Chris Hedges's Blog, page 86

Of Course John Kerry Endorsed Joe Biden

On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post sent out a news alert headlined “John Kerry Endorses Biden in 2020 Race, Saying He Has the Character and Experience to Beat Trump, Confront the Nation’s Challenges.” Meanwhile, in Iowa, Joe Biden was also touting his experience. “Look,” Biden said as he angrily lectured an 83-year-old farmer at a campaign stop, “the reason I’m running is because I’ve been around a long time and I know more than most people know, and I can get things done.”

But Kerry and Biden don’t want to acknowledge a historic tie that binds them: Both men were important supporters of the Iraq war, voting for the invasion on the Senate floor and continuing to back the war after it began. Over the years, political winds have shifted — and Biden, like Kerry, has methodically lied about his support for that horrendous war.

The spectacle of Kerry praising Biden as a seasoned leader amounts to one supporter of the Iraq catastrophe attesting to the character and experience of another supporter of the same catastrophe.

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The FactCheck.org project at the Annenberg Public Policy Center has pointed out: “Kerry agreed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and should be overthrown, and defended his war authorization vote more than once — including saying in a May 2003 debate that Bush made the ‘right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein.’ . . . Kerry also told reporters in August 2004 that he would have voted for the resolution even if he had known that the U.S. couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.”

As for Biden, he can’t stop lying about his major role in pushing the war authorization through the Senate five months before the March 2003 invasion. During his current presidential campaign, more than 16 years after the invasion, Biden has continued efforts to conceal his pro-war role while refusing to admit that he was instrumental in making possible the massive carnage and devastation in Iraq.

Three months ago, during a debate on ABC, Biden claimed that he voted for the war resolution so it would be possible to get U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq — saying that he wanted “to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.” But that’s totally backwards.

It was big news when the Iraqi government announced on September 16, 2002 — with a letter hand-delivered to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — that it would allow the U.N. weapons inspectors back in “without conditions.” The announcement was a full 25 days before Biden joined with virtually every Republican and most Democratic senators voting to approve the Iraq war resolution.

That resolution on October 11 couldn’t rationally be viewed as a tool for leverage so that the Iraqi government would (in Biden’s words) “allow inspectors to go in.” Several weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had already agreed to allow inspectors to go in.

Biden keeps trying to wriggle out of culpability for the Iraq war. But he won’t be able to elude scrutiny so easily. In a mid-October debate, when Biden boasted that he has a record of getting things done, Bernie Sanders (who I actively support) made this response: “Joe, you talked about working with Republicans and getting things done. But you know what you also got done? And I say this as a good friend. You got the disastrous war in Iraq done.”

Indeed, Biden — as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — presided over one-sided hearings that greased the war-machine wheels to carry the war resolution forward. He was the single most pivotal Senate Democrat for getting the Iraq invasion done. While sometimes grumbling about President George W. Bush’s diplomatic performance along the way, Biden backed the invasion with enthusiasm.

Now, dazzled by Kerry’s endorsement of Biden, mainstream news outlets are calling it a major boost. Media hype is predictable as Kerry teams up with Biden on the campaign trail.

“The Kerry endorsement is among Mr. Biden’s most significant to date,” the New York Times reports. “His support provides Mr. Biden the backing of the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential nominee and a past winner of the Iowa caucuses.” Kerry praised Biden to the skies, declaring that “I believe Joe Biden is the president our country desperately needs right now, not because I’ve known Joe so long, but because I know Joe so well.”

This year, many progressives have become accustomed to rolling their eyes at the mention of Biden’s name. A facile assumption is that his campaign will self-destruct. But that may be wishful thinking.

The former vice president has powerful backers in corporate media, wealthy circles and the Democratic Party establishment. Deceitful and hidebound as he is, Joe Biden stands a good chance of becoming the party’s nominee — unless his actual record, including support for the Iraq war, catches up with him.

Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

We Need to Talk About Joe Biden

This piece originally appeared on carlbeijer.com.

I am a partisan for Bernie Sanders, but six months ago, if you asked me who could beat Trump, I would give you two names: Sanders and Joe Biden. Everyone else has extremely shaky numbers against Trump, and some candidates in particular (Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg) seem personally ill-matched for his combative, reactionary populism. Biden, meanwhile, has polled well against Trump, which is why my argument against him was entirely political: I saw no reason to expect him to lose.

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by Norman Solomon

So when I say that I’ve changed my mind, please for the love of God do not read this as a cynical argument for Sanders. I was not saying this six months ago. Even now I don’t have to say it for Sanders, because he doesn’t need it. The case for Sanders is still that he is the best candidate who can beat Trump, and this is true even if worse candidates (like Biden) can also beat Trump.

But I don’t think Biden can. Not anymore.

Biden’s behavior in this primary has been erratic and bizarre. This is not just the goofy, gaffe-prone Biden we remember from the years before his retirement—that Biden was undisciplined, but he was diplomatic and sharp. This Biden is unpredictable, often confused, and occasionally flat-out disturbing. When he speaks he spins his wheels, meanders into bizarre tangents, and stumbles over simple points of fact. When he interacts with people he veers from uncomfortably familiar to wildly aggressive.

Just look at this video. Joe Biden:

Calls a voter a liar
Flirts with calling him fat
Challenges him to feats of strength
Challenges him to an IQ test
And makes fun of his age

This is completely unhinged. More importantly, this will not win votes. People will suspect that Biden is ridiculous, or cruel, or creepy, or dim-witted, or unwell, or simply a bad politician—and some, inevitably, will decide that they just can’t vote for him.

Biden’s behavior is especially damaging in a race against Trump for two reasons:

Biden is going to run as a return to normalcy and respectability from the embarrassing aberration of Trump. Most other candidates (including Hillary Clinton, by the way) could pull this off. The Biden we remember from a decade ago could pull this off. But the Biden we are seeing today is going to leave voters wondering if they are just trading one embarrassing weirdo for another.
Trump is going to say that Biden is senile and unfit for office. He is not going to just imply it or let attack dogs say it like other Republicans might – he is going to say this explicitly and repeatedly and make it a major part of his campaign. He is not going to care that one might say this about him because he has the shamelessness and audacity of a sociopath. He is going to be cruel and bullying about it, and he will have the benefit of low expectations because no one expects anything else from him. This will be especially brutal in debates, because for all of his faults, Trump is still very quick on his feet verbally, and is very conscious of this advantage.

For the first several months of his campaign, Joe Biden did what all front-runners do: he attempted to stay above the fray of the primaries, limiting his public appearances and coasting on his reputation. It is only in recent months, first in debates and then during his forays into early-state retail politics, that he gained significant public scrutiny. That’s why it has been extremely easy to miss the change: we began the year with memories of the old Joe Biden, and have only seen the new one emerge quite gradually.

But I am telling you now, this is not a Joe Biden who can beat Donald Trump. The Democratic establishment sees this, which is why they’ve hedged their bets on so many other candidates. The public sees this, which is why Biden has struggled with donations. And I promise you that the media sees it too, even though they are not saying it out loud. If you want to beat Donald Trump, there is one safe bet—one candidate that we need to rally behind yesterday. And it’s not Joe Biden.

Amazon Abuses Workers and the Climate Because It Can

While online shoppers were busy taking advantage of bargain prices on Black Friday, retail workers in various European cities were walking off their jobs in anger. Hundreds of Amazon workers in six German cities protested, saying that their employer’s demands were making them ill. Similar protests were held by Amazon workers in France, aimed at the environmental cost of Black Friday, and in the U.K., members of the union GMB held signs saying pointedly, “We are not robots.” Here in the U.S., workers picked up on that theme as dozens gathered outside Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ Manhattan apartment to insist that they are “human beings, not robots.”

A majority of American households are members of Amazon Prime. All we see with our eyes is the website that we make purchases on and the boxes that arrive on our doorstep a day or two later. Sometimes we may catch a glimpse of a delivery person rushing away to their truck to drop off the next package. But the worker protests that have plagued the company ought to deeply trouble us, as well as documented abuses in numerous recent studies and investigative reports.

As millions of Americans this holiday season have been doing, I too have been relying on the convenience of Amazon’s shopping experience to tick off the boxes on my list of gifts. In fact, I routinely count on it to meet the needs of my family. As a parent with a full-time job, I have barely 20 minutes of free time during the day to run errands, buy groceries, drive my kids to their extracurricular activities, and so on. When I see heavy rain in the forecast and realize with dismay that my child has outgrown his rain boots, it is far easier to order him the right pair of boots on Amazon in minutes than spend more than an hour driving to and from a store that may or may not have the size and price I’m looking for.

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Online shopping has been a boon, especially for working mothers like me. I will admit, I have often thought of my reliance on the convenient online shopping experience as “self-care,” to use the parlance of the modern wellness movement. But each click confirming a purchase comes with a heavy bout of guilt, knowing what I know about how the workers who fulfill my order are treated.

Earlier this year Amazon surpassed Walmart to become the world’s largest retailer. Like Walmart, Amazon has reached its heights by cutting labor costs to the bone and faces a plethora of accusations of underpaying workers and violating their rights. But Amazon has gone further than Walmart could ever dream of in its quest to squeeze workers, ruthlessly spying on and tracking them to ensure they spend every second of their work day in service of the corporation.

Most Amazon customers are blissfully unaware of the appalling conditions behind their online shopping experience. The company paints a rosy picture of the warehouses where the bulk of work happens in translating orders into packages for delivery. According to Amazon, its warehouses are spaces where “magic” happens, where the temperature is always kept comfortable for workers, and where there are “orange robots balancing towers of goods twirling in what looks like a choreographed dance across shiny concrete floors, miles of conveyor belts and ramps carrying inventory across the building, and shipping labels practically flying onto boxes, blown by puffs of air.”

This fantasy has a dark underbelly, as a recent investigative report from The Atlantic and Reveal showed. Workers are under surveillance to ensure they do not waste even a single second and are often left injured so badly by the pace of the work that they can no longer find employment. Internal records obtained by reporters showed that Amazon’s worker injury rate is more than twice that of the industry average. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health also placed Amazon on its “Dirty Dozen” list of most dangerous workplaces of 2019 citing grim statistics: “Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013. Reports of a high incidence of suicide attempts; workers urinating in bottles and workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries.”

The company squeezes its workers so hard that they are forced to rely on public benefits in order to survive—an accusation that dogged Walmart for years when it was the nation’s top retailer. A new study by the Economic Roundtable focused on Amazon’s Southern California warehouses found that “For every $1 in wages paid by Amazon, warehouse workers receive an estimated $0.24 in public assistance benefits.” Additionally, “57 percent of Amazon warehouse workers live in housing that is overcrowded and substandard. There is direct and indirect evidence of significant homelessness among warehouse workers.”

Amazon relies on taxpayers subsidizing its workers’ livelihoods, but it also refuses to pay its fair share of taxes. A U.K.-based watchdog group called Fair Tax Mark claimed in a report last week that the so-called “big six” tech firms, all based in the U.S., are “aggressively avoiding” paying international taxes and that Amazon was the worst offender. Globally, the company paid only $3.4 billion in taxes over the past ten years. Microsoft paid nearly $47 billion during this same time period, despite the fact that Amazon’s profits were $80 billion more than Microsoft’s.

It’s not just that workers are mistreated and government treasuries fleeced, but also the fact that the impact of Amazon’s business model on the environment has been serious. With climate catastrophes unfolding around the world, our thirst for easily available products translates into a huge amount of transportation of packages to and from factories, warehouses and customer homes, and an immense amount of packaging material that is expended each year. Thousands of Amazon’s employees recently signed a letter addressed to the CEO, demanding he draw up a plan for the company to lessen its impact on the climate. When Mr. Bezos released a climate plan in response, critics pointed out that it was full of “gaping holes.”

Clearly something needs to be done. It is not enough for individuals to declare that they are canceling their Amazon Prime memberships. There is no formal boycott in place, and Amazon’s aggressively seductive business model will ensure that it keeps growing. The company pushes its workers to injuries, pays them so poorly and hurts our environment because it can—not because it must.

Workers are best protected when they have collective power, and that can only come through a union. Amazon has aggressively engaged in anti-union tactics in a country that has deliberately weakened labor laws and undermined the rights of workers to unionize.

Our climate is best protected when there are strict laws in place to regulate emissions and force companies to manage their environmental footprint. Yet year after year, even with climate catastrophe looming all around us, our federal government has only encouraged greater carbon emissions. So Amazon continues to offer free shipping on low-cost disposable items that have an outsize impact on the climate, not because it must, but because it can.

Our tax revenues are best protected and expanded when strict tax laws are in place to ensure companies and the wealthy pay their fair share. But corporate lobbyists and compliant lawmakers have chipped away so badly at our tax code that it has been entirely rewritten to favor the likes of Amazon. So why should Amazon not take advantage of what our laws enable?

Far more effective than individuals walking away from the company (although that doesn’t hurt), is collective action to change the laws that Amazon benefits from. Yesterday it was Walmart, today it is Amazon. And tomorrow it may be another company that earns the notoriety that comes with ruthless corporate behavior. Our system is designed to allow Amazon to flourish at the expense of workers and the environment. We have to change the system.

Amazon Abuses Workers and the Climate—Because It Can

While online shoppers were busy taking advantage of bargain prices on Black Friday, retail workers in various European cities were walking off their jobs in anger. Hundreds of Amazon workers in six German cities protested, saying that their employer’s demands were making them ill. Similar protests were held by Amazon workers in France, aimed at the environmental cost of Black Friday, and in the U.K., members of the union GMB held signs saying pointedly, “We are not robots.” Here in the U.S., workers picked up on that theme as dozens gathered outside Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ Manhattan apartment to insist that they are “human beings, not robots.”

A majority of American households are members of Amazon Prime. All we see with our eyes is the website that we make purchases on and the boxes that arrive on our doorstep a day or two later. Sometimes we may catch a glimpse of a delivery person rushing away to their truck to drop off the next package. But the worker protests that have plagued the company ought to deeply trouble us, as well as documented abuses in numerous recent studies and investigative reports.

As millions of Americans this holiday season have been doing, I too have been relying on the convenience of Amazon’s shopping experience to tick off the boxes on my list of gifts. In fact, I routinely count on it to meet the needs of my family. As a parent with a full-time job, I have barely 20 minutes of free time during the day to run errands, buy groceries, drive my kids to their extracurricular activities, and so on. When I see heavy rain in the forecast and realize with dismay that my child has outgrown his rain boots, it is far easier to order him the right pair of boots on Amazon in minutes than spend more than an hour driving to and from a store that may or may not have the size and price I’m looking for.

Online shopping has been a boon, especially for working mothers like me. I will admit, I have often thought of my reliance on the convenient online shopping experience as “self-care,” to use the parlance of the modern wellness movement. But each click confirming a purchase comes with a heavy bout of guilt, knowing what I know about how the workers who fulfill my order are treated.

Earlier this year Amazon surpassed Walmart to become the world’s largest retailer. Like Walmart, Amazon has reached its heights by cutting labor costs to the bone and faces a plethora of accusations of underpaying workers and violating their rights. But Amazon has gone further than Walmart could ever dream of in its quest to squeeze workers, ruthlessly spying on and tracking them to ensure they spend every second of their work day in service of the corporation.

Most Amazon customers are blissfully unaware of the appalling conditions behind their online shopping experience. The company paints a rosy picture of the warehouses where the bulk of work happens in translating orders into packages for delivery. According to Amazon, its warehouses are spaces where “magic” happens, where the temperature is always kept comfortable for workers, and where there are “orange robots balancing towers of goods twirling in what looks like a choreographed dance across shiny concrete floors, miles of conveyor belts and ramps carrying inventory across the building, and shipping labels practically flying onto boxes, blown by puffs of air.”

This fantasy has a dark underbelly, as a recent investigative report from The Atlantic and Reveal showed. Workers are under surveillance to ensure they do not waste even a single second and are often left injured so badly by the pace of the work that they can no longer find employment. Internal records obtained by reporters showed that Amazon’s worker injury rate is more than twice that of the industry average. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health also placed Amazon on its “Dirty Dozen” list of most dangerous workplaces of 2019 citing grim statistics: “Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013. Reports of a high incidence of suicide attempts; workers urinating in bottles and workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries.”

The company squeezes its workers so hard that they are forced to rely on public benefits in order to survive—an accusation that dogged Walmart for years when it was the nation’s top retailer. A new study by the Economic Roundtable focused on Amazon’s Southern California warehouses found that “For every $1 in wages paid by Amazon, warehouse workers receive an estimated $0.24 in public assistance benefits.” Additionally, “57 percent of Amazon warehouse workers live in housing that is overcrowded and substandard. There is direct and indirect evidence of significant homelessness among warehouse workers.”

Amazon relies on taxpayers subsidizing its workers’ livelihoods, but it also refuses to pay its fair share of taxes. A U.K.-based watchdog group called Fair Tax Mark claimed in a report last week that the so-called “big six” tech firms, all based in the U.S., are “aggressively avoiding” paying international taxes and that Amazon was the worst offender. Globally, the company paid only $3.4 billion in taxes over the past ten years. Microsoft paid nearly $47 billion during this same time period, despite the fact that Amazon’s profits were $80 billion more than Microsoft’s.

It’s not just that workers are mistreated and government treasuries fleeced, but also the fact that the impact of Amazon’s business model on the environment has been serious. With climate catastrophes unfolding around the world, our thirst for easily available products translates into a huge amount of transportation of packages to and from factories, warehouses and customer homes, and an immense amount of packaging material that is expended each year. Thousands of Amazon’s employees recently signed a letter addressed to the CEO, demanding he draw up a plan for the company to lessen its impact on the climate. When Mr. Bezos released a climate plan in response, critics pointed out that it was full of “gaping holes.”

Clearly something needs to be done. It is not enough for individuals to declare that they are canceling their Amazon Prime memberships. There is no formal boycott in place, and Amazon’s aggressively seductive business model will ensure that it keeps growing. The company pushes its workers to injuries, pays them so poorly and hurts our environment because it can—not because it must.

Workers are best protected when they have collective power, and that can only come through a union. Amazon has aggressively engaged in anti-union tactics in a country that has deliberately weakened labor laws and undermined the rights of workers to unionize.

Our climate is best protected when there are strict laws in place to regulate emissions and force companies to manage their environmental footprint. Yet year after year, even with climate catastrophe looming all around us, our federal government has only encouraged greater carbon emissions. So Amazon continues to offer free shipping on low-cost disposable items that have an outsize impact on the climate, not because it must, but because it can.

Our tax revenues are best protected and expanded when strict tax laws are in place to ensure companies and the wealthy pay their fair share. But corporate lobbyists and compliant lawmakers have chipped away so badly at our tax code that it has been entirely rewritten to favor the likes of Amazon. So why should Amazon not take advantage of what our laws enable?

Far more effective than individuals walking away from the company (although that doesn’t hurt), is collective action to change the laws that Amazon benefits from. Yesterday it was Walmart, today it is Amazon. And tomorrow it may be another company that earns the notoriety that comes with ruthless corporate behavior. Our system is designed to allow Amazon to flourish at the expense of workers and the environment. We have to change the system.

NAFTA Did Exactly What It Was Designed to Do

The Washington Post (11/21/19) tells readers that “NAFTA was meant to expand trade…but it also proved disruptive in terms of…relocating businesses and jobs.

The Washington Post (11/21/19) gave readers the official story about NAFTA, diverging seriously from reality, in a piece on the status of negotiations on the new NAFTA. The piece tells readers:

NAFTA was meant to expand trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico by removing tariffs and other barriers on products as they were shipped between countries. The pact did open up trade, but it also proved disruptive in terms of creating new manufacturing supply chains and relocating businesses and jobs.

This implies that the disruption in terms of shifting jobs to Mexico to take advantage of low-wage labor was an accidental outcome. In fact, this was a main point of the deal, as was widely noted by economists at the time. Proponents of the deal argued that it was necessary for US manufacturers to have access to low-cost labor in Mexico to remain competitive internationally. No one who followed the debate at the time should have been in the least surprised by the loss of high-paying, union manufacturing jobs to Mexico; that is exactly the result that NAFTA was designed for.

NAFTA also did nothing to facilitate trade in highly paid professional services, such as those provided by doctors and dentists. This is because doctors and dentists are far more powerful politically than autoworkers.

It is also wrong to say that NAFTA was about expanding trade by removing barriers. A major feature of NAFTA was the requirement that Mexico strengthen and lengthen its patent and copyright protections. These barriers are 180 degrees at odds with expanding trade and removing barriers.

It is noteworthy that the new deal expands these barriers further. The Trump administration likely intends these provisions to be a model for other trade pacts, just as the rules on patents and copyrights were later put into other trade deals.

The new NAFTA will also make it more difficult for the member countries to regulate Facebook and other internet giants. This is likely to make it easier for Mark Zuckerberg to spread fake news.

The Twenty-First-Century Legacies of America’s Twin Sins

On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein. It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story of how the Committee to Re-elect the President burglarized Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.  That reporting and the impeachment hearings that followed eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace in 1974. Bharara wanted to hear about what differences Bernstein sees between the Nixon impeachment proceedings and Donald Trump’s today.

That was the week when the New York Times reported that viewership of those “boring” hearings was proving to be “as big as Monday Night Football.” That was the week when the world heard from, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman on Donald Trump’s July 25th “perfect” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky; from ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on how “everyone was in the loop” when it came to the Ukrainian quid pro quo (not to speak of his “Zelensky loves your ass” exchange with the president); and from the steely former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, on how that country promulgated the fiction that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 American election.

That should have been enough to convince anyone paying attention that the president had indeed attempted to trade a Zelensky White House visit and U.S. military aid for an announcement that Ukraine was investigating its own (fictitious) interference in that election and the (equally fictitious) corruption of Joe Biden via his son Hunter. Clearly, however, the Republicans in Congress were anything but convinced.

Bharara reminded Bernstein that, when Richard Nixon was at risk of impeachment, key Republican congressional figures, including two senators (at a moment when, as now, Republicans had a majority in that body) encouraged the president to resign rather than be impeached and be convicted in a trial there. Why, Bharara asked, is today’s Republican Party more loyal to the president than the Constitution and the rule of law?

Bernstein replied that, in his view, the divisions in the U.S. today are no longer simply a matter of ideological differences — disagreements about what constitutes a good society and how to achieve it. The whole country, he suggested, is already embroiled in a “cold civil war” that’s vividly reflected in Congress. If so, then it’s a complex war indeed, involving at least four allied but also diverging forces in today’s Republican Party:

Those motivated by white anxiety and resentment, some of whom also tend to be isolationists opposing U.S. military adventures abroad;
Those dedicated to maintaining U.S. military expansion around the world, some of whom genuinely believe in the ultimate superiority of a white, Christian United States and some of whom care only about the projection of force;
Right-wing evangelicals, many sharing white resentment and also ready to make common cause with the forces of imperial expansion, especially when it comes to support for Israel;
Those dedicated to increasing the wealth of the wealthiest elites, who are quite willing to harness white fear of losing privilege, as well as nationalist military desires, to advance their own agenda of reducing taxes and rolling back regulatory constraints on corporate power.

The roots of much of the turmoil in the current Republican Party are, however, centuries old. They go back, in fact, to the twin crimes that have helped shape this country from its very beginning: slavery and imperial expansion.

Slavery

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival in the British colonies that would become the United States of America of the first enslaved Africans. The New York Times has gathered some of the best recent scholarship on the nature and history of American slavery in an excellent series: “The 1619 Project.”

Many white people in this country think of slavery as a “problem” of the distant past. They are mistaken. African Americans live with its effects today (as do the rest of us in different ways) in legacies like mass incarceration and the existential threat of police violence. In 2015, the Guardian reported that “young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.” In that year, police killed 1,134 people. The Washington Post now keeps a running annual tally of such police-caused deaths. As of November 25th, the number for this year was 829.

The line that can be drawn from slavery to convict leasing to lynching to torture in police stations to police shootings of African Americans is all too direct. It’s impossible, in fact, to overstate the importance of slavery to the economic, legal, and social development of this country. The 1789 Constitution was in many ways a document meant to appease southern slave states and keep them in the union. This included the “three-fifths” compromise, which counted any enslaved resident as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives to each state. Similarly, the creation of an upper house, the Senate, where each state has two representatives, regardless of population, and the invention of the Electoral College were meant, in part, to enhance the power of southern states. And to this day, those two institutions continue to allow southern and, more generally, rural states to exercise an undemocratic power, disproportionate to their population size. In a very real sense, compromises made in 1789 helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

The first income-generating crop in the southern colonies was tobacco, initially planted, tended, picked, and packed by semi-free indentured servants from England who worked for a fixed period (usually seven to 10 years) and then were free to start farming on their own. Enslaved Africans, however, soon offered a number of advantages over such contract workers. As a start, their “contracts” never ran out. Indeed, their children and children’s children would also be enslaved workers. They would prove crucial to the way those planters built their wealth (and significant parts of the wealth of the colonies and that of the United States as a whole), both as profit-generating laborers and as capital-building assets against whom money could be borrowed. This history is well-described in a number of books, including Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Andres Resendez’s The Other Slavery (about the little-studied enslavement of native peoples in what would become the American Southwest), as well as in the autobiographies and collected oral testimonies of hundreds of formerly enslaved people.

In Virginia and the Carolinas, however, those tobacco farmers faced a serious problem. Unlike indentured servants who could look forward to their eventual freedom, newly enslaved Africans had no incentive to work; none, that is, except physical pain. As a result, torture — real mind- and body-destroying torture — was part of the American experience from the first moments the slave system was established, with effects that have lasted to this day.

After the revolution and the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s seed-stripping cotton gin, southern farmers turned to another, far more lucrative export crop: cotton. First in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, but soon in the lowlands that would become Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, cheap raw cotton would feed England’s fast-industrializing textile industry and so, for the next two centuries, help make that country’s economy the world’s preeminent one. It also fed the nascent textile mills in the North after Samuel Slater, an early industrial spy, crossed the Atlantic to New England, carrying in his memory plans (embargoed by Great Britain) for a water-powered textile factory.

As slavery expanded, so did the systematic use of torture. Enslavers on the new plantations organized “gangs” of laborers, their long lines easily visible to overseers who followed them with cowhide whips. From dawn to dark, through the endless workday, that whip flew at supersonic speed (the source of its “crack”), tearing flesh till the blood ran. It waited for workers in camp at night, as each day’s output was weighed, and those who failed to make their quotas were punished.

A new form of torture-enforced labor began after the Civil War and the brief interim period of Reconstruction when black people in the South found themselves, through the legal conceit of convict leasing, essentially enslaved all over again. Arrested on minor charges or none at all, prisoners — almost all of them African-American men — found themselves leased out by county and state authorities to private cotton growers and to the developing coal and steel industries of Tennessee and Alabama. Once again, the whip came along for the ride. Convict leasing lasted into the 1920s when Southern states chose to employ their convicts directly in chain gangs to build the region’s railroads and highways.  Legal segregation, also begun at the end of Reconstruction, did not end until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Nor did state-sanctioned torture of African Americans end with emancipation or the eventual diminution of those convict-leasing programs. Lynching (a label Donald Trump recently had the nerve to apply to the impeachment proceedings) continued from the end of the Civil War well into the twentieth century, peaking between 1880 and 1920. In addition to its culminating murder by hanging or burning, lynching often involved whipping and the castration of male victims prior to death. In the context of Jim Crow segregation, these institutionalized rituals of torture and murder served to secure the power of white authorities over black populations. In many places, lynchings were also treated as popular entertainment, encouraged by local officials who often participated themselves. The practice even produced a form of popular art: photographs of lynchings decorated many postcards in the early part of the twentieth century.

Every society that adopts institutionalized torture as a method of social control identifies certain groups of people as legitimate targets for it. From the very beginning of this country, one group was so identified: enslaved Africans (and their emancipated descendants). Even today, in police stations, prisons, and public schools, black Americans are at risk of socially sanctioned physical abuse, even torture.

President Trump’s open embrace of a white supremacy born of slavery and nurtured by convict-leasing, segregation, and lynching has powerfully emboldened its modern proponents, encouraging economically and socially anxious whites to focus their resentment on blacks and, of course, immigrants from anywhere but northern Europe.

Imperial Expansion

As much as American history is a story of slavery and its legacy, it’s also a tale of steady geographical expansion and imperial domination, often enabled by military force. That history, too, has a twenty-first-century legacy: America’s forever wars across a significant part of the planet.

It’s a tale that began early. The newly independent United States quickly acquired a lot more of itself, starting with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France. That deal effectively doubled the country’s territory, annexing lands that would eventually become parts or all of 10 new states. Of course, France didn’t actually control most of that land, apart from the port city of New Orleans and its immediate environs. What the U.S. government really bought was the “right” to take the rest of that vast area from the native peoples who lived there, using treaties, population transfers, and wars of conquest and extermination.

Such acquisitions continued with Florida in 1819 (from Spain) and the annexation of Texas (by war) from Mexico in 1845. All of this new territory contained land that was, as Sven Beckert says in Empire of Cotton, “superbly suited to cotton agriculture.”

So, conquest, slavery, and (when it came to native peoples) displacement and genocide combined as cotton growers expanded their holdings. A frequent first step in securing new territory for cotton planting was to remove the people already occupying it. That process began in Georgia in the early 1800s, as the Creek nation was driven west. Soon, as Beckert writes, “the Creeks suffered further defeats and were forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceding 23 million acres of land in what is today Alabama and Georgia.” In a process that today would likely be called ethnic cleansing, cotton’s empire continued to expand at the expense of indigenous peoples:

“In the years after 1814, the federal government signed further treaties with the Creeks, Chickasaw, and Choctaws, gaining control over millions of acres of land in the South, including Andrew Jackson’s 1818 treaty with the Chickasaw nation that opened western Tennessee to cotton cultivation and the 1819 treaty with the Choctaw nation that gave 5 million acres of land in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the United States in exchange for vastly inferior lands in Oklahoma and Arkansas.”

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, designed to do exactly what its name implied by requiring Indian nations in the southeastern United States to “exchange” prime cotton-growing acreage for vastly inferior land in present-day Oklahoma. As the National Park Service’s website on the subject recounts, after the Choctaws, Muscogee Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickasaws had for some time “fiercely resisted” such relocation, they finally “agreed” to be moved to the newly designated Indian Territories.

Perhaps the best-known population transfer of this period was the one that took place along the Trail of Tears. Beginning in May 1838, the U.S. Army, together with various state militias, began the forcible removal of more than 16,000 Cherokee people from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to Oklahoma. The job was completed by the following year. The journey proved a tragic one (more than 1,000 people died along the way) and the destination unsatisfactory, but the Park Service wants to assure visitors that the story has a happy ending:

“The Cherokee, in the years that followed, struggled to reassert themselves in the new, unfamiliar land. Today, they are a proud, independent tribe, and its members recognize that despite the adversity they have endured, they are resilient and invest in their future.”

U.S. expansion continued across the rest of the continent, decimating Indian nations and consigning survivors to reservations. In 1893, it reached Hawaii where U.S. Marines supported a coup against Queen Lili’uokalani. In 1898, the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the country’s first full-scale imperial conflict abroad, gave the United States Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. After World War II, the United Nations awarded the U.S. what would become the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, including the island of Saipan, which remains in U.S. “trusteeship” to this day.

The U.S. shadow also fell across Latin America, as it occupied Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933, installing the autocrats of the Somoza dynasty in power there in 1936. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the government of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz to prevent him from instituting a land reform program. Support for coups continued into the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Rather than make these Latin American countries actual colonies, a policy of global neocolonialism (backed by the unprecedented military garrisoning of the planet) allowed the United States to fuel a postwar economic boom with cheap raw materials from around the world.

Today, the United States maintains about 800 military bases in more than 80 countries and has forces stationed on every continent except Antarctica. We remain by far the world’s preeminent military force and continue to fight (unsuccessful wars) across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Uneasy Bedfellows

The Trump Republican Party has inherited, and continues to make use of, the legacies of this nation’s twin evils: slavery and imperial expansion. We see in its white supremacist strand a commitment to maintaining systems of white superiority that have persisted from slavery through Jim Crow segregation to ever-present threats of violence today. Many white evangelical Christians maintain an enthusiasm for racial separation (as the histories of their flagship universities reveal). They see in Trump a leader who will advocate for white supremacy so they don’t have to.

The power of the Republican militarist wing may appear to have diminished in the face of Trump’s vocal isolationism and threats to bring U.S. troops home from this country’s various twenty-first-century wars, but in truth, the military and intelligence sectors of the government have managed to do almost everything they’ve wanted to, even while seeming to agree with the president. (No surprise, then, that there are now more U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East than there were when Donald Trump took office.) In addition, he has certainly made sure that the Pentagon has all the money it could possibly want, even if he sometimes decries excessive military budgets.

The history of U.S. territorial and military expansion has long been accompanied by a commitment to American exceptionalism, a belief that this country is different from and better than the rest of the world’s nations. That sense of superiority is usually described as an embodiment of national values like democracy and equality, but bubbling beneath the surface there has always been the belief that the U.S. succeeded in all but eliminating the native peoples on this continent and in defeating others around the world because of a natural superiority born of a European heritage. This confidence remains strong today, despite the fact that (apart from invading the tiny nations of Grenada and Panama) the U.S. hasn’t won a war since World World II, including the never-ending conflicts it has launched over large stretches of the planet after 9/11.

And what of the economic elites, the top tenth of the top one percent? Their commitment, however they may choose to wrap it in libertarian anti-tax rhetoric, remains only to themselves and to maintaining and expanding their own vast wealth. To the extent that any of the party’s other three strands contribute to that goal, they are happy to contribute to the party.

Today’s Republicans are very different from those of the Nixon era. His was a party with an ideological commitment to anticommunism, law and order, and opposition to organized labor. In Trump, the party seems to be committed not to principles, but to a man who defies the rule of law and is disorder personified. However, like their president who shamelessly turns on his friends when it suits him, his party will likely turn on him the moment he appears to threaten, rather than enhance, their election prospects. In the meantime, they are in every sense a historic crime in the making.

Video Shows Teen’s Horrible Death in U.S. Immigration Detention Center

Footage from an immigrant detention center in Texas obtained by Pro Publica and published online Thursday shows the final hours of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez—who died from complications of the flu while in custody—but also strongly indicates the border patrol agents responsible for his care lied about what happened that night.

“As immigration authorities sat by, a child lay dying from the flu on a slab of concrete in a pool of his own vomit next to a toilet.”

—Jess Morales Rocketto, Families Belong Together

Carlos, according to the news outlet,

was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.

A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

While a log kept by officers at the McAllen detention center in Texas says that Carlos, born in Guatemala, was given wellness checks three times over the course of four hours during the overnight, the video footage reveals that his seemingly lifeless body remained where it was—on the floor by the cell’s toilet—from approximately 1:30am until Carlos’ cellmate discovers him there after waking up past 6:00am. Notably, while the local police say the obtained the video footage from CBP, it contains a four-hour gap that the CBP has still not explained even as they refuse to hand over or acknowledge the existence of a complete recording of the night.

Pro Publica explained it decided to publish the available portion of the video “because it sheds light on the Border Patrol’s treatment of a sick child and shows the government’s account was not true.”

A 16-yr-old boy died in Border Patrol custody. He had the flu

They didn’t take him to the hospital

They didn’t release him

They didn’t even seem to check on him as he was dying on the floor of his cell, contrary to the govt’s account

We have the videohttps://t.co/DE0BDzyviI

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) December 5, 2019

The annotated video—the original of which was obtained from local law enforcement in Texas who investigated the death—details the final hours of Carlos life [warning the footage is graphic]:

Response to the video and accompanying reporting was a mix of a sadness, shock, and outrage.

“As immigration authorities sat by, a child lay dying from the flu on a slab of concrete in a pool of his own vomit next to a toilet,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, chair of the immigration rights group Families Belong Together.

“Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez’s death was preventable,” Rocketto added. “As flu season is upon us, the Trump administration has ignored the CDC’s demands to vaccinate children in their immigration jails.     Three children have died of flu-related illnesses on the Trump administration’s watch in the past year.  We need action immediately to get children the life-saving care they deserve and ensure that no more kids die in cages.”

Children are dying in cages at the border. Where’s your outrage for children who are actually being traumatized and abused?! https://t.co/MDlaWKC4yu

— Alex (@AlexMcMackivan) December 5, 2019

“Impeach Trump for this,” said another user on Twitter.

As the Pro Publica notes towards the end of its long and detailed reporting on Carlos’ death while in U.S. custody “reverberated beyond the small village of San Jose del Rodeo” from where he came.

“Friends posted video of his funeral and a village wake on social media, with emotional tributes to him,” the outlet reports. “Guatemalan immigrants outside New York City held a fundraiser to help support his family, one of the goals Carlos had in coming to the U.S.”

Kerry Endorses Biden as Ad Cites NATO Leaders Mocking Trump

NEW HAMPTON, Iowa — John Kerry, the former secretary of state and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, endorsed Joe Biden for president on Thursday, buoying the former vice president’s argument that his international experience should be a deciding factor for voters in 2020.

“I’ve never before seen the world more in need of someone who on day one can begin the incredibly hard work of putting back together the world Donald Trump has smashed apart,” Kerry said in a statement.

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The Biden campaign rolled out Kerry’s endorsement as it continued to portray Trump as a dangerous and erratic commander in chief and head of state. The campaign amplified its argument with an online ad featuring video of other world leaders mocking Trump at a Buckingham Palace reception held alongside the NATO summit this week.

Biden, at an event in New Hampton, Iowa, expressed embarrassment over the world reaction to the video capturing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson laughing about Trump earlier this week in London.

“Did you ever think you’d see that?” Biden asked.

Yet before Biden could bolster his argument by celebrating Kerry’s high-profile endorsement, he demonstrated that foreign affairs isn’t a seamless issue for his candidacy. That came during a tense exchange with a voter in New Hampton.

Biden reacted testily and then grew angry at his campaign town hall when an 83-year-old retired farmer queried the candidate about his son Hunter Biden accepting a lucrative post on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while Biden handled U.S.-Ukraine relations as vice president. The issue is near the heart of House impeachment proceedings against Trump after disclosures that the president sought Ukraine’s help in investigating the Bidens. Ukraine officials have said there was nothing illegal about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The voter, who declined to give his name, pressed Biden on why it was acceptable for Hunter Biden to capitalize on his father’s power while Democrats assail Trump for self-dealing.

“You’re a damn liar, man, that’s not true,” Biden boomed as the man continued to argue that “You don’t have a backbone … any more than Trump.” When the man finally told Biden he wouldn’t vote for him, Biden replied, “I knew you weren’t voting for me.”

Separately, the man told the 77-year-old Biden that he worries the former vice president is too old for the presidency. Biden challenged the man to a pushup contest and an IQ test. The man later told reporters that he prefers Elizabeth Warren, a 70-year-old Massachusetts senator, for president.

Biden drew applause during the exchange from other attendees, a point the candidate noted afterward to reporters. “I didn’t lose my temper,” he said. “What I wanted to do was shut this down. You saw the reaction here.”

He added that he knows Trump will keep pushing the Hunter Biden story line in a general election campaign that promises “to be even meaner.”

Biden has touched on Trump’s belligerent style on the world stage repeatedly this week as he travels across Iowa, whose Feb. 3 caucuses open Democrats’ 2020 voting. He believes that international experience — with his six terms as a Delaware senator and two terms as vice president — is a winner for him in a primary and potential general election.

“Foreign policy is a major issue” for voters he encounters, Biden said in an interview. “It’s not an issue that they say, well … I think we should take this number of troops out of there and that number of troops there and I’m worried about what’s going on in Ukraine,” he said. “They just know something’s not right. It’s uncomfortable. They know.”

He added that he not only has a better demeanor and skill set for the job than Trump, but he also has more relevant experience, deeper knowledge and more extensive relationships abroad than his Democratic competitors. “It’s not in their wheelhouse,” Biden said. “I mean, it doesn’t mean they can’t learn it, doesn’t mean they’re not smart as hell.”

Biden believes that international experience — with his six terms as a Delaware senator and two terms as vice president — is a winner for him in a primary and potential general election.

Meanwhile, Biden said he looks forward to Kerry, who won the 2004 Iowa caucuses, joining him in the state on Friday.

“John’s a good friend,” Biden said. “He knows what’s at stake.”

The Activists Guiding Us Through These Dark Days

STOCKHOLM — Over 1,000 people packed into the historic Cirkus Arena in downtown Stockholm Wednesday night. It wasn’t for the building’s original purpose, an actual circus, or for a rock concert, which is one of the contemporary uses of the building. What drew this remarkable cross section of Swedish society, as well as people from around the world? Activism. Courage. Passion.

Each year for the past four decades, in the short, dark days of December, people have gathered in Sweden’s capital to celebrate change-makers, whistleblowers and resistance leaders: recipients of the Right Livelihood Award. The award recognizes four individuals or organizations, to “honor and support courageous people solving global problems.”

It is no accident that the award ceremony falls at about the same time as the Nobel Prizes. The Nobels recognize lifetime achievements in medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, economics and peace. “The Nobel Foundation started a sixth Nobel Prize, in economics in 1969,” Right Livelihood Foundation executive director Ole von Uexkull explained on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “My uncle, Jakob von Uexkull, began to think, if you can start new Nobel categories, it shouldn’t just be one in economics. There should be Nobel Prizes also for people who work for the environment and for the interest of the poor majority in the world.”

This year’s new Right Livelihood laureates are Aminatou Haidar of Western Sahara; Guo Jianmei of China; Davi Kopenawa and the Hutukara Yanomami Association of Brazil; and Sweden’s own Greta Thunberg.

Aminatou Haidar is an indigenous Sahrawi woman. Western Sahara is often called Africa’s last colony, as it has been violently occupied by the Kingdom of Morocco since 1975. Haidar is one of the most prominent leaders of the nonviolent resistance to the Moroccan occupation, and has defended human rights in Western Sahara for decades. For this, Morocco imprisoned and tortured her for years.

Guo Jianmei was honored “for her pioneering and persistent work in securing women’s rights in China,” the Right Livelihood Foundation said its announcement earlier this year. She is the first public interest lawyer working in legal aid in China, with a strong focus on women’s issues, like domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. Her legal aid law office has been shut down by the Chinese government, and she was absent from the award ceremony.

“She could not travel from China to attend the award presentation here in Stockholm,” von Uexkull told “Democracy Now!” “It is a sign of the shrinking space for civil society around the world. We have seen that in recent years with laureates from other countries as well. We are in constant contact with her, and we have agreed that we are not commenting on the exact reasons.”

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist who is actually from Stockholm, also missed the award ceremony, but for very different reasons. Greta refuses to fly in airplanes because of the vast amounts of carbon emissions they spew into the atmosphere. In September, she traveled across the Atlantic in a zero-emissions sailboat, arriving in New York City in time for the United Nations Climate Action Summit. There she admonished world leaders:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. … People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

She then crisscrossed the United States and Canada, and was heading to Santiago, Chile, to attend the United Nations climate summit, known as COP 25. When the Chilean president canceled the COP due to mass protests against austerity and inequality, it was moved to Madrid, Spain.

Determined to make the summit, Greta then reversed course and set sail again, back to Europe, making landfall near Lisbon, Portugal, the day before the Right Livelihood award ceremony.

This year’s U.N. climate summit was moved not once, but twice. Before it was scheduled for Chile, it had been slated for Brazil. After right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency, one of his first acts in office was to cancel Brazil’s role as host. He, like U.S. President Donald Trump, calls climate change a hoax.

The fourth and final of this year’s Right Livelihood Award recipients is a leading defender of the Amazon from Brazil, Davi Kopenawa, along with the organization he co-founded, the Hutukara Yanomami Association. Davi said on “Democracy Now!” [translated], “The president of the United States, they exterminated our indigenous peoples who lived over there. [Bolsonaro] is doing just the same. He is repeating it. He wants to kill my people. He wants to get rid of the forest. He wants to destroy our health.”

Aminatou Haidar. Guo Jianmei. Greta Thunberg. Davi Kopenawa. Each truly pursues ethical living, a right livelihood. Their examples should guide us through these dark days.

U.S. Considers Sending Several Thousand More Troops to Mideast

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is considering sending several thousand additional troops to the Middle East to help deter Iranian aggression, amid reports of escalating violence in Iran and continued meddling by Tehran in Iraq, Syria and other parts of the region.

John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy, told senators Thursday that Defense Secretary Mark Esper “intends to make changes” to the number of troops deployed in the region. Other officials said options under consideration could send between 5,000 and 7,000 troops to the Middle East, but they all stressed that there have been no final decisions yet. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The troop deliberations follow several decisions since spring to beef up the U.S. presence in the Middle East because of a series of maritime attacks and bombings in Saudi Arabia that the U.S. and others have blamed on Iran.

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President Donald Trump has approved those increases, even though he also routinely insists that he is pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East and withdrawing from what he calls “endless wars” against extremists. In October, Trump told his supporters that despite the sacrificing of U.S. lives in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, the region is less safe and stable today. “The single greatest mistake our country made in its history,” he said, “was going into the quicksand of the Middle East.”

Asked about a possible troop increase, Trump told reporters Thursday that “We’ll announce whether we will or not. Certainly there might be a threat. And if there is a threat, it will be met very strongly. But we will be announcing what we may be doing — may or may not be doing.”

Military leaders have argued that the U.S. needs to increase its presence in the region in order to deter Iran from conducting more and broader attacks. Rood provided no details to back up why the additional troops are needed, but said the U.S. is concerned about recent intelligence indications suggesting an increased threat from Iran.

Rood was asked several times about reports that 14,000 more troops could be sent to the region. He repeatedly said Esper hasn’t made a decision yet, but didn’t specifically confirm or deny the number, so his answers appeared only to confuse senators. Shortly after the hearing, Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah sent out a statement flatly denying the 14,000 number, saying Esper told the Senate committee chairman Thursday morning that “we are not considering sending 14,000 additional troops” to the region.

The troop discussions came as the Trump administration on Thursday accused Iranian security forces of killing more than 1,000 people in crackdowns against recent protests that have swept the country.

The estimated death toll is significantly higher than previously estimates from human rights groups and others, and the administration did not present documentary evidence to back up the claim. But Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, told reporters the tally was based on a variety of reports coming out of Iran as well as intelligence analyses.

Speaking at the State Department, Hook said the U.S. had received and reviewed video of one specific incident of repression in the city of Mahshahr in which the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps had mowed down at least 100 protesters with machine-gun fire.

He said the video was one of tens of thousands of submissions the U.S. has gotten since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appealed last month for Iranians to submit evidence of atrocities by the authorities in putting down the protests. In it, he said IRGC forces can be seen opening fire on protesters blocking a road and then surrounding those who fled to nearby marshlands where they were sprayed with bullets.

“In this one incident alone the regime murdered as many as 100 Iranians and possibly more,” Hook told reporters at the State Department. He did not display the video but said the actions it depicted corresponded to accounts of a brutal nationwide crackdown on the demonstrations, which started in response to gasoline price increases and rationing.

“We have seen reports of many hundreds more killed in and around Tehran,” he said. “And, as the truth is trickling out of Iran, it appears the regime could have murdered over 1,000 Iranian citizens since the protests began.” The dead include 13- and 14-year-old children, he said.

Speaking at the White House, Trump said Iran had “killed hundreds and hundreds of people in a very short period of time” and called for international pressure to be applied. “They are killing protesters. They turned off their internet system. People aren’t hearing what’s going on,” he told reporters while hosting a lunch for the ambassadors of U.N. Security Council members.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and there was no immediate comment on state media in Iran.

There was no known public video that supported Hooks’ allegation of a massacre in Mahshahr, although he said the State Department had gotten more than 32,000 responses to Pompeo’s appeal for videos and other evidence using the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which is popular in Iran.

Nor has there been any widely accepted claim matching Hook’s death toll of more than 1,000. Amnesty International believes at least 208 people have been killed and that the number could be higher. Iran has disputed that figure, but has refused to offer any nationwide statistics of the number of injuries, arrests or deaths from the unrest.

However, Hook’s numbers appear to match a figure put out late Wednesday by the Iranian exile group called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which has paid Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani for speeches at its events in the past.

The MeK alleged late Wednesday that more than 1,000 people had been killed. It published a list of 320 people it said it had identified so far as having been killed but did not provide proof.

Iran has alleged MeK supporters and those backing exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s late shah, of being behind the unrest alongside foreign powers. It has not offered evidence to support those allegations.

In addition to the deaths, Hook said more than 7,000 protesters had been detained, with many sent to two prisons. Hook said that Pompeo had notified Congress on Thursday that both prisons would be hit with U.S. sanctions for gross human rights abuses. It was not immediately clear when those designations would occur.

Hook’s comments come as the U.S. steps up its “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran that it began after withdrawing from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal last year. That campaign has been highlighted by the imposition of increasingly tough sanctions and an increase in rhetoric critical of Tehran and its leadership.

As part of the pressure campaign, Hook announced that the U.S. is offering a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the whereabouts of a top IRGC commander now believed to be supporting rebels in Yemen. He said Abdul Reza Shahalai was responsible for numerous attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and had been behind a foiled plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington restaurant.

___

Lolita C. Baldor, Robert Burns and Deb Riechmann in Washington and Jon Gambrell in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.