Chris Hedges's Blog, page 572

Needed Now: A Real and Radical Left

It’s “socialism or barbarism.” So wrote the brilliant German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in 1915. The 20th and 21st centuries have borne her out. The list of barbarian horrors that have disfigured the human record under the class rule of capital across the last century is daunting indeed.

Now, however, we have to say that Luxemburg put things too gently. Marx and Engels got closer to our contemporary reality in 1848. They wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” about how the long-standing class struggle between producers and appropriators always ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

It’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky. To be more precise, its eco-socialism or annihilation as capital turns the planet into a giant greenhouse gas chamber. The earth science is perfectly clear. The “common ruin” of all is precisely where humanity is headed after half a millennium under the rule of a system that relies on permanent unsustainable expansion to avert collapse. “The rich,” the French ecological writer Herve Kempf observed 11 years ago, “are destroying the Earth.” Well, not the earth itself, just the chances for a decent and organized human future.

The 21st-century global bourgeoisie isn’t doing this because it is loaded with malevolent ecological Scrooges who need to be visited by ghosts of the environmental Christmas past, present and future. Capitalists are driven to pillage and poison and rape the common good, including the ecological commons, by systemic imperatives compelling them to relentlessly commodify everything under the sun and to drive infinite growth on a finite planet.

For Marx, and I think for any authentic left today, the moral predisposition of bourgeois “elites” was and is of little concern. It’s not about speaking truth to wealth and power. Beseeching our capitalist masters to be nicer and smarter for the common good of all is a fool’s errand. We’re not trying to write a Charles Dickens novel in which rich Mr. Brownlow saves the day for poor Oliver Twist or the bad capitalist Scrooge becomes the good capitalist Scrooge. We know there’s no appealing to capitalist chieftains’ better angels where money and profit are concerned.

Real leftists know that five people owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the species while millions starve and lack adequate health care and half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor is capitalism working.

We know that giant corporations buying up every last family farm, tapping every new reserve of cheap global labor, raping the Congo’s raw materials in alliance with warlords, purchasing the votes of nearly every elected official, extracting every last fossil fuel and driving the planet past the limits of environmental sustainability is capitalism working.

We know that a giant military-industrial complex, generating vast fortunes for the owners and managers of high-tech “defense” (war and empire) firms while schools and public parks and infrastructure and social safety nets are underfunded—we know that that too is capitalism working.

I could go on.

The only solution, a real left would know, along with Marx, is for workers and citizens to organize collectively to overthrow the amoral profits system and take control of what they produce and how society is organized.

Power to the people. Power to the workers. And power to the commons, whose enclosure was and remains among other things the making of modern capitalism and its wage-enslaved working class.

That is what I have always understood to be the basic irreducible bottom-line perspective of anything that deserves since the time of Marx to be called “the left.”

I’m always amused when I hear mainstream U.S. media reporters, talking heads or pundits refer to “the left” in statements like “the left won’t like Trump’s tax plan” or “the left is gearing up for the 2018 midterms.” What left are they talking about?

In the reigning U.S. media-politics culture, “the left” refers first and foremost to the Democratic Party and its many allies at places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, most of academia and a host of other elite sectors and actors. But for anyone who knows anything about the history and meaning of radical movements, calling the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies “the left” is like calling the National Pork Producers Association vegan. As the multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a young CNN town hall questioner last year, “We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”

The Robert Rubin-approved and Goldman Sachs- and Citigroup-backed presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote and spoke with gushing praise for the lords of capital and their supposedly glorious profits system, which he called the source of a “prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.” His policy record as a militantly pro-Wall Street and arch-neoliberal president consistently matched his words. He did more for the nation’s leading financial institutions and corporations than any Republican president could have in the wake of the Great Recession, caused by concentrated wealth.

And he was proud of it. “People call me a socialist sometimes,” Obama told some top corporate executives at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council with a laugh in late 2013. “But no,” the arch-neoliberal president, TransPacific Partnership advocate and drone war champion said, eliciting chuckles from his ruling-class friends, “you’ve got to meet the real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is. I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace.” The CEOs in attendance got a big chuckle out of what CounterPunch called that “tender ruling class moment.”

“Socialists”? The “lying neoliberal warmonger” and arch-corporatist Hillary Clinton recently added those nasty socialists in the Democratic Party to the list of people other than herself and her Wall Street bankrollers that she blames for her defeat in 2016. If socialists in the Iowa Democratic caucuses had properly understood and respected her commitment to what top Democrats oxymoronically called “inclusive capitalism,” Hillary thinks, Trump would not be president.

Leftish liberals call for the supposed “party of the people” to abandon its “corporate and cultural elitism” and “return” to its purported grand mission of “fighting for social justice and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.” When, the plaintive progressive cry goes, will they learn how to win? But for the dismal Dems it isn’t about winning; it’s about serving corporate masters. As William Kaufman told Barbara Ehrenreich on Facebook last year, “The Democrats aren’t feckless, inept, or stupid, unable to ‘learn’ what it takes to win. They are corrupt. They do not want to win with an authentically progressive program because it would threaten the economic interests of their main corporate donor base. … The Democrats know exactly what they’re doing. They have a business model: sub-serving the interests of the corporate elite.”

The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-apocalyptic right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party. So what if Bernie Sanders, running (imagine!) in accord with majority progressive opinion would have been considerably more likely to defeat Trump than the incredibly unpopular and transparently elitist Hillary Clinton in the general election in 2016? The Democrats preferred handing the presidency and Congress to the Insane Clown President and the ever more radical right over letting a leftish neo-New Dealer into the White House. That was the “Inauthentic Opposition”—as the late Sheldon Wolin called the Democrats in 2008—doing its job.

Among other things, Russiagate is the Inauthentic Opposition following its business model and doing its job, working to cover its tracks by throwing the debacle of its corporatist politics down George Orwell’s memory hole and attributing their largely self-made defeat to Russia’s allegedly powerful interference in our supposed democracy. Russiagate is meant to provide corporate Democrats cover not only for 2016 but also for 2018 and 2020. It is meant to create a narrative that lets the Fake Resistance Party continue nominating corporate captive neoliberal shills and imperialists who pretend to be progressive while they are owned by the nation’s own homegrown oligarchs, the real masters of America’s oxymoronic “capitalist democracy.” This year’s crop of Democratic congressional candidates is disturbingly loaded with military and intelligence veterans, a reflection of the Democrats’ determination to run as the true party of empire.

As Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano write in their book “The Russians are Coming, Again,” “The scapegoat of Russia functions as a distraction for a ruling class that has lost its legitimacy.”

What is the Democrats’ leading cry? That the terrible Trump is truly terrible. And, of course, that is all too terribly true. But after you’ve bemoaned the terribleness of the beastly, orange-tinted Trump for the 10,000th time, are you ready to get serious about the systemic and richly bipartisan, oligarchic context within which he has emerged? “The Trump administration,” my fellow Truthdigger Chris Hedges reminds us:

“did not rise … like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count.”

Corporate Democrats could well re-elect Trump in 2020. The smart money now is on their running the tepid neoliberal centrist Kamala Harris. Part of what could make her irresistible to the corporate and professional-class know-it-alls atop the party is that she would be a “progressive neoliberal”-bourgeois identity politics double whammy when it comes to keeping their own party’s portside wing at bay. With Obama as their standard bearer, the corporate-war Democrats got to call their progressive critics racists. With Hillary as their candidate, the corporate-war Democrats got to call their progressive critics sexists. With Kamala Harris atop the ticket they could call their disobedient left racists and sexists if progressives dare to publicly notice her captivity to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Council on Foreign Relations and the military-industrial complex.

Not that Sanders, who was the Democrats’ best chance to defeat Trump, is all that “left.” Bernie “F-35” Sanders’ occasional and carefully hedged claims to be a “democratic socialist” were contradicted by his dutiful if quiet embrace of the mass-murderous U.S. military empire. It takes real chutzpah to repeatedly mention Scandinavia as his social-democratic role model without once noting that Sweden, Denmark and Norway spend comparatively tiny percentages of their national budgets on militarism. Failure to tackle the giant U.S. war budget (a vast mechanism of upward wealth transfer) means that you can’t pay for poverty-ending progressive transformation at home.

Sanders has never seriously criticized capitalism, the profits system or modern class rule. He has never questioned the underlying and foundational institutional despotism of capital over labor and the commons that makes a mockery of the West’s democratic pretense while placing human life itself at grave peril. Along the way, Sanders has sustained progressives’ deadly attachment to the nation’s narrow and strictly time-staggered election- and candidate-centered politics. “The really critical thing,” the great American radical historian Howard Zinn once sagely wrote, “isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.”

“The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change,” Noam Chomsky told Abby Martin in the fall of 2015, “is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle.” Sanders was and remains about the masters’ election cycle, which is dedicated to the delusional notion that we the people get meaningful democratic input into policy by spending three minutes in a voting booth choosing from among a handful of candidates selected in advance for us by the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money once every two years.

The Democrats know that lots of citizens think like Zinn. That’s why they set up Astroturf outfits like Indivisible and Move On and the Town Hall Project. These fake resistance groups masquerade as extra-electoral grass-roots movements, but they’re all about channeling everything into a big get-out-the-vote campaign for candidates affiliated with the not-so-left-most of the two reigning corporate parties.

A number of Sanders supporters have migrated into DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, whose popular online “Thanks Capitalism” video defines “socialism” as little more than collective bargaining and civil rights. It says nothing about capitalism’s destruction of livable ecology or about its evil twin, imperialism, whose vast military budgets cancels out social democracy in the “homeland.” The video says nothing about Marx’s and other authentic leftists’ long-standing understanding of socialism as workers’ control.

A panoply of outwardly and sometimes substantively progressive advocacy, policy and service organizations can be found across the U.S. But as Les Leopold has noted, they are badly crippled by single-issue-ism, related to do their budgetary dependence on private foundations. “For the last generation,” Leopold wrote last year, “progressives have organized themselves into issue silos, each with its own agenda. Survival depends on fundraising (largely from private foundations) based on the uniqueness of one’s own silo. The net result of this Darwinian struggle is a fractured landscape of activity. The creativity, talent and skill are there in abundance, but the coherence and common purpose among groups is not.”

There are multi-issue nonpartisan progressive policy, lobbying and protest groups in the Citizen Action tradition across the nation. Their 501c3 (nonprofit) status prevents them from openly identifying as Democratic Party-affiliated groups, but that is what they are. Real authentic root-and-branch radicals who want to keep their jobs know to tread carefully and watch their backs when they work in the “progressive” nonprofit sector. It’s the same in “higher education” and the so-called labor movement.

There are a number of groups that call themselves Marxist in the U.S.—an alphabet soup whose various names and sectarian tendencies can be reviewed on Wikipedia. None of them have anything close to a large membership. Many of them spend more time tearing each other apart in sectarian squabbling than in organizing or inspiring anyone to fight the many manifest evils of capital.

Left anarchism seems as fragmented, marginal and sectarian as the Marxist left.

We’ve seen hopeful seeds of rank-and-file people’s organizing over the years with developments like the Wisconsin Rebellion before it was electorally co-opted, Occupy, the Fight for $15, the Chicago and subsequent statewide teacher strikes, the Verizon strike, rebellions and the movement against racist police killings—a movement bigger than just the Ford Foundation-funded and Borealis Foundation-coordinated Black Lives Matter brand. There’s been the Malcom X Grassroots Movement, We Charge Genocide, the remarkable Standing Rock moment, the broader struggle against the Dakota Access pipeline, the successful struggle against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the remarkable alternative economy political developments led by black radicals in Jackson, Miss., something that strikes me as the most potentially radical and remarkable development of all so far.

Now we have the Poor People’s Campaign, just underway, under the leadership of the Rev. William Barber, who has criticized U.S. militarism and kept Democratic Party politicos off his speaking platforms. Perhaps the PPC can develop in ways that will help us build an authentic radical left—not just another leftish moment that gets folded into a Get Out the Vote for Democrats campaign. To do so, it will need to open its platforms to serious left anti-capitalists. It will have to step further away from the not-so left-most party of capital, the Democrats. It will need to speak less in terms of the immorality of poverty and more in terms of how poverty is rooted in the profits system of class rule and the racism and imperialism that go with capitalism “like white on rice.”

“For whatever reason,” a PPC supporter writes me from Pennsylvania, the campaign is “unwilling or unable to name the disease, capitalism. In the absence of this diagnosis,” he says, “I worry that the PPC might be nothing more than a sheepdog for the Democrats in 2018.”

For now—and this must change—“the [U.S.] left” is still far too scattered, excessively siloed, overdependent on corporate foundations, overly identity-politicized, excessively episodic, excessively metropolitan and bicoastal, excessively professional and middle-class, insufficiently radical, insufficiently working-class, insufficiently anti-capitalist and insufficiently distanced from the dismal, demobilizing, depressing and dollar-drenched Democratic Party.

Noam Chomsky’s judgment five years ago remains all too accurate today: “There is no real left now” in the United States, Chomsky told David Barsamian. “If you are just counting heads,” Chomsky elaborated, “there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they … don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things. We’re not supposed to say it,” he continued, “but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn’t show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else had to start something new. It was always there and it was there for the long haul. … That mentality is basically missing [now]. And it was during the 1960s, too,” Chomsky said.

The absence of a real, dedicated, persistent and serious, adult left is profoundly dangerous. People who are getting shafted and who know it are going to get behind militant and angry politicos seeking to channel their understandable rage. If there’s no effective, durable, organized, intelligent and durable through-thick-and-thin anti-capitalist left around, the job of channeling that popular anger falls by default to the white nationalist racist, nativist and sexist right—the Hitlers, Goebbels, Marine Le Pens, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salivinis, Nigel Farages, David Dukes, Steve Kings, Donald Trumps and Steve Bannons of the world. Resentment abhors a vacuum.

At the same time, without a functioning left able to fight and do things for ordinary working and poor people, we will have nothing to defend and sustain our households, families and communities when the next big capitalist meltdown comes—an event that is due in the very near future. Before the coming collapse, Hedges tell us, “We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town.”

Hedges’ list of institutions for parallel people’s power should be expanded to cooperative production, under the participatory and self-managed ownership, control and design of the “associated producers” themselves in harmony rather than at war with the natural environment.

It’s no small matter, given what we know now to be the essentially ecocidal nature of modern capitalism. “If there is not future for a radical mass movement in our time,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 15 years ago, “there can be no future for humanity itself.”

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Roseanne Barr Has Been a Dangerous Conspiracy Theorist All Along

It began, as so many scandals do today, with a tweet. On Tuesday morning, actress Roseanne Barr cracked a racist “joke” at the expense of Valerie Jarrett, comparing the former Obama adviser to an ape. Within hours, Barr had issued a public apology and vowed to “leave Twitter.” Before noon in Los Angeles, she was unemployed, with ABC canceling the second season of her eponymous sitcom “Roseanne.” “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” President of ABC Entertainment Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Dungey, who is the network’s first black president, has earned plaudits for her decisive action. Still, in an age when the president of the United States regularly obscures the truth while degrading entire races and populations, the question remains: Why did ABC feel compelled to revive Barr’s television career in the first place?

Tuesday’s tweetstorm is hardly the comedienne’s first brush with ignominy. Less than a decade ago, Barr, who grew up in a working-class Jewish household in Salt Lake City, posed for a “Germany” issue of the now-defunct magazine Heeb with a swastika armband and Hitler mustache. The photo shoot included pics of her displaying a batch of burnt gingerbread men that accompanied an article titled “That Oven Feelin’.”

“There’s another, deeper layer to it,” Barr explained to “The Aristocrats” producer Paul Provenza at the time. “You know just the every day. Moving off this Holocaust. There’s been about fifty of them since then. That’s what I’m kind of trying to say. Jesus Christ it’s so every day now, holocausts, it’s like baking cookies…You know what I mean, I don’t know. I’m just really old. When you’re post-menopausal, you’re just really crazy.”

If the incident can be dismissed as an attempt at edgy humor for a Jewish satirical magazine gone awry, her more recent behavior cannot. An avid Trump supporter, Barr has emerged in recent years as one of the right’s more delirious conspiracy theorists. On several occasions, she has suggested, baselessly, that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was assassinated, and that the Clinton campaign operated a child sex ring out of the Washington, D.C., pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. Prior to her departure from Twitter on Tuesday, she retweeted an account offering information about Reddit invention QAnon, a shadowy Trump official whose dispatches detail the president’s plan to combat the deep state and (what else) a cabal of liberal pedophiles—or so his followers have convinced themselves.

Tuesday’s episode wasn’t even the first time Barr has engaged in overt bigotry on social media. In a tweet from 2013 that has since been deleted, the actress called then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice “a man with big swinging ape balls.” (A separate attack this morning saw her accuse billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, an anti-Semitic smear popular among white nationalists). As of this writing, she has just shy of 700,000 followers on Twitter.

ABC executives have known who Barr was all along, and they greenlighted a second season of “Roseanne” anyway. Whereas the original sitcom offered a nuanced portrait of a working-class American family, the reboot has served, at least in part, to sanitize the voice of certain Trump voters. Roseanne Barr reveals what one actually sounds like.

Embattled Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens Resigns

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo—Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a sometimes brash political outsider whose unconventional resume as a Rhodes scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in the Republican party, abruptly resigned Tuesday amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser.

The 44-year-old governor spent nearly six months fighting to stay in office after the affair became public in January in a television news report that aired immediately following his State of the State address. The probes into his conduct by prosecutors and lawmakers began with allegations stemming from the affair and expanded to include questions about whether he had violated campaign-finance laws.

Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday.

“This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family — millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends,” he said in a brief statement from his Jefferson City office, his voice breaking at times.

Lawmakers pressuring Greitens to step down included many Republicans, who feared that his troubles could jeopardize the GOP’s chances of defeating incumbent Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill in a race considered essential to Republican hopes of keeping control of the Senate.

The local St. Louis prosecutor’s office said it had reached a “fair and just resolution” on criminal charges against Greitens now that he’s leaving office. But the prosecutor said details would not be made public until Wednesday.

A St. Louis grand jury indicted Greitens on Feb. 22 on one felony count of invasion of privacy for allegedly taking a photo of the woman without her consent at his home in 2015, before he was elected governor. The charge was dismissed during jury selection, but a special prosecutor was considering whether to refile charges.

In April, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner charged Greitens with another felony, alleging that he improperly used the donor list for a charity that he had founded to raise money for his 2016 campaign.

Then less than two weeks ago, the Missouri Legislature began meeting in special session to consider whether to pursue impeachment proceedings to try to oust Greitens from office. A special House investigatory committee had subpoenaed Greitens to testify next Monday.

Republican leaders in the Missouri House said Greitens had “put the best interest” of the state first in deciding to resign. His brashness had alienated some GOP legislators even before his affair became public.

The woman’s then-husband released a secretly recorded conversation in which she described the affair, which happened before Greitens officially started running for office. The woman later told a Missouri House investigative committee that Greitens restrained, slapped, shoved and threatened her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid.

Greitens said the allegations amounted to a “political witch hunt” and vowed to stay in office. But a report from a House committee created a firestorm, with both Republicans and Democrats calling for his resignation.

His departure elevates fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson to the governor’s office.

The Greitens administration was thrown into chaos the night of Jan. 10, when a St. Louis TV station aired a report about Greitens allegedly taking the compromising photo and threatening to blackmail the woman if she ever spoke of their encounter.

The governor admitted to having an affair but denied any criminal wrongdoing. He said the criminal case was politically motivated and called Gardner, a Democrat, a “reckless liberal prosecutor.”

Lawmakers from both parties immediately began questioning whether Greitens could continue to lead the state. The House authorized the legislative investigation a week after the indictment.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley also launched an inquiry into a veterans’ charity Greitens founded. Federal law bars 501(c)(3) charities such as The Mission Continues from intervening in political campaigns on behalf of candidates.

The Associated Press first reported in October 2016 that Greitens’ campaign had obtained a list of individuals, corporations and other nonprofits that had given at least $1,000 to The Mission Continues. The AP reported that Greitens raised about $2 million from those who had previously given significant amounts to the charity.

Hawley, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, turned evidence over to Gardner, saying April 17 that he believed Greitens had broken the law. Her office charged him with tampering with computer data for allegedly disclosing the donor list without the charity’s permission.

A May 2 report from a special House investigatory committee indicated that Greitens himself received the donor list and later directed aides to work off it to raise money for his gubernatorial campaign. A former campaign aide testified that he was duped into taking the fall when the campaign tried to explain how it had gotten the list.

The invasion-of-privacy indictment alleged that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed the woman and transmitted the photo “in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer.”

During her testimony to the House investigative committee, the woman said Greitens invited her to his home and offered to show her “how to do a proper pull-up.” The woman said she initially thought “this is going to be some sort of sexy workout.”

But once in his basement, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, and started kissing and disrobing her without her consent, according to her testimony.

Then she saw a flash and heard a click, like a cellphone camera, she said. The woman testified that Greitens told her: “Don’t even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I’m going to take these pictures, and I’m going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.”

Greitens, a married father of two young boys, repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman. He declined to say whether he took a photo.

The governor, who also served as a White House fellow and wrote a best-selling book, entered the 2016 gubernatorial race as an outsider. He won an expensive Republican primary, then defeated Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election to give Republicans control of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years. Some considered him a potential future presidential contender.

Republicans also controlled the Missouri House and Senate, but there were frequent clashes between lawmakers and Greitens, who compared them to third-graders and labeled them “career politicians.”

He confronted criticism from some educators and lawmakers for working to pack the State Board of Education with members who would fire the education commissioner. Greitens’ use of a secretive app that deletes messages after they’re read also sparked a review by Hawley.

Israeli Warplanes Target Gaza as Militants Fire Rockets, Mortars

JERUSALEM—Palestinian militants bombarded southern Israel with dozens of rockets and mortar shells Tuesday, while Israeli warplanes struck targets throughout the Gaza Strip in the largest flare-up of violence between the sides since a 2014 war.

The Israeli military said most of the projectiles were intercepted, but three soldiers were wounded, raising the chances of further Israeli retaliation. One mortar shell landed near a kindergarten shortly before it opened.

The sudden burst of violence, which stretched past midnight with no signs of slowing, follows weeks of mass Palestinian protests along the Gaza border with Israel. Over 110 Palestinians, many of them unarmed protesters, have been killed by Israeli fire in that time. Israel says it holds Gaza’s Hamas rulers responsible for the bloodshed.

“Israel will exact a heavy price from those who seek to harm it, and we see Hamas as responsible for preventing such attacks,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic group seized control of Gaza in 2007.

The last war in 2014 was especially devastating, with over 2,000 Palestinians killed, including hundreds of civilians, and widespread damage inflicted on Gaza’s infrastructure in 50 days of fighting. Seventy-two people were killed on the Israeli side.

Tuesday’s violence bore a striking resemblance to the run-up to past wars. In the early morning, Palestinian militants fired over two dozen mortar rounds into southern Israel, including the shell that landed near the kindergarten.

The Israeli military confirmed over 60 airstrikes throughout Gaza, including an unfinished tunnel near the southern city of Rafah that crossed under the border into Egypt and from there into Israeli territory. It said other targets included “sheds of drones,” a rocket manufacturing workshop, naval weaponry, military and training facilities and a munitions manufacturing site. No Palestinian casualties were reported.

Palestinian militants continued to fire additional barrages toward southern Israel, setting off air raid sirens in the area throughout the night.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief military spokesman, threatened tougher action and said it was up to Hamas to stop the situation from escalating.

“These strikes will continue to intensify as long as necessary if this fire continues,” he told reporters outside Israeli military headquarters.

Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant issued a joint statement Tuesday, claiming shared responsibility for firing rockets and projectiles against Israeli communities near Gaza.

They said Israel “began this round of escalation” by targeting their installations in the past two days, killing four militants. It was the first time the armed wing of Hamas has claimed responsibility for rocket attacks out of Gaza since the 2014 war.

An Islamic Jihad spokesman, Daoud Shehab, claimed that Egypt had brokered a cease-fire deal to go into effect at midnight. But more than an hour after the deadline, rocket fire and Israeli airstrikes were continuing. Shehab said some militants rejected the cease-fire and were continuing to fire rockets. There was no Israeli comment on the purported cease-fire plan.

Hamas has been severely weakened by the three wars with Israel, as well as a stifling Israeli-Egyptian blockade that has brought the local economy to a standstill.

Hamas initially billed the weekly border protests as a call to break through the fence and return to homes that were lost 70 years ago during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment.

But the protests appear to be fueled primarily by a desire to ease the blockade. Gaza’s unemployment rate is edging toward 50 percent, and the territory suffers from chronic power outages.

With limited options at its disposal, and a failure so far of the protests to significantly ease the blockade, Hamas appears to be gambling that limited rocket fire might somehow shake up the situation.

Ismail Radwan, a Hamas official, said the “resistance is capable of hurting the occupation and it proved this today by responding to its crimes.”

Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from building up its military capabilities.

Also Tuesday, two fishing boats carrying students and medical patients set sail from Gaza City’s port, aiming to reach Cyprus and break the Israeli blockade, which has restricted most activity along the coast. Hamas acknowledged it was mostly a symbolic act.

One of the boats quickly turned around, while the Israeli navy intercepted the second vessel after it ventured beyond a six-mile (10-kilometer) limit imposed by Israel.

The Israeli military said the boat was intercepted without incident, was taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod and the 17 people aboard would be sent back to Gaza.

In southern Israel, angry residents complained about the renewed rocket fire.

Adva Klein of Kibbutz Kfar Aza said she only got about two hours of sleep because of the frequent incoming fire and the warning sirens. Other residents reported machine- gun fire from Gaza.

“It’s been a really scary morning,” said Adele Raemer of Kibbutz Nirim.

Regional councils near the Gaza border instructed residents to stay close to bomb shelters.

The high Palestinian death toll in the border protests has drawn strong international criticism of Israel, with rights groups saying Israel’s use of live fire is illegal because in many cases it has struck unarmed protesters who did not pose an imminent threat to Israeli soldiers.

But on Tuesday, the Palestinians came under criticism.

The United States condemned the attacks out of Gaza and called for an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said the Security Council “should be outraged and respond.”

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, called for an immediate halt to the rocket and mortar fire.

“Indiscriminate attacks against civilians are completely unacceptable under any circumstances,” she said.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said it had instructed embassies around the world to seek similar condemnations of the Palestinian fire.

Israel has rejected the criticism of its response to the protests, saying it is defending its border and nearby communities. It accuses Hamas of trying to carry out attacks under the cover of protests and using civilian demonstrators as human shields.

Hamas has vowed to continue the border rallies.

___

Associated Press writer Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed.

How Breitbart Recruited a Bernie Sanders Activist to Suppress the Black Vote

“If you can’t stomach Trump, just don’t vote for the other people and don’t vote at all” was Bruce Carter’s refrain to voters in the summer of 2016. Carter, armed with vehicles wrapped in photo collages of famous black Republicans and speeches touting how Donald Trump’s business experience would benefit black communities, was an atypical fixture on the Trump campaign trail.

Just a few months earlier, Carter had been campaigning heavily for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and was the founder of the group Black Men for Bernie. According to a new Bloomberg scoop, this wasn’t a mere change of heart for Carter, but the result of a Breitbart News writer’s campaign to persuade him to switch sides and help elect Trump.

The writer, Dustin Stockton, courted Carter for weeks, originally under the guise of interviewing him for a story. Eventually, after showing him the anti-Hillary Clinton documentary “Clinton Cash,” and spending hours hanging out at the Democratic National Convention, he dropped the act, “signing Carter up for a 10-week blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul, or simply sit out the election,” Bloomberg reports.

Once convinced, Carter was then paid to start a group called Trump for Urban Communities.

The group claimed to be independent of the Trump campaign, which Carter’s recollections contradict. “If there was coordination,” Bloomberg writes, “election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as his must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate. One supporter far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000 to Carter’s efforts.”

The group’s activities and funding in coordination with the Trump campaign may have violated election and campaign finance laws, as it never disclosed its spending to the Federal Election Commission. Carter says he believed he was working for the Trump campaign, and because of that it wasn’t his responsibility to do the reporting. One expert told Bloomberg there is enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation, though there’s no evidence one has started.

The relationship between the Trump campaign and Trump for Urban Communities ended badly, with Carter’s backers failing to fund a promised new project after the election.

There’s also the question of whether Stockton’s work persuading Carter was a campaign donation in and of itself. According to Stockton, the plan was a valuable one, and Carter’s work paid off: “Trump vastly outperformed the projection models in the 12 areas Bruce was targeting” in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, Stockton told Bloomberg. “In Philadelphia,” the article continues, “where Carter spent much of his time, Clinton won about 35,000 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, and that drop was primarily in majority-black wards. Those ballots alone could have cut Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania by more than half.”

Stockton himself left Breitbart after colleagues told him his work with Carter could be a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Carter is beginning a new project he calls The People’s Ticket, aimed at holding both Democrats and Republicans accountable for their promises to black communities.

Harvard Study: Hurricane Maria Death Toll 4,645, Not 64

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, drenching the island with six months’ worth of rain in four days and pummeling it with strong winds, landslides and avalanches that erased roads, took out power lines and even buried people alive. Eight months later, the government’s official death toll from the hurricane stands at 64, but a new study from Harvard University suggests it’s closer to 4,645.

The official toll, the study says, does not count the thousands of people who died not from the direct impact of the storm but from delayed medical care, particularly for the elderly and chronically ill.

“About 15 percent of the people interviewed,” The New York Times writes, “reported that someone in their household was unable to get medicines for at least a day after the storm. Roughly 10 percent said that a household member had trouble using breathing equipment, which often relies on electricity.”

Compounding the problem, some “reported closed medical facilities and 6 percent said doctors were unavailable.”

The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was conducted by scientists with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

This latest study isn’t the first to challenge the U.S. government’s findings. In December, The New York Times analyzed death statistics and found “1,052 more people than usual died across the island in the 42 days after the storm.”

In addition, the Times notes, “Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and CNN, and Alexis Raúl Santos, a demographer at Penn State, have also challenged the government’s figure, finding evidence for hundreds of excess deaths in the weeks following the hurricane.”

The Harvard survey, however, is the most comprehensive, with over 3,000 households surveyed across the island. Researchers then compared the post-Maria death rate to that of the previous year and found that the mortality rate was 14.3 deaths per 1,000 residents from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2017, a 62 percent increase compared with 2016, or 4,645 “excess deaths.”

The Trump administration, under pressure after initial criticism of its death count, commissioned the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in December to conduct a revised tally of Hurricane Maria deaths. “They’re still acquiring data,” Dr. Lynn R. Goldman, the school’s dean, told the Times.

Meanwhile in Puerto Rico, eight months after the storm, the situation is little improved. As The Washington Post reports:

The island’s slow recovery has been marked by a persistent lack of water, a faltering power grid and a lack of essential services — all of which have imperiled the lives of many residents who have been struggling to get back on their feet, especially the infirm and those in remote areas, some of which were the hardest hit in September.

George Washington University says its review will be completed this summer.

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Poor People’s Campaign Continues Strong in North Carolina (Live Blog)

Editor’s note: To document the Poor People’s Campaign,  Truthdig has launched a reader-funded project. Please help us provide firsthand accounts of this activism by making a donation.

Activists and civil rights advocates have gathered for the third week of action by the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to relaunch Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against poverty, war and income inequality. The campaign’s goals include federal and state living-wage laws, an end to anti-union and anti-workers’ rights efforts, welfare programs for the poor, equity in education, Medicaid expansion and accessible housing.

Truthdig correspondent Michael Nigro is reporting from North Carolina. Scroll down to see Truthdig’s live multimedia updates.

3:00 p.m. PDT: The Poor People’s Campaign is asking for donations to help bail out those who were arrested while peacefully protesting:

Hundreds have been arrested across the country today standing up for peace against the #WarEconomy – many more are still taking action! Help us bail them out: https://t.co/rTFLlV3PUV #poorpeoplescampaign pic.twitter.com/EBQI3cr6RE

— Poor People’s Campaign (@UniteThePoor) May 29, 2018

In Frankfort, Kentucky, the figures of bodies were outlined in chalk to represent the lives lost to militarization in communities:

#PoorPeoplesCampaign at the Governor’s mansion in Frankfort today. Bodies outlined in chalk to represent the millions of lives lost to the weaponization of our communities every day. @UniteThePoor pic.twitter.com/vPacYLqU7O

— Laurel Mayes (@LaurelMayes) May 29, 2018

2:00 p.m. PDT: Protesters have occupied the rotunda of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing:

After being refused entrance to the House Floor, #PoorPeoplesCampaign occupies the Capitol Rotunda #WeAreNotAfraid pic.twitter.com/SEWSeXCvMl

— Michigan Poor People’s Campaign (@MichiganPPC) May 29, 2018

1:30 p.m. PDT: At least five arrests have reportedly been made at the North Carolina protest in Raleigh:

David is the 5th person arrested in North Carolina with the #PoorPeoplesCampaign today. You cannot fight poverty in this nation while spending so much on the war economy #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/0qfWNjeb7K

— Fight For 15 (@fightfor15) May 29, 2018

1:00 p.m. PDT: The action at the New York state Capitol in Albany continues as a teach-in is held on U.S. militarism:

Holding a teach-in and discussion on US #militarism in the “War Room” of the NYS Capitol building now. @nysppc #PoorPeoplesCampaign pic.twitter.com/uen084GXOw

— Kairos Center (@Kairos_Center) May 29, 2018

In California, veterans are sharing their stories. “The war economy is immoral,” says Antonio Palacios:

“I joined the Navy because I needed money to finish college, I just had to hide who I was for four years… My supervisor joined because it was the military or prison… The war economy is immoral” @TonePalacios, Los Angeles @VFPNational #PoorPeoplesCampaign pic.twitter.com/06RMG3NI73

— California Poor People’s Campaign (@CaliforniaPPC) May 29, 2018

12:30 p.m. PDT: In Washington, D.C., a crowd delivered a folded flag and list of demands to the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

#PoorPeoplesCampaign just delivered a folded flag, a prayer of demands and flowers to Sen. McConnell’s office. End militarism and war, feed children, honor all people. pic.twitter.com/9OvuVkEXk6

— Camille D Holmes (@CamilleDHolmes) May 29, 2018

Noon PDT: A satellite protest, focusing on the war economy, is happening at the New York state Capitol:

“I’m glad that we’ve got ‘Ain’t gonna Study War No More’ down, and I hope the people passing through here will get it too.” Rev Claudia De la Cruz #PoorPeoplesCampaign pic.twitter.com/Uxv8T6qeqA

— Kairos Center (@Kairos_Center) May 29, 2018

11:40 a.m. PDT: The protesters unite in song, singing “Somebody’s taking our freedom and we won’t be silent anymore.”

Theomusicologist leads the #PoorPeoplesCampaign in song. “Somebody’s taking our freedom and we won’t be silent anymore.” #40DaysofAction pic.twitter.com/hvclhC8Z9x

— Poor People’s Campaign (@UniteThePoor) May 29, 2018

11:20 a.m. PDT: Michael Nigro leads a Facebook Live broadcast from the ground:

11:00 a.m. PDT: Michael Nigro reports from the ground:

Truthdig correspondent @Nigrotime is on the ground in North Carolina for the third week of action with the #PoorPeoplesCampaign @UniteThePoor @RevDrBarber @liztheo @fightfor15: pic.twitter.com/lIFJjtqVu0

— Truthdig (@Truthdig) May 29, 2018

Misleading Tweets by Liberal Activists Fuel Trump on Border Issue

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday seized on an error by liberal activists who tweeted photos of young-looking immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in steel cages and blamed the current administration for separating immigrant children from their parents.

The photos were taken by The Associated Press in 2014, when President Barack Obama was in office. The photo captions reference children who crossed the border as unaccompanied minors.

Early Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country…Bipartisan Bill!”

The immigration debate has reached a fever pitch in recent months following reports that since October about 700 children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have been separated from their parents.

The number of separated minors is expected to jump once Trump’s new “zero tolerance” policy is enacted. That policy, embraced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would enforce criminal charges against people crossing the border illegally with few or no previous offenses. Under U.S. protocol, if parents are jailed, their children would be separated from them.

“The parents are subject to prosecution while children may not be,” Sessions said earlier this month. “So, if we do our duty and prosecute those cases, then children inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions.”

Enter a June 2014 online story by The Arizona Republic titled “First peek: Immigrant children flood detention center.”

The story linked to photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption references U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.

How or why the story resurfaced on social media four years after it was published is unclear. But among those who took notice was Jon Favreau, Obama’s former speechwriter.

In a now-deleted tweet, Favreau wrote: “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”

Other liberal activists also linked to the Arizona Republic story using the hashtag “WhereAreOurChildren,” which grew out of testimony in April by a federal official that the U.S. government had lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minor children it placed with adult sponsors in the U.S.

Favreau did not immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment. But he later issued a corrected tweet: “These awful pictures are from 2014 when the government’s challenge was reconnecting unaccompanied minors.”

He added: “Today, in 2018, the government is CREATING unaccompanied minors by tearing them away from family at the border.”

As the immigration debate lit up social media over the weekend, Trump on Saturday falsely claimed that “we have to break up families” at the border because “the Democrats gave us that law.”

That’s not true. There’s no law mandating that parents must be separated from their children. But if an administration opts to impose harsh criminal charges against an adult for crossing the border illegally, their children would be separated from them as a result.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has defended the Trump administration’s practice of separating children from parents when the family is being prosecuted for entering the U.S. illegally, telling a Senate committee earlier this month that removing children from parents facing criminal charges happens “in the United States every day.”

A 2008 law, passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, says children traveling alone from countries other than Mexico or Canada must be released in the “least restrictive setting” — often to family or a government-run shelter — while their cases slowly wind through immigration court. It was designed to accommodate an influx of children fleeing to the U.S. from Central America.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

One Dire Prediction for Trump’s Tax Cuts Is Already Coming True

Six months after Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 into law, “the days of most people getting a pay raise are over.” That is one finding of a disturbing new report from Axios, which also notes that major corporations are planning on cutting their respective payrolls, despite having secured trillions in tax savings from Republican legislators in Congress.

During a conference Thursday at the Dallas Fed, several of the country’s leading CEOs were asked if they had any plans to use their collective tax windfall to increase wages. Their answers, according to Axios’ Steve LeVine, were “candid and bracing.”

“It’s just not going to happen,” Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Beverages Florida Troy Taylor told the discussion’s moderator. “Absolutely not in my business.”

Taylor and several others suggested that if workers wanted to increase their salaries, or even save their jobs, they would have to pursue more “technically-skilled” employment. As AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens remarked, “I don’t need that many guys to install coaxial cables.”

Meanwhile, the chasm separating the incomes of corporate executives from rank-and-file workers has never yawned wider. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which requires major corporations to compare the earnings of CEOs with median-compensation employees, we now know it would take workers at companies like Walmart and Time Warner centuries, even millenniums, to match what top executives make in a single year.

Last week, The New York Times highlighted six outrageous CEO pay packages that help put this gap in perspective. They include those of disgraced casino mogul Stephen Wynn, whose $34,522,695 income totaled 909 times that of an average Wynn Resorts staffer; First Data CEO Frank Bisignano, whose compensation was $102,210,396, or 2,028 times that of his average employee; and former Mattel CEO Margaret Georgiadis, whose $31,275,289 compensation registered at 4,987 times that of her average worker.

If the Trump tax cuts have widened this gulf, the American people can’t say they weren’t warned. Prior to its passage, Sen. Bernie Sanders derided the legislation as a thinly veiled gift to billionaire donors, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “the biggest tax giveaway to giant corporations in modern memory.”

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China Approves 13 Ivanka Trump Trademarks in 3 Months

SHANGHAI — Ivanka Trump’s brand continues to win foreign trademarks in China and the Philippines, adding to questions about conflicts of interest at the White House, The Associated Press has found.

On Sunday, China granted the first daughter’s company final approval for its 13th trademark in the last three months, trademark office records show. Over the same period, the Chinese government has granted Ivanka Trump’s company provisional approval for another eight trademarks, which can be finalized if no objections are raised during a three-month comment period.

Taken together, the trademarks could allow her brand to market a lifetime’s worth of products in China, from baby blankets to coffins, and a host of things in between, including perfume, make-up, bowls, mirrors, furniture, books, coffee, chocolate and honey. Ivanka Trump stepped back from management of her brand and placed its assets in a family-run trust, but she continues to profit from the business.

“Ivanka Trump’s refusal to divest from her business is especially troubling as the Ivanka brand continues to expand its business in foreign countries,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in an email Monday. “It raises significant questions about corruption, as it invites the possibility that she could be benefiting financially from her position and her father’s presidency or that she could be influenced in her policy work by countries’ treatment of her business.”

As Ivanka Trump and her father have built their global brands, largely through licensing deals, they have pursued trademarks in dozens of countries. Those global trademarks have drawn the attention of ethics lawyers because they are granted by foreign governments and can confer enormous value. Concerns about political influence have been especially sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party.

Chinese officials have emphasized that all trademark applications are handled in accordance with the law.

More approvals are likely to come. Online records from China’s trademark office indicate that Ivanka Trump’s company last applied for trademarks — 17 of them — on March 28, 2017, the day before she took on a formal role at the White House. Those records on Monday showed at least 25 Ivanka Trump trademarks pending review, 36 active marks and eight with provisional approval.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s global brand database also shows that her company, Ivanka Trump Marks LLC, won three trademarks in the Philippines after her father took office. Two of them that cover clothing, including lingerie and baby clothes, were filed on Feb. 8, 2017 and registered in June and November. The third, filed on March 1, 2017, covers clothing and footwear and was registered in July.

Companies register for trademarks for a variety of reasons. They can be a sign of corporate ambition, but in many countries, like China, where trademark squatting is rampant, companies also file defensively, to block copycats from grabbing legal rights to a brand’s name. Trademarks are classified by category and may include items that a company does not intend to market. Some trademark lawyers also advise clients to register trademarks for merchandise that is manufactured in China, even if it’s not sold there.

Ivanka Trump does not have a large retail presence in China, but customs records show that the bulk of her company’s U.S. imports are shipped from China.

The brand’s secretive Chinese supply chains have been the subject of some controversy. A year ago Monday, three men working for China Labor Watch, a New York-based non-profit group, were arrested while investigating labor abuses at Ivanka Trump suppliers in China. After thirty days in detention, they were released on bail, but continue to live under police surveillance.

Li Qiang, the group’s founder, said Monday that he hopes bail will be lifted soon and that the case will not go to trial.

Police in Ganzhou, the southeastern Chinese city where the men were detained, could not be reached for comment. The Chinese law firm that handles Ivanka Trump’s intellectual property in China also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

___

Associated Press researcher Fu Ting contributed to this story from Shanghai.

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