Chris Hedges's Blog, page 71

Where Is the Outrage Over Boris Johnson?

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you with us. So imagine you heard someone say or write about Jews as people who control the media, being shady business people, greedy, who exploited immigrant labor, and hurdled around the red-light district looking for “a bit of black.” Who also, let me quote from this, “Some kind of fiddling of the figures in an election by oligarchs of Jewish origin.”

Sounds a little antisemitic, or maybe a lot of antisemitic. And imagine hearing that same person talk about mixed race people as half-caste, coffee- colored, without “Too many Negroid features,” or as bush people on the hunt. Sound a little racist to you? I think so.

Or Arabs as Islamic nutcases, with slanty eyes and hook noses. That you could tell from a distance because of their one brow. Sound a little Islamophobic? Just a little, maybe? Well guess who said that? In his 2004 novel, 72 Virgins, the same man who said Obama was half-Kenyan, so he had an ancestral dislike of Britain and the British people. It was this man.

Juarez Johnson: Okay. Well I will say about that. I do think it is a very serious business when, when the chief rabbis speaks is as he does. I’ve never known anything like it. It is a failure of leadership on the part of the labor leader that he has not been able to stamp out this virus in the labor party. But I’m afraid it’s, it is, it is cognate with a, a general failure of leadership that we’re seeing at the moment.

Marc Steiner: So we know who that is. Mr. Juarez Johnson. And Jeremy Corbyn is the anti-Semite? How does labor in Britain not scream from the rooftops that are blatant antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist, Philander about to move into or perhaps he has where he moved into 10 Downing Street. How did that happen? We’re joined once again by Moshé Machover who is founder of Matzpen, the Israeli socialist organization in the early sixties continues his political work and professor of philosophy at the University of London. Welcome back Moshé. Good to have you with us.

Moshé Machover: Very nice to be with you.

Marc Steiner: So how did this get overlooked? I mean, the news was nothing but about Johnson being, I mean, about Corbyn being an anti-Semite, when Johnson says blatant racism and antisemitic words are known by all. So what happened?

Moshé Machover: Well that only goes to show the slant of the mainstream media, including the BBC and the allegedly progressive Guardian. They are interested not in hunting down real antisemitism, but the fake antisemitism, which is basically hostility or the policies of Israel and to the Israeli Zionist regime.

Marc Steiner: But what does it also say just about where Britain is? I mean I was thinking about this, maybe this is no connection. Maybe you’ll make a connection for us. But when I, when I watched the football match soccer match of the day and these kind of crowd just taunting black players and this kind of viral racist stuff streaming out of this, and then you have the same kind of racist though, I would say intellectually more subtle racism of Boris Johnson come out. There is a connection here. Right?

Moshé Machover: Yes. Yes. That is a connection. And you see, Boris Johnson is not a man of any conviction, including possibly racist ones. He merely uses it as a crowd pleaser. He is using these anti-Semitic tropes that you quoted. And there are more. I mean, you haven’t covered the whole shift of the book, 72 Virgins. I think he, he’s doing it simply as as a way of appealing to a certain crowd. And I mean by, it’s by no means the case that the racist out bursts walked in the football game expresses the day prevailing feeling in the British public. But there’s a certain section of it that is racist. After all, you know, Britain was an empire based on racism.

I mean, racism was used in order to justify and console the empire. Britain in the industrial revolution was based on slavery. The slaves were employed in the, in the Southern United States and in the Caribbean. But what that fed the cotton industry in Manchester. The slaves were growing, picking the cotton in the Southern, Southern United States, and in the Caribbean and these fed the machines in Manchester. And this is how Britain industrialized and became an empire. So racism is endemic in certain sections. I mean, is necessary to certain sections of the of the British public. It’s by no means universal, but there’s always manifestations. But the answer to your original question, why it was ignored is because the mainstream media is not really interested in Boris’s not good enough racism. But in the alleged and imaginary antisemitism in the Labor Party. Of course, this is helped by the fact that this witch hunt against so-called and antisemitism in the Labor Party is supported by scabs within the Labor Party.

Marc Steiner: But you have this. I mean, this is just to kind of get a sense of this for our viewers. I mean, this book, 72 Virgins was written by Boris johnson in 2004. Published in 2004. He was a government official, he was a minister in the government. And he wrote this blatantly anti-Semitic, racist novel that had a Serbian fascist who was hunting down Muslims as one of the main characters. I mean, I can just fathom how someone could publish that and then still end up becoming the prime minister.

Moshé Machover: Well then you have to read. You see that, that shows you the kind of regime with eh and, and you know, you have something not, not very different in the United States. How can, how can somebody the like the Donald become president of the United States? Mind you, in both cases they achieve powered by a minority of the votes. I mean, people have forgotten that Donald Trump did not achieve a majority of their popular vote. He was shortened by about 3 million votes. But because of the sick electoral system that you have, and because of the sick electoral system that Britain has, you can get to be prime minister here by securing less than a majority of the votes. That is how it happens. And it shows you also the nature nature of the media.

By the way, at the time when he was liking this novel, he was also, I think, editor of the journal weekly call The Spectator. And he was the editor of that magazine. And he published a series of articles by a well known, racist writer. I mean, not himself. But he was, he was giving space to a notorious racist writer who published in The Spectator. So it’s a little bit vague. I mean, if you’re interested in asking what his own views are, I think the answer is, he hasn’t gotten any fixed views. I mean he’s a narcissist, basically. I mean, much the same as you have in the president of the United States, who is a narcissist. But he’s a better educated narcissist. And a possibly more intelligent one. He uses racism as, as a crowd pleaser to appeal to a certain section of the public.

Marc Steiner: Well, I guess we’ll see how this unfolds. You’ve have five years of him and we’ll see what happens between, as you called him, the Donald and, and Boris good-enough and see what [crosstalk 00:10:36]

Moshé Machover: We’ll see if he lasts five years. It’s not at all clear. You know, things happen. He may have a solid majority now and a united party, but the future is not strictly foreseeable.

Marc Steiner: Things can unravel. Well, they can unravel and they do unravel often. So well, let’s hope. So, Moshé Machover, thank you so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Have a lovely holiday and happy new year.

Moshé Machover: It’s a pleasure. And the same to you.

Marc Steiner: We’ve been talking to Moshé Machover and this is Mark Steiner here for the Real News Network. We want to thank you so much for joining us. Have a wonderful new year and take care.

Robert Reich: Trump Has One Glaring Weakness

For a century the GOP has been bankrolled by big business and Wall Street. Trump wants to keep the money rolling in. His signature tax cut, two years old last Sunday, has helped U.S. corporations score record profits and the stock market reach all-time highs. To spur even more corporate generosity for the 2020 election, Trump is suggesting more giveaways. Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently told an assemblage of CEOs that Trump wants to “go beyond” his 2017 tax cut.

Trump also wants to expand his working-class base. In rallies and countless tweets he claims to be restoring the American working class by holding back immigration and trade. Incumbent Republicans and GOP candidates are mimicking Trump’s economic nationalism. As Trump consigliore Stephen Bannon boasted recently, “we’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party.”

Keeping the GOP the Party of Big Money while making it over into the Party of the Working Class is a tricky maneuver, especially at a time when capital and labor are engaged in the most intense economic contest in more than a century because so much wealth and power are going to the top.

Armed with deductions and loopholes, America’s largest companies paid an average federal tax rate of only 11.3 percent on their profits last year, roughly half the official rate under the new tax law – the lowest effective corporate tax rate in more than eighty years.

Yet almost nothing has trickled down to ordinary workers. Corporations have used most of their tax savings to buy back their shares, giving the stock market a sugar high. The typical American household remains poorer today than it was before the financial crisis began in 2007.

Trump’s giant tax cut has also caused the federal budget deficit to balloon. Even as pretax corporate profits have reached record highs, corporate tax revenues have dropped about a third under projected levels. This requires more federal dollars for interest on the debt, leaving fewer for public services workers need.

The Trump administration has already announced a $4.5 billion cut in food stamp benefits that would affect an estimated 10,000 families, many at the lower end of the working class. The administration is also proposing to reduce Social Security disability benefits, a potential blow to hundreds of thousands of workers.

The tax cut has also shifted more of the total tax burden to workers. Payroll taxes made up 7.8 percent of national income last year while corporate taxes made up just 0.9 percent, the biggest gap in nearly two decades. All told, taxes on workers were 35 percent of federal tax revenue in 2018; taxes on corporations, only 9 percent.

Trump probably figures he can cover up this massive redistribution from the working class to the corporate elite by pushing the same economic nationalism, tinged with xenophobia and racism, he used in 2016. As Steve Bannon has noted, the formula seems to have worked for Britain’s Conservative Party.

But it will be difficult this time around because Trump’s economic nationalism has hurt American workers, particularly in states that were critical to Trump’s 2016 win.

Manufacturing has suffered as tariffs raised prices for imported parts and materials. Hiring has slowed sharply in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states Trump won, and in states like Minnesota that he narrowly lost.

The trade wars have also harmed rural America, which also went for Trump, by reducing demand for American farm produce. Last year China bought around $8.6 billion of farm goods, down from $20 billion in 2016. (A new tentative trade deal calls for substantially more Chinese purchases.)

Meanwhile, health care costs continue to soar, college is even less affordable, and average life expectancy is dropping due to a rise in deaths from suicide and opioid drugs like fentanyl. Polls show most Americans remain dissatisfied with the country’s direction.

The consequences of Trump’s and the Republicans’ excessive corporate giveaways and their failure to improve the lives of ordinary working Americans are becoming clearer by the day.

The only tricks left to Trump and the Republicans are stoking social and racial resentments and claiming to be foes of the establishment. But bigotry alone won’t win elections, and the detritus of the tax cut makes it difficult for Trump and the GOP to portray themselves as anti-establishment.

This has created a giant political void, and an opportunity. Democrats have an historic chance to do what they should have done years ago: Create a multi-racial coalition of the working class, middle class, and poor, dedicated to reclaiming the economy for the vast majority and making democracy work for all.

Biden’s New Endorsement Reflects Battle for Latino Support

Joe Biden’s presidential bid got a boost Monday from one of the leading Latinos in Congress, with the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus’ political arm endorsing the former vice president as Democrats’ best hope to defeat President Donald Trump.

“People realize it’s a matter of life and death for certain communities,” Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., told The Associated Press in an interview, explaining the necessity of halting Trump’s populist nationalism, hard-line immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric that the California congressman called cruel.

Cárdenas’ is the chairman of Bold PAC, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Related Articles


[image error]







We Need to Talk About Joe Biden



by








[image error]







Joe Biden Has Corporate Democrats in Panic Mode



by Norman Solomon








[image error]







Biden Under Fire for Telling Protester to 'Vote for Trump'



by

His announcement follows presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ weekend of mass rallies with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman congresswoman from New York who has become a face of the progressive movement and a key supporter for the Vermont senator’s second White House bid.

The dueling surrogates highlight a fierce battle for the Hispanic vote between Sanders and Biden, whose campaigns each see the two candidates as the leading contenders. Biden leads the field among Democratic voters who are non-white, a group that includes Democratic voters who are Hispanic, with Sanders not far behind, according to national polling. Another top national contender, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, draws less support from non-white voters. There are few recent national polls with a sufficient sample of Hispanic Democratic voters to analyze them independently.

The dynamics also demonstrate the starkly different approaches that Biden and Sanders take to the larger campaign. Biden is capitalizing on his 36-year Senate career and two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president to corral Democratic power players across the party’s various demographic slices. Cárdenas joins four other Hispanic caucus members who’ve already backed Biden, a show of establishment support in contrast to some Latino activists who’ve battered Biden over the Obama administration’s deportation record. Sanders, true to his long Capitol Hill tenure as an outsider and democratic socialist, eschews the establishment with promises of a political revolution, just as he did when he finished as runner-up for Democrats’ 2016 nomination.

Together, it’s an argument on politics and policy at the crux of Democrats’ 2020 nominating fight.

Sanders and his supporters like Ocasio-Cortez argue that existing political structures cannot help working-class Americans, immigrants or anyone else. That argument, they insist, can draw enough new, irregular voters to defeat Trump in November.

“We need to be honest here,” retorted Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Biden supporter whose congressional district includes part of the U.S.-Mexico border. “If Joe Biden loses the primary, Democrats will lose in 2020.”

It’s impossible for polling almost a year ahead of a general election to affirm that view, but the contention echoes Biden’s consistent arguments about Electoral College math.

Texas Rep. Filemon Vela, also a border-district congressman who backs Biden, was not so absolute. But he said Biden is best positioned for a general election on immigration because of his plans to roll back Trump’s immigration restrictions and boost the asylum process, while stopping short of decriminalizing all border crossings. Sanders supports making all border crossings civil offenses, rather than criminal, a position first pushed by the lone Hispanic presidential candidate and former Obama housing secretary Julian Castro.

“In some swing states, that might not go over well,” Vela said, even as he, Gonzalez and Cárdenas said the distinction is more important to political pundits than to Hispanic voters.

Said Cárdenas: “There is activist language and there are litmus tests; and there are hard-working people around the country who just want fairness.”

He added another key plank of Biden’s case: that meaningful change, from reversing Trump’s migrant family separation policy to expanding health care coverage, requires not only winning in November but then achieving some semblance of consensus in Congress.

Hispanic voters are a rapidly growing portion of the U.S. population and electorate, though they have consistently had lower election-participation rates than African Americans and non-Hispanic whites. At the least, Hispanics will play key roles in the Nevada caucus (third in the Democratic nominating process) and the Texas and California primaries, the two largest sources of delegates on the March 3 Super Tuesday slate.

Sanders leads Biden among younger voters generally, according to national polling, and Biden aides say that could carry over to Hispanics. The variable is seemingly on display when comparing Biden’s campaign crowds with those like Ocasio-Cortez drew this weekend in California and Nevada.

Immigrants-rights advocates picketed outside Biden’s Philadelphia campaign headquarters shortly after its opening. Castro used Democratic debates to challenge Biden on why he didn’t stop more deportations when he was vice president.

Last month, members of the Movimiento Cosecha, which describes itself as an immigrant-led group pushing for “permanent, protection and respect” for immigrants, confronted Biden during a campaign event in South Carolina. One of them, Carlos Rojas, asked Biden to answer for deportations under Obama and to commit to an outright moratorium on all deportations — a position Sanders supports. Biden declined. After Rojas pressed him, Biden said, “You should vote for Trump.”

Gonzalez called it “ridiculous” to question Biden’s commitment to immigrants, but said the skepticism demonstrates that the Latino community vote is not monolithic, with a range of national origins and philosophical differences.

Vela agreed, adding that Sanders’ rallies and Ocasio-Cortez’s social media following shouldn’t obscure Biden’s standing among the “traditionalist Democrats” he said constitute the majority of Hispanic voters. Vela recalled an unplanned campaign stop he made recently with Biden at Mi Tierra, an iconic restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, after a campaign event with several hundred people.

“He went table to table,” Vela said, “people getting up, ‘Joe Biden is here’ and ‘There’s Joe Biden.’ The response was overwhelming.”

Former Uber CEO Kalanick Severs Ties With Ride-Hailing Giant

NEW YORK — Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is resigning from the board of directors, severing ties to the ride-hailing company that he co-founded a decade ago and ran until a series of scandals led to his downfall.

The departure, announced Tuesday, did not come as a surprise. Kalanick recently sold more than $2.5 billion worth of stock in the company, or more than 90% of his holdings.

“Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years. At the close of the decade, and with the company now public, it seems like the right moment for me to focus on my current business and philanthropic pursuits,” the 43-year-old entrepreneur said in a statement.

Related Articles


[image error]







Uber Reports Over 3,000 Sexual Assaults on 2018 Rides



by








[image error]







The Washington Post Has an Uber Problem



by








[image error]







As Uber Gets Ready to Turn Public, L.A. Drivers Prepare a Strike



by Donald Kaufman

Uber, based in San Francisco, turbocharged the gig economy, and its drivers have logged 15 billion trips since 2010. But Kalanick was ousted as CEO in the summer of 2017 with the company mired in lawsuits.

Uber under Kalanick grew with incredible speed, but like a number of other tech startups, it ran into trouble with a corporate “bro” culture that appeared at times to be spinning out of control. It was a problem Kalanick acknowledged. Before his ouster as CEO, he said he needed to “fundamentally change and grow up.”

His career at Uber seemed to fit a certain pattern seen in Silicon Valley: The brash and disruptive personalities who are great at creating startups can be ill-suited for the corner office when the company reaches maturity. Sometimes “adult supervision” in the form of experienced executives has to be brought in.

In one of the Uber’s biggest scandals, Kalanick was accused of presiding over a workplace culture that allowed rampant sexual harassment.

A former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, leveled sexual harassment and sexism allegations in a 2017 blog post, saying a boss — not Kalanick — had propositioned her and higher-ups had ignored her complaints. Kalanick called the accusations “abhorrent” and hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate. Holder recommended reducing Kalanick’s responsibilities.

After multiple investigations, Uber fired 20 employees accused of sexual harassment, bullying and retaliation against those who complained. This month, the company paid $4.4 million to settle a federal investigation over workplace misconduct.

The problems went beyond employee relations.

Waymo, the self-driving car company spun off from Google, sued Uber in 2017, alleging a top manager at Google stole pivotal technology from the company before leaving to run Uber’s self-driving car division.

Uber also gained a reputation under Kalanick for running roughshod over regulators, launching in markets before officials were able to draft rules and regulations to keep the ride-hailing business in check.

During Kalanick’s tenure, The New York Times revealed that Uber used a phony version of its app to thwart authorities in cities where it was operating illegally. Uber’s software identified regulators who were posing as riders and blocked access to them. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating.

“Many investors will be glad to see this dark chapter in the rear view mirror,” Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, said in a note to investors.

Kalanick is not alone among visionary tech entrepreneurs who have stumbled after building startups from nothing.

Tesla founder Elon Musk has had too loose a grip on his Twitter habit and has been fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors with a tweet. He was also sued for defamation, but ultimately cleared, for going on Twitter and calling a British cave explorer “pedo guy” — short for “pedophile.”

Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork, recently stepped aside after the company canceled its initial public offering amid concerns about his judgment, including his use of company stock to secure a $500 million personal loan.

After Kalanick’s ouster, former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was brought on as Uber’s chief executive to clean up Uber’s image and steer the company to its stock market debut in May. But Uber’s stock floundered and fell almost 11% in its first day of trading as a public company. It has tumbled more than 30% since.

“Let’s call it like it is: Uber stock has been a nightmare since the IPO coming out of the gates,” Ives said.

Spending the Holidays at the Heart of the Hong Kong Protests

Imagine this happening on Wall Street.

On Dec. 10, hundreds of white-collar Hong Kong protesters—mostly bankers, accountants and lawyers—spent their lunch break in Central’s Statue Square, writing Christmas cards to the protesters who have been jailed since the demonstrations began last June.

These types of actions and open defiance against mainland China occur daily across Hong Kong. Residents there are establishing a momentum of resistance through art, song, graffiti, music, lunch-ins, prayer and creating what has become known as Lennon Walls (named after the memorials that sprung up after John Lennon was killed), where people gather and collectively create collages of protest messages. Lennon Walls happen in parks, storefronts, subway stations and anywhere else there is space.

“Ann” is a lawyer in her 30s who has helped coordinate escape routes for the frontliners during the violent conflicts with police since the protests began more than six months ago. She summed up the purpose and intention of these “white collar” actions this way: “The police have arrested the best and bravest of us, the kids, and it is up to the rest of us to keep the momentum going until we figure out what to do next.”

Police have arrested more than 6,000 people from ages 11 to 84, and many face up to as much as 10 years in jail. According to the Anti-Extradition Verified News, police have used about 16,000 canisters of tear gas, 10,000 rubber bullets, 2,000 bean bag rounds and 1,850 sponge bullets.

Everyone I spoke with that afternoon has participated in the protest in one form or another. Some wore face masks in solidarity with the protesters. Others chose not to reveal their faces.

Here are a few of their voices.

PHOTO ESSAY | 13 photosInside the Ongoing Hong Kong Protests

 

Is Donald Trump America’s Second 9/11?

Here’s the question at hand—and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris Johnson in Britain’s recent election, the greatest previous imperial power on this planet is clearly headed for the sub-basement of history. Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, now Russia, remains a well-sauced Putinesca shadow of its former self. And then, of course, there’s the country that, not so long ago, every major American politician but Donald Trump proclaimed the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever.

As it happens, the United States—if you didn’t catch the reference above—has been looking a bit peaked lately itself. You can’t say that it’s the end of the road for a land of such wealth and staggering military power, enough to finish off several Earth-sized planets. However, it’s clearly a country in decline on a planet in the same condition and its present leader, Tariff Man, however uniquely orange-faced he may be, is just the symptom of the long path to hell in a handbasket its leadership embarked on almost three decades ago as the Cold War ended.

Admittedly, President Trump has proved to be the symptom from hell. To give him full credit, he’s now remarkably hard-at-tweet dismantling the various alliances, agreements, and organizations that U.S. leaders had assembled, since 1945, to make this country the Great Britain (and beyond) of the second half of the twentieth century and that’s an accomplishment of the first order.

And keep in mind the context for so much of this: it’s happening in a country that may be experiencing an unprecedented kind of inequality. It’s producing billionaires at a staggering clip with just three men already possessing wealth equivalent to that of half the rest of the population; this, mind you, at a moment when the globe’s 26 richest people reportedly are worth as much as half of everyone else, or 3.8 billion people. And this in a world in which, as the income of that poorest half of humanity continues to decline, the wealth of billionaires increases by $2.5 billion a day and a new billionaire is minted every two days.

Had all of this not already been so and had a sense of decline not been in the air, it’s inconceivable that those heartland white Americans who had come to feel themselves on the losing end of developments in this country would have sent a charlatan billionaire into the White House to represent them (or at least to give the finger to the Washington establishment). And all this on a planet that itself, in climate terms, appears to be in unprecedented decline.

Think of the above as part of what’s come down, metaphorically speaking, since those towers in New York fell more than 18 years ago.

Looking Back on 9/11

It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day—though it seems unimaginable now—we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.

The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth.

Who knew back then? Not me, that’s for sure. Not when I started what became TomDispatch 18 years ago, feeling, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, that something was truly wrong with our world, that something more than the World Trade Center might be in the process of coming down around all our ears. I can still remember the feeling in those weeks, as I saw the mainstream media’s focus narrow drastically amid nationwide self-congratulatory celebrations of this country as the greatest survivor, dominator, and victim on the planet. I watched with trepidation as we began to close down to the world, while essentially attempting to take all the roles in the global drama for ourselves except greatest evil doer, which was, of course, left to Osama bin Laden.

I still remember thinking then that the Vietnam years had been the worst and most embattled in my lifetime, but that somehow this—whatever it turned out to be—would be so much worse. And yet whatever I was sensing, whatever I was imagining, wouldn’t prove to be the half of it, not the quarter of it.

If you had told me then that we were heading for Donald Trump’s version of American decline and a corrupt global gilded age of unprecedented proportions, one in which showmanship, scam, and self-serving corruption would become the essence of everything, while god knows what kinds of nightmares—like those subprime mortgages of the 2007 economic meltdown—were quietly piling up somewhere just beyond our view, I would have thought you mad.

The Second 9/11

All these years later, it’s strange to feel something like that moment recurring. Of course, in this elongated Trumpian version of it, no obvious equivalent to those towers in New York has come down. And yet, over the three years of The Donald’s presidency, can’t you just feel that something has indeed been coming down, even as the media’s coverage once again narrowed, this time not to a single self-congratulatory story of greatness and sadness, but to one strange man and his doings.

If you think about it, I suspect you can feel it, too. Looking back to 2016, mightn’t you agree that Donald Trump rather literally embodied a second 9/11? He certainly was, after a fashion, the hijacker-in-chief of that moment, not sent by al-Qaeda, of course, but… well, by whom? That is, indeed, the question, isn’t it? Whom exactly did he represent? Not his famed “base,” those red-hatted MAGA enthusiasts at his endless rallies who felt they had gotten lost in the shuffle of wealth and politics and corruption in this country. Perhaps, of course, the al-Qaeda of that moment was actually another kind of terrorist crew entirely, the one-percenters who had mistaken this country’s wealth for their own and preferred a billionaire of any sort in the White House for the first time in history. Or maybe, as a presidential hijacker first class, Donald Trump simply represented himself and no one else at all. Perhaps he was ready to bring a whole system to its knees (just as he had once bankrupted those five casinos of his in Atlantic City), as long as he could jump ship in the nick of time with the loot.

On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself.  He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”

From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.

No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it. Admittedly, unlike Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other such places on this increasingly unsettled planet of ours, true civil strife has (yet) to break out here (though individual mass shootings certainly have). Still, the president and some of his supporters have begun talking about, even threatening, “civil war” for our unsettled future.

On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.

Was 11/9 the original 9/11?

Perhaps this is the time to bring up the possibility that September 11, 2001, might not really have been the first 9/11 and that Donald Trump might actually be the third, not the second 9/11.

In a sense, the first 9/11 might really have been 11/9. I’m thinking, of course, of November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War, a divided Europe, and a deeply divided world, suddenly began to be torn down by East and West Germans. Believe me, in our nation’s capital, it was an event no less unexpected or shocking than September 11, 2001. Until that moment, Washington’s political class and the crew who ran the national security state had continued to imagine a future dominated by a never-ending Cold War with the Soviet Union. The shock of that moment is still hard to grasp.

“On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.”

Looked at a certain way, that November the people had hijacked history and Washington’s response to it would be no less monumentally misplaced than to the 2001 moment. Once the key officials of George H.W. Bush’s administration had taken in what happened, they essentially declared ultimate victory. Over everything. For all time.

With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)

It’s in this context that Trump’s could be considered the third hijacking of our era. Given his sense of self, his might even be thought of not as the 1% hijacking moment, but as the .000000001% moment.

And be prepared: the next version of 9/11, however defined, is guaranteed to make Osama bin Laden and his 19 hijackers look like so many pikers. Depending on what tipping points are reached and what happens after that on our rapidly warming planet, so much could come down around humanity’s ears. And if so, that moment in 2015 when Donald Trump rode an escalator down into the presidential contest to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” will look very different—because it will be far clearer than it is even now that he was carrying a blowtorch with him.

Putin: Russia Leads the World in Hypersonic Weapons

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia has got a strong edge in designing new weapons and that it has become the only country in the world to deploy hypersonic weapons.

Speaking at a meeting with top military brass, Putin said that for the first time in history Russia is now leading the world in developing an entire new class of weapons unlike in the past when it was catching up with the United States.

The Russian leader noted that during Cold War times, the Soviet Union was behind the United States in designing the atomic bomb and building strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Related Articles


[image error]







Putin Sternly Warns U.S. Against Putting Missiles in Europe



by








[image error]







Manufacturing War With Russia



by Chris Hedges








[image error]







Putin Orders Russia to Respond After U.S. Missile Test



by

“Now we have a situation that is unique in modern history when they are trying to catch up to us,” he said. “Not a single country has hypersonic weapons, let alone hypersonic weapons of intercontinental range.”

The Pentagon and the U.S. military services have been working on the development of hypersonic weapons in recent years, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in August that he believes “it’s probably a matter of a couple of years” before the U.S. has one. He has called it a priority as the military works to develop new long-range fire capabilities.

The U.S. also has repeatedly warned Congress about hypersonic missiles being developed by Russia and China that will be harder to track and defeat. U.S. officials have talked about putting a layer of sensors in space to more quickly detect enemy missiles, particularly the more advanced hypersonic threats. The administration also plans to study the idea of basing interceptors in space, so the U.S. can strike incoming enemy missiles during the first minutes of flight when the booster engines are still burning.

Putin said that the first unit equipped with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle is set to go on duty this month, while the air-launched Kinzhal hypersonic missiles already have entered service.

The Russian leader first mentioned the Avangard and the Kinzhal among other prospective weapons systems in his state-of-the-nation address in March 2018.

Putin said then that the Avangard has an intercontinental range and can fly in the atmosphere at a speed 20 times the speed of sound. He noted that the weapon’s ability to change both its course and its altitude en route to a target makes it immune to interception by the the enemy.

“It’s a weapon of the future, capable of penetrating both existing and prospective missile defense systems,” Putin said Tuesday.

The Kinzhal, which is carried by MiG-31 fighter jets, entered service with the Russian air force last year. Putin has said that the missile flies 10 times faster than the speed of sound, has a range of more than 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) and can carry a nuclear or a conventional warhead. The military said it’s capable of hitting both land targets and navy ships.

The United States and other countries also have worked on designing hypersonic weapons, but they haven’t entered service yet.

The Kremlin has made military modernization its top priority amid tensions with the West that followed the 2014 Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.

Putin on Tuesday described a buildup of NATO’s forces near Russia’s western borders and the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty among top security threats.

He argued that Russia must have the best weapons in the world.

“It’s not a chess game where it’s OK to play to a draw,” he said. “Our technology must be better. We can achieve that in key areas and we will.”

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported Tuesday that the military this year has received 143 warplanes and helicopters, 624 armored vehicles, a submarine and eight surface warships. He said that the modernization of Russia’s arsenals will continue at the same rapid pace next year, with 22 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 106 new aircraft, 565 armored vehicles, three submarines and 14 surface ships to enter duty.

Putin noted that the work to develop other prospective weapons, including the Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile, the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile was going according to plan.

The Burevestnik has stoked particular controversy. The U.S. and the Soviet Union worked on nuclear-powered rocket engines during the Cold War, but they eventually spiked those projects considering them to be too hazardous.

The Burevestnik reportedly suffered an explosion in August during tests at a Russian navy range on the White Sea, killing five nuclear engineers and two servicemen and resulting in a brief spike in radioactivity that fueled radiation fears in a nearby city. Russian officials never named the weapon involved in the incident, but the U.S. said it was the Burevestnik.

‘Little Women’ for Millennials

Whether literary adaptation or historical drama, a period film reveals as much about the era in which it is made as it does the era in which it is set. Case in point: Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” the fourth screen version made since 1933 of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters. One reason it is remade so often is that, more than a century before Alison Bechdel proposed her “Bechdel test” to confront gender inequity in entertainment, “Little Women” had already gotten it right. It’s fun to see how those who adapt Alcott inevitably project their zeitgeist onto hers.

Few narratives honor the very different choices very different women make with their lives. That, I think, is one reason Alcott’s story is ageless. There’s an additional bonus: Watch the iterations of “Little Women” chronologically and you see radically different interpretations. The earlier versions are about America at war and at peace. The later ones are tuned into how women negotiate a world tilted against them.

Seen from a present-day perspective, the 1933 version of  “Little Women,” starring Katharine Hepburn as aspiring writer Jo, reflects both the Depression era in which it was made and the Civil War era in which it is set. Director George Cukor frames the story as one in which the March family falls from prosperity to the striving end of the working class. Brought together by hard times, they embody New Deal ideas of sacrifice and sharing the wealth. The March family helps their immigrant neighbors, the Hummels; the wealthy Laurences help out the less fortunate Marches.

Released in 1949 and starring June Allyson as Jo, Mervyn Le Roy’s “Little Women” underlines the similarities between the periods following the Civil War and World War II, when women are eased out of the workplace and back into the domestic sphere. It seems less 1865 than 1945 when Laurie Laurence (Peter Lawford) patronizingly proposes to Jo, noting that if she accepts him she won’t have to write anymore. He has failed to notice that Jo’s identity is as a writer.

Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film may be the canonical big-screen version of “Little Women.” Released shortly after the 1980s-‘90s years that feminist critiques dubbed “post-feminist,” it revels in a multitude of feminisms. Every scene is alive with active women involved both in their duties as breadwinners and their avocations as artists. They are caregivers, rolling bandages at hospitals and rolling out dough in the kitchen. And they are sustained by creative work, whether it’s Jo (Winona Ryder) at her desk writing, Amy (Kirsten Dunst) at her sketchbook drawing, or Beth (Claire Danes) at the piano.

Where their filmmaking predecessors tend to frame Jo as unconventional and her sisters traditional, Armstrong and screenwriter Robin Swicord, along with the titular little women and their mother, Marmee, see a spectrum of women who make individual choices and support each other in them.

Gerwig’s adaptation — she both wrote the screenplay and directed — is more pragmatic, dramatizing many of the same vignettes but framing the story differently. For the writer/director, it’s about how the daughters of an improvident father (played by Bob Odenkirk) and a resourceful mother (a splendid Laura Dern) make decisions about marriage and about art. Do they do it for love or for money? One of the sisters, Meg (Emma Watson) chooses love; two others, Jo (Saiorse Ronan) and Amy (Florence Pugh, also splendid), find ways to balance both. In order to find that equilibrium, Jo must make compromises to her art, while Amy consider compromises to her heart.

The film opens in the middle of Alcott’s story, with the adult Jo bracing herself to walk into the office of “The Weekly Volcano,” the journal to which she wants to submit her fiction. Mr. Dashwood, its proprietor (Tracy Letts), gives her a ironclad rule: By story’s end, the heroine must be “married or dead.” While Alcott herself never wed (she wasn’t so inclined, and anyway, she was too busy supporting her sisters and their kin), her alter ego, Jo, will make sure that each March sister ends as Mr. Dashwood demands. (Those who know how movie studios run today can also imagine Mr. Dashwood’s counterpart saying something like this to Gerwig.)

Gerwig proceeds from the establishing scene to ping-ponging flashbacks and flash-forwards. This has the advantage of accelerating the pace of an episodic narrative but the disadvantage of causing character development interruptus. The pleasure of coming-of age stories is in watching characters evolve. By scrambling the chronology, Gerwig discloses effects before showing their causes. (Many in the audience I saw it with kept asking out loud, “Have we gone ahead or back in time?”)

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously observed that a movie needs a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. In this case, discontinuous storytelling is to the detriment of the performers — particularly to Watson, whose Meg is superfluous in this telling, and to Ronan, an actress of unshakable confidence, whose rhythms are shaky here. As Laurie, Timothee Chalamet, who plays Laurie, seems downright anachronistic. He’s petulant when he should be ardent and giggly when he should be buoyant.

Happily, Laura Dern as Marmee and Florence Pugh as Amy enlarge every scene they are in and emerge as the critical characters. Amy, the vain, calculating and materialistic youngest, is the least likeable in the novel and in most of the movies (Elizabeth Taylor played her in the 1949 version). Gerwig and Pugh interpret Amy as one who belatedly emerges from Jo’s long shadow.

Amy’s the one her father’s rich aunt dotes on, the one Aunt March (Meryl Streep) instructs to marry well so she can support her family. Much to Amy’s own surprise, she’s not a gold-digger, She doesn’t marry the man her aunt chooses; she chooses the one she loves. In loving, she grows a conscience, heart and generosity so conspicuously absent in her youth.

The parts of Gerwig’s film I appreciated most were those of its candidness about the economic choices a woman makes. Some of them are in Alcott’s novel — as they are in the novels of Jane Austen and Willa Cather. Others — like a very droll exchange between Dashwood and Jo about her percentage of book profits, are Gerwig’s projections of our zeitgeist onto Alcott’s.

“Little Women” may have been written more than 150 years ago, yet it is still so pertinent today that every movie version has things to teach new generations of fans. Of how many other novels, or movies, can we say the same?

House Committee Raises Prospect of More Impeachment Articles

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee held open the possibility Monday of recommending additional articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump as it pressed anew for the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn.

The committee wants a federal appeals court to order McGahn to testify as it examines potential obstruction of justice by the president during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The committee says McGahn’s testimony could also be useful for any Senate impeachment trial.

A judge last month directed McGahn to comply with the House Judiciary Committee subpoena, and a Washington-based appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Jan. 3.

In a court filing Monday, lawyers for the committee said McGahn’s testimony remains essential even though the House has already voted to impeach Trump on two charges related to his interactions with Ukraine rather than on actions uncovered during Mueller’s Russia probe.

“If McGahn’s testimony produces new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles approved by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly — including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment,” lawyers for the Democratic-led committee wrote.

The committee also said McGahn’s testimony is important for the committee’s oversight role of the FBI and the Justice Department, “including in determining whether those agencies are operating free from improper political interference.”

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn well before the start this fall of an impeachment inquiry centered around Trump’s request to Ukraine’s president that he investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, as well as an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory alleging Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Justice Department has asked the appeals court to dismiss the case, saying there’s no reason for judges to become involved in a political dispute.

The department also says the need for resolving the case is less urgent now that the House has moved ahead with impeachment articles even without McGahn’s testimony.

But the committee disagrees.

“The House’s vote on the Articles of Impeachment against President Trump underscores the Committee’s urgent need for expedited consideration of this appeal,” lawyers for the panel wrote.

“As discussed above, McGahn’s testimony is critical both to a Senate trial and to the Committee’s ongoing impeachment investigations to determine whether additional Presidential misconduct warrants further action by the Committee,” they added.

____

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

Our Nightmare Health Care System in One Doctor’s Bill

Strep throat tests are usually quick and painless. Sure, there are a few seconds of discomfort during the throat swab, but after that, and maybe another related test, you’re out the door. Hopefully, the results offer some relief and peace of mind, two qualities none of us should have to put a price on.

Unfortunately, Alexa Kasdan’s doctor and her insurance company did: $28,395.50. That is not a typo. Bill of the Month, a joint project of NPR and Kaiser Health News, reported Monday that  Kasdan, a New York City public policy consultant, went to get a strep test from her primary care doctor before a vacation. When she got home from the trip, she was greeted by multiple messages from her insurance company and doctor’s office, including one informing her the insurance company would send a check for more than $25,000 that she should then bring to her doctor’s office. The office told the insurance company it was waiving Kasdan’s portion of the bill: $2,530.26.

Unfortunately, Kasdan is not the only American struggling with eye-popping medical bills. “The number of patients whose medical care cost at least a million dollars over the course of a year rose by nearly 90% between 2014 and 2017, according to a new report conducted by Sun Life Financial,” Marketwatch reported in 2018. Sun Life pointed to expensive injectable drugs, particularly for rare diseases, as a major culprit of these bills.

“We’re seeing drug claims that can be in the millions of dollars,” Dan Fishbein, president of Sun Life Financial, explained to MarketWatch last year. He added, “Most people don’t imagine getting an $80,000 prescription, but that’s relatively common now.”

Insurance companies assume people will cough up. “There is this new group of people who, on paper, look like they should be able to afford their bills,” Craig Antico, founder of RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit that buys and forgives medical debt, told The New York Times in November.

That America even requires a nonprofit to tackle medical debt is disheartening, but not surprising, in an era in which others turn to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe to pay for lifesaving treatments. A third of the money raised by GoFundMe is for medical bills.

When patients are unable to pay, the Times’ Sarah Kliff reports, “Hospitals across the country are increasingly suing patients for unpaid bills, a step many institutions were long unwilling to take.”

Fortunately, unlike the people in The Times’ article, Kasdan was able to dispute the charges immediately. The cause of her high bill wasn’t related to medication. Instead, further research showed that far from a normal throat culture, the doctor sent Kasdan’s swab for a variety of complicated DNA tests, searching for a variety of viruses and bacteria. At least one doctor NPR spoke to was highly skeptical of this move: “In my 20 years of being a doctor, I’ve never ordered any of these tests, let alone seen any of my colleagues, students and other physicians order anything like that in the outpatient setting,” Dr. Ranit Mishori, professor of family medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, explained to NPR.

The doctor also ended up sending the tests to an out-of-network lab, a facility that NPR found just happened to be affiliated with the doctor’s office, further raising the costs.

Kasdan disputed the bill immediately, telling her doctor that she would report the office to New York State’s Office of Professional Medical conduct. She then brought it to the attention of Bill of the Month. After the project started asking questions, Blue Cross Blue Shield said it would stop payment on the check.

If there’s anything to be gained from the situation, it’s an excellent reminder to ask your doctor which tests they’re ordering and whether the labs they’re using are in your network, and, even if NPR doesn’t pick up your story, to not be afraid to contest your medical bills.

Read Kasdan’s full story here.