Chris Hedges's Blog, page 599

How the Trumpian Circus Benefits the Trumpian Project

One of the many costs of the Trump era is the dumbing down of our political discourse. The incoherent spoken and tweeted outpourings from President Trump and the daily outrages of his administration leave little time for serious debate about policy or meaningful dialogue about our larger purposes.

In a normal environment, the Republican Congress’ assault on food-stamp recipients, the administration’s waivers allowing states to erode Medicaid coverage, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s proposed rent increases for some of the country’s poorest people would be front and center in the news.

But poor people lack the media cache of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen or a president who rants uncontrollably over the telephone to his favorite Fox News show.

News outlets are entirely justified in lavishing coverage on the sensational and the personal, since developments in these areas are a part of a bigger story that could undermine the Trump presidency all together. Nonetheless, the circus that Trump has brought to town is nearly as much of a threat to a well-ordered political system as is Trump himself.

Nothing is significant for long, everything is episodic, and old scandals are regularly knocked out of the headlines by new ones. It’s a truly novel approach to damage control.

And governing? It seems almost beside the point. Thus does the unraveling of regulatory protections for workers, the environment and the users of financial services rush forward with little notice.

This is where the Trumpian circus benefits the Trumpian project. If there are too many scandals for any one of them to seize our attention for long, all of them taken together allow what are potentially very unpopular policies to take root without much scrutiny.

Yes, good journalists are on top of what’s happening. But their stories usually get buried beneath reports about the latest presidential statement contradicting an earlier presidential statement.

Also consider this: Budget Director Mick Mulvaney last week made a brash admission about his time in Congress. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money,” he said to an audience of banking executives, “I didn’t talk to you.”

In a more innocent age, this confession would have provoked sustained indignation over how our political money system fundamentally corrupts our politics. (And imagine if Hillary Clinton had said such a thing.) But Mulvaney’s words just seemed to slide by.

Mulvaney should write thank-you notes to Trump, Cohen and Daniels. Also to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who had to justify his unjustifiable uses of public money before Congress, and Ronny Jackson, who withdrew from consideration to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs after allegations (which he denies) related to, among other things, his improperly dispensing drugs and his own use of alcohol.

But if the severity of every abuse is relativized, something less tangible but at least as important is lost as well. We are ignoring the imperative of shoring up the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy.

Intellectual confusion and ambivalence now haunt the West. Older and once vital systems of thought—in Europe, Christian democracy and social democracy; in the United States, New Dealism and free market conservatism—have an ever-weaker hold on the popular imagination.

This vacuum is filled by strange concepts that hark back to the irrationalism of the 1930s. They include what to supporters of liberal democracy are oxymoronic ideas such as “illiberal democracy” or “authoritarian democracy.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has the intellectual courage to raise the specter that lurks behind these terms in her new book, “Fascism: A Warning.” She notes that fascism arose at “a time of intellectual liveliness and resurgent nationalism coupled with widespread disappointment at the failure of representative parliaments to keep pace with a technology-driven Industrial Revolution.”

In the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, she adds, “the promises inherent in the Enlightenment and the French and American Revolutions had become hollow.”

Albright is not a catastrophist (and neither am I). But she doesn’t mind being called an alarmist. She notes “that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.” We can’t just “close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass.”

Yet at a moment when we need politics to be thoughtful and engaging, we have a government whose profound swampiness only further deepens public doubts about democracy and encourages us to view public life as mere spectacle. It’s a very bad time to be distracted by a circus.

As Trump and Netanyahu Join Forces to Torpedo Iran Deal, Remember That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit the U.S. media circuit on Tuesday to regurgitate claims he laid out in his “bizarre” speech accusing Iran of violating the nuclear accord, journalists and non-proliferation advocates worked to call attention to the fact that there is only one nation in the Middle East that already possesses nuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge them: Israel.

“I just want someone in a position of power in this country to call out Israel for its nuclear weapons,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, told Common Dreams in an email. “How can this hypocrisy continue, with Israel having hundreds of nuclear weapons, no inspections and no adherence to any nuclear treaty calling out Iran on nuclear weapons? It is because Israel is good and Iran is evil? Ask the people of Gaza about that one.”

A striking example of Israel’s hypocrisy and refusal to confirm what virtually the entire international community has known for decades came when Netanyahu was asked about his country’s nukes Tuesday morning by CNN‘s Chris Cuomo—a question that notably didn’t come up in the prime minister’s earlier softball interview on “Fox & Friends.”

“Does Israel have nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons, yes or no?” Cuomo asked.

Netanyahu offered an evasive response, claiming “we’ve always been the first to say we wouldn’t introduce it so we haven’t introduced it.”

After Cuomo continued to press for a “yes or no answer,” Netanyahu said, “That’s as good an answer as you’re going to get.”

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald noted in response to the exchange between Cuomo and Netanyahu, the inconvenient fact that Israel continues to shroud its own nuclear stockpile in secrecy as it levels accusations against Iran—which, unlike Israel, allows inspectors to examine its nuclear facilities to ensure they’re being used for peaceful purposes—is “typically ignored” by America’s corporate media outlets.

Kudos to @ChrisCuomo for pressing Netanyahu on that little uncomfortable fact that is typically ignored: the only country in the Middle East with a proven, clandestine nuclear weapons stockpile is . . . Israel. And the rogue state refuses to join the NPT https://t.co/giuIE0Przz https://t.co/IJwFkuJ9E9

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2018

Netanyahu’s media appearances came just hours after the Trump administration was forced to retract a false statement claiming that Iran “has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program.”

After journalists quickly noted that this assertion was false, the White House quietly changed “has” to “had” and said the inaccuracy was the result of a “clerical error.”

In a tweet on Monday responding to the Trump administration’s statement, Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione noted that it is Israel, not Iran, that has repeatedly attempted to hide its nuclear capacities.

May I just point out that #Israel had a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it tried and failed to hide for years. They repeatedly and consistently lied to US officials when confronted with the evidence.

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) May 1, 2018

The Sound of Wit

William Hamilton already had a long-standing history as a cartoonist at The New Yorker when I met him, though it wasn’t his cartooning that caught my eye. I was a publisher at the time, and after reading a newspaper article he wrote, I approached him to write a book. The book was not meant to be, but we were.

Strikingly tall with a bohemian flare, William was a bit of a bad boy, and I was not unaware that he would be a precarious undertaking. Background is a poor substitute for character but shouldn’t be entirely ignored because, inevitably, it explains a thing or two. William’s background placed him in high society. Annoying to him was that high society lacked any meaningful cash flow. Because he recognized just how absurd money and society could be, the captions William wrote to accompany his drawings almost always hit the mark.

In ways having nothing to do society or money, we were wed on the Amazon River by the captain of a Peruvian supply boat. Not surprisingly, the legality of our marriage didn’t make it across the border, and we had to repeat our vows in the United States. Shortly before, William called me in my office: He wanted to discuss a personal matter that evening over dinner. “It’s important” was his ominous warning.

Resembling one of his drawings waiting for a caption, he and I sat facing one other across a restaurant table,

“If I tell you what it is, you won’t bolt, will you?” he asked, looking anxious.

“Of course not,” I managed to say. It wasn’t an entirely truthful answer.

“The thing is … I make a sound.”

I told him that, having been in each other’s close company for the year we were engaged, I was by now intimately familiar with all of the sounds in his repertoire. Admittedly, while some were distracting, none were disturbing to me.

“But you don’t know this sound,” he insisted. “Actually, it’s a noise I make when I draw. You’re not around when I draw, and when you are, I try not to make it.”

True: I left for my office early in the mornings before William sat down to draw, and I returned home in the evenings long after his ink and pen were put away. Apparently, he was able to suppress the noise during weekends, but the effort was taking its toll.

“Don’t worry” were my reassuring words. “I promise I won’t mind the noise.”

“I’m glad,” William said, relieved.

I was curious.

“What kind is it?” I asked.

“All I can tell you is that the couple living in the apartment below thinks I’ve set up a machine shop,” said the man for whom I would forsake all others.

The noise made a point of introducing itself the day we would be joined in legal matrimony at William’s family home in the Napa Valley. That morning—walking toward the room in which he was drawing—I heard what I assumed was a vacuum cleaner, but each step brought me closer to the realization that it was William powering the noise. Not right away, but eventually, William explained to me that the noise was how he moved his mind and pen in sync.

Two years ago last month, William was killed in a car collision—in a split second, he was gone. For me, he left behind our very tall son in possession of his father’s dry wit and nuanced sensibility. I can recall without much effort our three lives when they were happily combined. And, if I concentrate, I can still hear the noise that was William’s, and his alone.

Rod Rosenstein: Justice Department Won’t Be Extorted by Congress

WASHINGTON — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Tuesday lashed out at Republican allies of President Donald Trump who have drafted articles of impeachment against him, saying the Justice Department won’t be extorted or give in to threats.

Rosenstein, speaking at a question-and-answer session at the Newseum, chided the lawmakers who have prepared the document by saying that “they can’t even resist leaking their own drafts” and that they lack “the courage to put their name on it.”

“I can tell you there have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time, and I think they should understand by now, the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said, in response to a question about news reports on the articles of impeachment.

“We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law,” he added. “And any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.”

He did not elaborate on what he meant by threats, but some congressional Republicans have excoriated him for his oversight role of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Some lawmakers have blamed Rosenstein and other Justice Department officials for a secret surveillance warrant to monitor the communications of a former Trump campaign associate that they say relied excessively on Democrat-funded political opposition research.

They’ve also criticized Rosenstein and the Justice Department for what they say is a slow response to lawmakers’ demands for documents, including about the now-resolved Hillary Clinton email probe.

Trump has also repeatedly lambasted Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose recusal from the Russia investigation laid the groundwork for the appointment of Mueller.

Rosenstein said that while the Justice Department supports congressional oversight, lawmakers must also understand that their duty is not to interfere with ongoing investigations.

“If we were to just open our doors to allow Congress to come and rummage through the files, that would be a serious infringement on the separation of powers,” he said. “It might resolve a dispute today, but it would have negative repercussions in the long run, and we have a responsibility to defend the institution.”

The Washington Post on Monday reported the articles of impeachment from members of the House Freedom Caucus, a hard-right group of Republican lawmakers. A person familiar with the effort but who was not authorized to discuss it publicly confirmed it to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Tuesday.

Rosenstein repeatedly refused to discuss Mueller’s investigation. He deflected one question about whether he believed the Justice Department can indict a sitting president by noting, generally, the existence of a legal opinion that says the commander in chief may not be charged while in office.

“There’s been a lot of speculation in the media about this. I just don’t have anything more to say about it,” Rosenstein said. “When the issue arose, someone in the department reached a legal conclusion, and that’s what it is.”

Asked about an FBI raid last month in New York that targeted Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, Rosenstein said additional safeguards exist when it comes to searching the offices of an attorney, including consultation with Justice Department in Washington.

“What we’re looking for, if we do search an attorney’s office, we’re not looking for privileged information,” Rosenstein said. “We don’t want that. In fact, we could create a lot of problems for ourselves if we inadvertently get access to privileged information.”

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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

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Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

Denying Asylum Seekers Would Be a Stain on America’s Conscience

The “caravan” of asylum-seeking migrants that has finally arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border is a test of American character and purpose—a test that President Trump wants us to fail.

I put caravan in quotation marks because the group that reached Tijuana hardly qualifies for the term. Just a few dozen would-be entrants presented themselves at the Port of San Ysidro on Sunday—only to be told that U.S. immigration officials were too busy to attend to them. Another several hundred were reported to be in the general area, waiting their turn to attempt to cross the border.

Trump has spoken of these people as if they were some kind of rampaging horde. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has accused them of “a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system.” The truth is that this sort of thing happens every year: Would-be migrants seek safety in numbers as they make the long and perilous trek north through Mexico.

Sessions probably understands this context; Trump probably doesn’t. But I believe both are sincere in their desire to stanch the flow of Latino immigration—not, I strongly suspect, because of drugs or crime, but because they loathe the demographic and cultural change that is taking place.

While he and his administration were being appropriately roasted at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday evening, Trump was at a rally in Michigan claiming that our immigration laws are “corrupt … so corrupt” and that the motives of those who defend our nation’s traditional role as a haven for asylum-seekers are political. “The Democrats actually feel, and they are probably right, that all of these people that are pouring across are going to vote for Democrats, they’re not going to vote for Republicans.”

They’re not going to vote for anybody, of course, since they’re not citizens. Truth doesn’t matter to Trump. But you knew that.

What seems to really drive the president crazy is that the United States remains a haven for those fleeing persecution. Trump laid out his complaint Saturday: “If a person puts their foot over the line, we have to take them into our country, we have to register them. We then have to ask them a couple of questions. Lawyers are telling them what to say. How unsafe they are. And once they say that, we have to let them go, to come back to court in like a year. Only one problem: they don’t come back, OK. That’s the end. Welcome to the United States.”

You will have noticed that missing from Trump’s rant is any sense of morality or mission.

There is a reason why the law makes provision for those seeking asylum. In 1939, Congress rejected a bill that would have admitted 20,000 German Jewish children. Later that year, authorities refused to allow the St. Louis, a ship carrying about 900 German Jews, to dock in Miami; the Coast Guard sent out patrol boats to warn the ship away. The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, and 254 of its passengers later perished in the Holocaust.

That shameful history led to changes in immigration policy that prohibit rejecting claims of asylum out of hand. The bar is high, but many of the Central American asylum-seekers probably clear it.

In El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the major threat comes from rampant gang violence. Boys are often offered a stark choice: Join a gang or be killed. Girls are threatened with rape. It is easy to say this is a problem that local elected officials and police ought to solve, but government institutions are weak and corruption is widespread. What choice does a family under imminent threat have but to flee? What would you do?

It is of course true that not every Central American who asks for asylum truly merits it. That’s why each case is examined and evaluated, taking all the time needed to reach a proper determination—which is how the migrants now at the border must be handled, despite what Trump and Sessions might prefer.

To close our eyes and hearts to legitimate claims of persecution would be to repeat the shameful and tragic mistakes of the World War II era. If the subjects of Trump’s demagoguery were summarily denied entry, as he apparently would like, most would be forced to go home and some would be killed. That would be a terrible stain on the nation’s conscience.

I’m tempted to add that it would be a stain on Trump’s conscience as well, but it’s not clear that he has one.

Thousands Protest Ruling in Spanish ‘Wolf Pack’ Sexual Assault Trial

In July 2016, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly gang-raped in Spain during the Running of the Bulls festival. The woman told police that five men in their mid-20s took turns raping her after offering to walk her to her car. The subsequent trial of these five men has become known as the “Wolf Pack” trial, referring to the name of a WhatsApp chat group the alleged perpetrators were in together. On Thursday, a judge found the men guilty of sexual abuse but not of rape. Thousands in Spain have since taken to the street, protesting the charges as too lenient.

BBC continues:

The 18-year-old victim’s ordeal caused a national outcry.

Under Spanish law, the charge of sexual abuse differs from rape in that it does not involve violence or intimidation.

Women and men came out into the streets in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Pamplona itself, and in more than a dozen other cities across Spain.

In Madrid, police tried to block demonstrators who marched on the Congress of Deputies, shouting slogans such as “patriarchal justice” and “sister, here is your pack”.

The protests began outside the courthouse in Pamplona, where supporters of the victim had gathered to hear the verdict, and women’s rights groups organised protests elsewhere.

After the assault, the defendants reportedly exchanged messages about raping the victim, and said they had video footage of the attack. Controversially, the judge in the trial did not allow the jury to consider these messages, although the video footage itself was viewed during the trial and reportedly showed each of the five men raping the woman. The defendants were sentenced to nine years in prison on the charge of sexual abuse and were required to pay $61,000, in total, to the victim. State prosecutors said they will appeal the ruling.

Shortly after the ruling, the Spanish national police force tweeted out “No is no” a dozen times (in Spanish):

#NoesNo#NoesNo #NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo#NoesNo

ESTAMOS CONTIGO

Boost Planned for Paris Climate Agreement

The global climate treaty, the Paris Agreement, already ratified by a huge majority of the world’s governments, is for the next 10 days in intensive care.

That doesn’t mean it’s in danger of expiring, but that it needs a hefty boost so that the countries which signed up to it in 2015 will make commitments that will give it teeth.

So talks aimed at ramping up international action to cut carbon emissions and speed up progress on the treaty have begun in the German city of Bonn, attended by representatives of 193 governments.

The talks last until 10 May, and the basic agreements which the organisers, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, hope they will have reached by then will go to a summit meeting in December for approval.

Today the world is on course to heat up by 3°C under the impact of the increasing consumption of fossil fuels, double the amount that scientists say is likely to be sustainable by human civilisation and the natural world. The talks are aimed at getting governments to be far more ambitious than their current national plans for greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

With 2017 already the costliest on record for climate-related disasters as well as the third hottest ever recorded for the US, the effects of climate change are already causing severe economic and political problems. The World Bank says 143 million people may soon become climate migrants.

With this background the grouping of Small Island States, currently led by Fiji, is starting a new conversation between governments and society, called the Talanoa Dialogue. The plan is to share ideas and methods of speeding up progress on combating climate change. These ideas will then be submitted to the government ministers at the December conference of the signatories to the Agreement, known in UN jargon as COP 24, in Katowice, Poland.

Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change secretariat, said: “The Talanoa Dialogue is a key opportunity for all stakeholders to come together and share stories on how we can significantly step up climate action to prevent even greater human suffering in the future.”

This first phase of the Fiji-led Dialogue will introduce a new element to the talks on 6 May, when countries and other stakeholders, including cities, businesses, investors and regions, engage for the first time in what is billed as interactive story-telling around their ambitions.

Silver lining

This will include many US stakeholders who disagree with Donald Trump. He has repudiated the Paris Agreement and seems unable to accept the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the world – a setback which seems to have redoubled some countries’ efforts to act to reduce their own emissions.

There are hopes that, by COP 24, 30 more countries will have joined the 111 that have already ratified another agreement, the Doha Amendment, which is aimed at implementing extra emissions reductions for developed countries.

The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, an international group of US-based grass roots organisations, says there are only four years left to take the radical action needed if the Paris Agreement’s ambitious target of keeping global average temperature rise at no more than 1°5C above pre-industrial levels is to be achieved (Paris’s other, more modest target is 2°C). It says countries must step up their action in both the short and the long term.

As ever, one sticking point in Bonn is finance, particularly how the rich countries that have largely caused the problem of climate change should help poorer countries adapt to rising temperatures and sea levels. Developed countries pledged in 2009 to provide US$100bn a year by 2020 to help this adaptation, but they are far from reaching their goal – and President Trump has withdrawn a US pledge of $2bn.

Hopeful signs

But there is some optimism at the talks. The giant strides that China and now India are taking towards adopting renewables and phasing out coal for generating electricity could not have been predicted five years ago. The world-wide programmes by cities to clean up air pollution and introduce electric vehicles are also expected to have a dramatic effect on reducing emissions, and there are hopes than some countries will reach their Paris targets more easily than they expected.

The chair of the Least Developed Countries group (LDC), Gebru Jember Endalew, said: “Climate change is a critical issue and an urgent, global response is required. Lives and livelihoods across the world are on the line, particularly in the LDCs.

“We have a very small window of time left to develop a set of clear, comprehensive and robust rules to enable full and ambitious implementation of the Paris Agreement before the December 2018 deadline.

“Keeping global temperature increase below 1°5C is a matter of survival … science tells us that even full implementation of current commitments under the Paris Agreement will not be enough to reach 1°5C.”

The Ghosts of ‘New Democrats’ Are Haunting Us

Twenty-five years ago, the so-called New Democrats were triumphant. Today, their political heirs are eager to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its name. At stake is whether democracy will have a chance to function.

A fundamental battle for democracy is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates to the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate them entirely. That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party committee meeting next week and then be decided by the full Democratic National Committee before the end of this summer.

To understand the Democratic Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to know how we got here.

After a dozen years of awful Republican presidencies, Bill Clinton and running mate Al Gore proved to be just the ticket for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton settled into the White House in early 1993 as the leader of pathbreaking New Democrats. Many media outlets hailed him as a visionary who had overcome left-leaning liberalism to set the party straight.

Although candidate Clinton had criticized Republican trickle-down economics and spoken about the need for public investment by the federal government, as president he proceeded along the lines of what Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowan described as a formula of “fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.” That formula provided a template that the next Democratic president, Barack Obama, deftly filled.

Both Clinton and Obama were youthful and articulate, breaths of fresh air after repugnant Republican predecessors in the White House. Yet our two most recent Democratic presidents were down with corporate power—not as far down as the GOP, but nevertheless in the thrall of Wall Street and the big banks.

From the outset of the Clinton and Obama administrations, top appointees reflected and propelled the deference to oligarchic power. Robert Rubin went from being co-chair of Goldman Sachs (paid $17 million in 1992) to serving wealthy interests as director of Clinton’s National Economic Council, a post so powerful that it earned him the title of “economic czar.” Two years later, Rubin began a long stint as secretary of the treasury, succeeding former Texas senator and big-business tool Lloyd Bentsen. They were just two of the numerous corporate functionaries in the upper realms of the Clinton administration.

“Ron Brown, corporate lawyer and lobbyist for American Express and Duvalier’s Haiti, would supervise a Clinton industrial policy at the Department of Commerce,” economic analyst Doug Henwood wrote after eight months of Clinton’s presidency. “Mickey Kantor, corporate lawyer, would negotiate trade deals. Warren Christopher, corporate lawyer, would oversee the New World Order. Hillary Rodham Clinton, corporate lawyer and board member at Walmart, the low-wage retailer that’s destroyed countless rural downtowns, would supervise health care.”

While that kind of lineup went over big with moneyed interests, its policy pursuits would end up driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and the working class. Of course the guys driving Clinton’s economic train loved the North American Free Trade Agreement. Why wouldn’t they? Workers were costs, not people. Corporate trade deals were profit boosters.

Weeks after pushing NAFTA through Congress with an alliance of Republicans and corporate-friendly Democrats, Clinton signed the trade pact in December 1993—a move that was unpopular with working-class voters across the political spectrum. A year later, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, a GOP grip over the body that went uninterrupted for 12 years.

During his first term, Clinton’s signature accomplishments to serve economic elites went beyond NAFTA to include the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996. That same year, riding a wave that included ample undertows of misogyny and racism, Clinton celebrated his signing of the welfare “reform” bill into law. The legislation created a gold rush for media conglomerates to gobble up broadcast stations, while low-income women found their financial plights becoming even more dire.

Heartbroken over the new welfare law, one of the lone holdouts against the corporate sensibilities in the Clinton Cabinet, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, exited as the first term ended. Meanwhile, Clinton doubled down on selecting an intensely corporate crew for the administration. “The firm—er, team—is still adding partners—er, members,” Time reported in December 1996, cataloging the array of investment bankers, stock-market-friendly lawyers and wealthy financiers who had reached key posts.

The newcomers “are don’t-rock-the-boat appointments, and they are exactly what Wall Street wants,” a senior economist at an investment banking firm told the magazine. During the last years of his presidency, Clinton’s economic team implemented reckless Wall Street deregulation, paving the way for the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.

The political similarities between how Presidents Clinton and Obama behaved in office—and the electoral disasters that ensued for Democrats—are grimly acute. Only two years into their service to corporate America as presidents, the bottom fell out of support from the Democratic base to such an extent that in both instances the Democrats lost control of Congress.

Arriving in the Oval Office while a huge financial crisis threatened the homes of millions, Obama proceeded to bail out the big banks, offering little help to people whose houses were “under water” and who faced foreclosures.

Not coincidentally, like Clinton, Obama stocked his Cabinet with Wall Street favorites. His first-term treasury secretary was Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner. During the second Obama term, the job went to Jack Lew, a former top executive whose achievements from 2006 till 2008 included overseeing “a unit of Citigroup that made money by betting against the housing market as it prepared to implode.”

In fact, profiteering from the 2008 housing implosion was in keeping with what helped make Obama’s election to the presidency possible. In 2007, his campaign was lubricated by bountiful donations from the biggest Wall Street investment banks. And more than anyone else, his financial patron in the quest for the White House was Penny Pritzker, a billionaire real estate magnate who profited handsomely from the 2008 subprime mortgage disaster that befell so many low- and moderate-income Americans, a large proportion of them people of color.

In 2013, Obama made Pritzker the secretary of commerce, a position she held through the end of his presidency. Of all the people to choose for that Cabinet role, he selected someone with an estimated wealth of more than $2 billion who just happened to be the most important financial backer of his political career.

After his re-election, Obama lost interest in the Democratic National Committee, leaving its finances in shambles by the time the 2016 election rolled around. And, as measured by votes, the Democratic base eroded nationwide. During Obama’s eight years in office, his party lost about 1,000 seats in state legislatures.

Now, the New Democrats and those walking in their footsteps are battling to retain control of the national party.

This year’s midterm election campaign has seen lots of intervention efforts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, favoring establishment candidates over progressive opponents in party primaries from California to Texas to Pennsylvania. Days ago—after the release of a secretly recorded audio tape that exposed how House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer tried to pressure a progressive congressional candidate to pull out of a race in Colorado—House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended Hoyer at a news conference.

Later this year, as the 2020 election grows larger on the horizon, the DNC will make decisions about party rules with major effects on the race for the presidential nomination. Insiders who don’t want to democratize the Democratic Party are weighing their options.

Consider, for instance, a long-standing New Democrat named Elaine Kamarck. She’s one of only a few people (all of them Clinton 2016 primary supporters) on both the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission and its powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee—which will meet in Washington next week to vote on such matters as superdelegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

Based at the Brookings Institution, Kamarck has been on the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee since 1997. Her official Brookings biography says that “she has participated actively in four presidential campaigns and in 10 nominating conventions—including two Republican conventions.”

The bio goes on to tout Kamarck this way: “In the 1980s, she was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review, also known as the ‘reinventing government initiative.’ ”

In her role on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, Kamarck is part of the process that could end up—as recommended by the party’s Unity Reform Commission that included Clintonites and progressives—eliminating 60 percent of the existing 712 superdelegates (more than one-seventh of the total) in time for the 2020 national convention.

The distorting and undemocratic impacts of superdelegates have gone way beyond their numbers. By November 2015, Hillary Clinton had already gained public commitments of support from 50 percent of all the superdelegates—fully 11 weeks before any voter had cast a ballot in a state caucus or primary election. Such a front-loaded delegate count, made possible by high-ranking party officials who are superdelegates, can give enormous early momentum to an establishment candidate.

Many Democrats are eager to substantially reduce or eliminate superdelegates as antithetical to democracy. But Kamarck has quite a different agenda. She doesn’t want to get rid of superdelegates. In fact, she’d like more of them.

That makes sense, when you consider that Kamarck is working to lower corporate taxes. She’s co-chair of the big business organization RATE (Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably) Coalition, which has the explicit mission of “reducing the corporate income tax rate.”

Such an agenda is best served in the long run by choking off democracy as much as possible, lest the riffraff get away with undermining the ruling elites.

“Kamarck has backed the original Unity Reform Commission proposal, but also made clear that she believes that, in the long term, more so-called peer review by veteran party leaders produces stronger presidential nominees,” BuzzFeed reported in April.

Kamarck’s idea is for party authorities to screen candidates. BuzzFeed explained: “In a forthcoming study for New York University’s law journal, she said, she will propose a number of changes to the nominating system, from an increase in superdelegates to a new pre-primary endorsement process where the party’s top elected officials would meet with the candidates, question their positions, and issue votes of confidence or no confidence. Candidates who fail to meet a certain threshold would be barred from debates or from a spot on the ballot, depending on how the party decided to structure the system, she said.”

Let’s face it: Democracy is dangerous to the powerful who rely on big money, institutional leverage and mass media to work their will. The insurgencies of this decade against economic injustice—embodied in the Occupy movement and then Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—are potentially dire threats to the established unjust order.

For those determined to retain their positions in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party hierarchy, democracy within the party sounds truly scary. And inauthenticity of the party—and its corresponding heavy losses of seats from state legislatures to Capitol Hill during the last 10 years—don’t seem nearly as worrisome to Democratic elites as the prospect that upsurges of grass-roots activities might remove them from their privileged quarters.

As Sanders told a New York Times Magazine reporter in early 2017: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Cardinal Ordered to Stand Trial on Sex Charges

MELBOURNE, Australia—Australian Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Vatican official to be charged in the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis, must stand trial on charges alleging he sexually abused multiple victims decades ago, a magistrate ruled Tuesday.

Magistrate Belinda Wallington dismissed around half the charges that had been heard in the four-week preliminary hearing in Melbourne but decided the prosecution’s case was strong enough for the remainder to warrant a trial by jury. The number of charges has not been made public

When she asked Pell how he pleaded, the cardinal said in a firm voice, “Not guilty.” Wallington gave the 76-year-old permission not to stand, which is customary.

When the magistrate left the room at the end of the hearing, many people in the packed public gallery broke into applause.

Pell’s plea marked the only words he spoke in public. Wearing a cleric’s collar, white shirt and dark suit, he was silent as he entered and left the downtown courthouse with his lawyer Robert Richter. More than 40 uniformed police officers maintained order on the crowded sidewalk outside.

The cardinal’s legal team found some solace in the outcome, with Richter telling the magistrate “the most vile allegations” had been dismissed.

Lawyers for Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic had argued that all the accusations were untrue, could not be proved and should be dismissed.

Wallington dismissed one charge because the alleged victim was an “unsatisfactory witness” during the first two weeks of the preliminary hearing, when complainants testified via a video link from a remote location to a courtroom closed to the public and media.

“It is difficult to see how a jury could convict on the evidence of man who has said on his affirmation that he cannot recall what he said a minute ago,” Wallington said.

“In my view, this is one of those rare cases where the witness demonstrated such a cavalier attitude toward giving his evidence that a jury couldn’t rely upon it,” he added.

She described her job in the preliminary hearing as “sifting the wheat from the chaff.”

“Unless the credibility of a witness is effectively destroyed, credibility and reliability are matters for a jury,” she said. “Where the evidence is so weak that the prospect of conviction is minimal, it is not of sufficient weight to commit” a defendant to stand trial.

She said she did not dismiss charges “merely because there is a reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence.”

She ordered Pell, Pope Francis’ former finance minister, to appear on Wednesday in the Victoria state County Court where he will eventually stand trial.

Under his bail conditions, Pell cannot leave Australia, contact prosecution witnesses and he must give police 24-hours notice of any change of address.

Pell was charged last June with sexually abusing multiple people in his Australian home state of Victoria. The details of the allegations against the cleric have yet to be released to the public, though police have described the charges as “historical” sexual assault offenses — meaning the crimes allegedly occurred decades ago.

Richter, Pell’s lawyer, told Wallington in his final submissions two weeks ago that the complainants might have testified against one of the church’s most powerful men to punish him for failing to act against abuse by clerics.

But prosecutor Mark Gibson told the magistrate there was no evidence to back Richter’s theory that Pell had been targeted over the church’s failings.

Since Pell returned to Australia from the Vatican in July, he has lived in Sydney and flown to Melbourne for his court hearings. His circumstances are far removed from the years he spent as the high-profile and polarizing archbishop of Melbourne and later Sydney before his promotion to Rome in 2014.

The case places both the cardinal and the pope in potentially perilous territory. For Pell, the charges are a threat to his freedom, his reputation and his career. For Francis, they are a threat to his credibility, given he famously promised a “zero tolerance” policy for sex abuse in the church.

Advocates for abuse victims have long railed against Francis’ decision to appoint Pell to the high-ranking position in the first place. At the time of his promotion, Pell was already facing allegations that he had mishandled cases of clergy abuse during his time leading the church in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia’s largest cities.

So far, Francis has withheld judgment of Pell, saying he wants to wait for justice to run its course. And he did not force the cardinal to resign, though Pell took an immediate leave of absence so he could return to Australia to fight the charges. Pell said he intends to continue his work as a prefect of the church’s economy ministry once the case is resolved.

In recent years, Pell’s actions as archbishop came under particular scrutiny by a government-authorized investigation into how the Catholic Church and other institutions have responded to the sexual abuse of children.

Australia’s Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse — the nation’s highest form of inquiry — revealed last year that 7 percent of Catholic priests were accused of sexually abusing children in Australia over the past several decades.

In testimony to the commission in 2016, Pell conceded that he had made mistakes by often believing priests over people who said they had been abused. And he vowed to help end a rash of suicides that has plagued abuse victims in his hometown of Ballarat.

Pell testified to the inquiry in a video link from the Vatican about his time as a priest and bishop in Australia. He did not attend in person because of a heart condition and other medical problems.

Police said at the preliminary hearing that they had planned to arrest Pell for questioning had he returned to Australia in early 2016 to testify.

His lawyers argued in court that Pell was targeted for “special treatment” by detectives from a police task force that investigated historical sex abuse. Police witnesses denied that accusation.

The investigation of Pell began in 2013 before any complainant had come forward to police, whom Richter accused of running “a get Pell operation.”

Pell’s lawyers told the court in February that the first complainant approached police in 2015, 40 years after the alleged crimes, in response to media reports about the royal commission.

Pell was charged by summons in Rome and agreed to return to Australia to face the allegations.

Donald Trump and the Next Crash: Making the Fed an Instrument for Disaster

Warning: What you are about to read is not about Russia, the 2016 election, or the latest person to depart from the White House in a storm of tweets. It’s the Beltway story hiding in plain sight with trillions of dollars in play and an economy to commandeer.

While we’ve been bombarded with a litany of scandals from the Oval Office and the Trump family, there’s a crucial institution in Washington that few in the media seem to be paying attention to, even as President Trump quietly makes it his own. More obscure than the chambers of the Supreme Court, it’s a place where he has already made substantial changes. I’m talking about the Federal Reserve.

As the central bank of the United States, the “Fed” sets the financial tone for the global economy by manipulating interest rate levels. This impacts everyone, yet very few grasp the scope of its influence.

During times of relative economic calm, the Fed is regularly forgotten. But what history shows us is that having leaders who are primed to neglect Wall Street’s misdoings often sets the scene for economic dangers to come. That’s why nominees to the Fed are so crucial.

We have entered a landmark moment: no president since Woodrow Wilson (during whose administration the Federal Reserve was established) will have appointed as many board members to the Fed as Donald Trump. His fingerprints will, in other words, not just be on Supreme Court decisions, but no less significantly Fed policy-making for years to come — even though, like that court, it occupies a mandated position of political independence.

The president’s latest two nominees to that institution’s Board of Governors exemplify this. He has nominated Richard Clarida, a former Treasury Department official from the days of President George W. Bush who later became a strategic adviser to investment goliath Pimco, to the Fed’s second most important slot, while giving the nod to Michelle Bowman, a Kansas bank commissioner, to represent community banks on that same board.

Like many other entities in Washington, the Fed’s Board of Governors has been operating with less than a full staff. If Clarida is approved, he will join Trump-appointed Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and incoming New York Federal Reserve Bank head John C. Williams — the New York Fed generally exists in a mind meld with Wall Street — as part of the most powerful trio at that institution.

Williams served as president of the San Francisco Fed. Under his watch, the third largest U.S. bank, Wells Fargo, created about 3.5 million fake accounts, gave its CEO a whopping raise, and copped to a $1 billion fine for bilking its customers on auto and mortgage insurance contracts.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street has embraced Trump’s new Fed line-up because its members are so favorably disposed to loosening restrictions on financial institutions of every sort.  Initially, the financial markets reflected concern that Chairman Powell might turn out to be a hawk on interest rates, meaning he’d raise them too quickly, but he’s proved to be anything but.

As Trump stacks the deck in his favor, count on an economic impact that will be felt for years to come and could leave the world devastated. But rest assured, if the Fed can help Trump keep the stock market buoyant for a while by letting money stay cheap for Wall Street speculation and the dollar competitive for a trade war, it will.

History Warns Us

At a time when inequality, economic hardship, and household and personal debt levels are escalating and wages are not, why should any of this matter to the rest of us? The answer is simple enough: because the Fed sets the level of interest rates and so the cost of money. This, in turn, indirectly impacts the value of the dollar, which means everything you buy.

Since the financial crisis, the Fed has kept the cost of borrowing money for banks at near zero percent interest. That allowed those banks to borrow money to buy their own stock (as did many corporations) to inflate their value but not, of course, the value of their service to Main Street.

When money is cheap because interest rates are low or near zero, the beneficiaries are those with the most direct access to it. That means, of course, that the biggest banks, members of the Fed since its inception, get the largest chunks of fabricated money and pay the least amount of interest for it.

Although during the election campaign of 2016 Trump chastised the Fed for its cheap-money policies, he’s since evidently changed his mind (which is, of course, very Trumpian of him). That’s because he knows that the lower the cost of money is, the easier it is for major companies to borrow it. Easy money means easy speculation for Wall Street and its main corporate clients, which sooner or later will be a threat to the rest of us.

The era of trade wars, soaring stock markets, and Trump gaffes may feel like it’s gone on forever. Don’t forget, though, that there was a moment not so long ago when the same banking policies still reigning caused turmoil, ripping through the country and devouring the finances of so many. It’s worth recalling for a moment what happened during the Great Meltdown of 2008, when unrestrained mega-banks ravaged the economy before being bailed out. In the midst of the current market ecstasy, it’s an easy past to ignore. That’s why Trump’s takeover of the Fed and its impact on the financial system matters so much.

Let’s recall that, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers crashed. That bank, like Goldman Sachs a former employer of mine, had been around for more than 150 years. Its collapse was a key catalyst in a spiral of disaster that nearly decimated the world financial system. It wasn’t the bankruptcy that did it, however, but the massive amount of money the surviving banks had already lent Lehman to buy the toxic assets they created.

Around the same time, Merrill Lynch, a competitor of Lehman’s, was sold to Bank of America for $50 billion and American International Group (AIG) received $182 billion in government assistance. JPMorgan Chase had already bought Bear Stearns, which had crashed six months earlier, utilizing a $29 billion government and Federal Reserve security blanket in the process.

In the wake of Lehman’s bankruptcy, $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies from the Federal Reserve and Congress were offered mostly to Wall Street’s biggest banks. That flow of money allowed them to return from the edge of financial disaster. At the same time, it fueled the stock and bond markets, as untethered from economic realities as the hot air balloon in The Wizard of Oz.

After nearly tripling since the post-financial crisis spring of 2009, last year the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose magically again by nearly 24%. Why? Because despite all of his swamp-draining campaign talk, Trump embraced the exact same bank-coddling behavior as President Obama. He advocated the Fed’s cheap-money policy and hired Steve Mnuchin, an ex-Goldman Sachs partner and Wall Street’s special friend, as his Treasury secretary. He doubled down on rewarding ongoing malfeasance and fraud by promoting the deregulation of the banks, as if Wall Street’s greed and high appetite for risk had vanished. 

Impending Signs of Crisis

A quarter of the way into 2018, shadows of 2008 are already emerging. Only two months ago, the Dow logged its worst single-day point decline in history before bouncing back with vigor. In the meantime, the country whose banks caused the last crisis faces record consumer and corporate debt levels and a vulnerable geopolitical global landscape.

True, the unemployment rate is significantly lower than it was at the height of the financial crisis, but for Main Street, growth hasn’t been quite so apparent. About one in five U.S. jobs still pays a median income below the federal poverty line. Median household income is only up 5.3% since 2008 and remains well below where it was in 1998, if you adjust for inflation. Workforce participation remains nearly as low as it’s ever been. Meanwhile, the top 1% of American earners saw their incomes go up by leaps and bounds since the Fed started manufacturing money — to more than 40 times that of the bottom 90%.

Just as before the 2007-2008 financial crisis, there’s a scary level of confidence among politicians and regulators that neither the economy nor the banking sector could possibly go bust. Even the new Federal Reserve chair views the possible need for bailouts as a relic of a bygone time. As he said at his confirmation hearing, “Generally speaking I think the financial system is quite strong.” When asked if there are any U.S. banks that are still too big to fail, he responded, “I would say no to that.”

That’s a pretty decisive statement, and not strikingly different from one outgoing Fed Chair Janet Yellen made last year. By extension, it means that Trump’s new chairman supports laxer structures for the big banks and more cheap money, if needed, to help them. So watch out.

When a crisis hits, liquidity dies, and banks close their doors to the public. Ultimately, the same formula for crisis will surely send Wall Street executives crawling back to the government for aid and then Donald Trump will find out what financial negligence truly is.

A Time of Crisis and Financial Collusion

As signs of crisis emerge, few in Washington have delved into how we can ensure that a systemic crash does not happen again. That’s why I’ll never forget the strange message I got one day. It was in the middle of May 2015, about a year after my book, All the Presidents’ Bankers, had been published, when I received an email from the Federal Reserve. Every year, the Fed, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank hold an annual conference where the most elite central bankers from around the globe assemble. To my shock, since I hadn’t exactly written in a kindly fashion about the Fed, I was being invited to speak at the opening session about why Wall Street wasn’t helping Main Street.

Two months later, I found myself sitting in front of a room filled with central bankers from around the world, listening to Fed Chair Janet Yellen proclaim that the worst of the crisis and its causes were behind us. In response, the first thing I asked that distinguished crowd was this: “Do you want to know why big Wall Street banks aren’t helping Main Street as much as they could?” The room was silent. I paused before answering, “Because you never required them to.”

I added, “The biggest six U.S. banks have been rewarded with an endless supply of cheap money in bailouts and loans for their dangerous behavior. They have been given open access to these funds with no major consequences, and no rules on how they should utilize the Fed’s largesse to them to help the real economy. Why should you expect their benevolence?”

After I returned home, I became obsessed with uncovering just how the bailouts and loans of that moment were only the tip of an iceberg, the sort of berg that had once taken down the Titanic — how that cheap money fabricated for Wall Street had been no isolated American incident.

What my research for my new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, revealed was how central bankers and massive financial institutions have worked together to manipulate global markets for the past decade. Major central banks gave themselves a blank check with which to resurrect problematic banks; purchase government, mortgage, and corporate bonds; and in some cases — as in Japan and Switzerland — stocks, too. They have not had to explain to the public where those funds were going or why. Instead, their policies have inflated asset bubbles, while coddling private banks and corporations under the guise of helping the real economy.

The zero-interest-rate and bond-buying central bank policies prevailing in the U.S., Europe, and Japan have been part of a coordinated effort that has plastered over potential financial instability in the largest countries and in private banks. It has, in turn, created asset bubbles that could explode into an even greater crisis the next time around.

So, today, we stand near — how near we don’t yet know — the edge of a dangerous financial precipice. The risks posed by the largest of the private banks still exist, only now they’re even bigger than they were in 2007-2008 and operating in an arena of even more debt. In Donald Trump’s America, what this means is that the same dangerous policies are still being promoted today. The difference now is that the president is appointing members to the Fed who will only increase the danger of those risks for years to come.

A crash could prove to be President Trump’s worst legacy. Not only is he — and the Fed he’s helping to create — not paying attention to the alarm bells (ignored by the last iteration of the Fed as well), but he’s ensured that none of his appointees will either. After campaigning hard against the ills of global finance in the 2016 election campaign and promising a modern era Glass-Steagall Act to separate bank deposits from the more speculative activities on Wall Street, Trump’s policy reversals and appointees leave our economy more exposed than ever. 

When politicians and regulators are asleep at the wheel, it’s the rest of us who will suffer sooner or later. Because of the collusion that’s gone on and continues to go on among the world’s main central banks, that problem is now an international one.

Truthdig is co-sponsoring Truthdig columnist Nomi Prins’ book release event for “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World” in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 5, at 7 p.m. Truthdig contributor Greg Palast will be the moderator. Click here for multiple ticketing options, which give Truthdig readers a substantial discount. See a calendar of Prins’ public events schedule around the country.