Chris Hedges's Blog, page 87

New York’s Other Hopelessly Corrupt Candidate

For better or worse, New York City has produced some of the biggest names in contemporary U.S. politics. From President Donald Trump and his conspirator-in-corruption Rudy Giuliani, all the way to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (the latter has spent most of his life in Vermont, of course, but is a New Yorker to the core), politicians from across the political aisle have hailed from the Big Apple.

And if there is one American city in this moment that can help us understand (and forecast) general trends in U.S. politics, it is New York.

The state’s notorious culture of corruption, for example, provides some insight into the deep-seated rot in Trump’s camp. As Jeet Heer put it in The New Republic last year, “It’s impossible to understand why Trump’s administration has been so scandal-wracked without appreciating where he comes from.” Heer calls New York “the most politically toxic place in America,” and in terms of corruption, this is undoubtedly true. A PolitiFact analysis from 2016 documented that between 2006 and 2015, the state endured 28 corruption scandals involving public officials, followed by Pennsylvania in second place with 24 corruption cases and New Jersey with 12 cases.

Going back at least three decades, New York has been home to the most corrupt officials of any state in the union. Of course, Trump has been one of the city’s most prominent figures throughout this period. The president epitomizes the sleazy amorality of New York’s elite, and rather than “draining the swamp,” he has brought the corrupt style of New York politics to Washington, turning the D.C. swamp into a giant sewer.

As if there weren’t already enough New York elites currently inhabiting Washington, Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani’s successor as mayor (and the richest man in New York), recently announced that he would be jumping into the Democratic primaries. Bloomberg entered the running just two months after the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, dropped out of the race.

Billionaire Bloomberg launched his campaign with the largest ad buy in history, spending a ridiculous $31 million on television ads in one week. On his campaign website, he played up his “unique set of experiences in business, government, and philanthropy,” calling himself a “doer and a problem solver” rather than a talker. “I’ve spent my career bringing people together to tackle big problems – and fix them,” his campaign statement continued, declaring that this has served him well in business and in running the country’s “largest, most progressive city.”

Calling New York the “most progressive city” in America is certainly a bold claim for a city that has been consistently ranked as one of the most unequal places in the country, but this reveals a lot about the kind of politics that passes for “progressive” these days in many top Democratic circles. As of 2018, New York boasted the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, with more than 100 living in the city, and for a neoliberal Democrat like Bloomberg, this is a sign of genuine progress.

“If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” declared Bloomberg in 2013 during his final year as the city’s mayor. (Earlier, he had even mused about luring “all the Russian billionaires” to move to the city, which isn’t an opinion that would fly in today’s Democratic Party).

Twenty-first-century New York is a city of haves and have-nots. During Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor, the former thrived while the latter were effectively excluded from the city’s growing prosperity. This was especially true for poor people of color, who suffered disproportionately under the mayor’s expansion of the racist stop-and-frisk policy.

Under Bloomberg, median rents in New York City skyrocketed while average incomes stagnated, and by the end of his third term, the homeless population had reached its highest level since the Great Depression. Overall, the three-term mayor’s reign was great for New York’s billionaires, millionaires and professional elites. For poor and working-class New Yorkers, “prosperity” and “progress” often meant being forced out of their neighborhoods due to gentrification.

While things have improved slightly in the five years since Bill de Blasio succeeded Bloomberg, class distinctions and disparities in wealth continue to divide New York into two cities. Today, the top 1% of earners take home 40% of the city’s income, while one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. Fourteen percent of the United States’ homeless population lives in New York City, and a devastating report released last month revealed that 10% of public school students in the city are homeless (a 70% increase over the past decade).

Another study, from UC Berkeley, found that in 2016, over one-third of low-income households lived in neighborhoods “at risk of or already experiencing displacement and gentrification pressures.” Gentrification, the researchers note, is creating “islands of exclusion” throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

In a brillient essay published last year in Harper’s, Kevin Baker observed that New York City is “approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there.” For wealthy liberals like Mike Bloomberg and his Democratic (and perhaps some Republican) supporters on Wall Street, this is progress.

On the surface, New York is a liberal utopia: diverse, tolerant, innovative, socially progressive, and so on. But this is an exclusionary utopia, and much like the great infrastructure projects that Robert Moses oversaw in the mid-20th century, which by design destroyed working class communities and , the city’s development has exacted a high cost from the lower classes.

One of Moses’ greatest accomplishments was convincing everyone that his projects were the product of historical destiny. As the late urban theorist Marshall Berman put it, to “oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was — or so it seemed — to oppose history, progress, modernity itself. And few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that.”

Today, neoliberal Democrats like Bloomberg (and virtually every Silicon Valley billionaire) see themselves as the new harbingers of progress. Those who stand in the way of their vision—whether they are poor minority families who can no longer afford to live in their own communities or factory workers losing their jobs in Michigan to automation and/or outsourcing—deserve very little sympathy. It is up to them to adapt and equip themselves with the education they need to survive.

To these wealthy visionaries, the grassroots opposition that mobilized earlier this year against Amazon opening one of its headquarters in Long Island City was both irrational and futile, a kind of neo-Luddite resistance to the inevitable tide of progress.

“The urban crisis of affluence,” Baker remarks in his Harper’s essay, “exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.” Neoliberals not only accept this notion but are convinced that our current system is the best and needs only a few minor adjustments. On the other hand, left-wing progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who helped lead the successful fight against Amazon, increasingly oppose this conservative vision of progress. Instead, they advocate radical alternatives to the status quo.

Contemporary New York City politics presents a microcosm for the current divide in the Democratic Party. Though New York has always had its share of corruption and injustice, it has also been, as Heer points out in his article, “a hotbed of political reform.” While New York has given us corrupt reactionaries like Donald Trump and neoliberal elites like Bloomberg, it has also become the epicenter of the progressive revolt against both of these forces.

AOC, who endorsed Bernie Sanders during a rally in Queens last October, took on the notorious Queens Democratic Party machine last year and defeated the most powerful man in Queens County politics, showing that it was entirely possible for grassroots movements to challenge the establishment and win.

Bloomberg, who was a registered Republican for half of his mayoral career, wants to prevent the progressive revolt that is currently brewing in his own city from going national. In his heart, he would probably prefer another four years of President Trump over a President Sanders. No matter their differences, then, it seems the New York elite—and the American elite in general—will always have each other’s back when a real threat to their power presents itself.

Wealthy Nations Are Condemning Hundreds of Millions to Suffer

In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference—known as COP25—began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. What prevents a transfer from carbon-based fuel to other fuels is not the stubbornness of this or that country. The main problems are three:

The right wing that denies climate change;
Sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in the continuation of the use of carbon-based fuels;
The refusal by the Western advanced countries to admit both that they have caused the problem and that they should use their vast wealth to finance the transfer from carbon-based fuels to other fuels in countries whose wealth has been siphoned off to the West.

The first two blockages—the right wing and sections of the climate industry—are related, since it is often money from the climate industry (the Koch brothers, for instance) that finances the climate deniers and sows confusion about the immense reality that confronts us.

The third blockage is serious, and it has prevented the United Nations process from bearing fruit. At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the countries of the world negotiated a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In that document—which was ratified at the General Assembly two years later—the governments agreed to a key principle, namely that the impact of colonialism cannot be divorced from discussions of the climate crisis.

“The global nature of climate change,” the parties wrote, “calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.”

Common and Differentiated Responsibilities

The main phrase here to consider is “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This means that the problem of climate change is something that is common to all countries, and that no one is immune to its deleterious impact; at the same time, the responsibility of countries is not identical, and some countries—which benefited for centuries from colonialism and carbon fuel—have a greater responsibility for the transition to a less damaging energy system.

There is little scholarly debate on the fact that certain countries—the West—benefited inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel. A look at the data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center’s Global Carbon Project shows that the United States of America—by itself—has been the largest dispenser of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely European states and the United States of America. From the 18th century, these countries have not only dispensed the bulk of the carbon into the atmosphere, but they also continue to exceed their share of the Global Carbon Budget.

Carbon-fueled capitalism—enriched by the wealth stolen through colonialism—enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations. The extreme inequalities between the standard of living for the average European (742 million people) and the average Indian (1.4 billion people) is as stark as it was a century ago. The reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon—particularly coal—is high; but even this use of carbon has not raised the per capita emissions of China and India above that of the United States, whose per capita emissions are almost twice as much as China’s per capita emissions.

Green Climate Fund

The Framework Convention recognized the importance of colonialism, the geographical divergence of industrial capitalism, and its impact on the carbon budget. That is why the countries at Rio agreed to create a Green Climate Fund. The West was asked to make substantial contributions to the fund, whose capital would then be used to assist developing countries to “leapfrog” carbon-fueled social development.

It was hoped that the fund would draw in $100 billion—at a minimum—by 2020. The United States pledged $3 billion but has only contributed $1 billion. Trump has blocked any further contributions to the fund (Bernie Sanders, in contrast, said he would pay $200 billion into the fund, while the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn pledged to use his country’s leverage over the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds toward “climate justice for the Global South”). Australia and Russia have also paused contributions. No real appetite exists to expand this fund; there is little expectation that it—or the concept of leapfrogging—will be taken seriously at COP25.

The $100 billion figure is very conservative. The International Energy Agency suggests each year in its World Energy Outlook that the actual figure is in the trillions. None of the Western powers has intimated anything like a commitment of that scale to the fund.

Attack on Coal

It is far easier to attack China and India, and other developing countries.

In early November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the press after his participation in the UN-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) meeting in Bangkok, Thailand. He mentioned neither the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility” nor the Green Climate Fund.

Tellingly, the secretary-general made three proposals, each of which says nothing to the main principle of “differentiated responsibility”:

Taxes must be placed on carbon emissions.
Trillions of dollars of subsidies for fossil fuels must end.
Construction of coal-fired power stations must end by 2020.

None of these proposals per se would raise eyebrows. In fact, given the gravity of the reports coming in from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is no doubt that action is necessary.

But what kind of action? These three proposals would directly strike at the energy sources for countries that have not yet provided electrification for their populations, or where their people are far from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Southeast Asia, where Guterres made these remarks, only anticipates full electrification of the region by 2030.

Advanced industrial states—such as the United Kingdom and Germany—have said that they will phase out coal by 2040. These are countries that have created the Powering Past Coal Alliance (backed by the Bloomberg New Energy Finance, one of the major capital funds that seeks to make money off the Green New Deal). There is money to be made here for venture capitalists; they are not going to contribute the billions needed for the Green Climate Fund. No philanthropy by the billionaires will be willing to donate their money into the fund; the tax-free money they make on the “green transition” will eclipse the tiny amounts of money they will donate for a non-carbon future.

Ugly Choice

Meanwhile, developing countries have an ugly choice before them: to forgo carbon, the cheapest fuel, and then forgo social development for their populations; or to continue to use carbon and threaten the planet. These are the only choices if the advanced industrial states refuse to fund the Green Climate Fund, and if they refuse to transfer technology for wind and solar to countries without any financial obligation.

A Green New Deal in the West is not going to be sufficient if this deal does not include trillions of dollars into the UN’s Green Climate Fund and the transfer of technology as a social practice and not for profit.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Tufts University Severs Ties with Family Behind OxyContin

BOSTON — Tufts University is cutting ties with the billionaire family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, saying it will strip the Sackler name from its campus and accept no further donations amid concerns over the family’s role in the opioid crisis.

University officials announced the decision Thursday, ending a relationship that has spanned nearly four decades and brought $15 million to the school’s science and medical programs. Tufts leaders said they considered the issue for more than a year before concluding it is inconsistent with the school’s values to display the family’s name.

“We had to deal with the reality that the Sackler name has become associated with a health care epidemic. Given our medical school’s mission, we needed to reconcile that,” Peter Dolan, chairman of Tufts’ board of trustees, said in an interview.

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A firm that represents the Sackler family did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The change was announced at the same time officials released findings from an outside review examining the school’s ties with the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. The inquiry, commissioned by the school, found no major wrongdoing but concluded there was an “appearance of too close a relationship between Purdue, the Sacklers and Tufts.

The family’s ties with Tufts date to 1980, when the three founding brothers of Purdue Pharma provided a donation to establish the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. Tufts separately named its medical school building after one of the brothers, Arthur, after he made a donation in 1983.

Arthur Sackler’s wife, Jillian, served on the university’s board of trustees for a decade starting in 1986. And Richard Sackler, a Purdue board member and former CEO, sat on the medical school’s board of advisers for nearly two decades until he left in 2017.

Officials said the Sackler name will now be dropped from all campus facilities and programs, including the biomedical sciences school, the medical school, a laboratory and two research funds. A sign bearing Arthur Sackler’s name on the facade of the medical school was being removed Thursday.

Tufts joins a growing number of colleges seeking distance from the Sackler family amid pressure from students and activists. Several have stopped accepting gifts from the family, including Cornell and Yale universities. Others, including Brown University, said they will redirect past donations to support addiction treatment.

An Associated Press review in October found that prestigious universities around the world accepted at least $60 million from the Sacklers over the past five years. Some critics say schools should return the money so it can be used to help cities and states harmed by the opioid crisis.

Past donations to Tufts will continue to be used for their original purpose, officials said, but the university will establish a $3 million endowment to support research and education on addiction. The school also plans to create an educational exhibit exploring Tufts’ history with the Sacklers.

Previously known for their philanthropy, the Sacklers have more recently gained attention for their role in the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy this year amid thousands of lawsuits accusing it of aggressively pushing OxyContin despite its addiction risks. Some of the suits target individual members of the family, who deny wrongdoing.

Students and faculty at Tufts have long called on the school to sever ties with the Sacklers, especially those in science and medicine programs. Dr. Harris Berman, dean of the medical school, said the building’s name had become an “embarrassment.”

“Our alumni, our board of advisers all have been troubled by the fact that we’ve got the Sackler name all over the place,” Berman said in an interview. “I think there’s going to be a great sigh of relief among all of them that we’ve finally done the right thing. Certainly I feel that way.”

Tufts also faces criticism over its direct ties to Purdue Pharma. In 1999, the company paid to establish a master’s program on pain research and education, and continued to fund it for a decade. One of the company’s senior executives became a lecturer in the program and was appointed as an adjunct professor.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey alleged in a January civil complaint that Purdue used the partnership with Tufts to bolster its reputation and promote OxyContin. In response, Tufts’ president ordered the outside review examining the relationship.

The inquiry, led by a former U.S. attorney, found that Purdue and the Sacklers contributed a combined $15 million to Tufts since 1980. Much of the family’s funding supported research on cancer and neuroscience.

Investigators found no evidence that the funding significantly skewed Tufts’ research or academic programs, but they believe the family and its company benefited from the relationship in subtler ways.

In 2002, for example, the director of the Tufts pain program appeared in an advertisement for Purdue, with his Tufts affiliation prominently displayed. In 2015, the medical school chose not to assign students to read “Dreamland,” a book on the opioid crisis, largely because it was too critical of the Sacklers, the review found.

“We do believe that Purdue intended to use the relationship with Tufts to advance its own interests and, in a few particular instances, there is some evidence that it was successful in exercising influence,” the report found.

Tufts leaders say they plan to implement a slate of recommendations included in the report. It called for “heightened scrutiny” of donors, greater transparency surrounding research donors, and the creation of a committee to review large gifts that “raise questions of conflicts of interest, reputational risk for the university or other controversy.”

Britain’s Choice Is Socialism or Barbarism

I am an American with a partner from England and a daughter with dual United Kingdom-U.S. citizenship. For a Yankee, I follow British politics closely.

During the past few years, thanks to the Brexit mess, the Gordian entanglements of U.K. politics have been vertigo-inducing, to say the least. However, since U.S. politics are also in a constant red-hot crisis, I’ve been unable to follow the U.K. tragicomedy at the granular level.

Paradoxically, this has been helpful, per my understanding of U.K. politics. While I’ve missed out on innumerable headline-grabbing absurdities, my distance has allowed me to maintain perspective on the big picture—at least, that’s my sense.

In that spirit, here are my observations about the Dec. 12 U.K. general election from the western shore of the Atlantic.

Corbyn is offering, by far, the best option on Brexit.

Whatever you might have heard about how Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has handled the Brexit crisis, here’s what’s important: as of right now, he has arrived at the best solution going forward.

No political issue in my lifetime has been more mind-numbingly tedious than the Brexit morass. Suffice to say, an ocean’s distance is helpful in maintaining one’s sanity, let alone clarity. So, apologies for sounding like a scold—but, c’mon you Brits, wake up and recognize that Corbyn is providing a simple, sane pathway to survive this clusterf*ck.

Here’s his plan, which, if you ask me, makes a lot of sense.

If elected prime minister, Corbyn will negotiate a new Brexit deal, aiming for an arrangement similar to Norway’s current relationship with the EU (which means the U.K. will remain part of the EU common market). Then, he would put that deal up for a popular vote with the only other option being to remain in the union. The whole thing will be resolved in half a year.

The only other option is a Tory-led government that eliminates any Remain option and that will present the familiar anti-worker, deregulatory, pro-finance Brexit that’s already proved very unpopular, and which, among other things, will almost certainly lead to the breakup of the U.K.

So, it’s very simple. If you support Remain, you have only one hope left: defeating the Tories. That means voting tactically for Labour and its allies, i.e. those parties that might be willing to form a Labour-led government so Corbyn can pursue Brexit sanity.

Also, if you support Brexit but actually want a positive arrangement with the EU—one that prioritizes the concerns of average people and the environment, as well as respects the Good Friday accord–you should also support Labour and its allies. This argument is not a pro-Remain sleight-of-hand. I am pro-Remain, but I sincerely believe that a Norway-like Brexit deal will have a very good shot of winning a second referendum. Norway, after all, is doing pretty damn well these days.

So, if you’re pro-Remain—you have to vote Labour and friends. If you want a decent Brexit—ditto. Those two positions have to represent two-thirds of the electorate. Why is this not a landslide?

Boris Johnson is the U.K.’s Trump, part of a global ethno-nationalist, anti-Democratic far-right revival. He must be vanquished.

This is obvious to the rest of the world, but for some reason seems lost on much of the U.K. public. I’m baffled.

Here’s a guy who has spent his entire time as prime minister so far making a series of anti-constitutional moves and political power plays that would make Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro blush.  Whatever Johnson’s past as an occasionally moderate Tory or a disarmingly witty caricature, he is now Team Trump. Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump certainly understand this.

A question for the British: if Johnson’s Tories win an outright majority, how often do you think he’ll have to “withdraw the whip” on members of the majority (i.e., kicking Tory members of Parliament out of the party for disagreeing with him)? The likely answer is never. Having won the majority that eluded David Cameron in 2010 and Theresa May in 2017, he’ll have a Conservative majority as pliant as the American GOP and just as contemptuous of parliamentary procedure as they are of inconvenient facts.

In other words, a Johnson victory will be a blow to constitutional democracies on par with Trump’s 2016 win—and provide the Donald with a talking point he is sure to trumpet in 2020. Even worse, it will be readily understood as the greatest validation yet of global Trumpism.

Neoliberalism brought us Trumpism. The Labour Party’s Manifesto is the humane alternative to both.

After four decades as the dominant socioeconomic order, neoliberalism is in crisis. The general population now understands that the system’s prevailing logic, “the market knows best,” works for the investor class (aka the rich) and leaves the vast majority (very far) behind.

Of course, an economic oligarchy is a difficult fit for a democracy—eventually the people will vote in their interests.

Hence, the rise of Trumpism, an anti-constitutional political tendency that preserves the neoliberal economic order—effectively buying it time through appeals to xenophobic populism—while simultaneously weakening democratic institutions.

On Dec. 12, the British electorate can take the other path—the one once offered not by Mussolini, but by FDR.

The 2019 Labour Party Manifesto (i.e., its party platform) is about re-allocation and reinvestment of wealth away from the oligarchs and to necessary services the market doesn’t care to fund (health, education and affordable housing), to populated regions that capital has abandoned, and into green technologies we desperately need but investors see as too long term. It spreads the wealth and generates more wealth, a formula conducive to a healthy democratic society.

We have to move past neoliberalism. As a wise soul once whispered, “It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now.”  The U.K. started neoliberalism with Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and it owes the world to take the lead again in the opposite direction. Our collective future depends on it.

Only a Labour-led government will adequately address the climate emergency.

In an emergency, how long do you continue with the same strategy without getting positive results?

You are lying to yourself if you think “the market” by itself will change course when it comes to the climate emergency. You are lying to yourself if you think a Tory-led government will do anything but rely on markets. If you vote Tory, you are complicit.

The outgoing governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has already explained how markets are responding to the climate crisis—with a frenzy of investment in fossil fuel technology. According to Carney (hardly a socialist), if current investments across the globe in fossil fuel infrastructure are used to their capacity, as the investors believe they will, the result is a catastrophic four-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. In other words, a radical intervention is necessary or humanity is toast (way to go, markets!).

When markets fail, and large-scale investment is required, government action is an absolute necessity. Thanks to the ambitious Green New Deal outlined in the Labour Manifesto, the British voters have an opportunity to lead the world in addressing the greatest crisis of our time.

Corbyn is an honorable man; BoJo is a self-serving inveterate liar.

I’ve followed politics my entire adult life and I have never encountered a politician more nakedly self-serving than Johnson. This is not a novel observation. Why anyone would put their faith in him is beyond me.

Corbyn is the exact opposite. Like Bernie Sanders, he has stood for the same things throughout his long political career. He is a model of integrity, a man of his word.

Regarding the matter of anti-Semitism in the U.K. and Corbyn’s relationship to the matter—an issue that has come up throughout the Labour leader’s tenure—I have two observations as a self-identified Jew who travels frequently to the U.K. and who loathes all instances of anti-Semitism. First, a Corbyn-led government will make a long-overdue adjustment in U.K. policy towards Israel/Palestine, grounded in Corbyn’s deeply held belief in the human rights of all people. This is not anti-Semitic, though it will be called such by people with a transparent agenda. It’s also not anti-Israel, which will find it has many more friends on the global stage if it shifts course and begins respecting the rights of Palestinians.

Second, a Corbyn government will inevitably place anti-Semitism under the microscope in Britain—and this is long overdue. I’m certainly sick of hearing how this or that bloke is too “Jewy” to pick up a tab at a pub in the U.K.  and whispers of how Jews control global finance—almost always from folks who are distinctly not pro-Labour. I understand these are petty instances, but I’ve heard enough to know Britain needs a national reckoning on this matter. I, for one, will welcome the scrutiny—and know that Cornyn will be all-in on this. Indeed, he has promised to call out all variants of racism, including the frequent instances of explicit Islamophobia inside the Tory Party and across British society. He has said so and Corbyn is nothing if not a man of his word.

Lastly, the matter of Jeremy’s integrity is of special importance as we approach Dec. 12.

Vote Tactically on Dec. 12 

On this, I break with Labour orthodoxy. The task at hand is simple: prevent a Tory majority. This requires throwing all support behind whatever non-Tory candidate has the best chance of winning the constituency. This is not hard to figure out in the digital era.

What about the Liberal Democrats, a party that claims to be pro-Remain but has a stated policy of not cooperating with Corbyn to defeat Brexit?

The Lib Dems won 12 seats last election and took a “close” second to a Tory in another handful of constituencies (about 16).

My advice is simple—Labour supporters need to be the adults in the room and accept that only the Lib Dems have a chance of defeating the Tories in those 28-odd districts.  (Of course, don’t trust me on those numbers—do the research yourself for each district, and then coordinate with people in the district itself to make sure.)

While the Lib Dem’s opposition to Corbyn show them to be inveterate apologists for neoliberal economics, they can be counted on to disrupt the Tories’ Brexit plans, and that is the first order of business at hand.

Having said that, Lib Dem supporters in every other closely contested constituency in the land have to understand that a vote for the Lib Dem in their district is a de facto vote for Brexit.

Simply put, if the final results show that Lib Dem voters in competitive districts are greater than the difference between the Tory candidate and the Labour candidate, they will be exposed as the people who, on the final day that mattered, voted to ensure Brexit.

So, if you are a Lib Dem, but the Labour candidate clearly has a chance to win in a tight race against a Tory, you must vote Labour. Same for Labour supporters in which the Lib Dem has a better chance—and, by all measure, both Lib Dems and Labour supporters in those 12 seats that the Scottish National Party (SNP) can reclaim from the Tories, need to vote SNP, and so on and so forth. Apply this strategy with unrelenting rigor in every region of the country.

(Now, I don’t want to create the impression that the SNP and the Lib Dems are ready to be full coalition partners with Labour. Britain being Britain, it’s much more complicated than that. The SNP, though, are pretty close—they’ve stated they are willing to support the formation of a Corbyn-led Labour government even while not entering into a formal coalition. So that’s pretty benign. The Lib Dems, much less so. In fact, they’ve gone right out and stated they will refuse to support any Labour-led government with Corbyn as the prime minister. Pretty toxic, right? So why am I calling for any voting, however tactical, for the Lib Dems? Two reasons: anything is better than a Tory majority and in roughly 30 districts only the Lib Dems has any chance of beating the Tory; and because if the Lib Dems do end up with the fate of the next government in their hands due to a hung Parliament, which is quite possible, the odds of them backing the Tories as opposed to Labour seemed pretty slight. After all, only a coalition with Labour will produce a revote on Brexit, which is the Lib Dems’ central policy position this election, not to mention they’re still paying for the last time they went into a coalition with the Tories).

The main issue is that the Tory and Brexit parties are perfectly aligned on their side. The tactical voters (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP et al.) have to equal their efficiency or they will lose.

Once Brexit is settled, you can return to your obstinacy, but this is truly a once-in-a-lifetime election. You need a coalition of 326 to block the Tories, nothing less will do.

If this tactical approach gives you pause, it shouldn’t. Unlike Johnson, Corbyn believes in the parliamentary system. He is a staunch constitutional Republican. If Corbyn becomes prime minister through a coalition (and frankly, that looks like the only way he can get to 10 Downing Street in this election), he will stick to his word (as he always does), negotiate a new Brexit deal and put it to a people’s vote.

After all that dust settles, both Labour and the Tories will want new elections, and you’ll all head back to the hustings.

Then, finally, the people of the U.K. can set about determining their future with the Gordian knot of Brexit untangled.

 

Trump’s Actions Impeachable, Scholars Say, as Democrats Go All In

WASHINGTON — Three leading legal scholars testified Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s attempts to have Ukraine investigate Democratic rivals are grounds for impeachment, bolstering the Democrats’ case as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure they’re prepared for that momentous next step.

Meeting behind closed doors ahead of an initial Judiciary Committee hearing to consider potential articles of impeachment, Pelosi asked House Democrats a simple question: “Are you ready?”

The answer was a resounding yes.

Though no date has been set, the Democrats are charging toward a Christmastime vote on removing the 45th president. It’s a starkly partisan undertaking, a situation Pelosi hoped to avoid but now seems inevitable.

Trump is alleged to have abused the power of his office by putting personal political gain over national security interests, engaging in bribery by withholding $400 in military aid Congress had approved for Ukraine; and then obstructing Congress by stonewalling the investigation.

Across the Capitol on Wednesday, the polarizing political divide over impeachment, only the fourth such inquiry in the nation’s history, was on display.

At the Judiciary hearing, Democrats sided with the scholars who said Trump’s actions reached the Constitution’s threshold of “bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Republicans pointed to the lone professor they were allowed to invite, who said impeachment was not warranted.

Democrats in the House say the inquiry is a duty. Republican representatives say it’s a sham. And quietly senators of both parties conferred on Wednesday, preparing for an eventual Trump trial.

“Never before, in the history of the republic, have we been forced to consider the conduct of a president who appears to have solicited personal, political favors from a foreign government,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., as he gaveled open the landmark House hearing.

Nadler said Trump’s phone call seeking a “favor” from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wasn’t the first time he had sought foreign help to influence an American election, noting Russian interference in 2016. He warned against inaction with a new campaign underway.

“We cannot wait for the election,” he said. “ If we do not act to hold him in check, now, President Trump will almost certainly try again to solicit interference in the election for his personal political gain.”

Trump, attending a NATO meeting in London called the hearing a “joke” and doubted many people would watch because it’s “boring.”

Once an outsider to the GOP, Trump now has Republicans’ unwavering support. They joined in his name-calling the Judiciary proceedings a “disgrace” and unfair, the dredging up of unfounded allegations as part of an effort to undo the 2016 election and remove him from office.

“You just don’t like the guy,” said Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the panel. Trump rewarded some of his allies with politically valuable presidential tweets as the daylong hearing dragged into the evening.

Despite the intent of America’s Founding Fathers to create a durable system of legal checks and balances, impeachment is an admittedly political exercise. Thus Pelosi asked her still-new majority if they were willing to press onward, aware of still-uncertain electoral risks.

At the Democrats’ private morning meeting, support for the impeachment effort was vigorous, though voting to remove Trump could come hard for some lawmakers in regions where the president has substantial backing.

The Democratic lawmakers also delivered a standing ovation to Rep. Adam Schiff, whose 300-page Intelligence Committee report cataloged potential grounds for impeachment, overwhelmingly indicating they want to continue to press the inquiry rather than slow its advance or call a halt for fear of political costs in next year’s congressional elections.

)The meeting was described by people familiar with it, who were unauthorized to discuss it by name and were granted anonymity.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team fanned out across the Capitol with Vice President Mike Pence meeting with House Republicans and White House officials conferring with Senate Republicans to prepare for what could be the first presidential impeachment trial in a generation.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who has declined for now to participate in the House proceedings, relayed Trump’s hope that the impeachment effort can be stopped in the House and there will be no need for a Senate trial, which seems unlikely.

White House officials and others said Trump is eager to have his say. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said, “He feels like he has had no opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

Trump lambastes the impeachment probe daily and proclaims his innocence of any wrongdoing at length, but he has declined to testify before House hearings or answer questions in writing.

At the heart of the inquiry is his July 25 phone call asking Ukraine to investigate rival Democrats including Joe Biden. Trump at the time was withholding $400 million in military aid from the ally, which faced an aggressive Russia on its border.

At Wednesday’s session, three legal experts called by Democrats said impeachment was merited.

Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, said he considered it clear that the president’s conduct met the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, “If what we’re talking about is not impeachable … then nothing is impeachable.”

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor and former Obama administration Justice Department official, drew criticism for mentioning Trump’s teenage son, Barron, in a wordplay, violating an unwritten but firm Washington rule against dragging first family’s children into politics.

The only Republican witness, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, dissented from the other legal experts. He said the Democrats were bringing a “slipshod impeachment” case against the president, but he didn’t excuse Trump’s behavior.

“It is not wrong because President Trump is right,” Turley said. “A case for impeachment could be made, but it cannot be made on this record.”

New telephone records released with the House report deepened Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s known involvement in what investigators call the “scheme.”

Asked about that, Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Giuliani was calling the White House Office of Management and Budget, which was withholding the military aid to Ukraine.

“You have to ask him,” Trump said. “Sounds like something that’s not so complicated. … No big deal.”

Based on two months of investigation sparked by a still-anonymous government whistleblower’s complaint, the Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report found that Trump “sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process and endangered U.S. national security.” When Congress began investigating, it says, Trump obstructed the investigation like no other president in history.

Republicans defended the president in a 123-page rebuttal claiming Trump never intended to pressure Ukraine when he asked for investigations of Biden and his son.

Democrats once hoped to sway Republicans to consider Trump’s removal, but they are now facing an ever-hardening partisan split over the swift-moving proceedings that are dividing Congress and the country.

While liberal Democrats are pushing the party to incorporate the findings from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and other actions by Trump, more centrist and moderate Democrats prefer to stick with the Ukraine matter as a simpler narrative that Americans understand.

Democrats could begin drafting articles of impeachment in a matter of days, with a Judiciary Committee vote next week. The full House could vote by Christmas. Then the matter would move to the Senate for a trial in 2020.

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Zeke Miller, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Colleen Long, Eric Tucker and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

America’s Approach to Marijuana Is a Gateway to Misery

Like nearly all Americans of a certain age, I was told in school that tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana are gateway drugs — and that is why marijuana should remain illegal.

First of all, even if you accept that these three substances are “gateways” to something worse, why is it that adults can use alcohol and tobacco legally, but not marijuana?

This is particularly outrageous given that, unlike alcohol and cigarettes, marijuana has a wide range of medical applications.

Other than prescription opioids, marijuana is the only drug that relieves my chronic migraines. I like that it doesn’t come with the addiction or overdose risks that opioids do, and I want to use it legally and under a doctor’s supervision.

Unfortunately, I live in Wisconsin, where even medical uses are illegal.

For me, marijuana is a gateway to relief from headaches, not a gateway to harder drugs. Legal medical marijuana allows me to decrease my use of opioids.

Senator Kamala Harris recently reframed the gateway idea in another way. The war on drugs approach of criminalizing marijuana, she said, “is the gateway to America’s problem with mass incarceration.” As a former prosecutor and drug warrior who now supports decriminalization, she would know.

While I was sitting through D.A.R.E. classes in school, others were being criminalized and locked up for nonviolent drug offenses.

These harsh drug laws and strict sentencing guidelines were not enforced equally, either. Although blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates (white people actually use drugs a bit more), black people are 6.5 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.

In part this is because law enforcement spends more time looking for drugs in communities of color than in white communities. They could have found plenty of drugs and underage drinking among the rich kids in the dorms and frat houses of the mostly white, elite private school where I went to college, but they weren’t looking.

After the arrest, racial disparities continue, disadvantaging low income people and people of color at every stage of the judicial process. The racial disparities continue even after someone has paid their debt to society. A black person with a felony record faces more employment discrimination than an equally qualified white person with a felony record.

It seems like the war on drugs is on its way out, although not quickly enough. The tide is turning toward medical usage of marijuana and even some psychedelics, legalized recreational marijuana in some states, and handling addiction with treatment instead of prison.

Yet marijuana is still fully criminalized at the federal level and in many states (I’m looking at you, Wisconsin).

Many jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana have also expunged the criminal records of anyone convicted of nonviolent, low-level marijuana offenses. But there’s no way to give them back the years of their lives they spent locked up for pot.

Why are we still paying taxpayer dollars to incarcerate cannabis users, taking them away from their jobs and their families? Our current path is a gateway to misery. Let’s choose another.

Iceland Fights Climate Change the Same Way It Beat the Banking Crisis

What can you do if you’re a smallish island in the North Atlantic with a lot of snow and a melting economy? Quite a lot, it turns out, if you’re prepared to put local people’s needs first.

Iceland was hailed recently for erecting a memorial plaque to one of its most striking features, Okjökull, which shrank so drastically because of climate breakdown that it lost its status as a glacier. It was the first in Iceland to do so, and is now known, fittingly, by a diminutive, as Ok.

Barely 10 years ago, when the country was in the grip of a different crisis, the pace of its far from glacial response showed how quickly rapid changes of government policy can turn a crisis around.

Iceland was at the heart of the global financial crisis in late 2008 and was nearly destroyed by it; 97% of its banking sector collapsed in just three days. its three largest banks − Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbankinn − had accumulated a debt of $85 billion (£66bn), equivalent to 10 times the country’s national income (GDP), or 20 times the national budget.

These losses amounted to $330,000 for every man, woman and child on the island, whose stock market then collapsed, with huge numbers of businesses going bankrupt. Iceland approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency aid − the first western country to do so since 1976 − and obtained a loan of $2.1bn (£1.4bn).

“It is possible that the Icelandic way of governing also played a part. … Was their natural reflex to protect the many, rather than the few?”

So how did it manage to survive? First, it allowed a default on the $85bn in debt accumulated by the banks. A new national mood set in, creating lasting conditions for change and the desire for new economic approaches.

Other countries had largely let banks off the hook, but in 2015 Iceland’s Supreme Court upheld convictions against bankers at the heart of the crisis. Finance is now so sensitive that when the Prime Minister was caught up in revelations from the release of the so-called Panama Papers, he was forced from office.

The debts are now largely paid off, but most multinational businesses have left Iceland, for fear of the capital controls. A huge expansion in tourism has rescued the nation’s economy, though average wages are now much lower.

The government protected Icelanders’ bank deposits and forgave debts for a quarter of the population. As Bloomberg News reported in 2012, “Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn.”

The Rapid Transition Alliance (RTA), a global initiative which aims to learn from rapid change to address urgent environmental problems, believes Iceland’s way of extricating itself quickly from the global crisis has lessons for other countries, some of which are still paying a heavy price for the events of 2008 and the way they reacted.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that individual countries cannot independently follow radically different economic policy and control capital flows, says the RTA, Iceland shows they can, and quickly;

Radical change can usher in a virtuous circle, by becoming a habit: once you’ve started, new opportunities may open up for yet more change;

And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, the Alliance says, it is possible to put people before the demands of financial markets and still run a successful economy. Citizen engagement and economic reform can go hand in hand.

Iceland’s economy had thrived on speculative finance but, after the meltdown, rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as the Nobel economist Paul Krugman points out, Iceland “let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net.” Instead of placating financial markets, it introduced temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.

Following this, a “pots and pans” revolution kick-started a process that led to a new citizen-drafted constitution, which succeeded in engaging half the electorate.

The constitutional exercise proposed a new approach to the ownership of natural resources for the public good, which has had a lasting effect on the country’s choices: all its electricity and heat today comes from renewable sources, and transparency has become a central part of Icelandic public life.

The RTA thinks there were several key factors that enabled such rapid and fundamental change: the extent to which the economic system was irreparably damaged; the decision by the government to respond to the people’s demands and not to those of the banks; and the decision to punish those at fault and start anew.

It concludes: “It is possible that the Icelandic way of governing also played a part, because they have a longstanding history of deeply embedded democracy and a culture that discourages hierarchy. Was their natural reflex to protect the many, rather than the few?”

Fred Hampton Lives On, 50 Years After His Assassination

Fifty years ago today, Chicago police burst into the home of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. They gunned down Mark Clark, who was guarding the door, sprayed the apartment with bullets, and ran into Hampton’s room.

The officers knew exactly where to find Hampton because the FBI had coerced a trusted member of his security detail into giving police a detailed map of the house. They dragged Hampton’s pregnant fiancee out of the room and shot Hampton dead. It’s widely believed he couldn’t wake up to defend himself because he had been drugged.

What made Hampton so “dangerous” in the eyes of the state in which he was assassinated?

In his short life, the civil rights leader managed to forge an unprecedented interracial alliance that united the Black Panthers of Chicago, the Young Lords, a Latin American social justice organization, and the Young Patriots Organization—a group comprised of poor people from the South. Hampton and his organizers, including Bobby Lee, went into these communities and discovered they had more in common than not. The YPO, which was entirely white, eventually stopped wearing the confederate flag out of respect for the Black Panthers; it was the original Rainbow Coalition.

Together, they launched a breakfast program for the poor. The coalition protected members of their communities from the cops; they offered legal representation to battle abusive landlords and they educated their communities in the politics of global struggle and revolution. It was no coincidence, then, that Hampton soon became a primary target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 1956, under Hoover’s watch, the FBI had launched the secretive Cointelpro program, conducting oft-illegal activities to sabotage the revolutionary social movements that emerged during the era. Hoover was especially worried a black “messiah” might inspire the African American community to assert their civil rights. But whereas other Black Panthers could be vilified as racist, Hampton was resolute about organizing poor people across the racial divide.

“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism,” Hampton said. “We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”

Hampton, who was jailed and hassled by the police before his death, knew his revolutionary work put his life in danger.

“I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people,” he said. “I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.”

Billy “Che” Brooks, who was deputy minister of education for the Chicago office of the Black Panther Party and Bobby Seale’s bodyguard, worked closely with Hampton. Today, he lives in Chicago, where he’s still organizing to fight police oppression, racism and economic inequality. Over the phone, he described Hampton’s legacy: “The essence of our struggle will continue in the spirit of our beloved chairman Fred Hampton, The beat goes on.”

For its part, the Young Patriots Organization has posted the following message to Facebook:

George Zimmerman Sues Trayvon Martin’s Parents, Others for $100 Million

George Zimmerman, the former Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, is suing the victim’s family, prosecutors, and the media for $100 million in damages.

Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Martin in 2013.

“Imagine killing an unarmed child and then suing his parents,” tweeted Center for Policing Equity president Phillip Atiba Goff.

The lawsuit, which Zimmerman’s lawyer Larry Klayman—a right-wing legal advocate—filed in Polk County Circuit Court in Florida Wednesday names Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, as the lead defendant. Fulton is running for Congress in Florida’s District 1.

According to the Miami Herald:

The suit in Polk County Circuit Court cites information in a documentary about the case that accuses the Martin family of engineering false testimony, and the director has scheduled a press conference this week in Coral Gables to coincide with a film screening there. The suit seeks $100 million in civil damages, alleging defamation, abuse of civil process and conspiracy. A copy of the suit was distributed to media Wednesday by the movies’ director, Joe Gilbert. The case does not yet appear on the online docket of the Polk court system.

Zimmerman, Klayman, and Gilbert will host a press conference Thursday afternoon at the Coral Gables Art Cinema.

Documentary filmmaker Billy Corben said in a tweet he was outraged at the cinema’s involvement in what he called a “disgraceful sham.”

Shame on @gablescinema for hosting this disgraceful sham: George Zimmerman announces lawsuit against family of Trayvon Martin, publisher, prosecutors for $100 million with press conference and documentary screening at Coral Gables Art Cinema https://t.co/R2hOIjoVoN @mike23mena pic.twitter.com/V8LkdegSWC

— Billy Corben (@BillyCorben) December 4, 2019

 

New York State Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou couldn’t believe what she was reading.

“This killer wants to do what?!” said Niou.

The Ghost of Jimmy Hoffa Haunts American Labor

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters Union, disappeared.

He’d gone to a restaurant in suburban Detroit apparently expecting to meet a couple of mafia figures whom he had known for decades. He’d hoped to win their support for his bid to return to the union’s presidency. A few customers remembered seeing him in the restaurant parking lot before 3 p.m.

Sometime after that he vanished without a trace.

The FBI has long assumed that Hoffa was the victim of a mob hit. But despite a decades-long investigation, no one has ever been charged with his murder. His body has never been found.

Yet even though his physical remains are missing, Hoffa lives on in our collective cultural consciousness.

Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” is only the latest film to offer a fictionalized version of Hoffa’s story. Before that there was Sylvester Stallone’s “F.I.S.T.” (1978), Danny DeVito’s “Hoffa” (1992) and the made-for-TV movie “Blood Feud” (1983).

He’s been the subject of countless true crime books, most famously Charles Brandt’s “I Heard You Paint Houses.” He inspired an episode of “The Simpsons.” And he crops up in tabloids such as the Weekly World News, which claimed to have found him living in Argentina, hiding from the vengeful Kennedys.

Ever since I started researching and writing on the history of the Teamsters, people have asked me where I think Hoffa’s body is located. His story, I’ve learned, is the one aspect of labor history with which nearly every American is familiar.

Hoffa’s disappearance transformed him from a controversial union leader into a mythic figure. Over time, I’ve come to realize that Hoffa’s resonance in our culture has important political implications for the labor movement today.

The rise and fall of the ‘Teamsters Teamster’

Hoffa became a household name in the late 1950s, when Robert F. Kennedy, then serving as chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, publicly grilled him about his mob ties.

While other witnesses avoided answering questions by invoking their Fifth Amendment rights, Hoffa, the newly elected leader of the nation’s largest and most powerful union, adopted a defiant stance. He never denied having connections with organized crime figures; instead, he claimed these were the kinds of people he sometimes had to work with as he strengthened and grew his union in the face of employer opposition. He angrily dismissed any allegations of corruption and touted the gains his union had won for its membership.

The verbal sparring between Kennedy and Hoffa became the most memorable part of the hearings.

To the benefit of big business, it turned Hoffa into a menacing symbol of labor racketeering.

But to his union members, it only enhanced his standing. They were already thrilled by the contracts Hoffa had negotiated that included better pay and working conditions. Now his members hailed him as their embattled champion and wore buttons proclaiming, “Hoffa, the Teamsters Teamster.”

His membership stayed loyal even as Hoffa became the target of a series of prosecution efforts.

After becoming attorney general in 1961, Kennedy created a unit within the Department of Justice whose attorneys referred to themselves as the “Get Hoffa Squad.” Their directive was to target Hoffa and his closest associates. The squad’s efforts culminated in convictions against Hoffa in 1964 for jury tampering and defrauding the union’s pension fund. Despite that setback, Hoffa’s hold on the Teamsters’ presidency remained firm even after he entered federal prison in 1967.

When he finally did leave office, Hoffa did so voluntarily. He resigned in 1971 as part of a deal to win executive clemency from the Nixon administration. There was one condition written into the president’s grant of clemency: He couldn’t run for a position in the union until 1980.

Once free, Hoffa claimed that his ban from union office was illegitimate and began planning to run for the Teamsters presidency. However, he faced resistance not from the government but from organized crime figures, who had found it easier to work with Hoffa’s successor, Frank Fitzsimmons.

Hoffa’s meeting at the restaurant on July 30, 1975, was part of his efforts to allay that opposition.

Clearly, things didn’t go as planned.

Some theorize that the mafia had him killed in order to ensure that he would not run against Fitzsimmons in the Teamsters’ upcoming 1976 union election.

But after no arrests and multiple fruitless excavations to try to locate his body, Hoffa’s case remains, to this day, unresolved.

From man to myth

In Andrew Lawler’s history of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, he writes, “To die is tragic, but to go missing is to become a legend, a mystery.”

Stories are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. But when people go missing and are never found, Lawler explains, they’ll endure as subjects of endless fascination. It allows their legacies to be re-written, over and over.

These new interpretations, Lawler observes, “can reveal something fresh about who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.”

The myth of Hoffa lives on, even though almost five decades have passed since that afternoon in July 1975.

What shapes has it taken?

To some, he stands for an idealized image of the working class – a man who’d known hard, manual labor and worked tirelessly to achieve his success. But even after rising to his leadership post, Hoffa lived simply and eschewed pretense.

As a Washington Post article from 1992 put it, “He wore white socks, and liked his beef cooked medium well… He snored at the opera.”

Meanwhile, his feud with the Kennedys pitted a populist “tough guy off the loading docks” against “the professional class, the governing class, the educated experts.” The Washington Post piece ties Hoffa’s story to that of another working-class icon. “Watching Hoffa go up against Bobby Kennedy was like watching John Henry go up against a steam hammer – it was only a matter of time before he lost.”

But Hoffa’s myth can also serve as a morality tale. The New Republic, for instance, described how Danny DeVito’s 1992 film reworks Hoffa’s life into the story of an “embattled champion of the working class” who makes “a Faustian pact with the underworld.”

In the movie, Hoffa’s Teamsters are caught in hopeless picket line battles with mob goons who the anti-union employers have hired. In order to get those goons to switch sides, Hoffa makes a bargain with mafia leaders. But the mafia ultimately has Hoffa killed when he tries to defy their control, becoming the victim of his own unbridled ambition.

Finally, the underworld’s mysterious role in Hoffa’s death keeps his story compelling for Americans who have a fascination with conspiracy theories. It supports the idea of an invisible cabal that secretly runs everything, and which can make even a famous labor leader disappear without a trace.

Hoffa’s story is often intertwined with theories about the Kennedy assassination that attribute the president’s murder to an organized crime conspiracy. Both Hoffa and Kennedy’s murders, in these accounts, highlight the underworld’s apparently unlimited power to protect its interests, with tentacles that extend into the government and law enforcement.

Did Hoffa taint the labor movement?

Over two decades after he went missing, a 1997 article in The Los Angeles Times noted that “No union in America conjures up more negative images than the Teamsters.”

This matters, because for most Americans who lack first-hand knowledge about organized labor, Hoffa is the only labor leader’s name they recognize. And as communications scholar William Puette has noted, “the Teamsters’ notoriety is such that for many people in this country the Teamsters Union is the labor movement.”

A union widely perceived as mobbed up – with a labor leader notorious for his Mafia ties – has come, in the minds of some Americans, to represent the entire labor movement. That perception, in turn, bolsters arguments against legislative reforms that would facilitate union organizing efforts.

The other themes in Hoffa’s myth have similar negative implications for labor. He represents a nostalgic, white, male identity that once existed in a seemingly lost world of manual work. That myth also implies that the unions that emerged in those olden times are no longer necessary.

This depiction doesn’t match reality. Today’s working class is diverse and employed in a broad spectrum of hard manual labor. Whether you’re working as a home health aide or in the gig economy, the need for union protection remains quite real.

But for those working-class Americans who see their society controlled by a hidden cabal of powerful, corrupt forces – like the puppet masters who supposedly had JFK and Hoffa killed – labor activism can appear quixotic.

For these reasons, the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa continues to haunt the labor movement today.

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David Scott Witwer, Professor of American Studies, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.