Chris Hedges's Blog, page 73

The White House Is Pretending Impeachment Didn’t Happen

On December 18, minutes after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump two articles of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, CNN’s Brian Stelter took to Twitter to announce “there is no way to deny: Trump has been impeached.”

Reporting Saturday from CBS News, however, indicates that the White House may be about to do just that.

The administration is reportedly looking at claiming Trump was not impeached because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding back on sending the articles to the Senate until the upper chamber’s Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lays out the rules for how Trump’s trial will be run, technically the president has not been impeached.

CBS News broke the story Saturday evening, citing two sources in the administration.

According to CBS News, the White House believes that a Thursday opinion piece written for Bloomberg News by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman is a solid basis for denying the president’s impeachment.

Feldman argues that Pelosi holding the articles could mean that technically the president has not been impeached.

“If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all,” writes Feldman. “That’s because ‘impeachment’ under the Constitution means the House sending its approved articles of to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the president is impeached.”

That argument works for the administration, which has been trying to find a way to reject the outcome since the December 18 vote:

The sources told CBS News that the White House views Pelosi’s delay as “a Christmas gift.” They plan to use the delay to argue that the Democrats have so little faith in their own case for impeachment, they are too scared to trigger a trial they know they will lose. The two sources also say that the president, while “angry” about what he views as an unfair process, is actually in a “very good mood,” and feels confident he can win the messaging war via Twitter while lawmakers are back home for the holidays.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday said that the House holding back, for now, from sending the articles to the Senate meant that the nation was watching “America’s first fake impeachment.”

“One could make a fairly decent argument that the president wasn’t really even impeached,” said Ingraham, citing Feldman’s opinion piece.

Denying the legitimacy of the vote’s outcome is not new to the president and his allies.

Trump rejected the December 18 vote the very next day in comments to reporters at the White House.

“I don’t feel like I’m being impeached,” the president said. “It’s a hoax.”

NEW: “What does it feel like to be the third president in U.S. history to be impeached?” Pres. Trump is asked.

“Well, I don’t feel like I’m being impeached,” he says. “It’s a hoax.” https://t.co/ve4JTln6Jx pic.twitter.com/WYVnrkVSH1

— ABC News (@ABC) December 19, 2019

Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig on CNN Saturday called Feldman’s argument “ridiculous” and the product of what happens when “law professors get a little too clever.”

“The Constitution is clear here,” said Honig. “The Constitution gives the House the sole power to impeach and the Senate to try impeachments. There’s nothing about a formal transmission. This is something that is made up.”

Celebrating Two Overlooked Irish Writers

When an authoritative book on post-World War II Irish fiction is written, it will be fascinating to see how William Trevor and Iris Murdoch are considered. Not so much their literary qualities, which are undeniable, but whether or not they are embraced as Irish.

They were almost contemporaries. Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, William Trevor Cox in County Cork in 1928. Murdoch died in 1999, Trevor in 2016. Both lived their entire literary lives in England—Murdoch’s parents moved to London when she was just a few weeks old; Trevor went there at age 26 in 1954, the year Murdoch’s first novel, “Under the Net,” was published to rousingly good reviews.

I do not know if they ever met or read each other. They had a few things in common, such as a love of Russian literature. Murdoch, who was renowned as both a philosopher and novelist, was drawn to the more philosophical writers Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Trevor leaned toward the painterly sensibility of Chekhov, with whom he was destined to be compared.

They were alike in one other way: Although they lived in England, the subject of much of their writing was Ireland. Certainly there was nothing new about this; many prominent Irish poets, novelists and playwrights who spent most of their adult life abroad, from Wilde and Shaw to Edna O’Brien, did the same. This dual citizenship has afforded the Irish abroad a perspective unique in Western literature, except with the exception of exiles like Vladimir Nabokov.

“Under the Net”
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Of the great poet Louis MacNeice it was said that “to the Irish he often seemed an exile, to the English a stranger.” MacNeice, whose father, a widower, left County Antrim for England when he was 10, wrote angrily and eloquently about his connections with the country of his birth, and in “Valediction” he perhaps summed up the mindset of the Irish writer abroad:

“But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,

The woven figure cannot undo its thread.”

William Trevor, the greatest Irish-born writer since Joyce not to be afforded the honor of the Nobel Prize, was often—too often—referred to as “the Irish Chekov.” He never denied his interest in or similarities to the great Russian; most of Trevor’s and Chekhov’s stories involve people living outside what is called the mainstream, and who are not particularly bothered by or even aware of that fact. Like Chekhov, Trevor’s stories are about the pursuit, capture and dissection of ordinary life.

But Trevor’s method, entirely his own, puts his people in extraordinary places where a lightning flash gives sudden illumination to some dark corner of their personality. Trevor’s atmosphere is often pervaded by a vague whiff of impending dread that is alien to Chekhov. In these stories about lonely, repressed spinsters, middle-aged salesmen, solitary drinkers, weary shopkeepers, petty thieves, and in one case, a serial killer, Trevor never raises his voice or introduces a note of melodrama; surely he subscribed to John Stuart Mills’ dictum, one revered by Yeats, that “Rhetoric is heard, poetry is overheard.”

Here’s another distinction between the Irishman and the Russian: Chekhov wrote several long stories but only one novel, while Trevor may be judged by future generations of readers to have been a greater novelist than story writer. Perhaps the most misleading characterization of Trevor is that he was a great writer of stories who dabbled in longer fiction. Trevor himself may have contributed to this fallacy when he told The New York Times many years ago, “I start writing away, and sometimes I find myself, to my considerable horror, in the midst of a novel.”

If one of Trevor’s finest novels, “Fools of Fortune,” began as a short story, one can imagine the horror of its characters when they found their angst was to spread out over 200 pages. Published in 1983, “Fools of Fortune” is set during and after The Troubles, which pitted not just Catholics against Protestants but neighbors and even relatives against one another with a ferocity that even Americans during the Civil War never experienced. Readers of Trevor’s stories and other novels, particularly “The Story of Lucy Gault,” will find a similar atmosphere and theme in “Fools of Fortune.”

But the novel isn’t about the war, it’s about its consequences. As Francine Prose points out in its introduction, “one of the most striking things about the book is the extent to which it takes time as its subject.” As Trevor said in an interview, time “both heals and destroys, depending on the nature of the wound.”

“Fools of Fortune” spans 60 years, during which we see, as a character says, “Destruction casts shadows which are always there. … We will never escape the shadows of destruction that pervade Kilneagh [the estate house torched by the British Black and Tans].”

“Fools of Fortune”
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The story has the sweep of a long historical novel but is told with the compactness of a master of short fiction. It doesn’t end so much as wind down. The characters, Trevor writes, “are aware that there is a miracle in this end”— a quiet miracle, that is, not to be confused with a happy ending.

The salacious wit of Iris Murdoch is the perfect antidote for the ominous aura of Trevor’s work (and vice versa). In the recent flood of appreciation that surrounded her 100th birthday on July 15, critics were torn between “Under the Net” (1954) and Booker Prize winner “The Sea, the Sea” (1978) as her best novel; I favor the light, fast nastiness of the former. (The title has been traced by scholars to a treatise by the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein—good luck figuring it out.)

The protagonist of “Under the Net,” Jake Donaghue, is a sometime artist, hack writer, and translator who always manages to scrape by. “It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known,” he finds, “than works of genius when you’re unknown.” He is either a gadfly or ingratiating, depending on his mood, and desperately in search of a moral compass. After turning down an easy windfall, he worries: “What prevented the closure of this mutually rewarding deal? My principles. Surely there must be some way round. In similar fixes, I have rarely failed to find one.” When in need of advice, he goes to a museum and talks to the painting, Franz Hall’s “The Cavalier”; the painting talks back to him. When he is barred admission to an entrance for authorized persons, he decides, “I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person.”

The novel covers a few days in his life when he seeks shelter from friends after being thrown into the streets by his lady friend, who’s tired of his shiftlessness. (Rather than beg for forgiveness, Jake “followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.”)

Over those few days, Jake is down and out in both London and, for a while, Paris. He manages to connect and reconnect with a wide strata of bohemians, from actresses to gamblers to movie producers and a soapbox Socialist. This is all done in search for the love of his life, whom he scarcely acknowledges until about halfway through the book. It’s a picaresque novel, if the term can be applied to a story in a modern urban setting.

There would seem to be no way that he could avoid a bad end, but, remarkably, Jake, with a little help from his friends—including an aging and engaging movie wonder dog named Mars—has an epiphany.

On an impulse, he takes a job as a hospital janitor, though his coworkers are mildly suspicious of him: “Perhaps some obscure instinct warned them that I was an intellectual.” Still, he discovers “a feeling which was almost entirely new to me, that of having done something.” By the novel’s delightfully unexpected end, Jake sheds his cynicism and rediscovers the literary ideals of his youth.

Purists may not regard “Under the Net” as an Irish novel, though Jake Donaghue is of Irish descent, as is a cousin from Dublin with whom he shares some adventures. Jake bears a bit of resemblance to Gulley Jimson, the reprobate painter in Joyce Cary’s 1944 novel “The Horse’s Mouth,” and a 1955 Donaghue would see a kindred spirit in Sebastian Dangerfield from J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man.”

For her own part, Murdoch was always ambiguous about her Irishness. In 1978 she told Philippa Foot that she felt “unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred”—a sentiment only an Irishman or woman could hold. In 1965, her controversial novel “The Red and the Green” was published, and she came to regret its mildly Irish Republican leanings. According to her biographer, Peter J. Conradi, she sympathized in later years with the Northern Irish anti-Catholic bigot Ian Paisley.

Conradi argues, “No one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris’s Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish … [but] with both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris has as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American.”

You can agree or disagree, or you can disregard politics and simply read Murdoch because she’s an outstanding novelist.

Ambitious Texas Law Fails to Make Dent in Jailhouse Suicides

NOTE: Part of the series Death Behind Bars, a joint reporting effort by The Associated Press and the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service.

In a county jail in central Texas, an inmate on suicide watch begins strangling himself with a phone cord. The guard watching him does not rush in because of security rules that prohibit him from going into a cell alone, leading to an agonizing 10-minute wait before another staffer arrives to provide backup.

Derrek Monroe, who died the next day in a hospital, was among the first of 48 jail suicides since the 2017 launch of a sweeping Texas law aimed at reducing such deaths through better screening and monitoring. That law hasn’t made a dent in the number of suicides, and experts blame its failure to address one of the most significant factors: the lack of staff to watch troubled inmates.

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“Jails are understaffed and often very understaffed,” said Diana Claitor, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for inmates and their families. “You know you have to check a suicidal inmate, but at the same time, another crisis or fight occurs down the hall, and you have to go there. If you don’t have any extra personnel because someone is sick, you’re doing everything alone.”

In a joint reporting effort, The Associated Press and the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service compiled a database of more than 400 lawsuits in the last five years alleging mistreatment of inmates in U.S. prisons and jails. Close to 40 percent involved suicides in local jails — 135 deaths and 30 attempts. All but eight involved allegations of neglect by the staff.

“It’s not always maliciousness,” Claitor added. “We’re talking about people who are doing a very tough job.”

___

Part of the series Death Behind Bars, a joint reporting effort by The Associated Press and the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service.

___

Texas became a national flashpoint in the debate over jailhouse suicides and treatment of mentally ill inmates after the highly publicized 2015 case of Sandra Bland, a black activist who killed herself in a county jail three days after her arrest in a contentious traffic stop.

Her death led to protests, debate and ultimately an ambitious law in her name that sought to be a national model. It included policy changes that required mentally ill inmates to be diverted toward treatment, independent investigation of jail deaths, de-escalation training for police, and funding for electronic sensors or cameras for accurate and timely cell checks.

But critics note that the law had no requirement or money for additional guards, and jailhouse suicides remain a stubborn problem in Texas. The 22 suicides in the state’s jails this year through November already surpass the 17 in all of last year, a nearly 30% increase.

Since the Sandra Bland Act went into effect in September 2017, state figures show staffing levels at Texas’ 239 local jails have remained largely unchanged at around 25,000 jailers. Jails are still only required to meet state standards that mandate a minimum of one jailer for every 48 inmates in a single-story jail. In multistory jails, a guard is required for each floor with 10 or more inmates.

At the time of Derrek Monroe’s video-recorded suicide attempt on Oct. 1, 2017, the Coleman County Jail met state standards with a single guard overseeing nine inmates and two floors, even though Monroe was on a suicide watch because of another attempt the day before.

Details of Monroe’s case have emerged as part of his family’s lawsuit against the county. The guard and the sheriff acknowledged in a deposition last year that the guard could have stopped the 28-year-old Monroe, who was being held on unspecified drug or alcohol charges, if more than one guard had been working in the jail that day.

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, said another staffing-related challenge for jails is failing to carry out face-to-face checks of suicidal inmates every 30 minutes — the standard set by Texas administrative code even before the Bland Act.

The commission regularly inspects the state’s 239 jails for compliance with state inmate safety requirements and fails jails if there are one or more violations. The agency carried out 3,752 inspections since 2006 and jails failed one of every four inspections. When a jail fails, it is listed on the commission’s web page until it passes re-inspection and ultimately could be shut down if it keeps failing.

Waller County Jail — where Bland died in 2015 — appeared on the list last December for violating five standards, including the 30-minute check requirement. A month later, Evan Parker, 34, hanged himself there while in custody on murder charges.

Sheriff R. Glenn Smith said the 30-minute check violation was caused by an error in the software system the jail used to track jailer rounds and had no bearing on Parker’s death.

Smith said the biggest issue in Waller County is keeping trained staff, noting that he often loses guards to larger jails in other counties where there are more opportunities for advancement. Other guards leave because they are burned out working hard hours for little pay.

“They’re incarcerated every day along with the inmates,” Smith said. “They just don’t want to do that 20 years.”

Texas State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Democrat who introduced the Sandra Bland Act, explained that cameras and tracking equipment are one-time expenditures but staffing requires a sustained commitment that would be too costly for the state. He said local governments have primary responsibility for funding jails and the wherewithal to do so with their own tax revenues.

“Nothing forbids governments from increasing taxes to improve our jails,” Coleman said. “But how can they convince people that it’s necessary? That comes only with educating people and with the rise of awareness. It is happening, but not fast enough.”

Catalog Retailers See Reason for Optimism After Declines

PORTLAND, Maine — Catalogs, those glossy paper-and-ink offerings of outdoor apparel, kitchenware and fruit baskets, are not yet headed for the recycling bin of history.

Until recently, the future appeared grim for the mailbox-stuffers. A one-two punch of postal rate increases and the Great Recession had sharply cut their numbers. Common wisdom had everything retail-related moving online.

But a catalog-industry rebound appears in the works, fueled in part by what might seem an unlikely group: younger shoppers who find it’s sometimes easier, more satisfying and even nostalgic, flipping pages rather than clicking links.

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Industry experts say that all those catalogs crammed into mailboxes this holiday season are a sign that mailings have stabilized — and may be growing — after a decline of about 40% since the Great Recession.

New companies are mailing catalogs. And even died-in-the-wool online retailers like Amazon and Bonobos are getting into the act.

“They’re tapping out on what they’re able to do digitally,” said Tim Curtis, president of CohereOne, a direct marketing agency in California. “They’ve got to find some new way to drive traffic to their websites.”

Catalog retailers slashed mailings, and some abandoned catalogs altogether, after a major U.S. Postal Service rate increase and the start of the recession in late 2007. Catalog numbers dropped from about 19 billion in 2016 to an estimated 11.5 billion in 2018, according to the American Catalog Mailers Association.

The industry still faces challenges, but there’s reason for some optimism, said Hamilton Davison, president of the mailers association.

Millennials who are nostalgic for vinyl records and all things vintage are thumbing through catalogs and dog-earing the pages. It’s a new demographic roughly from 22 to 38 that’s helping to breathe some new life into the sector, industry officials say.

In fact, millennials are more likely than baby boomers to visit a store based on mailings, according to the U.S. Postal Service inspector general.

Sarah Johnson says she loves flipping through catalogs at her convenience — but gets her hackles up when retailers fill her email inbox.

“Promotion emails drive me crazy,” said Johnson, 29, of Vernal, Utah. “When there’s a catalog lying on the table, it feels like it’s my choice to pick it up and flip through it. When it arrives in my inbox it feels like it’s imposing on me,” she said.

Angela Hamann, another millennial, says she prefers catalogs because it’s easier than scrolling through webpages to evaluate a retailer’s offering.

“It’s a great way to assess what a company has to offer without making a bunch of clicks,” said Hamann, 37, of New Gloucester, Maine.

During the downturn, catalog retailers reduced the size of the catalogs, slashed the number of pages and became selective about their mailings, said Jim Gibbs from The Dingley Press, in Lisbon, Maine, which prints and mails about 330 million catalogs a year.

But catalogs never died off, as some began predicting during the dot-com bubble. Catalog naysayers didn’t understand that a webpage is useless unless shoppers know about it, and catalogs are an important tool for driving customers online, Gibbs said.

These days, retailers like Amazon, Wayfair and Walmart are boosting their mailings, helping to offset companies that abandoned catalogs, and dozens of smaller companies are also getting into the act, Davison said. There’s also a trend toward postcard fliers being mailed by companies like Shutterfly, Curtis added.

The tactile feel of catalogs creates a more meaningful connection, Curtis said. Consumers, meanwhile, routinely delete emails or skim over online promotions without a second thought, he said.

For some, there’s no escaping the sentimental aspect.

In Austin, Texas, tech company worker Mike Trimborn described himself as a “nearly 100% online shopper” who sees catalogs as an “exercise in futility.” But he waxed nostalgic when he received a toy catalog from Amazon in the mail this holiday season.

Trimborn, 42, said his sons, ages 9 and 11, marked up the Amazon catalog just like he marked up the big Sears catalog as a kid.

“It was such a fun experience when I was a kid. To be able to give that to my kids was a surprise,” he said.

Buttigieg Leads 2020 Rivals in Wall Street Contributions

WASHINGTON — The financial sector, blamed by progressives for spawning the 2008 economic collapse, is lining up behind Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

The mayor of South Bend, Ind., has collected more campaign cash from donors and political action committees tied to the financial, insurance and real estate sector than any other White House hopeful, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The $3.06 million in contributions compares to $2.8 million directed toward former Vice President Joe Biden and $2.03 million for Sen. Cory Booker, whose home state of New Jersey has strong ties to Wall Street.

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While Buttigieg is hardly alone in turning to the finance industry for support, the data could leave him exposed to further attacks from his progressive rivals, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Democrat’s criticism of big banks during the economic collapse helped propel her political career and she repeatedly hit Buttigieg during Thursday’s presidential debate for his ties to large donors.

Buttigieg is making moves that suggest he’s aware of the potential vulnerabilities. His campaign said Friday it has returned a $5,000 donation from one of Wall Street’s most prominent lawyers, H. Rodgin Cohen.

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said the donations will give Buttigieg’s opponents the opportunity to argue “he’s in the pocket of big business.”

“We can’t ignore the fact that, time and again, those who are the chief donors at the top industries are well-placed to have a sympathetic ear — if not a champion — in office, should their candidate win,” said Krumholz, who has not backed a presidential candidate.

One top Wall Street law firm could pose particular challenges for Buttigieg with progressives. He’s the top recipient of cash this cycle from Sullivan & Cromwell, which has worked on some of the biggest corporate mergers in recent history, including Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner and Bayer’s merger with Monsanto. The firm also represented some of the largest financial institutions that received federal bailout money.

Sullivan & Cromwell “essentially designed the bailouts on behalf of all the too-big-to-fail banks,” said Kevin Connor, executive director of the Public Accountability Initiative, an organization that tracks corporate and big-money involvement in politics.

Buttigieg’s team argues his campaign has broad support, noting his average donation was $32 for the third quarter if 2019 and that 98% of the donations are under $200. Buttigieg spokesman Sean Savett said the candidate is “proud to be running a campaign that’s powered by more than 700,000 grassroots donors from across the country.”

“The only promise any donor will ever get from Pete is that he’ll use that money to defeat Donald Trump,” Savett said in a statement.

Representatives for Sullivan and Cromwell did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Cohen, one of the firm’s prominent attorneys, also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Employees of the law firm have contributed more than $83,000 to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. At least 20 Sullivan & Cromwell partners have given to his campaign. Cohen and David Hariton are bundlers for Buttigieg, those who have raised at least $25,000 for his campaign.

Cohen’s role in the financial crisis could make his ties to Buttigieg problematic with progressives. Cohen helped orchestrate more than a dozen deals with financial institutions during the bailout. In addition to the $5,000 contributed to Buttigieg, Cohen gave $4,900 to Booker and $2,500 to Biden.

In announcing that Cohen’s donation was being returned, Buttigieg’s campaign said he was “no longer actively involved with the campaign.”

Representatives for Biden and Booker didn’t immediately comment on whether they would also return Cohen’s contributions.

Though employees of the law firm have contributed to nearly every major presidential candidate remaining in the race — including Biden, Booker, Warren and a small amount to Bernie Sanders — Buttigieg received more than any of his opponents.

At least two other max-out donors from the firm have had roles in some of the most controversial recent financial scandals and mergers.

David Braff’s Sullivan & Cromwell bio says he represented Barclays in criminal matters related to the LIBOR interest rate-rigging scandal that ultimately resulted in the bank paying a then record-setting fine of $450 million. He also represented Sallie Mae in a lawsuit brought by the Illinois attorney general alleging the company engaged in predatory lending practices against student borrowers, and served as counsel to companies in connection with “sanctions-related criminal and civil investigations.”

And Krishna Veeraraghavan, another partner at the firm, advised a number of major pharmaceutical and energy companies in major acquisitions, as well as Amazon in its acquisition of Whole Foods. Both gave the maximum $5,600 contribution to Buttigieg.

The firm’s work on mergers in particular could raise concerns among voters in Iowa, where Buttigieg has staked much of his candidacy on a strong showing in the nation’s first caucuses. Sullivan & Cromwell worked on one of the biggest agricultural company mergers in history in 2018 when drug and chemical company Bayer combined with agricultural giant Monsanto.

Steven Holley, a law firm partner who led the antitrust portion of the negotiations, gave the maximum $5,600 to Buttigieg’s campaign, while Ron Creamer and S. Neal McKnight, who were also on the law firm’s team assigned to the merger, gave $2,800 to Buttigieg in June.

Prior to the merger, the Department of Justice argued in a complaint against it that “the proposed acquisition would result in higher prices, less innovation, fewer choices, and lower-quality products for farmers and consumers.” Bayer eventually sold $9 billion in assets to satisfy the government’s concerns, and the merger went through.

Austin Frerick, a native Iowan and former Treasury economist who now heads up an antitrust enforcement research program at Yale University, said “seed cost increases are a direct impact of ag mergers like these,”

Frerick helped Buttigieg develop his agriculture plan in which Buttigieg pledges, among other antitrust planks, to double funding for antitrust enforcement and “launch investigations of the seed market’s recent mergers for anticompetitive behavior.”

Frerick said he was initially “really inspired” by Buttigieg running for president as a young, gay candidate with a message of change. But after seeing the donations from Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers, he decided to support Warren instead.

“Antitrust is about power, and are you willing to trust power,” Frerick said. “This type of donation from a law firm makes me question his ability to challenge power.”

Indeed, David Weaver, a corn and soybean farmer from Rippey, Iowa, said he worries about the impact the merger could have on his business, because he won’t be able to shop around for different seeds and pesticides.

“As these mergers happen, you’re really not having much of a choice because you have to buy everything from one company,” he said.

Weaver’s considering caucusing for either Warren or Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and said Buttigieg’s Sullivan and Cromwell donations “raise questions about his commitment to antitrust enforcement.”

“Money dictates a lot of things, and where your money comes from dictates a lot of things,” he said.

House Vote Locks in Impeachment as Issue in ’20 Hill Races

WASHINGTON — The day after nearly every House Democrat voted to impeach President Donald Trump, the chief of the House Republican campaign committee said the political fallout was clear.

“Last night their obsession with impeachment finally came to a head, and they basically ended their majority,” Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer said Thursday. “Max Rose is done,” he continued, listing him among freshmen Democrats from districts Trump captured in 2016 who he said won’t survive next November’s elections.

The feisty Rose, a Brooklyn native and Afghanistan combat veteran with an advanced degree from the London School of Economics, sees things differently. “Mark my words, okay?” said Rose, whose Staten Island-centered district was the only one Trump won in New York City. “We are going to beat them by such a wide margin that next time around, they won’t even talk like this again, okay?”

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It’s too early to say who will be proven correct as Republicans wage a challenging struggle to regain the House majority they lost last year. But less than 11 months from presidential and congressional elections, the near party-line House vote impeaching Trump locked in lawmakers’ positions on the subject. Many moderate lawmakers from swing districts had spent months saying they were on the fence.

Now, voters will decide whether to reward or punish incumbents for their choices. And while Republicans and Democrats acknowledge that other issues like the economy and health care costs could overwhelm impeachment by next November, both sides — but especially the GOP — are already using the bitter impeachment fight as weapons.

“This is an attack on Democracy,” blared one Trump campaign fundraising email that included a thank you from “Donald J. Trump, President of the United States.” It added, “An attack on freedom. An attack on everything we hold dear in this country. And it’s an attack on YOU.”

Freshman Rep. Harley Rouda, who ousted a 30-year House GOP veteran from what was once a Republican stronghold in Southern California, was among Democrats issuing their own pleas for cash.

“Last night I cast my vote to defend our Constitution and impeach the President of the United States. A vote bigger than party, polling, and politics, & we’ve faced an onslaught of attacks since,” Rouda beseeched supporters.

Republican organizations and conservative outside groups have outspent their Democratic rivals, $11 million to $5 million, on television ads mentioning impeachment in congressional races. The figures from Advertising Analytics, a firm in Alexandria, Va., that tracks advertising, exclude spending by candidates’ campaigns.

So far, both sides have combined to spend at least $500,000 in each of 15 House races from South Carolina to Nevada on impeachment spots, the data shows. Republican groups have spent that amount without any Democratic expenditures in three other districts in Utah, Minnesota and New York.

Underscoring how the GOP is using impeachment for offense while Democrats are in a more defensive crouch, all but one of the 18 districts that’s seen that much money spent on the issue are held by Democrats. The lone Republican is Rep. John Katko, a three-term lawmaker whose upstate New York district is one of just three held by the GOP that were won by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Of the remaining 17 districts, all were carried by Trump and all but one are represented by Democratic freshmen, who are often less secure than congressional veterans.

“If you’re a truth seeker or care about where the country is going, I think we cast the right vote,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., who heads House Democrats’ campaign organization.

“We have to just keep focused on what matters to people. Health care is No. 1. Making Washington more functional is very important. That’s a very hard thing to do, but we’ve got to keep working on it,” Bustos said.

That’s a formula that Rose, whose working-class district Trump carried by 10 percentage points, is following.

Asked how he would overcome GOP attacks over his vote to impeach Trump, Rose cited measures including one financing a sea wall for Staten Island’s eastern shore and another buttressing a compensation fund for survivors of the 9/11 attacks.

“We are delivering for the district, plain and simple,” he said. “Over and over and over again, we’re putting government back on the side of people who’ve been working their hearts out and been ignored.”

Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., control the House 232-198, plus one independent and four vacancies. That includes Thursday’s party switch by New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who joined the GOP after being one of only two Democrats who opposed impeachment.

Impeachment will reverberate as well in Senate races, where the GOP will be fighting to retain its 53-47 majority. That chamber is expected to begin its trial next month on whether to oust Trump from office and seems certain to acquit him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear he is cooperating with the White House and wants a swift trial with no witnesses.

That could limit the risks for GOP senators like Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine. They face competitive reelection races in swing states where Republicans adore Trump but independents are divided, and these senators could also be damaged by a trial that seems to veer out of control.

Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama faces risks of his own. His state overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016, so Jones must chose between voting to remove Trump and infuriating most voters or acquitting him and angering loyal Democrats.

McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have had unproductive talks so far on what the trial’s rules will be.

Schumer has said he wants testimony from top White House officials, which McConnell seems certain to block. They could provide potentially damaging evidence on Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations of Democrats like former Vice President Joseph Biden — the core of the impeachment charges.

French President Says 33 Jihadists Killed in Central Mali

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — French forces have killed 33 Islamic extremists in central Mali, French President Emmanuel Macron said Saturday.

He made the announcement on the second day of his three-day trip to West Africa that has been dominated by the growing threat posed by jihadist groups.

In a tweet, Macron said he was “proud of our soldiers who protect us.” Two Malian gendarmes also were rescued in the operation, he said.

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In a speech to the French community living in Ivory Coast, Macron said the French troops will continue fighting terrorism in the Sahel region.

“I want to reiterate my determination to continue this fight. We suffered losses, we also have victories,” he said, stressing the “huge success” of Saturday’s operation in the Mopti region of central Mali.

France has some 4,500 military personnel in West and Central Africa, much of which was ruled by France during the colonial era. The French led a military operation in 2013 to dislodge Islamic extremists from power in several major towns across Mali’s north.

In the ensuing years the militants have regrouped and pushed further into central Mali, where Saturday morning’s operation was carried out.

On Friday evening, Macron met with French military personnel stationed in Ivory Coast, which shares a long border with volatile Mali and Burkina Faso.

Later Saturday, Macron was to meet with Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara in Abidjan. Both men will highlight a new training effort being launched. The International Academy to Fight Terrorism will be in charge of “training in Ivory Coast some specialized forces from across Africa,” Macron said Saturday. “Then we will collectively be better prepared for the fight against terrorism.”

Whitewashing ‘Watchmen’

“Watchmen” is a masterpiece of comics literature. Intricately plotted and beautifully illustrated, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 stand-alone maxi-series explores what our world be like if superheroes really existed. Moore suggests that a group of unaccountable masked crusaders would be a corrupting force culturally and politically, ushering in an interminable Nixon-led dystopia.

Moore’s central indictment of the superhero myth as white supremacist and fascist (Moore has stated “Birth of A Nation” is perhaps the first superhero film) is barely considered during the pseudo-sequel HBO television series “Watchmen.” Instead, the show replaces Moore’s deep critique of the superhero genre as corrosive to reality with a largely baffling fantasy tale that has only a superficial interest in the real world.

HBO’s “Watchmen” has been critically acclaimed, mostly for its willingness to tackle issues of race head-on. While the show does explicitly bring up race and racism in ways most big-budget prestige dramas avoid, it has very little to say about the issues. While Moore surmised that superheroes would spend their time trying to quash “black unrest” during the civil rights era, the reboot’s creator, Damon Lindelof, instead sees the new series’ masked vigilante, Sister Night, played by Regina King, as a force for racial justice—but only to a point. In fact, almost all the racial elements of the show are cast in the broad terms of superheroes and supervillains that have become standard issue in the comic-book genre.

The opening scene of the first episode is a brutal recreation of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street massacre of 1921, which left as many as 300 people dead, almost all black. It is one of the most horrific and vile acts of racial violence in America’s history, but in later episodes of HBO’s “Watchmen,” it’s treated as little more than a superhero origin story analogous to the destruction of Krypton, Superman’s home planet. The show later reveals that the events of the Tulsa massacre—which, again, actually happened—were caused by a super-villainous secret organization called Cyclops.

The hero the Tulsa massacre produces is the first masked superhero from “Watchmen” lore, Hooded Justice. In the comic, Hooded Justice is a violent racist who expressed sympathy for the Nazi Party. Lindelof’s version reimagines him as a black police officer named Will Reeves, who barely escaped Tulsa as a five-year-old.

After Reeves is brutally attacked by white police officers, who happen to be members of Cyclops, he expresses his pent-up anger at decades of extreme racist violence—not by attacking the racist supervillain police officers, but by donning a mask and stopping a white couple from being assaulted by random hoodlums.

Only years later, when the same racist supervillain police officers whom “superhero” Will has allowed to operate for years use a hypnotic film projector to trigger the slaughter of a theater audience of black patrons does he decide to step up. However, the show frames Will’s ultra-violent assault on the racist supervillains, whose plans involved sending hypno-projectors across the country, as a low point for the character. To drive the point home, Will’s wife leaves him in the very next scene for being too angry.

The show’s message about race is further muddled by the fact that in present-day Tulsa, Cyclops members spend most of their time targeting police officers because they feel that liberal President Robert Redford has made the police too protective of black people. More confounding, President Redford’s police reforms have rendered the police unable to effectively fight the white terror organization, and a black cop is gunned down because he could not get approval to unlock his gun in time.

Even as pure fantasy, “Watchmen” demonstrates a startling lack of imagination about how to address race in a world of superheroes. What if there were a show about a badass black female superhero played by Regina King? Of course, she’d have to be a police officer. What if liberals took control of the government and instituted reparations? There’d be a tax credit given only to black people who can prove, through DNA, that they are descendants of victims of specific acts of racial violence, and it would all just make white people more racist. What if Dr. Manhattan, a godlike being who can do almost anything with his powers, became a black man? He’d give up those powers to become a stay-at-home dad.

At one point, Will tells his granddaughter Angela Abar, who transforms into masked superhero Sister Night, “You can’t heal under a mask … wounds need air.” This banal line encapsulates the truly unimaginative theme of the show. As Lindelof helpfully explained in an episode of “The Official Watchmen Podcast,” “Anger is camouflage for fear or sadness or both. If you are a person of color in the United States of America … there’s a lot of things to scare you and even more to make you sad. … The answer is not to wear a mask.”

While Lindelof is the first to admit he is generally clueless about issues of race—he first heard of the Tulsa massacre after reading the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates shortly before beginning production on the show—he nevertheless made the decision to use real black trauma and real black pain in his show. And what does the show say to black people? Anger is a mask and things won’t get better until we let it go.

With daily reminders that racist violence is not a thing of the bygone past, as white supremacist views are expressed openly and not in supervillain hideouts, “Watchmen’s” racial politics seem like a dispatch from a “post-racial” Obama-era style of liberalism. The alternate world of HBO’s “Watchmen” is one in which fighting white supremacy head-on is ultimately less important than making peace with your anger at white supremacy, even if you’re a superhero.

Is This Goodbye to the American Republic?

You don’t have to be a leftist or a liberal to worry that the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump might try to negate the United States republic’s electoral process and term limits. Consider the following statement from the distinguished conservative scholar and American Enterprise Institute fellow Norm Ornstein last week:

It seems clear that [Attorney General William Barr] will do or enable anything to keep Trump in office. And Trump will do anything to stay there. Suspension of the election, negation of the results, declaration of martial law are not simply fanciful, alarmist or crazy things to throw out there or to contemplate. Members of Congress, governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law enforcement figures and the military need to be thinking now about how they might respond” (emphasis added).

Ornstein wrote this on the same day that Trump told another of his many permanent neofascistic campaign rallies that he might remain in office for as long as another 29 years. The previous Sunday, Trump had jested about staying in the White House beyond the end of his term, calling it “not a bad idea.” It’s been a recurrent Trump “joke” across his presidency, with many previous iterations.

Another longtime Republican who has taken the so-called joke seriously is Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen. In testimony before Congress last February, Cohen likened his former boss to Hitler and suggested Trump may not leave office peacefully. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen told the House Oversight and Reform Committee, “I fear that, if he loses the election in 2020, there will not be a peaceful transition of power.”

It’s not much of a leap to worry that Trump could view an election result that does not go his way as a reason to try to light up his heavily armed right-wing followers and enlist soldiers and police on the side of a coup—or that he might move to suspend the election in advance if the polling numbers look too favorable for his opponent. The second option would find support from a good-sized chunk of the American citizenry. In the summer of 2018, a poll conducted by political scientists Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56% of Republicans support postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump and congressional Republicans back this move to “make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.”

From the beginning of his presidency, Trump has been setting the nation up to buy the ridiculous notion that an election he lost would be marred by massive voter fraud on the part of “illegal aliens.” It started with his early and absurd claim to have been denied a victory in the popular vote over Hillary Clinton due to counterfeit immigrant votes.

As president, Trump has openly flirted with calling for extra-legal political violence by “bikers,” soldiers, cops and other “tough guys” among his backers if Democrats should try to remove him from office. He has even suggested that impeachment (likely to take place later in the very day on which I am writing this commentary) could spark “Civil War.”

Trump has absurdly claimed that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution means that he is granted “the power to do whatever I want as president.”

He fills his cabinet with groveling yes-men and yes-women, tolerating no criticism or pushback in his administration.

He has decimated the nation’s professional diplomatic corps, which he sees as a barrier to his deal-making genius on the global stage.

Trump calls the media, with the exception of de facto Trump television (Fox News) and certain other right-wing outlets, “the enemy of the people.” He demonizes and falsely conflates liberals and leftists.

He questions the patriotism of those who disagree with him, identifying criticism of him with anti-Americanism.

He uses his Twitter account to shame and spark mass hatred against a seemingly endless parade of enemies.

Telling his supporters not to pay attention to what they see and hear beyond what he tells them, Trump has bombarded the world with more than 15,000 false and misleading statements since he entered the White House.

He recently called Republicans who may oppose him “human scum”—echoing the vile and genocidal language of Adolf Hitler and Jair Bolsonaro—and in June 2018 he described F.B.I. officials who had investigated him as the “scum on top” of the agency.

Believing himself “the world’s greatest person,” President Trump has promoted an absurd cult of personality. He has regularly praised dictators and despots while showing disdain for more democratically elected leaders the world over.

In the fall of 2018, Trump provided cover for the brutal and absolutist Saudi Arabian regime’s murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Absurdly defying the judgement of his own government’s intelligence agencies, Trump declared that he believed the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s declaration of innocence in Khashoggi’s savage torture and homicide.

Amidst the furor over the slaughter of Khashoggi, Trump lauded a Republican congressman for body-slamming a reporter the previous year, saying the assault may have helped the congressman get elected. At a campaign rally in Missoula, Mont., Trump praised Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault for an attack on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. “Any guy that can do a body slam—he’s my kind of guy,” Trump said to cheers and laughter from the crowd.

Earlier in the day, before impeachment, Trump released a rambling, rage-filled six-page letter loaded with absurd and unproven charges, accusing House Democrats of “subverting democracy” by launching a “partisan coup.” The fascistic letter absurdly portrayed Trump as the victim of a “socialist” plot. It ignored the mountains of evidence accumulated by the House Judiciary Committee showing that Trump tried to bribe Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into digging up dirt on a U.S. presidential rival by withholding military assistance from Ukraine.

On the day before his impeachment, Trump said that House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff deserved harsh, Central American-style punishment for paraphrasing Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president during a hearing. “In Guatemala,” Trump intoned, “they handle things much tougher than that.” It was a not-so-veiled call for Schiff’s execution.

That is all symptomatic of precisely the kind of vicious and authoritarian head of state who could be expected to suspend an election or defy one that doesn’t go his way.

Trump is not being impeached for his biggest neo- and eco-fascistic crimes (his detention camps and his open escalation of global warming top a long list). Rather, the transgression for which he will soon wear the black mark of impeachment (the third of the nation’s 45 presidents to do so) is no small matter for the fate of the republic.

Trump’s attempt to extort assistance from Ukraine in his political campaign against his Democratic Party presidential rival Joe Biden is straight out of the U.S. Constitutional Convention’s case for including the impeachment clause. Why not rely on the quadrennial elections alone to remove a terrible president, the U.S. founders asked? Because, the framers answered, a U.S. president might one day use his office to connive with foreign leaders to corruptly perpetuate his position as leader of the republic.

Trumpeachment will not lead to removal. There’s no chance of actual defenestration, which would require a two-thirds vote in the majority-Republican U.S. Senate, where the archaic 18th-century Constitution’s assignment of two senators to each U.S. state regardless of (steep) differences in state population grossly exaggerates the voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, gun-addicted, racist and proto-fascistic regions. (Republican Wyoming, home to 573,720 Americans, holds U.S. Senatorial parity with Democratic California, where more than 39 million Americans reside. That’s one U.S. Senator for every 19.5 million Californians versus one U.S. Senator for every 287,000 Wyoming residents.)

If Trump plays his cards right, he can survive impeachment and the 2020 elections without having to suspend the exercise or dispute the tally. Impeachment is already rallying his Amerikaner base and filling his campaign finance coffers. If early polling data is any indication, it may well help him in the small number of battleground states that matter in the Electoral College’s final presidential tally. The Republican- and White House-rigged Senate’s “exoneration” trial could well prove to be an electoral asset for him next year. And the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats seem hell-bent on running yet another depressing capital-captive, neoliberal, Citigroup-Council-on-Foreign-Relations centrist who can be counted on offering the usual “inauthentic opposition” (the late Sheldon Wolin’s useful term for the Democratic Party) to the ever more chillingly authoritarian and neofascistic direction of the nation under nominal Republican rule.

Any doubts as to the cringingly compliant nature of most Congressional Democrats’ opposition to such a neofascistic White House should have ended on Dec. 17, two days before the impeachment vote. That’s when the majority of House Democrats voted for a “national security” measure, thus granting Trump $1.4 billon to build his nativist southern border wall and setting no limits on his ability to transfer money from the military budget to construct his vicious barrier. Democrats also dropped a bill that would have outlawed “surprise” medical bills (the often exorbitant charges patients face when they go to hospitals that accept their insurance but are treated by doctors who do not) and signed off on a $738 billion Pentagon funding bill. “One of the most expensive military measures in the nation’s history,” as The New York Times put it, this “defense” (empire) funding bill granted Trump his dream of a Space Force as a new, sixth branch of the U.S. military.

One week before last Wednesday’s impeachment vote, Nancy Pelosi’s House voted by a huge bipartisan margin, 377–48, to approve the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In what the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) rightly calls an “extraordinary juxtaposition of impeachment and political collaboration,” the latest NDAA “removes most provisions to which the White House objected, including barring U.S. military assistance to the Saudi war in Yemen and the deployment of a submarine-launched medium-range missile that would violate the INF treaty. “It strips out,” the WSWS reports, “a requirement for Trump to get congressional approval for military strikes on Iran.”

So what if these votes defy majority progressive public opinion? Notice that I wrote “fate of the republic” and not “fate of our democracy” above. American democracy, in a sequence of events that realized the U.S. founders’ ultimate nightmare, was trumped by capitalism—and indeed by the Constitution itself—long, long ago.

As the Trump impeachment drama peaks and then fizzles, and the nation descends into the horror of its next grim presidential election, likely pitting two right-leaning white male septuagenarians (Joe Biden and Donald Trump) against each other, I am reminded of a brilliant reflection on how fascism can rise to power from the great Dutch astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoek. “Parliaments evermore serve to mask, by a flood of oratory,” Pannekoek wrote in Nazi-occupied Holland, “the rule of big capital behind the semblance of the self-determination of people. So the cant of the politicians, the lack of inspiring principles, the petty bargaining behind the scenes, intensifies the conviction in critical observers not acquainted with the deeper causes that parliamentarianism is a pool of corruption and democracy a chimera—and … that the strong personality must prevail, as independent ruler of the state.”

“The fascist in the White House,” the WSWS reported, “constitutes an immense danger to democratic rights and must be forced from power. But this urgent and historic task cannot be left in the hands of the Democrats. It can be achieved only through an independent mobilization of the working class in intractable opposition to all factions of the American financial oligarchy.”

There’s no electoral and constitutional Santa Claus coming to bend the arc of American history away from a descent into fascism and toward democracy and decency. Only a mass movement of, by, and for the people beneath and beyond the election cycle and stale aristo-republican constitutionalism has any chance of doing that.

McConnell Pushes Through 12 More Lifetime Trump Judges

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

The right-wing takeover of the U.S. courts continued apace Thursday as the Republican-controlled Senate, with the help of some Democrats, quietly confirmed a dozen more of President Donald Trump’s lifetime judicial nominees hours before leaving for Christmas recess.

The confirmations received little media attention amid Trump’s impeachment and the 2020 Democratic debate, but progressives warned the consequences could reverberate for generations.

“While all eyes were understandably on impeachment, Mitch McConnell’s conveyor belt churned out a shocking number of judges this week in what remains the most underrated story of the Trump era,” Christopher Kang, chief counsel for advocacy group Demand Justice, said in a statement.

“Trump’s hijacking of our judiciary will be his most enduring legacy,” added Kang, “and it will continue to threaten everything progressives care about long after he leaves office.”

The Senate has now confirmed 187 of Trump’s disproportionately young and ultra-conservative judicial picks, putting them in a position to reshape U.S. law on reproductive rights, climate, and other areas for decades to come.

187 lifetime federal judges.

I say it often, but it becomes more serious every single day: Our rights are at stake. We need a pro-civil rights Senate. https://t.co/EsFCToXcPz

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) December 19, 2019

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, three of the judges confirmed this week refused to say whether Brown v. Board of Education—the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional—was correctly decided.

Those judges, according to a list (pdf) from the Leadership Conference, are Mary Kay Vyskocil and Lewis Liman of the Southern District of New York and Gary Brown of the Eastern District of New York.

“McConnell is rushing to confirm as many lifetime nominees as he can to entrench his terrifying agenda,” Lena Zwarensteyn, Fair Courts campaign director at The Leadership Conference, said in a statement. “With his caucus’ full participation, he will stop at nothing to achieve through the courts what his party cannot accomplish legislatively: erasing the progress the nation has made to protect civil rights.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Trump—with the help of the right-wing Federalist Society—has appointed around one in every five federal judges.

“With shameful glee, McConnell has transformed twenty percent of the federal judiciary already, and is intentionally installing individuals who have demonstrated hostility to the communities whose civil and human rights are most at risk under this administration,” said Zwarensteyn.