Chris Hedges's Blog, page 81

Johnson May See Best Tory Result Since Thatcher

LONDON — The Latest on Britain’s Brexit general election (all times local):

11:55 p.m.

In a London pub, Conservative supporters are drinking and cheering following an exit poll that suggests their party will win a majority of seats in the House of Parliament.

Jack Rydeheard, 20, says “I think it’s fantastic. It’s a big relief.” He says the Conservatives could see “the opportunity to get Brexit done and get everything else that we promised.” He says that includes more “investment in the NHS (National Health Service), schools, hospitals, you name it.”

Keith Schofield, a 75-year-old retiree says “we want Brexit to get done.” He says with a majority in Parliament, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a much stronger hand in negotiating with European Union officials over Britain’s Brexit divorce deal.

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Britain is now scheduled to leave the European Union on Jan. 31.

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11:20 p.m.

France says an exit poll shows the British election appears to have produced the “clarification” needed to move forward with Brexit. France’s European affairs minister Amelie de Montchalin was asked about an exit poll projecting a clear majority for U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. She said if the result is confirmed, it will allow EU leaders to move rapidly toward building a new relationship with Britain. EU leaders will meet Friday morning with EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier about next steps regarding Britain’s impending departure from the bloc. De Montchalin says “the most important thing is not the method of divorce but the new legal framework.”

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11 p.m.

If the results of a U.K. exit poll are confirmed, Prime Minister Boris Johnson could become the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

The survey was released just after polls closed late Thursday in Britain’s general election. It predicted the Conservatives would get 368 of the 650 House of Commons seats and the Labour Party would get 191. That would be the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher’s 1980s’ heyday and Labour’s lowest seat total since 1935.

That result would be a triumph for Johnson and a disaster for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is facing immediate calls to resign.

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10:45 p.m.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tweeted his thanks to people who participated in Thursday’s national election.

He did not address an U.K. exit poll suggesting that his Conservative Party would likely win a strong majority of the 650 seats in the House of Commons Parliament. Official results are not yet in, but if the exit poll is correct, it would be a disastrous result for the opposition Labour Party.

Johnson wrote on Twitter: “Thank you to everyone across our great country who voted, who volunteered, who stood as candidate. we live in the greatest democracy in the world.”

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10:35 p.m.

Britain’s opposition Labour Party may be facing a notable drubbing in the country’s general election that could raise questions over the future of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

An exit poll in Britain’s election has projected that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party likely will win a majority of seats in Parliament in Thursday’s vote. That outcome would allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union on Jan. 31.

If that prediction is confirmed by actual results, Corbyn will have led his left-of-center party to two electoral defeats since 2017.

Labour trade spokesman Barry Gardiner says “certainty this exit poll is a devastating blow.”

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10:10 p.m.

The pound has surged after an exit poll in Britain’s Brexit election projected that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party likely will win a majority of seats in Parliament.

The pound jumped over two cents late Thursday against the dollar, to $1.3445, the highest in more than a year and a half.

Many investors hope a Conservative win would cement the the country’s impending departure from the European Union and ease, at least in the short term, some of the uncertainty that has corroded business confidence since Britons voted in 2016 to leave the bloc.

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10 p.m.

An exit poll in Britain’s election projects that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party likely will win a majority of seats in Parliament.

That outcome would allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union next month.

The survey predicts the Conservatives will get 368 of the 650 House of Commons seats and the Labour Party 191 seats. It projects 55 seats for the Scottish National Party and 13 seats for the Liberal Democrats, both parties that want to stop Brexit.

The poll, based on interviews with voters leaving 144 polling stations across the country, is conducted for a consortium of U.K. broadcasters.

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9:15 p.m.

Polls close in less than an hour in Britain’s general election, where voters are deciding which party will form a government and try to break the country’s political deadlock over Brexit.

Some 46 million people are eligible to vote in the country’s first December election since 1923. Thursday’s vote came amid rounds of blustery weather.

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson is hoping to win a majority of the 650 seats in the House of Commons so he can lead the U.K. out of the European Union on Jan. 31 as promised.

The main opposition Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, is promising a new referendum on Brexit.

An exit poll will be released when polls close at 10 p.m. (2200 GMT). Ballots will be counted throughout the night, with most results declared by Friday morning.

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3 p.m.

Britain’s general election is going to the dogs.

Voters on Thursday took their pooches to polling stations up and down the country.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party set the tone early when he took his Jack Russell cross Dilyn with him as he voted in London.

The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party, followed Johnson’s lead, posting a video of himself and his dog Luna at a polling station and urging people to vote.

By early afternoon, the hashtag #dogsatpollingstations was trending on Twitter.

___

11 a.m.

People in Oxford could have brought their dirty laundry with them as they cast their vote in Britain’s general election.

That’s because the Ace Launderette in the English university city was pressed into service as a polling station. Thursday’s early election was called by Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a bid to break the country’s Brexit stalemate.

There were plenty of odd polling locations throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In the town of Hampshire, voters could also check out the automobiles for sale at the Petersfield Used Car Centre. And in the West Midlands town of Dudley, a converted shipping container was turned into a voting booth.

In addition to traditional polling stations at churches and schools, many picturesque pubs also served as voting centers.

___

7 a.m.

Britons who have endured more than three years of wrangling over their country’s messy divorce from the European Union are cast ballots in an election billed as a way out of the Brexit stalemate in this deeply divided nation.

Braving blustery rain, voters went to polling stations Thursday in schools, community centers, pubs and town halls after a five-week campaign rife with mudslinging and misinformation.

The contest pits Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who says he will take Britain out of the European Union by Jan. 31, against the opposition Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, who has promised another referendum on Brexit.

All 650 seats in the House of Commons are up for grabs in the election. Opinion polls suggest the Conservatives have a lead over Labour. But all the parties are nervous about a volatile electorate fed up after years of Brexit wrangling.

Lawmakers Debate Articles of Impeachment

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee pressed toward a historic vote Thursday to approve articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Split sharply along party lines, the panel was expected to send the charges to the full House for pre-Christmas action next week.

The committee, made up of some of the most partisan Democrats and Republicans in Congress, clashed for hours in pointed and at times emotional debate, drawing on history and the Constitution to argue over the two charges. Trump is accused, in the first article, of abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate his 2020 rival, Joe Biden, while holding military aid as leverage, and, in the second, of obstructing Congress by blocking the House’s efforts to probe his actions.

Trump is only the fourth U.S. president to face impeachment proceedings and the first to be running for reelection at the same time. He insists he did nothing wrong and blasts the Democrats’ effort daily as a sham and harmful to America. Republican allies seem unwavering in their opposition to expelling Trump, and he claims to be looking ahead to swift acquittal in a Senate trial.

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi sounded confident Thursday that Democrats will have the votes to impeach the president without Republican support when the full House votes next week, but said it is up to individual lawmakers to weigh the evidence.

“The fact is we take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Pelosi told reporters. “No one is above the law; the president will be held accountable for his abuse of power and for his obstruction of Congress.”

The outcome poses potentially serious political consequences for both parties ahead of the 2020 elections, with Americans deeply divided over whether the president indeed conducted impeachable acts and if it should be up to Congress, or the voters, to decide whether he should remain in office.

The president has refused to participate in the proceedings, tweeting criticisms as he did Thursday from the sidelines, mocking the charges against him in the House’s nine-page resolution as “impeachment light.” But Pelosi said the president was wrong and the case against him is deeply grounded.

Democrats note that the investigations go back to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. And they say his dealings with Ukraine have benefited its aggressive neighbor Russia, not the U.S., and he must be prevented from “corrupting” U.S. elections again and cheating his way to a second term next year.

“It is urgent,” Pelosi said.

The Judiciary Committee session drew out over two days, with both sides appealing to Americans’ sense of history — Democrats describing a sense of duty to stop what one called the president’s “constitutional crime spree” and Republicans decrying what one said was the “hot garbage’’ impeachment and what it means for the future of the country.

Trump, apparently watching the live proceedings on television, tweeted his criticism of two Democratic women on the panel, Reps. Veronica Escobar and Sheila Jackson Lee, both of Texas. He called their comments about his actions inaccurate.

“Very sad,” Trump tweeted.

As lawmakers dug in for the second day at the stately hearing room in the Capitol, Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., immediately asked for a full reading of the two articles of impeachment against the president as TV cameras carried the live proceedings. Then came a long day of fights over amendments, primarily by Republicans trying to stop the impeachment. They were being rejected by Democrats along party lines.

“The central issue of this impeachment is the corruption of our institutions that safeguard democracy by our president,”Nadler said. “We cannot tolerate a president subverting the fairness and integrity of our elections.”

The top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, called the proceedings a “farce” and said they should be halted until his side was provided a chance for its own hearing. The request was denied, with the chairman saying the process was in line with the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

First up was an amendment from GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who tried to delete the first charge against Trump. “This amendment strikes article one because article one ignores the truth,” he declared.

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., argued there was “overwhelming evidence” that the president, in pushing Ukraine to investigate rival Biden, was engaged in an abuse of power “to corrupt American elections.”

Debate on that one amendment lasted for hours before it was defeated, 23-17, on a party-line vote.

Another amendment, from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., sought to replace part of the article that says Trump “corruptly solicited” Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden with his reference to Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the gas company in Ukraine where he served on the board. That, too, was rejected by the panel on party lines.

Thursday’s hearing picked up where Wednesday’s late-night session left off.

Into the night, Democrats and Republicans delivered sharp, poignant and, at times, personal arguments for and against impeachment. Cicilline asked Republicans standing with Trump to “wake up” and honor their oath of office. Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana responded with his own request to “put your country over party.” Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., shared his views in English and Spanish.

One Democrat, Rep. Val Demings of Florida, told the panel that, as a descendant of slaves and now a member of Congress, she has faith in America because it is “government of the people” and in this country “nobody is above the law.” Freshman Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia emotionally talked about losing her son to gun violence and said that while impeachment was not why she came to Washington, she wants to “fight for an America that my son Jordan would be proud of.”

But Jordan of Ohio insisted Democrats were impeaching because “they don’t like us” — referring to Trump voters in what he called “fly-over” states like his.

Said Nadler: “History will look back on our actions here today. How would you be remembered?”

The House is expected to vote on the articles next week, in the days before Christmas. That would send them to the Senate for a 2020 trial.

___

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Alan Fram and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Should Be Democrats’ First Choice

Less than two months out from the Iowa caucus, the Democratic primary has become a four-way race featuring Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But while a recent war of words between Warren and Buttigieg has done little to bolster the prospects of either, it has served to underscore what makes Sanders such a unique candidate—more specifically, his remarkable consistency.

In case you missed it, Warren said this about Buttigieg last Thursday: “The mayor should be releasing who’s on his finance committee, who are the bundlers who are raising big money for him,” adding that Buttigieg should “open up the doors so that the press can follow the promises he’s making in these big-dollar fundraisers.” Earlier, Warren had complained that Buttigieg had “not released the names” of his corporate clients when he worked for three years at the controversial McKinsey & Co. consulting firm.

Warren was completely correct here. In the face of demands for transparency, Buttigieg had declined to name his corporate clients, claiming he was bound by a non-disclosure agreement. On Monday, amid sustained public pressure, Buttigieg released a full list, including Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan, Best Buy and the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, among others.

Meanwhile, big money continues to flood into the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign from corporate executives, lobbyists and billionaires. While Warren and Sanders don’t hold events for wealthy donors, Buttigieg and Biden do. But unlike Biden, Buttigieg had denied the press access to those events. On Monday afternoon, the Buttigieg camp gave into Warren, announcing it would name its bundlers and allow reporters into his numerous high-dollar fundraisers.

Returning fire at Warren last week, the Buttigieg campaign labeled the Massachusetts senator a “corporate lawyer” and demanded that she release her tax returns prior to 2008—years in which she earned outside income representing corporations as a law professor.

Warren did work for some big corporations while also representing consumer interests, and on Sunday, she provided the details of her legal work, compensation included. Warren, it should be said, has been far more transparent than Buttigieg. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt for her to further discuss her legal career, particularly when she was a registered Republican.

While I’m impressed by Warren’s campaign and supportive of her far-reaching proposals to tax the wealthy to fund programs benefiting poor, working-class and middle-class people, Buttigieg highlighted—albeit in a hypocritical and overheated fashion—the main concern I have about her: Her past career as a legal scholar who supported the “Law and Economics” movement that preached a corporate-friendly, free-market ideology.

Both Biden and Sanders have longer and more consistent histories than either Warren or Buttigieg. But while the former has spent his career defending corporate interests, the latter’s history is unabashedly progressive. Biden was among the minority of Democrats in Congress who supported the devastating NAFTA trade pact; Sanders led its opposition. The then-senator of Delaware also voted for media conglomeration via the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and supported Wall Street deregulation that led to the Great Recession. Biden has long served the interests of banks and credit card companies and was instrumental in the passage of a 2005 bankruptcy bill that continues to harm those with student debt. Warren, for her part, vigorously opposed the legislation.

Biden’s civil rights record is spotty at best. He has proudly championed the notorious 1994 crime bill as the “Biden Crime Bill,” diverging sharply from Sanders at the time. In 2002, Biden was the most prominent Senate Democrat to push for George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, while the Vermont senator helped lead the anti-war opposition in Congress.

Sanders’ history, by contrast, is beyond reproach. He’s been a fighter for the most vulnerable Americans his entire life in public office, not to mention a champion of civil rights since his college days. He has not only defended the environment and unions but resisted business-friendly trade deals that undermine workers and the planet alike. His anti-imperialist bona fides speak for themselves, and as the longest-serving independent in Congress, he’s proved himself a uniquely skilled legislator willing to pull all of the levers of power at his disposal.

The Democratic establishment may bleat that he’s not even a member of the party, but it is his independence that attracts the young and the disaffected. If defeating Donald Trump is their first priority, Warren and Buttigieg supporters would be wise to take note.

The Case for Abolishing Standardized Tests

A lawsuit is taking on the University of California system’s use of the SAT and ACT standardized tests in admissions. The suit claims the tests are “deeply biased and provide no meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed.”

As a sociologist who’s looked at the research, I agree the tests are biased.

For instance, studies show that students whose parents have more education and/or higher incomes do better on the tests. Test scores are also racially biased, with whites and Asians scoring better than blacks and Latinos in ways that are “unlikely” to be “explained away by class differences across race,” according to Brookings researchers.

Why does wealth impact your SAT score? There are several reasons.

Schools are funded by property taxes, so students from wealthier families get to go to better-funded schools. They can afford to take test prep classes, and they can afford to take the test multiple times to improve their scores. Additionally, students from wealthy families are more likely to get access to disability accommodations (like extra time) on the exam if they qualify for them.

But there’s a second part to the lawsuit’s claim: These test scores don’t even predict a student’s ability to succeed in college.

This appears to be correct as well. What does predict college success? High school GPA. This makes sense: The skills students use to get good grades in high school are more or less the same ones they use to get good grades in college. The skills used to take a standardized test generally aren’t.

In America, we like to think we live in a meritocracy, where people get ahead through brains, grit, and hard work. We don’t.

Instead, students from low-income families are already at a disadvantage in the school system, for a long list of reasons. Even the most talented and hard-working child born into a poor family is going to struggle to compete with wealthier peers.

In episode of This American Life, a reporter followed an honor student around his high school in Ferguson, Missouri. In an entire day he had only three academic classes, and only one in which a teacher showed up and taught.

At the time the reporter visited, the school had been failing for so long that it had lost its accreditation, and yet it was still teaching students — or failing to. How could even the best students in that school compete with peers who had full days of classes with teachers teaching in their schools?

While the school system cannot single-handedly correct for all social ills and inequalities, it should do what it can to level the playing field for all students. And efforts to increase equity need to start long before students apply to college.

That said, if standardized tests are biased against low-income students and students of color — and if they don’t even predict success in college — then what are they even for?

Under these circumstances, the only function they can possibly serve is as a roadblock to social mobility for students who were not born into privilege — and as an extra unearned advantage for those who were.

Paul Volcker’s Long Shadow

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called Paul Volcker “the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” But while Volcker, who passed away Dec. 8 at age 92, probably did have the greatest historical impact of any Fed chairman, his legacy is, at best, controversial.

“He restored credibility to the Federal Reserve at a time it had been greatly diminished,” wrote his biographer, William Silber. Volcker’s policies led to what was called “the New Keynesian revolution,” putting the Fed in charge of controlling the amount of money available to consumers and businesses by manipulating the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks borrow from each other). All this was because Volcker’s “shock therapy” of the early 1980s – raising the federal funds rate to an unheard of 20% – was credited with reversing the stagflation of the 1970s. But did it? Or was something else going on?

Equally important was Volcker’s role at the behest of President Richard Nixon in taking the dollar off the gold standard, which he called “the single most important event of his career.” He evidently intended for another form of stable exchange system to replace the Bretton Woods system it destroyed, but that did not happen. Instead, freeing the dollar from gold unleashed an unaccountable central banking system that went wild printing money for the benefit of private Wall Street and London financial interests.

The power to create money can be a good and necessary tool in the hands of benevolent leaders working on behalf of the people and the economy. But like with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s “Fantasia,” if it falls in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc on the world. Unfortunately for Volcker and the rest of us, his signature policies led to the devastation of the American working class in the 1980s and ultimately set the stage for the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Official Story and Where It Breaks Down

According to a Dec. 9 obituary in The Washington Post:

Mr. Volcker’s greatest historical mark was in eight years as Fed chairman. When he took the reins of the central bank, the nation was mired in a decade-long period of rapidly rising prices and weak economic growth. Mr. Volcker, overcoming the objections of many of his colleagues, raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20%, drastically reducing the supply of money and credit.

The Post acknowledges that the effect on the economy was devastating, triggering what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s and driving thousands of businesses and farms to bankruptcy and propelling the unemployment rate past 10%:

Mr. Volcker was pilloried by industry, labor unions and lawmakers of all ideological stripes. He took the abuse, convinced that this shock therapy would finally break Americans’ expectations that prices would forever rise rapidly and that the result would be a stronger economy over the longer run.

On this he was right, contends the author:

Soon after Mr. Volcker took his foot off the brake of the U.S. economy in 1981, and the Fed began lowering interest rates, the nation began a quarter century of low inflation, steady growth, and rare and mild recessions. Economists attribute that period, one of the sunniest in economic history, at least in part to the newfound credibility as an inflation-fighter that Mr. Volcker earned for the Fed.

That is the conventional version, but the stagflation of the 1970s and its sharp reversal in the early 1980s appears more likely to have been due to a correspondingly sharp rise and fall in the price of oil. There is evidence this oil shortage was intentionally engineered for the purpose of restoring the global dominance of the U.S. dollar, which had dropped precipitously in international markets after it was taken off the gold standard in 1971.

The Other Side of the Story

How the inflation rate directly followed the price of oil was tracked by Benjamin Studebaker in a 2012 article titled “Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s”:

We see that the problem begins in 1973 with the ’73-’75 recession – that’s when growth first dives. In October of 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an oil embargo upon the supporters of Israel – western nations. The ’73-’75 recession begins in November of 1973, immediately after. During normal recessions, inflation does not rise – it shrinks, as people spend less and prices fall. So why does inflation rise from ’73-’75? Because this recession is not a normal recession – it is sparked by an oil shortage. The price of oil more than doubles in the space of a mere few months from ’73-’74. Oil is involved in the manufacturing of plastics, in gasoline, in sneakers, it’s everywhere. When the price of oil goes up, the price of most things go up. The spike in the oil price is so large that it drives up the costs of consumer goods throughout the rest of the economy so fast that wages fail to keep up with it. As a result, you get both inflation and a recession at once.

… Terrified by the double-digit inflation rate in 1974, the Federal Reserve switches gears and jacks the interest rate up to near 14%. … The economy slips back into the throws of the recession for another year or so, and the unemployment rate takes off, rising to around 9% by 1975. …

Then, in 1979, the economy gets another oil price shock (this time caused by the Revolution in Iran in January of that year) in which the price of oil again more than doubles. The result is a fall in growth and inflation knocked all the way up into the teens. The Federal Reserve tries to fight the oil-driven inflation by raising interest rates high into the teens, peaking out at 20% in 1980.

… [B]y 1983, the unemployment rate has peaked at nearly 11%. To fight this, the Federal Reserve knocks the interest rate back below 10%, and meanwhile, alongside all of this, Ronald Reagan spends lots of money and expands the state in ’82/83. … Why does inflation not respond by returning? Because oil prices are falling throughout this period, and by 1985 have collapsed utterly.

The federal funds rate was just below 10% in 1975 at the height of the early stagflation crisis. How could the same rate that was responsible for inflation in the 1970s drop the consumer price index to acceptable levels after 1983? And if the federal funds rate has that much effect on inflation, why is the extremely low 1.55% rate today not causing hyperinflation? What Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is now fighting instead is deflation, a lack of consumer demand causing stagnant growth in the real, producing economy.

It looks suspiciously as if oil, not the federal funds rate, was thus the critical factor in the rise and fall of consumer prices in the 1970s and 1980s. “Stagflation” was just a predictable result of the shortage of the essential commodity at a time when the country was not energy-independent. The following chart from Business Insider Australia shows the historical correlations:

The Plot Thickens

But there’s more. The subplot is detailed by William Engdahl in “The Gods of Money”(2009). To counter the falling dollar after it was taken off the gold standard, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Nixon held a clandestine meeting in 1972 with the Shah of Iran Then in 1973 a group of powerful financiers and politicians met secretly in Sweden to discuss how the dollar might effectively be “backed” by oil. An arrangement was finalized in which the oil-producing countries of OPEC would sell their oil only in U.S. dollars, and the dollars would wind up in Wall Street and London banks, where they would fund the burgeoning U.S. debt. For the OPEC countries, the quid pro quo was military protection, along with windfall profits from a dramatic boost in oil prices. In 1974, according to plan, an oil embargo caused the price of oil to quadruple, forcing countries without sufficient dollar reserves to borrow from Wall Street and London banks to buy the oil they needed. Increased costs then drove up prices worldwide.

The story is continued by Matthieu Auzanneau in “Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History”:

The panic caused by the Iranian Revolution raised a new tsunami of inflation that was violently unleashed on the world economy, whose consequences were even greater than what took place in 1973. Once again, the sharp, unexpected increase in the price of crude oil instantly affected transportation, construction, and agriculture – confirming oil’s ubiquity. … The time of draconian monetarist policies advocated by economist Milton Friedman, David Rockefeller’s protégé, had arrived. The Bank of England’s interest rate was around 16% in 1980. The impact on the economy was brutal. …

Appointed by President Carter in August 1979, Paul Volcker, the new chief of the Federal Reserve, administered the same shock treatment to the American economy. Carter had initially offered the position to David Rockefeller; Chase Manhattan’s president politely declined the offer and “strongly” recommended that Carter appeal to Volcker (who had been a Chase vice president in the 1960s). To stop the spiral of inflation that endangered the profitability and stability of all banks, the Federal Reserve increased its benchmark rate to 20% in 1980 and 1981. The following year, 1982, the American economy experienced a 2% recession, much more severe than the recession of 1974.

Volcker was appointed head of the Federal Reserve in 1979. In an article in American Opinion that year, Gary Allen, author of “None Dare Call It Conspiracy: The Rockefeller Files” (1971), observed that both Volcker and Henry Kissinger were David Rockefeller protégés. Volcker had worked for Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank and was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1971, when he was Treasury undersecretary for monetary affairs, Volcker played an instrumental role in the top-secret Camp David meeting at which the president approved taking the dollar off the gold standard. Allen wrote that it was Volcker who “led the effort to demonetize gold in favor of bookkeeping entries as part of another international banking grab. His appointment now threatens an economic bust.”

Volcker’s Real Legacy

Allen went on:

How important is the post to which Paul Volcker has been appointed? The New York Times tells us: “As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System, which by law is independent of the Administration and Congress, has exclusive authority to control the amount of money available to consumers and businesses.” … This means that the Federal Reserve Board has life-and-death power over the economy.

And that is Paul Volcker’s true legacy. At a time when the Fed’s credibility was “greatly diminished,” he restored to it the life-and-death power over the economy that it continues to exercise today. His “shock therapy” of the early 1980s broke the backs of labor and the unions, bankrupted the savings and loans, and laid the groundwork for the “liberalization” of the banking laws that allowed securitization, derivatives, and the repo market to take center stage. As noted by Jeff Spross in The Week, Volcker’s chosen strategy essentially loaded all the pain onto the working class, an approach to monetary policy that has shaped Fed policy ever since. In 2008-09, the Fed was an opaque accessory to the bank heist in which massive fraud was covered up and the banks were made whole despite their criminality. Taking the dollar off the gold standard allowed the Fed to engage in the “quantitative easing” that underwrote this heist. Bolstered by OPEC oil backing, uncoupling the dollar from gold also allowed it to maintain and expand its status as global reserve currency.

What was Volcker’s role in all this? He is described by those who knew him as a personable man who lived modestly and didn’t capitalize on his powerful position to accumulate personal wealth. He held a lifelong skepticism of financial elites and financial “innovation.” He proposed a key restriction on speculative activity by banks that would become known as the “Volcker Rule.” In the late 1960s, he opposed allowing global exchange rates to float freely, which he said would allow speculators to “pounce on a depreciating currency, pushing it even lower.” And he evidently regretted the calamity caused by his 1980s shock treatment, saying if he could do it over again, he would do it differently.

It could be said that Volcker was a good man, who spent his life trying to rectify that defining moment when he helped free the dollar from gold. Ultimately, eliminating the gold standard was a necessary step in allowing the money supply to expand to meet the needs of trade. The power to create money can be a useful tool in the right hands. It just needs to be recaptured and wielded in the public interest, following the lead of the American colonial governments that first demonstrated its very productive potential.

 

Judiciary Panel Takes First Steps Toward Impeachment Vote

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee took the first steps Wednesday evening toward voting on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, beginning a marathon two-day session to consider the historic charges.

The Judiciary meeting is to mark up, or amend, the two articles of impeachment that Democrats introduced Tuesday. Those articles charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to his dealings with Ukraine.

The articles aren’t expected to be changed, though, as Democrats are unlikely to accept any amendments proposed by Republicans unified against Trump’s impeachment.

Democrats have already agreed to the language, which span only nine pages and say that Trump acted “corruptly” and “betrayed the nation” when he asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and the 2016 U.S. election. Hamstrung in the minority, Republicans wouldn’t have the votes to make changes without support from at least some Democrats.

The Wednesday evening session of the 41-member panel is expected to last several hours, with opening statements from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Votes won’t come until Thursday, when the committee will consider amendments and likely hold a final vote to send the articles to the House floor.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler opened the prime-time hearing to make a final argument for impeachment and to urge his Republican colleagues to reconsider. He said the committee should consider whether the evidence shows that Trump committed these acts, if they rise to the level of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors and what the consequences are if they fail to act.

“When his time has passed, when his grip on our politics is gone, when our country returns, as surely it will, to calmer times and stronger leadership, history will look back on our actions here today,” Nadler said. “How would you be remembered?”

Republicans are also messaging to the American people — and to Trump himself — as they argue that the articles show Democrats are out to get the president. Most Republicans contend, as Trump does, that he has done nothing wrong, and all of them are expected to vote against the articles.

The top Republican on the panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, argued that Democrats are impeaching the president because they think they can’t beat him in the 2020 election.

Democrats think the only thing they need is a “32-second commercial saying we impeached him,” Collins said.

“That’s the wrong reason to impeach somebody, and the American people are seeing through this,” Collins said. “But at the end of the day, my heart breaks for a committee that has trashed this institution.”

On Wednesday, Republicans are expected to offer an array of amendments and make procedural motions, even if they know none of them will pass. The Judiciary panel is made up of some of the most partisan members on both sides, and Republicans will launch animated arguments in Trump’s defense.

Earlier Wednesday, Collins said the GOP would offer amendments but said they’d mainly be about allowing more time to debate.

“Remember you can’t fix bad,” Collins said. “These are bad, you’re not going to fix it.”

In the formal articles announced Tuesday, the Democrats said Trump enlisted a foreign power in “corrupting” the U.S. election process and endangered national security by asking Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, including Biden, while withholding U.S. military aid as leverage. That benefited Russia over the U.S. as America’s ally fought Russian aggression, the Democrats said.

Trump then obstructed Congress by ordering current and former officials to defy House subpoenas for testimony and by blocking access to documents, the charges say.

Trump tweeted that to impeach a president “who has done NOTHING wrong, is sheer Political Madness.”

The House is expected to vote on the articles next week, in the days before Christmas. That would send them to the Senate for a 2020 trial.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he would be “totally surprised” if there were the necessary 67 votes in the chamber to convict Trump, and signaled options for a swift trial. He said no decision had been made about whether to call witnesses.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Israel Heads to Historic 3rd Straight Election After Parliament Vote

JERUSALEM — Israel’s parliament on Wednesday dissolved after failing to meet a midnight deadline for forming a new government, triggering an unprecedented third election in a 12-month period while giving scandal-plagued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a welcome break as he fights to save his political career.

After months of political deadlock following a September election, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the first of three votes required to dissolve the parliament and set a March 2 date for new elections.

But after a midnight deadline passed, parliament was automatically dissolved. Lawmakers were continuing their debate early Thursday to confirm the official date.

A new campaign will prolong a year-long political stalemate that has paralyzed the government and undermined public trust in the government. For the third time in the past year, the country now appears to be heading to what is sure to be a nasty three-month political campaign that according to recent opinion polls is expected to deliver very similar results.

In September’s vote, Netanyahu’s Likud party and the rival Blue and White party both were unable to secure a parliamentary majority. Netanyahu and Blue and White’s leader, former military commander Benny Gantz, both failed during officially mandated periods to cobble together a governing coalition. Then, during a final three-week window that ended Wednesday, they were unable to agree on a power-sharing agreement that would have avoided another vote.

Both men had insisted they want to avoid another costly election campaign. And together, their parties control a solid majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

But neither was willing to compromise on their core demands for a unity government. Netanyahu insisted on serving as prime minister, where he is best positioned to fight his recent indictment on a series of corruption charges. Gantz has refused to serve under a prime minister with such serious legal problems and called on Likud to choose a different leader.

Given the divisions in Israeli society, and the deep mistrust between the opposing camps, there appears to be little hope that another vote will break the loop of elections and instability that has rocked the country for the past year. In the recent campaigns, the candidates have launched deep personal attacks on one another, and Netanyahu has been accused of inciting against the country’s Arab minority.

“Keep your children away from the television,” said Yair Lapid, a senior member of Blue and White, saying the campaign will be a “festival of hate, violence and disgust.”

“What used to be a celebration of democracy has become a moment of shame for this building,” he added. “There are only three reasons for this election — bribery, fraud and breach of trust,” he said, referring to the criminal charges filed against Netanyahu last month.

Netanyahu skipped the vote. But in a video on social media, he accused Gantz of conspiring with Arab leaders and “forcing” new elections. “In order to prevent this happening again, there is only one thing we must do: win and win big,” he said.

The upcoming campaign is expected to cost the economy hundreds of millions of dollars, and a string of caretaker governments has frozen major legislation, key appointments, long-term planning and budgets for the military and important government ministries.

But for Netanyahu, the country’s longest-sever serving leader, a new campaign offers a much-needed lifeline.

Netanyahu was indicted last month on charges of accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust. He is desperately clinging to power to wage his legal battle from the favorable perch of prime minister. Israeli law does not require a sitting prime minister to resign if charged with a crime.

Netanyahu can now use his office in the coming months as a bully pulpit to continue his attacks on prosecutors and police investigators, whom he has accused of staging an “attempted coup” against him.

Without a functioning parliament in place, Netanyahu can also put on hold his expected request for immunity from prosecution.

The outgoing parliament does not have a majority in favor of granting him immunity. Netanyahu can now hope that the next election delivers him a more favorable result. After the March election, he also could use coalition negotiations as leverage to push potential partners to support his immunity request. Netanyahu’s trial appears to be on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said that being in the prime minister’s post during these negotiations is a huge advantage. “Because then one can trade politically important Cabinet portfolios and so on in return for support for the immunity,” he said.

Netanyahu’s first immediate challenge will be to fend off an insurrection inside Likud. The party announced Wednesday that it will hold a leadership primary on Dec. 26.

One renegade lawmaker, Gideon Saar, has already said he will challenge Netanyahu, though the prime minister remains popular in the party and appears to have a solid edge.

Netanyahu could also face new legal questions. Although he is currently not required to step down, Israeli law is unclear about whether he could be given the authority to form a new government after the next election. Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who was criticized for his slow decision making before he indicted Netanyahu, will now be required to rule on that question as well.

Even if Netanyahu overcomes these challenges, polls indicate that he will not be able to muster a majority in favor of granting him immunity or forming a coalition government.

Maverick politician Avigdor Lieberman, a former Netanyahu ally, has turned into the prime minister’s greatest nemesis.

Lieberman served in a string of Netanyahu governments, but then abruptly resigned as defense minister last December to protest what he thought were weak policies toward Gaza militants.

That resignation pushed the country into its current predicament, setting the stage for inconclusive elections in April and then in September. Though Lieberman shares Netanyahu’s hardline views toward the Palestinians, his secular Yisrael Beitenu party opposes Netanyahu’s close relations with ultra-Orthodox religious parties.

Refusing to endorse either Netanyahu or Gantz, Lieberman has repeatedly called on them to form a broad unity government. If the three leaders continue to refuse to soften their positions, it seems unlikely a new election will break the deadlock.

Donald Trump’s Anti-Semitism Grows Ever Bolder

On Saturday, President Donald Trump gave a speech at the Israeli American Council’s National Summit in Florida. It should have been a straightforward appearance in front of a sympathetic audience. He could have bragged about his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or maybe mentioned how he moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that garnered support from multiple conservative and mainstream Jewish groups even as it angered leftists.

Instead, as CNN reports, he chose to lead with stereotypes of Jews as money-hungry villains, telling the crowd: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me, you have no choice.” He might as well have declared, “Good morning, money stealers.”

According to CNN, “Trump’s remarks were greeted with laughter and applause from the conservative-leaning crowd, which at several points during Trump’s speech chanted ‘four more years.’”

Other less conservative Jewish groups were furious. “We strongly denounce these vile and bigoted remarks in which the president – once again – used anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize Jews as driven by money and insufficiently loyal to Israel,” Halie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, wrote in a statement.

J Street, a liberal Jewish group, tweeted their dismay:

The President of the United States is incapable of addressing Jewish audiences without dipping into the deep well of anti-Semitic tropes that shape his worldview. https://t.co/XGewT2VGPC

— J Street (@jstreetdotorg) December 8, 2019

The American Jewish Committee tried to have it both ways, thanking Trump for his support of Israel while admonishing him for perpetuating stereotypes, as USA Today explained:

Dear @POTUS – Much as we appreciate your unwavering support for Israel, surely there must be a better way to appeal to American Jewish voters, as you just did in Florida, than by money references that feed age-old and ugly stereotypes. Let’s stay off that mine-infested road.

— American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) December 8, 2019

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Trump frequently uses his support for Israel, not to mention his Jewish daughter and son-in-law/adviser, as a cudgel against criticism for his white nationalist supporters and advisers as well as his general history of anti-Semitic remarks.

For example, in 2017, hate groups from all over the country converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite The Right rally, during which they marched through the city’s streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Trump, in response, claimed there were “very nice people” on “both sides.” In 2018, a white supremacist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Trump, sidestepping questions of a rise in white nationalism across the country, suggested that all houses of worship have armed guards.

Megan Flynn, writing in The Washington Post, points out Trump also used Jewish stereotypes during his presidential campaign. In 2015, he told the Republican Jewish Coalition “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians  – that’s fine.” One campaign ad, Flynn adds, “featured Hillary Clinton superimposed over mounds of cash along with the Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”

The speech to the Israeli American Council wasn’t Trump’s only run-in with anti-Semitism for the week. Three days after the Saturday event, The New York Times reported Trump planned to sign an executive order claiming to target anti-Semitism on college campuses.

He planned to do so, Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker explain, by “threatening to withhold federal money from educational institutions that fail to combat discrimination.”

Haberman and Baker also wrote on Tuesday night that “The order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion, to prompt a federal law penalizing colleges and universities deemed to be shirking their responsibility to foster an open climate for minority students.” However, as Jewish Insider, which obtained a copy of the order, reports, “The draft text of the order obtained by JI makes no such reference” to Jews as a nationality.”

Whether the order names Jews as a nationality, it still raises free speech concerns. Leftist Jewish groups, the Times reports, are concerned the order “could be used to stifle free speech and legitimate opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.”

Stosh Cotler, chief executive officer of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice advocacy organization, summed up many progressive Jews’ fears, telling the Post, “This president continues to endanger Jews through his embrace of white nationalism, his antisemitic comments and his spreading of conspiracy theories that incite violence.” Trump will continue to hide his anti-Semitism behind a cloak of his support for Israel.

 

Progressive Media Failed Bolivia in the Run-Up to the Coup

In our brave new age of hybrid warfare, corporate media play the role of ideological heavy artillery within the arsenal of Western imperialist powers. Day in and day out, “reputable” establishment outlets bombard progressive and/or anti-imperialist governments in the Global South with endless salvos of smears and libelous misrepresentations (e.g., FAIR.org, 5/23/18, 8/23/18, 4/11/19, 7/25/19).

The cumulative effect is to delegitimize any government that does not abide by Western dictates, justifying coups, murderous economic sanctions, proxy wars and even full-scale invasions. The recent US-sponsored coup d’etat in Bolivia is an instructive case study. In the leadup to Evo Morales’ military ouster, Western media routinely impugned the indigenous president’s democratic credentials, despite his having won re-election by a sizeable margin (FAIR.org, 11/5/19).

But corporate outlets have not been alone in attacking Morales. Progressive and alternative media in the Global North have long portrayed Bolivia’s deposed Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government as repressive, pro-capitalist and anti-environment—all in the name of “left” critique. Regardless of the stated intention, the net result was to weaken already anemic opposition within Western imperial states to the destruction they inflict abroad.

Equivocating around the coup

In the wake of the November 10 coup, corporate journalists predictably played their part in gaslighting the public, presenting the fascist putsch as a “democratic transition” (FAIR.org, 11/11/19, 11/15/19).

Truly astonishing, however, was the response of Western progressive media, whom one might have expected to unequivocally denounce the coup and demand the immediate reinstatement of Evo Morales.

A dismaying number did not.

Image in Towards Freedom accompanying “Bolivia: New Elections are Not Enough” (11/10/19).

In the immediate aftermath of Morales’s ouster, Towards Freedom (11/11/19, 11/15/19, 11/16/19) published the perspectives of several Bolivian and Latin American intellectuals playing down the reality of a coup d’etat and drawing false equivalences between the Morales government and the fascist right. Other articles posted in days prior accused the government of fraud, justifying the coup to come (Towards Freedom, 11/8/19, 11/10/19). The Vermont-based outlet, with historic ties to the Non-Aligned Movement, declined to publish any alternative Bolivian points of view unambiguously opposing the coup.

Other progressive outlets correctly identified Morales’ overthrow as a coup, but felt compelled to question the indigenous leader’s democratic legitimacy for the sake of “nuance.”

While condemning the coup and rightly dismissing the baseless electoral fraud allegations, the editorial board of NACLA Report on the Americas (11/13/19) nevertheless refrained from voicing solidarity with Morales and the MAS party. Instead, the publication took MAS to task for the “slow erosion of progressive aspirations” and its failure to transform the “patriarchal and prebendal political system.” Even NACLA’s denunciation of the coup was at best lukewarm, citing “MAS’s own role and a history of political miscalculations,” before noting that “the unfolding pattern of rightist revanchism, the role of oligarchic forces and external actors, and the final arbitrating role played by the military, suggests that we are witnessing a coup.”

A subsequent article published by NACLA (10/15/19) preferred to debate whether Morales’ military ouster constituted a coup, failing to note the baseless character of the OAS’s fraud allegations and attributing the fascist right’s “racialized violence” to “polarization.” The authors, Linda Farthing and Olivia Arigho-Stiles, actually made the outlandish claim that assessing if Morales’ ouster was bad for democracy was “complicated.”

Meanwhile, a Verso Blog interview (11/15/19) with Forrest Hylton and Jeffrey Webber made no call for Morales’ democratic mandate to be respected, instead urging international leftists to “insist on the right of Bolivians to self-determination” without “refrain[ing] from criticism of Morales.”

Far from outliers, these editorial positions are very much par for the course in progressive media coverage of Bolivia over the past months and years.

The making of an ecocidal murderer  

In the leadup to the October 20 election, many outlets drew or otherwise insinuated false equivalences between Morales and Brazilian ultra-right President Jair Bolsonaro in response to the tropical forest fires in both nations.

Despite rejecting such an equivalence, NACLA (8/30/19) nonetheless blamed the policies of both “extractivist governments” for “stoking destruction in the Amazon and beyond,” while casting Global North countries as having a responsibility to exert effective “pressure” in lieu of paying their historically accrued climate debt.

Others were less subtle. Writing for UK-based Novara Media (8/26/19), Claire Wordley explicitly compared the Morales government to Bolsonaro in Brazil, calling MAS policies “every bit as extractivist and damaging as those of the capitalists Morales claims to hate.” More damning, she cites Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a Western-backed regime change operative, to disparage the Morales government’s handling of the fires.

Manuela Picq (Truthout, 9/26/19) charges Evo Morales with “genocide.”

A piece in Truthout (9/26/19) took hyperbolic slander to new heights, likening Morales to Bolsonaro and accusing the Bolivian leader of “genocide.” “Evo Morales played green for a long time, but his government is deeply colonial…like Bolsonaro in Brazil,” Manuela Picq wrote, going on to cite unnamed “Bolivians” who brand the indigenous president a “murderer of nature.” Picq offered no analysis concerning how Western leftists’ failure to shift imperialist political-economic relations has contributed to Global South countries’ ongoing dependence on extractive industries.

The “extractivist” critiques of Morales are hardly new, going back to his government’s controversial 2011 plan to build a highway through the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). As Federico Fuentes pointed out in Green Left Weekly (republished in NACLA, 5/21/14), the dominant extractivism/anti-extractivism frame of the conflict served to obscure the political and economic dimensions of imperialism.

While the highway did indeed engender important endogenous opposition—which was largely centered on the route, rather than the project per se—the main organization behind the protests, the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia, was being financed by Washington and backed by the right-wing Santa Cruz oligarchy.

Although the USAID’s funding of the Confederación is publicly notorious, many progressive outlets prefer to omit it from their reporting (NACLA, 8/1/13, 8/21/17, 11/20/19; ROAR, 11/3/14, 3/11/14; In These Times, 11/16/12; Viewpoint Magazine, 11/18/19). When foreign interference is mentioned, it is generally presented as an unsubstantiated allegation from the Morales government.

In a particularly revealing case, ROAR (11/3/14) detailed, among its laundry list of “authoritarian” MAS abuses, “obstructing the free functioning of…several NGOs that have sided with the TIPNIS protests,” but avoided any mention of foreign and local right-wing ties to those same NGOs.

This whitewashing of imperialist structure and agency ultimately allows Morales to be vulgarly caricatured as a two-faced “strongman” who “gives to the poor but takes from the environment” (In These Times, 8/27/15).

Passive solidarity?

The “extractivist” critique circulated by many progressive outlets foregrounds a more generalized reproach of the MAS for failing to live up to its socialist discourse.

Jacobin (10/29/15) saw in Morales’ administration “disquieting new forms of class rule and domination.”

Writing in Jacobin (1/12/14; also see 10/29/15), Jeffrey Webber accused the MAS of running a “compensatory state,” whose legitimacy “conferred by relatively petty handouts runs on the blood of extraction.” Under this top-down “passive revolution,” the “repressive” state “co-opts and coerces…opposition…and builds an accompanying ideological apparatus to defend multinationals.”

Webber’s long-running argument that the legacy of Bolivia’s MAS government is “reconstituted neoliberalism” has been challenged by critics, who point to the shifting terrain of class forces under Morales.

Bracketing the empirical veracity of Webber’s claims, it is striking that he dedicates virtually no space to exploring the role Western imperial states play in reproducing Bolivia’s extractive model and constraining possibilities for its transcendence.

Rather, the focus is always on MAS’s allegedly insidious agency “on behalf of capital,” and scarcely ever on Western leftists’ own anti-imperialist impotence, which never appears as an independent variable in explaining the Global South’s revolutionary failings.

The political effect of such one-sided analysis is to effectively equate the “neoliberal” MAS with its right-wing opponents, given that, as Webber put it, “Morales has been a better night watchman over private property and financial affairs than the right could have hoped for.”

Such lines might come as a surprise to current readers of Jacobin, which has fiercely opposed the coup (e.g., 11/14/19, 11/18/19, 12/3/19), whose fascist brutality has thrown to the wind any notion of left/right equivalence. But by now, the damage is already done.

Anti-imperialist reckoning 

For all the current talk of a leftist resurgence in the Global North, it is a paradox that anti-imperialist movements are weaker now than they were at the height of the Iraq War 15 years ago.

It is undeniable that the absence of popular opposition to Western imperial interventions, from Libya and Syria to Haiti and Honduras, has paved the way for the coup in Bolivia and the ongoing onslaught against Venezuela.

It is likewise indisputable that Western progressive media coverage of the Morales government and its left-leaning counterparts in the region has not helped to repair this void of solidarity. This editorial stance is particularly troubling, given Morales’ outspoken international advocacy against climate change and for Palestinian liberation.

None of this is to proscribe criticism of Morales and the MAS. Indeed, in the context of places like Bolivia and Venezuela, the task of left-wing media is to produce critical, grassroots analysis of states and popular movements that is anti-imperialist in both content and form. That is, the contradictions endemic to the political process (e.g., the TIPNIS dispute) must be contextualized within the imperial parameters of the capitalist world-system. Moreover, Northern progressive outlets—no matter the intensity of their critiques of the state and political process—must stake a clear editorial position defending Global South governments against Western intervention.

The firm positions taken by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders against the coup in Bolivia are a hopeful sign on the political front. The job of progressive media is to produce truly alternative journalism dedicated to effectively resisting empire.

Watchdog Caught in Political Crossfire on His Russia Report

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s internal watchdog was caught in a political tug of war Wednesday as Republican and Democratic senators used his report on the origins of Russia investigation to back their views that it was an important and legitimate probe or a badly bungled farce.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his findings this week that while the FBI had a legitimate basis to launch the Russia investigation and was not motivated by political bias in doing so, there were major flaws in how that investigation was conducted.

The hearing was the latest reflection of Washington’s intense politicization. Senators from both parties praised a detailed, nuanced report by a widely respected, nonpartisan investigator, while pressing him to call attention to findings that back their positions.

Horowitz tried to strike a balance. He insisted that the FBI should not feel comforted by his findings and pointed out the absence of evidence for some of the most sensational claims by President Donald Trump and his supporters: that the investigation into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia had been opened for political reasons or that agents had infiltrated his election bid.

His opening statement was overwhelmingly critical of the investigation, focusing more on the flaws that his report. Under questioning from Republicans, he rejected the views of former FBI Director James Comey, who had claimed vindication for the bureau based on Horowitz’s conclusions.

“I think the activities we found don’t vindicate anybody” in the FBI involved in preparing applications to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide.

Yet Horowitz also repeatedly noted under questioning from Democrats that he had not found that the FBI had targeted Trump for investigation for political reasons.

“It finds that it was a properly predicated investigation based on the rules on the FBI,” Horowitz of his report.

Trump and his supporters are counting on different conclusions from a separate investigation led by John Durham, a prosecutor selected by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the early days of the Russia investigation. Durham issued a statement disputing some of Horowitz’s conclusions. But Horowitz said they had a relatively technical disagreement — that the evidence was sufficient to open a preliminary investigation but not a full one. The latter gives the FBI more intrusive tools for an investigation.

Horowitz’s report identified significant problems with applications to receive and renew warrants to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016 and 2017. Investigators were concerned about Page’s ties to Russia, but never accused him of wrongdoing.

Horowitz told senators that the FBI failed to follow its own standards for accuracy and completeness when it sought a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s communications.

The report detailed 17 errors and omissions during those wiretap applications, including failing to tell the court when questions about raised about the reliability of some of the information that it had presented to receive the warrants.

“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams, on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations, after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI,” Horowitz said.

Those problems were especially alarming because the warrant to monitor Page “related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign” and “even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny.”

Horowitz’s findings that the FBI was justified in launching the investigation has been criticized by Barr, a vocal Trump defender. On Tuesday, Barr said the Russia investigation was based on a “bogus narrative” and he declined to rule out that agents may have acted in bad faith.

Horowitz said that he has spoken with Barr about his findings, and that the attorney general did not present anything that changed his conclusions.

Republican senators repeatedly asked about another criticism Horowitz leveled at the FBI — that the bureau sent a representative from its Russia investigation team to a strategic intelligence briefing that intelligence officials gave to both the Hillary Clinton and Trump campaigns, including to Trump himself and aide Michael Flynn, who later became the administration’s national security adviser.

That was a “pretext,” Horowitz said, to collect information that might be relevant for the investigation. The FBI debated but ultimately opted to not give a standard and more extensive defensive briefing that Russia might be trying to influence their campaign, fearful that it could impede the ongoing counterintelligence investigation.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said that decision struck him as reasonable, particularly because Flynn was himself under suspicion and ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Nonetheless, Horowitz said, “it raises significant policy questions.”

In a blistering opening statement, the committee chairman, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said the code name for the FBI investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was an apt title “because that’s what we ended up with — a ‘Crossfire Hurricane.'”

“What happened here is the system failed. People in the highest levels of government took the law into their own hands,” said Graham, a close Trump ally.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s top Democrat, said, “I believe strongly that it’s time to move on from the false claims of political bias.”