Chris Hedges's Blog, page 312

Massive Protests Greet Algerian President’s Return

ALGIERS, Algeria—President Abdelaziz Bouteflika returned to Algeria on Sunday after two weeks in a Swiss hospital amid massive demonstrations demanding he withdraw his candidacy for a fifth term.

The 82-year-old Bouteflika suffered a stroke in 2013 and has rarely been seen in public since. The decision to run for a new term in the April 18 election angered large swathes of Algerian society.

The protests have also served as a reality check for a hard-to-read system that is an intrinsic part of the power structure. Protesters want to end that too.

A coterie of people have grown rich under Bouteflika and are thought to exert pressure on the presidency.

Bouteflika arrived at Boufarik military airport, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of the capital, and was shown in video by private television station Ennahar in a fast-moving convoy heading toward the Algiers suburb of Zeralda. He could be seen inside a car slightly bent over and with a cap on his head.

Bouteflika resides in Zeralda, not in the presidential palace in the capital. Earlier, Bouteflika had departed from a Geneva airport.

The official APS news agency confirmed that the president had returned home “after a private visit to Geneva … during which he underwent periodic medical tests.”

The power structure has been shaken by the size of the unprecedented citizens’ revolt, which has drawn millions into the streets of cities across the country to say no to a fifth term — and to a system blamed for corruption and keeping Bouteflika in office despite ailments.

A general strike Sunday was taking place as the president arrived, with numerous shops in Algiers and other cities closed.

As if to lay the groundwork for change, the top Algerian party backing the beleaguered chief of state broke its silence Sunday over massive demonstrations demanding the end of the regime, saying it’s ready to work with all parties to end the crisis.

The National Liberation Front, or FLN, said in a statement that it wants to find a way out of the crisis “with the least cost to the country.”

Army Chief of Staff Ahmed Gaid Salah added his voice, saying Sunday that the army and the people “have the same vision of the future.”

Thousands of protesters in the Algerian diaspora protested Sunday in Paris and other French cities. Protests also were held in neighboring Rabat, Morocco.

The protests trickled down to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, with several hundred marching in the center of Algiers, also calling for Bouteflika to withdraw his bid for a fifth mandate.

“Since I was born, the only (president) I’ve known is Bouteflika,” said a young protesting girl Amina, asking not to give her full name.

“These kids don’t have any political calculations,” said a mother on the sidelines of the protest, Karim Ziad. “They’re just 13-year-old kids.”

Peaceful nationwide protests began Feb. 22 to protest Bouteflika’s plan to run for a fifth term in April 18 elections. The protest movement also wants a change in the much-decried system that has kept him there and has a stranglehold on the power structure.

Bouteflika, first elected in 1999, is the first civilian president of the North African nation except for a short term by Ahmed Ben Bella after Algeria won its independence from France in 1962. He was deposed in a bloodless military coup in 1965 that set the stage for a series of generals serving as presidents.

In a third week of protests on Friday, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Algiers calling for change in the biggest demonstration yet against Bouteflika. Similar marches were held across the country.

The government plane, which had been hidden away from view in a hangar, taxied onto the runway at Geneva airport as a rainbow came into view.

Algerian officials had said days ago that Bouteflika was expected to return shortly.

___

Lotfi Bouchouchi in Algiers, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

California Police Report Almost No Racial Profiling

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—California’s first-in-the-nation attempt to track racial profiling complaints against police produced numbers so small that the board overseeing the tally wants departments to make changes to encourage more people to come forward.

The panel’s most recent report found 17 percent of California’s law enforcement agencies reported not a single complaint in 2017.

And of 659 profiling complaints that were filed in a state of nearly 40 million people, just 10 were sustained. Three-quarters of the profiling complaints involve race or ethnicity, but they can also include age, gender, religion, physical or mental disability or sexual orientation.

The people who share leadership of the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board are divided over the seriousness of the problem and whether changes are needed based on the results of the second annual report.

Andrea Guerrero, executive director of the advocacy group Alliance San Diego, doesn’t believe the numbers and thinks it might be the result of police protecting their own.

“We know we have a profiling problem in the state,” she said.

Her co-chair, Kings County Sheriff David Robinson, disputed that. He said the numbers reflect the reality that it’s “so rare and far between that someone is racist.”

Under current standards, people who lodge formal complaints generally must use their name to report concerns that can range from an officer being rude or disrespectful up to false arrests or racially targeted traffic stops. And often they must go to a police station and fill out a form.

Robinson said most people prefer a more informal process that often doesn’t show up in official statistics, like having a police supervisor hear the complaint and talk to the officer.

The panel has recommended that local agencies allow anonymous and third-party complaints to shield victims from retaliation, while making it easier to file complaints, including by providing materials in many languages.

There should be follow-ups so complainants don’t feel they’re being ignored, Guerrero said, and civilian oversight panels with “teeth in them” should oversee complaint investigations.

Plumas County sheriff’s Deputy Ed Obayashi, an expert on use-of-force policies who teaches other law enforcement personnel around the state, said the racial numbers don’t reflect reality, but he discounted any nefarious intent.

In Southern California, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, where Obayashi used to work, reported just one racial profiling complaint in 2017, while the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had seven. About 3.34 million people live in San Diego County, while the population of Riverside County, which includes the cities of Riverside and Palm Springs, is around 2.42 million.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the United States’ largest sheriff’s agency, recorded 31.

“There’s no way,” Obayashi said. “People who see this report are going to say, ‘They’re covering this up.'”

He and others blamed conservative reporting policies that leave out informal complaints, coupled with “complaint fatigue” by people who are too frightened to complain or believe they’ll be ignored.

Proving a complaint is even tougher, he said.

“To sustain a complaint would require the officer to say, ‘I stopped that motorist because he was black or Hispanic.’ And what officer is going to admit to that?” Obayashi said.

The 7,400-officer California Highway Patrol reported just 24 profiling complaints from nearly 4 million contacts with the public. None was substantiated by the department, which board member Warren Stanley, the CHP’s first black commissioner, said shows the professionalism of the agency’s personnel.

Morgan Hill Police Chief David Swing, who represents police chiefs on the board, said he isn’t surprised by the low reported statewide numbers.

“There are some that may have, or had, a perception that there are more racial or identity profiles being made, but the data that we have doesn’t bear that out,” Swing said.

In Sacramento, the department reported 18 civilian complaints in 2017, none of them alleging racial or identity profiling.

“We actually get a lot more than that,” acknowledged Sacramento police spokesman Sgt. Vance Chandler. But the department counts only formal complaints that under state law could result in an officer being disciplined, omitting what it calls informal inquiries.

The department plans to provide more accurate information on the number of complaints and their outcome as part of reform efforts, Chandler said.

Betty Williams, president of the NAACP branch in Sacramento, said racial profiling is “undersold and underreported in such a shameless fashion.”

She feels the low numbers are reported “so you won’t have stronger policies and procedures and laws in place that will give a little more protection from law enforcement.”

The next statewide report in January will for the first time include statistics from California’s eight largest police agencies on the perceived race, gender, sexual orientation and other characteristics of motorists during traffic stops.

In December, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department suspended operations of a team of deputies who targeted vehicles on Interstate 5, the main West Coast highway between Mexico and Canada, for drugs and other contraband. The decision came amid accusations of racial profiling after a Los Angeles Times investigation found 69 percent of drivers stopped were Latino and that two-thirds had their vehicles searched, a far higher rate than other racial and ethnic groups.

At the federal level, legislation twice proposed by New York U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, most recently with her fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, would require federal border agents to track and report why they conduct stops and searches that critics fear are frequently based on racial profiling.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer, prosecutor and now a policing expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, fears that well-intended efforts by “elite critics, including politicians” to discourage racial profiling will ultimately discourage law enforcement efforts and dissuade recruits from becoming police officers.

“It’s essentially inviting people to make a very serious allegation against officers who are acting in good faith, that they’re profiling people,” he said.

The Arctic Ocean Could Soon Be Ice-Free

Sunlit skies and bright blue water could come earlier to the Arctic – much earlier, thanks to a distant Pacific climate wobble.

Scientists now think that the Arctic Ocean could be effectively ice-free within the next 20 years, opening it to sea lanes across the polar waters between Europe, the US and east Asia.

Climate researchers have repeatedly warned, in the last two decades, that because of global warming the ice sheet that masks the Arctic Ocean has been thinning and could in effect vanish altogether in summertime by 2050.

New research has brought forward the prediction date. And this time the effective agency is not just global warming driven by profligate combustion of fossil fuels worldwide, but a natural cyclic phenomenon known to oceanographers as the interdecadal Pacific oscillation, or IPO.

“The trajectory is towards becoming ice-free in the summer …  there’s more chance of it being on the earlier end of that window than the later end”

Over a cycle of between one to three decades, the average ocean temperatures of the north Pacific shift up or down by about 0.5°C.

And a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters pinpoints the state of the present cycle: the Pacific ended its cold phase and started to warm up about five years ago.

James Screen of the University of Exeter, UK, and a colleague used computer modelling to merge the continuous upward rise in global average temperatures as a consequence of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with the pattern of predicted natural change in ocean surface temperatures to identify the moment when the summer ice will have melted.

The phrase “ice-free” is not a simple one, because some sea ice always remains, but oceanographers and glaciologists have their own definition: it happens when the area of summer sea ice falls below a million square kilometres.

Dramatic change likely

And this is now likely to happen some time between 2030 and 2050. Any argument is not about if, but when. The Arctic is just about the fastest-warming region of the planet, and in 2016 polar sea ice in both hemispheres  reached a record low: an area of ice the size of Mexico was lost.

Temperatures in the Arctic were recorded as up to 20°C above the average for some of the winter months. The long-term consequences are unpredictable, but since both ocean current and air movement are driven by the difference between equatorial and polar temperatures, dramatic climate change is likely to follow.

“The trajectory is towards becoming ice-free in the summer, but there is uncertainty as to when that is going to occur,” Dr Screen said.

“You can hedge your bets. The shift in the IPO means there’s more chance of it being on the earlier end of that window than the later end.”

The Wall Isn’t the Worst Part of Trump’s Immigration Policies

The current administration has bent over backwards to force-feed its anti-immigrant agenda to the American public. That agenda remains broadly unpopular, but they’ve tried every trick in the con artist book to impose it anyway.

Despite years of hysterical anti-immigrant propaganda, most Americans continually report positive views of immigrants and immigration in opinion surveys. Yet we’ve been faced with constant threats of government shutdowns or made-up “national emergencies” if we don’t give the administration money for a wall most of us oppose.

While politicians debate these things, real people die.

Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old, was separated from her father, kept in a cage, and died in Border Patrol custody. Felipe Gomez Alonzo, an 8-year-old, died just weeks later in custody in New Mexico.

Roxana Hernandez, a trans woman seeking asylum from Honduras, died in ICE custody last spring, with an autopsy showing signs of abuse. Thousands of migrants, in fact, have reported sexual abuse and other mistreatment in ICE and CBP custody.

When big injustice occurs, a bigger plan for resistance must follow. To be effective, we must recognize where the core of the injustice lies.

This is true of policy, too. And the inescapable conclusion is that funding for the agencies that detain, abuse, deport, and sometimes kill migrants needs to be every bit as toxic as many Democrats regard funding for the wall.

The American public recognizes this. The administration’s “zero tolerance” and family separations policies drew protests across the country and political spectrum. And despite an anti-immigrant advertising blitz by Republicans late last year, voters repudiated this brutal extremism in the midterm elections, flipping seat after seat in the House of Representatives (and a Senate seat in the border state of Arizona).

Most people understand that the wall is just a symbol, a waste money on a fabricated crisis. But the crisis created by agencies that persecute immigrants, families, and people looking for a better life is all too real.

As funding for agencies like ICE and CBP has increased, so have deportations — chiefly among immigrants with no criminal record, according to many on-the-ground studies.

Unfortunately, Democratic leaders in Congress have kept this funding on the table in their negotiations with the administration. They’re funding agencies that accomplish in real life what the wall is supposed to do symbolically: keep out people looking for a better life.

While politicians talked, Eduardo Samaniego was deported.

At just 16, Eduardo immigrated alone to the United States to look for a better life for his family, knowing he’d have no chance to enter legally. Eduardo worked full time, enrolled himself in high school, and excelled academically. He made himself known not only because he was kind, hopeful, and spirited, but because he believed in justice and making his community a better place.

Then ICE took him.

They placed him in solitary confinement for months, which mental health professionals consider a form of torture. The boy that had seem unbreakable by life’s challenges was broken by the injustices ICE inflicted on him. It got so bad he chose to accept “voluntary departure” to Mexico.

Day after day these agencies keep taking people, families keep being separated, and people keep dying — and they’ll keep doing it if we keep funding the agencies that are responsible. Instead of playing games on the wall.

Fortunately, a growing number of Americans are demanding strategies that actually protect families — and honor the majority of Americans who welcome their immigrant neighbors. As the last election showed, if leaders don’t catch up, they’ll be held accountable.

How Women Learn to Hate Their Vulva

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my own menstrual period start. I was seated on the floor in a circle of women, legs bent in front of me, soles facing each other, a mirror resting on my feet. The flashlight directed at the mirror illuminated my vagina, which was held open by a plastic speculum. There, at the end, sat a little pink mushroom, my very own cervix. A single drop of ruby-colored blood emerged from its center.

It was just like in the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective song “The Bloods”:

“Get a speculum at your neighborhood clinic

Learn about your cervix and what’s in it

There’s a new day coming when you’ve got the bloods again.”

In those days, the women in my collective lesbian household celebrated our periods. We recorded them on a calendar in the kitchen, so we could see how well we synchronized with each other. We thought the old euphemisms (“I fell off the roof today,” “My Aunt Flo is visiting,” or my mother’s favorite, “the Curse”) were worse than silly. We were proud of being mysterious creatures who bleed but do not die.

We may have gone a little overboard.

It was certainly ridiculous to celebrate menstrual cramps, which can be pretty awful. One of my lovers used to vomit monthly from the pain. But then Stewart Adams invented ibuprofen and millions of women rejoiced. (Dr. Adams’s death this January didn’t receive the media attention many of us — whether weekend warrior athletes or women “of childbearing age” — think it should have.)

We had some other silly ideas about our vaginas: we thought that if you inserted carefully peeled garlic cloves in them you could cure a yeast infection. (As far as I know, it didn’t work, but if you nicked one of those cloves with the knife as you were preparing it, it sure would burn!) Plain yogurt may have worked a little better, by creating an acidic environment inhospitable to yeast, but boy was it messy! And don’t get me started on using sea sponges as tampons. Let’s just say that they act like any other wet sponge when you squeeze them. Not the moment to practice your Kegel exercises.

Our Bodies, Our Lives

If we were sometimes silly, we were also wise enough to know that understanding and taking control of our bodies was a first step to taking control of our lives. In 1973, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective turned its 193-page, 75-cent pamphlet “Women and Their Bodies” into the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, and for the first time, women all over the United States could read about our own mysterious inner (and outer) workings. (Today, resources based on OBOS exist in 30 languages.) That same year, the Feminist Press reissued Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s booklet from Glass Mountain Pamphlets, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Female Healers, about the hidden European and American history of medicine by and for women.

Taking control of our bodies went beyond reading and writing, though. Feminists opened their own clinics in the 1970s, where women could get healthcare and information from practitioners who didn’t condescend to their patients and who made experiences like getting a pap smear, a test for cervical cancer, as comfortable and non-invasive as possible.

And in the days before home pregnancy tests and before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal, feminists learned how to end unwanted pregnancies as safely as possible. They also learned and taught each other how to perform “menstrual extractions” (terminations of early pregnancies) and even full abortions. In Chicago, the underground Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation (better known as “Jane”) provided referrals to illegal abortion providers and later learned how to do it themselves, performing perhaps as many as 11,000 such procedures. A film about Jane’s work is still available today.

These days, when you can Google pretty much anything, it’s hard to imagine just how challenging it was back then to get information about women’s health. There just wasn’t much out there when it came to gynecological well-being, and even less about women’s sexual pleasure.

And what was available was often simply wrong. Nobody’s high school sex education classes even mentioned that women possess an organ called a clitoris. You couldn’t find it on the pull-down drawings of genitalia we boys and girls were shown in our separate “health” classes either. I remember having to look the word up in the dictionary at about 14, while reading the “racy” novel Candy. (“Oh, that’s what that is!”)

In college, my friends’ therapists were giving out copies of The Power of Sexual Surrender, a pernicious little book which claimed that “the problem of sexual frigidity in women is one of the gravest problems of our times.” Its chapter on “The Normal Orgasm” assured them that real women achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration alone and that, “in the fully mature female, this sensitivity [of the clitoris] often diminishes, giving way to the vagina as the primary source of the greatest sexual pleasure.” (Just to be clear: this is a lie.) All a woman needed to do to achieve a “mature” orgasm, we were assured, was to recognize that “the sexual act in its purest form expresses the essential passivity associated with women and the aggressiveness of the male, the actor and the acted-upon.”

Imagine, then, the life-changing revelation in Anne Koedt’s 1970 essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” She confirmed what some of us had figured out for ourselves: “Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm.” (Not that many women don’t enjoy penetration, but the vast majority of us need something more.) Maybe, it finally occurred to us, we weren’t immature, frigid women; maybe we were just having bad sex.

Information about our bodies was hard to come by in the 1970s. When it was my turn to give a talk at my monthly lesbian support group meeting, I chose to research the physiology of women’s orgasms. This required a trip to my local library and rooting around in some pretty obscure medical textbooks, where I learned about the pubococcygeus muscle, which stretches between the pubic bone and the coccyx, and whose contractions are responsible for the wave-like experience of orgasm. You wouldn’t discover that, even today, simply by Googling the term.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Nor would you encounter a fact that students of human anatomy have discovered, then forgotten, then rediscovered over the centuries: that the clitoris is much bigger than that bump above the vagina. That’s just its top. The rest of it is inside and it’s huge — as much as four inches across — shaped like a double wishbone, with two inner bulbs and two outer wings. Who knew? Well, the Dutch anatomist Reinier de Graaf got part of the story. In 1672, he produced the most complete depiction to date of the thing but missed its internal workings. The curtains of ignorance were then redrawn until 1844 when the German scientist George Ludwig Kobe produced the first known drawings of the external and internal clitoris.

And yet, more than a century later, the whole organ had disappeared again. In the 1947 twenty-fifth edition of Gray’s Anatomy, that primary text and medical student’s bible on the human body, it was missing in action. For reasons now lost to history, that edition’s editor, Charles Mayo Goss, simply left it out. (It’s back in the current forty-first edition, even if with half as many index entries as “penis.”)

It took another 50 years, but in 1998 Australian urologist Helen O’Connell published a definitive description of the clitoris, with an accurate drawing, including all of its internal and external structures, revealing that it has three times the nerve endings of the homologous structure in men, the penis. That’s right; it was only a couple of decades ago that the true structure of the clitoris was finally known.

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by a conversation I had sometime around 2010. It was early in my university teaching career and my students were sitting in small groups, discussing an article when the four young women in one group all raised their hands.

“Professor Gordon, Professor Gordon!”

“Yes?” I looked into those four earnest faces.

“Professor Gordon, there’s a word here we don’t understand,” exclaimed one of them, pointing to a spot on the page.

“Oh,” I replied. “Clitoridectomy. That’s a surgical procedure practiced in some cultures. It involves cutting the clitoris, sometimes just a little bit, and sometimes removing the whole thing.” (The cultures mentioned in the article didn’t happen to include our own, even though as recently as the 1960s, some girls underwent clitoridectomies to “cure” masturbation.)

“Oh,” they said. An awkward silence followed. Then, once again, “Professor Gordon!”

“Yes?”

“What’s a clitoris?”

Mow That Grass and Pass the Scalpel

It’s easy now to make fun of our youthful attempts to understand our own genitalia, but at least we didn’t hate our vulvas. We didn’t think we needed to have our pubic hair regularly ripped out of our skin, as so many American women do today, so that they won’t be messy “down there,” so that the area around their genitals will look like a little girl’s.

This look has, in fact, become so common in online pornography that young men are often surprised to discover that adult women actually have pubic hair. Of course, maybe that’s just very young, inexperienced men — or maybe not. Last October,Glamour UK, for instance, interviewed a number of men with sexual experience. “Leon, 28” from Manchester pretty much summed things up:

“I hate any hair on a woman. My ex and I would always argue about it — she would never shave and I would always ask her to. In the end, we broke up, not entirely because of her bush, but it played a role in highlighting all our differences.”

Getting married? Better check out “The Ultimate Pre-Wedding Hair Removal Guide” on the website for the popular magazine Brides. There, you’ll be able to compare the merits and drawbacks of each method. Shaving causes “razor bumps and ingrown hair,” but never fear, not if you have the foresight to keep a little cortisone cream in the fridge. “It really works,” insists Brides writer Anka Radakovich, “and can be applied as soon as you’re done” to “cool down the razor burn”!

Looking for a more permanent solution? You could try laser hair removal. But Radakovich warns that “if you’re doing this as a permanent hair removal technique for a completely bare vag, it can grow back unevenly or cause skin discoloration, especially if you have a darker complexion,” so that might not be the best option.

Which brings us to waxing, as in paying someone to cover your pubis in warm wax, wait until it cools and hardens, and then rip the wax and the offending hair off your body. Somehow, I don’t think most men with beards would go for the clean-shaven look, if that’s what it took, but many women think they have to do so to be presentable sexual partners.

We 1970s feminists may have believed some odd things. But at least we didn’t think our vulvas were ugly. We had Betty Dodson’s drawings to show us that, in fact, our genitals are as beautiful and varied as our faces.

I wish young women still felt that way, but if the online ads for labiaplasty are any guide, many of them are unhappy indeed about the shape of the inner and outer lips of their vaginas. They want them to have the “clamshell” look of a prepubescent girl’s (or a porn star’s) vulva, with no fluted, flowery edges protruding. One local plastic surgery purveyor in my area explains why women might choose to have their inner lips sliced off to look like the ones they’ve seen on Pornhub.com:

“Many women are bothered by labia minora (inner lips) that are stretched or asymmetrical, while others may feel self-conscious of large or sagging labia majora (outer lips). Still other women may wish to augment their labia majora with fat grafting for a more pronounced appearance. These procedures, which may be performed together, are highly customizable. Our surgeons adjust their surgical techniques to suit your specific wishes.”

There are some legitimate medical reasons for performing labiaplasty; if, for instance, someone’s inner labia are so large that daily activities are uncomfortable or painful. The fact that insurance companies won’t ordinarily pay for such procedures, however, indicates clearly enough that this is generally considered a “cosmetic” form of surgery. Its purpose is to make a woman’s genitals more closely conform to an ideal of beauty which originated in some man’s imagination and which bears only a remote resemblance to a woman’s body.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think everyone’s entitled to their own sexual imagination, however much your fantasies may make me smile, rage, or laugh out loud (just as mine might for you). And much as I may dislike such denigrating portrayals of women created for male amusement, I have no desire to make them illegal. But it does make me sad that, after all this time, #MeToo notwithstanding, women in this country seem to have made so little progress towards loving our astonishingly beautiful bodies, ourselves.

Paul Manafort’s Sentence Is an Affront to Us All

Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was given 47 months in prison for his crimes on Thursday, in a jaw-dropping ruling that treated him as a good family man without priors. He only didn’t have priors because white collar criminals are so coddled in an American firmly under the thumb of the big business classes. The judge said he was “a good friend” and had lived “an otherwise blameless life.”

Even this admiring judge admitted that it was startling that Manafort showed no remorse at all.

Manafort was a lifelong lobbyist for vicious dictators with lakes of blood on their hands– his firm was known as “lobby of the Dictators.” They included Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Angola’s Jonas Savimbi. (Manafort was accused of lengthening Angola’s civil war).

I wrote last fall,

“Manafort has been convicted of lobbying for pro-Russian politicians and interests in Ukraine, of not registering as a foreign agent, and of keeping tens of millions of dollars in payments from Russian oligarchs and their Ukrainian counter-parts in banks in Cyprus while never paying any taxes on them. He got paid for doing things like circulating a false charge that Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (anti-Russian) was guilty of ordering people killed (Manafort said he wanted to “put some stink” on her). Manafort colluded with an unnamed Israeli official to weaponize “anti-Semitism” for Russian aims in Ukraine, painting Tymoshenko as an anti-Semite. He then put pressure on the Jewish figures in the Obama administration to pressure Obama to oppose Tymoshenko, in favor of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych.”

I have no insider knowledge whereby to explain the judge’s incredible leniency, other than that Washington is an Old Boy’s Club, the members of which get kid glove treatment compared to ordinary folk.

But let’s just consider some sentences for shoplifting small items from stores to compare and contrast it with Manafort’s tax avoidance to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

* A man accused of helping his girlfriend shoplift $186 worth of dog toys from a Hardware & Pet Center in Chambersburg, PA, was sentenced to as much as 23 months in prison (with a lower limit of at least 2 months). The upper limit is about half of Manafort’s sentence.

*In Napierville, Illinois in 2015, a 40-year-old man was given 2.5 years for shoplifing $500 worth of merchandise from a Walmart. Admittedly, this was part of a plea deal in which drug possession charges were dropped.

*In Topeka, a habitual offender who shoplifted a $1.47 knife was given 57 months in prison.

*Last year a 15-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing black and white Nike Air Jordan Fives, worth $180 from someone he knew slightly. A couple other boys were present, and one brought a gun to the scene, so the charge escalated to armed robbery.

*A Tennessee man who committed $46 worth of “return fraud” at a Walmart picking up items in the store and pretending to have bought them, then returning them for cash, faces 12 years in prison because the prosecutor used a legal maneuver to charge him with a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Years earlier he had shoplifted a bra from Walmart, which then issued against him a restriction from entering their property. Violating that order with intent to commit fraud could be interpreted as burglary rather than just shoplifting.

*A Florida man who shoplifted $600 in cigarette cartons but who was clearly a habitual offender was given twenty years for his crime.

Despite there being some circumstances that help explain some of these incredibly harsh sentences for relatively minor crimes against property, I think we may conclude that Manafort was treated differently than his less fortunate fellow citizens.

Scandalously differently.

 

Ilhan Omar’s Critics Did Her a Favor

As originally reported (Jewish Insider, 2/28/19), Ilhan Omar’s remarks were about how charges of antisemitism shut down criticism on Israel/Palestine.

Though it was not their intention, Ilhan Omar’s critics did her a favor: They proved the very point she made at the Progressive Issues Town Hall at Busboys and Poets bookstore in Washington, DC, last week.

Referring to herself and fellow Democratic Rep. Rashid Tlaib, who was also on the panel, Omar said:

It’s almost as if, every single time we say something, regardless of what it is we say, that is supposed to be about foreign policy or engagement or advocacy about ending oppression or the freeing of every human life and wanting dignity, we get to be labeled something, and that ends the discussion. Because we end up defending that, and nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine.

Of course, you wouldn’t know what she said or what point she was making, because the media and the politicians attacking her ignored those remarks and focused almost exclusively on a single sentence she added: “So I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Jonathan Chait’s article in New York magazine (2/28/19), which launched the days of outrage that followed, reported only on  this “allegiance” sentence with the headline “Ilhan Omar Accuses Israel Hawks of ‘Allegiance to a Foreign Country.’” Yet the article Chait linked to as his source, a rather neutral report on the event in the Jewish Insider (2/28/19), under the headline “Reps. Omar and Tlaib: Antisemitism Charges Shut Down Criticism of Israel,” contained the earlier sentences and a context for Omar’s remarks, which Chait chose to ignore.

It also included the moderator’s question to which Omar was responding, asking what

we as a community here can do to support you criticizing Israel for some of the war crimes that it has done so that it’s not seen as “you’re antisemitic”? Because you’re not criticizing the religion, you’re not criticizing Jewish people, you’re criticizing the government policies.

But Chait omitted that in his hit piece.

Omar didn’t accuse “Israel hawks” of having “allegiance to a foreign country” (New York, 2/28/19); she said that allegiance was being demanded, implicitly of lawmakers like herself.

To Chait, the sentence on its own was clearly antisemitic, repeating the old and sinister “myth of dual loyalty in which the Americanness of Jews is inherently suspect.” The doubting of the Americanness of Jews as well as Catholics, because of their supposedly overwhelming loyalty to Israel and the Vatican, is a myth that has been retired for decades. Most of the friends (Jewish and non-Jewish) I asked about the antisemitic trope had no knowledge of it, and  it’s unlikely that Omar, who at 37 is about the same age as my friends, had any either.

Chait didn’t overtly call Omar an antisemite. But he accused her of

using that cause [of Palestinian rights] to smuggle in ugly stereotypes. And whatever presumption of good faith she deserved last time should be gone now.

Chait has a clear double standard for cultural sensitivity and respect: He requires a young Muslim woman to be conversant in and circumspect of even antiquated stereotypes about Jews, while his own remark makes use of the much more current stereotype of the sneaky, shady Arab or Muslim who is not to be trusted.

Toward the end of his article, Chait said, “There should be more space in American politics to advocate criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights.” But it’s hard to extend to him the “presumption of good faith” when his article provided no space for Omar’s words about the imbalance in US politics regarding Israel and Palestine.

Omar wasn’t talking about Jewish allegiance anyway, but the demand for unquestioning support of Israel in US politics and the ban on discussions of humanitarian and human rights matters when it comes to Palestine.  The largest group of Zionists in America are Christian Zionists who support Israel at all costs, lest they have no place for the Rapture, when Jews will have the choice of conversion or eternal damnation.  But nobody calls Mike Huckabee an antisemite.

Once Chait circulated this sentence and declared what it meant, politicians, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the lead,  rushed to condemn and punish Omar for advancing antisemitic stereotypes. Rep. Juan Vargas (D.-Calif.) explicitly but unwittingly laid out exactly what Omar’s critics were actually doing when he tweeted:

It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful antisemitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community. Additionally, questioning support for the US/Israel relationship is unacceptable. Israel has and remains a stalwart ally of the United States because of our countries’ shared interests and values. I condemn her remarks and believe she should apologize for her offensive comments.

This statement illustrates Omar’s points:  The United States’ allegiance to Israel, right or wrong, is unwavering, and any questioning of Israeli policy and the Palestinian plight is “unacceptable” and will be linked to  antisemitism in order to squash debate.

If Congress were sincerely offended by antisemitism and antisemitic tropes, and not just hellbent on silencing a much-needed questioning of US support of Israel, they would have found a way to condemn Trump when he failed to mention Jews in his statement commemorating the Holocaust. They would have written a resolution condemning the use of antisemitic tropes when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R.-Calif.) singled out Jewish billionaires George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer as trying to “buy” the election—or when Rep. Jim Jordan (R.-Ohio) referred to Steyer as “$teyer,” and accused Jewish Rep. Jerry Nadler (D.-NY) of being funded by him.

But they didn’t. Because neither Trump, nor McCarthy nor Jordan ever talk about Palestinians. And it’s discussion about the treatment of Palestinians, not antisemitic tropes, that they want to silence.

Dana Milbank (Washington Post, 3/4/19) accused Omar of suggesting “that Americans who support Israel — by implication, Jews — are disloyal to the United States.”

Journalists wore their bias on their sleeve.  At the Washington Post(3/4/19), Dana Milbank likened Omar’s bigotry to that of Donald Trump, accusing her of “using President Trump’s playbook.” And Henry Olson, who (3/4/19) likened her to Rep. Steve King (R.-Iowa), the congressmember who embraces white nationalism,  demanded that Omar be punished even if she had done nothing wrong:

History gives House Democrats a clear example of what they must do. The famous Roman leader Julius Caesar divorced his wife because of accusations that she had tried to meet a lover during a female-only religious ceremony. Even though the allegations were never proved, Caesar said his wife must be beyond suspicion and sent her packing. So, too, it must be with the Democrats. If they wish to credibly maintain that they have no tolerance for bigotry in any of its forms, they must be beyond suspicion of such. They must remove Omar from all of her committees now, or forever risk that bigotry will haunt them for the remainder of her time in office.

Even if Omar did not do what people are saying she did, Olson (“a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center”) wants Democrats to treat Omar way  the same way a dictator two millennia ago punished his wife for an unproven offense. So much for loving our democratic principles and laws.

And if politicians and the mainstream media were sincerely concerned with bigotry, they would have condemned the theocratic, Islamophobic and Jewish chauvinist statement of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-NY) in his March 2017 address to AIPAC about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  “Of course, we say it is our land, the Torah says it,” he said, but Arabs and Palestinians

don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace…and that is why we, in America, must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin.

First of all, religious Palestinians and Arabs (whether they’re Muslim—which Schumer was of course talking about—or Christian) do, in fact, believe in the Torah, since both religions incorporate it. But that’s beside the point. The Democratic leader of the Senate felt comfortable attributing a geopolitical conflict to Arabs not being Jewish. This is beyond the usual Islamophobic representation of Arabs and Palestinians being unreasonable fanatics, with whom it’s impossible to negotiate; Schumer is using religion to justify an occupation, and faulting Arabs for not being Jewish.

Omar’s points about the state of US politics when it comes to Israel were on the mark, as proven by the frenzy that followed them: Regardless of what she said, Ilhad Omar was labeled, and the discussion about foreign policy and engagement and human rights and humanitarian crises in Palestine averted.

Congress was too busy working on their resolution-writing this week to debate the March 4 decision by the State Department to close the US Consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem, which functioned for decades as an American embassy for Palestinians under the authority of the US Consular General in Palestine. Renamed the Palestinian Affairs Unit, it will be folded into the US Embassy in Israel, overseen by the ambassador to Israel, marking a clear demotion of Palestinian status in relation to the United States.

Nor was there discussion in Congress this week about the United Nations report issued February 28, on violations and abuses of international humanitarian and human rights law in the Israeli response to 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The report found that “more than 6,000 unarmed demonstrators were shot by military snipers, week after week at the protest sites,” from the start of the protests on March 30, 2018, through to December 31. “Snipers targeted people clearly identifiable as children, health workers and journalists,” and in all but two of the 189 fatalities investigated, the use of live ammunition by Israeli security forces against demonstrators was found to be unlawful. Nor was there discussion of Israel’s lack of cooperation with the investigation, or their quick dismissal of the findings, which included crimes against humanity.

It’s vital to have a discussion of such abuses, backed by $3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel. Instead, we got another debate on how to label Ilhan Omar. Which was exactly her point.

As Budget Deficit Balloons, Few in Washington Seem to Care

WASHINGTON—The federal budget deficit is ballooning on President Donald Trump’s watch and few in Washington seem to care.

And even if they did, the political dynamics that enabled bipartisan deficit-cutting deals decades ago has disappeared, replaced by bitter partisanship and chronic dysfunction.

That’s the reality that will greet Trump’s latest budget, which will promptly be shelved after landing with a thud on Monday. Like previous spending blueprints, Trump’s plan for the 2020 budget year will propose cuts to many domestic programs favored by lawmakers in both parties but leave alone politically popular retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Washington probably will devote months to wrestling over erasing the last remnants of a failed 2011 budget deal that would otherwise cut core Pentagon operations by $71 billion and domestic agencies and foreign aid by $55 billion. Top lawmakers are pushing for a reprise of three prior deals to use spending cuts or new revenues and prop up additional spending rather than defray deficits that are again approaching $1 trillion.

It’s put deficit hawks in a gloomy mood.

“The president doesn’t care. The leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t care,” said former Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. “And social media is in stampede mode.”

Trump’s budget arrives as the latest Treasury Department figures show a 77 percent spike in the deficit over the first four months of the budget year, driven by falling revenues and steady growth in spending.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut bears much of the blame, along with sharp increases in spending for both the Pentagon and domestic agencies and the growing federal retirement costs of the baby boom generation. Promises that the tax cut would stir so much economic growth that it would mostly pay for itself have been proved woefully wrong.

Trump’s upcoming budget, however, won’t address any of the main factors behind the growing, intractable deficits that have driven the U.S. debt above $22 trillion. Its most striking proposed cuts — to domestic agency operations — were rejected when tea party Republicans controlled the House, and they face equally grim prospects now that Democrats are in the majority.

Trump has given no indication he’s much interested in the deficit and he’s rejected any idea of curbing Medicare or Social Security, the massive federal retirement programs whose imbalances are the chief deficit drivers.

An administration official said Friday that the president’s plan promises to balance the budget in 15 years. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss specifics about the budget before the document’s official release and spoke on condition of anonymity

Democrats have witnessed the retirement of a generation of lawmakers who came up in the 1980s and 1990s and negotiated deficit-cutting deals in 1990 and 1993. But those agreements came at significant political cost to both President George H.W. Bush, who lost re-election, and President Bill Clinton, whose party lost control of Congress in 1995.

But the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has withered with the electoral wipeout of “Blue Dog” Democrats at the hands of tea party forces over recent election cycles.

“Concern about the deficit is so woefully out of fashion that it’s hard to even imagine it coming back into fashion,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., one of his party’s few remaining deficit hawks. “This is as out of fashion as bell bottoms.”

While in control of the House, Republicans used to generate nonbinding budget blueprints that promised to balance the federal ledger by relying on a controversial plan to eventually transform Medicare into a voucher-like program. But they never pursued follow-up legislation that would actually do it.

Republicans, who seized Congress more than two decades ago promising and ultimately achieving balanced budgets during the Clinton administration, have instead focused on two major rounds of tax cuts during the Trump era and the administration of President George W. Bush in 2001.

Nor are Republicans willing to consider tough deficit-cutting steps such as higher taxes or Pentagon budget cuts. Leading Democratic presidential contenders talk of “Medicare for All” and increasing Social Security benefits instead of curbing them.

“You have to get pretty damn serious about revenue as well as defense spending, and those are two things the Republicans don’t want to bring into the conversation,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “My Democratic friends who talk about expansion of benefits. I’ve told them to ‘get real.'”

Trump has never gone to the mat for his plan to slash domestic spending such as renewable energy programs.

“If Trump can be criticized I think the perception has been that he has not fought for the spending cuts that he’s proposed,” said former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. “There’s no upside to trying to cut anything. There’s no political reward. But if you cut something there’s a lot of political downside.”

Neither is there any reservoir of the political will and bipartisan trust required to take the political heat for the tough steps it would take to rein in deficits. And it’s not like voters are clamoring for action.

“There’s been very little dialogue in the last several years about debt and deficit and how to really be able to address it,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. “It just never came up” in the 2016 election. “It still doesn’t come up.”

The deficit registered $714 billion during Trump’s first year in office but is projected to hit about $900 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which says Trump’s tax cut will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

“One of the short-term goals should be — I know it’s not a lofty goal — stopping things from getting a lot worse. It’s something the Republicans obviously were unable to do. That’s a low bar, but they couldn’t meet a low bar,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Is Sanders Enough of a Socialist?

The following is a conversation among activists Jacqueline Luqman, Eugene Puryear and Norman Solomon and The Real News Network’s Paul Jay. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network, I’m Paul Jay.

Well, Donald Trump has framed the 2020 elections as a fight between socialism and capitalism. Here’s what he had to say at the State of the Union.

DONALD TRUMP: Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt Socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

PAUL JAY: Now, I suppose a lot of people like me, when I watch the State of the Union, it’s not so much about what the president says, it’s more the applause-o-meter. Who is getting up to applaud when? And you try to read the politics of the room. And as he was saying “America will never be a socialist country,” there’s Nancy Pelosi behind him, applauding. At any rate, a town hall held by Bernie Sanders, or with Bernie Sanders, on CNN just a few days ago, Bernie Sanders was asked about socialism, and here’s what he had to say.

SPEAKER: Senator Sanders, can you make a simple, persuasive case as to why socialism is preferable to capitalism?

BERNIE SANDERS: Democratic socialism, right?

SPEAKER: Yes.

BERNIE SANDERS: OK. Let me tell you what I mean by that so we’re clear. Right now, we have a nation which prides itself on a lot of political rights. In other words, under the Constitution, thank God, you have freedom of speech, media can do its thing, even though Trump calls you an enemy of the people. How does it feel to be an enemy? That’s another story. All right.

SPEAKER: You don’t think we are.

BERNIE SANDERS: No, I don’t. I certainly do not. So we have freedom of religion, and all of that is enormously important. But you know what we don’t have? We don’t have guarantees regarding economic rights. And way back in 1944, in a little known, a little publicized State of the Union speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said something. And I’m paraphrasing him, but he said when we talk about human freedom and rights, we’ve got to understand that everybody needs a decent paying job, that people need healthcare, that people need education. And all over the world, these ideas are taking place. You go to countries in Scandinavia, of course healthcare is a right, higher education is free. They have strong preschool programs. They make sure that their elderly folks can retire in dignity.

These are not radical ideas. So what democratic socialism means to me is having, in a civilized society, the understanding that we can make sure that all of our people live in security and in dignity. Healthcare is a human right. All people should have healthcare. You can’t get ahead in this country, in this world, unless you have a decent education. We have got to, as a right, end the kinds of discrimination, the racism and the sexism and the homophobia that exist. So to me, when I talk about Democratic socialism, what I talk about are human rights and economic rights.

PAUL JAY: Eugene, what do you think?

EUGENE PURYEAR: Well, I have to say, this is one of the areas I’m most critical of Bernie. I mean, I think that he’s defining as socialism is really just a New Deal, Great Society liberalism, which certainly is good as far as it goes, it’s certainly much better than the unrealized dreams of those eras. It’s certainly a much better state of affairs than what we have now. But I think he was unable to really hit the core of the difference between capitalism and socialism and the idea that capitalism is a system where everything is produced for profit to be a commodity, and socialism is a system where the basic goods that people need to live, survive, and thrive are also not commodities. And certainly, he mentions healthcare, education, and things of that nature, but what about clothing, what about food, what about shelter?

And I think above and beyond anything else, I think also it’s to me a little bit of a naive presentation from the point of view of sort of the U.S. political structure which enshrines, in and of itself, and this is certainly the contravention of what Trump was saying, of course, property above all other interests. Certainly, that was rooted in the slave system, and the control of land that resulted in slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, that ultimately, what do you do in this kind of context in the United States when say the Fifth Amendment, for instance, comes up against the desire to be able to decarbonize the economy? I mean, it says that you can’t take property without paying people for it. Well, if the health of the planet is at stake and the cost is too high, well what are you going to do? Are you going to take over and shut down all the oil companies and save the planet or are you going to go with the U.S. Constitution?

So I think the reality is is perhaps what Bernie is portraying is as much as you can do within the U.S. system, but I think it’s not actually socialism. And I think that that is in and of itself an important distinction that I think has to be made here, that socialism is a system where profit is never going to be able to succeed over the needs of people. And I think that goes beyond what he was willing to say, despite the fact that certainly, all the things he’s saying I think, would be good and should be instituted right away. And there’s actually really almost no reason why all of them couldn’t be instituted tomorrow except for a lack of political will.

PAUL JAY: Jacqueline, how do you balance this, what’s possible within the current American political system and politics versus perhaps what actual socialism is?

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Well, when you have a current political system in which Citizens United has declared that that corporations are people so now corporations and the heads of corporations have more say in the political system than the people the political system is supposed to represent, there’s no balancing that. I mean, that system needs to be changed.

So there is no way to really reconcile this idea that America is never going to be a socialist nation in a chamber in which so many of the politicians are standing up and cheering because they’re cheering for the fact that they were going to fight to maintain the benefits they get from private interests, from the interests of private corporations that make and keep them rich. And if that means the rest of us who they are supposed to represent in that chamber get nothing and that we have to give every dime we make, if we can even get a job, to maintain this unjust predatory capitalistic system, they will do it even if they are standing there lying about this threat of socialism that really is not even a threat in this country and never really has been, but the threat of socialism taking over the United States government is as old as what 1927, 28. So this isn’t even a new argument we’re having here in our government.

PAUL JAY: Norm?

NORMAN SOLOMON: We can argue, and we need to keep talking about what socialism is, what it should be. When Francois Mitterrand became president of France, he became president as the standard bearer of the Socialist Party back in the early 80s. I mean, they call themselves socialist, that wasn’t socialism. And we’ve seen the result of that kind of bogus claim to socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We were told that was socialism. When you throw people in jail for expressing themselves, that’s not socialism, economic rights are part of it and political rights are part of it, human rights, as Bernie said, has to be central to socialism. I think from the very first words of his response to what in our political context in the U.S. is a loaded context, he asked by the questioner, “Do you support socialism?” And he said, “democratic socialism.” Unlike what is sometimes done in print media, that’s lowercase d democratic socialism. And I think, given the history of the last hundred years, it’s absolutely excellent to emphasize democracy as being essential component of socialism.

So I really believe that Bernie’s few minutes there, given the question and that he had two or three minutes, I think it’s a terrific answer. And we can be as theoretical as we want, we can argue about history, we can argue about the future, we can say we want to get from here to there in the next week. I would love that we would have socialism yesterday. We’re in the real world. We’ve got our feet on the ground, our eyes on the horizon, which should be, I believe, democratic socialism. And one of the best retorts, I think, to the baiting that mass media are already engaged in, not only the right wing but much of the mass media towards Bernie about being a democratic socialist, is to refer to the fact that in the 1930s, the trade union movement that helped bring us Social Security, that program was denounced as socialist. In the 1960s, the fight for Medicare, that was denounced as socialist. So as time goes on, I’m less and less interested in the theoretical arguments and more and more fascinated with the real, on the ground potential to transform this country in the way that Bernie Sanders is describing.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, I don’t think we should underestimate how powerful those cold war years were. The House of Unamerican Activities Committee, McCarthyism, how it transformed what was taught in the schools. You’d go at kindergarten, you’d put your hand on your heart and you’d pledge allegiance to the flag, essentially the flag of the Cold War and the rise of imperialist interventions. I think Bernie, and to some extent to give some credit to Occupy too, but the extent to which Bernie has allowed socialism to be in the discourse in a very positive way, even if it isn’t what some of us might consider actual socialism, that being said, and I give Bernie tons of credit for that, and not just Bernie, but the whole movement that gave rise to Bernie has arisen. And it’s not just Bernie anymore, there’s lots of such candidates. That being said, I think again, there’s a way he could be going further than he is without stepping so outside the bounds of what’s possible within this kind of mainstream politics.

I don’t think he talks enough about the public sector. When you talk about the oligarchy, which he does, and the power of concentrated ownership, which he does, how do you counter that? Well, you don’t counter that just because you have Medicare for all. Canada has Medicare for all, and we still have concentrated ownership of media, of most everything else in the country. We still have right wing governments and so on. So these policies, while they’re constructive and positive, they don’t counter the power of the oligarchy. Now, Medicare for All is actually something that in my mind, goes towards that direction, because you’re going to actually get rid of the private insurance companies. But if you built out, for example, public sector banking, and next time the banks say we’re too big for you to control us, and next time we go down the toilet because of our speculation you’re going to come save us. And we can say no, we now have public sector banking.

Building out the public sector and link that to democratization, because the stronger the public sector is, and the more you democratize, the more you weaken this power of the oligarchy. I think he could talk more about that. And when I’ve interviewed him and talked to him kind of about that, he agrees with that. Like I asked him once, when it comes to an infrastructure program and a jobs program, would you go like the model of direct federal government jobs or does it have to be private-public sector, which is certainly what Obama was talking about? And he said he’d support a direct hiring program, which starts to go toward strengthening the public sector. The problem is, I don’t ever hear him talking about it except when I asked him that. So I think he could go further than that. I don’t know, what do you guys think? Eugene?

EUGENE PURYEAR: Yeah, I mean, I think a few things. I definitely tend to agree with you that I think in some ways, the biggest issue is, regardless of the definitions, is the fact that Bernie just raising these issues has created what I think very clearly is a nationwide conversation from top to bottom about should we be in capitalism, should we be in socialism and what does that mean? And I think that’s a fertile moment and a very good moment, at least potentially, for organizers. I think certainly, he could go further. And I think it’s also a question from the point of view a presentation, of if you’re saying, well look, I’m a socialist but I believe that you don’t have to be a socialist to be for universal health care, which is true, that would be a different way of presenting it which I think would be more commensurate with sort of not only what he’s actually presenting, but the type of political coalition he’s trying to build, which is one that could contain socialists, people who don’t consider themselves socialist but who want to see more of the sort of crucial elements of what people need to survive be socialized and not be parceled out or rationed, if you will based, on how much your paycheck is each and every week or each and every month or whatever it may be.

And so, I think there’s that element. But I do think that it is crucial and important to have the conversation, because so many of the issues, we were having so much conversation about climate change and the Green New Deal and the original Green New Deal draft saying decarbonize the economy in 10 years. I mean, it’s difficult to see how that really happens with some of the constraints that exist in our society. Or what it really means to say let’s have universal healthcare. What happens to this massive, bloated insurance industry and everyone that works within it? I mean, I think there’s so many answers to these questions for sure, but I think almost all of them start to come up with what I view as one of the basic challenges we have in America, is that we are pretty much the only “industrialized” nation that has not revisited its constitution, which is basically the shared agreement among citizens about how we’re going to live as a society and what our most rooted values are.

And that’s a conversation we have to start in to America, to really take these things I think many people believe should be rights and enshrine them at a bedrock principles level, and also think more about what really needs to be enshrined that way if we’re going to move forward around some of these broad principles that Bernie laid out in his answer. Full racial justice and equality, reparations and so on, the decarbonization of the economy, socializing large sectors of the economy and society. And also truly, I agree, human rights. But I mean, look at some of the things that are legal, the shooting of Black people and others by the police wantonly and being covered by the courts. So I think there’s so much more things that we need to do to deepen the democratic content of our society that I think we have to have a conversation about how we go beyond just the slave owners and slave holders conception of what rights and responsibilities should be of a government or between or with us between each other.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, I think that’s an important point. Living in Baltimore has given me an entire different framing of what political rights mean. Even the Department of Justice, when they did an assessment of the Baltimore Police Department, said in their report that the constitutional rights of the people of Baltimore are violated by the police department here every single day. For much of the population of the country, there actually aren’t political rights, and that needs to be constantly repeated. And here, Jacqueline, one last word from you on this. Bernie and socialism.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: I think part of what Eugene said about reframing this discussion of human rights and what rights are, I always think about the way Americans think about liberty and freedom and how the very same people who are so focused on liberty and freedom also have a problem with the concepts of healthcare, housing, and a decent paying job as human rights. So I don’t think we are ever going to resolve this issue of what is socialism, should this society be socialist, or what kind of economy we should have if we can’t even have the discussion and agree on what human rights are. Because as long as we live in this society where our ethos, where our mythology is based on the idea of rugged individualism and that the government is not responsible to providing anything in the way of basic sustenance for its citizens, then I think all the other discussions are almost nonstarters. We’ve gotten farther than we have in a while, and I think Sanders has done a good job bringing on Medicare for all and some of these other issues to the fore, but I really don’t think we’re going to get much farther unless we address this issue of what do we really believe human rights are in this country.

PAUL JAY: Norm?

NORMAN SOLOMON: In this context, I think Eugene used a very important phrase, political coalition. At this historic moment, we have emphatically two huge imperative responsibilities. One is to fight the right, the xenophobes, the racists, the misogynists, this entire panoply of power that has fallen heavier than ever on people in the United States and consequently in much of the world, and that includes the militarization, not only further militarization of U.S. foreign policy, but also domestic militarization against people of color by the police forces, as Paul, you were just referring to. And the second imperative is to move forward a progressive agenda. And given, you might say, the objective conditions right now, a political coalition that is powered by a Democratic Socialist Movement and is open to an embracing of other progressive forces, I think that is absolutely essential.

PAUL JAY: Yeah. I think that’s a good note to end on. We have to find a way to balance what is a vision for the future, in other words, what does actual socialism, what might it look like in an American context, and it’s going to be something we’ve never seen before, with the most immediate question, a rise of fascism in the United States, a fascisization of the United States. It’s not something new, but it’s reaching a very degenerate, more advanced form right now, and we’re having serious conversations about are we even going to have a transfer of power in 22? Are we going to have some crazy event that creates a national emergency? Where would the military be? I mean, even the fact these are things that one can actually see as possible, probable, I don’t know, that’s a matter of debate. But we’re in a very specific moment here, and the need for the broadest front of unity against this fascisization is absolutely critical. It doesn’t mean we shut up in our criticism of things we think need to be criticized, but I think it has to be done in a way where broad front politics really are are what’s called for in the day.

Anyway, we’re going to continue our conversations, but for now, thanks for joining us. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Trump to Slash Funding for Renewable Energy

A senior Trump administration official has told Bloomberg News that the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would see its $2.3 billion budget slashed by about 70 percent, to $700 million, under President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget request, which will be released on Monday.

Trump, who rejects the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding the climate crisis, has repeatedly vowed to zero out federal spending on clean energy research and development (R&D). Trump proposed similarly dramatic cuts to EERE’s budget in both his fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2019 proposals.

“It’s a shutdown budget,” said Mike Carr, who served as the No. 2 official within the division under President Barack Obama. “That’s apparently what they want to signal to their base — they still want to shut these programs down,” Carr told Bloomberg.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year in grants and other financial assistance for clean energy, has financed research into technologies ranging from electric vehicles to energy projects powered by ocean waves. It has been credited with financing research to help make the cost of wind power competitive with coal and cutting the costs of LED lighting.

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have called for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, to be eliminated entirely, saying energy innovation is best left up to the private sector.

Trump said to again seek deep cuts in renewable energy funding: The Trump administration is… https://t.co/DcxsZ0RjbB

— World Solar News (@worldsolarnews) March 9, 2019

Trump to propose massive renewable energy cuts, something Republicans don’t even want https://t.co/zgzz1526hd #USRC pic.twitter.com/02H3PDmPpB

— U.S. Reality Check