Chris Hedges's Blog, page 60

‘Medicare for All’ Would Help Heal the Income Gap

An overlooked aspect of the health care debate is how “Medicare for All” could reduce the income inequality that separates America’s rich from the poor and middle class.

In the presidential campaign, attention has been focused on well-publicized, important questions of patient care: Will I lose my company- or union-sponsored health insurance? Will I have my choice of a doctor or be forced to wait for care from a narrow network of health providers, making a visit to a physician as harrowing as a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles? What about pre-existing conditions? Will rising deductibles and copays bedevil me? Will my family be able to afford medical care, or will a serious illness bankrupt us?

But beyond these questions is a broader issue, one that explains the difficulty of providing the nation with the health care it needs. Income inequality is the root cause of health care woes, and it is becoming more widespread. A family of five, with middle-income earnings of $53,000, is feeling the pressure of high health costs, as are low-income Americans making less money.

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Health insurance premiums are rising faster than pay, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in September. “Despite the nation’s strong economy and low unemployment, what employers and workers pay toward premiums continues to rise more than workers’ wages and inflation over time,” the foundation said. “The cost of private health insurance is out of control,” wrote Drew Altman, who heads the foundation. Meanwhile, a 2019 study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center noted, “Since 2008, premiums for job-based family health coverage have grown by 49 percent on average.”

These factors could add up to make health care the most decisive domestic issue of the 2020 election, possibly zooming to the top after cable news journalists, with their short attention spans, tire of impeachment and move on to something else.

The debate in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has revolved around two approaches. One is a Medicare for All type of plan, espoused by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Both favor a transitional period from the current Affordable Care Act (ACA) system. Many details remain unclear, but people would probably be enrolled at birth or when they immigrated and got resident status.

The other approach, generally supported by other candidates ranking high in the polls—among them former Vice President Joe Biden, ex-South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and businessman Andrew Yang—would keep Obamacare, with some adjustments. They propose retaining private insurance and adding a government insurance policy—the “public option”—to the current menu of private policies offered on the exchanges, or electronic marketplaces, that are one of the most important features of the ACA. Through the exchanges, consumers can buy a variety of plans from private insurance companies. Low- and middle-income consumers are eligible for tax credits—reductions in their income tax bills—to help them pay premiums. The public option would offer lower-cost policies. Competition from the government policies, advocates say, would drive down the price of private insurance.

Republicans just want to eliminate the whole thing. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicted that the GOP’s favored route of “striking down the ACA … would cut taxes sharply for the highest-income Americans and certain corporations [amounting to] … a massive transfer of income from low- and moderate-income Americans to people on the top rungs of the income ladder.”

But the Republicans’ destructive ambition seems to have been thwarted by the growing approval of the ACA. Just look at the numbers: A total of 11.46 million have signed up for Obamacare through government-sponsored exchanges, reports Charles Gaba on his respected acasignups.net website. In addition, 74.8 million low-income people receive benefits from the federal/state Medicaid program, an enrollment boosted by provisions of the ACA.

Beyond the exchanges and Medicaid, the many provisions of the health care law have improved the lives of millions, including those who buy health insurance through employer- or company-sponsored plans or purchase policies individually. Those with pre-existing conditions, totaling 54 million, are now covered. Young people, through the age of 26, are now included in their parents’ plans. Maternity, outpatient, mental health, substance abuse and preventative care must now be included in health insurance plans. Low-income individuals and families, long denied care, now receive it through Medicaid. While reporting on this story over the past few years, I have seen how poor people, once denied care, now regularly visit physicians and dentists, living healthier lives because of Obamacare.

A huge factor that hangs in the balance is the fate of employer-sponsored group plans covering about 153 million people, as the Kaiser Family Foundation found. Many beneficiaries are happy with their coverage. I’ve talked to union members and others who receive benefits from their corporate employers, public universities and colleges, school systems and other institutions. They fear a new government scheme for health care wouldn’t be as good as what they have, even though the current version is flawed.

Yet there’s no guarantee that private employers would continue their plans. The same is true of unions, increasingly in danger of being busted, and of financially hard-pressed public universities and colleges and school systems.

Public opinion is divided, according to Kaiser Family Foundation polling. A total of 53% favor Medicare for All, while 43% oppose it. When informed that Medicare for All would eliminate private insurance, opponents rose to 58%, with those in favor dropping to just 37%. Most people included in that poll favored improving the ACA rather than replacing it with something new.

In the face of a divided public, the backers of Medicare for All make convincing arguments. “Here’s what is unbelievable,” Sanders told the Los Angeles Times editorial board late last month: “[S]ome half a million people go bankrupt in this country for medically related reasons. … [Y]ou’re struggling financially; you’re diagnosed with cancer. … You make $50,000 or $60,000 a year, you run up a bill for $50,000, $100,000. How do you pay that bill? I mean, it’s insane,” said the characteristically blunt Vermont senator. “So we are living in a country which says that you can suffer financial ruin for the rest of your life, for what crime did you commit? You were diagnosed with cancer or heart disease.”

Sanders is the father of the current drive for Medicare for All, having made it part of the national dialogue during his 2016 campaign for the presidency. Dr. Don McCanne, past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, has made a strong case that Medicare for All would begin closing the gap between rich and poor. “The purpose of government subsidies is to transfer payment for health care from the wealthy to those who cannot afford to pay for their full, evenly-divided allocation of our national health care bill,” he said. “That now includes middle-income America.”

UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman explained in The Guardian in October how Medicare for All would improve the lives of underpaid workers. They cited the case of a secretary earning $50,000 and contributing $15,000 through her employer to an insurance company. “With universal health insurance,” Saez and Zucman wrote, “her wage would rise to $65,000—her full labor compensation. With an income tax of 6%—which, if applied to a base large enough, would be enough to fund universal health insurance—she would have to pay about $4,000 more in tax. But the net gain would be enormous: $11,000. Instead of taking home $50,000, the secretary would take home $61,000.”

The secretary’s life and that of her family would improve. If she contracted cancer or another debilitating ailment, she would not be bankrupted by the cost. She, her family and friends could devote their energy to her care. Moreover, she and her family would be assured of dental care. The cost of prescription drugs would drop.

Under either Sanders or Warren, Medicare for All would cost the wealthy more money. So would the lesser plans of the other Democratic candidates. But the end result is clear: These plans would help ease the income inequality that is blighting the country.

Some Pet Products Touted as CBD Don’t Have Any

Companies have unleashed hundreds of CBD pet health products accompanied by glowing customer testimonials claiming the cannabis derivative produced calmer, quieter and pain-free dogs and cats.

But some of these products are all bark and no bite.

“You’d be astounded by the analysis we’ve seen of products on the shelf with virtually no CBD in them,” said Cornell University veterinary researcher Joseph Wakshlag, who studies therapeutic uses for the compound. “Or products with 2 milligrams per milliliter, when an effective concentration would be between 25 and 75 milligrams per milliliter. There are plenty of folks looking to make a dollar rather than produce anything that’s really beneficial.”

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Such products can make it to the shelves because the federal government has yet to establish standards for CBD that will help people know whether it works for their pets and how much to give.

Still, there’s lots of individual success stories that help fuel a $400 million market that grew more than tenfold since last year and is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2023, according to the cannabis research firm Brightfield Group.

Amy Carter of St. Francis, Wisconsin, decided to go against her veterinarian’s advice and try CBD oil recommended by a friend to treat Bentley, her epileptic Yorkshire terrier-Chihuahua mix. The little dog’s cluster seizures had become more frequent and frightening despite expensive medications.

“It’s amazing” Carter said. “Bentley was having multiple seizures a week. To have only six in the past seven months is absolutely incredible.”

But some pet owners have found CBD didn’t work.

Dawn Thiele, an accountant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, said she bought a $53 bottle of CBD oil from a local shop in hopes of calming her 2-year-old Yorkshire terrier during long car trips.

“I didn’t see a change in his behavior,” said Thiele, who nonetheless remains a believer.

“The product is good, it just didn’t work for my dog,” she said.

Short for cannabidiol, CBD is a non-intoxicating molecule found in hemp and marijuana. Both are cannabis plants, but only marijuana has enough of the compound THC to get users high. The vast majority of CBD products come from hemp, which has less than 0.3% THC.

CBD has garnered a devoted following among people who swear by it for everything from stress reduction to better sleep. Passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which eased federal legal restrictions on hemp cultivation and transport, unleashed a stampede of companies rushing products to the market in an absence of regulations ensuring safety, quality and effectiveness.

Products for people were swiftly followed by CBD chewies, oils and sprays for pets.

“The growth is more rapid than I’ve seen for any product in 20 years in this business,” said Bill Bookout, president of the National Animal Supplement Council, an industry group whose member companies agree to testing and data-gathering requirements. “There’s a gold rush going on now. Probably 95 percent of the industry participants are responsible, but what’s dangerous is the fly-by-night operative that wants to cash in.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is developing regulations for marketing CBD products, for pets or people. This year, it has sent warning letters to 22 companies citing violations such as making claims about therapeutic uses and treatment of disease in humans or animals or marketing CBD as a dietary supplement or food ingredient.

“It’s really the Wild West out there,” said S. David Moche, founder of Applied Basic Science, a company formed to support Colorado State University’s veterinary CBD research and now selling CBD online. He advises consumers to look for a certificate of analysis from a third-party testing laboratory to ensure they’re getting what they pay for.

“Testing and labeling is going to be a critical part of the future of this industry,” Moche said.

Wakshlag said products must be tested not only for CBD level, but also to ensure they’re free of toxic contaminants such as heavy metals and pesticides and have only trace amounts of THC, which in higher levels is toxic to dogs.

Bookout said his organization has recorded very few health incidents involving CBD and no deaths.

Still, scientific documentation of CBD’s safety and efficacy is nearly nonexistent.

That’s starting to change, however. A small clinical trial at Colorado State University published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in June found CBD oil reduced seizure frequency in 89 percent of the epileptic dogs that received it.

A clinical study headed by Wakshlag at Cornell, published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in July 2018, found CBD oil helped increase comfort and activity in dogs with osteoarthritis.

Stephanie McGrath, a Colorado State University researcher, is now doing a larger clinical trial funded by the American Kennel Club’s Canine Health Foundation.

“The results of our first epilepsy study were promising, but there was certainly not enough data to say CBD is the new miracle anti-convulsive drug in dogs,” McGrath said.

Seizures are a natural focus for research on veterinary CBD products, since Epidiolex, the only FDA-approved drug containing cannabidiol, was approved last year for treatment of two severe forms of epilepsy in children. Veterinarians are allowed to prescribe Epidiolex for pets, but it’s prohibitively expensive — upwards of $30,000 a year for an average-size dog, McGrath said.

The Kennel Club’s chief veterinary officer, Jerry Klein, said CBD is “over-hyped” but promising for treatments like pain relief. He’s hopeful that the growing market will result in more money being invested in research to prove uses.

Meantime, the American Veterinary Medical Association is telling veterinarians they can share what they know about CBD with clients but shouldn’t prescribe or recommend it until the FDA gives its blessing.

“There’s no question there’s veterinary interest in these products as therapies, but we really want to see the manufacturers demonstrate that they’re effective and safe and get FDA approval so we can have confidence in the products,” said Gail Golab, chief veterinary officer for the association.

McConnell Says He’ll Start Impeachment Trial, Delay Decision on Witnesses

WASHINGTON—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he has secured the Republican votes needed to start President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and postpone a decision on witnesses or documents that Democrats want.

McConnell is expected to launch the trial as soon as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sends the articles of impeachment to the Senate. She is set to meet late Tuesday with her leadership team.

“We have the votes,” McConnell told reporters. He said the question of new witnesses will be addressed later “and not before the trial begins.”

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The GOP leader told senators at their closed-door lunch Tuesday has support for his plan, which is modeled after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial 20 years ago. It would start the trial first and postpone votes on witnesses until later in the process.

“He has 51, for sure,”‘ said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top ally of the president, exiting the meeting.

Democrats are ramping up pressure on Republicans to insist on hearing from former national security adviser John Bolton and other witnesses, and not to go along with McConnell’s proposal to put off voting on new testimony until later. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls it a “trap.”

“The Republican leader seems more concerned with being able to claim he went through the constitutional motions than actually carrying out our constitutional duty,” Schumer said Tuesday. He called it an “Alice in Wonderland logic.”

Just four GOP senators would be needed to deny McConnell his majority, but he appears to have locked up the votes. GOP leaders were conducting a whip count Tuesday to gauge support. Several GOP senators have indicated they want to hear from Bolton and other witnesses, but they are nevertheless standing with McConnell’s plan for starting the trial.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Tuesday the Clinton process “provided a pathway” to start the trial and consider witnesses “down the road.” He said he supports it.

“I’m comfortable with that process,” Romney said. “And at this stage, I’d like to hear from John Bolton and other witnesses with the right information, but that process will accommodate that.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has also said she supports McConnell’s approach. Others say they are not sure they even need to hear from Bolton or other witnesses.

“It’s not that I don’t want to hear from him,”said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. “I want to hear from him when the House is willing to do their work and have the same agreement with the ambassador on their side of the Hill.”

Trump faces charges that he abused the power of the presidency by pressuring Ukraine’s new leader to investigate Democrats, using as leverage $400 million in military assistance that is critical for the ally as it counters Russia at its border.

The funding for Ukraine was eventually released but only after Congress intervened.

___

Associated Press writer Padmananda Rama in Washington contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Hits Joe Biden Where It Hurts

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday evening took aim at the legislative record of 2020 Democratic primary rival former Vice President Joe Biden, calling Biden—who also served in the U.S. Senate representing Delaware for 36 years—the wrong candidate to take on President Donald Trump in the general election this November.

Sanders hit Biden on voting for the Iraq War, a pattern of supporting disastrous trade deals, and Biden’s many efforts as a lawmaker to cut social programs.

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“I just don’t think that that kind of record is going to bring forth the kind energy we need to defeat Trump,” Sanders told CNN‘s Anderson Cooper.

Watch:

Presidential candidate @BernieSanders hammers Joe Biden for his Iraq War, NAFTA votes.

“I just don’t think that that kind of record is going to bring forth the kind energy we need to defeat Trump.” pic.twitter.com/3JIIVCNE48

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 7, 2020

Sanders has recently focused on providing a contrast between the two men’s decades-long records of public service. Biden’s longtime, consistent support for cutting Social Security and Medicare and tax breaks for the wealthy are a stark difference from Sanders’ career goals of expanding social programs and taxing the rich.

“Joe Biden has been on the floor of the Senate talking about the need to cut Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid,” said Sanders.

Campaign speechwriter David Sirota shared video of Biden doing just that in 1995.

JOE BIDEN: “When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare & Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits….And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a 3rd time & I tried it a 4th time.”https://t.co/TpoSdmjGhA pic.twitter.com/MIAx4nO9Qa

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 2, 2020

On CNN Monday, Sanders also hit Biden for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and being a booster of former President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq.

“Do you think that’s going to play well in Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania?” Sanders asked Cooper.

According to New York Magazine, the answer to that question from progressives and Sanders is, “not well”:

Biden’s record, the Vermont senator said, won’t inspire young people and working people. It will also allow President Trump to attack him in some of the Rust Belt states Democrats are trying to claw back from the GOP. Sanders’s conclusion? Biden won’t be able to “bring forth the energy we need to beat Trump.”

The two frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic nod, Sanders and Biden are locked in tight battles in Iowa and New Hampshire, which caucus and cast votes respectively to officially kick off the primary starting next month. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg round out the top contenders in the Democratic field.

Trump’s Trade War Is Crushing Small Business

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Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.

“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”

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Elrod also thought that big businesses had long been able to buy their way out of problems, either by spending lots of money on compliance or on lobbyists to look for loopholes and apply political pressure. Trump, of course, had promised to address that — to “drain the swamp.”

Elrod is in his mid-60s, tall with a white beard and deliberative drawl. He trusted the president even as Trump started a trade war with China, where Elrod manufactures his heaters. The administration said U.S. companies that could prove they had no other source for their imports and whose business would be gravely injured could be spared the punishing tariffs that Trump was imposing. They would simply have to file for an exemption.

“I had every reason to believe they were talking about us,” Elrod said. Eccotemp had spent 15 years developing different models of tankless heaters with manufacturers in China. Simply finding new factories in other countries seemed impossible.

So in the summer of 2018, Elrod settled in at his desk, strewn with brass valves, a pressure tester and a smiling jade Buddha from a Chinese supplier, and began typing. He and his dozen U.S. employees — designers, engineers, salespeople and customer service representatives — operate out of a squat cinder block building in a woodsy suburb of Charleston that used to be a film studio and now doubles as a distribution warehouse.

In letters to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Elrod asked that gas-powered water heaters be exempted from the administration’s 25% tariffs, writing that the cost would be “devastating” for the company’s balance sheet. “We had all the boxes checked,” Elrod said. “Or so I thought.”

The process didn’t go as he expected. It’s the stuff that libertarians like Elrod dread: Low-level staffers with limited industry knowledge issuing seemingly arbitrary decisions that can save or smash a company’s bottom line.

Every few weeks, a list comes out with a new batch of lucky winners, and losers. “Non-electrical wall candelabras, of wood, each with 3 wrought iron candle holders” received a pass, for example, but none with one or two candles.

There is no mechanism for appeals.

Overall, Trump’s tariffs have not had the effect that the self-described “Tariff Man” promised. Companies have moved manufacturing out of China — and it has mostly gone to Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico. Tariffs are chiefly behind a months-long decline in domestic manufacturing, Federal Reserve researchers have found. The total loss of jobs across the economy may be as high as 300,000.

But constantly up-in-the-air trade agreements and the byzantine, opaque exclusion process has been a blessing for one set of players: Washington’s influence industry, including the firms of former Trump officials and allies like inauguration committee chief Brian Ballard, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and Trump fundraiser Marc Lampkin.

Ballard was once Trump’s lobbyist in Florida. He’s since been dubbed “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” A cancer therapy firm, Varian Medical Systems, paid Ballard and a colleague $540,000 to lobby the White House, the trade office and Vice President Mike Pence on trade issues, filings show. The outreach included a meeting with Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro.

Since then, four of Varian’s five exclusion requests have been approved — which, the company said in an SEC filing, boosted revenues by . (Navarro said he doesn’t intervene in the exclusion process.)

Priebus’ firm, Michael Best Strategies, was hired by a Wisconsin company, Primex, to handle exemptions for its timekeeping and temperature measurement devices. “You’re not gonna do it on your own,” Primex CEO Paul Shekoski said in an interview. “It’s suicide actually.”

Shekoski said he wanted help understanding the process and making sure all the requests were filed correctly. With Michael Best’s guidance, he personally wrote letters to and met with his representatives in Washington.

The collective effort may have made it all the way to the Oval Office. Shekoski said in an email last fall that he heard from his lobbyist at Michael Best, Denise Bode, that Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. cited Primex as an example of a Wisconsin company suffering from tariffs when the senator took the issue to the president. “He not only called USTR, he was able to bring our specific case up to Trump directly,” Shekoski said. Bode did not respond to a request for comment, and a Johnson spokesman did not respond to questions about the Trump contact, saying only that Johnson had advocated for many Wisconsin companies.

Days before this story was published, Shekoski denied knowing whether Johnson brought up the issue with Trump. He said he was just trying to give his elected representatives concrete stories about small businesses struggling with tariffs that they could use to advocate for tariff relief.

Lobbying records show that Primex paid Priebus’ firm, Michael Best Strategies, $85,000 in 2018 and 2019 for its services. “I’m not selling access,” Priebus once told Politico. “I’m merely providing strategic advice and helping them handle their problems.” (Neither Priebus nor the White House responded to requests for comment.)

Primex got mixed results, with about half of its 205 exclusion requests granted and half denied.

Disclosure rules don’t require companies to say how much money they’ve spent lobbying on exclusions specifically. But records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that the number of clients lobbying on tariffs and other trade issues are higher than any year on record. In 2018, the number jumped by 28% to 1,372, and 2019 will significantly exceed that once final figures are in.

There is also no comprehensive picture yet of how companies that have hired lobbyists have fared compared with those that haven’t. But there is evidence that agencies have bent the rules. In October, a government watchdog found that Commerce Department officials had secretly changed the rules for one exclusion category after “off-the-record” discussions with a favored company, creating a “perception of undue influence.”

Companies with enough resources and savvy can not only push their own cases, they can work to undermine those of competitors. Elrod began to understand that in early August. He had been on the trade office’s website, waiting to see if he would get his exclusion and watching for requests from competitors, when he noticed that an industry giant had formally objected to his application.

Rheem Manufacturing Company is a Japanese-owned conglomerate and one of the world’s largest producers of water heaters, including in the United States. It challenged Elrod and a handful of other companies that had claimed they couldn’t find alternative sources for their products outside of China, arguing that Elrod could find suppliers in Japan, Germany and South Korea — or buy from Rheem itself.

Elrod quickly fired back with another letter, laying out how difficult and expensive it would be in practice to move production to another country. Amid a rush out of China, factories in Vietnam are holding out for enormous orders and shunning the relatively small quantities that Eccotemp imports. Plus, after developing his heaters over more than a decade with a handful of suppliers, finding one that could meet his exacting standards would require months of tests and new certifications.

That did not sway the government’s trade office, the USTR, which in late September posted a one-page form letter saying that Elrod had failed to demonstrate his products weren’t available outside of China. Thinking that his original ask for exclusions might have been too broad, Elrod then filed individual requests for several of his models, hoping the government might exempt at least a few of them.

But Rheem had reinforcements. New comments in opposition arrived on the letterhead of King & Spalding, a law firm with sleek offices across the street from the White House and a complement of former government officials. Stephen Vaughn had left the firm in 2017 to serve on the administration’s “beachhead team” at USTR, served as the agency’s general counsel — where he oversaw the exclusion process — and then rejoined the firm in 2019.

Fees paid for legal services aren’t public, but records show that Rheem spent $610,000 on lobbying on all federal issues in 2018. Neither Rheem nor Vaughn responded to requests for comment.

“I don’t have anyone on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Elrod said. “That letter probably cost them more than we’ve spent on legal expenses in the last five years.”

His concern growing, Elrod met a staffer in the district office of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and asked for a letter of support. He inquired with USTR about testifying at one of the agency’s multiday hearings on its sweeping tariff action.

Nothing worked. He didn’t make the witness list for USTR’s hearings, but the head of Rheem’s air conditioning division did. South Carolina’s Department of Commerce wrote letters on behalf of large employers like the fiberglass manufacturer China Jushi, but for the first few rounds of tariffs, no letters for small companies appear in the public record. (A spokeswoman said the state had written letters for “companies of various sizes and with varying numbers of employees.”)

Graham, who had filed seven letters supporting companies with a presence in South Carolina — several of them multinational or foreign-owned — also didn’t help.

“Lindsey Graham really did kick it to the curb,” Elrod said. (A spokesman for Graham did not respond to a request for further explanation.)

Finally, in November, the trade office rejected all of Elrod’s requests for relief in the same terse fashion it had the first. “After careful consideration, your request was denied because the request failed to show that this particular product is available only from China,” the letter read.

As a result, Eccotemp would get back none of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in duties that it had already paid out, and the bleeding would continue. Its profit margins vaporized and its employee head count sank by about 30%, as the company opted not to replace departing staff.)

For a while after receiving the denials, Elrod carefully watched the steady stream of response letters posted on the federal regulations portal, in case another company received an exclusion that would also cover his products. But no relevant approvals appeared.

Elrod has appreciated how under Trump, other regulators have been more business friendly. The government pesters him much less these days about energy and environmental rules. “Then you’ve got the USTR and the whole tariff thing that’s just a crusher,” he said.

“People our size, that don’t have K Street lawyers,” said Elrod, referring to the center of Washington’s lobbying industry. “We’re the ones that bear the brunt, we’re the ones that have the least tools in the box to work with.”

It’s not often that K Street gets handed the type of business development opportunity that Trump’s volatile trade policy offers.

With new tariffs being announced and lifted on a few days notice and trade agreements constantly being renegotiated, companies have scrambled to protect themselves. Tariff exclusions are highly sought after because they offer a huge competitive advantage — especially if a rival still has to pay. The review of exclusions is happening on a compressed time schedule, with little warning before tariffs and a complex set of rules that few people understand go into effect. And there are no second chances.

“When you’re running a process that has no appellate review, there’s a lot of room for questionable behavior because there’s no one really checking the process,” said one former USTR official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s common knowledge in town that the best way to get a leg up on an exclusion request is to get a Republican House or Senate member to call the White House.”

Members of Congress frequently work the bureaucracy on their constituents’ behalf, but there’s a particularly large pile of money on the line with trade. So far, Trump’s new tariffs amount to an $88 billion annual tax increase for U.S. companies, according to the Tax Foundation.

Just understanding the complexities of the process can require a specialized trade lawyer. Often, multiple importers will request exclusions for similar products. A reviewer at USTR’s Washington office might grant one company’s request and reject another’s, but anyone may take advantage of the resulting exclusion and request a refund of all the duties it paid on that product, which means keeping a close eye on the Federal Register. (The Commerce Department runs the exclusion process for steel and aluminum tariffs, and under its rules, exclusions are company-specific.)

Companies that can’t afford their own lobbyists often go through their trade associations, which can help open doors on the Hill on behalf of an industry’s interests. Still, even the trade groups are often baffled at why decisions come down the way they do. The National Marine Manufacturers Association has seen confoundingly mixed results — a fish finder is excluded while a depth finder isn’t, for example.

“We can’t make heads or tails out of why that happens,” said John-Michael Donahue, the association’s communications director. “I don’t think there’s a lack of help from Congress being loud about this issue, it’s more getting through to the administration and figuring out what the next step is in their mind.”

Some companies don’t need members of Congress or trade associations to make their case. Apple, for example, got 10 out of the 15 exclusions it asked for on items like computer chargers and mice, with 11 yet to be decided. The company spends more than $6 million on lobbying overall each year. Its CEO, Tim Cook, has met with Trump several times and the president cited Apple’s exclusion approvals during a public event at its Texas production facility.

“It’s difficult for me to see how this is a fair and transparent process,” said Nicole Bivens Collinson, head of the international trade and government relations practice for Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg. “When you’ve got Tim Cook who’s able to go in and meet with the president and get an exclusion, and someone who’s a very small company trying to submit through the regular process, and this is going to have a huge impact on their business.”

The federal government last set up an exclusion process in 2001, when George W. Bush imposed tariffs of up to 30% on $15 billion worth of steel imports in an attempt to bolster flagging mills. About half of the goods originally covered by the measure were exempted, which was one reason why the tariffs ultimately didn’t arrest the steel industry’s decline.

Trump’s tariffs are much less discriminate. Hefty new duties now cover about $364 billion worth of imports, or 12% of the overseas products Americans buy in a year. The tariffs don’t just fall on finished goods, like toasters or water heaters. They also cover many of product components, from motherboards to heat exchangers.

Because they’re so sweeping, the Commerce Department and USTR have been flooded with clemency pleas. As of mid-December, steel and aluminum users had requested exclusions on about 152,000 specific products. With two-thirds of the requests decided, about 79% had been approved. Importers of goods from China had requested about 44,000 exclusions, of which 43% had been decided and 35% approved, with a final round of exclusions under way.

For the first two rounds of China tariffs, which are worth about $50 billion in imports, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that USTR had excluded products worth about $12.8 billion, in what it called “a substantial off-budget concession to lucky firms.”

Many of those affected simply submitted no requests, figuring they had slim chances of success. A handful of businesses submitted thousands, especially industrial suppliers that globally source tools and parts and distribute them to U.S. manufacturers, since a separate application was needed for every possible product variation. A single company — AEP Holdings, a private equity-owned supplier of aftermarket car parts — filed more than 10,000 exclusion requests. So far, about 2,600 have been denied and only a handful approved.

Adjudicating each request is an enormous undertaking, and the federal government was ill-prepared.

The Commerce Department at first had projected that it would see only about 4,500 applications — a threshold that was passed almost instantly. According to a regulatory filing, USTR estimated that each exclusion request would take applicants two hours to prepare, at a cost of $200 each, and two and a half hours for USTR to process. For the China tariffs, adjudicating cases is expected to take 175,000 staff hours over the course of a year, at a cost of $9.7 million.

To keep up, agencies have had to borrow staff from other departments and brought on dozens of contractors, giving them a crash course in tariff codes. (“The internet is useful to research the product,” reads one set of instructions for reviewers obtained by ProPublica.) There is no hard completion deadline, and companies can only track their applications’ progress via an online portal.

Very often, at least with the steel and aluminum process run by the Commerce Department, it was hard to believe that parties were being considered equally.

Christine McDaniel, an economist and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has found that requests are rarely granted if objections are filed. A handful of steel producers have objected to thousands of applications, claiming that the importers should get no relief because U.S. manufacturers could make the necessary items. But McDaniel poked a hole in their argument: Added together, the producers’ claims far exceed what they’re realistically able to produce.

Tariffs are hurting U.S. companies’ bottom lines. Free Trade Zones, a 1930s rule which they can use to shield themselves from those costs, require expensive legal help. One Michigan manufacturer called it “a no-win situation.”

“It’s nearly costless for these guys to file objections, but the objection can prevent a company from getting its steel,” McDaniel said.

Capitol Hill has noticed. In early 2018, after receiving complaints from steel importers, Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., sent letters to the Commerce Department detailing problems with evaluations. The process had been a “masterclass in government inefficiency and plagued by maddening inconsistency,” she wrote in April. After receiving no formal responses, on Oct. 17 she wrote in exasperation, “It is difficult not to believe that there is a finger on the scale favoring objectors.”

In one letter, Walorski cited the case of National Tool & Manufacturing Company, a 45-person firm based in East Dundee, Illinois, that found itself in a fight with a multinational metals titan.

National Tool requested an exemption on a specialty grade of steel it buys in Italy and distributes to companies that make injection molds. EDRO Specialty Steels, which is owned by the Austrian conglomerate Voestalpine AG, objected on the grounds that it could produce the steel National Tool needed in the U.S. National Tool’s request was denied, so it had to keep eating the 25% tariff.

Then, EDRO itself requested exclusions for the raw material it imports from Slovenia to produce its proposed substitute — showing that the product it said it could supply wasn’t entirely American-made after all. (EDRO said this summary was “incomplete,” but declined to comment further.)

National Tool President Eric Sandberg suspects his exclusion request never had a chance.

“It truly is one of these big vs. small battles,” Sandberg said. “Because one of those big three companies wrote a letter, done. Without investigation, it was just done. It really feels like the government is working against you.”

In late October, the Commerce Department wrote back to Rep. Walorski, tersely rejecting her complaint. But Walorski’s concern was merited. On Oct. 28, the agency’s inspector general issued an alert finding that steel producers had back channel communications with Commerce Department staff that swayed their decisions. For example, the inspector general found that criteria for evaluating exclusions had been changed at an objector’s request, before decisions were posted publicly.

That apparent bias has percolated out to some Washington insiders, who see the steel and aluminum exclusion process as so slanted toward U.S. producers that it’s not worth the trouble. “I wouldn’t take anybody’s money against the U.S. steel industry,” said one prominent D.C. lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We say no a lot.”

Throughout his career, Mike Elrod has tried to follow the incentives that American trade policy has created for U.S. businesses.

In the 1990s, he owned a factory that made industrial rainwear. After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, which locked in low tariff rates, Elrod’s biggest client decided to relocate production there. “It killed the company,” Elrod said. “There was nowhere else to go.”

After that, Elrod decided to start importing from China himself, setting up a business that manufactured precision metal components before finding a type of water heater that he thought would sell well in the U.S.. Founded in 2006, Eccotemp grew steadily, adding people, new models and distribution centers overseas, to the point where Elrod started thinking about setting up assembly operations in the U.S. Even if labor is more expensive, not having to wait four months for new orders to ship across the world would allow him to more closely control inventory levels and turn around design changes faster.

Instead of accelerating that plan, however, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports took it off the drawing board. If the only place to get components is China, the duties would make bringing them into the U.S. for final assembly cost-prohibitive.

As the trade war began, Elrod had been looking forward to retirement. As soon as the tariffs were announced, Elrod and his successor as CEO, Joe Bolognue, had to formulate a new business strategy based on a 25% hike in the cost of goods: More higher-margin products, more non-U.S. sales, leaner operations.

They don’t want to walk away from the brand they’ve built, or put their employees out of work. “We don’t have the luxury to say, ‘We’re going out of business,’” Bolognue said. “We just don’t make as much money as we used to.”

The tariffs have also created other problems, like Chinese manufacturers selling directly into the U.S. on Amazon or Alibaba rather than going through companies like Eccotemp. They still have to pay tariffs, but they can undercut prices by avoiding one layer of markups.

Since the tariff decisions came down, Elrod has moved to Georgia and isn’t as involved in day-to-day operations. But he’s still heavily invested in the company, financially and emotionally. That’s why it was particularly devastating when the tariffs killed a potential deal to sell Eccotemp to a private equity firm, which would have allowed it to keep growing while ensuring his retirement.

“That’s usually what people see as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” Elrod said. “My net worth, you’re sitting in it. I don’t have a 401(k). Everything that I’ve ever done has flown back into this business. I don’t have enough runway to do it again.”

Elrod says that despite it all, he still plans to vote for Trump in November, citing the administration’s friendlier stance to his company on regulations. As for draining the swamp, Elrod doesn’t blame the president.

“Maybe if Trump moved the capital to Dallas and put everyone with a DC address on the Do Not Fly List, maybe,” Elrod said. “You get all the justice you can afford.”

The Democratic Party’s Militarism Rears Its Ugly Head

There’s nothing like an illegal and utterly reckless U.S. act of war to illuminate the political character of presidential candidates. In the days since the assassination of Iran’s top military official, two of the highest-polling Democratic contenders have displayed the kind of moral cowardice that got the United States into—and kept it in —horrific wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eager to hedge their bets, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have offered merely tactical critiques of President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani. In sharp contrast to Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders, the gist of the responses from Biden and Buttigieg amounted to criticizing the absence of a game plan for an atrocious game that should never be played in the first place.

Many journalists have noted that only in recent days has foreign policy become prominent in the race for the 2020 nomination. But what remains to be addressed is the confluence of how Biden and Buttigieg approach the roles of the U.S. government in class war at home and military war abroad—both for the benefit of corporate elites.

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Let’s be clear: More than 50 years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. bravely condemned “the madness of militarism,” he was directly challenging those who included the political ancestors of the likes of Buttigieg and Biden—Democratic politicians willing to wink and nod at vast death and destruction, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, equivocating while claiming that the war machinery would operate better in their hands.

On war-related issues, Buttigieg’s rhetorical mix offers something for just about anyone. “Mr. Buttigieg is campaigning as an antiwar veteran,” the New York Times oddly reported in a Jan. 5 news article. Yet on the same day, during a CNN interview about the drone killing, Buttigieg functioned more as a war enabler than opponent.

In response to anchor Jake Tapper’s first question—“Are you saying that President Trump deserves some credit for the strike?”—Buttigieg equivocated: “No, not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made, and the president has failed to demonstrate that.” His elaborations were littered with statements like “we need answers on whether this is part of a meaningful strategy.”

As for Biden, in recent months his shameful war-enabling history has drawn more attention while he continues to lie about it. And—given how hugely profitable endless wars have been for military contractors—Biden’s chronic enabling should be put in a wider context of his longtime service to corporate profiteering on a massive scale.

Biden has no interest in discussing his actual five-decade history of serving corporate power, which can only discredit the renewed “Lunch Bucket Joe” pretenses of his campaign. Meanwhile, as Buttigieg gained in the polls amid a widening flood of donations from Wall Street and other bastions of wealth, he moved away from initial claims of supporting such progressive measures as Medicare for All.

The military-industrial complex, inherently corporate, needs politicians like Biden and Buttigieg. One generation after another, they claim special geopolitical (Biden) or technocratic (Buttigieg) expertise while striving to project warm personas in front of cameras. The equivalents, one might say, of happy-face stickers on corpses.

Such dedicated political services to militarism are also political services to the corporate power of oligarchy.

Political positions on class warfare don’t always run parallel to positions on military warfare. But they have now clearly aligned in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Days ago, Bernie Sanders summed up: “I know that it is rarely the children of the billionaire class who face the agony of reckless foreign policy, it is the children of working families.”

One of the many reasons I’m actively supporting Sanders for president is that (although hardly flawless) his track record on military spending, war and foreign policy is much better than the records of his opponents.

Devastating impacts of nonstop war are all around us in the United States, from deadly federal budget priorities to traumatic effects of normalized violence. And it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of harm to so many millions of human beings in other countries. Sometimes, while trying to clear away the fog of the USA’s political and media abstractions, I think of people I met in Baghdad and Kabul and Tehran, their lives no less precious than yours or mine

Trump’s Apologists on the Left Never Had an Excuse

This article originally appeared on Salon.

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson famously observed, then maybe Donald Trump really is the “stable genius” he has proclaimed himself. Certainly our president’s vanity and narcissism are such that he’d enjoy seeing himself on Emerson’s list of the great and misunderstood giants of history: “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.” At least, Trump might appreciate that if he knew who even half those people were. Or if he could read.

There are other, more plausible explanations for Trump’s behavior, of course. Such as that his greatness is entirely in his own mind, and that he barely recognizes other people or the outside world as real. He is a damaged, impulsive man-child whose pathologies distill many of the worst pathologies of the nation that (more or less) elected him. So many judgments of Trump — from those who love him, those who hate him and those who have ridden along and made their peace with him for various reasons — were built on the faulty premise that he could be predicted or controlled, or at least that he was guided by some recognizable ideology.

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Nearly all of us, frankly, have been guilty of that to some degree. In this moment of crisis, I think we all owe a debt to NeverTrump conservatives like Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson, and to mental health professionals like Dr. Bandy Lee, Dr. Lance Dodes, Dr. John Gartner and others, who have consistently warned that Trump was unstable and unpredictable, and at some stage was likely to endanger the safety of not just the United States but the entire world. Well, here we are.

Last week’s drone assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, as most humans outside the robot-Republican chorus would agree, was a reckless, radical act that risks all-out war between the U.S. and Iran and dramatically ramps up the atmosphere of tension and chaos throughout the Middle East. It has already united the fractious Iranian population against the U.S., drawing that nation’s largest crowds since the election protests of 2009, and provoked the Iraqi government to demand that American troops leave their country. Everyone expects Iran to pursue some form of violent reprisal, and over the weekend Trump threatened to destroy sensitive cultural sites in Iran if that happens. That would certainly be a war crime, but then this is a president who ran for office openly praising war crimes and yearning to commit some of his own.

In other words, all of this was predictable. All of us were basically crossing our fingers and hoping that this dangerously unstable president could get through a four-year term without sparking or exacerbating a major international crisis. That was a foolish hope. According to a New York Times report published on Saturday, Pentagon officials proposed a hit on Soleimani to Trump as the most extreme option on a list of possible military responses to attacks on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad by pro-Iranian militants.

If that’s true it was a dreadfully bad bet, and now those ever-so-smart and grown-up war planners have stepped in the shit. There was no reason to be so surprised when, at random or by process of elimination, finally wanted to see a fireworks show. Both George W. Bush, who ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Barack Obama, who ordered the drone killings of U.S. citizens on secret evidence, had reportedly considered targeting Soleimani but decided against it.

Trump’s decision shocked the world, although as I say, it really shouldn’t have. You have to assume that was a major point in its favor, in the president’s shrunken-hobgoblin mind. To the extent he thinks strategically at all, he wants to keep his foes and critics off balance, and simply is not capable of looking beyond the immediate consequences.

The Soleimani assassination also flew in the face of the widespread perception — found on the far left, the far right and among the above-it-all pundits of the center — that Trump is a non-interventionist or isolationist with a constitutional aversion to endless war overseas. As Mehdi Hasan summarizes in an appropriately outraged response for The Intercept, this was everywhere and it was always hogwash, going back to “the most unforgivable take of the 2016 presidential race,” Maureen Dowd’s Times column from May of that year headlined “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.”

Hasan marshals considerable evidence that this interpretation of Trump was “wholly, utterly, and embarrassingly wrong,” yet for reasons that are difficult to capture with precision, it has gotten stuck in the collective brain of the media caste like an unkillable parasite. In an article on the Baghdad embassy crisis published Dec. 31, the Times referred to “the president’s reluctance to use force in the Middle East” as if it were a fact universally understood. There’s no mistaking the faint tone of clerical disapproval in that phrase; nothing seems more “presidential” to the top-shelf journalists who whisper back and forth with the national-security mandarins and spook overlords than a willingness to kill dark-skinned people for unclear reasons in some distant place.

On the left, and especially on what might be termed the anti-imperialist, internationalist radical left, Trump’s alleged distaste for military intervention — and the displeasure it provoked among the mainstream media and the neocon Republican establishment — worked a special kind of dark magic. Although foreign policy didn’t play a major role in either the 2016 Democratic campaign or the general election, many leftists and liberals (along with a few people on the far right) distrusted Hillary Clinton for what — even now! — I would argue were valid reasons.

Clinton’s credentials as a medium-hawkish Cold War-style Democrat were well established from her time at the State Department, and indeed long before that. It has been widely reported that she argued for full-on U.S. military intervention in Syria, for example (while Vice President Joe Biden counseled against it). I’ve personally heard prominent figures in the Obama White House tell reporters, off the record, that they were concerned that a future President Clinton might endanger the rickety and tentative edifice of peace (or at least not-quite-war) they had struggled to construct in the Middle East.

Out of these dark materials was born the “anti-anti-Trump left,” which was of course also nourished by leftist dislike for the entire Clinton enterprise, which had conquered the Democratic Party in the early 1990s and driven it toward Wall Street money, endless strategic triangulation and a renunciation of the welfare state and progressive economics. And yes, also by the vicious misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton throughout her career in public life. You didn’t have to like her one bit to understand how much that contaminated everything about the 2016 election.

So the worldview of the anti-anti-Trump left had a certain coherence that wasn’t entirely superficial. Let me be clear, for example, that I generally share the view Russia scandal and the Mueller investigation were wildly overblown by Democrats (and MSNBC hosts) eager for any excuse not to address their party’s spectacular failures, and that liberals, not too long into the future, will be forced to repent of their Trump-era love affair with the CIA and FBI. (Surely among the most bizarre turnabouts of a topsy-turvy age.) I believe one of the unspoken underlying narratives of the Ukraine scandal is that Trump’s misconduct accidentally endangered an overtly belligerent U.S. foreign policy that no one involved is eager to explain to the public.

That coherence was compromised, however, by a self-gaslighting willingness to treat certain things that Trump said seriously while ignoring others. When he campaigned against endless war or promised dialogue with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, he was rejecting failed orthodoxy and opening new possibilities. When he promised to bring back waterboarding (and improve on it), asked why tactical nuclear weapons were off limits, or bragged about taking oil from conquered nations or shooting Muslim prisoners with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, it was just “locker room talk,” to coin a phrase.

In the approximate view of the AATL, electing a pseudo-fascist buffoon as president was arguably preferable to electing a neoliberal warmonger — and might, over the long haul, lead to productive changes in the global balance of power. I’ve written about this previously, in August of 2018, arguing that, on one hand, the anti-anti-Trump left believed that

Trump’s chaotic nationalism would create at least a momentary rupture in the hegemonic world order dominated by the United States — so far, so good! — which might be better overall for the future of the planet than the continuation of the “Washington consensus” under Clinton. On the other, they suspected the brutal proto-fascism of a Trump presidency might spark renewed resistance on the left and force the political establishment into major reforms.

You can kind of sum it up by saying that [such leftists] believed that America was already so screwed up that a Trump presidency might actually open a pathway to making things better, whereas a Clinton presidency would only make the bad stuff worse. It’s a debatable proposition at best, clearly akin to the old Marxist notion that you had to “heighten the contradictions” of capitalism in order to create the conditions for revolutionary change.

This was almost exactly what lured Julian Assange, patron saint of the AATL, into waging a campaign of sabotage against Hillary Clinton in 2016, either directly or indirectly in concert with Russian hackers eager to aid Trump. As I argued when Assange was arrested last spring, I think it’s mistaken to conclude that he felt any particular affection for either Trump or Putin.

If anything, he may have convinced himself he was manipulating them, rather than the other way around. He loathed Clinton for both personal and political reasons … and seduced himself into the radical-nihilist position that Trump and Putin were preferable enemies-of-his-enemies, if only because they might accelerate an existential crisis within the national-security states of the neoliberal Western order, et cetera. He was partly right, at least about that last part, but I don’t imagine that’s much comfort right now.

Oddly enough, the thinking of the AATL intersected with the banal Beltway view that Trump could be trained to be “presidential,” or could at any rate be contained or supervised, like a poorly trained Schnauzer, by his initial cadre of generals or a White House staffed with savvy adult insiders or some other clichéd vision of competence. Both approaches rested on contradictory but overlapping assessments of Trump’s character and intentions: On one hand, he was laughably incompetent and could be controlled; on the other, the “Man in the High Castle” vision that Trump imbibed from Steve Bannon, with its promise of a reindustrialized, white-dominated nation pretty much decoupled from the outside world, was something he actually believed in and had thought about.

None of that was true. It should be obvious by now that Trump’s primary concern is his own glorification, and the closest thing he has to a political or social vision is incoherent racist paranoia mingled with fantasies of violent retribution. It might be accurate to say he longs to recreate a world in which America is an unchallenged hegemonic power, except without engaging in any of the messy and demoralizing warfare of the last 60 years. That can only lead to catastrophe, which is where his presidency has been heading from Day One.

In the words of the poem Trump likes to recite to audiences at his campaign rallies — the only literary work he appears to know well — we knew he was a snake before we took him in. A push-button assassination that throws the world into chaos, with little thought of what may follow, is not a departure from Trump’s policy vision or a sign that he has been seduced and conquered by the neocons. It’s exactly the kind of thing he’s been longing to do ever since he took office, and now that he’s gotten a taste of it, more will surely follow. Everyone who has normalized him, made excuses for him, laughed at him, pitied him or talked themselves into believing he was a blessing in disguise owns a share of this disaster. I’m pretty sure that’s all of us.

Is This the End of U.S. Interference in West Asia?

Major General Hossein Salami, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran, said on January 4 that his country would take “strategic revenge” against the United States for the assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani. The assassination of Soleimani, Salami said, will be later seen as a “turning point” in U.S. interference in West Asia.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif reacted strongly to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s suggestion that Iraqis were “dancing in the street” to celebrate the assassination. On Twitter, Zarif posted pictures of the funeral procession for Soleimani and wrote, “End of US malign presence in West Asia has begun.”

Both the military and the diplomatic wings of Iran’s government are in agreement that it is not Iran that will be weakened by the assassination of Soleimani, but that the United States will suffer the consequences of this action.

Why the U.S. Fears Iran

Why does the United States of America—the country with the largest military force in the world—fear Iran? What can Iran do to threaten U.S. interests?

To understand U.S. fears about Iran, it is important to recognize the ideological threat that Iran poses to Saudi Arabia.

Until the Iranian revolution of 1979, relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran were on an even keel. Both were monarchies, and both were subordinate allies of the United States. Whatever historical animosity remained between the Shia and Sunni—two branches of the Islamic tradition—were on mute.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 shook up the region. The crown of the monarch was set aside, as a specifically religious republic was created. The Saudis have long said that Islam and democracy are incompatible; this is precisely what the Islamic Republic rejected, when it created its own democratic form of Islam. It was this Islamic republicanism that swept the region, from Pakistan to Morocco. Fears of Islamic republicanism brought shudders into the palaces of the Saudi royal family, and into the U.S. higher establishment. It was at this point that the U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that the military defense of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy was a paramount interest of the U.S. government.

In other words, the U.S. military would be used to protect not the people of the Arabian Peninsula but the Saudi monarchy. Since the main threat was Iran, the U.S. turned its entire arsenal of military and information war against the new Islamic Republic.

The Saudis and the West egged on Saddam Hussein to send in the Iraqi army against Iran in 1980; that bloody war went on till 1988, with both Iran and Iraq bled for the sake of Riyadh and Washington. Soleimani and his successor Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani both fought in the Iraq-Iran War. Both Saddam Hussein and later the Afghan Taliban held Iran tight inside its borders.

American Wars, Iranian Victories

U.S. President George W. Bush broke the wall around Iran. The United States prosecuted two wars, which were essentially won by Iran. First, the U.S. in 2001 knocked out the Taliban and delivered an advantage to pro-Iranian factions, who joined the post-Taliban government in Kabul. Then, in 2003, the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party; the pro-Iranian Dawa Party succeeded Saddam. It was Bush’s wars that allowed Iran to extend its influence from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean Sea.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel used several mechanisms to push Iran back into its borders. They first went after Iran’s regional allies: first sanctions against Syria (with the 2003 Syria Accountability Act in the U.S. Congress), and then a war against Lebanon (prosecuted by Israel in 2006 to weaken Hezbollah). Neither worked.

In 2006, the U.S. fabricated a crisis over Iran’s nuclear energy program and pushed for UN, European Union, and U.S. sanctions. This did not work. The sanctions regime ended in 2015.

Attempts to intimidate Iran failed.

Trump’s Incoherence

Trump left the 2015 nuclear deal, and then said that he would get the U.S. a better deal from Iran. The Iranians scoffed.

Trump ratcheted up the economic war against Iran. This hurt the Iranian people, but with Chinese help, Iran has managed to survive the contraction of its economy.

Trump’s policy toward Iran is known as “maximum pressure.” It was this that led to the recent fracas, including the assassinations of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (Hashd al-Sha’abi).

After the assassination, the U.S. sent an envoy to Tehran. The brief from Trump was simple: if Iran does not retaliate, the U.S. will remove part of the regime of sanctions. Soleimani’s life was the price to pay to reduce sanctions. Trump wants to make a deal. He does not understand Iran. His is a policy that is both naïve and dangerous. But it is rooted in the Carter Doctrine, and therefore in the U.S. establishment’s policy framework.

What Will Iran Do?

Iran will not accept Trump’s tawdry deal. It has already set aside its policy of “strategic patience” for a much more forthright “calibrated response” policy.

If the U.S. wants to leave the nuclear deal, then Iran will start to process uranium.

If the West threatens Iranian shipping, then Iran will threaten Western shipping.

If the U.S. attacks Iranian interests, then Iran will attack U.S. interests.

Now, the U.S. has assassinated a senior Iranian military leader—who was traveling from Beirut to Baghdad on a diplomatic passport; will Iran offer a proportionate response?

Where will this U.S. policy of “maximum pressure” lead? Iran has said that it would not bow down to the U.S. pressure.

It has become commonplace to compare the assassination of Soleimani to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to World War I. This is chilling. If the U.S. starts a full-scale war against Iran, what will be the reaction of the other major powers in Eurasia, namely China and Russia? Both China and Russia have condemned the assassination, and both have called for calm.

However, Iran responds, the Iranian officials—such as Zarif and Salami—are correct that U.S. influence in the region has deteriorated and will deteriorate further. The U.S. can continue to thrash about with its superior military force, and it will continue to have bases that ring Iran. But what it can do with that power is unclear. This power was not able to subdue Iraq, nor was it able to overthrow the government in Syria, and nor could it create anything near stability in Libya. The attitude toward the U.S. is dismissive on the streets of West Asia, even as the Saudi monarchy continues to flatter U.S. presidents into its worldview.

This article was produced by Globetrotter , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

The U.S. Alone Is to Blame for a War With Iran

This article originally appeared on antiwar.com.

We, as Americans, are now living in different realities. The almost completely partisan response to Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate one of Iran’s top leaders proves that once and for all. To listen to Mitch McConnell versus Nancy Pelosi – and just about all their underlings – argue about the execution, is to almost believe each are talking about a different event! It’s surreal. Trump hit Iran, he says, because Iran hit us. Trump calls Soleimani a “terrorist” mastermind; Iran calls the assassination an “act of terrorism.” Are both right? Who knows…but…who started this whole mess?!?

Truth is, few politicians or commentators on the mainstream left or right bother to ask who started the now open-shooting-conflict between Iran and America. Don’t get me wrong, both sides starkly disagree on whether Trump’s assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani was strategic, (it wasn’t) or whether the president ought to have sought congressional approval (he should have). Still, both Democrats and Republicans almost unanimously believe that – whether war is the answer or not – Iran is ultimately in the wrong, the villain of the whole sordid tale.

I, on the other hand, sympathies aside, have the luxury of (mostly) intellectual independence. And I’m an historian. Therefore let me address the title question in a rather uncomfortable manner. The answer, I surmise, is complex, but, to trained scholar or regional analyst, unsurprising: the United States of America. This is not to say Iran hasn’t played a nefarious part of its own, or that there was zero blood on Soleimani’s hands, or that there aren’t human rights violations within the Islamic State. My narrow – but profoundly consequential – assertion is simply this: between the two adversaries, it was the United States that “started” the insults and provocations that got-us-hear, so to speak.

So, where is here, exactly? A state of war, of course. The targeted killing of a sovereign nation’s top uniformed military officer is quite obviously tantamount to war. Imagine how the U.S. would have responded if, on December 6th, 1941, the Germans assassinated Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. With a declaration of war, certainly, perhaps against Germany and its ally, Japan – potentially doing so a day before the real-world Pearl Harbor attack of December 7th. Or, in a more modern counterfactual scenario, would America eschew retaliation, at a minimum, or, more likely, open warfare, were Iran to have blown away Generals Petraeus or Mattis, back when they were still in Iraq? Don’t be silly. It’s valuable, remember, to walk a mile in an opponent’s shoes – in this case, to consider the view from Tehran.

Let us agree, then, that – for better or worse – Mr. Trump has started a war. What’s perhaps more troubling is that he has unilaterally done so, committed America to – what Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute recently called – an “irreversible escalation.” In doing so, he’s left Congress, the US military, and the People, to pick up the pieces. The president’s purpose, or at least his outcome, has been to engender a de-facto state of war, to commit the US to a combat fait accompli.

He’s not the first president to do it. Back in 1846, President James K. Polk – another dark horse candidate – by supporting the annexation of the breakaway Mexican province of Texas, and then ordering an army across the internationally recognized border, unilaterally made the resultant war – the deadliest per capita for US troops in history – all but inevitable. That, we now know, was his purpose. Problem is, whether a Polk or a Trump or some future blowhard is in the White House, that’s decidedly not how the Constitution says its supposed to work!

Nevertheless, it seems it is too late now. What’s done is – absent an unlikely wave of antiwar people’s protests – as they say, done. Trump has changed the paradigm. See, undeclared, proxy (until now) war had long been the name of the game played by the US and Iran. As such, it was waged as a retaliatory cycle, with each side pointing blame-riddled fingers at the other. So, times being as dark as they are, let me indulge the blame-seekers, and do my best to trace the timeline of provocations and retaliations. Only, to keep it interesting – and because I think it more instructive – I’ll do so in reverse.

Since I don’t know when it will happen (perhaps before publication of this piece?), but am certain that it will, I’ll start with what will be Iran’s promised and likely bloody response attack on US personnel somewhere in the world. Americans will, across the spectrum, be shocked – just shocked!
But, Iran only responded to the American assassination of perhaps the second or third most powerful man in Tehran’s government.
Well, an Iranian-backed militias had “attacked” the US embassy in Baghdad – though this was, for the Americans, a bloodless event.
But, the US had killed some two dozen members of the militia in a series of airstrikes.
Well, this was in response to the group’s alleged responsibility for a rocket attack on a US base in Iraq that killed an American contractor.
But, Trump had been funneling extra US troops into Saudi Arabia – Iran’s sworn enemy – and de facto sanctioned numerous, illegal, Israeli airstrikes on Iranian personnel and Iraqi militias in both Syria and Iraq.
Well, in September, Yemeni Houthi rebels – loosely affiliated with Iran – claimed responsibility for a temporarily crippling attack on Saudi oil infrastructure.
But, the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition had been terror bombing Yemeni civilians for four years, causing the world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster.
Well, in June, Iran shot down an American drone that was allegedly over international airspace.
But the Trump administration’s had labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – which Soleimani commanded – a foreign terrorist organization, for the first time in history. (Iran designated US Central Command – which has responsibility for the entire Middle East – a terrorist organization, in response, days later.)
Well, in May, Trump claimed that Iran was behind attacks on a few Saudi oil tankers.
But, a year earlier, Trump had unilaterally pulled out of a multinational Obama-era nuclear deal, in spite of clear evidence that Iran had followed its strictures. Furthermore, rhetoric in Washington – particularly from John Bolton – had grown increasingly pugnacious and later Bolton reportedly ordered the Pentagon to update plans to send 120,000 additional troops into the Persian Gulf.
Well, Iranian troops and friendly militias had long been “meddling” in Syria to back President Assad (though they were, unlike the US, invited, and partly combated the mutual enemy of ISIS)
But, Iran could (cogently) argue that the US had indirectly backed Al Qaeda elements in Syria and, through its ill-fated invasion of Iraq, set the conditions that created ISIS in the first place.
Well, according to the official Washington line, at least, Iran had backed the militias and provided the technology to kill hundreds of US troops in Iraq. (Though there is much evidence to the contrary, and much talk about the Iranian bogeyman in Iraq may be mythology.)
But, even so, the US had invaded both of Iran’s main neighbors – Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) – surrounding the country with American military bases. Furthermore, Iran felt genuinely threatened, which was understandable given that Bush administration officials were itching for regime change in Iran. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” was a common trope around neocon circles in Washington. Heck, Bush had even included Iran in the “axis of evil” triumvirate in his speech.

Now, I could stop here, in 2003, and declare America the primary aggressor. That would be fair. But I won’t. Instead, let us take an ever so brief trip further down memory land.

Bush would argue his invasions and rhetoric were justified, since some Iranians had long chanted that the US was “the Great Satan,” and publicly burned the American flag. And, according to a US judge, at least, Iran had been responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 that had killed American servicemen. (There is still much debate on who was actually responsible)
But, during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which caused perhaps a million deaths, the US Navy waged an undeclared maritime war in the Persian Gulf. In the “Tanker War,” the US flew the stars and stripes on Kuwaiti vessels to protect them from attack, and, finally, in April 1988, overtly sank the majority of the Iranian Navy in a one-sided sea battle.
Well, during that existential war, Iran had attacked Iraqi and its allies’ tankers; furthermore, its Lebanese partner Hezbollah had taken several Americans hostage.
But, throughout the war (1980-88), which Iraq had started by invading Iran, the US openly backed the Saddam Hussein’s aggressive regime. The US provided key intelligence in the form of satellite photos to the Iraqi Army, and granted Baghdad over $1 billion in economic aid. President Reagan, in absurd twist of irony, sent a special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to meet with Saddam. Saddam regularly employed poison gas to attack Iranian formations. It is largely agreed that U.S.-supplied satellite imagery allowed Iraq to better calibrate these illegal, immoral, chemical attacks.
Well, in 1979, during Iran’s Islamic Revolution, dozens of American embassy personnel were taken hostage and held for more than a year.
But here’s the kicker: Back in 1941, though Tehran declared neutrality in the world war, Russia and Britain jointly invaded and occupied the country to secure control of its oil reserves. Then, in 1953, when a democratically elected prime minister – Mohammad Mossadegh – dared nationalize Iranian oil (which had been largely under Western corporate control) the CIA coordinated a coup with MI6 to overthrow the government. The dictatorial Shah was promptly put in power and ruled with an iron fist for the next 26 years. America had armed, funded, and backed this brutal regime for two and a half decades.

And that, folks, an aggressive, illegal, intervention to overthrow an elected government – one of the most intrusive sins in foreign affairs – amounts to checkmate in the blame-game: Uncle Sam started it! You know something else? That still matters.

Establishment Democrats Can’t Stop Bernie Sanders’ Surge

Bernie Sanders is surging in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary polls, and, as CNN analyst Harry Enten wrote Sunday, “It’s becoming more apparent” that the Vermont senator and former Vice President Joe Biden “are the candidates to beat.” Sanders, according to Enten, has an extra advantage: “Biden’s fundraising is not anywhere near as strong as Sanders’.” As a recent Politico story observed, Sanders’ campaign is “being taken seriously” among Democratic party insiders.

Sanders’ ascension is scaring acolytes of former President Barack Obama, but according to a new story from the Daily Beast, they can’t figure out a way to stop him.

“As Sanders gained new flashes of traction in recent weeks,” the Daily Beast reports, “the former president’s lack of official guidance to halt his momentum, and the scattering of his inner circle to rival campaigns, have hampered any meaningful NeverBernie movement.”

In fact, writer Hanna Trudo continues, “the most striking aspect of Obamaworld’s response to Sanders … is the lack of a cohesive one.” It’s possible they’re just hoping that Sanders fades away on his own.

That seems to be Neera Tanden’s strategy. The president of the Center for American Progress and former policy director for the Obama campaign told the Daily Beast, “Money is important but doesn’t always translate to votes.”

Other former Obama aides, many of whom declined to give their names, pointed to the emergence of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as a formidable progressive opponent and a reason the Sanders campaign could fizzle out. They also mentioned Biden’s strong support among black voters, a demographic with which Sanders has previously struggled.

One former top Obama adviser, who chose to remain anonymous, believes that while Sanders may stay flush with cash, “he’s going to be a zombie candidate. You can go anywhere and still be dead,” emphasizing that Sanders isn’t enough of a threat to merit a large opposition strategy.

Another former Obama aide believes Sanders’ supporters are insufficiently supportive of Obama’s legacy: “If you read between the lines of what the Sanders folks are saying about the rationale of his candidacy, it is based on their belief that Barack Obama was not progressive,” adding, “there is a fundamental flaw in the Sanders candidacy relative to the Obama coalition and it’s because they’ve continually undermined President Obama.”

Not everyone in Obama’s orbit shares the same view of Sanders; some are even taking his candidacy seriously. “I believe people should take him very seriously,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, told Politico in December. “He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada.”

Obama himself has yet to endorse a candidate in the primary, but as the Daily Beast points out, he hasn’t been very complimentary of the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He told donors in November not to pay too much attention to “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.”

With Sanders in the top three in multiple state and national polls, and with his coalition becoming increasingly diverse, the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party may have a more formidable on their left than they think.