Chris Hedges's Blog, page 8
March 9, 2020
Coronavirus Could Wreak Havoc on the Working Class
In America, taking a day off from work, let alone a few days, to recover from illness, is at best discouraged, at worst penalized. Sometimes the consequence is a pointed comment from a manager, encouraging an employee to “work through it.” Other times, as Amazon employees can attest, even a tiny drop in productivity means losing their jobs. Perhaps that’s why 47% of Americans went to work sick in the past year, according to a HuffPost/YouGov survey.
Employer expectations are being tested with spread of the coronavirus, at least when it comes to being physically present at a workplace. In some industries, companies are encouraging their employees to heed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines: work from home, avoid large crowds, and see a doctor immediately if you’re sick.
But those recommendations are not an option for workers in the service industry and the gig economy, who can’t work from home, won’t get paid if they don’t work, and often don’t have adequate health insurance.
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As The New York Times reported this weekend, “[this] disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave.”
Most retail and service workers unable to work from home because their jobs depend on person-to-person contact. For example, home health aides can’t care for homebound seniors, waiters can’t serve food and drivers for ride share companies can’t ferry passengers via laptop — nor can warehouse workers assembling packages with the hand sanitizers Americans can’t seem to stop ordering, causing a nationwide shortage. And unlike most white-collar office workers, they don’t have paid sick leave.
This cohort is most likely to be among the 27.5 million people in America without health insurance, according to 2018 data from the American Community Survey Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
Portia Green, a restaurant employee who spoke to the Times, doesn’t have paid sick leave or health insurance. If she doesn’t work, she doesn’t get paid, and that means losing at least $100 per day. If her child’s school closes, she can’t afford child care. The expectation in her industry is that sick workers will show up. “They’re going to push you to do it anyway,” she explained, adding, “You go to work, pop a vitamin C and if you can do it, you do it.”
Kris Garcia, an airport worker in Denver, told a similar story. “When you’re talking about paid leave and who should stay home, it’s the ones who need it most that don’t have access to it, the ones showing up at work sick touching your food, touching your bags, coming into everyday contact with your direct life,” he said. Garcia does get paid sick days after six months on the job, but he is out of luck if he needs to deal with health issues before then.
Infectious disease experts echo workers’ concerns. “Very quickly, it’s going to circulate a lot faster in the poorer communities than the wealthiest ones,” Dr. James Hadler, Connecticut’s former epidemiologist and now a consultant to the state, told the Times.
Only 10 states and 33 cities have passed some version of paid sick leave, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families, but they vary in amount and eligibility, which is a particular cause for concern as coronavirus cases mount.
“It’s very clear,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, associate professor of economics at Cornell University, who wrote multiple papers on the subject. “When people don’t have access to sick leave, they go to work sick and spread diseases.”
Read the full New York Times story here.
Many New Voting Systems Aren’t Ready for Prime Time
Put aside, for now, foreign meddling in U.S. elections, social media propaganda and partisan voter suppression. The newest emerging threat to elections in 2020 is new voting systems that have been insufficiently tested and phased in, but have been debuting in many of 2020’s presidential primaries and caucuses.
Since the Iowa Democratic Party’s presidential caucuses, there has been a string of new technology-based failures and frustrations—despite officials’ and voting system designers’ intentions. The failures share some common elements, from data connectivity issues to machinery breakdowns to poor planning—whether in party-run or government-run contests.
While some defenders of the newest systems praise efforts to counter cybersecurity threats since 2016’s Russian hacking, what is indisputable is that 2020’s opening contests have been marred by hours-long delays, malfunctioning machines and counting issues, frustrating voters, poll workers and campaigns.
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The problems are wider and deeper than has been acknowledged. Unless steps are taken to understand what failed and address causes, they could recur in the fall’s even-higher-stakes elections, when the voter turnout will likely be double or more than early 2020’s nominating contests.
After Iowa, Media Silence
Voting Booth has witnessed problems in many early nominating contests. While elections always have snafus, the year has not had a good start as various problems have affected large numbers of voters.
Not only were Iowa’s results delayed for more than a day, but 10 percent of precincts there also apparently filed inaccurate tallies. In Nevada’s Democratic Party caucuses, thousands of early voters waited for hours. Its reporting of results took longer than Iowa because of vote-counting data problems. Meanwhile, 9 percent of Nevada precincts also apparently filed inaccurate tallies.
However, unlike Iowa’s photo finish where participants were demoralized by inconclusive results and many in the media voiced anger at officials, in Nevada the coverage mostly focused on Bernie Sanders’ landslide win. In later primaries, the press has similarly focused on the shrinking field, not the voting process. But problems with new voting systems did not vanish.
In one of South Carolina’s three metro areas, surrounding the state capital city of Columbia, its Democratic primary saw one-in-six new machines—automatically marking or scanning ballots—malfunction or jam.
In Los Angeles County, the country’s most populous election jurisdiction, voters waited for hours after work on Super Tuesday. California’s statewide voter database—used to check in voters—had connectivity issues, was slow, and intermittent in 15 counties. Los Angeles’s new publicly owned system, which had positive aspects such as multilingual ballots and allowing voters with mail-in ballots to cast new ballots after candidates dropped out, saw one-fifth of its ballot-marking devices fail. Needless to say, the long waits and machine failures quickly overshadowed the positive features.
In Dallas County, Texas, it took officials several days to discover that 10 percent of Super Tuesday’s ballots went uncounted. Election Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole found 44 thumb drives—which store the tabulation data for each precinct—were not included in the official results. Despite criticism about her office’s handling of its new voting system, she has sought a court order to conduct a manual recount. (In Harris County, where Houston is located, partisan allocations of voting machines led to hours-long waits.)
Problems Seen, Solutions Harder
Not all of these mistakes are minor or easily rectified. They have different causes, including technological breakdowns, training lapses, unfamiliarity with new systems by election workers and voters, and human errors—such as data-entry typos when handling vote-count data. The causes can cascade and affect close contests. They also can undermine public confidence.
It may not be fair when one aspect of a complex system fails and the entire enterprise is tarred. However, high-stakes processes like voting have little margin for error. This is why 2020’s voting system debuts are troubling.
Unless solutions are found and implemented—which is more easily said than done—it would not be hyperbole to suggest that more voters would have to turn out in the tightest fall contests (where new systems are being used) for one side to win. New technology that is now present, but not ready for prime time, could undermine voters and outcomes.
This scenario is not what election managers, voting system vendors and their defenders in the public policy arena have been saying after each of 2020’s fraught presidential contests. The quick retort from the newest system’s defenders is that Iowa’s and Nevada’s caucuses were amateurish party-run contests, while government-run primaries are more professional.
That line is a bit porous on closer examination, however, because some of the problems at the caucuses—device failures, scrambled data, poor online connectivity—have also surfaced in government-run primaries. Error rates of between 10 and 20 percent—in equipment malfunctions and counting—keep recurring. Unanticipated problems have surfaced with systems that have been hastily put together (the caucuses) or taken years (Los Angeles).
Running elections has never been easy. There are key decision points where the correct choices in technology and procedures help or impede the process. If one looks at what voting system elements have underperformed so far in 2020, some takeaways emerge. Needless to say, new machinery should not fail in large numbers in its first major debut. Examining the event logs on those machines should reveal what happened—as opposed to speculating.
While it also appears that there have been no cybersecurity breaches thus far, election officials’ post-2016 focus on cybersecurity may have distracted from planning surrounding the more mundane, human aspects of voting. They assumed new equipment would work and voters would quickly adapt to new poll locations, early voting, new check-in procedures, new balloting and more.
Voters don’t expect their elections to be hacked. Nor do they expect to wait for hours, see iPads with registration files go down, see costly new ballot-marking devices fail, see paper ballots clog new scanners, and not get honest explanations from officials about what is happening.
If these frustrations seem like griping or expecting too much, the question of “how good is good enough?” will likely resurface again in November. Should officials be unable to show that the process was trustable and the results accurate, the stakes will be much higher than they are now.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Latin American Socialism
When 60 Minutes (2/24/20) asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his past support for aspects of Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as for Nicaragua’s 1979–90 leftist Sandinista government, Sanders responded by saying he opposes what he described as the “authoritarian” features of the Cuban government, while noting that after the 1959 revolution, Cuba launched “a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”
News organizations seemed unable to process that a major national political figure could say something positive about a socialist country, leaving these outlets flailing around in absurd ways.
During a town hall, CNN’s Chris Cuomo (2/24/20) asked Sanders to respond to “the Democrats who say you don’t say good things about Fidel Castro, he destroyed freedoms in that country.” The revolution did not “destroy freedoms” in Cuba: The ruler it overthrew, Fulgencio Batista, ran what the US Library of Congress (4/01) called a “corrupt and brutal dictatorship,” under whose rule there were 20,000 political killings.
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In the New York Times (2/27/20), David Brooks criticized Sanders because he “excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens.” Yet there were few “civil liberties” for the Sandinistas—the “Nicaraguan communists” to whom Brooks refers—to take away. The Somoza dictatorship, which the Sandinistas overthrew in a popular revolution, was one of “chronic repression” (New York Times, 2/26/78). According to the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) (11/19/84), Somoza left the country with “no democratic tradition,” instead bequeathing a legacy of “militarized politics with rampant human rights violations,” so that the 1984 election that the Sandinistas held—and won fairly, according to the British observer—was the “first experience with participatory democracy” for most Nicaraguans.
Even before the current Cuba kerfuffle, NBC (2/21/20) criticized Sanders because “he denounced what he called a ‘coup’ against Bolivia’s leftist president, Evo Morales, despite findings by independent groups that Morales tried to steal an election.” Less than a week later, the Washington Post (2/27/20) published a report from researchers at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, saying, “As specialists in election integrity, we find that the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October election.” The report bolsters critiques that were made immediately after the (yes) coup (FAIR.org, 11/18/19) that there was no compelling evidence that Morales tried to steal the election. The “independent group” cited in the article the Post linked to, notably, gets 60% of its funding from the US government.
Forced to broadcast qualified praise for some elements of Latin American socialism, several outlets took refuge in the most over-the-top rhetoric imaginable. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (2/25/20), for example, listed the Sandinistas and Cuba’s revolutionary government as being “some of the most murderous regimes in the history of our planet.”
The “murderous” Sandinistas conducted “sanitation campaigns, health education, occupational health and safety, and nutrition programs” that LASA found to “have significantly reduced the incidence of communicable diseases, malnutrition and infant mortality.” LASA went on to say that
even though real money wages have not risen appreciably, access to government-subsidized foodstuffs and other products through the basic-commodity rationing system has helped to raise living standards for the bulk of the population.
In Cuba, before 1959, “the greater part of the population had access only to…underfunded, low-quality, public healthcare services,” reported the International Journal of Health Services (2/05); “in rural areas, many people had never seen a doctor.” By 1975, there were “56 rural hospitals and numerous rural medical posts” (Library of Congress, 4/01). It went on to create a health system that, according to the World Health Organization (5/08), is “by many standards one of the world’s most effective.” According to the CIA World Fact Book, Cuba has a lower rate of infant mortality than the United States.
The Nicaraguan and Cuban socialists evidently decided that the best way to murder people was to make them healthier.
The Times’ Brooks said that “every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for” a “slave regime” such as “Cuba or Nicaragua.” What Brooks called a “slave regime” in Nicaragua was characterized by, as LASA documented, agrarian reform that involved nationalizing the extensive landholdings of the Somoza family and some of its associates, giving nearly two-thirds of these to individual peasants and some 15% to cooperatives, moves that help explain why these campesinos were “staunch supporters of the government”; the remainder of the nationalized land went to government-owned firms, where workers “enjoy[ed] mechanisms for participation in the management of such enterprises.” Brooks did not explain how redistributing land to the poor is akin to owning humans as chattel.
The Sandinistas also carried out a mass literacy campaign that won Nicaragua two awards from UNESCO, which said of the educational initiative:
The illiteracy rate was brought down in five months from 50% to 12%. The National Literacy Crusade is the greatest educational and cultural achievement in the history of Nicaragua. It was a major experience for the young from the cities who taught people to read and, at the same time, discovered the other half of the country with its conditions of neglect and poverty bequeathed by 50 years of dictatorship.
With its massive, participatory and united character, the Crusade became a unique national and international experiment that won the recognition of UNESCO.
As for the “slave regime” in revolutionary Cuba, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) places the country in the “high human development” category. This refers to the Human Development Index, which aggregates key benchmarks for health, longevity, knowledge and standard of living. The UNDP says Cuba is above average for the countries in the high human development group, and above average for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
A 2016 University of Chicago study of public opinion inside Cuba asked respondents “about how things are going in their life in general”; 57% said they were very or somewhat happy, while 11% said they were somewhat or very unhappy. Cubans were also asked, “Generally speaking, would you say that things in [Cuba] are headed in the right direction or the wrong direction?”; 53% said right and 36% said wrong.
Not to be outdone by Brooks’ slavery analogy, Francisco Toro of the Washington Post (2/25/20) said of Sanders’ identification as a democratic socialist:
The bottom line is that when you associate yourself with an ideology whose past contains some of history’s worst crimes, you take on a special duty to denounce. When those denunciations come hedged with qualifiers that rest on propaganda lines, they ring entirely hollow.
Germans get this. Angela Merkel’s party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, always understood that if you’re going to stand even half an inch to the right of center in the country that Hitler once ran, you must go to very great lengths to put distance between yourself and anything even vaguely reminiscent of Nazism. Which is one reason the center-right in Germany is one of the most doggedly pro-democracy forces in Europe.
Sanders needs to understand he’s in a similar position.
To suggest that the Cuban government is as bad as the Nazis is, of course, to say the Nazis were no worse than Cuba—a creepy position in any case, but particularly offensive in a critique of a politician whose family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust.
There are no documented cases of Cuba carrying out the death penalty since 2003, and nobody in the country is known to be facing a death sentence. Forget Hitler: The United States has executed 328 people since 2010—22 last year and four in just the first two months of this year—while 2,654 people are currently on death row in the United States.
Toro’s piece focuses on his concern that Sanders is apparently “parrot[ing] Fidel’s propaganda.” That’s an interesting choice of word, because Toro is a professional propagandist: He is the “chief content officer of the Group of 50,” an outfit with a vested interest in promoting capitalism and discrediting socialism in any form; the organization describes itself as “composed of a select group of business leaders” and
a top forum for Latin America’s most influential business leaders to explore the latest trends in world affairs as well as an opportunity for them to hear from their peers in other countries and industries.
The Group of 50 has partnerships with the plutocratic World Economic Forum and with the Inter-American Development Bank, which the US dominates, and which the Intercept (4/18/19) found to be circulating a plan to infuse Cuba’s crucial Venezuelan ally with $48 billion in capital, but only following the hoped-for US-backed overthrow of Venezuela’s government.
Being part of such networks goes a long way to explaining how one ends up claiming there are parallels between Cuba and Nazi Germany.
Not that Toro’s assertions are unique. Bret Stephens of the New York Times (2/28/20) suggested that Cuba and the Sandinistas are among “the vilest regimes in history.” The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman (2/24/20) denounced Sanders’ praise for “tyrants” and “brutal regimes,” or, as Casey Michel said of Cuba in the New Republic (2/25/20), “enduring despotism.” Incarceration rates are a standard measure of tyranny, brutality and despotism, and it happens that the US has more people in jail per capita than any other country: 655 per 100,000 for the US, 510 for Cuba, and 332 for the present incarnation of the Sandinistas, just over half of the figure for the US.
The New Republic’s Michel also lent ideological cover to 60 years of often violent US attacks on Cuba, alleging—in part on the basis of an unproven, extremely dubious claim that $900 million of Cuba’s national wealth was Fidel Castro’s personal ATM—that Cuban government policies “have immiserated an entire island,” supposedly turning the country into “an economic basket case.” Jaw-droppingly, he did so without mentioning the US’s economic blockade that, according to the UN, has cost Cuba $130 billion.
US violence against Cuba, economic and otherwise, brings us to another important consideration for assessing who are “some of the most murderous regimes in the history of our planet” or “some of the vilest regimes in history,” or who exhibits the “blood-soaked brutalism” that Michel ascribed to Cuba: how states conduct themselves outside of their borders. To cite only a few grotesque examples, the United States visited the horrors of the Earth upon Indochina; was behind the deaths of hundreds of thousands as it prosecuted a vicious war against the Sandinistas and other liberation movements in Central America; caused the deaths of up to a million in Iraq (FAIR.org, 2/21/20); and is currently helping starve Yemen while levying sanctions against Iran that are enabling the spread of coronavirus in the country. Cuba, by contrast, played a crucial role in liberating multiple African countries, while sending doctors and teachers around the world to help many of the planet’s least well-off.
Rather than denouncing Bernie Sanders for noting the accomplishments of Latin American socialists whom the American media deems too authoritarian, a far more urgent task for reporters covering the US election cycle would be asking candidates how they plan to combat US authoritarianism at home and abroad, and questioning why the accomplishments of Latin American socialism aren’t possible in the United States.
Turkey Ups the Stakes in Migrant Crisis
BRUSSELS — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed the European Union on Monday for more help caring for Syrian refugees after EU officials accused him of “blackmail” for waving migrants through to Europe.
Thousands of migrants have massed at Turkey’s land border with EU-member Greece since Erdogan’s government made good on a longstanding threat and announced it would no longer prevent migrants from crossing.
EU countries have rallied behind Greece, which is also a member of NATO, and described it as a “shield” protecting Europe’s borders with the outside world.
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“It is beyond reason and understanding that a neighboring and ally country can point to us as the cause of the wave of irregular migration,” Erdogan told reporters after talks with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Turkey hosts more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, and Erdogan has demanded that Europe shoulder more of the burden of caring for them.
He has accused the EU of not meeting its obligations, including failing to pay money promised to Turkey under a 2016 deal to stem the flow of migrants to Europe. The EU says it is disbursing the funds.
The Turkish leader later met with top EU officials, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to discuss the 2016 deal.
The deal called for Turkey to halt the flow of Europe-bound migrants and refugees in exchange for up to 6 billion euros ($6.7 billion) in aid for Syrian refugees on its territory, fast-track EU membership and visa-free travel to Europe for Turkish citizens.
Michel told reporters that Turkey and the EU “have different opinions on different things and that’s why it’s important to have a frank and open dialogue.”
“For us, it’s important to implement the deal,” he said.
Beyond migration, the EU was keen to discuss developments in Syria with Erdogan and “how we can contribute to bringing more political support, more stability in the entire region,” Michel said.
A high-level Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said the sides would discuss a possible revision of the agreement. It wasn’t clear if a deal would emerge Monday.
Von der Leyen said the meeting would be the “restart of a dialogue.” She repeated the EU has the obligation to protect its borders, but also to guarantee the fundamental individual right for asylum.
Erdogan was also expected to raise concerns over alleged violence by Greek authorities as they push migrants back to Turkey.
Greece has deployed riot police and border guards to repel people and the border area has since seen violent confrontations. On Saturday, youths threw rocks at Greek police and tried to pull down a border fence.
Many migrants have alleged mistreatment at the hands of Greek police, and Turkey says two migrants were killed in violence along the border. Greece has denied the accusations.
EU foreign ministers have criticized Turkey, saying it is using migrants’ desperation for political purposes. EU countries are still dealing with the political fallout from a wave of mass migration five years ago.
Tens of thousands of migrants were already in Greece before Turkey announced its borders open, many of them in massively overcrowded camps on Greek islands facing the Turkish coast. Part of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal stipulates new arrivals must remain on the islands pending deportation unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece.
Germany’s coalition government said early Monday the country was willing to “support Greece regarding the difficult humanitarian situation of about 1,000 to 1,500 children on the Greek islands.”
The government said Germany could host children in dire need of medical treatment or those who are unattended minors younger than 14, especially girls. It didn’t say exactly how many children Germany would take, but said an agreement would be negotiated by a European “coalition of the willing” in coming days.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, meanwhile, welcomed Erdogan’s visit, saying he hoped it would mark “the start of the de-escalation of the crisis.”
Speaking in Berlin, where he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mitsotakis said “there must be a concrete change in Ankara’s policy” if Turkey is to become an ally of the EU in the migration issue once more.
The first step, he said, would be for Erdogan “to immediately withdraw the desperate people he gathered” on the border and to accept back those caught having entered Greece illegally.
“Greece has always …. recognized and does recognize that Turkey has a crucial role to play in the management of the migration problem. And it needs Europe’s help to do it,” Mitsotakis said. “But this cannot happen … under conditions of threats and blackmail, using desperate people as pawns.”
Merkel said Greece “deserves our full solidarity and our full support.”
The situation on the Greek-Turkish land border was generally calm Monday. Greek authorities said in the 24 hours to Monday morning, they had blocked 1,646 attempts to cross the border and arrested two people — one Moroccan and one Egyptian.
____
Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Kirsten Grieshaber and Geir Moulson in Berlin, Samuel Petrequin in Brussels, Elena Becatoros in Athens and Costas Kantouris in Kastanies, Greece, contributed to this report.
Joe Biden Weighing Multiple Billionaires for Cabinet Positions
Joe Biden is reportedly considering appointing businessman Michael Bloomberg and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, both billionaires, to powerful leadership positions should Biden win the Democratic presidential nomination and defeat President Donald Trump in November.
Axios reported Monday that the former vice president and his campaign advisers are weighing Dimon for treasury secretary, a cabinet position tasked with overseeing the U.S. financial system. Biden is also considering Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bank of America vice chair Anne Finucane for the top Treasury post.
Bloomberg, who dropped out of the presidential race last week and immediately endorsed Biden, “would be top possibility to head the World Bank” under a Biden administration, according to Axios.
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Progressive observers were appalled, if not surprised, by the preliminary list of potential Biden appointees, which Axios reported just 24 hours before Democratic primary contests in six states.
“This shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is who the Dem Party is,” tweeted Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept. “The establishment wing of the party didn’t fall into line behind Biden despite the fact that he’d put Bloomberg and Jamie Dimon in his cabinet. They did it because of that. This is who they are, their ideology.”
Sarah Jones, a writer for New York Magazine, tweeted that “probably the highest expectation anyone should have for a Biden presidency is that he’d be a caretaker president.”
“The worst,” Jones added, “is that he’d empower people like Bloomberg and Dimon and actively make the U.S. a worse place than it was when Trump was elected.”
Congratulations to Biden. This is worse than Hillary’s rumored shortlist in 2016 https://t.co/ktOBdAxwDe pic.twitter.com/97vPZ4hcy0
— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) March 9, 2020
Biden advisers told Axios that the former vice president’s cabinet picks would be tasked with implementing “a Return to Normal plan—a reversal of President Trump’s unorthodox, improvisational style.”
“Biden wants known, trusted people around him—many from the Obama years,” Axios reported.
Critics, including members of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) presidential campaign, said the list of potential appointees is further evidence that Biden, if elected, plans to make good on his promise to wealthy donors last June that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency.
“This is maybe the most depressing thing you’ll read all day,” tweeted Tyson Brody, research director for the Sanders campaign. “Imagine after all this just to make Jamie Dimon treasury secretary. Not only would ‘nothing fundamentally change,’ things can be even worse for working people.”
Warren Gunnels, senior adviser to Sanders, highlighted Dimon’s role in the 2008 financial crisis as CEO of JPMorgan Chase and board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
Aw man, Are you kidding me?
Biden is measuring the White House drapes by floating Jamie Dimon as Treasury Secretary.
He’s the CEO of a bank that:
– got a $416B bailout while he was on the NY Fed
– was fined $13B for mortgage fraud
– illegally foreclosed on military families https://t.co/4iT6ZE8NuA
— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) March 9, 2020
Pointing to growing fears of a global financial meltdown as the coronavirus spreads globally, academic and writer Josh Mound tweeted that “Biden floating Dimon, Finucane, and Bloomberg for major economic positions just as the economy teeters on the edge of collapse for the second time in roughly a decade tells you all you need to know about the utter hopelessness of the mainstream of the Democratic Party.”
Progressive advocacy group Democracy for America, which endorsed Sanders for president last week, echoed Mound.
“The fact that Joe Biden’s advisers, when musing about cabinet picks, are debating between Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, and a Bank of America exec for treasury secretary pretty much tells you all you need to know about Joe’s non-existent commitment to a progressive agenda,” the group said.
Markets Shudder as Saudis, Russia Clash Over Oil
FRANKFURT, Germany — A clash of the oil titans – Saudi Arabia and Russia – is sending shock waves through energy markets, with wide-ranging implications for consumers and oil companies, including those in the No. 1 producing country, the United States.
In the short term, oil prices fell by the most in one day since the 1991 Gulf War. The price of U.S. crude fell as much as 34% to $27.34 a barrel, a stunning drop for one day and the lowest price since early 2016. In morning trading in New York, U.S. oil traded down 20% at $33.16 a barrel, causing massive losses for shares in energy companies.
The decline followed Russia’s refusal last week to join the OPEC oil cartel in proposed production cuts aimed at supporting prices. Thwarted in its search for cuts, Saudi Arabia, the leading OPEC member, sharply changed course by cutting prices and signalling it will ramp up production.
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Here is a look at the oil price war and what it could mean over the longer term in the industry as well as for consumers at the gas pump.
___
Q: WHY ARE OIL PRICES FALLING?
A: First came the coronavirus outbreak, which reduced travel and transport – meaning the economic slowdown from the virus saps demand for fuel particularly hard. The international Brent benchmark had fallen from $69 at the start of the year to around $50.
Then came last week’s meeting between OPEC and non-member countries. On the agenda: a production cut of 1.5 million barrels a day, or about 1.5% of global production. The idea was to keep prices from sagging even more as demand is expected to fall this year. Saudi Arabia, the world’s No. 2 oil producer, wanted No. 3 Russia and other nonmembers to take 500,000 barrels per day of the cuts. Since 2016, the Saudis and the Russians have worked together on production issues.
But this time the Russians balked. They refused to join new cuts, or even to extend previous production cuts that were due to expire at the end of March. And the Saudis hit back, telling customers that they were going to ramp up production and slash prices for Asian customers.
___
Q: WHAT IS SAUDI ARABIA’S GOAL?
A: First, protecting market share. Both Saudi Arabia and Russia have seen U.S. producers take a chunk of their market, and falling prices help keep customers on board.
Second, Saudi Arabia may hope that the pain of low prices will force a Russian rethink. “Saudi Arabia has de facto launched a price war against Russia, promising to sell its oil at a discount in order to maximise its oil revenues,” say analysts at UniCredit bank. “It appears Saudi Arabia wants to cement its position as the world’s top oil exporter and to persuade Moscow to return to the negotiating table.”
___
Q: WHAT’S BEHIND RUSSIA’S REFUSAL?
A: Russia may have seen no point in cutting production only to lose market share as U.S. shale producers in Texas and New Mexico take up the slack. Analysts say Saudi Arabia may be underestimating Russia’s ability to weather low prices. Both countries are heavily dependent on oil revenues for their state budgets. But Russia says it can balance its budget at around $42 for its own benchmark crude. Saudi Arabia on the other hand needs more than $80, according to the International Monetary Fund.
What Saudi Arabia has done is to send prices so low that both will feel a serious crunch.
And Russia may have a longer-term target: the U.S. oil industry.
“The Russians are doing this out of long-term strategic considerations,” said Tom Adshead, research director for the Macro-Advisory consulting firm in Moscow. “Their view is that by doing this they can damage the financial health of U.S. shale-oil producers and that by doing this they can take a lot of U.S. capacity offline and thereby remove U.S. producers as a source of competition. The other thing that is on their mind in all this is that if they cut then that will also primarily benefit U.S. producers.”
“So they’ve decided they’re going to take some short-term pain in order to inflict damage on one of their major competitors.”
Stephen Innes, chief market strategist at financial services firm AxiCorp., says Russian President Vladimir Putin may also have decided to hit back at the U.S. industry after Washington placed sanctions on Russian state oil company Rosneft for marketing Venezuela’s oil.
Q: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR US PRODUCERS?
A: The current low prices could constrain activity in the American shale oil industry. A downturn in oil prices in 2014-2016 hurt companies in places like the Permian Basin in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, $50 per barrel is the price at which it becomes profitable to drill a new well in the U.S. Large producers such as Exxon have already scaled back with prices at $50 a barrel. In Texas, the number of active rigs fell from 553 in October 2018 to 398 in January 2020. Around the same time, the oil industry in Texas shed about 14,000 jobs
“With the growth phase of the shale boom grinding to a halt due to the lack of investment in the industry, now U.S. shale oil could find itself running into a brick wall,” says Innes from AxiCorp.
The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, says that he believes the U.S. shale industry will survive.
Q: WHAT’S IT MEAN FOR PRICES AT THE PUMP?
A: Most of the price of gasoline in the United States simply reflects the price of oil, so lower crude prices should mean lower pump prices with a lag of about six weeks. Right now, they’re at $2.42 according to the U.S Energy Information Administration. When crude fell to $36 in 2016, prices at the pump averaged $2.15. Lower pump prices mean people have more to spend on other goods.
The impact is less pronounced in Europe since most of the price is made up of taxes. Currently, gasoline costs 1.32 euros per liter in Germany, or about $5.70 per gallon.
___
Jim Heintz in Moscow and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
Thousands Prepare to Depart Cruise Ship Hit by Virus
SAN FRANCISCO — Federal and state officials in California prepared to receive thousands of people Monday from a cruise ship that has been idling off the coast of San Francisco with at least 21 people aboard infected with the coronavirus.
Personnel covered head to toe in protective gear woke up passengers on the Grand Princess to check whether they were sick.
Michele Smith, of Paradise, California, said a doctor knocked on her and her husband’s cabin before dawn and asked if they had a fever or a cough. The couple who went on the cruise to celebrate their wedding anniversary are healthy and, like the rest of the 2,400 passengers aboard, have been isolating in their cabins since Thursday.
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On land, fences were installed at an 11-acre site at the Port of Oakland as authorities readied flights and buses to whisk the passengers aboard the ship to military bases or their home countries for a 14-day quarantine. The more than 3,500 passengers and staff on the ship hail from 54 countries.
“We’re making every effort to get them off the ship as safely and quickly as possible,” said Dr. John Redd of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who urged passengers to remain in their rooms.
As the U.S. death toll from the virus reached at least 21 and the number of cases worldwide soared above 110,000, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the mayor of Oakland sought to reassure the public that none of the Grand Princess passengers would be exposed to the U.S. public before completing the quarantine. The number of infections in the United States climbed above 500 as testing for the virus increased.
The Port of Oakland was chosen for docking because of its proximity to an airport and a military base, Newsom said. U.S. passengers will be transported to military bases in California, Texas and Georgia, where they’ll be tested for the COVID-19 virus and quarantined.
About 1,100 crew on the ship, 19 of whom have tested positive for the new virus, will be quarantined and treated aboard the ship, which will dock elsewhere, Newsom said.
“That ship will turn around — and they are currently assessing appropriate places to bring that quarantined ship — but it will not be here in the San Francisco Bay,” he said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s infectious diseases chief, said Sunday that widespread closure of a city or region, as Italy has done, is “possible.” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said communities will need to start thinking about canceling large gatherings, closing schools and letting more employees work from home, as many companies have done in the Seattle, Washington, area amid an outbreak at a care home that has killed 17.
On the Grand Princess, the Smiths said they hope their time spent in quarantine on the ship will count toward the 14 days they are expected to isolate themselves. But they said officials have not yet provided an answer.
“We would love to get credit for the three or four days we’ve spent in our cabin,” Steven Smith said.
The Department of State was working with the home countries of several hundred passengers to arrange their repatriation, including nearly 240 from Canada.
The ship was held off the coast amid evidence it was the breeding ground for a cluster of at least 20 cases from a previous voyage.
Meanwhile, another cruise ship, the Regal Princess, pulled into a Florida port late Sunday night after being held off the state’s coast for hours while awaiting coronavirus test results for two crew members, who did not have symptoms consistent with COVID-19.
Another Princess ship, the Diamond Princess, was quarantined for two weeks in Yokohama, Japan, last month because of the virus. Ultimately, about 700 of the 3,700 people aboard became infected in what experts pronounced a public health failure, with the vessel essentially becoming a floating germ factory.
On Sunday, the U.S. State Department urged U.S. citizens against travel on cruise ships as officials said there was “increased risk of infection of COVID-19 in a cruise ship environment.”
Private companies and some public venues in the U.S. have been taking safety measures in an effort to limit the virus’ spread. Several universities have begun online-only courses, including the University of Washington, Stanford University and Columbia University. The largest school district in Northern California, with 64,000 students, canceled classes for a week when it was discovered a family in the district was exposed to COVID-19.
___
Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Juliet Williams in San Francisco and Robert Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.
The One-Choice Election
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited — as he was viciously Friday in The New York Times’ “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity” — and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either.
Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery — and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is impossible working within the system to shatter the hegemony of oligarchic power or institute meaningful reform. Change, real change, will only come by sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass mobilization, as with the yellow vests movement in France and the British-based Extinction Rebellion. The longer we are fooled by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered we will become.
I was on the streets with protesters in Philadelphia outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention when hundreds of Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. “Show me what democracy looks like!” they chanted, holding Bernie signs above their heads as they poured out of the exits. “This is what democracy looks like!”
Sanders’ greatest tactical mistake was not joining them. He bowed before the mighty altar of the corporate state. He had desperately tried to stave off a revolt by his supporters and delegates on the eve of the convention by sending out repeated messages in his name — most of them authored by members of the Clinton campaign — to be respectful, not disrupt the nominating process and support Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, attempting to herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Clinton campaign. At his moment of apostasy, when he introduced a motion to nominate Clinton, his delegates had left hundreds of convention seats empty.
After the 2016 convention, Sanders held rallies — the crowds pitifully small compared to what he had drawn when he ran as an insurgent — on Clinton’s behalf. He returned to the Senate to loyally line up behind Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose power comes from his ability to funnel tens of millions of dollars in corporate and Wall Street money to anointed Democratic candidates. Sanders refused to support the lawsuit brought against the Democratic National Committee for rigging the primaries against him. He endorsed Democratic candidates who espoused the neoliberal economic and political positions he claims to oppose. Sanders, who calls himself an independent, caucused as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determined his assignments in the Senate. Schumer offered to make Sanders the head of the Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate. Sanders became a party apparatchik.
Sanders apparently believed that if he was obsequious enough to the Democratic Party elite, they would give him a chance in 2020, a chance they denied him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is not democratic is about being complicit in the charade. Sanders misread the Democratic Party leadership, swamp creatures of the corporate state. He misread the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage. Its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props at rallies and in choreographed party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have zero influence on party politics or party policies. Sanders’ naivete, and perhaps his lack of political courage, drove away his most committed young supporters. These followers have not forgiven him for his betrayal. They chose not to turn out to vote in the numbers he needs in the primaries. They are right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system, not placate it.
Sanders is wounded. The oligarchs will go in for the kill. They will subject him to the same character assassination, aided by the courtiers in the corporate press, that was directed at Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, the only two progressive presidential candidates who managed to seriously threaten the ruling elites since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump another term in office.
By voting for Biden, you endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for limiting a woman’s right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of debt obligations through bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for bloated defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.
There are no substantial political differences between the Democrats and Republicans. We have only the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes” that it can make their interests a priority, the Democratic Party “pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system,” political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes.
The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism.
We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system, especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don’t need a “Punch and Judy” show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.
March 8, 2020
Bernie Sanders Is Trying to Save the Democratic Party From Itself
The movement that has grown around Sen. Bernie Sanders has become a political force to reckon with in the 2020 presidential election. Part of its strength is the many intersections it has with other progressive movements, some of which have been around for many years, others which stemmed from his 2016 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Sanders’ campaign has been endorsed by or includes members from Black Lives Matter and the Sunrise Movement, among many others, and from its inception was made up of activists.
One such movement that stemmed from Sanders’ first presidential bid was founded by a 2016 Sanders delegate, Norman Solomon. Solomon, whose columns are regularly featured at Truthdig, is also the founder of online initiative RootsAction. The writer and activist joined Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer last week in the run-up to Super Tuesday to discuss Sanders’ 2020 campaign and the socioeconomic conditions that led to the democratic socialist’s rise.
Speaking at a time in which Sanders was the clear front-runner in the Democratic race, Solomon, who has witnessed firsthand how the Democratic Party worked to undermine Sanders in 2016, warned that the worst is yet to come. His words, of course, proved prophetic as in the moments before the March 3 primaries in 14 states, corporate Democrats rallied around Joe Biden in an effort to impede the Vermont senator’s path to the presidential nomination.
“We’re at an extraordinary moment as we come into the spring of 2020 [with] the Bernie Sanders campaign because of the grassroots strength and the fact that he has always been part of a movement, even with the contradictions of being in Congress,” the progressive organizer explains. “For instance, this is an upsurge of progressive populism with a strength in electoral arenas that I never would have anticipated.
“So now we’re operating at a level of who’s going to gain state power, and the amount of backlash, the amount of viciousness that we’ve already seen this year, 2020 is just a prelude to pulling out all the stops to try to block Bernie Sanders and the movement that he’s part of.”
The movement, the two acknowledge, is built on ideas of class that Americans for many years did not hear discussed in media, let alone in the halls of Congress and other institutions. To Scheer, the oppression of the working class and the many betrayals it suffered at the hands of Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Biden, led to Sanders’ unexpected success both in 2016 and now.
“The way [media harps on], you would think it’s Bernie that started class war or the people around them or young people,” says Scheer. “That’s not the way I see this history that I’ve lived through.”
Scheer delves into this personal history to provide a context for what he views as Sanders’ true predecessor, a wealthy U.S. president who wasn’t trying to implement socialism but rather save capitalism years ago.
“I was born in 1936. My father lost his job the day I was born,” recalls the Truthdig editor in chief. “Roosevelt was the hero in our house. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why? Because the ruling class in our country, the robber barons, the rich people — and he was from a rich family — they undermined their own system. They were so consumed with greed and short-term profit and swindling, the market and everything else that they forgot about stability in society.”
Continuing on the thread of systemic change that needs to take place in the U.S., Solomon recalls a crucial lesson from Martin Luther King Jr. of which he believes Sanders and his movement are well aware.
“I ran across in an essay and then the last book that Martin Luther King wrote, ‘Where We Go From Here,’ where he talked about power and he talked about love and he said, ‘Power without love is cruel, it’s abusive and so forth.’ He says, ‘but love without power is ineffectual and anemic.’
“There hasn’t been a focus [on the American left] on gaining power tangibly,” laments Solomon. “And that has to include government electoral power as much as we might wish that the electoral system as it now exists was something we never need to deal with because [it’s] so awful and tacky and uh, dominated by money. And what Bernie is saying and the movement is saying is much in sync with what Martin Luther King was saying. If you want to effectuate love toward human beings as social policy, you need power. And if you don’t have power, you’re going to be anemic.”
Listen to the full discussion between Solomon and Scheer as the two discuss the forgotten history of progressive movements in the U.S. and what the results of the nail-biting Democratic primary may be. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.
— Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
RS: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case it’s Norman Solomon, who I’ve known for many years as a — as an everything, as a media watchdog. I associated him with FAIR, and a guy named Jeff Cohen that I did a podcast with, great people trying to keep the media straight. He’s involved with RootsAction, a grassroots organization. He’s the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. But the reason I wanted to talk to him now is that everybody’s dumping on Bernie Sanders — not everybody, but the party bosses, and the mostly hacks; I’ll exempt Elizabeth Warren. But I’ll let my own prejudice show, I was really offended by the so-called, the panel debate that they had on the eve of the South Carolina primary, when everybody decided to attack Bernie. And I found it really deplorable, the red-baiting and so forth. So there, I’ve got it out. And I wanted to talk to Norman Solomon because the real last encounter I had had with him was at the Democratic Convention in 2016. So welcome.
NS: Thank you. Thanks, Bob.
RS: And you were — I was there covering it as a journalist, and I’ve covered many conventions of both parties going back to, well, Chicago in 1956, I guess it was. I was a young activist for Estes Kefauver, believe it or not, against Adlai Stevenson; I thought he was more of a populist, college activist. But I’ve been at a lot of these conventions, and I found what you did at this last Democratic convention to be really interesting. I don’t know what the technical name of it [is]. You were a Bernie Sanders delegate, and you along with Jeff Cohen and other people put together a kind of progressive caucus, of delegates mostly, right? And you had speakers, you had debates, discussions. And it was one of the healthier things. I mean, it wasn’t as healthy and as exciting as the challenge over the Mississippi delegation at the ’64 convention —
NS: There was no Fannie Lou Hamer there, yeah.
RS: Yeah, and it wasn’t the ’68 convention, where we mostly were in the streets, and even some delegates. But it was really quite exciting. The tenor of the debate, the people who were there, mostly Sanders supporters, but others. So just tell me, what was your role there at the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia?
NS: As an elected Bernie Sanders delegate, I worked with other delegates to set up what we call the Bernie Delegates Network. And back then, as the spring unfolded and it became clear that Hillary Clinton had enough delegates, we really felt that there needed to be an independent entity that brought together Bernie delegates. That of course we were warm toward the Bernie Sanders official campaign, but we felt that there needed to be some autonomy and some mutual communication. Because God help us, if we were only thinking what other delegates were thinking, because of the mass media narrative, we wouldn’t know what each other was thinking. So we set up a mechanism through its RootsAction.org, which we co-sponsored with Progressive Democrats of America, to be able to have sort of lateral communication. We were able to, for instance, survey one person, one vote of the Bernie delegates in the weeks before and then during the convention.
So we had ultimately two-thirds of all the Bernie Sanders delegates in this independent Bernie Delegates Network, and we learned a lot of stuff. For instance, we surveyed: What are the most important issues to you? And the two of them were, stop the TPP — the corporate-friendly trade pact — and also Medicare for All. And keep in mind, this is 2016. So that’s what we helped to push up with daily news conferences, which you know, included a live one on C-SPAN, etc., etc. And the other element was, for instance, when it was clear there was about to be a vice presidential pick, we had a list of a dozen names that were being bandied about.
And we asked the Bernie delegates — and we had several hundred instantly respond with their individual votes — who do you favor for vice presidential candidate? And Tim Kaine came up with like 1%. Nobody wanted this guy! And of course, Hillary Clinton chose him — I mean, if anything, to her right, which is saying a lot. You know, corporate just enmeshed person, about as exciting as drying paint. But reassuring Wall Street, which of course she was doing all the time, and trying to do, and enervating what was left of progressive enthusiasm for her. So anyway, that’s what we were doing, and actually in the work now, 10 years of RootsAction, we’ve tried to — have been working with others in coalition to be an independent force.
RS: OK, but I just want to capture this moment in time, because Bernie Sanders came from nowhere to really run this very strong campaign. And even though he didn’t get it, it kind of upset the whole inevitability about Hillary Clinton — which should have been a warning for her to run a more populist, progressive campaign. She didn’t do that, and I think she has the main responsibility for her loss in the electoral votes. But what was interesting about it — first of all, let me give my own prejudice about Sanders’ campaign. I’ve always liked him, I like what he does. But I thought — and I have, like I say, my only grievance with Bernie Sanders is that he’s from Brooklyn — you know, forget the Vermont stuff — and I’m from the Bronx. So that really is the–
NS: [Laughs] Is this a Yankees-Dodgers thing, or —?
RS: No, no, just the two boroughs, and Brooklyn got all the attention, and the Bronx was real people. I don’t have to go through that nostalgia, but I actually thought he was going to get a couple of percent of the vote. Protest candidate, and so forth. Bernie, to Bernie’s credit, took off, you know; [he] was real to people, tapped into the great alienation and anger and frustration that’s out there. And we’re seeing it now in this election. And I learned about it — we’re doing this recording from the University of Southern California, not a hotbed of leftism. You know, this is not Berkeley. Which is not any longer, really, a hotbed. But I learned about Bernie Sanders in 2016 from my students. Had very large classes, and they would open their laptop and I saw ”1-2-3 Bernie” stickers. By the time we had a primary, almost everyone had a Bernie sticker, and I never saw a Hillary Clinton sticker. So you know, I said, wow — and plenty of these kids, their parents were Republican or conservative. You know, I don’t want to type, and we got a great student body. But you know, and now I’ve seen it again, and the polling backs it up. And this is what has happened in the early primary states and so forth. This old — you know, and again, no one’s even talking about the fact that he’s the first Jewish candidate to have a shot at the White House. You know, he didn’t get any points for that, because he doesn’t line up as a hawk on Israel, dares to say something about the Palestinians.
But I must say, for me, as a longtime observer of American politics, I was shocked in 2016, and even more so now. Because along with many people in the media, I thought well, he had his time, and now it’s going to be, if it’s a progressive it’ll probably be Elizabeth Warren, or so forth. Meanwhile, the establishment will chew him up, and so forth. And as we’re talking now, after the Nevada primary and just days before South Carolina, it looks–I mean, Bernie is being called a frontrunner. I think my own pessimism indicates to me that they will–they, the powers that be, and the Democratic Party will destroy him.
NS: They will try.
RS: Well, you know. But it is a phenomena, just like Trump on the other side was this phenomena, discounted by the Republican Party, and he chews up every single candidate in the Republican Party. Not because he’s a particularly effective demagogue — I’m not going to take away his effectiveness as a demagogue on the right, because I think progressive populism on the right involves being a demagogue; you’re not really going to take on the corporations. I think Bernie is the real thing on the progressive left side, where you’re willing to take on the corporations; that’s his great appeal. But the fact is, both of them are speaking to the pain out there. Both of them are coming up with a view of that pain out there —
NS: Warren and Bernie, yeah.
RS: Yeah. Well, and so to my mind, this is an incredible moment in American politics. And what we’re seeing, as happened on the other side, there’s an establishment that I feel is both Republican and Democrat, that’s responsible for what has happened over the last, certainly 40 years of growing income inequality, the loss of decent jobs, the great unhappiness where so many people realize they’re not going to live the American dream, or get a shot at it. Many of our students here are graduating in debt, wondering about what jobs they’ll have.
So I think this is actually an extremely healthy development in America. And what I wanted to ask you about, as the kind of political pro that you are — in the sense of knowledge, and you’ve been around the block, you’ve seen these people — and I watched you at the convention, and you were conversant with the delegates. And by the way, being at that convention was quite depressing, because it started with the Bernie people being acknowledged by the party, and they’re as significant — and they were a great cross-section of population. Many of these delegates that I interviewed were in politics for the first time, they had lives in their own communities of connection with people, and so forth. And suddenly they were rudely shunted aside. They even had, were pressured to give up their seats at the convention so others could move in and cheer lustily for Hillary. It was all staged, it was quite depressing there.
And so I want a preview from you: what do you think is going to happen now? How vicious is it going to get? And what are they going to do to Bernie?
NS: In terms of mass corporate media, as bad as it’s gotten, I fear we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Because as Frederick Douglass said, power does not concede without a struggle. It never did, it never will. And we sometimes, I think, even though we know that, there’s a tendency to forget it. Which, the flip side of that is we always have to gain, we always have to organize, otherwise we’re going to get nothing. And I just see the Democratic Party as part of the corporate system, so therefore anything we’re going to accomplish is going to be in direct conflict–that ”in,” and then the next word, ”direct” conflict. And the way to overcome it is organizing from the bottom up. And four years ago, I felt it was wrong to say there was a Bernie Sanders movement. I think there is now. Or another way to put it, there’s a confluence of so many movements that are full-throated, shoulder-to-the-wheel, behind the Bernie 2020 campaign. I think you alluded a few minutes ago, Bob, to being shocked or surprised or whatever, and I think that’s a very important point. Because I would not have anticipated a strong, genuine —
RS: Shocked at his success, four years ago and now, yes.
NS: Absolutely. And it reminds me of something that I read I.F. Stone once said, that he could never understand why his colleagues in the journalistic profession like to act as though they would never be surprised by anything. You know, it’s a sort of an affect that sometimes even comes in on the left.
RS: It’s their stock-and-trade.
NS: Yeah, it’s like oh, we are not surprised about anything that has happened, is happening now, or ever will. And I think that as the great Howard Zinn, who we miss very much, was fond of saying, you don’t know what can be achieved. We have our hopes. We have reasons to be in dire mental depression sometimes, politically. But who would have anticipated — and there’s a long litany, whether it’s Nelson Mandela being president of South Africa, or whatever. And now we are — and I fully agree — we’re at an extraordinary moment as we come into the spring of 2020. The Bernie Sanders campaign, because of the grassroots strength, and the fact that he has always been part of a movement — even with the contradictions of being in Congress, for instance — this is an upsurge of progressive populism with a strength in electoral arenas that I never would have anticipated. So now we’re operating at a level of who’s going to gain state power. And the amount of backlash, the amount of viciousness that we’ve already seen this year, 2020, is just a prelude to pulling out all the stops to try to block Bernie Sanders and the movement that he’s part of.
RS: Well, let’s examine this movement, because it’s not a simple movement. But then again, movements rarely are, and certainly populist-based movements aren’t. But let’s take this word that they’re trying to wrap around his neck, the two words of democratic socialist. And that’s really the big dirty trick here, OK. It’s, first of all, it’s red-baiting without reds. I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders — first of all, democratic socialism is the norm in most industrialized countries. It’s what helped Germany develop after World War II; the Social Democratic Party, Willy Brandt, all these people were democratic socialist, very proudly so. Even Tony Blair, [laughs] who supported Bush on the Iraq War, was the leader of a party that certainly had very strong democratic socialist origins, labor origins and so forth. Most of the American labor movement was certainly run by people who were; the auto industry, right on down the line.
But what happened in America is the mythology of a classless society, which is very convenient, into an advanced capitalist society, is to convince everyone that we are really without class, and we’re just at different stages of life, and everyone’s going to hit the jackpot. And what happened in this last 20-, 30-year period, maybe even 40-year period, is that it’s laughable to assert that. And the odd thing about this whole controversy about Bernie Sanders is that the label ”democratic socialist” still has some effectiveness in strangling someone. But billionaire capitalists — no. That’s a good thing. They can bankroll the party, they can win everyone over, they’re charitable, they do philanthropy, they have great people, almost by definition, right? And so the prevailing myth of America has become a caricature now. You know, kick the democratic socialist to the curb, but elevate, you know, the billionaire.
NS: The venture capitalist, whatever. Yeah.
RS: Yeah. And it’s really startling. And the fact is, it’s not playing well.
NS: The demographics are so pronounced, where you go to people — well, my age; I’m in my late 60a — but 60s, 70s, 80s. And that red-baiting, as you said, without the reds as targets, to some degree it’s really resonating. And then the opportunistic corporate politicians and their cohorts in the news media, they’re playing it and banging on the drum for all they can. But for people in their twenties and thirties and forties, it has very little resonance, and the demographics point that out. Bernie is doing so phenomenally well with people under 40. And I think for good and bad, mostly for good, the awful history of McCarthyism and post-McCarthyism in the U.S. McCarthyiteism, the terrible Russia-baiting that’s gone on under the guise of Russiagate that’s coming back to bite progressives, predictably. That’s something that goes to the lack of historical knowledge among younger generations.
And I’ll give you an example, Bob. I was in, for RootsAction, New Hampshire in the week before the New Hampshire primary. And I wrote an article, which Truthdig published, about the young people who were organizing in New Hampshire. And keep in mind, it’s such a small state there are only two congressional districts. The group called New Hampshire Youth Movement had organized 10,000 people to sign that they would vote; then the organization endorsed Bernie Sanders and got out the vote, and was probably responsible for the victory. And I think that was phenomenal. They were so committed to Bernie, about climate, about class, about getting rid of this horrendous student debt, and so many other reasons. And I was chatting with one — I was interviewing for the piece, I ended up not including it — but I said, well, do you see any parallels with the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968 in New Hampshire, which was also youth-driven? And the answer was, ”I’m not familiar. What was that?”
And I think that, of course, is an indictment of the mass media, and the educational system, such as it is, but also to some degree tells us as progressives that we have not done a great job of conveying the history of progressive politics and grassroots organizing to the next generations.
RS: Well you know, in a way, it doesn’t matter. Because at the end, facts and logic matters. You know, in organizing, in what sways people, and so forth. You can only keep up the myth for so long. But, you know, if a young person has graduated from college, a fine college like ours, and is now driving a Lyft or an Uber — and I’m not putting them down, I know they’re doing what they have to do get by — or they’re still doing some unpaid internship, you know. Or they’re figuring out what was it all about, and they still have this student debt. They’re up against an objective reality that is difficult to negotiate or spin. It’s a reality, OK?
And for instance, so the question of Medicare for All — a lot of those older voters, they assume their social security, which after all was branded as a socialist invention; they assume Medicare, which was derided as a socialist invention. Everything, all the things that allow older people in this country to have some security — it used to be the oldest population was also the most impoverished, and if they didn’t have a relative or if they hadn’t been wealthy themselves, they were hurting. Thanks to what was derided as the socialist inventions, going back to the New Deal — of unemployment insurance, of social security, of housing subsidy, go right down the list, OK — we took a whole category of population, seniors, and basically lifted them out of poverty. They were assumed to be, OK.
So now you try to take — you got this old guy, Bernie Sanders, he says hey, it’s a pretty good system, let’s extend it to young people. Then these smart alecks at MSNBC who work for Comcast, you know, which is determined to mess up our internet freedom —
NS: And is the most hated, according to one major survey — Comcast, the most hated corporation in the country, yeah.
RS: OK, but it wasn’t any better when they were working for defense contractor General Electric that used to own NBC, and exported two out of three jobs abroad. And, you know, not the old GE, progress. But the fact of the matter is, certain facts are just, you can’t push them away, you know. And then they say, well, how are you going to pay for medicine — well, how do we pay for medicine now? OK, so you know, they say Bernie doesn’t have the specifics — and I was really disappointed that Elizabeth Warren ran away from Medicare for All after embracing it. Because the accounting is garbage. The fact of the matter is we spend, as Bernie points out, much more than anybody else does on medical. I happen to be, by the way, much older than you. I am 83 years old, and I am working here at the University of Southern California. And you know what? I can’t use Medicare, you know, because I have a health plan that I’m paying for here, and is available. My doctors all tell me they wish I were on Medicare, because this great private care that I’m paying for in part with the university, they don’t like as much; they don’t get paid as quickly, OK.
So these seniors are being hypocritical when they say, oh, don’t let young people have it. In fact, it’s much easier to extend to young people. They don’t get sick as often, and so forth; they’re not as much a pressure on the system. So it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out argument that you can’t expand Medicare. Yes, you can, OK. And you can also have a lot of choice. You can have alternative plans, you can subsidize it, you can do a lot of things with Medicare to make it work for you if you have more money. But what it does is it takes the basic insecurity that people have about their health care and their family health care off the table. Therefore, by the way, if they were smart about the advancement of technology, that would also remove one of the concerns about robotics, or where the jobs are, or more efficient ways of producing. You know, the same thing with good public education that you don’t have to pay for, so you don’t get hung up with the tuition indebtedness for the rest of your life.
All of these things are ways of saying to a younger population: You can do meaningful work. You don’t have to be frightened out of your mind about international trade and all these trade agreements. The fact is, the basics of life will be guaranteed to you, because it’s a human right to have shelter, have medical, and so forth. So Bernie’s message is actually, basically, a way of conserving capitalism. It’s actually what the New Deal represented. Everybody forgets the New Deal saved capitalism, it didn’t destroy it, OK? And why not a single reporter or commentator on MSNBC, let alone Fox — why they don’t know that, these ideas that have given us stability, when we used to have bonus marches and veterans storming the streets. You know, I’m old enough to remember the insecurity, I was born in the Depression. And all of these things now that are derided as socialist, whether they’re done in France or they’re done in England, and not as much here, were all designed by a former millionaire–he now would be considered a billionaire, Franklin Delano Roosevelt — not to eliminate capitalism, but to save it from its excesses, OK.
Now, if Bernie Sanders says that–and he says something like that — he will be considered, as in Trump’s words, crazy Bernie. But it’s actually the most accurate way to look at the American dilemma. You know, it’s not a question of getting rid of the market economy and getting rid of capital; you’re not going to do that very quickly. You know, the fact is, you’re talking about taming it; you’re talking about making it more responsible for its own good. That is really the argument in this election.
Now, in the ’16 election, when you were working for Bernie, the obvious fact — so we should stop for a minute and consider it. The obvious fact is that Hillary Clinton didn’t get it, OK. Now, maybe deep in the recesses of her brain she did. But the fact of the matter is that Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton at his side from the very beginning, were actually involved in freeing capitalism to be more irresponsible, rather than doing what Roosevelt did, containing capitalism to be more responsible. And they eliminated — the main achievement, so-called, of the Clinton era was the elimination of the New Deal restraints on finance, capital, and the protection of housing. That’s the main thing. The Financial Services Modernization Act, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, what they did is they destroyed not just the Glass-Steagall prevention, but all of the basic restraints on Wall Street that the New Deal had put in. They betrayed the Democratic Party, they betrayed capitalism, OK. So it seems to me what we’re really talking about here is, are you going to have adults watching the store?
NS: There’s a through line where, of course, there are so many different issues that Bernie has tackled, and he’s much stronger on a multiplicity of them now than he was four years ago. And yet I think the through line is class war. If you look at why the news media revile him so much, the corporate news media — and I include NPR and PBS, “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” “PBS News Hour” — it’s because he’s unrelenting. And that has been portrayed routinely as, oh, he just is the same old record, he says the same thing over and over again. And that’s why so many people love him, because he doesn’t blow with the wind. He’s not a sock puppet of corporate capital, he’s not a windsock. He’s just being real about what is facing people — and I think it’s very related to what you were saying, Bob — the opportunities that so many young people face are so circumscribed by the power of corporate capitalism. And at this point, unless there is, as Bernie has said, an uprising from the grassroots, it’s predictable that the same problem will continue.
I was very struck by one of the early debates in 2019, when you know, there’s a minute left for each candidate. And it’s the usual ”I’m so great, I’ve been so great, I’d be a great president.” Bernie didn’t use his minute that way. He said, ”Unless millions and tens of millions of people rise up and insist on a change in this system, where corruption and corporate power is maintained, none of these issues are going to improve appreciably.” And I think that signifies how much he is part of social movements, and social movements are part of his campaign. I think it’s very both symbolic and politically historic that when, as usual, corporate media and corporate candidates try to drive a wedge through the working-class base by saying, if you’re in the culinary union you’re going to lose your benefits for Medicare for All — that’s what the hierarchy of the union kept saying. And the rank and file, even the corporate media acknowledged in retrospect, totally ignored that line. They voted for Bernie at the caucuses. And that, as somebody said who I heard interviewed afterward — ”We’ve got brothers, we’ve got sisters, we’ve got aunts and uncles. We don’t know if we’ll be in this job forever. It’s not just about us.” And I think that really is in sync with the Bernie theme: not me, us. And that is, on the one hand it can be seen as a platitude, but when it’s hitched to the plow of grassroots organizing that says, we’re going to take power because we need to improve the lives of everybody, not just a few, that is really powerful.
And one thing I want to mention is I ran across in an essay, and then the last book that he wrote, Martin Luther King, “Where Do We Go From Here,” he talked about power, and he talked about love. And he said, power without love is cruel, it’s abusive, and so forth. He says, but love without power is ineffectual and anemic. And a lot of the sort of religious left, a lot of the witnessing left, a lot of the doctrinaire ideological left, rhetoric aside, for all of their virtues, there hasn’t been a focus on gaining power tangibly. And that has to include government electoral power, as much as we might wish that the electoral system as it now exists was something we’d never need to deal with, because it’s so awful and tacky and dominated by money. And what Bernie’s saying and the movement is saying is much in sync with what Martin Luther King was saying. If you want to effectuate love towards human beings as social policy, you need power; and if you don’t have power, you’re going to be anemic.
RS: So, it’s time for a break. I’ve been talking to Norman Solomon, and we’ll let any stations that want to use this, or others, identify themselves, and we’ll be right back. [omission for station break] I’m back with Norman Solomon, who has had a lifetime of experience of organizing progressive movements, and he was a Bernie delegate, and that’s why I wanted to do a podcast, he was at the 2016 convention. Which I think was a moment of incredible clarity, at least for me as a journalist covering it, and I’ve been at most of these, just about almost all of the political parties’ conventions, republican, democrat, since 1956 when I was a kid. And I was a member of Eleanor Roosevelt’s group, Americans for Democratic Action, the student wing. And we supported, our student wing supported Estes Kefauver, a populist from Tennessee, against Adlai Stevenson; the adult group supported Adlai Stevenson. So I started out with this.
But what I want to pick up for what remains of our podcast, I want to discuss this question of class war. And the way you put it before, you would think it’s Bernie that started class war, or the people around him, or young people. That’s not the way I see this history that I’ve lived through. I was born in 1936. My father lost his job the day I was born, OK? And Roosevelt was the hero in our house, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why? Because the ruling class in our country, the robber barons, the rich people — and he was from a rich family, you know — they undermined their own system. They were so consumed with greed and short-term profit and swindling the market and everything else, that they forgot about stability in society. They forgot about what de Tocqueville praised America for, some kind of solid middle class emerging and gaining power, and so forth. Accountability — from my students here, I hear all the time about Bernie: he’s real, you know, he’s authentic. There’s accountability. They like his saying the same thing, [laughs] because it shows he really has a message that he believes in. They don’t want him all over the map.
But I think about this idea of class war, and what I’ve witnessed in my life in America, my parents were both — my father was a machinist on knitting machines, and my mother was a garment worker, sewing machines and so forth. I grew up in that kind of background. And all my life — yes, I’ve engaged in the meritocracy; I went to City College, the whole thing —but all my life I’ve seen a relentless class war, after the Second World War, to reverse what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. Because out of that period of the Great Depression and then the wartime boom, we had victories for trade unions. We had strong industrial trade unions, you came out of the war, you had the auto workers, the steel workers, the coal miners, the electrical workers, big industrial unions with political power and clout. And then you had the Taft Hartley law to undermine that; the Republicans led that fight, but many Democrats, including the Dixiecrats in the South, supported it. So the class war that I’ve observed, as a young person and then as a journalist, analyzing it, writing books and so forth, has been ruthless. And it’s not to gain power for the dispossessed or working people, it’s been to take it away. Unions have been crushed, the industrial unions were undermined by corporate control of government, you know. So there’s been a class war all along. The power of the press has been concentrated in wealthier and wealthier hands, the coming of television increased that and so forth, you know.
And the problem is with their excessive power. At some point they got greedy again, as they had done in the ’20s, the roaring ’20s and so forth. And they began to go excessively in the direction of short-term gain, fattening their own thing, using hedge funds, everything else. And you get to a point when Bill Clinton comes in, and that is the turning point in modern history. Because Bill Clinton, who claimed to have the poor-boy roots there in Hope and so forth, in Arkansas, one of the poorest states and everything, had the promise of a populism. And he betrayed it almost instantly, in part because he had only — Ross Perot was in the race, he didn’t have a majority of votes; he had, you know, roughly what, 40% or 35%, something like that, maybe a little more. And the fact of the matter is, almost from the first days of the Clinton administration, he betrayed the most vulnerable people in this society.
NS: And carrying that thread forward —
RS: But let me just give some specifics for listeners, maybe don’t know that. But for instance, we’re here in Los Angeles, where we have a lot of homeless people. We have a lot of people who are dependent upon some kind of government assistance. And it was Bill Clinton who destroyed the federal, main federal anti-poverty program, which the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson has supported, but that was started by Roosevelt, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And so, you know, and that was mostly women with children, and they were cut off!
NS: Right. Five years and you’re out.
RS: Yeah. And then you can go right down the line, the Telecommunications Act that empowered the concentration of wealth in the control of communications. And you had the ones I mentioned before, the freeing of Wall Street to go further than the savings and loan scandal under Ronald Reagan. So the Democratic Party really presided — in alliance with the Republicans, Phil Gramm and others, but they couldn’t do it on their own — under Bill Clinton. And this is why we now are with Bernie Sanders, OK. And that under, starting with Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party allied with Wall Street. And that’s why, by the way — no one mentions it — Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to turn down campaign finance. John McCain was still accepting it. You know, and the argument is, well, he’s got a hard row here, we’ll go turn to Wall Street. And Barack Obama betrayed that commitment, because he started out, when he was running against Hillary Clinton, he attacked the Clinton freeing of Wall Street, but then what did he do? He has Lawrence Summers come in, who was one of the architects under Clinton of doing it.
He brings in — and the telling moment — and I’ll shut up after and let you take the rest of the time. But what really kills me is Julian Assange somehow is the bad guy in all this, and WikiLeaks, and told us, what — what did he do? What was the great interference in the 2016 election, and the Russians are tied to that, and everything else? The great interference, the only thing that really affected that election, was not, you know, playing with voting machines or bots on the internet or false sites; all of that accounts for very little. The main impact on that election is that through WikiLeaks and whoever, however you got that information, he told us what Hillary Clinton said when she was sitting next to Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, who had given her three quarters of a million dollars for her speeches. And she said there, we need the smart people here to come with me to Washington and fix this problem. And it was Goldman Sachs, more than any other company, that had created the problem.
And now, fast forward, it’s Lloyd Blankfein who says, said that he would have a hard time voting for Bernie Sanders against Donald Trump. OK. That’s the man who was behind Hillary Clinton. The other thing we learned from those leaks was that Podesta and the head of the Democratic National Committee undermined Bernie Sanders, and did everything they could to undermine his campaign. So the main interference from WikiLeaks, for which Julian Assange is now imprisoned in London under horrible conditions, is to tell American voters how the Democratic establishment and how Hillary Clinton had betrayed what they claim was — what she claimed, and they claimed — was their commitment to ordinary Americans in favor of Wall Street.
NS: Those were certainly inconvenient facts that were revealed. I think of a photograph that’s symbolic — actually a series of them — when in the White House, Barack Obama would meet up with the two former Democratic presidents, right. So there’s Barack Obama, there’s Bill Clinton, and there’s Jimmy Carter. And it’s very consistent in those photos that Obama is huddling closely with Bill Clinton, they’re yucking it up, they’re very warm. And Obama and Clinton are leaving aside Jimmy Carter, who’s certainly a much better ex-president than he was a president. And to me, it embodies what you’re talking about, Bob. Because Obama continued what Bill Clinton started —
RS: When we say Obama, it’s Obama-Biden.
NS: Yes, indeed, as Biden keeps trying to tell us. Hobart Rowen, the late economics correspondent for the Washington Post, when Bill Clinton was first elected said it was a combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. And I think Obama in practice, as a president, kept that thread going. So we had 16 years with Obama and Clinton before him, the combination of, yes, some good liberal social policies, some decent economic policies, earned income tax credit or whatever. But on the whole, as you’re spelling out, turning the Treasury Department over to, I mean, people like Lloyd Bentsen you can go back to, wasn’t that under Clinton, etc., etc. — turned it all over —
RS: Well, Robert Rubin, who came straight from Goldman Sachs to the Treasury Department under Clinton to preside over ending all the New Deal restraints on Wall Street, in effect. And then after doing this, he goes to work for Citigroup, the bank that he made whole by reversing Glass-Steagall, and Lawrence Summers took over in the tail end, Lawrence Summers came back with Obama. You can’t make this up. And by the way, Elizabeth Warren deserves a great deal of credit, both as a consumer advocate and as a senator, in exposing this. She does, you know. But the rest of the party, with the exception of Bernie Sanders in this debate, they forget it.
NS: It’s sort of a sum-up, in a way, that we’ve had these last two Democratic presidents who have created a new normal for the hierarchy and so-called leadership of the National Democratic Party. And it is the Bernie Sanders campaign that is saying, this normal is unacceptable; the rich corporate elites have been winning the class war; and it’s time for the working class to win that war, because we’re sick of losing.
RS: Well, that’s a good way to summarize. But I want to add, I want to just throw in another idea here. Because the attack on Bernie is the attack from the pundit class. By the way, if you get to be a big talking head, you probably got a pretty good bank account these days. Everybody forgets that. You know, making three, four hundred thousand dollars is considered chump change in that world, OK, so they don’t really share the plight of, you know, most Americans. But they try to brand Bernie — this is the thing — oh, it’s old politics. It is old politics! Precisely because you brought us back to the roaring ’20s. That’s why, yes, you have to talk about a higher minimum wage. You have to talk about union organizing, service employee unions, unions that are active in Nevada, you know, on a more militant basis, you know. Yes, you have to talk about exploitation of workers, you have to talk about something Richard Nixon even talked about, the guaranteed annual income, you know. You know, expanding protection of Americans.
And that is a modern idea now, because that’s the only way you’re going to get scientific advancement. And yes, we’d all like to have robots do boring, horrible work that human beings now do. I worked at various points on assembly lines, there was no glory in it, you know. But the fact of the matter is, you’re not going to get that kind of modernization of technology through computers or anything else, and the benefits of international trade, if you don’t guarantee a decent standard of living for the home population. Because otherwise they will rise up.
That’s the moment we’re at. And Bernie Sanders really has a very timely — I’m not trying to turn this into a pitch for him — I would have to say Elizabeth Warren has a very strong economic message, which she has articulated, to be fair. And, but the rest of the pack that survive there now, they’re talking as if we have no problems.
NS: The rest of the pack to me is dismal, very dismal. It’s back to the future, the same mess that got us here in the first place. I want to mention that on the night that Bernie won the Nevada caucus in his victory speech, he thanked the rank-and-file union members in Nevada. He didn’t thank the leaders of the union, he thanked — he used the phrase, ”rank-and-file,” and that says a lot about where his strength is coming from.
RS: OK, well, that’s a good positive note on which to end this. I have been talking to Norman Solomon, who has a lifetime of working in grassroots organizations. And I must say, you don’t deserve the credit all alone, but you are one of the people that really had a lot to do with keeping some of these great ideas about accountability to ordinary people alive, and creating the grassroots, helping create the grassroots for a Bernie Sanders campaign. So that’s why I particularly wanted to talk to you today.
And I want to thank Sebastian Grubaugh here, our producer at the University of Southern California, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, which has helped us get this program going. Natasha Hakimi Zapata, who writes the great intros for Scheer Intelligence, and who by the way wrote a terrific piece making the point on the Nevada caucus, because she’s very familiar with the Latinx community. And she recorded in real time early on a revolt among younger Latinos and Latinas over the established view that they would just go with the Democratic Party. We’re seeing that in the black community. And so she was very early to record that. And I must say Scheer Intelligence is a product of two Scheers, Joshua Scheer who is our producer, and I’m Robert Scheer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
International Women’s Day Honors Its Activist Roots
Given the course of natural and manufactured events, it’s easy to get the sense that there have been more setbacks recently than there have been encouraging developments for women around the world. While it’s important to stay focused on the many issues — domestic and state-sponsored violence, human trafficking, income inequality, climate change, transphobia, homophobia and reproductive rights — that require urgent global attention to make International Women’s Day a true celebration rather than an annual observation, it’s also useful to watch for signs of progress in whichever form they take.
Here’s one: As the Associated Press reported, women showed up en masse to march around the world Sunday. From Cambodia to Pakistan, Chile to Kyrgyzstan, their group actions were not just about commemorating International Women’s Day but also to use the occasion to draw worldwide attention to specific causes, some facing forceful push-back from their governments:
But tensions marred some celebrations, with police reportedly using tear gas to break up a demonstration by thousands of women in Turkey and security forces arresting demonstrators at a rally in Kyrgyzstan.
“In many different ways or forms, women are being exploited and taken advantage of,” Arlene Brosas, the representative of a Filipino advocacy group said during a rally that drew hundreds to the area near the presidential palace. Protesters called for higher pay and job security, and demanded that President Rodrigo Duterte respect women’s rights.
[…] In Pakistan, however, women managed to rally in cities across the country, despite petitions filed in court seeking to stop them. The opposition was stirred in part by controversy over a slogan used in last year’s march: “My Body, My Choice.”
Some conservative groups had threatened to stop this year’s marches by force. But Pakistani officials pledged to protest the marchers. The rallies are notable in a conservative country where women often do not feel safe in public places because of open harassment. The main Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, organized its own rallies to counter the march.
In countries such as Chile and France, femicide and rape were taken up as common themes among marchers. In Santiago, Chile, attempts by police forces to tamp down the mass action through the use of tear gas and water hoses met with resistance from protesters who came equipped for the occasion.
It’s not only the tenor of the time that made this particular day so charged with defiance and focused activism. Though International Women’s Day has predictably been co-opted by greeting card companies and florists as another call to consumers to plunk down currency of all denominations, the BBC and other sources recalled the holiday’s activist origins:
International Women’s Day grew out of the labour movement to become a UN-recognised annual event.
The seeds of it were planted in 1908, when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. It was the Socialist Party of America who declared the first National Woman’s Day, a year later.
The idea to make the day international came from a woman called Clara Zetkin. She suggested the idea in 1910 at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. There were 100 women there, from 17 countries, and they agreed on her suggestion unanimously.
It was first celebrated in 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.
[…] In China, many women are given a half-day off work on 8 March, as advised by the State Council, although many employers don’t always pass the half-day on to their female employees.
Since the 109th International Women’s Day took place in a hyper-mediated world, it only follows that the event came complete with its own hashtag, #EachForEqual, reflecting the day’s official theme.
#IWD2020 was another, catch-all hashtag making the rounds on social media and showing up in posts featuring news coverage of crowded streets in various hotspots for activism, as in Chile:
Aerial footage of the massive and historic International Women's Day march in Chile.
Over a million Chilean women have reportedly taken to the streets of Santiago to protest against sexual violence.
Footage via @esmifiestamag, @adnradiochile and @cortanews#IWD2020 pic.twitter.com/v0WvDvR6FS
— redfish (@redfishstream) March 8, 2020
Other posts highlighted efforts to organize at the local level:
In commemoration of International Women's Day today, I went on @xpressradio and spoke about the feminist movements happening in Mexico
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