Chris Hedges's Blog, page 76

Buttigieg Campaign Failed to Disclose Power Brokers in Release of Big Donors

This article was originally published on Common Dreams.

Among the more than 20 top fundraisers for South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg that his 2020 presidential campaign omitted from a release of his “campaign bundlers” on Friday were hedge fund executives and other power brokers with ties to Wall Street.

As Politico reported Tuesday, the list of about 100 bundlers who have raised more than $25,000 each for the mayor left out a number of donors included in an internal campaign fundraising report which the outlet had previously received.

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The omission was inadvertent according to Buttigieg spokesman Chris Meagher, who told Politico the campaign was making an updated, accurate list. The news was nonetheless condemned as “sketchy” by Jeff Hauser of the watchdog group Revolving Door Project.

“The first time I saw this list, I said, ‘There is no way this is comprehensive.’ It’s just kind of mind-blowing that they would be this dishonest,” Hauser told Politico.

Under pressure from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the Buttigieg campaign on Friday evening released a list of more than 100 bundlers who have raised more than $25,000 for the mayor’s bid for the Democratic ticket. Warren had called on Buttigieg to release the names of his top donors and open his private high-dollar fundraisers to the media.

In response to criticism from Warren and other progressives, Buttigieg said last week that his campaign “strives to be the most transparent in the field.” But Politico revealed that nearly two dozen bundlers had been left out of the campaign’s data release, which one critic derided as a “Friday night news dump” designed to satisfy the demands for transparency while leaving out key information.

The tactic “only works if there’s few threads for reporters to pull,” tweeted Adan Jentleson of Democracy Forward. “Otherwise, it reeks of deception and only whets reporters’ appetites. It seems to have backfired in this case.”

Pete's campaign dumped his bundlers last Friday night, but the Friday night news dumps only works if there's few threads for reporters to pull. Otherwise, it reeks of deception and only whets reporters' appetites. It seems to have backfired in this case. https://t.co/5g0bYtV00w

— Adam Jentleson

We Must Come Together to Beat Back Neoliberal Fascism

This article was originally published on Truthout.

This week in the United States, the impeachment hearings made clear that President Trump abused his office and committed a crime against the Constitution. Not only did he attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating his presidential political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in exchange for military aid, Trump also used the power of his administration to pressure loyal followers, such as Rudy Giuliani (his personal lawyer) to claim that Ukraine, not Russia, had intervened in the 2016 election — a position completely debunked by every U.S. government intelligence agency.

In addition, Trump once again displayed his disregard for the law and the separation of powers by refusing to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, claiming that the evidence pointing to his use of power to secure political favors from the Ukrainian government was fake news and amounted to nothing more than a witch hunt. Moreover, he escalated his contempt for the proceedings by conducting a smear campaign against investigators leading the hearings by calling them “human scum.” And he threatened Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, who criticized Trump’s policies with Ukraine, and derided media outlets that critically covered the event.

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At the same time, Trump made clear his disdain for any viable notion of justice by pardoning three American servicemen accused of war crimes. There is more at stake here than simply a president’s abuse of office for political gain and his authoritarian embrace of unaccountable power and a shameful disregard for the law. Trump has launched a direct attack on the ideological, institutional and ethical foundations central to the functioning of a democracy.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked Indigenous groups working to protect the environment from illegal loggers and from lawbreaking networks that are driving the destruction of the Amazon. In doing so he has given a green light to groups that are illegally pillaging the rainforest and threatening to kill Indigenous people, small farmers, law enforcement agents and anyone else who tries to stop them. Exhibiting a Trump-like embrace of solipsism, the spectacle of distraction, and a penchant for political absurdity, Bolsonaro has falsely accused actor Leonardo DiCaprio “of bankrolling the deliberate incineration of the Amazon rainforest” and praised Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973. Unsurprisingly, Bolsonaro has also expressed his support for Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship on a number of occasions. And when faced with opposition, he draws from the Trump playbook by producing scapegoats.

Resistance to the emboldened authoritarianism of Bolsonaro’s government is growing in Brazil, however, especially with the release from prison of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Protests are occurring daily in the streets of Brazil, though not on the scale in which they are taking place in Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador, and in spite of accelerating state repression. The massive protests that have occurred in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador have been met with violent police abuse and state repression.

These events may seem unrelated, but in fact they are part of intertwined trends that are transforming the political landscape across the globe. These movements of resistance represent a reaction to the multiple abuses produced by a mix of political authoritarianism and neoliberalism marked by cruel predatory policies, a disdain for human rights, and fascist claims to ultra-nationalism and social cleansing. In Chile, Bolivia, Colombia and other Latin American countries, people are organizing against a neoliberal system that denies meaningful health care, a decent pension system, quality education, public transportation, investment in public goods, and social mobility to the underclass of people deemed as disposable. In countries such as Hong Kong, the United States and Brazil, there are growing movements for democratic rights, solidarity and economic equality. In this instance, resistance movements share the struggle for combining struggles for economic equality, social justice and minority rights.

In other words, two distinct political tremors are shaking the world: the spread of resistance to rising neo-fascism (evident in places like Brazil and the United States) on the one hand, and a new surge in massive forms of collective resistance against neoliberalism (evident in places like Chile and Colombia) on the other.

These movements, which are engaging in massive forms of collective resistance, are aiming to destroy the structures and ideological plague of neoliberal global capitalism, with its relentless attacks on public goods, unions, social provisions and the ecosystem, as well as its relentless drive to privatize everything and turn all social relations into commercial transactions.

Taken together, these two movements are confronting the interrelated and mutually compatible demons of neoliberalism and fascist politics. Moreover, both movements are predicated on the need to engage the role of the symbolic as a political site where politics can be rethought and collective strategies can emerge.

Toward a Politics and Pedagogy of Everyday Life

Pedagogy as a politics of persuasion, identity formation and resistance offers up the opportunity for such movements to speak to a vision that addresses the core values of justice, equality and solidarity while taking on economic inequality, corporate power and racial injustice. Rather than talk in abstractions about freedom, equality and justice, it is crucial for radical political movements to frame their language in relation to the everyday experiences and problems that people face. For instance, it is important for radical social movements to fashion a language that resonates politically and emotionally with peoples’ needs, values and everyday social relations while embracing the core values of equality, freedom, solidarity and justice. Leah Hunt-Hendrix points to the importance of addressing such core values in the U.S. She writes:

Millions of Americans—whether they’re people of color, white, immigrants; whether they live in cities, suburbs, small towns or the country; whether they’re Republicans, Democrats, independents, voters or non-voters—living in poverty or struggling to make it from paycheck to paycheck. Millions are unemployed or underemployed, choosing between health care, heat or housing. Many more feel like they’re slipping behind and lack the economic security they once had.

At the same time, movements in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador are mobilizing against the twin evils of neoliberalism and fascism, and are demonstrating the need to address the cultural forces shaping society. Such forces are viewed as constitutive of the very nature of politics and modes of agency that both repress progressive alternatives and make them possible. Such movements are not only addressing the educative nature of neoliberal politics, but creating the theoretical and pedagogical groundwork for giving people the tools for understanding how everyday troubles connect to wider structures of domination. This pedagogy of resistance is critical of the attack on notions of the democratic imagination, redemptive notions of the social, and the institutions and formative cultures that make such communities, public goods and modes of solidarity possible. A radical pedagogy in this instance functions to break through the fog of manufactured ignorance in order to reveal the workings and effects of oppressive and unequal relations of power. Pedagogy as a tool of resistance opens up a space of translation, critique and resistance.

Atomization Makes Us Vulnerable to Oppressive Regimes

One reason the movements in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador have gained momentum is through their successful resistance to the atomization that isolates individuals and encourages a sense of powerlessness by claiming the existing order cannot be changed. They have at times succeeded in countering this atomization by refusing what Robert Jay Lifton in a different context calls a “malignant normality.” That is, the imposition of “destructive versions of reality” and the insistence “that they are the routine and the norm.”

This is particularly crucial because atomization is one of the conditions that make oppressive regimes possible. In order to dismantle these regimes, we must also find a way to break out of the patterns of atomization that enable them.

Leo Lowenthal writing in Commentary in January 1, 1946, writes about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear that approximates a kind of updated fascist terror, one that echoes strongly with the present historical era. Hannah Arendt went further and argued that, “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” She elaborates her view of loneliness as the precondition for fascist terror when she writes:

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.

What both understand, writing in the aftermath of the ravaging destruction produced by fascism and World War II, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational, political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible. Moreover, atomized, rootless and uninformed individuals are not only prone to the forces of depoliticization, but also to the false swindle and spirit of populist demagogues, and the discourses of hate and the demonization of others.

We live in an age of death-dealing loneliness, isolation and militarized atomization. If you believe the popular press, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions in advanced industrial societies. The usual suspect is the Internet, which isolates people in the warm glow of the computer screen while reinforcing their own isolation and sense of loneliness. The notion of friends and likes become disembodied categories in which human beings disappear into the black hole of abstractions and empty signifiers.

Many blame the internet for this development, but the rootlessness and loneliness on display in many internet-facilitated interactions actually predate the internet. In neoliberal societies, even before the invention of the internet, dependence, compassion, mutuality, care for the other and sociality were already undermined by a market-driven ethic in which self-interest becomes the organizing principle of one’s life, and a survival-of-the-fittest mode of competition breeds a culture that promotes an indifference to the plight of others, a disdain for the less fortunate, and a widespread culture of cruelty aimed at those considered poor, “disposable” and excess.

Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society. A more theoretical language produced by Marx talked about alienation as a separation from the fruits of one’s labor, and while that is certainly more true than ever, the separation and isolation now is more extensive and governs the entirety of social life in a consumer-based society run by the demands of commerce and the financialization of everything. Isolation, privatization and the cold logic of instrumental rationality have created a new kind of social formation and social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy and long-term commitments.

Neoliberalism has created a society where pain and suffering are viewed as entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence and militarism as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an exit from ethics, and thus the issue of social costs is divorced from any form of intervention in the world. This is the ideological metrics of political zombies and the currency of neoliberal fascism. The key word here is atomization, and it is a curse imposed by both neoliberal and authoritarian societies while also posing a dire threat to any viable form of democracy.

Toward a Politics of Investment

As we are witnessing in Chile, Ecuador, Hong Kong and Brazil, the heart of any type of politics wishing to challenge this flight into authoritarianism is not merely the recognition of economic structures of domination, but something more profound — which points to the construction of particular identities, values, social relations, or more broadly, agency itself. Central to such a recognition is the fact that politics cannot exist without people investing something of themselves in the discourses, images and representations that come at them daily.

Rather than suffering alone, lured into the frenzy of hateful emotion, individuals need to be able to identify — see themselves and their daily lives — within progressive critiques of existing forms of domination and how they might address such issues not individually, but collectively. This is a particularly difficult challenge today because the scourge of atomization is reinforced daily not only by a coordinated neoliberal assault against any viable notion of the social, but also by an authoritarian and finance-based culture that couples a rigid notion of privatization with a flight from any sense of social and moral responsibility. Moreover, under the dynamics of a fascist political machine, power is concentrated in the hands of a small financial elite that promote divisiveness and hatred through appeals to white nationalism, a deep contempt for liberalism, a propensity for violence and a suppression of dissent.

The atomization of individuals in fascist and neoliberal societies finds its counterpart in the often fatal political fragmentation that is often seen on the left with its proliferation of different groups articulating and addressing often single-issue forms of oppression, whether they are rooted in some version of identity politics or specific instances of domination such as issues associated with climate change. This is not to suggest such struggles are not important politically. On the contrary, what is crucial and equally important is the strategic imperative to unite them around a politics of solidarity that can get them to work together through narratives that, as Nancy Fraser and Houssam Hamade argue, unite struggles for emancipation and social equality.

Feminist scholar Zillah Eisenstein captures insightfully and with great lyrical power the necessity for coalition building as part of a politics of solidarity. She writes:

Coalitions are part of building solidarity with and between the differences. They are demanded by the complexity of our presences. We must move with and beyond the categories that push us apart like center and margin; we must move beyond binaries that separate and divide, and instead find a way towards connectedness that denies unity, or oneness, and instead images solidarity and its tensions. This is a moment for cross-movement and intersecting actions that will create new alliances that we might not know or imagine yet. This means supporting autonomous actions that become cross movement through the intersections that exist within each.

A politics of solidarity could incorporate calls for health care, higher wages, decent pensions, access to quality education, a clean environment, and social goods that improve the dignity and quality of life for everyone. What is needed in this case is a politics that awakens new modes of identification, desire and self-reflection. Stuart Hall was right when he argued in the journal Cultural Studies that, “There’s no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and without that moment of recognition.… Politics also has a drift, so politics will go on, but you won’t have a political movement without that moment of identification.”

The cultural apparatuses controlled by the 1 percent are the most powerful educational forces in many authoritarian societies, and they have been transformed into disimagination machines — apparatuses of misrecognition, ignorance and cruelty. Collective agency is now atomized, devoid of any viable embrace of the social. Too many people on the left and progressives have defaulted on this enormous responsibility for recognizing the educative nature for politics and for challenging this form of domination, working to change consciousness, and make education central to politics itself. Democracies are only as strong as the people who inhabit society. Put differently, the relationship between culture and politics becomes clear in the understanding that democracy’s survival depends on a set of habits, dispositions and sensibilities of a formative culture that sustains them.

Authoritarians Use Miseducation to Maintain Power

Trump plays to and manipulates the media because he understands how politics and theater merge in an environment in which the spectacle becomes the only politics left. He does not want to change consciousness, but to freeze it within a flood of shocks, sensations and simplisms that demand no thinking while erasing memory, thoughtfulness and critical dialogue.

For authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro, miseducation is the key to maintaining power. In addition, they use the media, schools and other cultural institutions to kill the social imagination, collapse the distinction between the truth and falsehoods, and abolish the line between civic literacy and lies. Education in the broadest sense has become a powerful weapon not merely of propaganda, but a tool of power in the shaping of desires, identities and one’s view of the future. The central political issue here is not about the emergence of an existing reign of civic illiteracy, but about the crisis of agency, the forces that produce it, and the failure of progressives and the left to take such a crisis seriously by working hard to address the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle — all of which is necessary in order to get people to be able to translate private troubles into wider social issues. The latter may be the biggest political and educational challenge facing those who believe that the current political challenge is not between simply Trump and progressives who rail against the financial elite and big corporations, but over those who believe in democracy and those who do not.

The threat to the planet and humankind is so urgent that there is no space in between from which to refuse to challenge these predatory political movements. The machinery of social and political death unleashed by the avatars of greed, disposability and exploitation parades its horrors like a badge of honor, all the while escaping into the global networks of finance and social irresponsibility, while preaching a feral nativism and developing a politics of entrenched walls and borders. Against these new political formations — as is evident in resistance movements in Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Iraq, Lebanon and Hong Kong — movements for resistance have developed that are global, mobilized by millions, and call not to win justice through often rigged and corrupt elections, but to shut down the militarized institutions, cultures and ideologies of racism, exploitation and death through direct action. When thousands take to the streets, the punishing state loses the only weapon it has left: sheer repression. If these authoritarian states imprisoned and killed millions, such actions would attract even more resistance. Susan Buck-Morss, the author of Revolution Today, is right in writing:

In order to challenge the illegality of law itself, the force that is needed has nothing to do with firearms. It is the overwhelming, globally democratic force of numbers across every line of difference. The way to prevent an ‘end to democracy’ is to make democracy the means.

Any viable strategy for change needs a politics that informs the masses and immobilizes the ruling elite. Also needed is a politics that shuts down the flow of capital, the production of misery and the institutions that make it possible.

This suggests a politics that must unite workers, educators and others across the boundaries of race, class and a range of other oppositional movements. The biggest challenge to create such a unified movement speaks not only to a crisis of politics, but agency itself. Such a politics is only possible if it is accompanied by rigorous forms of self-reflection and self-determination as well as a rejection (as Theodor Adorno once put it) of the educational ideal of hardness and toxic masculinity that informs and shapes current right-wing populist movements. Paul Valery’s insistence that “inhumanity has a great future” can only survive if people accept the alleged universal presupposition that power is only about domination and that nothing can change.

As Byung-Chul Han argues in What is Power?, power exceeds the domination of the will, and its affirmation and use are never far from both a critique of oppressive power relations and a full-fledged resistance to them. Rather than only acting so as to repress freedom, power also constitutes itself through the production of freedom. If there is to be a successful challenge to the rise of neoliberal fascism across the globe, the root causes of the current political and economic threats to humankind must be uncovered by recognizing the “societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms.” In part, this means being historically aware of what forces are at work in a number of countries that signal the rise of new forms of authoritarianism and modes of fascist politics. While no historical moment provides the perfect mirror to the current crisis, our current situation offers up warnings about how the horrors of the past can crystallize into new forms.

Without Hope, There Is No Possibility For Resistance

Central to such a task is recognizing that the globe faces a crisis not only of politics, but also of memory, history, agency and hope. Without hope, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. It is worth noting that the U.S. is suffering from a crisis of agency brought on in part by a crisis of civic literacy, education and the heavy hand of relegating millions to an ethic of sheer survival. As civic institutions collapse under the ideological and economic weight of global neoliberalism, a unique blend of fascist politics — with its hyper nationalism, call for racial purity, religious extremism and market fundamentalism — operates in what appears to be an ideological ecosystem of ignorance, power and alleged common sense, not to mention the allure of hatred, bigotry and racism.

One consequence is that the inability to relate to and identify with the suffering of others has reached crisis proportions in the current historical moment. This is a politics that celebrates brutality, aggression and sadism, and can be seen in the exercise of state terrorism in Brazil against ecological activists trying to save the Amazon rainforest, and in the United States in the separation and incarceration of undocumented immigrants and their children. In this plague of human cruelty and misery, what must be addressed is an understanding of the forces at work in the updated fusion of fascism and neoliberalism that now dominates a number of countries. At the very least, this is a politics in which political zombies masquerade as patriots, all the while promoting forms of racial and economic fundamentalism and social cleansing.

In the current historical moment, fascism in its neoliberal forms has moved to the center of power in a number of countries, such as Brazil and the United States, and it represents a unique political formation that is haunting the globe. If it is to be challenged, we must rethink how dominant politics resonates with the simplified discourses of populism and easily accommodates the call for strongmen to take over the reins of governance. To do so we must critically analyze the educational conditions that allow individuals to surrender their sense of agency, modes of identification and dreams to the ideological and political forces of neoliberal fascism.

At the heart of this issue is the question of how education can enable forms of self-formation that enable people to resist fascist and neoliberal mentalities, which are inevitably present within cacophonous democratic political modes of governance. To resist these mentalities, we must expose the ideological and economic workings of power and collectively embrace the need to engage in direct action in order to shut down the machineries of death. People in Chile, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Ecuador, and Iraq, among other countries, are rising up against the corruption and brutal austerity measures produced by neoliberalism and in doing so they are producing a fierce critique of capitalism and constructing a new understanding of politics and mass resistance. These protests are occurring at a crucial time when the forces of militarism, state violence and disposability are on the march. Under such circumstance, it is crucial to remember — as Marx once stated — that history is open and is made by human beings. It is in precisely that warning and hope that democracy will either perish or thrive.

‘No Choice’ but to Impeach Trump, Pelosi Says

WASHINGTON—A sample of the sights and sounds across Washington on a momentous day in Washington as the House lurches toward a Wednesday evening vote on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump (all times local):

12:35 p.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump’s actions have left the House with “no choice” but to act on impeachment.

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The Democratic-run House has begun debate on two articles of impeachment against the Republican president. The first charges Trump with abuse of power. The second charges him with obstruction of Congress. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit him in a trial next year.

Pelosi held her hand over her heart and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the House. She observed that lawmakers are the “custodians of the Constitution.”

The California Democrat spent much of the morning in the dimly-lit third row from the back, all to herself. There, she sat in black with her mace pin on her jacket and a green folder on her lap. She flipped through sheaf of papers, appearing to read them one by one. Periodically, she looked up to hear the debate on the rules.

At 12:08 p.m., Pelosi descended to the well of the chamber to the podium and to open the debate on the abuse and obstruction articles.

___

12:15 p.m.

Joe Kennedy III took to the House floor with impeachment — and his children — on his mind.

The House was opening six hours of debate Wednesday on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, with evening votes scheduled. And Robert Kennedy’s grandson wanted to have his say.

The Massachusetts Democrat read from a letter to his own young children. It said, `This is a moment you will read about in your history books.”

With the House moving closer to impeaching a president for only the third time in U.S. history, Kennedy wanted to explain to his kids why he felt it necessary to act. Kennedy said Trump abused the “most sacred office in our land.” He said that by day’s end, the record will show that “justice won. … We did not let you down.”

But a Republican congresswoman from Arizona accused Democrats of “`tearing this country apart.” Debbi Lesko said the impeachment process was unfair and rigged.

The House will vote on two charges — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit him in a trial next year.

___

9:25 a.m.

Utter disbelief.

That’s the sense expressed by President Donald Trump as arose he Wednesday morning and faced the prospect that by day’s end, he’d likely to be just the third U.S. president to be impeached.

Trump has a relatively light schedule during the day. He’s indicated he won’t be watching the six hours of impeachment debate on the House floor. And in the evening he’s scheduled to be in Battle Creek, Michigan, for a rally.

His remarks at Kellogg Arena could come around the same time as House is voting on the two charges — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Trump’s press secretary says the president will have plenty to say at the rally about the voting back in Washington.

Trump started his day as he often does: by airing his grievances on Twitter.

Here’s what he said: “Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing.”

The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit him in a trial next year.

As House Nears Impeachment Vote, Trump Declares Disbelief

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump woke up in the White House Wednesday morning and expressed utter disbelief that he will likely become just the third U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

With the House taking up two articles of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Trump started his day as he often does: by airing his grievances on Twitter.

“Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing,” Trump tweeted. “Read the Transcripts. This should never happen to another President again. Say a PRAYER!”

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Trump has a relatively light schedule Wednesday, but has indicated he won’t be watching the six hours of impeachment debate on the House floor.

He did, however, retweet comments by GOP lawmakers and aides on his favorite morning show, “Fox & Friends,” as they rallied behind him and sought to reassure conservative voters that he remains in good spirits despite the dark mark of impeachment looming on his presidency.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, said they were among GOP lawmakers who huddled with Trump at the White House Tuesday evening to talk strategy about Wednesday’s hearing and the likely Senate trial that follow early next year.

But McCarthy insisted that Trump remained focused on moving his agenda even as his legacy will forever be marred by impeachment.

“Anybody else this would be traumatic for them,” said McCarthy, who noted that Trump in recent days has hosted White House holiday parties and will head to the 2020 battleground state of Michigan Wednesday evening for a campaign rally. “I’ve never seen a man so strong … He is focused on what the American people need.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told “”Fox & Friends” Trump will have plenty to say about the impeachment vote at his evening campaign rally in Battle Creek.

How America Broke Up With the Democratic Party

Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage.

While the GOP has been trying to establish a semi-permanent ruling majority through bigotry, gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats had long-term majority control of American politics pretty much continuously for more than a half-century.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency and brought with him a Democratic Party sweep so complete that, with the exception of two brief two-year periods, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1931 to 1995. FDR built the modern-day Democratic Party and launched it toward the 21st century.

Working-class Americans had fallen in love with Roosevelt and Democratic Party policies in the 1930s, and that love affair persisted across the better part of three generations. In the past few decades, though, they “fell out of love” with the Democratic Party and began regularly putting Republicans in charge of the country.

What happened?

Back in the 1980s, sociologist Diane Vaughan did some remarkable research about how people fall in and out of love that she compiled in her book Uncoupling. Her surprising but commonsense findings, now used by psychotherapists and marriage counselors around the world, apply to politics as much as they do to intimate relationships.

At some point during most relationships, one partner will become dissatisfied with the behavior of the other. When this dissatisfaction is so fundamental that the unhappy partner might consider dissolving the relationship if it’s not changed, they will almost always say something or otherwise signal their dissatisfaction.

This signal of dissatisfaction is referred to by therapists as “the cry,” as in “the announcement” (think town crier, not sobbing). If the “offending” partner ignores or doesn’t understand the gravity of this “cry out” about how the relationship is going, it’s referred to as “the cry unheard.” The most common occurrence is that the partner “hears” the cry, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal and so ignores it; in other cases, it’s missed altogether.

When the “cry” isn’t heard or is misunderstood as a routine small disagreement, the dissatisfied partner will begin noticing other things that are offending, and, over time, compile a list of reasons to leave the relationship that outnumbers the reasons to stay.

Meanwhile, the offending partner—not having heard, or having misunderstood the “cry”—is oblivious and thinks everything is just fine.

The first turning point in the relationship comes when the dissatisfied partner, having put out the cry unheard and not seeing changes in behavior, starts to share the grievance with others, complaining (often subtly) about their partner.

After a (typically relatively short) time, having gotten feedback from others that, “Yes, that behavior would bother me, too,” the dissatisfied partner, concluding the relationship can’t be salvaged, begins an emotional separation process, moving past bargaining and anger into grieving the loss, accepting that the relationship is not salvageable, and then, finally, announcing that they are pulling the plug on the relationship.

Hearing for the first time this announcement that the relationship is dead, the clueless partner who didn’t hear the cry is blindsided, shocked, and devastated. While their partner has already gone through all the stages of unhappiness, deciding to leave, grieving the failure of the relationship, and accepting it as over, the clueless partner is forced to begin the process (similar to Kubler-Ross’ stages of dying) for themselves from a cold start.

Applying this model to the Democratic Party, the first really loud “cry unheard” from the Democratic electorate came in 1992.

Prior to 1992, the Democratic Party had been FDR’s and LBJ’s party of big government, big projects (from legalizing unions to creating Social Security and Medicare to putting a man on the moon), and the great defender of working people.

For example, many Democrats and their union allies strongly opposed Nixon’s 1974 Trade Act (ultimately signed by Gerald Ford) that gave fast-track authority to the president to encourage offshoring American jobs (we’ve lost more than 80,000 factories just since then) by cutting protective tariffs on imports.

I was living in Michigan running an advertising agency and reporting news part-time in the mid-1970s, and I remember well how dangerous it was to drive one of the cheap imported (mostly Japanese) cars that began flooding the country that decade as a result of the Nixon/Ford trade policies.

Working people were furious with the job losses, and when Jimmy Carter didn’t reverse Nixon’s trade policies, they turned to Reagan, who had promised, in the election of 1980, that he would protect workers’ jobs, even securing the endorsement of PATCO, the air controllers union he would famously betray in his first year in office. While union leaders were wary and opposed Reagan, many rank-and-file members believed the charismatic actor.

But instead of standing up for working people, in 1981 Reagan declared war on the unions (then the largest funders of the Democratic Party nationwide), and began negotiations with Mexico and Canada to speed up the rate at which American companies were moving factories and, thus, union jobs out of the U.S.

This picked up steam with the NAFTA agreement itself, which was finalized by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992, although it was yet to be ratified by Congress.

In 1971, when Walmart was a regional retailer operating in only five states, its stores often had banners proclaiming what became the title of Sam Walton’s autobiography: “Made in America.” By the election year of 1992, four years after Sam had stepped down as CEO, it was getting hard to find anything in a Walmart that was still made in the USA.

And it wasn’t just Walmart—the 1970s trickle of foreign cars had become a flood by the end of the Reagan and Bush years in 1992, and union jobs all across America were vanishing, along with the factories that provided for them.

Thus, the “cry unheard” of America’s working people—most of them Democrats back then (even if they’d had an “affair” with Reagan)—was, “Please stop these insane ‘free trade’ deals that Nixon started and Reagan/Bush put on steroids!”

But by this time the leadership of the Democratic Party wasn’t listening, or dismissed union concerns as something that would pass. As Reagan planned, union jobs evaporated throughout the 1980s and with them went the ability of big unions to support Democratic politicians with either cash or boots-on-the-ground.

With the unions dying under Reagan’s assault, Bill Clinton, planning to run for president in the election of 1992, knew he had to find other sources of financial support (the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to corporate money in 1976 and 1978, exploding the cost of a presidential campaign). This was before anybody knew how to raise individual contributions on the internet, so Clinton had to figure out how to finance his campaign without relying on the unions.

As Al From lays out in his book The New Democrats and the Return to Power, he and Bill Clinton worked “to rescue the party from the political wilderness, redefine its message, and, most importantly, win presidential elections.” And that would take a lot of cash.

Bank robber Willie Sutton famously said that banks were “where the money is,” and the money available for politics in 1992 had moved from the pockets of working people (wages had been flat for more than a decade) and their unions (unionization was in freefall) into the pockets of banks, insurance companies, drug companies, defense contractors, and other big corporations. And the Supreme Court had legalized taking their money in exchange for favors just before Reagan’s election in 1976 and 1978 (and tripled down on it in 2016).

“In April 1989,” From’s book notes, he “traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to recruit the state’s young governor, Bill Clinton, to be chairman of the DLC.” The result of their partnership was the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a new mantra for the Democratic Party: “[E]conomic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…” that brought with it a flood of corporate and billionaire money.

The party of big government solutions had become the party of big corporate money.

As a result, that first Clinton election year, 1992, was also the year when the “cry unheard” of American working people became a primal scream.

Nearly one in five voters that year cast a ballot for an eccentric billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, whose mantra was that the NAFTA free trade agreement negotiated by Reagan/Bush but also supported by the newly baptized DLC chair Clinton would lead to “a giant sucking sound from the South” as factories and jobs moved to Mexico.

Clinton suggested that blue-collar jobs weren’t the future of America, and his running mate, Al Gore, said that moving automotive and other factories to Mexico would actually be good for America because Mexican workers would no longer have an incentive to cross our southern border and “we [could] cut down on illegal immigration.”

The Democratic Party now led by Clinton thus embraced a behavior that most working Americans knew would be a disaster for them, and that they had cried out loudly against with their Perot vote in 1992.

Over the next eight years, as Clinton ignored them, many began considering having another affair with the GOP. After all, if Clinton was going to embrace Reagan/Bush trade policies, why not just go right to the source—the GOP itself—for policy prescriptions.

According to Bob Woodward, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton said sarcastically, “Where are all the Democrats? I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans.”

He added, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we’re standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”

Further turning his back on the FDR/LBJ Democratic Party principles, Clinton went on to heartily embrace Republican policies of cutting the social safety net. “The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed.

Putting the knife hilt-deep into the spine of LBJ’s Great Society, Clinton said, “Today we are ending welfare as we know it” as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That law undid much of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, which had succeeded in cutting poverty rates in America from 22.2 percent in 1963 down to 12.6 percent in 1970.

For the first time since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s, families in poverty were not guaranteed a lifeline. They had to prove they were working in order to qualify for assistance, which sounded like a good idea in theory, especially during boom times like the ’90s, when there were lots of jobs available. But during recessions, when three or four people are looking for every one available job, a work requirement for welfare does a lot of harm to already struggling families.

The stats have borne this out. In the years after welfare reform, as a series of presidents and governors have followed in Clinton’s footsteps, ever more people have been kicked off benefits, while poverty has increased. Before Clinton’s “welfare reform,” roughly 70 percent of impoverished families had access to a lifeline. But after reform, by 2016, only 23 percent did, and in some states that number was below 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Revolution’s trade policy was wiping out the industrial base of America, while its tax policies were simultaneously moving trillions of dollars in wealth from middle-class families into the pockets of the top 1 percent.

The year Reagan was sworn in, we were the richest nation in the world, and other than a few wobbles during the Civil War and two World Wars, our national debt had been relatively steady in inflation-adjusted dollars since the administration of George Washington. We were the world’s largest creditor—more countries owed us money than any other nation on earth.

Today, after nearly 40 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, we are the world’s largest debtor nation, and our national debt nearly outweighs our annual GDP.

The year Reagan was sworn into office, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world, and the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. We brought in ores for manufacturing, and shipped out everything from TVs and computers to cars and clothing.

Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world’s mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world’s largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. We’ve gone from trade surpluses to trade deficits, a reflection of the fact that our factory floors had moved to Asia and Mexico.

In 1960, about one in four Americans worked in manufacturing, producing things of lasting wealth for our nation. Today, after jumping headfirst into one free-trade agreement after another, fewer than one in ten Americans work in manufacturing.

Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. They didn’t disappear; they just moved to low-wage factories in foreign nations.

Ironically, Republican President Eisenhower (1952-1960) knew that Americans loved FDR’s New Deal, and continued FDR’s trade policies. He had, after all, grown up with them (he was born in 1890), and fought World War II as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe under FDR and led the invasion at Normandy.

He told his brother Edgar in a 1954 letter, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

Eisenhower added, “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are… Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

But Clinton and the “moderate” DLC Democrats embraced becoming Eisenhower Republicans, even as Eisenhower would have repudiated their policies.

“CLINTON SWIPES THE GOP’S LYRICS” read the headline of a 1996 Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, which opened with this prescient paragraph:

“‘The good news is that we may elect a Republican president this year,’ said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. ‘The bad news is that it may be Bill Clinton.’”

The result was the beginning of the Great Uncoupling the Democratic Party experienced in the 1990s, with formerly Democratic-voting working-class and poor people going over to the GOP, a trend we saw continued with Trump’s election.

As Harry Truman once said, “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat…”

As jobs and economic issues became the exclusive provenance of what the media calls “far-left” politicians like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, and the leadership of the Democratic Party stayed with Reaganomics, working people generally failed to show up in large enough numbers to keep George W. Bush out of the White House.

But George W. Bush didn’t repudiate Reaganomics, so the working class continued to stagnate economically. Frustrated Americans decided to take another try with the Democrats.

This set up Senator Barack Obama, who promised “hope and change,” to beat John McCain’s “steady as she goes” approach to the presidency.

But, vague rhetoric aside, Obama’s “change” was largely a continuation of Clinton’s Eisenhower-like corporate- and billionaire-friendly DLC policies. He restored dignity and sanity to the presidency, but also pushed hard to expand NAFTA-like outsourcing policies by throwing several years of political capital into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was ultimately as unpopular among a majority of Americans as was NAFTA in 1992. And his support of organized labor was weak, at best.

Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance.

As a result, Pew found that only about half of Americans qualified as “middle class” by the beginning of the Obama presidency. “From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points,” they noted.

With fewer than half of Americans qualifying as middle class by 2015, Pew concluded their study: “The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for the past four decades.” Four decades earlier, of course, the Democratic Party began a course that culminated in Bill Clinton leading the party to turn its back on FDR and LBJ, and embrace Republican-lite economic and trade policies.

Like a partner whose cry was still unheard, America’s still-wounded working-class and newly poor voters decided to take another chance with a new Republican partner, this time a mobbed-up New York City real estate hustler and reality TV star who promised to reverse so-called “free trade” and “bring those jobs home.”

Donald Trump had reached back into the old Democratic playbook, picking up where LBJ (who maintained protective tariffs and brought us Medicare and Medicaid without a single Republican vote) had left off, promising to reinstate protectionist trade policies to bring factories back to America. He also promised to reinstate LBJ’s emphasis on the quality of life for working-class and poor people through a national health insurance plan that would be “better” than Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was floundering after being gutted by the Supreme Court.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump told the Washington Post. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” Then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price added, on “Meet the Press,” that “nobody will be worse off financially” with the new Trumpcare plan. Trump tweeted that there would be “no cuts… to Medicaid” and said that “no one will lose coverage.”

And while Trump’s trade efforts have been ham-handed, his trade war with China is—outside of farming communities—still popular in the industrial heartland, particularly among current and former union workers.

His health care plan was a scam, making available on Obamacare exchanges formerly 90-day (now three-year) emergency “bridge plans” that could still cancel insurance for preexisting conditions. But with the media focused on Trump, horserace and scandal, virtually no Americans realize that the plans Trump pitched as new and cheaper are so dangerous.

Thus, working-class whites in the American Midwest and South, even those not in thrall to Trump’s pitch to white supremacists, are largely staying with him. Hope springs eternal, after all, and dies last. The Democratic Party is still locked out of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, even after two of the past four presidents who served for eight years each were Democrats.

Which brings us to how relationships heal and couples reunite, and how this could be applied to save the soul and electoral outcomes of the Democratic Party.

When the partner who had ignored the “cry” now hears it, there’s a very real chance that the relationship can be saved. Doing so requires two steps, both done with a lot of commitment and hard work.

First, change the offensive behavior.

Second, remember why you “fell in love” in the first place, and revisit those reasons, experiences, feelings, and activities that first brought you together.

Democrats know how to do both of these things, party leadership notwithstanding.

The Democratic Party had built a three-generation governing majority once in the past. All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times.

Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history, after all, and should remember how well it was received by the American people.

Like a partner who wants to repair a wounded relationship, the Democrats must return to core principles and stay faithful to them. And we still have the template.

Today, the Democratic Party has two presidential nominees who carry the values and economic policies of FDR and LBJ, while embracing modern-day values of diversity and inclusion in ways neither party dared before this century. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the second-largest Democratic caucus and the third largest in all of Congress.

If the Democratic Party follows its base and promotes progressive candidates and policies, it has a good chance of pulling America back from the brink of authoritarianism and oligarchy, and to restore our moral authority in the world. A return to big thinking and big goals like those of FDR and LBJ will put Democrats on a track to a second multigenerational governing majority.

If the party uses its convention and superdelegates (on a second vote) to choose another candidate committed to DLC (now Third Way) policies, get ready for either another four years of Donald Trump or a “moderate” one-term pause in the continuing deterioration of the middle-class American Dream.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a former psychotherapist, SiriusXM talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Corporate Media Hates Progressives as Much as It Loves Capitalism

The Washington Post‘s function as a bullhorn for centrist Democrats continues full force this week, with an article (12/11/19) headlined, “As Democrats Trade Barbs on Business Ties, Some Worry Purity Tests Are Going Too Far” (or, in the print edition, “Democrats’ Purity Tests Over Business Ties Could Backfire: Some Observers Worry That Voters Will Perceive a War on Prosperity”). It’s a greatest-hits of an election piece, rounding up a posse of centrist sources to accuse progressive candidates of imposing “purity tests,” and argue that a leftist turn by Democrats will hurt the party.

The Washington Post (12/11/19) says “many Democrats…fret that an increasingly aggressive tone could ultimately hurt the party, potentially creating litmus tests and exposing candidates to Republican accusations of a war on prosperity.”

The article focuses on the Pete Buttigieg/Elizabeth Warren clash over transparency and ties to corporate America. This “growing battle” is “worrying some in the party that an escalating series of purity tests could turn off voters and convey an exaggerated disdain for business,” Sean Sullivan and Matt Viser report.

As usual, “some in the party” is corporate media code for “centrist Democrats.” Aside from the current candidates and their spokespeople, the piece seeks out almost exclusively the right wing of the party to judge the import and fallout from this scrutiny over corporate coziness. Sources include a fundraiser for Buttigieg and Biden, another Buttigieg backer, two Booker supporters who won House seats in swing New Jersey districts last year, former candidate Tim Ryan (who told the Post, “You can’t be hostile to business, to free enterprise”), and centrist former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. Former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the epitome of move-to-the-right-Democratism, was prominently featured.

They balance this barrage with one “liberal Democrat,” a strategist who has donated to Warren.

But it’s not just the centrist sources that do the spinning. Sullivan and Viser themselves report that “Buttigieg was being targeted by protesters labeling him ‘Wall Street Pete,’ though the bulk of his career has been in the military and city government.” Well, then, those protesters must be loony lefties! Except that Buttigieg has raked in more Wall Street money than any other Democratic candidate.

(The Post might also have mentioned the incident that went viral earlier in the week in which a young voter asked Buttigieg, “I wanted to ask if you think that taking big money out of politics includes not taking money off of billionaires and closed-door fundraisers.” Buttigieg’s curt reply: “No.”)

The piece uses the term “purity test” three times (four counting the headline), which—as FAIR (4/17/19) has pointed out—corporate media use exclusively to chastise the left for supporting progressive policies.

The New York Times (12/11/19) is alarmed as “more Americans become disillusioned with the capitalist system that has made upward mobility a pillar of the country’s identity.”

The problem, according to “many,” is that “the party needs to do a better job of outlining an economic agenda that can break through at a moment when the labor market is strong.” But for too many voters, the labor market doesn’t feel so “strong” (FAIR.org, 11/19/19)—and for them, the Post’s notion of a “war on prosperity” must seem rather ironic.

Sanders and Warren are perhaps the only ones outlining a breakthrough economic agenda—with Medicare for All, a wealth tax and a $15 minimum wage, among other ideas—but that’s not the agenda the Post and their “many” friends are looking for.

Instead, you’ll find the centrist answer in this week’s New York Times opinion section (12/11/19), where Henry Paulson and Erskine Bowles bash those leftist plans and explain that we “can get America to love capitalism again” by “aggressively invest[ing] in our human capital,” “expanding the earned-income tax credit” and “restoring the sanity of our fiscal position” by cutting Social Security. Can’t you just hear the crowds chanting those words now?

More Americans Facing Murder Charges in Drug Deaths

Emma Semler, 24, cried in a Pennsylvania federal courtroom as she waited for the judge to hand down her sentence.

On trial for the death of her friend, 20-year-old Jenny Werstler, she told the judge, “I have extreme remorse. If I could go back and change anything, I would.”

Although Semler and Werstler had met in rehab, they often shared drugs. On May 9, 2014, Semler gave Werstler some money, and Werstler bought some heroin from a dealer she knew. Semler got the needle. The two women, along with Semler’s sister, holed up in a KFC bathroom in West Philadelphia and shot up. Soon after, Werstler went into distress. Semler and her sister collected the signs of drug use and ran out.

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A KFC employee discovered Werstler, but by then it was too late. She died soon after.

In the courtroom last June, the judge noted that despite her claims of remorse, Semler had yet to apologize to her friend’s family (although if she had, it could have been seen as an admission of guilt, undercutting her defense).

But by that day, her sentence was already set, thanks to the charges brought by prosecutors and federal mandatory minimums. She turned and mouthed, “I’m sorry” to Werstler’s family, continuing to cry.

“I should be dead as well. I don’t know why I’m still here and not Jenny,” Semler said.

The judge handed down her sentence, ruling that she would spend the next 21 years in prison.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Williams justified the stack of charges against Semler. “This defendant acted with complete disregard for another human life, the life of a supposed friend,” she said. “The defendant continued to engage in criminal behavior and was arrested for possession of heroin again after the victim’s death. Aggressively prosecuting egregious drug crimes like this case is part of this office’s multilayered approach to confronting the opioid epidemic ravaging our neighborhoods. The sentence handed down today is in the interest of justice.”

Semler’s case is not unique. In the last few years, state and federal prosecutors have increasingly pressed murder charges against people who sell or share drugs that result in a death. Dozens of states have passed new drug-induced homicide laws or stricter ones. Other states, as well as the federal government, have had them on the books for years, but the number of prosecutions have jumped in the drive to “do something” about the opioid crisis. According to Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that supports science-based drug regulation over criminalization, media mentions of drug-induced homicide prosecutions rose over 300% between 2011 and 2016. In Pennsylvania, where Semler was tried, such cases spiked from 15 in 2013 to 205 in 2017, global health organization Vital Strategies reports. “Sadly, many jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania, continue to use the criminal justice system to address what is actually a public health crisis,” National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers President Nina Ginsberg said in a press release.

In many cases, prosecutors don’t have to show premeditation, malice or intent. They don’t have to demonstrate criminal negligence. In states with the harshest laws, all prosecutors have to prove is that a drug made it from person A to person B—and that person B died as a result. It doesn’t matter if the person overdosed because they had alcohol or other drugs in their system that they got elsewhere.

“They don’t have to prove that there was an intentionality to do this act, so there’s not much of a defense available here,” says Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University. “It doesn’t give you much ammunition. The balance of power is very much on the prosecutorial side.” And they’re redefining what constitutes murder.

*****

Pennsylvania state Rep. Sara Innamorato gets why there’s a drive to punish people who sell or share drugs that result in a death.

In the mid-1990s, Innamorato’s father got into a car crash, breaking his hip. He was prescribed OxyContin. At the time, no one (except for, arguably, the pharmaceutical industry) knew that the drug posed a high risk for addiction.

His drug habit threw her family into turmoil. “Dad was the breadwinner,” she says. “We really struggled.” He spent years in and out of treatment—court-ordered rehab for poor people, fancy rehab for rich people. But he couldn’t stop using drugs. “Nothing seemed to stick with him,” she says.

One day, while he was on vacation with his second wife in Florida, he disappeared. The family had no idea where he had gone—until they got the phone call they’d been dreading for years. Police had identified the body of a middle-aged man who had overdosed on the street.

“He died alone on the sidewalk,” she says. “Without anyone. Without dignity.”

*****

Innamorato’s dad died in 2004. In the decade-plus since, fatal opioid-related deaths have skyrocketed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, more than 702,000 people died of opioid overdoses; in the 12 month period ending in May, the CDC estimates that 67,071 people died of all drug overdoses, with opioids involved in the vast majority of fatalities. Now, lawmakers and public servants in communities ravaged by addiction—urban, suburban and rural—have begun to embrace public health policies based on the concept of harm reduction.

More first-responders carry Naloxone, a life-saving drug that almost instantly reverses a dangerous overdose if it’s administered in time. In medically assisted therapy, drugs like Methadone and Buprenorphine (aka Suboxone) curb cravings, lowering the chances of a relapse. Good Samaritan laws shield drug users from legal trouble if they call 911 to report an overdose, even if there are drugs at the scene.

“Dead people don’t recover,” Innamorato points out, neatly encapsulating the attitude behind harm reduction. Instead of shaming addicts and throwing them in jail for failing to kick their habit, the idea is to help people struggling with addiction so they can stay alive long enough to recover.

It’s a welcome break from the punitive approach that has characterized the racist war on drugs.

At the same time, police and prosecutors are literally redefining murder to punish people struggling with addiction, recasting them as evil dealers who don’t care about the lives of other addicts who overdose.

“It’s the classic scapegoat model—prosecutors needing to go out and saber-rattle and say, ‘We’re getting in front of this issue,’ ” Beletsky says. “They engage in all of these theatrics and steamroll over these people—a lot of them are literally the most vulnerable in the community—and they feed them into the mass incarceration machine.”

On their face, the laws are meant to take down drug kingpins. In practice, they’re applied to low-level street dealers (most of whom are addicts who sell to fund their habit) and cases where one user shared drugs with another.

“In many cases, it’s friends or family or loved ones,” Beletsky says.

He points out that resources allocated to prosecuting addicts and dealers and keeping them in prison for decades could be spent addressing the root problems that drive unhealthy drug use. “We’re paying for these prosecutions and prison terms at the same time that there’s no money to provide treatment or housing.”

Innamorato understands why grief might drive some families and public officials to demand vengeance.

They might see 20 years in prison—even life—as suitable punishment for engaging in drug use that led to someone else’s death. Prosecutors cite a deterrent effect, saying that making an example out of someone might make the next addict or dealer think twice before selling or giving away dangerous drugs.

The problem is, it might actually make an addict think twice about reporting an overdose, because it might put them on the hook for murder, resulting in decades—even life—in prison. In a recent case in Florida, prosecutors are seeking life without parole in a case where a woman smuggled drugs in jail and shared them with a fellow inmate who died.

And even a short stint in jail can be disastrous: People who do drugs are at their most vulnerable to fatal overdose after they’ve been to jail, because their tolerance is lower.

Innamorato doesn’t see how putting another addict in jail or in prison is going to bring her father back. She’d rather have resources go to helping people who are alive and struggling.

“What’s most important is keeping that person alive and allowing for the possibility they might recover and get better for the people who love them,” she says.

*****

That Semler fled instead of helping her friend makes her seem villainous and selfish. But harm reduction specialists note that this aspect of the case shows exactly why these prosecutions are so misguided. Semler was not a violent kingpin, building a fortune on the misery of others. She was a young, struggling addict.

When she cried that it should have been her that died and not Werstler, she hit on another important aspect of why these types of cases can backfire. It could just as easily have been her dying on the floor, with Werstler too scared to call 911.

Devin Reaves, a specialist at the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Coalition, is friends with Semler. “Twenty-one years. A fucking long time,” he says. “She’s going to be 56 years old by the time she gets out.”

He explains why bringing murder charges against addicts and dealers is counterproductive and inhumane.

“First of all, we really need to interrogate the social construct of why drugs are bad or good. Coffee is a drug,” he says, noting that while opioids obviously are more dangerous than coffee, focusing on a particular drug isn’t particularly helpful. “It’s not the problem. A better way to think about it is that it’s a symptom of the racist war on drugs.” (Semler is white. But many of the tropes about “dealers” vs. “victims” harken back to previous, more overtly racist drug panics.)

“Politicians say that we can’t arrest our way out of this problem; it’s just rhetoric. Drug delivery resulting in death drops even the semblance of the idea that you’re taking an anti-punitive approach.”

He hits on the most shocking fact about these prosecutions—how far they deviate from most people’s understanding of what constitutes murder.

“When most people think about murder, they assume it’s inspired by malice: ‘I meant to do something bad to somebody.’ But a lot of people who share drugs are doing the opposite. Their friend is sick and need some kind of opioid to ease withdrawal symptoms. It’s more like ‘I’m trying to hook my buddy up.’ ”

Beletsky says that it’s hard to process such cases. A drug user is grieving the loss of a friend, a spouse, a family member—and on top of that he or she is deemed a murderer by the state and packed off to prison for decades.

“It’s an absolute travesty,” he says. “It adds insult to injury to people whose friend or family member died.”

*****

At the same time, clearance rates (a crime is solved) for violent crimes of malice such as premeditated murder and rape are statistically low. According to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, in 2017 only 61.6% of murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases were cleared by an arrest. Only 34.5% of rape cases were resolved with an arrest. And although murder rates remained more or less steady between 2016 and 2017, rape rates showed a slight increase across the board.

So it’s not surprising that law enforcement personnel are drawn to cracking down on drug-induced homicide cases. They get to feel like they’re eradicating the scourge of opioid addiction and solving a murder. These cases are extremely easy to win. Often, all it takes is for the state to have a text or two between the person who lived and the person who died, proving they’d plotted to get and do drugs.

*****

In November, Vital Strategies organized a conference of defense attorneys in Harrisburg, Pa. During a presentation, Beletsky asked the roomful of lawyers how many of their clients had been prosecuted based primarily on texts.

Almost all of them raised their hands.

“It’s surprised me, honestly, that people would be so reckless with texting,” he says.

And cops are exploiting a legal loophole. When they get to the scene of the crime, they might immediately take the deceased person’s cellphone. Technically, they shouldn’t. The dead person no longer legally owns anything, so the police should either get a warrant or obtain permission from the next of kin or arbiter of estate.

But how many people know—or remember—that? Especially when they’re grieving a loved one who just died?

A recent court case further eroded reasonable expectations of privacy.

On June 22, 2018, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a defendant had no reasonable right to expect “privacy in the location information collected by the FBI because he had shared that information with his wireless carriers.”

Beletsy is not optimistic. There are very few legal strategies for defense attorneys to use to counter drug-induced homicide cases.

“All these defense lawyers are basically getting steamrolled by prosecutors, and people are going away for long sentences. As a lawyer, there’s not much you can do. And in many places, they’re trying to expand these laws,” he notes. “Like in Pennsylvania, every session there’s an effort to make laws even more draconian.”

Why Did So Many Democrats Vote for Trump’s Defense Budget?

What follows is a conversation between the Friends Congressional National Legislative Committee’s Hassan El-Tayyab and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you all with us.

Wednesday night, the United States Congress passed a $738 billion defense bill. That’s $20 billion more than last year, and $120 billion more than under Obama. 180 Democrats voted for it, along with most of the Republicans. Now, that vote was interesting. 41 Democrats, 6 Republicans, and 1 Independent voted no. But this bill is a hugely comprehensive bill that gives Trump his Space Force and gives the green light to more wars without end.

To put this in perspective, Poor People’s Campaign leader Liz Theoharis said in The Nation that we give $34 billion in this bill to Lockheed Martin–which we’ll talk about during the course of this conversation–but nothing in this Congress for 140 million people living in poverty or the 40 million people facing food insecurity across the country, let alone what we need for our teachers, schools, and building a new green economy. So how do we respond? What does this mean for the future? What are the next steps? What happens in the U.S. Senate?

And we are joined by Hassan El-Tayyab, who is Legislative Representative for Middle East policy for the Friends Congressional National Legislative Committee. Good to have you with us once again here on The Real News.

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: Thank you so much for having me, Marc. Just one quick clarification. It’s the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

MARC STEINER: Yes. I’m sorry. You’re right. My dyslexic self shining through one more time. But let’s begin with this. I want to play this short piece first, with Ro Khanna, a Congressman, and his response to this bill. And then we’ll pick up from there.

RO KHANNA: I rise in strong opposition to this defense authorization. There are many things that you can call the bill, but it’s Orwellian to call it progressive. Let’s speak in facts. When President Obama left, the defense budget was $618 billion. This defense budget is $120 billion more than what President Obama left us with. That could fund free public college for every American. At some time, we can’t just rhetorically give standing ovations when the President says, “We’re going to end endless wars and continue to vote to…”

MARC STEINER: So he touched on some of the complexity here. Just the Orwellian speak the progressive defense bill, but A, let me start with this, Hassan. It shows that no matter what happens in Congress in many ways, the power of the defense industry, beyond the Pentagon itself, which even asked for this much money, is what’s in part pushing this and I think that’s often the unspoken power behind the throne, when it comes to this bill.

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: Well I think that’s right. There is a lot of momentum to pass the National Defense Authorization Act. Year after year and we see increased spending levels. I mean this is the greatest amount allocated for military and defense spending pretty much since World War II. And we are quote/unquote at peace time. Another thing I think it’s worth mentioning is that this bill fails to reassert article one, section eight, congressional war authority. And that was something that Friends Committee on National Legislation, we’ve been taking exceeding interest in, with all of our advocacy and lobbying. Put aside the dollar amount for a second, which is obviously critical when we are looking at cuts to food stamps and increasing the Pentagon by billions of dollars.

So that’s, in and of itself, really disturbing. But there are also a lot of House passed provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act and a lot of those were stripped out in conference. And we were working to try to preserve the provision to end US support for the war in Yemen, to repeal the 2002, outdated Iraq AMF. Again, we have not used that as a primary justification for use of force, in about seven or eight years. And also trying to prevent Trump from a sending us into an unauthorized war against Iran. And all of those provisions were stripped out, despite tireless lobbying by so many advocates around the country and in DC. So overall, the Democrats, they didn’t get what I think they could have gotten had they taken a firmer stance and were willing to go to the mat to protect all of these provisions.

MARC STEINER: But two things kind of really blow my mind about this. I mean A, we haven’t had a declared war since World War II. It’s like Congress completely is abdicating in their responsibility here to talk for the citizens of this country, when it comes to going to war. And B, the House is in control of the Democrats. So where do you think the problem lies? Why do you think this could happen when the house is in control of the people who say they oppose these kinds of measures?

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: It’s a very complex question. I think there’s certainly inertia as that it was the first time in years that chairman Adam Smith had the gavel. So I think that could have been part of it. I think there were other priorities that the leadership wanted, and clearly ending endless war was not one of those. So I think it was a combination of things. But again the sheer inertia of just trying to get this bill through, and the fact that Democrats, to their credit they’re interested in governing, but when you have Republicans not negotiating necessarily in good faith, that can be problematic. They’re willing to take the bill and the Democrats want to get some sort of deal, and so they’re on a weaker negotiating playing field. So hopefully, there are a lot of lessons learned.

I think the whole peace community and a lot of people are outraged right now at the leadership, for pushing through this deal that has no progressive foreign policy attached to it. So the actual wins, if you were mostly on the domestic side, there was 12 weeks paid family leave for federal workers, and also a provision to ban the box for federal workers, in case people have prison records. So those are good. Those are great provisions, and we applaud that effort. But that did not need to happen on the Defense Authorization Act. That should have happened in appropriations on domestic policy. This was specifically designed and has been there to set policy for the Pentagon and our military. So, I don’t really understand why those provision, the major wins on this bill, for the Democratic side, or the progressive side, were all domestic policy-related.

MARC STEINER: So I’m curious how you would respond to this Tweed by Warren Gunnels, who’s this senior special advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders. And what he says in this tweet is, “New rule. Every member of Congress who voted to give the most corrupt, unhinged, and unstable president in history, $738 billion to fight endless Wars, fund a bogus space force, and put our troops at risk, must never tell us that we can’t afford Medicare for all, or a green new deal ever.”

So how do you begin to translate this action into that kind of political action? Because I mean the people in this country, for many interesting and good reasons, support the military. Even those who don’t support all the incursions that we do in the name of the United States across the globe. But if you take this political sensibility from people like Warren Gunnels, how do you begin to turn this around? What do you think this conversation for the us Senate, which has to take it up next, which is in the control of conservative, right wing Republicans.

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: I think it’s really challenging when so many people in the country are in need of a real safety net. I mean, healthcare education. We have an infrastructure that needs development and we are losing the tech race to China, and they’re developing 5G, investing in AI. For us to spend billions and billions and billions more each year on defense, to me, one, I think it’s immoral.

I also think that it’s not really making us safer, and I think that is the thing that we need to drive home. That just throwing more and more money at the military doesn’t necessarily equal safety. You know? Security means that our people have what they need and the fact that we’ve got 30 million people without healthcare, we’ve got people living in poverty. You know, those are things that we really should be addressing with that money. And simply, we need to reign in the endless Wars and Pentagon spending.

MARC STEINER: I mean, in part of it brings me to two things here that I want to kind of address before we leave each other is that, as I said earlier, you take Lockheed Martin, who gets $34 billion in this bill, for more F5s and the Pentagon even asked for. And to me that part that is the bottom of it, it’s the heart of this; is the power of that industry. The power that they have over Congressional representatives to vote the way they want to vote. They get the billions and billions of dollars to go to this defense industry. But that’s a piece of what’s happening here that we need to kind of really probe and expose. It seemed to me.

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: Well certainly, money in politics is a huge part of the issue in the fact that weapons contractors and corporate lobbyists have so much access to our politicians. But on the other side of this, we also proved that there’s bipartisan support to end endless war and reassert constitutional war authority. And we shouldn’t forget that. I mean all of the House-passed provisions that we were supporting got a tremendous amount of bipartisan support. The Yemen War Powers Resolution got bipartisan support. So it proves that Republicans and Democrats can come together to end endless wars. We just need to do a lot more work, keep educating people, and next week, the National Defense Authorization Act that got passed by the House, it’s going to go to the Senate for a vote.

So I think folks need to reach out to their senators and urge a hard no vote on this NDAA, and send the negotiators back to the bargaining table, to try to get a better deal for the American people. That includes again, a reassertion of congressional war authority, and at the very least, ending US support for the Yemen War that’s brought 14 million people to the brink of famine, and 1 million cases of cholera. I mean we have no business participating, and not to mention, again, it wasn’t authorized by Congress. All the more reason to end the war.

MARC STEINER: So, don’t you have a number to call for that?

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: Yeah, the 1-833-STOPWAR number. We have to update it. It was going to representatives before we’d have to change it, but you can just call the Congressional switch board. Look up your member online and you know, just make sure that they’re voting no on the National Defense Authorization Act next week.

MARC STEINER: So I’m going to leave you all with this one thought and this is a former president of the United States who was a five star general, and led the army armed forces during World War II was president in 1950s, of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower. And Dwight D. Eisenhower told our nation this, back in 1959.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are clothed and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of his children.

MARC STEINER: And that was from a Republican president who was a five star general. And Hassan El-Tayyab, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you taking the time. Look forward to more conversations and we’ll stay on this with you until we’re done.

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB: Thank you so much, Marc, appreciate it.

MARC STEINER: And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Let us know what you think. Take care.

The Rich Reap the Benefits of a Tax Credit Meant for the Poor

“You all just got a lot richer,” President Donald Trump told guests at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, in 2017 after he signed The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The massive tax bill was marketed as an act of financial relief for the middle class. Instead, multiple experts alleged, then and now, it disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

A supposed silver lining of this gift to the rich was an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a program meant to provide relief for working families.

The 2017 bill increased the maximum credit from $1,000 to $2,000 ($1,400 is refundable for qualifying taxpayers). It was a pet project of Ivanka Trump, the first daughter who, even before her father was elected president, branded herself a champion of women and working families. At least two outlets called it a win for Ivanka. An ABC News headline called it “a quiet political victory.” A Politico article used similar phrasing, saying she “notched a political victory.”

According to a sobering new report from The New York Times, however, “children with the greatest economic needs are least likely to benefit.”

“Food has been a bit of a struggle,” Josh, 16, told The Times. His father, Michael Spielberg, an attendant at Sam’s Club, received only a partial credit, despite a meager salary. Ciera Dismuke, a mother of two expecting a third, who earned $15,000 last year, got just $934. The Times explains that she earned too little to qualify.

Dismuke, Spielberg and their families aren’t alone. Per The Times:

35 percent of children fail to receive the full $2,000 because their parents earn too little, researchers at Columbia University found. A quarter get a partial sum and 10 percent get nothing. Among those excluded from the full credit are half of Latinos, 53 percent of blacks and 70 percent of children with single mothers.

The fawning coverage neglected to mention that in addition to expanding the amount of the tax credit, the bill also expanded who is eligible. Families earning up to $400,000 (originally $110,000) can take advantage of the program. Because the tax credit amount rises with family income, single parents have to make at least $30,000 to obtain the full credit.

According to The Times, “While the 2017 law made millions of upper-income families eligible for the $2,000 credit (in part to offset the loss of other tax benefits), it gave a boost of just $75 to most full-time workers at the minimum wage.”

Anti-poverty advocates and elected officials alike warned this would happen as soon as the law was proposed.

A 2017 Vox article put it bluntly:

If your family looks a bit like Ivanka Trump’s, you might just have a shot at benefiting from the national child care proposal she’s shopping around Congress. But if you’re one of the millions of low- and middle-income parents hoping to catch a break? Don’t count on it.

Earlier this year, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, argued against the continuation of the plan in an op-ed for NBC News:

They made families with incomes of as much as $400,000 eligible for a child tax credit of $2,000 per child — including members of Congress themselves. But a single parent with two children working full time at the federal minimum wage will receive an increase of only $75 — or less than $1.50 per week.

DeLauro and Tanden instead argued for the passage of the  American Family Act, which would extend the credit to $3,000, and create an additional Young Child Tax Credit of up to $3,600 for children under 6. It also would remove the income thresholds that hurt single-parent families.

Supporters of the original plan argue that the policy is a tax break, not an anti-poverty program, and so shouldn’t necessarily be targeted toward the needy. That the Democrats want to remove the income tests, and instead make the Child Tax Credit eligible for the working and non-working poor alike, The Times observes, reflects “a shift for a party that since the Clinton administration has been wary of the welfare label and reflects concerns over stagnant wages.”

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and an advocate for reforming the tax credit, told The Times about the Trump bill, “It left out 26 million kids” from receiving the full, highly touted amount.

He continued, “It’s critical that we don’t leave it as a half measure. Our entire conception of ourselves as a land of opportunity is diminished by the fact that our child poverty rates are as high as they are.”

Read the full New York Times article here.

Robert Reich Makes the Case for Sanders and Warren

There aren’t 20 Senate Republicans with enough integrity to remove the most corrupt president in American history, so we’re going to have to get rid of Trump the old-fashioned way – by electing a Democrat next Nov. 3.

That Democrat will be Warren Sanders.

Although there are differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I’m putting them together for the purpose of making a simple point.

These two have most of the grass-roots energy in the 2020 campaign, most of the enthusiasm, and most of the ideas critical for America’s future.

Together, they lead Biden and every other so-called moderate Democrat by a wide margin in all polls.

That’s because the real political divide in America today is establishment versus anti-establishment – the comparatively few at the top who have siphoned off much of the wealth of the nation versus everyone else whose wages and prospects have gone nowhere.

Warren and Sanders know the system is rigged and that economic and political power must be reallocated from a corporate-Wall Street elite to the vast majority.

This is why both Warren and Sanders are hated by the Democratic Party establishment.

It’s also why much of the corporate press is ignoring the enthusiasm they’re generating. And why it’s picking apart their proposals, like a wealth tax and Medicare for All, as if they were specific pieces of legislation.

And why corporate and Wall Street Democrats are mounting a campaign to make Americans believe Warren and Sanders are “too far to the left” to beat Trump, and therefore “unelectable.”

This is total rubbish. Either of them has a better chance of beating Trump than does any other Democratic candidate.

Presidential elections are determined by turnout. Over a third of eligible voters in America don’t vote. They go to the polls only if they’re motivated. And what motivates people most is a candidate who stands for average people and against power and privilege.

Average Americans know they’re getting the scraps while corporate profits are at record highs and CEOs and Wall Street executives are pocketing unprecedented pay and bonuses.

They know big money has been flooding Washington and state capitals to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy; roll back health, safety, environment, and labor protections; and allow big business to monopolize the economy, using its market power to keep prices high and wages low.

Most Americans want to elect someone who’s on their side.

In 2016 some voted for Trump because he conned them into believing he was that person.

But since elected he’s given big corporations and Wall Street everything they’ve wanted – rollbacks of health, safety, and environmental protections, plus a giant $2 trillion tax cut that’s boosted stock prices and executive pay while nothing trickled down.

Trump is still fooling millions into thinking he’s on their side, and that their problems are due to immigrants, minorities, cultural elites, and “deep state” bureaucrats rather than a system that’s rigged for the benefit of those at the top.

But some of these Trump supporters would join with other Americans and vote for a candidate in 2020 who actually took on power and privilege.

This is where Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders come in.

Their core proposals would make the system work for everyone and alter the power structure in America:Medicare for All based on a single payer rather than private for-profit corporate insurance; a Green New Deal to create millions of good jobs fighting climate change; free public higher education; universal childcare.

All financed mainly by a tax on the super-rich.

They’d also get big money out of politics and rescue democracy from the corporate and Wall Street elites who now control it.

They’re the only candidates relying on small donations rather than trolling for big handouts from corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy – or rich enough to self-finance their own campaigns.

Only two things stand in their way.

The first is the power structure itself, which is trying to persuade Democrats that they should put up a milquetoast moderate instead.

The second is the possibility that, as the primary season heats up, supporters of Warren and Sanders will wage war on each other – taking both of them down.

It’s true that only one of them can be the Democratic nominee. But if the backers of both Sanders and Warren eventually come together behind one of them, they’ll have the votes to take the White House, and even flip the Senate.

President Warren Sanders can then start clearing the wreckage left by Trump, and make America decent again.