Chris Hedges's Blog, page 72

Mitch McConnell Has No Interest in a Fair Impeachment Trial

This piece originally appeared on Truthout. 

In my decades as a criminal defense attorney, I have never seen a trial where the jurors admit they aren’t impartial, coordinate the trial process with the defendant and then, as promised, find the defendant not guilty. And yet, that is exactly what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell aims to do.

Negating any semblance of conducting a fair trial, McConnell has brazenly declared his intention to violate the senators’ oath of impartiality and deny the right to call witnesses to testify at the Senate trial on the articles of impeachment.

It’s no wonder that the leaders of the House of Representatives are waiting to transmit the articles to the Senate until they receive assurances that the senators will hold a fair trial. Now that the House has voted to impeach Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the decision about whether to convict Trump and remove him from office will be made by the Senate. But that trial will be a farce and a sham if the Senate majority refuses to provide basic guarantees of fairness.

McConnell Rejects Schumer’s Proposed Witnesses

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and McConnell are at loggerheads over how to proceed with the trial. Schumer sent a proposal for ground rules, modeled on those used during the Clinton impeachment, to McConnell. Schumer requested that the trial begin on January 7 and that each side have a time limit to present its case. He asked that four witnesses with direct knowledge of the facts be called to testify for a maximum of four hours each. They are Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; former National Security Adviser John Bolton; Mulvaney’s senior adviser Rob Blair; and Michael Duffy, Associate Director of National Security at the Office of Management and Budget. All four refused to appear in response to subpoenas from the House during its impeachment inquiry.

McConnell rejected Schumer’s proposed witnesses, stating that it is the House’s “duty to investigate” and the Senate will not volunteer for a “fishing expedition.”

Speaking on the Senate floor the day after the House passed the articles of impeachment, McConnell referred to the House impeachment inquiry a “slapdash process,” calling it “the most rushed, least thorough impeachment in modern history.” He accused Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of wishing that “the Senate should supplement [House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam] Schiff’s sloppy work.”

But Trump took actions that denied the House committees valuable evidence. In an unprecedented move, Trump ordered all executive branch employees to defy committee subpoenas and refuse to testify in the impeachment inquiry. He also refused to turn over any subpoenaed documents, another contrast with prior impeachments. Trump asserted that subpoenaed witnesses who declined to testify would receive “absolute immunity” from criminal or civil prosecution. That doctrine is a creation of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. No court, statute or constitution has ever recognized it.

Nine witnesses followed Trump’s order and refused to testify. Nevertheless, 17 witnesses provided depositions and 12 witnesses testified in the House proceedings. They were members of the Trump administration and they provided overwhelming evidence of Trump’s impeachable conduct.

Trump Obstructed Congress by Forbidding Witnesses to Testify

The article of obstruction of Congress was based on Trump’s blanket refusal to provide documents and allow subpoenaed witnesses to testify before the House of Representatives, to whom the Constitution grants “the sole power of impeachment.”

If witnesses are not allowed to testify at the Senate trial, it “would be the first impeachment trial in history that heard no witnesses,” Schumer stated on the Senate floor in response to McConnell’s remarks. The Senate has never “prevented House managers from fairly prosecuting their case,” Schumer added. If, as McConnell insisted, the House’s case for impeachment is so weak, why is he “so afraid of relevant witnesses and documents?”, Schumer asked. All four proposed witnesses are top Trump officials and Schumer said he doesn’t even know if their testimony would incriminate or exculpate Trump.

McConnell favors a pro forma trial with no witnesses that leads to a rapid acquittal of Trump. On Fox News, McConnell told Sean Hannity there was “zero chance” Trump would be removed from office. McConnell pledged “total coordination” with the White House and Trump’s defense attorneys. The senators, who will sit as jurors at the trial, must take an oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.” But McConnell didn’t even pretend to be impartial, declaring, “I’m not an impartial juror … I’m not impartial about this at all.”

What does a fair trial require?

To have a fair trial, both sides must be allowed to subpoena witnesses and documents. The House managers, as well as Trump, should be permitted to call witnesses and present documentary evidence. McConnell seeks to violate that right.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who has advised the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment inquiry, thinks the House can leverage its power over the timing of the transmittal of the articles to the Senate. “It would be justified to withhold going forward with a Senate trial,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “Under the current circumstances, such a proceeding would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal. It would also fail to inform the public, which has the right to know the truth about the conduct of its president.” Tribe tweeted, “Schumer’s proposal to McConnell. If he rejects these reasonable ground rules & insists on a non-trial, the House should consider treating that as a breach of the Senate’s oath & withholding the Articles until the Senate reconsiders.“

After the House voted for impeachment, Pelosi told reporters she would hold the articles back until it became clear there would be a fair trial in the Senate. “We will make our decision as to when we are going to send it when we see what they are doing on the Senate side,” she said. “So far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to us.”

The rules adopted by the House require a separate vote to give Pelosi the green light to appoint House managers and send the articles to the Senate. A sizable number of Democratic House members support a delay in transmitting the articles to the Senate while they determine whether the Senate trial will be fair.

Is Transmittal of Articles Necessary to Complete Impeachment Process?

Some Democrats argue that the House should never send the articles to the Senate to deny Trump an acquittal. But Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who testified at the House Judiciary Committee hearing, without citing any authority, maintains that impeachment is not complete until the House transmits the articles to the Senate for trial. “‘Impeachment’ under the Constitution means the House sending its approved articles to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the president is impeached,” he wrote in Bloomberg. “If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president,” Feldman asserted. “If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.”

Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman disagrees with Feldman. He asserts that by adopting House Resolution 755, the House effectively impeached Trump. That resolution says, “That Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.” Although the House adopted each article separately, House rules provide that, “the adoption of the resolution [755], as amended, shall be divided between the two articles.” Moreover, House impeachment rules state, “The respondent in an impeachment proceeding is impeached by the adoption of the House of articles of impeachment.” Furthermore, Pelosi declared at a news conference the day after the impeachment that the articles adopted by the House make Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors “an established fact,” not simply probable cause, that Trump committed abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Regardless, however, Feldman admits that the Constitution does not prohibit a delay by the House in sending the articles to the Senate. Thus even if one were to accept Feldman’s argument, the eventual transmittal of the articles will complete the impeachment of Trump.

After a brief meeting, McConnell and Schumer were unable to agree on a process for the trial. The Senate will recess for the holiday break and return January 3 but won’t make decisions about the trial rules until January 6.

Although it requires 67 senators to convict and remove a president, procedural decisions such as establishing trial rules require only 51. Since there are 53 Republicans in the Senate, three could defect and vote for rules acceptable to Democrats. Those most likely to buck their GOP colleagues are Senators Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitt Romney (Utah).

Meanwhile, Trump remains an impeached president who cannot yet brag that he’s been vindicated by the Senate.

The Most Important Free Press Stories of 2019

The most important stories of the year for those who care about a free press involve the arrest of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy at the request of the U.S. government, and the rearrest of the whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, a website that publishes official documents exposing the crimes and lies of world leaders. Before publishing, WikiLeaks verifies that the evidence submitted is authentic. Of the millions of items published by WikiLeaks, not one has been shown to be fraudulent or untruthful.

Chelsea Manning is a former Army intelligence officer who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks that exposed war crimes and official lies relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning confessed to her crimes and was sentenced to 35 years of incarceration. But her sentence was commuted after seven years by President Barack Obama, who conceded that she had acted out of a sense of duty to expose wrongdoing.

For at least three decades, our national government has primarily served the interests of the 1 percent—the major donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. To carry on in such an undemocratic fashion in a country that still requires leaders to stand for election, our leaders need to lie with impunity, especially about matters of war. To get away with this, they classify as secret every official document that has the potential to embarrass them or enlighten the people.

Of course, Assange is not the first publisher to expose government crimes. What makes Assange such a threat, and so hated, is that he publishes official government documents in real time that are impossible to dispute or discredit.

To grasp the power of WikiLeaks, imagine it had existed in 2002 during the run-up to the Iraq War. At that time, the administration of George W. Bush was telling the nation that we faced a grave threat from Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein, who we were told had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program and had amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of deadly VX, sarin, and mustard gas. The situation was said to be so dangerous that we couldn’t even wait a couple of months to allow a team of international weapons inspectors to finish their job. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned that the smoking gun in Iraq may “be a mushroom cloud.”

Of course, our leaders produced no actual evidence to support their claims about Hussein and Iraq. All of the evidence was classified. The American people—who were called upon to pay for the war in blood and treasure—were not entitled to see any of the actual evidence for war. The mainstream press, including the New York Times and NPR, repeated the evidence-free assertions by our public officials as if they were proven fact. The American people were given no choice but to fall in line.

Years later, after it was too late to do any good, the actual intelligence reports were leaked. They showed that nearly everything we were told by the Bush administration about its evidence for war was a lie. The wild claims about chemical weapons were all based on the stories of a known fabricator named Curveball, and on tales invented under torture by a CIA prisoner named al-Libi. The dire warnings about a “mushroom cloud” were based on a forged document that pretended to show Hussein purchasing uranium from Africa, together with a bogus report that ordinary aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq might be used to enrich uranium.

Had WikiLeaks existed in 2002, a patriotic officer like Manning might have leaked the official intelligence reports exposing the lies our leaders were telling to get us to go along with the war. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved, and the trillions of dollars spent on the Iraq War could have been used instead to give every American free health care, free college, and a Green New Deal.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been publicly threatening Assange since Pompeo was CIA chief. But there is concern among Assange’s foes that a fair-minded judge might recognize that Assange’s actions were no different than the actions of The New York Times and the Guardian, which also published the leaked material from Manning. If these establishment papers were protected by the First Amendment, then why aren’t Assange and WikiLeaks?

This explains why the U.S. government has put Manning back in jail. They need her to testify that Assange helped her steal classified documents, something the government almost certainly knows is untrue. The Obama Justice Department spent years trying to find evidence to justify a claim that Assange did more than act as a publisher but found nothing to justify that accusation. Besides, if the Trump Justice Department had any evidence that Assange participated in the theft of classified documents, it wouldn’t need to force Manning to say it.

This holiday season, Assange is locked away in the Belmarsh high-security prison in London, awaiting extradition to the U.S., while Manning is back in jail in Virginia. Our government believes that any person with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power must be eliminated. I am sending these words of encouragement to Assange and Manning. May they continue to find the strength to resist a ruthless foe and help save our democracy.

This article is distributed in partnership with Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader.

Saudis Sentence 5 to Death in Jamal Khashoggi’s Killing

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced five people to death Monday for the killing of Washington Post columnist and royal family critic Jamal Khashoggi, whose grisly slaying in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul drew international condemnation and cast a cloud of suspicion over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Three other people were found guilty by Riyadh’s criminal court of covering up the crime and were sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison, according to a statement read by the Saudi attorney general’s office on state TV.

In all, 11 people were put on trial in Saudi Arabia over the killing. The names of those found guilty were not made public by the government. Executions in the kingdom are carried out by beheading, sometimes in public. All the verdicts can be appealed.

A small number of diplomats, including from Turkey, as well as members of Khashoggi’s family were allowed to attend the nine court sessions, though independent media were barred.

While the case in Saudi Arabia has largely concluded, questions linger outside Riyadh about the crown prince’s culpability in the slaying.

Agnes Callamard, who investigated the killing for the United Nations, reacted by tweeting that the verdicts are a “mockery” and that the masterminds behind the crime “have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial.” Amnesty International called the outcome “a whitewash which brings neither justice nor truth.”

Khashoggi, who was a resident of the U.S., had walked into his country’s consulate on Oct. 2, 2018, for an appointment to pick up documents that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancee. He never walked out, and his body has not been found.

A team of 15 Saudi agents had flown to Turkey to meet Khashoggi inside the consulate. They included a forensic doctor, intelligence and security officers and individuals who worked for the crown prince’s office, according to Callamard’s independent investigation. Turkish officials allege Khashoggi was killed and then dismembered with a bone saw.

The slaying stunned Saudi Arabia’s Western allies and immediately raised questions about how the high-level operation could have been carried out without the knowledge of Prince Mohammed — even as the kingdom insists the crown prince had nothing to do with the killing.

In an interview in September with CBS’ “60 Minutes”, Prince Mohammed said: “I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia.” But he reiterated that he had no knowledge of the operation, saying he could not keep such close track of the country’s millions of employees.

The prince’s father, King Salman, ordered a shake-up of top security posts after the killing.

Turkey, a rival of Saudi Arabia, has used the killing on its soil to pressure the kingdom. Turkey, which had demanded the suspects be tried there, apparently had the Saudi Consulate bugged and has shared audio of the killing with the C.I.A., among others.

Saudi Arabia initially offered shifting accounts about Khashoggi’s disappearance. As international pressure mounted because of the Turkish leaks, the kingdom eventually settled on the explanation that he was killed by rogue officials in a brawl.

The trial concluded the killing was not premeditated, according to Shaalan al-Shaalan, a spokesperson from the Saudi attorney general’s office.

The 101-page report released this year by Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, included details from the audio Turkish authorities shared with her. She reported hearing Saudi agents waiting for Khashoggi to arrive and one of them asking how they would carry out the body.

Not to worry, the doctor said. “Joints will be separated. It is not a problem,” he said in the audio. “If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished. We will wrap each of them.”

Khashoggi had spent the last year of his life in exile in the U.S. writing in the Post about human rights violations in Saudi Arabia. At a time when Prince Mohammed’s social reforms were being widely hailed in the West, Khashoggi’s columns criticized the parallel crackdown on dissent the prince was overseeing. Numerous critics of the Saudi crown prince are in prison and face trial on national security charges.

In Washington, Congress has said it believes Prince Mohammed is “responsible for the murder.” President Donald Trump has condemned the killing but has stood by the 34-year-old crown prince and defended U.S.-Saudi ties. Washington has sanctioned 17 Saudis suspected of being involved.

Among those sanctioned is Saud al-Qahtani, a hawkish former adviser to the crown prince. The Saudi attorney general’s office said Monday that al-Qahtani was investigated and had no proven involvement in the killing.

Meanwhile, Ahmed al-Asiri, also a former adviser to the crown prince who was deputy head of intelligence, was tried and released because of insufficient evidence, the attorney general’s office said.

The court also ordered the release of Saudi Arabia’s consul-general in Istanbul at the time, Mohammed al-Otaibi. He is among those sanctioned by the U.S. over his “involvement in gross violations of human rights.” The U.S. State Department has also issued travel bans against his immediate family.

In Turkey, Yasin Aktay, a member of Turkey’s ruling party and a friend of Khashoggi’s, criticized the verdict, saying the Saudi court had failed to bring the real perpetrators to justice.

“The prosecutor sentenced five hit men to death but did not touch those who were behind the five,” Aktay said.

Although Khashoggi’s killing tarnished Prince Mohammed’s reputation in the West, he is hugely popular at home, especially among young Saudis happy with the social changes he has ushered in. Some American executives who had stayed away because of the backlash over the slaying have resumed doing business with the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia over the past months has opened the previously closed-off country to tourists and travelers from around the world as part of a push to boost the economy and change perceptions of the kingdom.

___

Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

Baba Ram Dass, Spiritual Guru and LSD Pioneer, Dies at 88

MAUI, Hawaii — Baba Ram Dass, the 1960s counterculture spiritual leader who experimented with LSD and traveled to India to find enlightenment, returning to share it with Americans, has died. He was 88.

Dass’ foundation, Love Serve Remember, announced late Sunday that the author and spiritual leader died peacefully at his home earlier in the day. No cause of death was given.

He had suffered a severe stroke in 1997 that left him paralyzed on the right side and, for a time, unable to speak. More recently, he underwent hip surgery after he was injured in a fall in November 2008, according to his website.

“I had really thought about checking out, but your love and your prayers convinced me not to do it. … It’s just beautiful,” he told followers in a videotaped message at the time from his hospital bed in Hawaii.

Over the years, Ram Dass — born Richard Alpert — associated with the likes of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote about his experiences with drugs, set up projects to help prisoners and those facing terminal illness and sought to enlighten others about the universal struggle with aging.

But he was best known for the 1971 “Be Here Now,” written after his trip to India. The spiritual primer found its way into thousands of backpacks around the world.

“I want to share with you the parts of the internal journey that never get written up in the mass media …,” he wrote. “I’m not interested in what you read in the Saturday Evening Post about LSD. This is the story of what goes on inside a human being who is undergoing all these experiences.”

Among his other books were “How Can I Help?” and “Compassion in Action” and “Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying.”

“In the ’60s, I was an uncle for a movement,” he told The Associated Press in 1998. “I was always showing people where they could go. I went east, and then there was a big movement east.”

Now, he said, “the baby boomers are getting old — and I’m learning how to get old for them. That’s my role.”

The Boston-born son of a prominent attorney, Ram Dass entered the public sphere in the early 1960s as a young Harvard psychology professor. Alpert, as he was then known, earned a doctorate at Stanford University.

He and Leary, a Harvard colleague, began a series of experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, giving the drugs to prisoners, philosophers and students to study their effects.

Ram Dass later wrote that he tried psilocybin, the compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms, in Leary’s living room.

“I peered into the semidarkness and recognized none other than myself in cap and gown and hood,” he wrote. “It was as if that part of me, which was a Harvard professor, had separated or dissociated itself from me.”

The experiments got him and Leary kicked out of Harvard in 1963.

“It was a little too sensational,” Ram Dass said in 1998. “We were the starters of it.”

He and Leary retreated to an upstate New York mansion that drew Beat Generation figures Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

By the late 1960s, LSD and other hallucinogens had become part of pop culture and a rite of passage for many young Americans.

But Alpert eventually sought a way to reach a state of enlightenment without drugs. Following Ginsberg’s advice, he headed to India in 1967, where he met the man who became his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.

There, his guru introduced him to yoga, meditation, Buddhism and Sufism, and gave him the name Ram Dass, Hindi for “servant of God.” (He is often called Baba Ram Dass; “baba” is an honorary title.)

Ram Dass wrote “Be Here Now” when he returned to the United States. Around the same time, he told The New York Times that he had turned away from drugs, saying: “I don’t want to break the law, since that leads to fear and paranoia.”

In 1974, Ram Dass founded the Hanuman Foundation, which set up programs such as the Prison Ashram Project to introduce inmates to spirituality. He also helped create the Seva Foundation, which works to prevent blindness and helps community groups in developing countries. His Love Serve Remember Foundation is dedicated to preserving his teachings and those of Neem Karoli Baba.

Ram Dass lived for many years in the quiet town of San Anselmo, Calif., about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of San Francisco, surrounded by the markers of his life straddling East and West: Japanese prints and statues of Buddha, seashells from the South Pacific and a well-used player piano.

In later years, he moved to Woodside, California. More recently, he was based in Maui.

He said his 1997 stroke brought physical and spiritual suffering, but that he came to see the suffering as a source of insight that he could share with others facing their own battles with illness and aging.

“It’s brought out new aspects of myself and aspects of my relationship to the world,” he said in 1998. The stroke has gotten me into a stage of life — this is a stage close to death, a stage which is inward.”

After regaining his speech, Ram Dass returned to the lecture circuit, starting by touring Northern California sharing tales of what he called his state of “heavy grace.”

“All illnesses are part of the passing show,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. “You are not just your body. You are the witness of your body.”

In the mid-1970s, when his old friend Leary was in prison on drug charges, Ram Dass took part in a news conference accusing Leary of agreeing to testify against others.

Not long before Leary died of cancer in 1996, Ram Dass said that he and Leary “relate through consciousness. If he’s in Los Angeles or in heaven, I can’t imagine how that will change anything.”

Ralph Nader: Democrats Have No Excuse for Dealing With Trump

While attention was focused on the House of Representatives’ impeachment of Donald J. Trump, legislators from both parties were secretly huddling with White House aides to seal a $1.4 trillion budget deal to fund the government until next September. They were rushing to do this to avoid a partial government shutdown starting December 21, 2019.

Had the budget been deliberated in open Congressional hearings, the media would have reported on this backroom deal and the people of this country would have had a chance to weigh in during the proceedings. Instead, a degraded Congress pulled a fast one on the citizens. This obfuscation is especially unacceptable considering that these lawmakers work only three days a week at best— when they are not in recess altogether.

Astoundingly the Democrats also caved in on Trump’s wall! After blocking Trump’s funding demand for the wall for three years, the Democrats approved $1.4 billion for the wall and even allowed Trump to divert funds from the Pentagon to that porous, wasteful barrier. In so doing, the Democrats legitimized one of the egregious, impeachable offenses Trump committed earlier this year when he seized $3.6 billion from the Pentagon’s budget in money not approved for the wall. The Washington Post reported that former secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus tweeted “As hurricane heads for Camp Lejeune Trump takes $3.6b from military for needless wall. Same amt Marines say needed to fix Lejeune after last storm.”

Trump usurped the Congressional “power of the purse,” to use James Madison’s phrase, under our Constitution. Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi declined to charge Trump with this and other similarly impeachable spending violations. Now we know one reason why—the ongoing secret budget deal.

Just as astonishing was that the  Democrats caved on the funding for Obamacare. Year after year, Democratic leaders defended Obamacare, rather than support more efficient  full Medicare for All (with free choice of doctor and hospital). See H.R. 1384 for the most recent version of Medicare for All.

With the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just deciding against the individual mandate in Obamacare, what does the House Democratic leadership do? They go along with the Republicans’ demand to repeal the medical device and health insurance taxes that were helping to fund Obamacare’s expansion of health insurance coverage for twenty million people.

It gets worse. The House Democrats approved a huge increase of $22 billion to the already bloated, wasteful military budget in return for Trump approving paid family leave for federal government employees. The Democrats made this deal instead of just pushing for paid maternity leave,  a right provided in all other Western democracies and numerous dictatorships in the world!

“No problem,” say the feeble Democrats. It is just more of the terrible practice by the Democrats of giving equal increases for the military budget, demanded by the Republican illegal war hawks, as the price for social service funds for low income families and children. What a grotesque way to spend taxpayer money!

To what level has this Congress lowered itself? Allowing the Trump dump to contaminate Congress even extends to cruel bigotry. They allowed Trump to extend his racist discrimination against the American citizens of Puerto Rico by reducing the Medicaid funds from $12 billion over four years to up to $5.7 billion over two years. The higher sum and longer term already were endorsed by Republican and Democratic leaders on two Congressional Committees.

Robert Greenstein, director of the highly respected Center on Budget and policy priorities, declared that “with another funding cliff looming in two years under the new agreement, Puerto Rico may continue to lack the certainty it needs to commit to long-term increases of its very low payment rates to health care providers [vendors] to stem their alarming exodus to the mainland, to provide coverage for such key health treatments as drugs to treat Hepatitis C, and to cover more poor, uninsured residents.”

Over the years, Congress has weakened its exclusive constitutional “power of the purse” by giving presidents waivers. As with the war powers, Congress has delegated more of its constitutional authority to the Executive Branch.

Just days ago, the racist President Trump bragged before a large campaign rally that he has cut off “six hundred million dollars” in aid for Palestinian relief, including aid for suffering children. This was a long term assistance program, under past Republican and Democratic administrations, to help provide the barest necessities to displaced and impoverished Palestinians whose territories are blockaded or militarily occupied by the Israeli government.

Washington justified such expenditures for both humanitarian and security purposes. No more, says the imperial Trump, exercising his Congressionally-granted waiver.

Congress has also long abandoned its constitutional authority over tariffs to the imperial presidency. Constitutional litigator Alan Morrison has challenged the White House’s unilateral imposition of tariffs—now involving tens of billions of dollars—on imports from foreign countries. In January Morrison will argue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that the authority to impose tariffs belongs to Congress.

What is Trump doing with these tens of billions of dollars deposited in the U.S. Treasury? Congress has not approved spending them for any programs or objectives. When I asked a staffer with the House Budget Committee what is being done with loads of money, she replied that “we have it under study.”

Secret government has its direct consequences for the American people, and abdication of congressional checks on the Executive Branch is harmful and cowardly.

Argentina Defies the Americas’ Crisis of Democracy

Everything grinds to a halt in the Buenos Aires heat. Pedestrians retreat indoors, shops can close for hours at a time, and the city itself seems to buckle in the sub-tropical humidity. So when a clutch of sanitation workers marched slowly up a cordoned-off Avenida Rivadavia earlier this month, the sun beating down on their neon vests, dozens of those who had defied temperatures in the 90s to support President-elect Alberto Fernández took notice, briefly erupting in applause. The workers grinned broadly, and several made the “V” for victory hand sign synonymous with Peronism, as well as the new coalition party Frente De Todos (Everyone’s Front).

Inside the Palace of the Argentine National Congress, Fernández delivered his inaugural address, laying out his vision for a more egalitarian society and a new social contract. Fernández, who defeated conservative incumbent Mauricio Macri by just shy of 8% in the October elections, acknowledged: “Los Argentinos hemos aprendido así, que las debilidades y las insuficiencias de la democracia solo se resuelvan con mas democracia.” (“We Argentinians have learned that the weaknesses and insufficiencies of democracy can only be resolved with more democracy.”)

In something of a departure from his Peronist predecessors, he also pledged to fulfill the dream of Rául Alfonsín—a member of the once-rival Radical Party. “Cuando mi mandato concluya, la democracia Argentina estará cumpliendo 40 años de vigencia ininterrumpida,” Fernandez closed. “Ese día quisiera poder demostrar que Raúl Alfonsín tenía razón.” (“When my term ends, Argentinian democracy will complete 40 uninterrupted years. That day I wish I could show Raúl Alfonsín that he was right.”) Alfonsín, who served as Argentina’s first democratically elected president following the military dictatorship that ruled from 1976-83, had famously pledged that: “Con democracia, se come, se cura y se educa.” (“With democracy, you eat, heal and educate.”)

Like much of the West, Latin America finds itself at a crossroads. After 15 years of center-left governance, Uruguay has turned to the right. Austerity measures have triggered mass demonstrations in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, with the state cracking down violently in each, while democracy backslides in Brazil and Bolivia—the latter the recent victim of what deposed President Evo Morales has called a U.S.-backed coup. Mexico under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Argentina stand alone among the region’s powers offering a popular, democratic alternative to authoritarianism and outright fascism. But whether the latter’s return to Peronism signals a greater pendulum swing toward social democracy or merely proves the exception to a new world order remains an open question.

To understand how Argentina has managed to avoid the kind of civil unrest that has seized its South American neighbors, and why it’s positioned to lead a left-wing revival on the continent despite an economy marred by runaway inflation and a foreign debt in excess of $100 billion, one must first examine its response to the junta government known as “El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (“The National Reorganization Process”).

“Argentina is the only South American country that has ruled—and continues to rule in a series of significant civil judgments—against those who perpetrated the crimes of its dictatorship in the 1970s,” says María Esperanza Casullo, professor at the Universidad de Rio Negro and the author of “Por Qué Funciona El Populismo?” (“Why Does Populism Work?”). “This isn’t just important for legal reasons,” she notes, “but because Argentina has maintained a series of democratic habits and commitments that don’t exist elsewhere. We see, for example, that the inheritance of Pinochetismo (1973-90) is much deeper in Chile [than the junta’s] in Argentina. At the same time, Argentina’s political parties—and not just the Peronist party—are big, with deep roots in civil society. And so they have the capacity to channel the demands of different unions and social movements, be they youth groups or women’s organizations. For all of Argentina’s problems, and there are many, these demands remain within the political system rather than outside of it.”

Argentina’s politicization, and the resilience of its commitment to democracy, may prove contemporary Peronism’s most enduring legacy. In March 2004, on the 28th anniversary of the military coup, then-President Nestor Kirchner made the radical decision to pull down the portraits of two former members of the junta from the Colegio Militar de la Nación (National Military College). He would later inaugurate a memorial museum at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), which served as a clandestine torture site during the dictatorship. The moves anticipated a series of high-profile prosecutions during his government and that of his wife and successor, Cristina Fernández, that cemented their commitment to human rights. “I come to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the state for the shame of having remained silent about these atrocities during 20 years of democracy,” Kirchner said at the time. “And to those who committed these macabre and sinister acts, now we can call you what you are by name: You are assassins who have been repudiated by the people.”

The inauguration of Alberto Fernández confirmed both his place in this political tradition and its wide appeal with the Argentinian electorate. Like sails amid a sea of faces and limbs, banners from such political groups as the Frente Nacional Movimientos Del Sur, Frente Patria Grande, Plataforma Por Una Nueva Mayoria and the Partido Comunista Congreso Extraordinario, the Communist Party of Argentina, among countless others adorned the festivities. Ubiquitous were the green bandannas of local abortion rights activists, as was the Wiphala flag of the Andes’ indigenous peoples—a group that has recently become a target of the Christofascist Jeanine Añez regime in Bolivia. As the crowd followed the president’s motorcade down Avenida de Mayo, the air thick with the smell of chorizo and charcoal from the makeshift parrillas (grills), I was nearly bowled over by a division of La Campora, a youth organization named for former Peronist President Héctor José Cámpora that first came to prominence under Nestor Kirchner during the first major swell of the pink tide.

Of the dozen or so attendees with whom I spoke, each identified as middle or working class. Music instructor Gabriela Manfredi, 54, explained that she was celebrating Fernández’s inauguration because she “adheres to a national, popular project.” Florencia Perez, a 28-year-old communications student, expressed a similar sentiment. “I believe we have the right to live with dignity,” she said. “We have an obligation to share the pie.” When asked how she would characterize the last four years under Macri, she pursed her lips before offering the one-word answer: “sad.” Perez later added that the outgoing administration “robbed an entire generation of their future.”

Even on its own terms, Macri’s Cambiemos government proved an unmitigated disaster. Riding a wave of reaction to the presidencies of Nestor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former real estate developer and football club owner won a narrow runoff victory in 2015 after promising “pobreza cero” (zero poverty), robust foreign investment and the elimination of Argentina’s deficit. “Yo quiero que seamos un país normal” (“I want us to be a normal country”), he told conservative television host Mirtha Legrand shortly after his election. For Macri, this meant the elimination of thousands of federal jobs, a settlement favorable to so-called “vulture funds” on the country’s debt obligation and the implementation of numerous austerity measures. According to Argentina’s Universidad Católica, he left office with more than 40% of the population living in poverty, up from 29% in 2015. Argentina’s GDP shrank 3.4%, foreign investors largely stayed away and the country handcuffed itself anew to the International Monetary Fund after accepting a record-breaking $57 billion loan.

Perhaps more consequential, the Macri administration frequently adopted authoritarian measures despite his running as a broadly liberal, post-political candidate. (When it issued a series of new banknotes in June 2016, replacing prominent historical figures with leopards, right whales and other native fauna, the Central Bank of Argentina said that it was “[focusing] on the future rather than the past.”)

In a matter of months, with the backing of the Cambiemos government, Jujuy Province Governor Gerardo Morales had Tupac Amaru Neighborhood Association leader and indigenous organizer Milagro Sala arrested on charges of fraud and criminal conspiracy. Amnesty International condemned her detainment as unlawful, but she was nonetheless sentenced in January to 13 years in prison. In 2017, 28-year-old environmental activist Santiago Maldonado went missing in Patagonia after witnesses claimed he was detained by a militarized police force—the disappearance evoking memories of the 30,000 who were abducted and killed by the military regime. His body was later discovered at the bottom of the Chubut River, and the episode sparked a protest movement that bore his name, “Donde Está Santiago Maldonado?” (“Where Is Santiago Maldonado?”).

More recently, Macri ignited controversy by honoring 12 soldiers killed by Montonero guerrilla forces during an attack in Formosa in 1975. Progressive critics maintain the ceremony lent legitimacy to the once-fringe “Teoría de Los Dos Demonios” (“Theory of the Two Demons”), which accepts as morally equivalent the violent acts of political dissidents and those of state actors during the dictatorship.

“Today, I’m celebrating the end of the worst government in the Democratic era of the past 36 years,” said a 50-year-old public employee who asked that he be identified only as Flavio. “This was a government that destroyed Argentinian constitutionality, a government that persecuted its political enemies and a government [characterized] by a lack of civil liberties. … The Argentinian right has been put on notice once again that if it follows this recipe, the people will remove them.”

Running on a slogan of “Hay futuro para vos, hay futuro para todos” (“There’s a future for you, there’s a future for everybody”) with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as his vice president, Alberto Fernández, who previously served as the Chief of Cabinet of Ministers for President Nestor Kirchner, and whose son is an openly bisexual queer performer, offered an unabashedly progressive alternative. Frente de Todos successfully synthesized calls for economic and social justice while presenting itself as a natural evolution of Kirchnerismo—a populist movement that mitigated the effects of the 2002 economic crisis while pulling millions out of poverty, but was nonetheless dogged by allegations of cronyism and corruption.

In October, a federal court dropped two cases against Fernández de Kirchner stemming from her time as president—the first related to alleged bribery in her home province of Santa Cruz, and the second concerning the importation of liquefied natural gas. The same court upheld a third indictment for sweetheart public works contracts amounting to 175 counts of “passive bribery.” (Fernández de Kirchner denies all wrongdoing and says she was unjustly targeted by the outgoing Macri administration. “The role played in different areas by the technical and non-technical areas of the government in putting together this systematic plan is what is known as ‘lawfare,'” she told an Argentinian court this month, calling her trial a “master class” in judicial persecution.)

“Alberto Fernandez embodies this [progressivism] in a very specific way within recent Argentinian history, not so much as a revival of the pink tide or the arguments of the pink tide, but instead as a comprehensive understanding of what Democratic politics might mean in Argentina,” says Ernesto Semán, an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway and the author of “Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina’s International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas.” “He has combined traditionally Peronist claims of social justice and general well-being with a much more conciliatory discourse that brings together different social, cultural and business sectors—including some of those that have been part of the anti-Kirchernismo coalition of the past four years—into a program of national unity. So it’s easy to anticipate conflicts in the near term.”

“I think his political argument for this wider approach is [evident] in his consistent rhetorical return to Alfonsín,” Semán continues. “That’s very different from the Kirchners. [In his inauguration speech], he didn’t say he was going to fulfill Perón’s dreams or realize my friend, Nestor’s, ambitions. He said my goal is to make a reality the democratic vision that Alfonsín put forward. Time has past, and Alfonsín is [now] dead, so I think that allows Fernández to use him as a symbol of something much wider. [But] he has also said that Bob Dylan’s songs have influenced him more than Perón. That’s almost profane for a Peronist candidate, and I don’t even know if it’s true.”

With a thick mustache and heavy bags under his eyes, Fernández even physically evokes the “father of modern Argentinian democracy.” After the fall of the junta in 1983, Alfonsín led the nation for six years, staving off a second coup attempt by mutineer officers known as “carapintadas” (“painted faces”) in 1987. While he was ultimately voted out in 1989 amid hyperinflation, he proved enormously successful in rebuilding Argentinian civil society and bringing to light the human rights abuses of the junta. A report released by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) titled “Nunca Más” (“Never Again”) detailed the military’s extensive crimes, including those of its Supreme Council.

“Alberto Fernández may construct a certain lineage by making gestures to [Juan] Perón, but what is the foundational promise that he returns to? It’s not the general, [and] it’s not 1945,” says University of Connecticut associate professor and author of “The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake” Mark Healey. “This is an attempt to use Peronism as a vehicle to build and fully achieve some of the ideas that Alfonsín set out in his administration. Whether he manages to succeed in that, and what that looks like in practice, are huge questions that are open for debate. … I think his speech is sending out a gentle but firm message that while it’s nice we’re singing ‘Vamos a Volver’ [‘We’ll Be Back’], we’re doing something else. He has a clear sense of what the moment calls for and what his mission is, but importantly in his speech, he aligns that with Cristina. There’s a key moment where he thanks [her] for having had the strategic wisdom to set out this path. He doesn’t want to return to late Kirchernism, and he’s signaling to its key actors that that’s what’s happening.”

If Fernández aims to distinguish himself from the Kirchners, his government nonetheless promises a consolidation of their social and political gains. Never was this more apparent than during his inaugural address when he pledged to radically overhaul the nation’s intelligence services, making public its secret funds and repurposing them for a new plan to combat hunger. Speaking to some of the more recent threats to Argentinian democracy while channeling the language of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons landmark report under Alfonsín, Fernández vowed: “Nunca más al estado secreto. Nunca más a la oscuridad que quiebra la confianza. Nunca más a los sótanos de la democracia. Nunca más es nunca más.” (“Never again to the secret state. Never again to the darkness that breaks the [public] trust. Never again to the basements of democracy. Never again is never again.”)

His margin for error will be perilously small. Six years after Fernández de Kirchner attempted to break up its monopoly, conservative media conglomerate Clarín Group still has a stranglehold on the Argentinian press. (A recent headline in the satirical magazine Barcelona read: “Por que fracasó: Los peores cuatro días desde la democracia” [“Why he failed: The worst four days since the return of democracy.”]) Prior to the inauguration, former Uruguayan President and one-time guerrilla fighter José “Pepe” Mujica summed things up to El Destape Radio in characteristically wry fashion: “La Argentina tendría que elegir no a Fernandez; a Mandrake tendría que elegir. Se precisa un mago, no un político, pero es imposible elegir un mago.” (“Argentina shouldn’t elect Fernandez; it should elect Mandrake [the magician]. A wizard is needed, not a politician, but it is impossible to elect a wizard.”)

While he was reflecting on the state of a country facing default, he might just as easily have been referring to Fernandez’s capacity to preserve a broad and unwieldy coalition, with potential faults along class lines. Just this past week, Daniel Funes de Rioja, president of La Coordinadora de Las Industrias de Productos Alimenticios (The Coordinator of the Food Products Industries), as well as a long-time advocate for employers’ rights, denounced Fernández’s executive order to double compensation over a period of 180 days for those fired without just cause.

Then, of course, there is the looming threat of the Trump administration, which has more actively meddled in South American politics than those of Barack Obama or George W. Bush—this despite the former lending its support to the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the latter backing an attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

That threat, both real and imagined, was not lost on 70-year-old retired agronomist Miguel Cagnoni. While celebrations kicked into high gear in Plaza de Mayo, with bands playing a mix of folklore and national rock music, Cagnoni shuffled down Avenida Presidente Roque Sáenz Peña, a Wiphala flag tied around his neck like a multi-colored cape. “I think Latin America needs to launch a new liberation campaign, like [José de] San Martin and Simón Bolívar, to combat a second Operation Condor by the United States,” he told me. “I [fear] that many local reactionary forces and Washington will unite to try and overthrow this government.”

With a sideways glance, Cagnoni then asked if I had ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was kidding, I think.

Despite these dangers, a Fernández administration offers reason for hope in Argentina and Latin America as a whole—an idea that recently found expression in the government’s decision to grant refugee status to Bolivia’s Evo Morales. “If Argentina achieves a level of stability, I do not envision the United States intervening the way it did in the 1960s or ’70s,” says Sebastián Etchemendy, a political scientist and associate professor at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. “[That is not a defense] of the Trump administration. Were it not for López Obrador or Fernández, it may well have captured or killed Evo [Morales]. So it’s clear who the United States is playing for. … But I don’t see a [left-leaning] government threatening its geopolitical interests beyond Argentina possibly getting tough with the IMF. I think it’s important to recognize that while the Fernández government is surrounded by right-wing forces, they are not comparable with the left that emerged at the [beginning of the aughts]. These governments are very weak. Bolsonaro is dealing with a bad economy in Brazil, [Piñera] faces calls for his resignation in Chile, and the [Añez] government in Bolivia is highly unstable. So Alberto Fernández can sustain a progressive [political project] alongside Mexico.”

Healey is more optimistic still. “What [happened] in Bolivia would have gone down very differently if Fernández were in power at the time,” he notes. “There has been a kind of open window for right-wing adventurism over the last two years thanks to Macri, and now Bolsonaro, that is closing. But the recent turmoil underscores the value of the unity that was constructed [at] the height of the pink tide, and while we’re obviously not getting back to that, the role that one or two large diplomatic actors can play in checking these enthusiasms and channeling them back toward institutional forms is non-trivial. And to the degree that Argentina is able to dig itself at least partly out of [its economic crisis], I think there is the potential for it to play a role in the region as a beacon for the restoration of a more participatory form of democracy.”

That Friday evening, three days after Fernández’s inauguration, hundreds gathered along Avenida 9 de Julio to watch the steel mural of Eva Perón affixed to the facade of the ministry of social development be illuminated for the first time in four years. (The Macri administration had pulled the plug on the grounds that it needed to “save energy.”) Fireworks lit up the broad avenue, pedestrians snapped photos on their phones and members of the Fernández administration, including Daniel Arroyo and Minister of Health Ginés González García, embraced.

The image of Evita may hold subtly different meanings than it did in 1945 or even 2011 when the mural was erected, but as night falls on Europe and the Americas, Argentinians could take comfort that the light was on.

Corporate Media Is Drawing All the Wrong Lessons From Corbyn’s Defeat

Conservative leader Boris Johnson swept to power in the UK’s December 12 elections, winning 365 of a possible 650 seats. Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation, after a bitterly disappointing night for his party.

Across the spectrum, corporate media all came to the same conclusion regarding the election: Corbyn’s loss spells the end for the US left and a “crushing defeat” (New York, 12/13/19) of the discredited policies of socialism. The press was filled with variations on the same reflexive warning to the Democrats: Don’t go left.

Indeed, CNN published three near-identical articles with that message in one 24-hour span  (12/12/19, 12/13/19, 12/13/19). The first, written even as polling stations were still open, suggested that “the Democratic Party may see a cautionary tale for the US 2020 presidential race,” as Corbyn “promised revolutionary change, a fundamental overhaul of society, heavy new taxes on the rich and a far bigger role for the state in the economy. Sound familiar?” It claimed he “took his party way to the left, leaving the more moderate ground where many voters feel most comfortable.” Going on to attack Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders specifically, it suggested that proposing a “state-run healthcare system” like Britain’s is a “vote killer,” and that Corbyn’s imminent loss implies Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg would be a better candidate.

Only a few hours later, John Avalon claimed (CNN, 12/13/19) the election was a “fierce repudiation” of leftist politics, presenting a “cautionary tale about the perils of polarization and the predictable dangers of embracing a far-left leader” who would nationalize key industries. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza (12/13/19) offered exactly the same opinion, claiming Johnson’s victory should “make 2020 Democrats nervous,” insinuating that embracing progressive politics and Medicare for All was political suicide, and recommending a more “moderate” or “pragmatic” candidate than Warren or Sanders.

The chorus did not stop at CNN, however. In fact, surveying just 24 hours of headlines is enough to understand the message corporate media appears so keen for you to hear:

“Corbyn’s UK Defeat Was Bad News for Sanders, Warren and America’s Left” (NBC News, 12/13/19),
“Labour’s Crushing Loss in Britain Adds to ‘Too Far Left?’ Debate in US” (New York Times, 12/13/19),
“The Real Warning in Labour’s Crushing Defeat” (The Week, 12/13/19; Yahoo! News, 12/13/19),
“Boris Johnson’s Win Should Send a Message to AOC, Warren and Sanders” (Fox News, 12/13/19),
“Jeremy Corbyn’s Disastrous Loss Should Be a Warning to US Leftists” (Washington Examiner, 12/13/19)
“Democrats Pick Over Labour Loss in UK as Biden Warns of Moving ‘So Far’ Left” (Guardian, 12/13/19)
“In British Election, Lessons for American Liberals: Jeremy Corbyn Was Loved by the Left, and He Just Got Trounced” (Newser, 12/13/19),
“Blowback From UK Election Burns Warren, Sanders: Centrists Warn Corbyn Defeat Highlights the Dangers of a Progressive Nominee” (Politico, 12/13/19),
“Corbyn’s Loss Is a Warning to Sanders, Warren and the Squad About the Limited Appeal of Socialism” (Hot Air, 12/13/19),
“Corbyn’s Bloodbath Defeat in UK Election Sends ‘Catastrophic Warning’ to 2020 Dems” (Fox News, 12/13/19).

There are a number of serious flaws with the reasoning, however. Few of these articles note that the UK’s version of Medicare for All, the National Health Service (NHS), is exceptionally popular, and the number one source of national pride for Britons. The NHS is so beloved that more people would countenance privatizing the army before the hospitals. Yet CNN still suggests that Corbyn’s support for the nationalized service contributed to his defeat. Furthermore, Labour’s leader and its overwhelmingly popular manifesto were virtually the same as in 2017, when Corbyn led the party to its best election result since World War II.

The only substantial difference between now and 2017 (unacknowledged in reporting) was that, at the demand of the “moderate” wing of his party, Corbyn had endorsed a second referendum on leaving the European Union without taking a position on the question, attempting to straddle the Brexit issue in a way that alienated both Remain and Leave voters. Just like the Democrats in 2016, a move to the center proved fatal.

Furthermore, none of the articles mentioned that there was another party who adopted precisely this “centrist,” “moderate,” “pragmatic”—or any other media code word (FAIR.org, 3/23/19, 8/21/19) meaning “corporate-approved”—position, and they fared poorly as a result. Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, presented herself exactly as such, and suffered the ignominy of losing her seat to a 27-year-old rookie challenger from the Scottish National Party.

Nevertheless, there are certainly lessons that American progressives could learn from Labour’s loss:

1. Get ready for a coordinated media smear campaign.

British media managed to turn Corbyn, an elderly, vegetarian, anti-war pacifist, into a figure of hate, presenting him as a terrorist sympathizer, a Communist spy and a national security threat. One academic study of media coverage included an entire section entitled “Delegitimization through Ridicule, Scorn and Personal Attacks,” finding that 75% of articles misrepresented Corbyn or his views. And a report from Loughborough University found a relentless and overwhelming anti-Labour and pro-Conservative message across the British media in the election run up. Progressives who intend to challenge power can expect similar coordinated attacks from power’s mouthpieces.

2. The antisemitism smears are coming.

Media managed to convince much of the British public that the lifelong anti-racism activist is a secret Jew-hater. British historian Mark Curtis noted there had been 1,450 articles in national newspapers linking Corbyn to antisemitism in the past three months alone. The reason for the allegations, as the Washington Post noted in a since-deleted tweet, was “because of [his] strong statements on Palestinian rights.”

The barrage succeeded. When media researchers asked the public what percentage of Labour members faced official complaints over antisemitism, the average guess was 34%. The actual answer is 0.1%. When questioned why they were off by such a massive factor, respondents replied that they chose a number that seemed commensurate with the media coverage.

This tactic will be far more difficult to stick on somebody like Sanders who speaks with such a stereotypical New York Jewish accent. Yet media, seeing how effective it was in discrediting a progressive in the UK, have already begun attempting to smear those around him (e.g., Spectator, 12/5/19; Commentary, 12/13/19).

Of particular note is a Washington Examiner article (12/13/19) claiming Sanders’ campaign is “the most antisemitic in decades.” Its author, Tiana Lowe, calls infamous fascist troll Milo Yiannopoulos “awesome” and regularly boasts of her pride in her Nazi collaborator grandfather, whose organization participated in the Holocaust that killed Sanders’ close relatives. Nevertheless, the attacks, if not the substance of the allegations, must be taken seriously.

3. Solidarity with developing countries will not be tolerated.

Corbyn, like Sanders, immediately condemned the US-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia, an action that drew the ire of an outraged pro-coup media (London Independent, 11/11/19; Daily Express, 11/11/19), who accused him of putting “Marxist solidarity ahead of democracy” (London Times, 11/12/19). Both men have been denounced for their connections, imaginary or otherwise, to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 3/5/19). Sanders’ history of solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s will be presented as support for a dictatorship. The left will have to have a response.

4. Building a movement to reach elderly voters will be crucial.

The Labour movement has managed to build an impressive network of alternative and social media countering the corporate press, reaching millions of young people, who voted 3 to 1 in favor of Corbyn. However, there was little concerted effort to reach elderly voters, who still largely rely on traditional media for news, information and opinion. This contributed to only 18% of those over 65 voting Labour, and the retired vote proved to be the backbone of the Tory victory. A similar phenomenon is happening in the US, where Sanders is the runaway favorite among the under-50s, but polls at just 5% among elderly voters, despite his commitment to the kind of social safety net programs they depend upon. Connecting with Boomers and Generation X, who use the Internet and social media for news far less than younger Americans, will require a specially geared effort.

5. Don’t unquestioningly accept advice from centrists.

Under enormous pressure from the “centrist” wing of his party and the media, Corbyn took a “on the one hand/on the other hand” approach to Brexit, the  dominant issue of the campaign. Rather than arguing that leaving the European Union was a necessary response to undemocratic, austerity-loving Eurocrats—or, contrariwise, that Brexit must be opposed as a xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants, the British equivalent of “build the wall”—Labour was induced to split the difference, promising to renegotiate a break with the EU and then asking voters once again whether they wanted to leave or not, while Corbyn professed neutrality on the question. Following the media’s insistent advice that the safe path is always somewhere in the middle, the position called to mind the line attributed to Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

Virtually every seat Labour lost was a “Leave” constituency, suggesting that Corbyn was hurt by Labour’s attempts to “moderate.” Turnout also declined from 2017 to 2019, and there are indications that the decline was greater in constituencies with more young voters—by far the most pro-Labour demographic group. All of the centrist defectors from the Conservatives and Labour lost their seats, as did the pro-EU, stop-Brexit-at-any-cost Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson—illustrating that the media center and the public center are not always the same.

Doctors Prescribe More of a Drug if Big Pharma Pays Them To

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Doctors who receive money from drugmakers related to a specific drug prescribe that drug more heavily than doctors without such financial ties, a new ProPublica analysis found. The pattern is consistent for almost all of the most widely prescribed brand-name drugs in Medicare, including drugs that treat diabetes, asthma and more.

The financial interactions include payments for delivering promotional talks, consulting and receiving sponsored meals and travel.

The 50 drugs in our analysis include many popular and expensive ones. Thirty-eight of the drugs have yearly costs exceeding $1,000 per patient, and many topped the list that are most costly for the Medicare Part D drug program.

Take Linzess, a drug to treat irritable bowel syndrome and severe constipation. From 2014 to 2018, the drug’s makers, Allergan and Ironwood, spent nearly $29 million on payments to doctors related to Linzess, mostly for meals and promotional speaking fees.

ProPublica’s analysis found that doctors who received payments related to Linzess in 2016 wrote 45% more prescriptions for the drug, on average, than doctors who received no payments.

Those findings were repeated for drug after drug. In 2016, doctors who received payments related to Myrbetriq, which treats overactive bladder, wrote 64% more prescriptions for the drug than those who did not. For Restasis, used to treat chronic dry eye, doctors who received payments wrote 141% more prescriptions. The pattern holds true for 46 of the 50 drugs.

On average, across all drugs, providers who received payments specifically tied to a drug prescribed it 58% more than providers who did not receive payments.

Other research, , has found a correlation between payments and overall prescribing. This new analysis expands upon past work by looking individually at a variety of popular drugs. “What clearly jumps out is how consistent the association is across drugs,” said Aaron Mitchell, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who has studied pharmaceutical payments for oncology drugs.

Our analysis looked at the relationship in two ways: whether those who received payments prescribed more of a drug, as well as whether those who prescribed a drug received higher payments than those who did not. We found that, on average, physicians who prescribed a drug received higher payments related to the drug that same year than those who didn’t prescribe it. For Linzess, the value of payments was more than four times higher for providers who prescribed the drug than among those who did not. For Myrbetriq, it was three times higher, and for Restasis, it was twice as much. (Read our methodology for more about the analysis.)

Holly Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, said it stands to reason that doctors who have interactions with a company about a drug may prescribe more of it “because they have more information about the appropriate uses for the products.”

Through spokespeople, Allergan (maker of Linzess as well as Alphagan P, Bystolic, Combigan, Lumigan, Namenda and Restasis), Janssen (maker of Invega, Invokana, Xarelto and Zytiga) and Novo Nordisk (maker of Levemir, Novolog and Victoza) described their interactions with physicians as important for sharing medical information.

Novo Nordisk added that prescribing data is not used to target physicians for speaking or other promotional interactions. Eli Lilly said in a statement that meals can take place in many contexts, including in doctors’ offices, at speaker events and at conferences, but didn’t answer other questions. GlaxoSmithKline, Ironwood, Astellas and Purdue declined to comment.

For some drugs that are household names, it was more common for prescribers to receive a payment than not to. More than half of doctors who prescribed Breo, an expensive asthma drug, to Medicare patients received payments involving the drug in 2016. This was also true for Invokana and Victoza, both of which are diabetes medications. For Linzess, nearly half of doctors who prescribed the drug had interactions with its maker.

More than one in five doctors who prescribed OxyContin under Medicare in 2016 had a promotional interaction with the drug’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

“If there are physicians out there that deny that there is a relationship, they are starting to look more and more like climate deniers in the face of the growing evidence,” said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an expert in pharmaceutical costs and regulation. “The association is consistent across the different types of payments. It’s also consistent across numerous drug specialties and drug types, across multiple different fields of medicine. And for small and large payments. It’s a remarkably durable effect. No specialty is immune from this phenomenon.”

Huey Nguyen, a gastroenterologist in southern Indiana, increased his prescribing of Linzess in recent years. From 2013 to 2015, Nguyen’s Medicare patients had fewer than 60 claims per year for Linzess. In 2016 and 2017, that jumped to over 110 claims per year.

Over that time, Nguyen was a promotional speaker for Linzess. Allergan paid him $1,000 in 2013, over $4,000 in both 2016 and 2017, and $2,000 in 2018 to speak about the drug.

Though Linzess has been on the market since 2012, Ironwood and Allergan made a big push to promote the drug in 2016 and 2017. Spending on doctors reached $10 million in 2016 and nearly $8 million the following year, up from under $4 million in both 2014 and 2015.

In total, Nguyen has earned $25,000 from 2014 to 2018 related to six drugs from four pharmaceutical companies, excluding meals. In 2018, he was paid by two companies to promote competing drugs that treat irritable bowel syndrome.

ProPublica’s analysis did not set out to examine, nor did it resolve, whether industry payments change doctors’ behavior, or if patients receive inferior care from doctors who receive payments. Many factors can influence doctors’ prescribing choices. Some patients, for instance, have conditions for which only brand-name treatments are available or for which other drugs have failed.

Nguyen said promotional speaking educates doctors about how a drug works, whether insurance covers it and when not to prescribe it.

“It’s a way for the primary care physicians to have access to a gastroenterologist where they can ask one-on-one questions,” Nguyen said. “I’m more educated towards the drug, because I have to be trained to speak on it, so I’m more comfortable prescribing it.”

Experts are skeptical that interactions between companies and doctors benefit patients. “If there really were innovations and real benefits that were accruing to patients for a new treatment, it shouldn’t take so much spending by the company to get the word out,” said Stacie B. Dusetzina, associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who advised ProPublica on the design of its analysis. “I wonder if promotion is really to try to push products that have a much less substantial benefit because they’re not gaining the market share naturally.”

Nguyen said he takes many things into account when prescribing a drug, including its approved uses, cost and side effects. “In my day-to-day practice, my patients still come first,” Nguyen said. He said the speaking engagements do not influence his prescribing, “at least not consciously. Unconsciously, I don’t know.” He sees the public disclosure of industry payments to doctors as a way to help patients be active participants in their care.

Nguyen said he works with companies for the extra compensation but acknowledged that “it’s perfectly reasonable for people to question my motives.”

ProPublica’s analysis matched doctors’ prescribing in Medicare’s prescription drug program to the industry payments doctors received. Drug and medical device companies are required to report these payments annually through the federal Open Payments program, and they are made public on a government website. More than 600,000 doctors receive payments annually. (Companies also report research payments and ownership interests, but these were excluded from our analysis.)

Some providers were paid thousands of dollars, often for promotional speaking. But the typical doctor took in much less. Most only received meals, typically worth less than $100 per year.

In 2016, ProPublica between the total dollar value of a doctor’s interactions with drug and device companies and the overall percentage of brand-name drugs he or she prescribed.

Other research has found correlations between industry interactions and prescribing for certain classes of drugs, includingopioids, urology drugs, oncologytreatments, inflammatory bowel disease treatments and heartburn medication. In one study, brand-name prescribing for certain classes of drugs was associated with receiving as little as a single pharmaceutical industry sponsored meal. A study of prostate cancer treatments did not find evidence of a connection.

Brand-name drugs are more expensive than generic options, both for patients and for Medicare. A recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that Medicare Part D and its beneficiaries could have saved almost $3 billion by switching from brand-name drugs to generics.

Linzess is an expensive drug, costing Medicare and patients an average of about $1,500 annually. A common alternative is the laxative Miralax, available over the counter as generic polyethylene glycol, which costs less than $200 annually if taken every day. Nguyen said he recommends Miralax to many patients, but that wouldn’t show up in Medicare’s data because Medicare doesn’t cover over-the-counter drugs. He said he often prescribes Linzess to patients who have tried Miralax and not seen the symptom relief they hoped for.

For brand-name drugs that have good generic alternatives, “every time a doctor prescribes one of these brand-name medications, it’s extra money transferred from the Medicare program to the manufacturer,” said Michael Barnett, assistant professor of health policy at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “Medicare spending is out of control. And drug costs are one of the major reasons.”

Drug cost can have major consequences, not just for Medicare balance sheets but also for patients’ well-being. “The newest, latest drug is often not any better than the old drugs” that treat the same condition, Mitchell said. “But the new drugs are always more expensive. That really hurts patients’ pocketbooks. You’ve got physicians prescribing more expensive drugs and patients who aren’t taking them as a result. A generic medicine that’s cheaper that a patient does take is a whole lot more effective than an on-brand, expensive medicine that they don’t take.”

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Most U.S. Workers Still Lack Paid Parental Leave

NEW YORK — Nancy Glynn could not afford a funeral for her newborn son who died after a premature birth.

She was already taking time off from her job as a waitress in Manchester, N.H., to recover from a C-section. Adding to her difficulties, her husband had an unplanned surgery just two days after the baby died.

Sawyer was cremated, his remains put into an urn the funeral home provided for free. The couple, who also had a 3-year-old son, struggled to pay the bills and their gas was cut off. A cousin set up a Go Fund Me campaign to help them pay the rent.

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Glynn was back at work after just a few weeks, smiling for customers. She sometimes hid in the restaurant office to cry.

“Just seeing a family come in was triggering. Seeing a kid come in,” said Glynn, who now works for several non-profits, including MomsRising, a group that advocates for paid parental leave and other policies. “But we had to make the money back.”

Glynn is on the losing side of a growing movement to provide U.S. workers with paid parental leave.

Congress passed a bill earlier in the week giving the country’s 2.1 million government employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave as part of a defense bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday.

But it still leaves about 80% of U.S. workers in the private sector with no access to paid family leave. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that lacks a federal policy, at least for new mothers, leaving employers to decide whether to offer it.

Disproportionately, paid leave has gone to higher-paid white collar workers.

Just 9% of wage earners in the bottom 25% have access to paid family leave, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares to 30% of wage earners in the top 25%.

The same year Sawyer died — 2015 — Netflix granted new parents a year of paid time off. Most other major tech companies have similar generous polices, as do big banks and major consulting firms.

Meanwhile, millions of construction workers, retail workers, public school teachers, warehouse and transportation workers and restaurant employees have to forego paychecks to take time to care for a new child.

As a waitress, Glynn belonged to the group least likely to have paid parental leave: part-time workers.

Women are historically more likely to work part-time than men, often because of caregiving responsibilities, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That usually means foregoing paid time off after giving birth —a trade-off that can be painful.

After she had her daughter, Daniella Knight took a part-time job for a website dedicated to helping parents train their babies to sleep through the night. It seemed perfect for the Virginia mom, a recent college graduate who could not afford childcare on top of payments on $80,000 in student loans that she and her husband owed.

But when Knight became pregnant with her second child, the company did not offer any paid leave, and her family could not afford to lose her income. She was back at work after using up two weeks of vacation, racing to put together sleep plans for her clients every minute her own newborn was sleeping.

Three years later, Knight got pregnant again, a surprise. She considered an abortion rather than going through the same ordeal again.

“I did not think we could survive it. It’s probably one of those things that will haunt me for the rest of my life, but my husband and I actually went to an abortion clinic,” said Knight, who ultimately had the baby and now works as real estate agent.

Support for extending paid leave to part-time workers is slowly gaining traction in recognition that in many low-wage earners rely on multiple jobs to make ends meet, said Pronita Gupta, director of job quality at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty organization.

Target made waves in June when the retailer included part-time employees in an expanded paid family leave policy. Part-time employees are also covered to varying degrees under paid family leave laws that eight states, plus Washington, D.C., have or will soon implement.

In Congress, there is growing bipartisan support for a federal paid family leave policy for all workers, but progress has stalled over sharp differences over how to pay for it.

Many companies that rely on low-wage workers, small businesses and non-profits are unlikely to take on the cost of family leave without a government policy to help pay for it, said Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

Colin Ma, founder of a digital marketing firm, said he has been unable to give his 10 employees paid parental leave for logistical and financial reasons.

Now it’s affecting Ma personally: He is expecting a baby in May but won’t take any time off beyond vacation out of fairness to his employees. That has upset his girlfriend, who is worried about juggling her own career in advertising while childcare falls largely on her shoulders.

“She wants more help, and I get it from her perspective because she is worried that maybe it’s going to hurt her long-term career prospects,” Ma said.

Even under the policy passed by Congress for federal workers, there are still gaps in coverage. For instance, federal workers do not get paid leave for their own serious illness or to care for a sick relative. More than 70% of the time, those are the reasons workers take time off under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, which only guarantees unpaid leave.

That coverage would have made a big difference for Regan Lamphier, a New Hampshire postal worker whose son died suddenly in 2014 shortly after his eighth birthday. Relatives had to launch a Go Fund me campaign so that Lamphier and her husband, also a postal worker, could take a few weeks off to grieve.

Lamphier had struggled with no paid family leave since Ethan was born with severe disabilities. When he was 3, Ethan suffered a stroke that sent him to the hospital in Boston and rehab for six weeks. Lamphier spent her days looking after her son and nights sorting out U.S. mail, traveling between two states every day. She and her husband separated for six months under the strain.

“There just wasn’t enough of me to go around,” said Lamphier, who also advocates for MomsRising. “I don’t know how I survived, but I didn’t have a choice.”

GOP Governors Grapple With Whether to Accept Refugees

LINCOLN, Neb. — An executive order by President Donald Trump giving states the right to refuse to take refugees is putting Republican governors in an uncomfortable position.

They’re caught between immigration hardliners who want to shut the door and some Christian evangelicals who believe helping refugees is a moral obligation. Others say refugees are vital to fill jobs and keep rural communities afloat.

More than 30 governors have agreed to accept refugees, but about a dozen Republican governors have stayed silent as they face a decision that must be made by Jan. 21 so resettlement agencies can secure federal funding in time to plan where to place refugees.

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Trump’s executive order requires governors to publicly say they will accept refugees. They cannot automatically come to their states, even if cities and counties welcome them. So far, no one has opted to shut out refugees.

A North Dakota county voted this month to accept no more than 25 refugees next year, after initially signaling it would be the first to ban them.

Trump issued the order in September after slashing the number of refugees allowed into the United States in 2020 to a historic low of 18,000. The reduction is part of the administration’s efforts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration.

With his order, Trump again thrust states and local governments into immigration policy, willingly or not. It has caused heated debates and raucous meetings in several states, including North Dakota to Wisconsin.

Trump says his administration acted to respect communities that believe they do not have enough jobs to support refugees. Refugees can move anywhere in the U.S. after their initial resettlement at their own expense.

Republican governors in Nebraska, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Arizona, Iowa and Oklahoma have consented to accepting refugees in 2020. Vermont’s Republican governor said he intends to accepts refugees.

Others have not taken a public stance. They include the Republican governors of Georgia and Missouri, along with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, the state that took in the largest number of refugees this year.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, the nation’s most populous state that resettles many refugees, also has not consented yet, but his office said he plans to do so.

In 2015, governors from 31 states — nearly all with Republican governors, including Abbott — tried to shut out Syrians, citing terrorism fears. But they didn’t have the legal authority at the time.

Now that they do, some governors have struggled with the decision.

Faith-based groups have led an aggressive campaign urging them to keep accepting refugees, while immigration hardliners have criticized Republicans who have not used their new authority to put the brakes on refugees coming into their states.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, who tried to turn away Syrians in 2015, spent weeks reviewing his options.

He gave his consent Thursday in an open letter to Trump co-signed by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, praising the president for strengthening the vetting process.

“Thanks to your leadership, Americans can be confident once again in the screening process for refugees entering the United States,” the governors said in the letter.

Hatim Ido, a former U.S. Army translator and member of the persecuted Yazidi community who fled Iraq, was relieved to know Nebraska’s doors are still open. Ido hopes his two sisters in Iraq will be able to join him someday in Lincoln.

“I’m really concerned about them,” said Ido, a graduate student who became a U.S. citizen last year. “I understand (government officials) need to be very careful. I just wish there was a process in place so we could bring them here.”

Administration officials say refugee applicants are subject to the strictest, most comprehensive background checks for any group seeking to come to the U.S.

Fraud detection and national security officers now come overseas with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services teams who are processing refugees.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb made the distinction that opening the door to refugees does not mean he’s going soft on illegal immigration.

A federal judge last year permanently blocked Indiana from trying to turn away Syrians under an order that Vice President Mike Pence championed as governor.

“These are NOT illegal or unlawful immigrants but individuals who have gone through all the proper channels,” Holcomb wrote in his consent letter.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced his consent the same day this month that 300 evangelicals signed a letter urging him to keep letting refugees resettle “as an exercise of our Christian faith.”

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said faith leaders reached out to him, too.

“I appreciate Oklahoma churches who have assisted these individuals,” he wrote in his consent letter.

Tennessee’s consent did not sit well with legislative leaders who sued the federal government over the resettlement program.

“Our personal preference would have been to exercise the option to hit the pause button on accepting additional refugees in our state,” House Speaker Cameron Sexton and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally said in a joint statement.

Gov. Bill Lee, who talks often about his Christian faith, said he had to follow his heart.

“My commitment to these ideals is based on my faith, personally visiting refugee camps on multiple continents, and my years of experience ministering to refugees here in Tennessee,” he wrote in his consent letter.

More than 80 local governments have written letters welcoming refugees. Many are rural towns in conservative states that have come to rely on young refugees to revitalize their economies.

“We need workers, big time,” said Nebraska Sen. John McCollister, a Republican who is sometimes at odds with his party. Refugees “bring a lot of enthusiasm, and they’re some of our best entrepreneurs. They add a lot to the economy of Nebraska.”

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert asked for more refugees in a letter to Trump last month. The Republican said Utah has the resources and space and that welcoming refugees is part of the culture in a state where members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found refuge generations ago.

“It’s been striking to see the breadth of bipartisan support for refugee resettlement in the states, with a number of governors writing very strong letters of support,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former official in the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which includes refugee resettlement. He left in 2017.

Holly Johnson, who coordinates the Tennessee Office for Refugees within the Catholic Charities, is not surprised. Employers are “chasing down resettlement agencies because they know refugees work hard,” she said.

Three resettlement groups have sued to block Trump’s order.

Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon does not plan to weigh in for now, his spokesman Michael Pearlman said, noting the state has not had a refugee resettlement program for decades.

GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Arkansas is determining which communities may be interested in accepting refugees, looking at financial costs and verifying security checks but that no final decision has been made.

“I am committed to ensure that refugees brought to Arkansas have a real chance to settle and become self-sufficient,” he said.

___

Watson reported from San Diego. Anita Snow in Phoenix; Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee; Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City; David Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri; Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas; Ben Nadler in Atlanta; Anthony Izaguirre in Charleston, West Virginia; Paul Weber in Austin, Texas; and Don Thompson in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report.