlife, landscapes, Native American sacred sites, and even caves and fossils.

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The new Wild West of the border wall is an authoritarian dreamscape where the boss man faces no limits and no obligations. It’s as though Marshall Wyatt Earp, reborn as an orange-haired easterner with no knowledge of the actual West, were back in charge, deciding who’s in and who’s out, what goes and what stays.

Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. The environmental analyses and impact statements NEPA requires might not force the government to evaluate whether a palisade of 30-foot-high metal posts — bollards in border wall terminology — were really a better way to control drug smuggling than upgrading inspection facilities at ports of entry, where, by all accounts, the vast majority of illegal substances enter the country. They would, however, require those wall builders to figure out in advance a slew of other gnarly questions like: How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?

The questions get big, fast. One that might look easy but isn’t concerns the flashfloods that stream down desert washes. The uprights of the border wall are to be spaced only four inches apart, which means they’ll catch flood debris the way a colander catches spaghetti.

Let’s get specific. The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge abuts the border in the far southeastern corner of Arizona. Black Draw, a gulch running through the middle of the refuge, is normally as dry as a hot sidewalk. When thunderstorms burst over the vast San Bernardino Valley, however, the floodwaters can surge more than 20 feet high.  Imagine a wall of chocolate water sweeping up tree trunks, uprooted bushes, the occasional dead cow, and fence posts snarled in wire. Imagine what happens when that torrent meets a barrier built like a strainer. The junk catches and creates a dam. Water backs up, and pressure builds. If the wall were built like the Hoover Dam, it might hold, but it won’t be and it won’t.

In 2014, a flood in Black Draw swept vehicle barriers aside, scattering pieces downstream. Local ranchers have shown me the pictures. You could say the desert was making a point about how wet it could be. In fact, there’s no mystery about what will happen when such a flood hits a top-heavy palisade. If a NEPA document were to evaluate the border wall, the passage discussing this eventuality might require its writer to invent a term for what a wall becomes when it lies flat on the ground.

On the other hand, if you leave gaps for floods to pass through, then smugglers and — for Donald Trump and his base — people of unacceptably dark skin color might come the other way. Not that they necessarily would. As local residents I talked to attest, active patrols, remote sensing, and improved coordination among law enforcement agencies have reduced illegal crossings in the San Bernardino Valley almost to zero, something current government officials don’t point out but a NEPA document would.

With NEPA out of the picture, the responsible parties only have to claim that they’ll figure out a solution later and, when “later” comes, maybe they’ll have conveniently moved on to other jobs.

Pittsburgh on the Border

Meanwhile, there’s another question that won’t have to be dealt with: How much water will the wall’s construction require? The answer matters in an area where water’s scarce. Again, the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge offers a useful vantage point for considering the question.

To get to the refuge, you drive east from the town of Douglas along the Geronimo Trail, an unpaved two-lane country road that earns its name honestly.  Nineteenth-century Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. military in the mountains on the horizon just ahead of you. Shortly before you reach the refuge, you top a low rise overlooking what the local assessor initially mistook for a new industrial park.  It was as if a section of Pittsburgh or Youngstown had suddenly sprouted from the desert, with enough mesquite and creosote bush scraped away to accommodate a concrete-batching plant, office trailers, and a massive staging area and machinery yard.

Stacks of steel bollards stand taller than houses, covering the space of a neighborhood. A grid of steel rails for laying out those bollards and welding them into pre-fab wall sections occupies another acre or two, beyond which stacks of completed sections cover yet more acres. In front of those stacks, a few scraps of wall stand vertical but disjointed, like shrines to a metal god — probably practice erections, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Scattered through the site are forklifts, graders, loaders, bulldozers, excavators, pickup trucks, flatbeds, and cranes. Generators and floodlights on wheeled rigs are parked at the margins, ready to illuminate round-the-clock shifts. Close to the batching tower, which may rival the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas as the tallest structure in Cochise County, cement trucks cluster like a litter of puppies.

And more steel keeps arriving. An approaching cloud of dust on the Geronimo Trail signals a line of incoming semis loaded with still more bollards. They pass newly posted signs that say: “Be Aware: Equipment Has the Right of Way” and “Risk Takers Are Accident Makers.”

These details, however, are prelude to the main event. If you look toward Mexico, a half-mile of wall already stands in place, undulating with the hills. Think of it as a dark, linear Steelhenge, a monolith screening the shimmering Sonoran mountains to the south. You can see where the next sections will be raised. Construction has already reached the refuge.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Better Not Play

The surface and subsurface flow of water from nearly the entire San Bernardino Valley converges at the refuge, creating an oasis in the heart of the desert. If this were the Sahara, caravansaries would have stopped by its green pools for thousands of years. As it is, Apaches, Yaquis, Tohono O’odham, and their predecessors have used its waters since time out of mind, as did the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who later strove to take the land from them and from each other. The ponds lie half-hidden amid jungles of reeds.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge is modest as refuges go — only 2,369 acres — but it was once part of the sprawling, 73,240-acre Slaughter Ranch, two-thirds of which lay in Mexico. Next to the refuge, the ranch headquarters, now a historic site, has its own big pond. From that pond or any of those on the refuge, a major-league slugger could knock a baseball out of the country.

Contractors building the wall have drilled three wells along the border and leased a fourth. Tanker trucks constantly shuttle between the wells and the concrete plant. Nobody is saying how much water wall construction will consume. The foundation for the wall will be — what? A yard wide and seven-feet deep? Ten-feet deep? Sorry, that’s privileged information, not for public consumption.

Anyway, the foundation just in this area will run for scores of miles, farther than you can see, and consume enough concrete to build a small town — and concrete requires water. Lots of it.

How much will the pumping deplete local aquifers? Nobody knows because, absent NEPA, nobody has had to figure it out. There’s been no modeling, no serious testing, no reliable calculations. Still, local ranchers would like to know the answer. They depend on wells and water tanks scattered through the desert scrub where their cattle drink.

Good luck to them. And good luck, as well, to the critters for which the refuge is supposed to provide… well, refuge.

I could print a list of the unusual fish, frogs, snails, snakes, and other living things that are found here and almost nowhere else on Earth, not to mention the rare plants, the itinerant mammals (some also rare), and the hundreds of species of birds that use this place. In the desert, reliable water is a kind of miracle that attracts and creates other miracles.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, you might say, is a cluster of miracles. There are too many to list. And a long list of weird names would take up a lot of space and sound pinheaded. I care a lot about those creatures, but I don’t want to sound like that.

To be honest, I’m almost afraid to learn the names of some of the refuge’s creatures because then it would only hurt all the more if they decline to extinction. The wall will certainly nudge, or maybe shove, many of them in that direction. Nevertheless, I have to mention two of them. Their names suggest a kind of taxonomic poetry, a nature music. They aren’t necessarily the rarest, but they sound the best: Yaqui topminnow. Chiricahua leopard frog. The words fall on the ears like melodies, evoking the mystery of tender life in a harsh land. As members of a species, you and I are as common as coal. In the big biological scheme of things, creatures like these are rubies and sapphires.

Forget Policy, Follow the Metaphor

It’s impossible to understand the wall, at least in the San Bernardino Valley, in terms of policy. As one rancher put it to me over coffee at the Gadsden Hotel, “This [wall] may be needed someplace, but it isn’t needed here.”

If Trump’s wall were really about policy, its advantages and disadvantages would be weighed against other strategies requiring different kinds of investment. But this is the new Wild West, where rational judgment, laws, and procedures only get in the way.

The truth of the wall lies in metaphor. If Chiricahua leopard frog conveys a kind of poetic resonance to people like me, then for millions of others chanting “Build the Wall!” is like hitting a big bass drum. Everybody understands wall! Even if the structure doesn’t actually work in physical space, it works in your mind. It stands between you and everything bad you can imagine. The core truth that unites Trump and his supporters is that he hates who we hate — and the border wall stands for keeping out those unwanted people and all they represent.

This is why the wall can’t coexist with NEPA. Impact statements don’t do imagery. If you really want to crack down on drug smuggling, for example, you’d concentrate your efforts at established ports of entry, where billions of dollars of goods and millions of people cross from one country to the other every day. The bulk of the fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs entering the U.S. is reportedly concealed among legitimate imports in railroad cars and trucks of every description. Or they get stashed in secret compartments in buses, vans, cars, and pickup trucks. (The U.S. mail is another major conduit.) Currently, it’s estimated that more than $4 billion in new scanners, inspection lanes, and the people to staff them are needed. Making that investment would have infinitely more impact on drug flow than using the same money to install bollards where they aren’t needed and won’t last. There are better ways to handle people, too, but let’s not get distracted from the real story.

Expenditures on wall construction in Fiscal Year 2019 ran to approximately $10 billion. Only a third of that amount was actually appropriated by Congress for border security structures. Delivering the rest of the money required masterful circumventions of constitutional intent.

Here’s one of them: each year Congress appropriates so-called 2808 funds to the Department of Defense for construction projects on military bases, including schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructure. Such expenditures are restricted to military property and the international border with Mexico isn’t — or wasn’t — a military base. For the Trumpistas, however, not a problem.

In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt reserved a 60-foot easement from the public domain along the southern border to keep it “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.” Since then, the “Roosevelt easement” has been administered by the Bureau of Land Management, but last year the Trump administration transferred the easement to the Department of Defense, which obligingly assigned it as a real-estate asset to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Voila! Now, the Roosevelt Easement is part of a military base and a tendril of Fort Bliss officially extends into Arizona, New Mexico, and California — but not Texas. (The Lone Star State reserved its public land for itself when it entered the union, so no Roosevelt Easement there.) Technically, border wall construction within the easement now constitutes an improvement to Fort Bliss, enhancing military preparedness, yadda, yadda, yadda. There’s more to it than that, including the president’s formal declaration of a national emergency last February, which enabled certain other steps, but you get the idea. Where there’s a will, there’s an imperial way.

As it happens, however, the Pentagon’s money for funding wall construction across the foot of the San Bernardino refuge itself comes from a different pot: “284” funds, intended for counter-narcotics work. Diverting $2.5 billion of these monies to the border wall was, to say the least, a stretch, so a coalition of humanitarian and environmental groups sued. A district court found in their favor and issued an injunction, halting the use of the funds for construction. A rapid series of appeals went to the Supreme Court and the Supremes said, Hmmm, interesting question, which will take time for the lower courts to resolve; meanwhile, the injunction is lifted. And so funding again flowed like a flash flood. If the courts ultimately decide that the transfer of funds is really not okay, the wall may already have been built. Thank you, Supremes.

Dollars and Nonsense

I forgot to mention something: in addition to suspending more than 50 laws protecting lands, wildlife, and the public interest, the government has also waived many procurement laws and also buried a lot of contract information. This means you and I will have a hard time learning what anything actually costs, even though our tax dollars are paying for it.

Example: the barrier to be built along the edge of the San Bernardino refuge, cutting off its terrestrial wildlife from the Mexican half of its world and quite possibly draining the ponds where some of the planet’s rarest creatures survive, is part of a contract for 63 miles of border wall awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors (SWVC), a subsidiary of Kiewit, a Fortune 500 company with $9 billion in annual sales.

The original May 2019 contract awarded $646 million to SWVC, putting the cost of the refuge wall at $10.25 million per mile, a veritable steal. But you would need to know someone who can log into the relevant government database to discover that the fifth modification of the original contract, signed on August 29th, added another $653 million to the kitty. Now, those 63 miles are going to cost $1.3 billion, or almost $21 million per mile.

And by the way, did I mention that construction will include a power line and floodlights on 60-foot masts to illuminate the wall all night long, every night of the year? I have friends in the San Bernardino Valley who just about weep — and they aren’t weepy people — when they think about the lights on that wall blazing away in what used to be the immense, holy darkness of their formerly unblemished land.

I can get pretty choked up about it myself, but you can be sure that smugglers won’t. Here’s where things get truly weird: believe it or not, darkness is an ally of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Its people have night vision goggles and its drones and other sensors have infrared detectors. They don’t need light. Flood the border with light and, counter-intuitively, the CBP is blinded, losing an advantage. Whose idea was this? Nobody’s saying, but it seems to have come from, ahem, the highest level. Good thing NEPA doesn’t apply.

Let’s turn up the weirdness a little bit further: out in western Arizona, close to the California line, you come to the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR). Here, young Air Force and Marine pilots learn to strafe and bomb. Migrants have been known to cross the international border at the BMGR but, according to court filings, over the past five years migrants have gotten in the way of only 195 of 255,732 air sorties – less than 0.1%.

An already existing pedestrian barrier along much of the range’s border possibly contributes to this low level of trespass — and the bombs and bullets may help, too. But the decisive factor is undoubtedly the range’s spectacular heat and aridity and the mortally long distances a migrant would have to walk to reach any possible pick-up or rendezvous spot. Nevertheless a second wall, backing up the first, is now slated for construction at BMGR, with a road sandwiched between the two walls, down which CBP patrols will race like hamsters on a flattened wheel.

Let’s just agree, as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford, Jr., did in a memorandum to then-acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, that double-walling the BMGR makes no sense in terms of policy. In terms of metaphor, however, double-walling a border where essentially nobody goes is perfectly logical. If the goal is to build miles of wall, costs and benefits be damned, you might as well build them where there’s nobody to get in the way. Build the wall!

And so it is indeed being built, at the cost of violating not just the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, but Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe National Monument, the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, the historic town center of Roma, Texas, and other sublime and exceptional places. One might ask why so much uniqueness and rarity lies along our southern border. The short answer is that the borderlands are the meeting place of biological communities as well as cultures. As Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña puts it, “The border is the juncture, not the edge.”

But an edge is exactly what President Trump’s wall would make it. Wall construction was and remains his foremost campaign pledge: 500 miles of wall by November of 2020, or 450 miles, or whatever the number du jour happens to be. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post, and others have tried to deflate the president’s boasts by asserting that he’s actually built no new wall and his promises are empty.

In their calculations, substituting a 30-foot-tall wall for vehicle barriers is only “replacement” and therefore doesn’t constitute “new” construction. That’s like arguing that mooring an aircraft carrier where a rowboat used to be changes nothing because there’s still just one vessel in the harbor. Such semantic jousting only camouflages the pervasive damage already being done both to people and to the land on the border — and there’s no end in sight. The congressional budget agreement hammered out in December 2019 appropriates another $1.375 billion for wall construction for fiscal year 2020, while removing obstacles to yet more transfers of Pentagon funds. And Trump is not being shy about those transfers.  He evidently plans to divert $7.2 billion more from legitimate Pentagon projects to wall building this year.

The international drug cartels should be thanking us. The wall will not curb their principal business of smuggling and the Trump administration’s new immigration policies have turned what was formerly a minor sideline — kidnapping people for ransom — into a growth industry. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers to whom the U.S. has refused entry are now huddled in cardboard slums in Mexico’s border towns, vulnerable to human predators. Their relatives in the United States — the people they were trying to reach — will beg, borrow, or steal to pay the ransoms that the increasingly busy (and brutal) kidnappers in Mexico demand.

That, however, is just collateral damage in the land of the free. Of course, we treat asylum seekers as though they were an inferior variety of human being. They talk funny. They aren’t like us. And we treat the borderlands and its creatures with the same loyalty we showed the Kurds. After all, we are America. Behind our wall, we are great again.

William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of nine books, including The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures and A Great Aridness: Clim

1st Malaria Vaccine Tried Out in Babies in 3 African Nations

TOMALI, Malawi — A pinch in the leg, a squeal and a trickle of tears. One baby after another in Malawi is getting the first and only vaccine against malaria, one of history’s deadliest and most stubborn of diseases.

The southern African nation is rolling out the shots in an unusual pilot program along with Kenya and Ghana. Unlike established vaccines that offer near-complete protection, this new one is only about 40% effective. But experts say it’s worth a try as progress against malaria stalls: Resistance to treatment is growing and the global drop in cases has leveled off.

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With the vaccine, the hope is to help small children through the most dangerous period of their lives. Spread by mosquito bites, malaria kills more than 400,000 people every year, two-thirds of them under 5 and most in Africa.

Seven-month-old Charity Nangware received a shot on a rainy December day at a health clinic in the town of Migowi. She watched curiously as the needle slid into her thigh, then twisted up her face with a howl.

“I’m very excited about this,” said her mother, Esther Gonjani, who herself gets malaria’s aches, chills and fever at least once a year and loses a week of field work when one of her children is ill. “They explained it wasn’t perfect, but I feel secure it will relieve the pain.”

There is little escaping malaria — “malungo” in the local Chichewa language — especially during the five-month rainy season. Stagnant puddles, where mosquitoes breed, surround the homes of brick and thatch and line the dirt roads through tea plantations or fields of maize and sugar cane.

In the village of Tomali, the nearest health clinic is a two-hour bike ride away. The longer it takes to get care, the more dangerous malaria can be. Teams from the clinic offer basic medical care during visits once or twice a month, bringing the malaria shot and other vaccines in portable coolers.

Treating malaria takes up a good portion of their time during the rainy season, according to Daisy Chikonde, a local health worker.

“If this vaccine works, it will reduce the burden,” she said.

Resident Doriga Ephrem proudly said her 5-month-old daughter, Grace, didn’t cry when she got the malaria shot.

When she heard about the vaccine, Ephrem said her first thought was “protection is here.” Health workers explained, however, that the vaccine is not meant to replace antimalarial drugs or the insecticide-treated bed net she unfolds every night as the sun sets and mosquitoes rise from the shadows.

“We even take our evening meals inside the net to avoid mosquitoes,” she said.

It took three decades of research to develop the new vaccine, which works against the most common and deadly of the five parasite species that cause malaria. The parasite’s complex life cycle is a huge challenge. It changes forms in different stages of infection and is far harder to target than germs.

“We don’t have any vaccines against parasites in routine use. This is uncharted territory,” said Ashley Birkett, who directs PATH’s Malaria Vaccine Initiative, a nonprofit that helped drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline develop the shot, brand-named Mosquirix.

The bite of an infected mosquito sends immature parasites called sporozoites into the bloodstream. If they reach the liver, they’ll mature and multiply before spewing back into the blood to cause malaria’s debilitating symptoms. At that point, treatment requires medicines that kill the parasites.

Mosquirix uses a piece of the parasite — a protein found only on sporozoites’ surface — in hopes of blocking the liver stage of infection. When a vaccinated child is bitten, the immune system should recognize the parasite and start making antibodies against it.

Scientists also are searching for next-generation alternatives. In the pipeline is an experimental vaccine made of whole malaria parasites dissected from mosquitoes’ salivary glands but weakened so they won’t make people sick. Sanaria Inc. has been testing its vaccine in adults, and is planning a large, late-stage study in Equatorial Guinea’s Bioko Island.

And the U.S. National Institutes of Health soon will start initial tests of whether injecting people periodically with lab-made antibodies, rather than depending on the immune system to make them, could offer temporary protection during malaria season. Think of them as “potentially short-term vaccines,” NIH’s Dr. Robert Seder told a recent meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

For now, only babies in parts of Malawi, Kenya and Ghana are eligible for the Mosquirix vaccine. After the vaccine was approved in 2015, the World Health Organization said it first wanted a pilot roll-out to see how well it worked in a few countries — in real-world conditions — before recommending that the vaccine be given more widely across Africa.

“Everyone is looking forward to getting it,” said Temwa Mzengeza, who oversees Malawi’s vaccine programs. Those eager for the shots include her husband, whom she had to stop from trying to get them, she said.

Mzengeza used to come down with malaria several times a year until she started following her own advice to sleep under a net every night. Unlike many other kinds of infections, people can get malaria repeatedly, building up only a partial immunity.

In the pilot program that began last year, 360,000 children in the three countries are meant to be vaccinated annually. The first dose is given at about age 5 months and the final, fourth booster near the child’s second birthday.

Experts say it is too early to know how well the vaccine is working. They’re watching for malaria deaths, severe infections and cases of meningitis, something reported during studies but not definitively linked to the vaccine.

“To do something completely new for malaria is exciting,” said researcher Don Mathanga, who is leading the evaluation in Malawi.

The rainy season has brought new challenges, making some rural roads impassable and complicating efforts to track down children due for a shot. So far in Malawi, the first dose reached about half of the children targeted, about 35,000. That dropped to 26,000 for the second dose and 20,000 for the third.

That’s not surprising for a new vaccine, Mzengeza said. “It will pick up with time.”

At the health clinic in Migowi in Malawi’s southern highlands, workers see signs of hope. Henry Kadzuwa explains the vaccine to mothers waiting at the clinic. He said there was a drop in malaria cases to 40 in the first five months of the program, compared to 78 in the same period in 2018.

Even though he wishes his 3-year-old daughter, Angel, could receive the vaccine, “it’s protecting my community. It also makes my work easier,” Kadzuwa said. The Migowi area has one of the country’s highest rates of malaria, and a worn paper register in the clinic’s laboratory lists scores of cases.

At the clinic, Agnes Ngubale said she had malaria several years ago and wants to protect her 6-month-old daughter, Lydia, from the disease.

“I want her to be healthy and free,” she said. “I want her to be a doctor.”

And she has memorized the time for Lydia’s second dose: “Next month, same date.”

___

Neergaard reported from Washington.

What Separates Sanders From Warren (and Everybody Else)

In America, the term “middle class” has long been used to describe the majority of wage and salary earners, from those receiving a median annual income of around $50,000 to those who earn three or four times that amount. Whether Democrat or Republican, politicians from across the political aisle claim to represent the middle class—that vast-yet-amorphous segment of the population where the managers and the managed all seem to fit together.

The term has always been somewhat problematic when it comes to politics. As Joan C. Williams observes in her 2017 book, “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” a “central way we make class disappear is to describe virtually everyone as ‘middle class.’ ” The majority of Americans see themselves as middle class, including those in the top 10% earning several times the average income. According to Williams, a close friend of hers who “undoubtedly belonged to the top 1%” once referred to herself as middle class, a perspective that the author describes as “class cluelessness.”

This cluelessness was also evident in a New York Times article last summer titled “What Middle Class Families Want Politicians to Know,” which included interviews with a number of purportedly middle class families with household incomes of up to $400,000 (only one of the interviewees earned less than $100,000, with the average around $200,000).

The fact that people who earn a quarter-million dollars annually place themselves in the same category as those earning $70,000 tells us just how politically useless the term “middle class” has become in contemporary America. Even when we take into account geographic factors and fluctuations in the cost of living, there is little rational justification for categorizing a $60,000-a-year blue-collar worker with a lawyer or doctor earning in excess of $200,000.

Of course, some may argue that one’s class is based largely on her own experience and perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, “White Collar: The American Middle Classes,” just because people “are not ‘class conscious’ at all times and in all places does not mean ‘there are no classes’ or that ‘in America everybody is middle class.’ ” Although subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities.

One’s class consciousness (or lack thereof) has important implications for one’s political attitudes, and in America class consciousness has always been somewhat lacking compared to other countries. The United States has never had a true aristocratic class or feudal property relations like those in Europe, and in the 19th century, the “middle class” essentially stood for small capitalists and propertied farmers. Between the mid-19th century and mid-20th century, the country was transformed, in Mills’ analysis, from a “nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees”—a trend that sociologists call “proletarianization.”

In the post-World War II era, thanks to the struggle of labor and the policies of the New Deal, which aimed to reduce inequality and mediate class tensions, many in the working class became comfortably middle class. In other words, the proletariat turned into a kind of “petty bourgeois,” adopting the same values and attitudes as their employers, while accepting the status quo after a few adjustments. Ironically, this ended up undercutting more radical labor movements while preserving the economic system, which eventually came back to bite working people and their children.

The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization, Mills explained, “refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of: income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness, outlook, or organized activity.”

The proletarianization of the middle class over the past 50 years has had an enormously detrimental effect on communities across the country, but it has taken quite a while for many working people in America to recognize their new situation in terms of consciousness and outlook. The enduring popularity of the term “middle class” reflects this state of affairs.

In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has deliberately chosen to use “working class” over “middle class.” Not surprisingly, that candidate is Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I am a candidate of the working class,” Sanders recently declared on Facebook. “I come from the working class. That is my background, that’s who I am. I fought for the working class as a mayor, a Congressman and a Senator. And that is the kind of president that I will be.” Sanders, whose campaign is 100% grassroots-funded, wrote in a column last week for the Des Moines Register, “… our campaign is focused on making sure the government stops representing billionaires and start representing us — the working class of this country.”

Though it may seem like a somewhat trivial distinction, when we look at the rest of the Democratic field, it’s clear that Sanders has indeed distinguished himself from the other top candidates. For example, Sanders’ opponent Joe Biden frequently speaks of the middle class but rarely the working class. “This country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs and hedge fund managers. It was built by the American middle class,” Biden declares on his campaign website, where he says that the middle class “isn’t a number,” but a “set of values.” (In a way this is correct, but not in the sense that Biden seems to think.)

On the more progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s website, where she lists her numerous plans, one searches in vain for any references to the working class, though there are plenty to the middle class.

How much this actually matters is, of course, debatable, but the term “working class” undoubtedly has far more implications and political significance than “middle class,” which, like many overused words in the political lexicon, has lost all meaning. By using “working class” instead, Sanders appears to be trying to increase class consciousness in America, where those in the ruling class have often demonstrated the highest level of class consciousness (never failing to use their abundant resources to protect and advance their own interests).

The more young and working-class people come to recognize their own situation and place in the 21st century American economy, the more they seem to embrace “socialist” policies that are rejected by “middle class” sensibilities.

In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has made raising levels of class consciousness part of his campaign strategy, and in an election that could very well be determined by working-class voters, this may be the strategy to defeat Trump.

How Economic Despair Drives Workers to Their Deaths

Maria Fernandes was a good-hearted American with a family, ambitions and a rock-solid work ethic.

She also juggled three part-time jobs to make ends meet and grabbed much-needed sleep in her SUV between shifts. She left the engine running during one of those naps, and when a gas container she kept in the SUV somehow overturned, the fumes and carbon monoxide killed her.

While her death might appear to be an accident, the poverty-level wages that kept Fernandes working all hours of the day and night are the deliberate choice of corporations that make billions of dollars exploiting the labor of average Americans. Corporate greed turned America into a nation of haves and have-nots.

And more and more often, economic despair kills the have-nots.

U.S. life expectancy dropped three years in a row, America’s suicide rate is at a record high, millions struggle with opioid addictions, and workers with multiple part-time jobs battle hopelessness. None of this occurred by chance. Diseases of despair soared as corporations sold out the American worker for higher profits.

CEO pay soared 940 percent over the past 40 years as middle-class workers’ pay stagnated. Corporations shifted family-sustaining manufacturing jobs to low-wage Mexico, hollowing out entire communities. They gutted retiree health care and shifted more health care costs to workers.

CEOs and business groups schemed with their Republican cronies in government to crush the labor unions that fight to get workers decent pay, fair benefits and safe working conditions. As union membership declined from more than 30 percent of American workers to about 11 percent, the bottom fell out of the middle class. Income inequality skyrocketed.

Fernandes held down minimum-wage jobs at three different Dunkin’ Donuts shops in New Jersey. She napped in her car because she had no time to go home to sleep and traveled with a filled gas can so she’d never be late because of an empty tank.

Dunkin’ considered her a model employee but failed to offer her full-time work in a single store—something that would have been life-changing. Fernandes never complained about her grueling workdays or Dunkin’s failure to reward her dedication.

She struggled to meet basic expenses on her wage of about $8.25 an hour and fell behind on the $550-a-month rent for the apartment she rarely slept in, even as Dunkin’s CEO pocketed millions.

Poverty is what really killed Fernandes. The same is true of low-wage workers who take their own lives.

New research blames thousands of suicides on low minimum wages. It predicts that thousands more suicides could be prevented each year—and the slide in U.S. life expectancy slowed—if each state increased its minimum wage by just one dollar an hour.

Researchers analyzed minimum wage and suicide data from all 50 states over a 25-year span. They concluded a one-dollar increase would cut suicides among adults without college degrees by as much as 6 percent. The increase would be enough to give minimum-wage workers financial breathing room—and some hope.

New Jersey’s minimum is now $11. But about 21 states still use the federal minimum wage, which Congress set at $7.25 in 2009. A person making $7.25 an hour and working 40 hours a week earns just $15,080 a year, below the poverty line for a household of two.

The Democratic-controlled House last year passed a bill to raise the federal minimum to $15 by October 2025. Corporations opposed the increase and got their Senate Republican buddies to kill the legislation. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refuses to hold a vote on the bill, even though his state has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.

The number of minimum-wage and other part-time jobs exploded with the demise of American manufacturing. U.S. corporations exploited NAFTA and shifted one million manufacturing jobs to Mexico during the agreement’s first two decades alone.

Corporations made a killing because of Mexico’s low wages and weak environmental regulation. But in the process, they stole U.S. workers’ livelihoods and gutted American communities.

The low-wage, limited-hour positions in retail, hospitality and other industries that proliferated in NAFTA’s wake pay much less than those lost in unionized plants and mills.

When Maytag closed a plant in Galesburg, Illinois, and moved the work to Mexico, about 2,000 unionized workers lost their jobs. Forklift driver George Carney began working as a bartender. Factory worker Tracy Warner took jobs as a teacher’s assistant and custodian.

Years later, they continued to struggle. It was nearly impossible to bounce back.

Corporations and their Republican allies made sure workers couldn’t get ahead. Besides holding down the minimum wage, they conspired to deny workers overtime, deliberately misclassify employees as contractors with fewer rights and prevent workers from organizing.

With the odds stacked against them, low-wage workers across America often live paycheck to paycheck and grow frustrated with their futures. Some vent their despair in internet chat rooms with posts like “Killing myself to avoid a life of dead-end jobs and loneliness” and “Is suicide acceptable in place of working a dead-end job?”

It’s no wonder that opioid overdoses spiked dramatically in counties where auto plants closed or that towns hollowed out by NAFTA saw increases in poverty, murders, prostitution, drug addiction, alcohol abuse and domestic violence.

Health care costs pile on even more pressure.

Corporations shift more and more of the costs to workers through higher co-pays, premium contributions and deductibles. They gutted the retiree health insurance programs that once were a major part of corporate America’s compact with workers.

This has devastating consequences. Over the past year, as many as 137 million Americans struggled with health care debt. Bills prompted some to break into retirement plans or declare bankruptcy.

They pushed Brian Jones over the edge.

Jones called 911 one August day and threatened to kill himself. When police arrived, they found the bodies of Jones, 77, and his wife Patricia, 76. Jones killed her and then himself because of medical debt.

The Joneses died of gunshot wounds. But despair killed them.

Rather than address the spiraling costs of health care, Senate Republicans ignore it. They continue to sit on bills the House passed last year to rein in drug prices and protect health care coverage for consumers with pre-existing conditions.

Reinvigorated unions are the antidote to corporate greed. When they negotiate contracts for members, unions set standards that produce better pay, benefits and working conditions for unorganized workers, too.

Public support for organized labor is on the rise, and workers in fields like technology and education now seek union representation. But workers also need an administration and Senate willing to stand up for them, not slavishly cater to corporate interests.

Although Fernandes had very little, she shared what she had. She bought pizza for homeless people and candy for kids. She bought suits for her boyfriend and her sons—and they wore them to her funeral.

Friends said they hoped her story would lead to a higher minimum wage nationwide. But corporate executives and Senate Republicans refuse to do the right thing, even if that means fueling Americans’ despair and sending more workers to early graves.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Reich: Facebook Is Failing the American People

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’ll run political ads even if false. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he’ll stop running political ads.

Dorsey has the correct approach, but this entire debate about ads skirts the bigger question: Who’s responsible for protecting democracy from big, dangerous lies?

Donald Trump lies like most people breathe, and his lies have grown more vicious and dangerous as he’s been cornered – conjuring up conspiracies, spewing hate, and saying established facts are lies, and lies are truths.

This would be hard enough for a democracy to handle, but Zuckerberg’s Facebook sends Trump’s unfiltered lies to 43 percent of Americans, for whom Facebook is a source of news. And Dorsey’s Twitter sends them to 67 million Twitter users every day.

A major characteristic of the Internet goes by the fancy term “disintermediation.” Put simply, it means sellers are linked directly to customers with no need for middlemen.

Amazon eliminates the need for retailers. Online investing eliminates the need for stock brokers. Travel agents and real estate brokers have become obsolete as consumers get all the information they need at a keystroke.

But democracy cannot be disintermediated. We’re not just buyers and sellers. We’re also citizens who need to know what’s happening around us in order to exercise our right to, and responsibility for, self-government.

If a president and his enablers are peddling vicious and dangerous lies, we need reliable intermediaries that help us see that they’re lies.

Intermediating between the powerful and the people was once the job of publishers and journalists – hence the term “media.”

This role was understood to be so critical to democracy that the Constitution enshrined it in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

With that freedom came a public responsibility to be a bulwark against powerful lies.

The media haven’t always lived up to that responsibility. We had yellow journalism in the nineteenth century, and today endure shock radio, the National Enquirer, and Fox News.

But most publishers and journalists have recognized that duty. Think of the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate investigation, and, more recently, the exposure of Trump’s withholding $400 million in security aid to Ukraine until it investigated Trump’s major political rival, Joe Biden.

Zuckerberg and Dorsey insist they are not publishers or journalists. They say Facebook and Twitter are just “platforms” that convey everything and anything – facts, lies, conspiracies, vendettas – with none of the public responsibilities that come with being part of the press.

That is rubbish. They can’t be the major carriers of the news on which most Americans rely while taking no responsibility for its content.

Advertising isn’t the issue. It doesn’t matter whether Trump pays Facebook or Twitter to post dishonest ads about Joe Biden and his son, or Trump and his enablers post the same lies on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Or even if Russia and Iran repeat the lies in their own subversive postings on Facebook and Twitter.

The problem is we have an American president who will say anything to preserve his power, and we’ve got two giant entities that spread his lies uncritically, like global-sized bullhorns.

We can’t do anything about Trump for now. But we can and should take action against the power of these two enablers.

If they are unwilling to protect the public against powerful lies, they shouldn’t have so much power to spread them to begin with.

The reason 45 percent of Americans rely on Facebook for news and Trump’s tweets reach 67 million Twitter users is because these platforms are near monopolies – dominating the information marketplace.

No television network, cable, or newspaper comes close. Fox News’s viewership rarely exceeds 3 million. The New York Times has 4.9 million subscribers.

Facebook and Twitter aren’t just participants in the information marketplace. They’re quickly becoming the information marketplace.

Antitrust law was designed to check the power of giant commercial entities. Its purpose wasn’t just to hold down consumer prices but also to protect democracy.

Antitrust should be used against Facebook and Twitter. They should be broken up. So instead of two mammoth megaphones trumpeting Trump’s lies, or those of any similarly truth-challenged successor to Trump, the public will have more diverse sources of information, some of which will expose the lies.

A diverse information marketplace is no guarantee against tyranny, of course. But the system we now have – featuring a president who lies through his teeth and two giant uncritical conveyors of those lies – invites tyranny.

Chief Justice Arrives at Capitol for Impeachment Trial

WASHINGTON — The chief justice of the United States arrived Thursday at the U.S. Senate to preside over President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, ready to swear in the senators with an oath to ensure “impartial justice” as jurors for only the third such proceeding in American history.

Chief Justice John Roberts made the short trip across the street from the Supreme Court before being ushered to the Senate chamber. He was to be sworn in himself before administering the oath it to the senators.

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The Problem With Impeachment



by Chris Hedges

The Constitution mandates the chief justice serve as the presiding officer. Roberts, who has long insisted judges are not politicians, is expected to serve as a referee for the proceedings rather than an active participant. Senators will ultimately render the verdict.

The Senate opened the impeachment trial at the start of the election year as Trump seeks another term, a test not only of his presidency but also of the nation’s three branches of power and its system of checks and balances. Several senators are running for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Trump in November.

Earlier Thursday, House Democrats prosecuting the case stood before the Senate and formally read the articles of impeachment against Trump.

“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!” said the Senate’s sergeant at arms, calling the proceedings to order at noon.

Senators filled the chamber, sitting silently at their seats under strict trial rules that prohibit talking or cellphones, as the ceremonial protocol shifted the proceedings out of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic-run House to the Republican-majority Senate.

Seven lawmakers prosecuting the charges, led by Rep. Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of the Judiciary Committee, made the solemn walk across the Capitol for a second day.

“With the permission of the Senate, I will now read the articles of impeachment,” said Schiff, standing at a lectern in the well of the chamber, a space usually reserved for senators.

All eyes were on him.

“House Resolution 755 Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the united States, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he began, reading the nine pages.

The other House prosecutors stood in a row to his side.

Trump faces a charge that he abused his presidential power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, using military aid to the country as leverage. Trump was also charged with obstructing Congress’ ensuing probe. Ahead of the proceedings the Government Accountability office said Thursday that the White House violated federal law in withholding the security assistance to Ukraine, which shares a border with hostile Russia.

The president calls the impeachment a “hoax,” even as new information emerges about his actions toward Ukraine that led to the charges against him.

Pelosi said new allegations from an indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, only reinforces the need for the Senate to consider further testimony about the president’s actions toward Ukraine.

Pelosi noted that typically a special prosecutor would investigate but she doubted that would happen.

“This is an example of all of the president’s henchmen,” Pelosi said, “and I hope that the senators do not become part of the president’s henchmen.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opened the chamber Thursday decrying Pelosi’s decision to hand out “souvenir pens” after she signed the resolution to transmit the charges to the Senate.

“This final display neatly distilled the House’s entire partisan process into one perfect visual,” McConnell said. “’It was a transparently partisan process from beginning to end.”

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer renewed his party’s request that the trial include new witnesses and documents not available for the House impeachment proceedings.

“What is the president hiding? What is he afraid of?’’ Schumer said.

“The gravity of these charges is self-evident,” he said. “The House of Representatives have accused the president of trying to shake down a foreign leader for personal gain.”

The president has suggested recently that he would be open to a quick vote to simply dismiss the charges, but sufficient Republican support is lacking for that. Still, an eventual vote to acquit Trump is considered highly likely.

On Wednesday, in a dramatic procession across the U.S. Capitol, House Democrats carried the charges to the Senate.

“Today we will make history,” Pelosi said as she signed the documents, using multiple pens to hand out and mark the moment. “This president will be held accountable.”

Moments later the prosecutors walked solemnly through the stately hall, filing into the Senate back row as the clerk of the House announced the arrival: “The House has passed House Resolution 798, a resolution appointing and authorizing managers of the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, president of United States.”

Opening arguments are to begin next Tuesday after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Earlier Wednesday, the House voted 228-193, almost entirely along party lines, ending a weeks-long delay to deliver the charges with a tally reflecting the nation’s split.

The top Republican in the House, Kevin McCarthy of California, said Americans will look back on this “sad saga” that tried to remove the president from office with the “weakest case.”

The president’s team expects acquittal with a Senate trial lasting no more than two weeks, according to senior administration officials. That would be far shorter than the trial of President Bill Clinton, in 1999, or the first one, of President Andrew Johnson, in 1868. Both were acquitted.

The seven-member prosecution team is led by the chairmen of the House impeachment proceedings, Reps. Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee and Jerrold Nadler of the Judiciary Committee, two of Pelosi’s top lieutenants.

On Wednesday, Schiff released new records from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, about the Ukraine strategy, including an exchange with another man about surveilling later-fired U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Schiff said the new evidence should bring more pressure on McConnell, who is reluctant to allow witnesses to testify and prefers swift acquittal. The White House has instructed officials not to comply with House subpoenas for testimony and documents.

“The challenge is to get a fair trial,” Schiff said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It shouldn’t be a challenge — if the senators are really going to live up to their oath to be impartial, they’ll want a fair trial. That’s obviously not where Mitch McConnell is coming from.”

The managers are a diverse group with legal, law enforcement and military experience, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, Val Demings of Florida, Jason Crow of Colorado and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Two are freshman lawmakers — Crow a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Garcia a former judge in Houston. Demings is the former police chief of Orlando and Jeffries is a lawyer and member of party leadership. Lofgren has the rare credential of having worked on the congressional staff investigation of President Richard Nixon’s impeachment — he resigned before the full House voted on the charges — and then being an elected lawmaker during Clinton’s.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is leading an effort among some Republicans, including Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, to consider Senate witnesses. She told reporters she was satisfied the rules will allow votes on that.

Romney said he wants to hear from John Bolton, the former national security adviser at the White House, who others have said raised alarms about the alternative foreign policy toward Ukraine being run by Giuliani.

Any four senators could force an outcome. Republicans control the chamber, 53-47, but it takes just 51 votes during the trial to approve rules or call witnesses. It also would take only 51 senators to vote to dismiss the charges against Trump.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Andrew Taylor, Mary Clare Jalonick, Laurie Kellman, and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

CNN Was the Biggest Loser of the Democratic Debate

The biggest loser from last night’s Democratic debate (1/14/20) was CNN’s journalistic credibility.

CNN debates have been marked by a tendency to pit one candidate against another, American Gladiators-style (FAIR.org, 8/2/19), so it’s no surprise that the cable network took its own journalistically dubious “scoop” (CNN, 1/13/20)—about Bernie Sanders allegedly telling Elizabeth Warren in 2018 that “he did not believe a woman could win” a race against Donald Trump—and used it as the basis of questions to both Sanders and Warren at its pre–Iowa caucus debate in Des Moines (presented jointly with the Des Moines Register).

But it was less predictable that CNN would frame those questions in such a nakedly one-sided manner, with wording that presumed that the truth was  known about what was really said in a disputed, year-old private conversation. “Senator Sanders,” began CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip:

Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?

Phillip obviously knew that Sanders had unequivocally stated that he had not said that. But by inserting the word “confirmed” into the preface, she put Sanders in the position of someone denying reality—despite the fact that his alleged remark would contradict his public position going back 30 years. And immediately after getting Sanders to reiterate his statement that he never told Warren that a woman couldn’t win the election, Philip turned to Warren and asked: “Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”—a question premised on the assumption that Sanders had just lied about what he had said.

CNN‘s healthcare questions were also nakedly one-sided. In the first debate the network hosted (7/30/19), Jake Tapper started off the night by asking Sanders whether “tak[ing] private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone,” was “political suicide,” and went on to focus on the cost of Medicare for All (FAIR.org, 8/2/19). Last night, Phillip’s first question on healthcare likewise went to Sanders, revisiting that focus on cost:

Senator Sanders, you have consistently refused to say exactly how much your Medicare for All plan is going to cost. Don’t voters deserve to see the price tag before you send them a bill that could cost tens of trillions of dollars?

After Sanders explained that Medicare for All “will cost substantially less than the status quo”—under which healthcare is projected to cost $52 trillion over the next decade—Phillip turned to Biden. But instead of asking him to answer any criticisms of his own plan, she offered him the same Sanders-bashing frame:  “Vice President Biden, does Senator Sanders owe voters a price tag on his healthcare plan?”

While Phillip gave every other candidate a chance to weigh in, she didn’t give them substantive questions. She then returned to Sanders with another question about the cost of his plans:

Senator Sanders, your campaign proposals would double federal spending over the next decade, an unprecedented level of spending not seen since World War II. How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?

Sen. Sanders, in the wake of the Iran crisis, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei has again called for all US troops to be pulled out of the Middle East, something you’ve called for as well. Yet when American troops last left Iraq, ISIS emerged and spread terror across the Middle East and, indeed, around the world. How would you prevent that from happening again? CNN’s Wolf Blitzer led off a series of foreign policy questions with a similarly loaded question for Sanders:

So Sanders was asked to defend his policy—identified as being the same as that of a hated official enemy—against the charge that it would “spread terror…around the world.” (Blitzer’s blaming ISIS on the withdrawal from Iraq evades the reality that there would never have been an ISIS were it not for the Iraq invasion.)

Rather than giving similarly poison-tipped questions to Sanders’ rivals, Blitzer went on for the most part to merely ask them to respond to what had already been said: “Vice President Biden?… Senator Klobuchar, what’s your response?… Mayor Buttigieg, you served in Afghanistan. Who’s right?” Politico’s Ryan Lizza (1/15/20) referred to this as Blitzer doing “an admirable job teasing out some of the subtle differences that have crystallized among Democrats in the post-Obama world.”

It’s important to remember that CNN’s blatant insertion of its own point of view into the presidential debate doesn’t  reflect a mere personal dislike of Sanders, but rather a consistent ideological orientation. Warren, despite being used as a blunt object with which to bash Sanders, was also given questions that likewise painted her as a champion of way-out ideas, as with this from Phillip:

 Why does it make sense for the government to manufacture drugs, especially when public trust in government is near historic lows?

Of course, it wouldn’t be elected officials making the drugs, but government agencies—and it’s the former and not the latter who are generally distrusted by the public (Pew, 9/6/19). The drug industry, meanwhile, is the least trusted of all major industrial sectors (Gallup, 9/3/19)—but why spoil the premise of a good “gotcha” question?

When Phillip asked a series of questions that were supposed to highlight the “unique challenges” each candidate faced in “prov[ing] to Democratic voters that you’re strong enough to take on Donald Trump,” Sanders was told that “more than two-thirds of voters say they are not enthusiastic about voting for a socialist,” while Warren was told that voters are worried her policies “will scare away swing voters you need to win this race in November.”

Phillip’s question to centrist darling Amy Klobuchar, by contrast, was set up with the senator’s self-description as “a practical candidate who can get things done,” and the observation that she’s “dismissed some of the ideas that are offered in this primary as pipe dreams”; in other words, she’s taken the same position on issues like Medicare for All that’s been consistently advanced by media monitors. That led up to this aren’t-you-really-too-conscientious? softball: “How are you going to inspire Democratic voters with a message of pragmatism?”

Her question to Biden didn’t even rise to that level of challenge:

Vice President Biden, the eventual nominee will face President Trump, who has no problem mocking people, using insulting nicknames, slinging mud and telling lies. The debate against him will make tonight’s debate look like child’s play. Are you prepared for that?

The question to Buttigieg in this segment of the debate was the only one that brought up race in a debate that was notable as the first with an all-white cast of candidates, following the withdrawal of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julián Castro, and the exclusion of Andrew Yang for not meeting polling thresholds. Race wasn’t raised at all in the questions in the last debate CNN ran (10/15/19), in conjunction with the New York Times (FAIR.org, 10/17/19). In the lone reference to race in the Iowa questioning, people of color appeared merely as a desirable voting bloc: “You’ve had trouble earning the support of black voters…support that you’ll need in order to beat Donald Trump.”

The complacent worldview behind CNN’s questioning was summed up by Rolling Stone (1/15/20):

In an era of endless war abroad, painfully and often prohibitively expensive healthcare and education at home, and a climate crisis that threatens to make the planet inhospitable to its 7 billion human inhabitants, the challenges of change were treated as paramount or even insurmountable, while the costs of maintaining the status quo barely mentioned.

But Pfannenstiel would not stand for having the serious business of trade agreements mixed up with trivia about threats to the planet: “We’re going to get to climate change, but I’d like to stay on trade.”That attitude was nowhere more on view than in the debate’s approach to the issue of climate. When Sanders was asked by Des Moines Register political correspondent Brianne Pfannenstiel why he opposes Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA treaty, despite its endorsement by the AFL-CIO—“Are you unwilling to compromise?”—he pointed out that every major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase “climate change” in it. And given the fact that climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet, I will not vote for a trade agreement that does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world.

Much later, when the topic did return to climate, suitably divorced from any other subject, it was with this inane question:

Mayor Buttigieg, you have talked about helping people move from areas at high risk of flooding. But what do you do about farms and factories that simply can’t be moved?

One really does get the impression that if CNN were holding a debate on the Titanic, the first question would literally be about rearranging the deck chairs.

Giuliani Associate: Trump Had Knowledge of Ukraine Pressure

WASHINGTON — A close associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is claiming Trump was directly involved in the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Lev Parnas says he delivered an ultimatum in May, at Giuliani’s behest, to the incoming president of Ukraine that no senior U.S. officials would attend his inauguration and vital American security aid would be withheld if an investigation into Biden wasn’t announced.

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He said Trump was aware of Giuliani’s efforts to secure an investigation and the president was briefed regularly.

If true, Parnas’ account undercuts a key Republican defense of Trump during the impeachment investigation — that Trump’s withholding of vital military aid to Ukraine last summer wasn’t a quid pro quo for Biden investigations.

“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” said Parnas, a Soviet-born Florida businessman facing a raft of criminal charges related to campaign finance violations. “He was aware of all my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani, or the president.”

Parnas made several potentially explosive claims in a televised interview Wednesday night with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The day after Parnas said he delivered the message, the State Department announced that Vice President Mike Pence would no longer be attending the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskiy.

Parnas alleged that Trump ordered Pence to stay away at the behest of Giuliani to send a clear message to the incoming Ukrainian administration that they needed to take seriously the demand for an investigation into Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate seen as a potential threat to Trump’s 2020 reelection.

Parnas said every communication he had with Zelenskiy’s team was at the direction of Giuliani, whom he regularly overheard briefing Trump about their progress by phone.

Giuliani called Parnas’ statements “sad.”

“I feel sorry for him,” Giuliani said Wednesday in a text message to an AP reporter. “I thought he was an honorable man. I was wrong.”

Asked directly if Parnas was lying, Trump’s lawyer replied, “I’m not responding yet.”

Parnas said he also heard Giuliani and another Trump-aligned defense lawyer, Victoria Toensing, briefing Attorney General William Barr by phone about their efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce the investigation into Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings.

“Barr was basically on the team,” Parnas said.

The Justice Department said in September that Trump had not spoken to Barr about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens and that the attorney general had not discussed Ukraine with Giuliani. Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Wednesday that Parnas’ claims were “100% false.”

The new accusations came as House Democrats made public a trove of documents, text messages and photos from Parnas’ smartphones that appear to verify parts of his account.

The documents, released just ahead of the start of the impeachment trial, could raise pressure on the Senate as it debates whether to hear witnesses.

A federal judge earlier this month ruled that Parnas could provide the materials to Congress as part of the impeachment proceedings. Democrats voted in December to impeach Trump for abuse of power and for obstruction of Congress.

A House committee chairman said Wednesday his panel will investigate what he says are “profoundly alarming” text messages among the newly disclosed materials that have raised questions about the possible surveillance of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch before she was ousted by the Trump administration last spring.

The messages show that Robert F. Hyde, a Republican candidate for Congress from Connecticut, disparaged Yovanovitch in messages to Parnas and gave him updates on her location and cellphone use.

Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the messages are “profoundly alarming” and “suggest a possible risk” to Yovanovitch’s security in Kyiv before she was recalled from her post.

“These threats occurred at the same time that the two men were also discussing President Trump’s efforts, through Rudy Giuliani, to smear the ambassador’s reputation,” Engel said.

He said the committee staff flagged the information for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and is seeking assurances that proper steps have been taken to ensure the security of Yovanovitch and committee staff. He said he also wanted to know what, if anything, the State Department knew about the situation.

“This unprecedented threat to our diplomats must be thoroughly investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Engel said.

The text and phone records show Parnas communicating with Giuliani multiple times a day before Yovanovitch’s removal, as well as a handwritten note that mentions asking Ukraine’s president to investigate “the Biden case.”

Among the documents is a screenshot of a previously undisclosed letter from Giuliani to Zelenskiy dated May 10, 2019, which was shortly after Zelenskiy was elected but before he took office. In the letter, Giuliani requests a meeting with Zelenskiy “as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent.”

The Associated Press reported in October that Zelenskiy had huddled three days earlier, on May 7, with a small group of key advisers in Kyiv to seek advice about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and Giuliani for a probe into the Bidens. He expressed his unease about becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the three-hour meeting. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, which has roiled U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

One of the documents released by Democrats is a note from Parnas handwritten on stationery from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Vienna that says “get Zalensky to Annonce that the Biden case will be Investigated.”

Parnas told Maddow he took the notes as he was speaking by phone to Giuliani, receiving precise instructions about the demands Trump wanted to convey to Zelenskiy’s team.

Trump asked Zelenskiy in a July 25 call to investigate the Bidens. Hunter Biden served on the board of a gas company based in Ukraine.

Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, both U.S. citizens who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, were indicted last year on charges of conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records. Prosecutors allege they made outsize campaign donations to Republican causes after receiving millions of dollars originating from Russia. The men have pleaded not guilty.

Parnas’ lawyer, Joseph Bondy, told The New York Times that his client is looking to cooperate with prosecutors in his case, who are investigating Giuliani and his dealings in Ukraine.

“We very much want to provide substantial assistance to the government,” Bondy told the Times.

Parnas told the newspaper that although he didn’t speak with Trump directly about the efforts, he met with the president on several occasions and was told by Giuliani that Trump was kept in the loop.

In several of the documents, Parnas communicated with Giuliani about the removal of Yovanovitch. The ambassador’s ouster, ordered by Trump, was at the center of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. Yovanovitch testified in the House impeachment hearings that she was the victim of a “smear campaign.”

Trump on the July call told Zelenskiy that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.” She had been recalled from her diplomatic post roughly three months earlier.

On April 23, just before Yovanovitch was directed to return to the United States, Giuliani texted Parnas, “He fired her again.” Parnas texted back, “I pray it happens this time I’ll call you tomorrow my brother.”

Parnas also received messages from Hyde, who referred to Yovanovitch as a “bitch.”

After texting about the ambassador, Hyde gave Parnas detailed updates that suggested he was watching her. In one text, Hyde wrote: “She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Her computer is off.” He said she was under heavy security and “we have a person inside.”

Hyde texted Parnas that ”they are willing to help if we/you would like a price,” and “guess you can do anything in Ukraine with money … is what I was told.”

Parnas texted back: “lol.”

Lawrence Robbins, an attorney for Yovanovitch, called for an investigation into the messages.

In a Twitter post Tuesday, Hyde called Parnas a “dweeb” and suggested the messages about surveilling the ambassador were a joke. He said he welcomed an investigation.

Parnas, in turn, also said Wednesday that Hyde’s texts shouldn’t be taken seriously.

The text messages show that Parnas consulted Giuliani in January 2019 after the U.S. denied a visa to former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Giuliani replied: “I can revive it.”

The following day, Giuliani told Parnas, “It’s going to work I have no 1 in it.” Giuliani then predicted “he will get one,” before giving Parnas the phone number for Jay Sekulow, the leader of the president’s personal legal team. Sekulow is expected to be part of Trump’s legal team during the impeachment trial.

Trump has repeatedly denied knowing Parnas and Fruman, despite numerous photos that have emerged of the men together. Among the materials released from Parnas’ phone this week were more photos of him with Trump, as well as the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., first daughter Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Asked by Maddow about Trump’s denials of knowing him, Parnas said he had spoken one-on-one with the president numerous times.

“He lied,” Parnas said of the president. “I mean, we’re not friends. Me and him didn’t watch football games together, we didn’t eat hot dogs. But he knew exactly who we were, who I was especially.”

___

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo, Lisa Mascaro and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

House Leaders March Trump Impeachment Articles to the Senate

WASHINGTON — In a dramatic procession across the U.S. Capitol, House Democrats carried the formal articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate late Wednesday, setting the stage for only the third trial to remove a president in American history.

Trump complained anew it was all a “hoax,” even as fresh details emerged about his efforts in Ukraine.

The ceremonial pomp and protocol by the lawmakers prosecuting the case against Trump moved the impeachment out of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic-run House to the Republican-majority Senate, where the president’s team is mounting a defense aiming for swift acquittal.

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“Today we will make history,” Pelosi said as she signed the documents, using multiple pens to hand out and mark the moment. “This president will be held accountable.”

Moments later the prosecutors walked solemnly through the stately hall, filing into the Senate back row as the Clerk of the House announced the arrival: “The House has passed House Resolution 798, a resolution appointing and authorizing managers of the impeachment trail of Donald John Trump, President of United States.”

The Senate will transform itself into an impeachment court at noon Thursday. The Constitution calls for Chief Justice John Roberts to preside at the trial, administering the oath to senators who will serve as jurors and swear to deliver “impartial justice.”

The trial will play out before a deeply divided nation at the start of this election year as Trump seeks a second term and voters review his presidency. Three senators are running for the Democratic nomination.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pledged to have the Senate “rise above the petty factionalism” and “factional fervor and serve the long-term, best interests of our nation.” He called it “a difficult time for our country.”

Technically, the House was simply notifying the Senate of its delivery of the articles, with a more formal presentation Thursday. Opening arguments are to begin next Tuesday after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Earlier Wednesday, the House voted 228-193, almost entirely along party lines, ending a weeks-long delay to deliver the charges with a tally reflecting the nation’s split.

The House impeached Trump last month alleging he abused his presidential power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, using military aid to the country as leverage. Trump was also charged with obstructing Congress’ ensuing probe.

“This is what an impeachment is about,″ Pelosi said before the vote. “The president violated his oath of office, undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections.”

Trump’s political campaign dismissed the House effort as “just a failed attempt to politically damage President Trump leading up to his reelection.”

The top Republican in the House, Kevin McCarthy of California, said Americans will look back on this “sad saga” that tried to remove the president from office with the “weakest case.”

The president’s team expects acquittal with a Senate trial lasting no more than two weeks, according to senior administration officials unauthorized to discuss the matter and granted anonymity.

That’s far shorter than the last presidential impeachment trail, of Bill Clinton, in 1999, or the first one, of Andrew Johnson, in 1868.

As McConnell sets the rules for the trial, Trump has given mixed messages about whether he prefers lengthy or swift proceeding, and senators are under pressure with the emerging new evidence to call more witnesses for testimony.

The seven-member prosecution team was led by the chairmen of the House impeachment proceedings, Reps. Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee and Jerry Nadler of the Judiciary Committee, two of Pelosi’s top lieutenants.

“The president gravely abused the power of his office,” Nadler said. “He did all this for his personal political gain.”

Ahead of Wednesday’s session, Schiff released new records from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, about the Ukraine strategy, including an exchange with another man about surveilling later-fired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Schiff said the new evidence should bring more pressure on McConnell, who is reluctant to allow witnesses to testify and prefers swift acquittal. The White House has instructed officials not to comply with House subpoenas for testimony and documents.

“The challenge is to get a fair trial,” Schiff said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It shouldn’t be a challenge — if the senators are really going to live up to their oath to be impartial, they’ll want a fair trial. That’s obviously not where Mitch McConnell is coming from.”

The managers are a diverse group with legal, law enforcement and military experience, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, Val Demings of Florida, Jason Crow of Colorado and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Two are freshmen lawmakers — Crow a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Garcia a former judge in Houston. Demings is the former police chief of Orlando and Jeffries is a lawyer and member of party leadership. Lofgren has the rare credential of having worked on the congressional staff investigation of then-President Richard Nixon’s impeachment — he resigned before the full House voted on the charges — and then being an elected lawmaker during Bill Clinton’s.

For the roll call, all but one Democrat, Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, voted to transmit the articles. All Republicans voted against. One former Republican-turned-independent, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, joined Democrats.

McConnell faces competing interests from his party for more witnesses, from centrists who are siding with Democrats on the need to hear testimony and conservatives mounting Trump’s defense.

Senate Republicans signaled they would reject the idea of simply voting to dismiss the articles of impeachment against Trump, as Trump himself has suggested. McConnell agreed he does not have the votes to do that.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is leading an effort among some Republicans, including Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to consider Senate witnesses. She told reporters she was satisfied the rules will allow votes on that.

Romney said he wants to hear from John Bolton, the former national security adviser at the White House, who others have said raised alarms about the alternative foreign policy toward Ukraine being run by Giuliani.

Those or any four senators could force an outcome. Republicans control the chamber, 53-47, and are all but certain to acquit Trump. But it takes just 51 votes during the trial to approve rules or call witnesses. It also would take only 51 senators to vote to dismiss the charges against Trump.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and other Republicans want to subpoena Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine, Burisma, while his father was vice president.

McConnell prefers to model Trump’s trial partly on the process used for Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999, which considered witnesses later.

McConnell is hesitant to call new witnesses who would prolong the trial and put vulnerable senators who are up for reelection in 2020 in a bind with tough choices. At the same time, he wants to give those same senators ample room to show voters they are listening.

—-

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Andrew Taylor, Mary Clare Jalonick, Laurie Kellman, and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.