Consortium News reports in “Fear of a Major Mideast War“: Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani, assassinated by the U.S. on Thursday night, “had been head of the Quds Force for 23 years. The Pentagon allegation is that he directed attacks on U.S. military during the U.S. illegal occupation of Iraq after its 2003 invasion. Soleimani was one of the men most responsible for defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria. …

“The assassination comes after Trump was impeached and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted last year. Both are facing difficult re-election campaigns in 2020 and have long portrayed Iran as the greatest enemy of Israel and the United States.”

RAED JARRAR, jarrar.raed at gmail.com, @raedjarrar
Jarrar is an Iraqi-born human rights activist and writer based in Washington, D.C. He has been on two recent accuracy.org news releases warning against such U.S. actions. He was recently quoted in USA Today. He just tweeted: “Unfortunately, the news of the U.S. assassination of Soleimani … is not only an escalation, it marks the end to the proxy war between the U.S. and Iran … now it’s just war.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Boyle’s books include Destroying World Order. See his essay, “American Militarism Threatening to Set Off World War III.”  He said today: “This attack is a violation of the UN Charter and also the War Powers Clause of the U.S. Constitution and War Powers Resolution by Congress. … Trump is wagging the dog to stave off conviction by the Senate.” In 1998, Bill Clinton launched a bombing campaign against Iraq just before his scheduled impeachment.

DAVID BARSAMIAN, barsamian at riseup.net
Barsamian is author of Targeting Iran and the forthcoming ReTargeting Iran. He was visited by the FBI following his most recent trip to Iran. He said today: “The assassination of General Qassem Soleimani is pouring gasoline on a region in flames. The Trump administration has been itching for a fight with Iran ever since it pulled out of the nuclear deal in May 2018.” Barsamian stressed the humanitarian toll of the sanctions the U.S. government has placed on Iran and the building of U.S. military bases that surround Iran. He added: “The Trump administration has threatened Iran with ‘obliteration.’ … Iran will respond to Soleimani’s killing and the possibility of a wider conflict will increase.”

DAVID SWANSON, davidcnswanson at gmail.com, @davidcnswanson
Executive director of World Beyond War, Swanson notes the militaristic policy commonalities between Trump and establishment Democrats.

Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept notes: “While warning us that Trump is the gravest threat in U.S. history, many leading Democrats have voted to give Trump unprecedented military budgets and sweeping surveillance powers.”

Swanson notes for example that Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted on New Years Eve: “The attack on our embassy in Baghdad is horrifying but predictable. Trump has rendered America impotent in the Middle East. No one fears us, no one listens to us. America has been reduced to huddling in safe rooms, hoping the bad guys will go away. What a disgrace.”

See from Ali Abunimah: “Why Trump is escalating the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.”

See “Dogs of War” by Sam Husseini about the dynamics surrounding the Clinton impeachment.

SARAH ANDERSON, sarah at ips-dc.org, @SarahDAnderson1
Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the IPS publication Inequality.org. She just wrote the piece “The Threat of War Inflates Stock Holdings of Military Contractor CEOs,” which states: “CEOs of major U.S. military contractors stand to reap huge windfalls from the escalation of conflict with Iran. This was evident in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian military official last week. As soon as the news reached financial markets, these companies’ share prices spiked, inflating the value of their executives’ stock-based pay.

“I took a look at how the CEOs at the top five Pentagon contractors were affected by this surge, using the most recent SEC information on their stock holdings.

“Northrop Grunman executives saw the biggest increase in the value of their stocks after the U.S. airstrike that killed Qasem Suleimani on January 2. Shares in the B-2 bomber maker rose 5.43 percent by the end of trading the following day.

“Wesley Bush, who turned Northrop Grunman’s reins over to Kathy Warden last year, held 251,947 shares of company stock in various trusts as of his final SEC Form 4 filing in May 2019. (Companies must submit these reports when top executives and directors buy and sell company stock.) Assuming Bush is still sitting on that stockpile, he saw the value grow by $7.4 million to a total of $94.5 million last Friday. …

“Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has a plan to deny federal contracts to companies that pay CEOs more than 150 times what their typical worker makes.

“As long as we allow the top executives of our privatized war economy to reap unlimited rewards, the profit motive for war in Iran — or anywhere — will persist.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Boyle is professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law.  Boyle was legal adviser to Rep. Henry B. González and wrote the first draft of the González Impeachment Resolution in 1991. George H. W. Bush would later write in his memoirs that if the Gulf War “drags out, not only will I take the blame, but I will probably have impeachment proceedings filed against me.”

Boyle said today: “Hypocrisies and hypocrites abound. Trump should be impeached for his attacks and threats against Iran. These are far more brazen violations of the War Powers Clause of the U.S. Constitution than anything regarding Ukraine.

“Some Republicans claim that Trump did nothing wrong regarding the Ukraine. That’s clearly wrong. Some Democrats are claiming that they are standing up for the rule of law and to prevent further illegal acts by impeaching Trump for his actions there. But that doesn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny. Trump should have been impeached for his illegal bombings in Syria. He wasn’t, so predictably, he has gone on to target Iran and is making further threats against it and Iraq.”

Boyle was on an accuracy.org news release on the War Powers Resolution, which was largely written by Rep. Paul Findley, who died last year at 98.

In 2017, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, and foreign policy speechwriter, told Politico that President Obama feared impeachment if he targeted the Syrian government:

Rhodes: “The only country in the world that was prepared to join us [in attacking the Assad government] was France. And we had no domestic legal basis. We actually had Congress warning us against taking action without congressional authorization, which we interpreted as the president could face impeachment.”

Politico: “Really? Was the prospect of impeachment actually a factor in your conversations?”

Rhodes: “That was a factor. Go back and read the letters from Boehner, letters from the Republican members of Congress. They laid down markers that this would not be constitutional.”

House Speaker John Boehner wrote to Obama in 2013: “It is essential you address on what basis any use of force would be legally justified and how the justification comports with the exclusive authority of Congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution.”

RAED JARRAR, jarrar.raed at gmail.com, @raedjarrar
Jarrar is an Iraqi-born human rights activist and writer based in Washington, D.C. He just wrote the piece “Iraq’s Vote to Kick Out U.S. Troops Reflects Growing Anti-Imperialist Movement.”

The New York Times reports: “Antiwar Protesters Across U.S. Condemn Killing of Suleiman.”

KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Kelly is with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has worked on Iraq and other peace issues for over 20 years. She said today: “Beginning in 1990, Iraqis were afflicted by both military and economic warfare, waged by the U.S. Now, President Trump threatens sanctions ‘like they’ve never seen before.’ Will hundreds of thousands more children under age five die gruesome deaths because of a new round of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions?” See “Autopsy of a Disaster: The U.S. Sanctions Policy on Iraq” from the Institute for Public Accuracy, which documents the reports of the carnage resulting from the sanctions as well as the continuously shifting legal justifications from the U.S. government.

Kelly added: “In Baghdad, during the 2002 Shock and Awe bombing, I sat outside an emergency room next to a woman convulsed in sobs. How could she tell her badly maimed teenage nephew, in surgery for amputation of both his arms, that she was now his only surviving relative? Ali learned from a surgeon that he had lost both his arms. ‘Will I always be this way?’ he asked. Ali’s agonized words beg from us an impassioned question: ‘Will we always be this way?'”

SEAN REYNOLDS, joveismad at juno.com
Reynolds, also with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, has recently been to Iran. He spoke at a one of dozens of rallies around the country over the weekend — see his remarks — and stressed the extent to which wars ultimately have support from both the Republican and Democratic Party establishments.

Liberation News reports: “Soleimani was in Iraq to ease regional tensions; then Trump said ‘Kill him.’“ The New York Times also offers reporting on this, see below. Tuesday morning, Secretary of State Pompeo denied this, saying Soleimani “was not there on a diplomatic mission trying to resolve a problem.”

DOUGLAS VALENTINE, dougvalentine77 at gmail.com. Skype: Douglas_Valentine
Valentine is the author of The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. His rare access to CIA officials has resulted in portions of his research materials being archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and John Jay College. He has written three books on CIA operations, including the Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

He said today: “As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated in April 2019 while visiting Texas A&M University, that as CIA director, ‘we lied, we cheated, we stole.’ If the CIA assassinated or lured Soleimani because he was trying to defuse tensions, the U.S. government obviously wouldn’t admit it. That’s SOP [standard operating procedure].”

In his new interview with Parsi Policy, “Soleimani’s Assassination Act of Psychological Warfare,” Valentine states: “Psychological warfare — the shaping of beliefs, and thus political and social movements — is the most highly prized and effective of all intelligence operations. …

“Like all administrations, the Trump administration has ‘stated’ policies that satisfy its political base, and it has ‘unstated’ policies that are necessary to satisfy the Establishment. The CIA conducts Trump’s ‘unstated’ policies. …

“The CIA and military have ‘long range’ strategic plans in place. For example, the military has 800 bases around the world to ensure that U.S. corporations have access to foreign markets, and that the U.S. military dominates the world.”

See Valentine’s recent interview in CovertAction Magazine: “Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine.”

The New York Times reports: “President Trump and other American officials have said that General Soleimani was in the midst of planning attacks on United States forces when he was killed. But the general may have also been working as a go-between in quiet efforts to reduce the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

“Hostility and competition for influence had grown for years between the two regional rivals, but in recent months, Iran and Saudi Arabia had taken steps toward indirect talks to defuse the situation.

“In an address to the Iraqi Parliament on Sunday, Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi of Iraq said that he was supposed to meet with General Soleimani on the morning he was killed.

“It was expected that he was carrying a message for me from the Iranian side responding to the Saudi message that we had sent to the Iranian side to reach agreements and breakthroughs important for the situation in Iraq and the region,” Mr. Mahdi said.

“The content of the messages was not immediately clear, but Mr. Mahdi’s comments suggested that the drone strike ordered by Mr. Trump may have interrupted a diplomatic back channel aimed at averting conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He just wrote the piece “There’s No Evidence Iran Is Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Americans” for The Progressive.

Newsweek reports that in response to criticism about his role in the invasion of Iraq, Biden said: “I don’t respond to Bernie’s ridiculous comments. … Bernie’s got enough baggage.” The Hill reports: “In response to an Iowa voter who expressed concern about Biden’s foreign policy record, the former vice president over the weekend said that he opposed the Iraq War ‘from the very moment’ it began in 2003, according to CNN.

“’The president then went ahead with “Shock and Awe,” and right after that — and from the very moment he did that, right after that — I opposed what he was doing and spoke to him,’ Biden said of President Bush on Saturday.”

Zunes has noted: “More than three months after U.N. inspectors returned, Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.’ He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’

“He then co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush and the invasion.

“Despite the fact that three months of unfettered inspections had revealed none of the chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear programs, or sophisticated delivery systems Bush and Biden claimed Iraq possessed, Biden insisted in May 2003 that, ‘There was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.’” See accuracy.org news release: “Biden’s Escalating Iraq War Lies.”

REESE ERLICH, ReeseErlich2 at hotmail.com, @ReeseErlich
Erlich is author of Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis and is interviewing sources in Iran to get first-hand reactions to the assassination.

See recent interview with him: “What’s really going on with the US and Iran?” In response to the question: “Does Iran pose a danger to U.S. national interests?” Erlich responded: “Iran’s government is a right-wing, religious-based regime that represses its own people. It seeks regional influence, mainly in countries with large Shia populations such as Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain, but also Syria. Washington cares little about human rights violations in Iran or anywhere else. It wants to reestablish a pro-U.S. regime in Iran that will allow U.S. oil companies to once again dominate the economy. The people of the U.S. have no national interest in protecting oil company profits. Recent events have shown that people in the region don’t want to be dominated by any foreign power, whether the U.S. or Iran.”

In October, Jefferson Morley wrote the piece “Is Israel Targeting Iran’s Top General For Assassination?”

Fox News is now reporting: “Netanyahu says Israel should ‘stay out’ of fallout from U.S. killing of Soleimani, per report.”

But Morley notes that Israel “began striking at the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq last year” — see partial list below.

JEFFERSON MORLEY, morleyj at gmail.com, @jeffersonmorley
Morley is editor of The Deep State. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

He just wrote the piece “Trump Fulfills the Wishes of Israel’s Mossad,” which states: “Last October Yossi Cohen, head of Israel’s Mossad, spoke openly about assassinating Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“He knows very well that his assassination is not impossible,” Cohen said in an interview. Soleimani had boasted that Israel tried to assassinate him in 2006 and failed.

“’With all due respect to his bluster,’ Cohen said, ‘he hasn’t necessarily committed the mistake yet that would place him on the prestigious list of Mossad’s assassination targets.’ …

“Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, under indictment for criminal charges, was the first and only national leader to support Trump’s action, while claiming that that Trump acted entirely on his own.

“’Just as Israel has the right to self-defense, the United States has exactly the same right,’ Netanyahu told reporters in Greece. ‘Qassem Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of American citizens and other innocents, and he was planning more attacks.’

“In recent years, Soleimani led two successful Iranian military operations: the campaign to drive ISIS out of western Iraq in 2015 and the campaign to crush the jihadist forces opposed to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The United States and Israel denounced Iran’s role in both operations but could not prevent Iran from claiming victory.”

July 31, 2019: Jewish News Syndicate reported: “A senior commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Abu Alfazl Sarabian, was killed in Iraq in an attack by ‘Israel and the United States’ on July 19, according to Iran’s Young Journalists Club news agency.”

August 1, 2019: The Wall Street Journal reported: “Israeli Jets Appear to Have Struck Iraq for the First Time Since 1981.”

August 20, 2019: Times of Israel reported: “Netanyahu hints Israel behind strikes on Iraq, says Iran not immune anywhere.”

August 23, 2019: AP reported: “An Israeli airstrike on an Iranian weapons depot in Iraq, confirmed by U.S. officials, is threatening to destabilize security in the volatile country that has struggled to remain neutral in the conflict between Washington and Tehran.”

September 10, 2019: Haaretz reported: “Report: 21 Iraqi Militia Members Killed in Explosion in Iran-linked Arms Depot.” “It remains unclear who is behind the blast however reports have linked the incident to a series of recent attacks, some of which have been attributed to Israel.”

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Porter is co-author of a book on the U.S.-Iran crisis — From CIA Coup to the Brink of War — due out Jan. 24. His past books include Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

He said today: “It is widely believed in the U.S. that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, but if you follow the evidence that I documented in Manufactured Crisis, it is clear that Iran’s nuclear program was never designed to produce a nuclear weapon.”

The American Conservative is due to publish a piece by him shortly: “The Killing of Soleimani: Another Gulf of Tonkin Deception,” in which he reports that on Dec. 27 “a rocket attack on the K1 Iraqi base near Kirkuk killed an American contractor, as the ‘Operation Inherent Resolve’ command confirmed. The Trump administration immediately went into crisis mode, discussing both killing Soleimani and retaliatory strikes against Kataib Hezbollah. …

“If there was indeed an investigation that turned up information indicating that Kataib Hezbollah was responsible, it would certainly have been released publicly, but no further information on the incident has been forthcoming from either Iraqi or U.S. commands. The only specific information available was a Reuters report from ‘security sources’ who ‘said security forces found a launchpad for Katyusha rockets inside an abandoned vehicle near the base,’ which further deepened the mystery. But Pompeo was eager for the United States to provoke a military confrontation with Iran, just as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was eager to begin airstrikes against North Vietnamese targets in 1964.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Boyle is professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He said today regarding moves in Congress on Iran: “The Kaine resolution and the Slotkin resolution are riddled with so many holes that Trump/Pompeo et al. will drive a truck through them. The legislation proposed by Ro Khanna and Sanders has some problematic rhetoric, which should be dropped, but it is not in the operative provisions and it is consistent with the War Powers Resolution and the War Powers Clause of the Constitution and the United Nations Charter and would make a real difference.”

Boyle noted: “Slotkin’s — who notably came out of the CIA — resolution talks of the president being free to act in case of ‘an imminent armed attack.’ This is not consistent with the War Powers Resolution and will likely assist Trump committing aggression.

“Part of the reason we have these continuous wars is that Congress has failed to live up to its responsibilities. I advised Rep. Henry B. González and wrote the first draft of the Gonzalez Impeachment Resolution, introduced in 1991. George H. W. Bush would later write in his memoirs that if the Gulf War ‘drags out, not only will I take the blame, but I will probably have impeachment proceedings filed against me.’ So that might have helped stop the first president Bush from trying to go to Baghdad in 1991.

“Rep. Robert F. Drinan tried to impeach over Nixon’s bombings and got shot down by most of the rest of Congress. If they had lived up to their responsibilities then, we’d live in a much better world.” See New York Times report from Aug. 1, 1973 on the first moves to impeach Nixon — over bombing Cambodia.

Boyle advised Sen. Patrick Moynihan and Rep. Dan Crane in the first use of the War Powers Resolution, after Reagan placed Marines in Lebanon. He added: “Unfortunately, a ‘compromise’ was struck and predictably led to disaster with the Marine barracks bombing.” See New York Times report from Sept. 21, 1983: “Congress And Reagan Back Compromise On War Powers Keeping Marines In Lebanon.”

Boyle added: “Part of the problem is my profession. As Noam Chomsky just noted: ‘there is a respected profession, called “international lawyers and law professors,” who can learnedly explain that words don’t mean what they mean.’”

See accuracy.org news release just after Clinton’s 1998 bombing of Iraq on the eve of his scheduled impeachment, featuring Boyle and the late head of the Center for Constitutional rights, Michael Ratner.

For more crucial background, including the Obama administration’s fears that he would be impeached if he bombed Syria, see recent accuracy.org news release: “Why Not Impeach Trump for War Crimes?”

Boyle has been featured on several accuracy.org news releases with Paul Findley, the main author of the War Powers Resolution who died last year at 98.

CommonDreams reports: “#JoeVotedForTheWar Trends After Sanders Camp Fires Back at Biden’s Denials of Support for Iraq Invasion.” Julie Hollar recently wrote for FAIR: “Steady Hand Joe: Turning Biden’s support for Iraq War into foreign policy ‘experience.’” Former Sen. John Kerry has been outspoken in his defense of Biden’s Iraq invasion record. See “Kerry’s Endorsement of Biden Fits: Two Deceptive Supporters of the Iraq War” by IPA executive director Norman Solomon.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting: “U.S. Warns Iraq It Risks Losing Access to Key Bank Account if Troops Told to Leave.”

Jim Lobe and Derek Davison write in Responsible Statecraft: “Has the Trump Administration Now Launched a ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Against Iraq?” Asking: “In the last three years, Trump has increasingly aligned Washington’s Middle East policies with Netanyahu. He’s slashed aid to the Palestinians, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He’s withdrawn from and systematically violated the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] ), declared the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] a terrorist organization, assassinated Soleimani, and pursued his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran. Do his latest moves to bully and threaten (possibly with support for partition) Iraq constitute a new ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and an even greater alignment with the Israeli Right?”

The prior champion of partitioning Iraq was Biden; see from the July 30, 2007 New York Times: “Biden plan for ‘soft partition’ of Iraq gains momentum.”

IMAD KHADDURI, khadduri.imad at gmail.com
Now retired in Toronto, Khadduri is author of the book Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions and blogs at Free Iraq. He worked on the Iraq nuclear program and left the country in the late 1990s. See a piece in the Irish Times from Jan 6, 2003 on him: “Iraq has no N-weapons, claims expatriate scientist.”

In 2006, he appeared on an accuracy.org news release: “Myth: Israel’s Strike on Iraqi Reactor Hindered Iraqi Nukes.” Khadduri states that the Iraqi nuclear program was peaceful — until Israel bombed their Osirak Iraqi reactor in 1981.

RAED JARRAR, jarrar.raed at gmail.com, @raedjarrar
Jarrar is an Iraqi-born human rights activist and writer based in Washington, D.C. He just wrote the piece “Iraq’s Vote to Kick Out U.S. Troops Reflects Growing Anti-Imperialist Movement.”

He was recently quoted by USA Today: “The U.S. and Iran are seen by the majority of Iraqis as partners in crime when it comes to supporting these sectarian militias,” Jarrar said. “The right move is to de-escalate, withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq, and end U.S. military aid to the Iraqi government and its deadly sectarian militias.”

CNN and the DNC are holding a debate this evening.

JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar at fair.org, @FAIRmediawatch
Hollar is senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project. She just wrote the piece: “Steady Hand Joe: Turning Biden’s support for Iraq War into foreign policy ‘experience.'”

She writes: “If journalists were consistently calling out Biden’s Iraq War lies — not to mention reminding viewers and readers that the war cost hundreds of thousands of human lives, aside from a financial cost in the trillions of dollars — their worn-out tropes about Biden’s foreign policy ‘steadiness’ would be incredibly difficult to sustain.” See from FAIR: “Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline.”

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini wrote the piece “With this week’s debate, Joe Biden is now pushing his Iraq war falsehoods to the max,” which was published by Salon in September.

Husseini said today: “While Biden and his surrogates like John Kerry continue to falsely claim that he was not for the Iraq invasion, the Sanders camp has rightly highlighted more documentation, including video, of his support for the Iraq invasion after it happened, like his statement about Bush at the Brookings Institution in July 2003: ‘The president of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.’

“But it’s the tip of the iceberg. That address to Brookings (video) itself contains brazen pro-war falsehoods, with Biden claiming that Saddam Hussein ‘violated every commitment that he made. He played cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors. He failed to account for the huge gaps in weapons declarations that were documented by UN weapons inspectors and submitted by them to the UN Security Council in 1998, and every nation in that Council believed he possessed those weapons at that time. He refused to abide by any conditions.’

“It’s a pack of lies. The Iraqi government released a massive amount of information in 2002, it agreed to allow the UN weapons inspectors in well before the Congressional vote that authorized war — a vote that Biden has claimed was justifiable to give Bush a stronger hand in getting inspectors into Iraq. Additionally, the prior weapons inspection regime, UNSCOM, was ended in 1998 not because Saddam Hussein kicked them out, but because Bill Clinton ordered them withdrawn on the eve of his scheduled impeachment vote to make way for the Desert Fox bombing campaign.

“It’s remarkably fitting that the Biden camp has put out Kerry on this issue since Kerry’s falsifications regarding Iraq are remarkably similar to Biden’s. Kerry might be the Democratic senator whose record helped the Iraq war as much as Biden’s. This notably led to his contortions in the 2004 election when he was the Democratic Party nominee and lost to George W. Bush.

“When I questioned Kerry in 2011 about his vote for the Iraq invasion, he claimed that ‘I didn’t vote for the Iraq war. I voted to give the president authority that he misused and abused. And from the moment he used it, I opposed that.’ Another lie. Kerry actually attacked the notion of a withdrawal from Iraq at that point, even saying in December of 2003: ‘I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy,’ effectively taking position even more militaristic that Bush.” Also see from August 2004 from CNN: “Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war.”

Husseini added: “It’s remarkable how little scrutiny Biden has gotten for his role in the Iraq invasion. Sanders has mostly criticized Biden’s vote, but Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been criticized by leading analysts and weapons inspectors for the hearings he presided over that led to war. Tulsi Gabbard, viewed by many as an antiwar candidate, has outright let Biden off the hook. At a debate last year, Gabbard said of Biden: ‘He was wrong — he said he was wrong.’ Thus, Biden may be positioned to become the Democratic nominee — and face Trump in the general election — with minimal scrutiny for his major role in the worst policy decision of our lifetimes. He’s also in a worse position to take on Trump’s phony ‘America First’ isolationism than Hillary Clinton was in 2016.”

See interview with Husseini: “The Entire U.S. Establishment Helped Lie Their Way into the Iraq War.” And for FAIR: “Film Official Secrets Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”

Yahoo News is reporting: “#CNNisTrash trending for perceived bias against Bernie Sanders at Democratic debate.” See from The Intercept: “At Iowa Debate, Bernie Sanders’s Biggest Opponent Was CNN.”

JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar at fair.org, @FAIRmediawatch
Hollar is senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project, which will feature a piece on last night’s debate this afternoon. She recently wrote the piece: “Steady Hand Joe Turning Biden’s support for Iraq War into foreign policy ‘experience.'”

She noted that Biden continued with his pattern of lying about Iraq without comment from the moderators of last night’s debate. Said Biden: “I said 13 years ago it was a mistake to give the president the authority to go to war if, in fact, he couldn’t get inspectors into Iraq to stop what — thought to be the attempt to get a nuclear weapon. It was a mistake, and I acknowledged that.”

As Hollar noted in her recent piece: “In the July debate, Biden was asked about his October 2002 vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq; he responded with an outlandish claim: ‘From the moment “shock and awe” started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress.'”

It was an obvious falsehood; Biden continued to defend his vote until more than three years later (‘Meet the Press,’ 11/27/05), when he first called it a ‘mistake’ — and even then, not because the war itself was wrong, but because ‘we went too soon. We went without sufficient force. And we went without a plan.’ (At that point, support for the war had tanked to the point where people who believed the Iraq War wasn’t worth it outnumbered those who thought it was by 2-to-1.)”

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Consortium News yesterday published his piece “Biden Has Been Lying About His Record on Iraq for Years.”

He said today: “It fits official agendas to focus on ‘Warren vs Sanders’ — partly because it lets Biden off the hook on Iraq, just as there is finally some attention to foreign policy. And people hear the word ‘mistake’ and want to end it there.

“But it’s lies all the way down with Biden regarding war, and especially the Iraq invasion because his actual position is indefensible. He talks about Bush not being able to ‘get inspectors into Iraq’ — but Iraq agreed to allow the inspectors back in mid-September 2002 — just after IPA had organized a delegation to that country. Biden (see his floor speech) didn’t vote to authorize war until Oct. 11.

“And it should be noted that the inspectors had to be let back in not because — as Biden himself has claimed — Saddam Hussein ‘kicked them out’ — but because Bill Clinton got the UN to withdraw them in 1998 for the Desert Fox bombing campaign just before his scheduled impeachment vote.

“Bush similarly withdrew the weapons inspectors in 2003 to launch the bombing that began the invasion in 2003. If Biden had honestly been fooled by Bush and thought that Bush wanted the Congressional vote for some kind of leverage regarding weapons inspections, then he would have denounced Bush the moment the bombs dropped — as Biden, at times, claims he did. But he didn’t. Biden backed Bush until — because Iraqis were blowing themselves up — the war finally became unpopular in the U.S. years later.

“But it’s kind of outlandish to think that someone like Biden could be fooled rather than at times wanting to pretend to be fooled by Bush. From the publicly available evidence, before the invasion, IPA put out a series of news releases with headlines like ‘White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit.'”

Regarding Biden’s claims of Iraq moving toward a nuclear weapon, see Newsweek report before the invasion cited on FAIR’s Iraq invasion timeline: General Hussein Kamel “the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told weapons inspectors that ‘after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapon stocks and the missiles to deliver them.'”

Also see former Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri in the Irish Times from Jan 6, 2003: “Iraq has no N-weapons, claims expatriate scientist.” Khadduri was just featured on an accuracy.org news release: “Completing the Circle? Biden Helped Bush with Iraq Invasion; Is Trump Resurrecting Biden’s Iraq Partition Scheme?”

Husseini added: “This week marks 28 years that the U.S. has been bombing Iraq. Unless you want to make it another 28, with all the mystery and threats that entails, there needs to finally be a reckoning.”

Today, six national organizations representing millions of progressive activists issued “A Progressive Unity Statement on the Democratic Presidential Primary.” The signers include groups that support Bernie Sanders or support Elizabeth Warren or currently are not supporting any candidate for president.

The signing organizations are Our Revolution, the Sunrise Movement and RootsAction.org (all supporting Sanders); the Working Families Party (supporting Warren); and Justice Democrats and Democracy for America (currently not supporting any presidential candidate).

JEFF COHEN, jeff at rootsaction.org, @Roots_Action

Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org. He said today: “When RootsAction initiated this statement a few months ago, Sanders and Warren were ‘playing nicely together.’ And the thrust of the ‘Progressive Unity’ statement is as true today as it was then: if supporters of Sanders and Warren don’t cooperate in the Iowa caucuses and before July’s national convention, neither of these two progressive candidates will likely be the Democratic nominee. Instead, a corporate Democrat will get the nomination, which could lead to re-election of faux-populist Trump.”

From the statement: “In 2016, mainstream conventional wisdom asserted that Hillary Clinton would easily triumph over Trump. Today, some still argue for a return to pre-Trump policies and politics as the safest path to victory. We disagree. Going ‘back to the future’ does not offer the best path to Trump’s defeat. Nor does it move our country forward in terms of the enormous challenges and inequities facing the American people.

“We offer this statement as independent organizations. Some support Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or are not currently supporting any candidate for president. For those with a declared preference, this statement in no way signals the slightest decrease in that commitment. Instead, this statement is a shared declaration of our belief that the surest way to defeat Trump is for the Democratic Party to nominate either Warren or Sanders, as these are the candidates best able to energize voters by providing a vision of a decent society and a fair economy. This vision is sorely needed, as is an administration that will implement far-reaching reforms toward a more just society.

“Sanders and Warren, as well as their campaigns and supporters, will need to find ways to cooperate. The crossfire amplified by the media is unhelpful and does not reflect the relationship between two Senate colleagues who broadly worked well together for most of the last year. We hope to build solidarity between delegates affiliated with these two candidates prior to the convention and will encourage the campaigns to work towards a unified convention strategy after the final primaries on June 2nd.“

Rev. GRAYLAN S. HAGLER, gshagler at verizon.net, @graylanhagler
Hagler is senior pastor at the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C. which is having a Martin Luther King service on Sunday. He is also chair of Faith Strategies, which works to “insure that human, civil and workers rights are promoted throughout the society and in public discourse.”

In his final years many are still unaware that King focused more on fighting poverty, launching the Poor People’s Campaign. During actions with the Poor People’s Campaign in 2018, Rev. Hagler was arrested at a protest for voting rights — see: “D.C. pastor shackled, held 27 hours for praying on Supreme Court steps.” He had his passport taken from him and had to report to authorities on a weekly basis.

See from the Atlantic in 2013: “Martin Luther King’s Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans.”

Also often overlooked is that in King’s final year, he was perhaps the most prominent critic of the Vietnam War. At the Riverside Church in New York City exactly a year before his assassination, King gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech: “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

After King was attacked for his remarks at Riverside, including by media such as the New York Times and Time magazine, he spoke out even more passionately. From the pulpit of his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta later that month, on April 30, 1967, he would deliver the sermon “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” in which he rebuked the major media outlets: “There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward [segregationist Selma, Ala. sheriff] Jim Clark!’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!’ There is something wrong with that press!”

ARUN GUPTA, arun.indypendent at gmail.com, @arunindy
Gupta is an investigative reporter published by The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The Intercept, and dozens of other publications.

He said today: “Since President Donald Trump rolled out the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) in January 2019, more than 56,000 asylum-seekers have been forced back to Mexico. Refugee camps have sprung up in Mexico in some of the most dangerous cities in the Americas.”

Gupta is currently visiting a camp of 2,500 asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas. See video of a tour around the camp. He said: “Residents have escaped violent gangs in Central America, paid bribes to cross borders at risk of death, and been kidnapped by deadly cartels and police once in Mexico. Those who survived the journey to Matamoros have been waiting weeks and months, pinning their hopes of gaining asylum into the United States. They express grave fear of returning to their countries, they don’t want to stay in Mexico because of similar dangers, and they can’t enter the United States because Trump is blocking them to whip up xenophobia and nationalism among his base this election year. By September 2019, of 9,500 asylum-seekers whose cases had been completed under MPP, only 11 were granted asylum. Because of this, the Matamoros camp is becoming permanent even as the U.S. and Mexican governments avoid designating residents as refugees, which would trigger legal responsibilities.

“The U.S. government is creating a new status of people on its border, with even less rights than official refugees. Filling the gap are civil society groups from both sides of the border who provide medical aid, meals, legal counsel, bedding, clothing, and tents. But one of the main beneficiaries of MPP has been drug cartels that profit from kidnapping, smuggling, and services and housing that the refugees require. The Matamoros camp itself is a new type of urban space appearing around the world. It’s part of a trend of people from the Americas to Europe to Asia fleeing war, violence, and climate chaos who lack basic rights. … They are concentrated in an area that is profitable to corporations involved in militarizing the border, powerful criminal gangs that prey on the migrants, and used by ethno-nationalist politicians like Donald Trump to whip up fear and hatred.”

The Hill reports: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in critiquing fellow Democratic presidential primary opponent Joe Biden’s Social Security record.

“’Bernie Sanders and I established the ‘Expand Social Security Caucus” in the Senate,’ Warren told Politico. ‘As a senator, Joe Biden had a very different position on Social Security, and I think everyone’s records on Social Security are important in this election.'”

NANCY ALTMAN, via Linda Benesch, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @SSWorks
Altman is president of Social Security Works and co-author of Social Security Works! Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All. She was instrumental in fighting back against the Bowles-Simpson Commission and moving the conversation in the Democratic Party from cutting Social Security to expanding it. She is very concerned that if elected President, Biden could pursue a Social Security cutting “grand bargain” similar to Bowles-Simpson.

She released a statement today: “Vice President Joe Biden recently claimed that the Bernie Sanders campaign ‘doctored’ a clip of a 2018 speech, to make it appear that he supports cutting Social Security. The truth is that the clip is in no way doctored. Indeed, the full speech is worse than the clip, because it includes Biden saying that Social Security ‘needs adjustments.’ That’s well known D.C. insider speak for ‘cut benefits.’ Biden’s campaign now claims that the adjustments he had in mind were benefit expansions, but this explanation is not credible. When politicians want to expand Social Security, which is extremely popular, they say so. They don’t use euphemisms like ‘adjustments.’ Additionally, the 2018 speech must be viewed in the context of Biden’s 40-year record of being open to benefit cuts. At various times, he’s expressed openness to raising the retirement age, reducing cost-of-living adjustments, and means testing.

“Now, Biden is running for president on a platform of expanding, not cutting, Social Security. This is both smart politics and wise policy, because the nation is facing a retirement income crisis. But Biden’s past record on Social Security, combined with his frequently expressed desire to work with Congressional Republicans, is still cause for concern. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he wants to work with the next Democratic President — on cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That begs the question: Is Biden’s newfound commitment to Social Security stronger than his desire for bipartisan dealmaking?”

See from Ryan Grim from The Intercept: “Fact Check: Joe Biden has Advocated Cutting Social Security for 40 Years.” He quotes extensively from Biden’s record: “After a Republican wave swept Congress in 1994, Biden’s support for cutting Social Security, and his general advocacy for budget austerity, made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s. 

“’When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,’ he told the Senate in 1995. ‘I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.’ (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)”

JOSEPH N. DiSTEFANO, joed at inquirer.com, @PhillyJoeD
DiStefano is a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of Comcasted: How Ralph and Brian Roberts Took Over America’s TV, One Deal at a Time.

He recently  wrote the piece “Joe Biden’s Friends and Backers Come Out on Top — at the Expense of the Middle Class” for The Nation, which states: “It’s a ritual expression of what locals call the Delaware Way, a bipartisan contrast to angry national politics. The Delaware Way can be useful for elected officials — and their friends in business. And family. There’s an axiom often repeated in his Senate years by Joe Biden’s staff: ‘Joe says that when someone helps his family, it’s just like helping Joe,’ recited Sam Waltz, a Wilmington business consultant who covered Biden’s first Senate reelection campaign as a young reporter.

“Soon after Biden was first elected in 1972, banks from three states lined up to finance his brother James Biden’s new disco in suburban Wilmington. When the club defaulted, Joe Biden blamed the banks for exploiting his 23-year-old sibling and for pressing his office to get their money back. (They didn’t.) Despite this, over the years, many Biden-related projects have proved irresistible to local, national, and lately, Chinese businesspeople. …

“In 2008, a month before Biden was elected vice president, [John] Hynansky [of Winner Auto Group] made his biggest political donation: $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. The next summer, Biden told a roomful of Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv, ‘My very good friend John Hynansky, a very prominent businessman from Delaware, is here.’ That fall, Winner won its first U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) loan, in the amount of $2.5 million. …

“Given the Trump family’s penchant for mixing personal and official business, it’s tempting to dismiss the Biden clan’s affairs as no crime, no foul. But Biden’s friends and backers have won victories that cost the middle-class Americans he claims to champion dearly. …

“In 1996, Biden’s cozy relationship with the banks was used against him. A Republican challenger for his Senate seat complained that MBNA’s No. 3 executive, John R. Cochran, had bought Biden’s Greenville house for the full $1.2 million list price, despite a weak housing market. MBNA stuck with Biden; even after Wilmington’s News Journal published an internal MBNA letter coordinating employee donations to him, he won reelection easily.

“MBNA then hired his son Hunter Biden, fresh out of Yale Law School, as a management trainee. (He stuck out among the mostly state and Catholic college alumni who worked at the bank.) The New York Times reported that when Hunter Biden left in 2000 for Washington, D.C., and a new lobbying firm, Oldaker, Biden & Belair, MBNA kept him on a $100,000 annual retainer — not to lobby his father, he said, but for advice on ‘Internet and privacy law.’

“With U.S. credit card debt doubling every five years, defaults and bankruptcies rose, too. Joe Biden joined the Republican lawmakers pushing new bankruptcy reforms that would make it tougher for individuals to write off a range of consumer loans. …

“President Trump’s conflicts may be bigger and bolder and more likely to spark criminal charges or even corrupt U.S. policy. But is this really the best Democrats can do: to point out that Trump is worse? They tried that in 2016 — and it didn’t end well.”

JEREMY KUZMAROV, jkuzmarov2 at gmail.com
Kuzmarov is co-author of the new book The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce.

He said today: “While the Democratic impeachment managers have accused Trump repeatedly of dishonesty — often with good reason — they themselves have twisted the truth to serve their own political agenda.

“Impeachment manager Adam Schiff, for example, claimed that ‘more than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies’ and that the military aid [which Trump subverted] was for ‘such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, radar… and other support for the war effort.’

“While the military aid may have assisted the war effort, Schiff’s comments are misleading because the majority of those killed have been Eastern Ukrainians who died at the hands of the Ukrainian military that the U.S. has armed — not the Russians. …

“At the hearings, Schiff frequently referenced the danger of ‘Russian expansion’ and its efforts to ‘remake the map of Europe’ and quoted a witness who stated that ‘the U.S. aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.’ …

“By spreading misleading or outright false information about Russia and Ukraine, and drumming up anti-Russian sentiment, the consequences of the hearings, however, could be even more damaging than the Trump presidency.”

Kuzmarov also recently wrote the piece “Biden’s Shameful Foreign Policy Record Extends Well Beyond Iraq” for Counterpunch. A piece on Schiff is slated to be published Tuesday on Counterpunch and on Antiwar.com. His prior books include Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State and Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century.

RAMZY BAROUD, ramzybaroud at gmail.com, @RamzyBaroud
Baroud is a syndicated columnist, editor of The Palestine Chronicle and a senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs in Istanbul. He is author of the new book These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons.

In the U.S. until Thursday, Baroud said today: “The ‘Deal of the Century’ is not a ‘peace plan,’ nor was it ever intended to be, despite what its chief architect and White House adviser Jared Kushner has been claiming.

“It is yet another propagandist U.S. government political undertaking justified by the false notion that it is in the best interest of the American people that Israel remains the regional hegemon and is enabled to swallow the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories. It’s a green light for further suffocation of Palestinian freedom.

“While this charade is taking place in Washington, the prospect of a real just peace is dimmer than ever; the Israeli military machine continues to occupy Palestinian land and to confiscate more territories for the expansion of its illegal settlement projects; Gaza remains under a hermetic siege; and over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners are still in Israeli jails, hundreds of them held without due process or a trial.

“No real peace can possibly be achieved without first and foremost ending the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. The ‘Deal of the Century’ is a political document aimed at propping up the right-wing policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and creating the needed media hype and distraction to give a respite to an embattled U.S. president.”

Baroud’s past books include The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story.

ROB RICHIE, [currently in Iowa] rr at fairvote.org, @FairVote
Richie is president of FairVote, a nonpartisan electoral reform organization.

He just wrote a piece for the Chicago Tribune in which he states: “Iowa at least gives supporters of weaker candidates a backup vote. If, for example, a candidate earns 5 percent at a caucus and isn’t viable for that precinct, those voters can move to have their vote count for their next choice who has enough support to win delegates. Half of all Iowa Democrats may well end up supporting a backup choice. This makes more votes count, and rewards candidates who can help unify the party by picking up support from trailing candidates.

“But it still doesn’t change the real potential that the ‘winner’ might have lost badly in a head-to-head matchup against the second-place finisher. That’s why parties should fully embrace ranked-choice voting. One of the year’s most encouraging developments is that early Democratic voters in Nevada and all Democratic voters in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas and Wyoming will cast ranked-choice ballots in their party-run presidential contests.

“With ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of choice: first, second and so on. If voters’ first choice has enough support to win delegates, their ballots will count for that candidate. Otherwise, those ballots will end up counting for the candidate ranked next who is viable.”

See FairVotes resources on “RCV for Presidential Nominations.”

FairVote commissioned YouGov to conduct a national poll of 1,002 likely Democratic presidential primary voters in the fall, see Vox report: “Elizabeth Warren leads Joe Biden in ranked-choice poll.”

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, kevin at shadowproof.com, @kgosztola
Managing editor of Shadowproof, Gosztola’s original Twitter thread of a week ago about new Democratic National Committee moves went viral  — see from Commondreams: “Tom Perez Stacks 2020 Convention Committees With ‘From the Swamp’ Nominations.” Also see, from John Nichols of The Nation: “The DNC’s Move to Accommodate Bloomberg Stirs Outrage in Iowa.”

See Gosztola’s interview with Marc Steiner of The Real News: “Dems Load Platform Committee to Stop Progressive Movement.” Gosztola recently wrote the piece: “DNC Defends Diverse Group of Corporate Democrats Appointed to Convention Committees,” which states: “Faced with a backlash, the Democratic National Committee defended the secretive manner in which dozens of lobbyists, corporate consultants, party insiders, think tank board members, and pro-Israel Democrats were nominated by DNC Chair Tom Perez to committees for the 2020 national convention.

“Seventy-five individuals were appointed to the Platform, Rules, and Credentials Committees on January 25 during a DNC executive committee meeting. The current membership of this executive committee is unclear.

“Two chairs and four vice-chairs were appointed to oversee each of the committees. Thirty-one spots on each committee were filled.

“Nearly all of the appointees endorsed Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign. Many endorsed Clinton early in 2015, but the DNC said it does not consider ‘past endorsements’ when filling committees.

“The DNC claimed ‘high-profile’ supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders were appointed to the committees, but that is false. Only one ‘high-profile’ supporter was appointed to the Platform, Rules, and Credentials Committees.”

The Intercept reports: “Sanders Campaign’s Internal Caucus Numbers Show Them Leading Iowa, With Biden a Distant Fourth.”

Max Blumenthal reports in The Grayzone: “Pro-Israel Buttigieg backer Seth Klarman is top funder of group behind Iowa’s disastrous voting app.”

Monday night, Chris Hayes asked Democratic Party consultant David Plouffe about his ties to the firm in question, Shadow Inc. and its backer, ACRONYM.

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, kevin at shadowproof.com, @kgosztola
Managing editor of Shadowproof, Gosztola’s just had a viral Twitter thread on Shadow Inc. His Twitter thread of a week ago about new Democratic National Committee moves also went viral  — see from Commondreams: “Tom Perez Stacks 2020 Convention Committees With ‘From the Swamp’ Nominations.” Gosztola recently wrote the piece: “DNC Defends Diverse Group of Corporate Democrats Appointed to Convention Committees.”

Today, he emphasized the pattern of corporate corruption in the Democratic Party establishment. He also scrutinized recent statements by Neera Tanden, former Clinton campaign aide and now president of the Center for American Progress, who tried to blame the Sanders campaign for the confusion in Iowa: “Just remember which campaign asked for reporting of three sets of data.” And: “As we wake up and still have no results from the caucus debacle, it’s a good time to remember the committee to set the Dem primary calendar was the Unity and Reform Committee. There were defenders of caucuses on the committee. Folks like me argued caucuses were anti-democratic.”

Gosztola said today: “But Bernie Sanders’ campaign had no role in contracting a startup company to create an app for the caucuses. All his people advocated for as part of the Unity and Reform Committee’s recommendations was public reporting of the raw vote totals in caucus states. That could’ve easily been handled by the Iowa State Democratic Party if they had not added non-essential technology into the mix.

“In fact, Sanders advocated reforms that led Iowa State Democrats to adopt a paper trail that has become the fail-safe for tabulating and verifying caucus results.

“Plus, Iowa Democrats have prided the role these ‘neighborhood gatherings’ play in the presidential election. They have not wanted to do away with the caucus system so it is not all Sanders’ fault for keeping caucuses in the 2020 presidential primary.”

Regarding Shadow, Inc., Gosztola said: “The Iowa State Democratic Party kept the public in the dark when it came to the company that was involved in developing the app that was added to the process of reporting results. No explanation has been given for why the company’s name was treated as a state secret. As it turns out, individuals who were software and tool developers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign founded Shadow  Inc. It was acquired by a dark money group called ACRONYM in 2019, which was founded by Tara McGowan, a former campaign official for Barack Obama. Her husband works for South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, and McGowan has expressed support for Buttigieg.

“It is evident the Iowa State Democratic Party offered a contract to friendly Democrats and failed to take steps to ensure an app could be used by precincts. The net effect of this was to bury the story of Biden doing incredibly poorly in Iowa and that Sanders has apparently done very well.”

“Additionally, the Des Moines Register reports, ‘Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director.’ This adds to the corruption around creating a process that could be outsourced to a company staffed with multiple former Clinton campaign developers.”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the author of many books and articles on money and elections. Short recent pieces include “Big Money — Not Political Tribalism — Drives U.S. Elections” and “The 2020 Election in Three Graphs.”

He said today: “Suddenly all the jokes about the U.S. income distribution looking more and more like Latin America’s aren’t funny. The first member of the Forbes 400 ever to sit in the White House survives impeachment after his lawyers and followers argue that what he did in the Ukraine wasn’t a high enough crime or misdemeanor. Meantime, rival oligarchs are laying siege to the official opposition party and denouncing proposals for modest rises in their taxes and Medicare for All as ‘socialism.’ Amid a frenzy of political money without precedent, they are pushing to change the Democratic Party’s rules to make sure one of them or somebody just as safe is the only alternative offered to voters in November. And the first time any voters were officially asked what they think, democracy itself inexplicably goes down for the count in Iowa. Whether or not he really said it, the famous claim ascribed to Justice Brandeis that a country can have either democracy or lopsided disparities in wealth but not both seems right on target.”

Ferguson’s books include Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press). He emphasizes that his views are his own and not that of any institution he is affiliated with.

ABC is holding a debate in coordination with the Democratic National Committee tonight.

SAM HUSSEINI, sam at accuracy.org, @accuracy2020
Husseini is senior analyst with accuracy.org, which has just launched accuracy2020. The project is organizing “voters, students, and local activists who care about fair debates and clean elections to gather in front of ABC headquarters in downtown Washington at noon on Saturday, Feb. 8, to challenge ABC and other major media corporations on their handling of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debates.”

Said Husseini: “We saw corporate media bias during ABC’s Sept. 12 debate and CNN’s Jan. 14 debate. Most of all, we’ve seen a skewing and marginalization of real issues, which this election should be all about. The public deserves far better.” See Facebook page for event and new Twitter feed.

JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar at fair.org, @FAIRmediawatch
Hollar is senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project. In September, she wrote the piece “ABC Debate Lowlights” about the last time ABC ran a debate.

Her recent pieces include “Corporate Media Are the Real ‘Sanders Attack Machine’” and “The Big Loser in the Iowa Debate? CNN’s Reputation.”

JIM NAURECKAS, jnaureckas at fair.org, @JNaureckas
Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org and just wrote the piece “How Corporate Media Make Pete Look Like He’s Winning.”

He writes that New York Times “polling maven Nate Cohn has a note nearby that states that SDEs [state delegate equivalents] are ‘the metric we use to call a winner.’ But — why? SDEs are a meaningless intermediate step between the number of votes cast and the pledged delegates awarded — the latter being what actually matters in terms of winning the Democratic nomination for president, which is what this is all about. Why not use those as the metric you use to call a winner — the way, you know, the Democratic Party does?”

Also see:

By Jeff Cohen: “7 Pointed Questions for Corporate Media About Their Anti-Progressive Biases.”

By Norman Solomon: “It’s Corporate Media, ‘Moderate’ Democrats, and the Oligarchy vs. Bernie Sanders and a Movement.”

LINDA BENESCH, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @ssworks
Benesch is communications director of Social Security Works. She said today: “Austerity is a lie. America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We can fully afford expanded Social Security, Medicare for All, universal childcare, and many other progressive priorities — so long as millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.

“By saying that Democrats should focus on cutting the deficit, Pete Buttigieg is promoting right-wing talking points and serving the interests of his billionaire donors. These billionaires want to pit working class Americans against each other by creating a false sense of scarcity, while continuing to hoard their ill-gotten wealth.

“Buttigieg’s comments raise serious concerns about how he would govern. Senator Mitch McConnell says he wants to work with the next Democratic president on cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, so that the Republican Party isn’t blamed for the cuts. McConnell uses the deficit as a pretext for demanding cuts to earned benefits, even though Social Security (unlike the $2 trillion Republican tax scam) doesn’t add a single penny to the deficit.

“We need to make sure the Democratic nominee is someone who would never take McConnell’s bait.”

Norman Solomon recently wrote the piece “Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out These Medicare for All Fliers.”

DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., himmelhandler at comcast.net
Himmelstein is a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College. He said today: “There are distortions on many fronts regarding Medicare for All.”

He noted NPR recently reported on Pete Buttigieg “pushing back against [Bernie] Sanders’ more extreme positions, like mandatory ‘Medicare for All’ with his own voluntary Medicare buy-in for those who want it.”

Said Himmelstein: “NPR reports this as if Medicare (for seniors) isn’t currently mandatory, which it is.

“Buttigieg’s Medicare buy-in would merely permit those who lack insurance but have plenty of money to buy into Medicare by paying a high premium. Buttigieg’s plan is Medicare for those who can afford it. It leaves out people who need insurance but don’t have the thousands of dollars to pay the premium. It leaves out the millions of people who have skimpy insurance but that’s all their employer is offering. Under Buttigieig’s plan, private insurers would continue to push high cost patients onto Medicare. Medicare would become an expensive high risk pool that absorbs all the losses while private insurers get all the profits. There’s no chance that Buttigieg’s plan would get us to universal health coverage.

“Many media reports around Elizabeth Warren’s plan cited an Urban Institute report about how the plan would allegedly raise healthcare costs, but that study is a unique outlier among the 19 cost estimates of Medicare for All — almost all the rest projected that Medicare for All would save money, and none predicted costs nearly as high as the Urban Institute.

“Some media and candidates claim that people love their private insurance plans, which is simply laughable. Surveys actually show most people don’t trust insurance companies to place enrollees’ health needs above their profits. People are much more satisfied with Medicare. And surveys find that whatever positive feelings voters might have toward a ‘choice’ of private insurance plans, that evaporates when people are told that under Medicare for All, they would get a choice of doctor and hospital. Medicare for All widens choice, it doesn’t narrow it.”

Himmelstein co-wrote the piece “The ‘Public Option’ on Health Care Is a Poison Pill.”

BBC is reporting: “Heavily-armed police and soldiers in El Salvador have forced their way into parliament, demanding the approval of a $109m (£85m) loan to better equip them.” See video.

ALEXIS STOUMBELIS, alexis at cispes.org, @CISPES
Stoumbelis is with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which just released a statement: “Human rights organizations in El Salvador, political parties and institutions on both the left and the right and international bodies including the UN High Commission on Human Rights decried actions over the weekend by President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to use military force to compel legislators to attend an extraordinary legislative session he convened for Sunday, February 9, in order to approve a $109 million loan to fund his national security plan.

“On Friday, Bukele threatened legislators who did not comply and incited the public, via Twitter, to exercise their constitutional right to popular insurrection if legislators did not comply with his order, despite its dubious constitutional grounds.

“Bukele then deployed members of the armed forces into the legislative palace for the first time since El Salvador’s brutal civil war. On Sunday, social media networks were ablaze with photos and videos of heavily armed soldiers flanking mostly empty seats in the legislative hall. …

“Both the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) — El Salvador’s largest political parties — condemned the president for using military force to intervene in legislative decisions. Members of both parties have also reported harassment by National Civilian Police agents.”

ARNIE ARNESEN, nharnie at gmail.com, @pchowder
Arnesen is host of “The Attitude” on WNHN in Concord. She recently appeared on “Democracy Now!” and CNN.

She said today: “Something that Trump likes to take credit for is some limited economic improvement for poorer people. But much of the reason for that is the movements in states and cities across the U.S. to raise the minimum wage — which has been championed by Bernie Sanders.

“The campaign might seem muddled in some ways because the more establishment candidates are responding to the message that Sanders has set. It’s largely with generic nice-sounding things. Pete Butteigeg talks about turning the page. My question is, what’s on the page? He is appealing to people who are not hurting. Sanders is appealing to those who are.

“We cannot forget that Bernie’s message has set the agenda for 2020. Bernie has moved the entire agenda of the Democratic Party not to the left (left/right is so yesterday) but to where the essence and soul of the party has historically been. About workers, about justice, about investment in infrastructure, about healthcare as a right and an environment that sustains us and does not serve the interests of corporate success and America’s failure. The New Dems under Bill Clinton moved the party into the arms of Wall Street and had more in common with a moderate Republican party that no longer exists in America. Our job is not to replace the GOP but to speak to the needs of the 90 percent.”

Sanders won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. In June, he gave a speech on democratic socialism in which he said: “President Trump and his fellow oligarchs hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, the co-chair of the Sanders campaign, was recently interviewed by Christopher Matthews and said: “Bernie is an FDR Democrat. … I represent Silicon Valley. Let me tell you, Bernie Sanders is not talking about nationalizing Apple.”

VICTOR WALLIS, zendive at aol.com
Wallis writes in his forthcoming book Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories: “The dynamic of Democrat/Republican collaboration is now long established. On the one hand, Democratic electoral strategists rejoice in the most outlandish (racist, misogynist, etc.) conduct of Republicans, as this allows the Democrats to present themselves as guardians of rationality and decency. On the other hand, Republicans, having no policies to address the economic needs of the majority, revel in being able to tar the Democrats as ‘socialists,’ thereby setting firm limits on the degree to which Democrats, recoiling from the dreaded ‘red’ label, can legislate an authentically popular agenda. The result is that whichever of these two parties working-class people vote for, they are voting — except in rare cases of individual candidates — against their own best interests.

“This dynamic affects the way activists sympathetic to socialism define themselves in the political arena. Given the systematic bias of the electoral system and the mass media against third-party challengers, there are powerful inducements for socialists to seek office as Democrats. This leads them to water down their conception of socialism to the point of rejecting any explicit challenge to the power of capital. What remains, typically, is an invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and his 1944 ‘Economic Bill of Rights.’ Although these expanded the scope of social welfare, thereby strengthening the economic power of the working class (for which they were widely denounced as ‘socialist’), they stopped short of questioning the legitimacy of the profit-system as such. The resulting political order has been variously dubbed ‘mixed economy,’ ‘welfare capitalism,’ and ‘social democracy,’ but some of its advocates in the U.S. – notably, Senator Bernie Sanders – refer to it as ‘democratic socialism.’

“Given that the New Deal agenda did not entail dissolution of the capitalist class, the practice of implying that it was somehow socialist is highly misleading. Its socialist aspects, although real enough (as far as they went) in terms of their benefits, were in the nature of partial and transitory concessions. What the New Deal meant was that capital gave up a portion of its power in order — as Joseph P. Kennedy said at the time – not to face the prospect of losing all of it. But when the historical moment was right, capital struck back. …

“[I]n the U.S. political context, programs even far more limited than that of Sanders do not escape the accusation of being socialist (recall the attacks made beginning in 2008 against Barack Obama). It therefore makes political sense for Sanders — especially considering the more fully socialist (including anti-imperialist) position he staked out earlier in his career, as well as his lifelong public admiration for Eugene Debs — not to disown his association with the word socialism. What his acceptance of the word ultimately reflects is the fact that socialism, despite any negative historical baggage and (above all) despite its sustained stigmatization, embodies the positive social goals that most people seek.”

Wallis is author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (2018) and Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics (2019). See his website: VictorWallis.com.

In “The New Hampshire Democratic Primary in One Graph,” researchers Thomas Ferguson, Jie Chen and Paul Jorgensen at the Institute for New Economic Thinking find: “Lower income towns in New Hampshire voted heavily for Sanders; richer towns did the opposite.”

ALEXANDER SAMMON, asammon at prospect.org, @alex_sammon
Sammon is a staff writer at The American Prospect. He just wrote the piece “Austerity Pete,” which states: “Asked by an attendee at a Keene, New Hampshire, town hall to give his thoughts on ‘the deficit,’ Buttigieg articulated a willingness to embrace fiscal hawkery that’s been notably absent from the Democratic primary.

“’I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable talking about the deficit,’ Buttigieg answered. ‘Because right now we got a president who comes from a party that used to talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, with a trillion-dollar deficit, and no plan in sight for what to do about it … This should concern progressives, who are not in the habit of talking or worrying too much about the debt.’ He then went on to claim that a ballooning deficit would in fact prevent investment in ‘safety net and health and infrastructure and education programs,’ intimating that deficit reduction would need to supersede the progressive policy agenda.

“That should alarm Democrats all over the political spectrum. Buttigieg’s sudden pivot to deficit-hawk politics is deeply misguided and evinces a profound misunderstanding of recent political and economic history. Virtually all of the party’s disparate factions understand that there simply isn’t a deficit problem worth obsessing over at this time, and making such noises only serves to restrict progressive ambitions. …

“The legitimacy of austerity politics seemed to have been driven out of the political arena with Paul Ryan, after he quickly capitulated and championed the deficit-exploding Trump tax bill. In fact, it’s hard to think of a school of political thought with less credibility and less popularity than deficit hawkery, which was openly forsaken by even its most fervid apostles in the Republican Party once it came up against an opportunity to deposit an extra buck of would-be tax revenue into the pockets of wealthy GOP donors. What’s become clear is that ‘fiscal responsibility’ is a tool only used when Democrats occupy the White House, to prevent popular programs from coming into being. …

“Could a pro-austerity agenda outflank Republicans in 2020? It certainly wouldn’t offend Mitch McConnell, who recently reiterated his long-standing ardor for cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even suggesting he would set aside his undying opposition to bipartisanship to do it. …

“In a general election that should attack Trump for his heartlessness toward the neediest, Buttigieg would be in the awkward position of agreeing with the president on the need to ‘tighten our belts.'”

MICHAEL BRENNAN, mryanbrennan at gmail.com
Brennan is a graduate student in public policy at the University of Maryland and a past intern at the Institute for Public Accuracy. He just wrote “Timeline: How DNC Manipulated 2016 Presidential Race.” Here’s a summary:

* April 7, 2015: Clinton campaign memo to the DNC articulates “Pied Piper” strategy to elevate the most extreme Republican candidates: “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.” (Salon)

* August 27, 2015: DNC announces “Hillary Victory Fund” joint fundraising agreement with Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a maximum possible individual contribution of $356,100 ($2,700 to Hillary for America, $33,400 to the DNC, and $10,000 to 32 of the state parties).

* November 13, 2015: Associated Press releases a widely-cited survey of superdelegates’ public support: 359 for Clinton, 8 for Bernie Sanders, 2 for Martin O’Malley, and 210 uncommitted.

* February 21, 2016: New York Times publishes front-page story proclaiming Sanders faces “steep climb” in delegates, despite trailing Clinton by only one pledged delegate following the Nevada caucus.

* March 5, 2016: DNC vice-chair Donna Brazile provides Clinton with a debate question on the Flint water crisis the day prior (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 10/11/16).

* March 12, 2016: Brazile shares question with Clinton on the death penalty the day before a CNN town hall (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 10/11/16). (Washington Post)

* April 26, 2016: DNC staffer shares messaging preparing for when Sanders ends his campaign (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (The Intercept)

* May 2, 2016: Politico reports bombshell on how the Hillary Victory Fund was being utilized to circumvent campaign contribution limits by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

* May 5, 2016: DNC CFO Brad Marshall conspires “atheist” smear against Sanders: “It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (Washington Post)

* May 14, 2016: The Nevada Democratic convention unfolds chaotically. Despite no evidence suggesting violence, major outlets uncritically repeat the myth of “pro-Sanders violence and chair throwing.“

* May 17, 2016: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz calls Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver a “damn liar” in DNC internal emails (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16).

* May 18, 2016: Wasserman-Schultz promotes “pro-Sanders violence at Nevada convention” myth on MSNBC.

* May 21, 2016: DNC national press secretary pitches an anti-Sanders story to DNC comms director: “Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” (as disclosed by Wikileaks on 7/22/16). (The Intercept)

* June 6, 2016: On eve of the second biggest primary day (California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Montana, and South Dakota), Associated Press publishes major story calling the primary for Clinton: “Clinton has delegates to win Democratic nomination”. This count includes public superdelegate commitments who will not vote until July 25.

* April 25, 2017: In class action lawsuit alleging DNC fraud, DNC attorney argues the party has the right to ignore primary voters: “The party could have favored a candidate… We could have voluntarily decided that, ‘Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.’” (See Newsweek: “Was the Election Rigged Against Bernie Sanders? DNC Lawsuit Demands Repayment for Campaign Donors.“)

* November 2, 2017: Brazile reveals Hillary Victory Fund agreement “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised.” (Vox)

MARGARET KIMBERLEY, margaretkimberley at gmail.com, @freedomrideblog
Kimberley is author of the just-released book Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, a “concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and black Americans through the lens of the presidents.”

She is editor and senior columnist with Black Agenda Report. She wrote last November: “In 2002 Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as mayor of New York City. In that same year the men known as the Central Park Five had their sentences vacated. They all served between 6 and 13 years in prison for a rape they did not commit. They sued New York City for the wrongful convictions but the Bloomberg administration refused to pay. They had to wait until he left office in 2014 to receive their $40 million settlement.

“Michael Bloomberg recently announced that he will seek the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2020. Unlike latecomers such as Deval Patrick, he actually has a chance to win the nomination or to play a role in choosing someone else. His weapon is not in any of his policy provisions but in his bank account. Bloomberg has an estimated net worth of $55 billion, a figure which makes him among the richest people on the planet. Like the old joke about the 900-pound gorilla, he can do whatever he wants, including prevent a progressive from getting the nomination.

“Bloomberg says he is ‘Running for president to stop Donald Trump and rebuild America.’ In reality he is running to stop Bernie Sanders because he knows that given a level playing field Sanders would emerge triumphant. Bloomberg’s strategy is to skip the early states and focus on Super Tuesday in March. This plan is a sign that he is more interested in being a spoiler than in actually being president himself.”

Kimberley said today: “Black ‘leaders’ — including mayors of several major cities — have capitulated and endorsed Bloomberg despite his legacy of racist policies. This is obviously connected to his funding vast networks of interest groups including the Democratic National Committee itself.

“Meanwhile, black voters remain incredibly loyal to the Democratic Party. Their fears of Republicans are justifiable but in the absence of a black political agenda, their efforts at self protection have led to dangerous passivity. The support for Biden indicated by polling was a result of being convinced that he was more electable against Trump. It was the same thing that was said about Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet Trump is the president. The notion of electability is a canard that has led to failure.”

Ryan Grim of The Intercept noted at end of January: “Just before jumping into the race, @MikeBloomberg gave $325,000 to the DNC [Democratic National Committee], on top of the gobs he spent on ads this month. Totally normal system.” And contrary to popular belief, Bloomberg is courting high-dollar donors. He’s just directing them to give money to the DNC, instead of his campaign. This was followed by the DNC changing its debate rules to help Bloomberg. He is thus expected to take part in the NBC organized debate on Wednesday.

A picket was formed outside ABC following the last debate, organized by Accuracy2020, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy, noting: “while the DNC and corporate-media-coproduced debates have excluded serious candidates at times, they have just changed their own rules to include billionaire Bloomberg. Last night, ABC injected him into the debate. Not the words of candidates of color who have been forced out of the debates — Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker or Julián Castro — but Bloomberg.” See report on The Real News: “Activists Demand Public Control of Presidential Debates.”

ROBERT McCHESNEY, rwmcchesney at gmail.com
McChesney is research professor at the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America and Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The Political Economy of the Media. He is also co-founder of the media reform group Free Press.

McChesney just wrote the piece “If Bloomberg Wants to Buy an Election, He Should Run as a Republican Against Trump — Not Sabotage Democrats,” which states: “Bloomberg could spend $100 million every single day on his presidential campaign between now and election day in November … and he would still have a net worth greater than $30 billion. He would remain one of the 30 richest people in the world. …

“Bloomberg may well be successful. He has already made media corporations hugely profitable by flooding the airwaves with his expensive and slick advertising — he has shown something corporate America knows well: carpet-bombing advertisements works if you can afford it — and this is just the beginning. … He has a large chunk of the political class on his payroll, with many more to come. He will accordingly get terrific mainstream press coverage, the type any other candidate would like, and Bernie Sanders can’t even begin to imagine.”

McChesney added that Bloomberg “could have done everything possible to expose Trump and to locate and encourage anti-Trump Republicans. He could have supported primary challengers on the Republican side to defeat Trump’s allies and enablers. He could have built up a parallel party apparatus employing thousands of Republican operatives at big salaries. He probably would have lost, but you never know for sure until you try. Bloomberg could outspend Trump 20 to 1. He would have been able to force public attention to this issue, and keep it there. He might have made Trump completely crack up. At any rate, he would have had an enormous impact that might have helped to slow and begin to reverse the Trumpian drift.”

NANCY ALTMAN, LINDA BENESCH, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @ssworks
Altman is president of Social Security Works; Benesch is the communications director for the group, which fights to “address our nation’s retirement income crisis by protecting and expanding Social Security.”

They just wrote the piece “Bloomberg (Still) Wants to Cut Social Security,” which states: “Of all the Democrats contending for the presidential nomination, Michael Bloomberg is the worst choice to debate Donald Trump on an overwhelmingly important issue: Social Security’s future. Bloomberg’s position on Social Security is to the right of Trump’s stated position — and widely out of step with even Republican voters, let alone Democrats.

“Bloomberg has a long history of supporting cuts to Social Security, including raising the retirement age. He’s disparaged Social Security, one of the most popular and successful government programs in history, by comparing it to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bowles-Simpson austerity commission, which tried to jam through huge Social Security cuts behind closed doors.

“Now, Bloomberg is running to be the Democratic nominee for President — even though he was a Republican for years, and only became a Democrat in 2018. For months, Bloomberg was the only major candidate without a Social Security plan. Now, he’s finally released one.

“Bloomberg’s Social Security plan is very carefully worded. Unlike Bloomberg’s past statements, the plan does not overtly endorse Social Security cuts. That’s no surprise, since cutting Social Security is incredibly unpopular with voters across the political spectrum. But a close read reveals that Bloomberg hasn’t changed his views. He’s just gotten smarter about hiding them. …

“For those who have followed the Social Security debate closely, Bloomberg’s words about ‘options’ are a clear signal. His language is insider speak, a wink and a nod to the donor class that he, like them, favors cutting Social Security. His promises to ‘strengthen’ and ‘preserve’ Social Security are meaningless. Those words are frequently used by billionaire elites like Bloomberg as code for ‘cut Social Security to save it.’ Nor does Bloomberg’s support of targeted Social Security increases inspire confidence. Bowles-Simpson also included targeted benefit increases, alongside huge cuts to overall benefits. So did Paul Ryan’s plans.”

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is among several prominent analysts featured in a just-released mini-doc narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” and produced by Mark Weisbrot. The documentary traces the central role that Biden — who was then chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee — played in ensuring the Iraq invasion was executed in 2003. 

Biden has continued making misleading claims at many of the debates so far with minimal scrutiny. On ABC earlier this month, Biden claimed “I trusted George Bush to keep his word. He said he was not going to go into Iraq. He said he was only using this to unite the United Nations to insist we get inspectors in to see what Saddam was doing.”

Zunes debunked this false narrative, which Biden has repeated over and over, in a piece last year, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies,” in which he notes: “More than three months after U.N. inspectors returned, Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, ‘I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.” He added, ‘Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.’ He then co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush and the invasion.’

For more: Sam Husseini, senior analyst with accuracy.org on Intercepted: “Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and the Rewriting of Iraq War History” with journalist Jeremy Scahill. Also see Husseini’s piece from last month on Salon: “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years” and relevant past accuracy.org news releases.

Zunes said today: “Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican mayor of New York, was a staunch supporter of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As recently as last month, Bloomberg stated that he has no regrets over supporting the illegal conquest. Though he acknowledges that it was a ‘mistake,’ he insists that Bush, Cheney and others who pushed the country to war based on false claims that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems ‘did it honestly.’ In the aftermath of the invasion when no such weapons were found, Bloomberg then tried to justify it by making the bizarre claim that the secular Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks by the Islamist Al-Qaeda network. As the war dragged on four years after the invasion and Congressional Democrats proposed legislation to set up timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, he blasted the proposed legislation as irresponsible and ‘untenable.’ Like Biden, Bloomberg is a dangerous militarist who as president could very well get the United States involved in other illegal, unnecessary, and disastrous wars.”

ROBIN ANDERSEN, andersen at fordham.edu, @FAIRmediawatch
Andersen is professor and director of graduate studies in the department of communication and media studies at Fordham University. She just wrote the piece “Factchecking NPR’s Attempted Takedown of Bernie Sanders,” part of the media watch group FAIR’s focus on the 2020 election.

Andersen writes that on NPR, Mara Liasson “claimed that the main issue for the Democratic Party is ‘electability’ — a fraught term often used to signal ideological orthodoxy rather than empirical chances of winning elections (FAIR.org, 10/25/19). She asserted that Democrats are ‘confused,’ and ‘for good reason,’ because Trump remains an ‘existential threat,’ and not only are none of the candidates ‘a sure thing,’ none even ‘seem likely to defeat’ Trump.

“Such handwringing is, again, not founded in facts or data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published the day before this broadcast — one day ahead of the Iowa caucuses — found that Trump was trailing all the leading 2020 Democratic candidates, with the top four candidates ahead of Trump in theoretical head-to-head matchups. Looking more broadly at polling, the two candidates who were then leading the Democratic field, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, had beaten Trump in 69 of 73 and 63 of 68 matchups, respectively.”

NBC is the main corporate media outlet determining the issues and questions at the Nevada debate tonight, organized by the Democratic National Committee.

A picket line was formed outside ABC following the last debate, organized by Accuracy2020, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy, noting: “while the DNC and corporate-media-coproduced debates have excluded serious candidates at times, they have just changed their own rules to include billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Last night, ABC injected him into the debate. Not the words of candidates of color who have been forced out of the debates — Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker or Julián Castro — but Bloomberg.” See report on The Real News: “Activists Demand Public Control of Presidential Debates.”

See from Salon: “MSNBC’s Chuck Todd under fire for reciting quote comparing Sanders supporters to Nazis.”

FAIR noted in their critique of a prior NBC debate: “‘Government-Run Healthcare’ Is a Product of Health Industry-Run Media,” writing: “At the first of two Democratic debates (6/26/19), MSNBC host and moderator Lester Holt asked the presidential hopefuls, ‘Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?’ He asked the same question the next night (6/27/19), and prefaced another question to Sen. Bernie Sanders: ‘You basically want to scrap the private health insurance system as we know it and replace it with a government-run plan.’ The question at the first debate, however, was asked just a day after a new report came out from the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). The report, ‘Parroting the Right: How the Media, Pollsters Adoption of Insurance Industry Spin Warps Democracy,’ demonstrates how power brokers in the for-profit health industry have worked to make this exact language (‘government-run healthcare’) the boilerplate description for a national health system in major media outlets.”

Also from FAIR from 2016: “Lester Holt Asks Zero Questions About Poverty, Abortion, Climate Change.”

Almost 600 groups signed a letter to Congress Thursday in support of The Fracking Ban Act. The bills, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are the first efforts to institute a national ban on oil and gas drilling.

MITCH JONES, mjones at fwwatch.org, @fwaction
Jones is policy director at Food & Water Action, a lead organizer of the letter. He said today: “The reality is that the fight against climate catastrophe requires a ban on fracking. When we properly account for the leaks of methane and carbon dioxide at every stage of the drilling process, we see that gas-fired power — touted so often for being a ‘bridge fuel’ — is barely an improvement over coal. We need to move much faster on clean energy. Fracking has not been a part of that transition; it has undermined it.

“Unfortunately, much of the media narrative pushes the notion that presidential candidates who call for a ban on fracking will lose swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. There is absolutely no evidence that voters actually feel strongly about supporting the fossil fuel industry; in fact, in Pennsylvania, strong anti-fracking candidates are winning elections. There is no doubt that voters want to support candidates who offer bold solutions. The media discussions of the campaign should welcome this discussion, instead of declaring it a liability.”

See piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Pundits say Democrats who want to ban fracking can’t win Pa. Here’s why they’re wrong” by Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Action, a national advocacy organization.

At the recent Democratic presidential debate in Nevada, Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “You know what, Mr. Bloomberg, it wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that, as well. … I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards, as well, so they can have some say over what happens to their lives.” (See Sanders’ proposals on corporate accountability and democracy.)

In 2018, Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed the “Accountable Capitalism Act“: “Borrowing from the successful approach in Germany and other developed economies, a United States corporation must ensure that no fewer than 40 percent of its directors are selected by the corporation’s employees.” Her proposed legislation builds on Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s “Reward Work Act,” which Warren has co-sponsored, and which would effectively ban stock buybacks while placing representatives of workers on corporate boards.

WILLIAM LAZONICK, william.lazonick at gmail.com
Lazonick is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network.

He was profiled last year in The New Yorker in “The Economist Who Put Stock Buybacks in Washington’s Crosshairs.” Lazonick “noted that both Merck and Pfizer, two of the largest pharmaceutical companies, had been spending heavily on buybacks, but had struggled to develop successful new drugs.”

His latest book (cowritten with Jang-Sup Shin) is Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored (Oxford University Press).

His most recent writing is at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Lazonick said today: “The stock market is an institution that enables owner-entrepreneurs to stop being owner-entrepreneurs, passing the control over management of the company to employees. Public shareholders who hold shares for a yield and who can easily sell those shares at any moment on a liquid stock market should not have ownership rights. Workers have a far stronger claim to call the company theirs, although workers can come and go. I would go for a trusteeship model of governance of publicly listed companies rather than a stakeholder model. That raises the questions of the purpose of the corporation as a public trust, how the trustees would be chosen, and how they would be held accountable.”

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, [currently in London] kevin at shadowproof.com, @kgosztola
Managing editor of Shadowproof, Gosztola is in London and covering the extradition hearing for Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange which began today. See his latest Twitter thread. Gosztola’s recent pieces include: “Interview With James Goodale: Stunning How Few In U.S. Care About Threat Posed By Assange’s Case” (see below) and “The DNC May Have Paved The Way For Julian Assange’s Acquittal.” His prior pieces include “The Prosecution Against Julian Assange: Where Presidential Candidates Stand.” Gosztola noted: “There are [members of parliament] from European countries, who will be there as observers, but there isn’t a single person from [the U.S.] Congress who is going over to watch proceedings.”

JAMES C. GOODALE, jcgoodal at debevoise.com
Goodale represented The New York Times in several U.S. Supreme Court cases, perhaps most notably leading the effort in the famed Pentagon Papers case. His books include Fighting for the Press: the Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles. 

He said in his interview with Gosztola (with posted audio) that Assange is “performing for all practical purposes, and particularly for all legal purposes, all the functions of a journalist. So come on. Wake up, American press! This guy is doing enough of what you’re doing so that, when he’s penalized for what he’s doing, the penalties are going to come back and get you. Wake up! …

“And what’s really bad is the United States is going to end up with an Official Secrets Act, by which leaking not only is criminalized but receiving leaks in the capacity of a leakee is also going to be criminalized. And that is really bad because you’re just inviting governments, particularly authoritarian governments, to control their information.”

Consortium News — which just awarded Julian Assange their Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award — is providing video and other coverage of the legal proceedings and protests in London.

The Hill reports: “Sanders won’t attend AIPAC conference, accuses it of providing platform for ‘bigotry.’”

DAVID SHEEN, [in Haifa] realdavidsheen at gmail.com, @davidsheen
Sheen has written extensively on Israel. He recently wrote an in-depth investigation for The Intercept about the assignation of Arab American activist Alex Odeh, whose office was bombed in California in 1985, and the whereabouts of his suspected killers, Baruch Ben Yosef and Keith Israel Fuchs, who are extremist racists: “Decades After a Palestinian American Activist Was Assassinated in California, Two Suspects in His Killing Are Living Openly in Israel.”

He added today: “An additional extraordinary thing is that the Trump ‘Peace’/Apartheid plan gives Jews the rights to pray on Haram al-Sharif, which is the very issue that Baruch Ben Yosef (one of the suspected assassins of Arab-American activist Alex Odeh) has been singularly focused on for the last 30 years. That’s how bonkers the plan is, it rewards the extremist demands of Alex Odeh’s alleged assassin.”

His other recent pieces include “Netanyahu has long run cover for Israel’s biggest racists,” “Israel’s homophobic education minister Rafi Peretz peddles a vile doctrine, racist to its core” and “Don’t let my reports on racism get deleted forever.”

Also see Sheen’s data-driven analysis of the upcoming Israeli election at: DavidSheen.com/elections.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has been criticized for recently stating: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

Notably, then-President Barack Obama stated in 2016: “And I said this to President Castro in Cuba. I said, look, you’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education — that’s a huge improvement from where it was. Medical care — the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That’s a huge achievement.” See video clip — viral on Twitter.

A 1984 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report found that in 1959, 23.6 percent of the population above the age of 10 were illiterate. By 1961, the number had fallen to 3.9 percent.

JAMES COUNTS EARLY, early1947 at aol.com
Early has visited Cuba many times over 44 years. He is the former Smithsonian Institution assistant secretary for education and public service and is a trustee of the Institute for Policy Studies.

He said today that an additional aspect of Cuba’s success on literacy has been the “global export of the Cuban literacy model to developing countries around the world, and to underdeveloped communities in developed countries. …

”Cuban citizens and their political representatives have always expressed a desire to respectfully pursue mutual beneficial relationships between the two countries [Cuba and the U.S.] without preconditions, and a readiness to respectfully discuss all differences. This has resulted in progress on drug interdiction, education of medical doctors from African American and Hispanic communities, a biotech joint venture designed to bring four promising Cuban cancer drugs to U.S. patients, artistic and scholarly exchanges enjoyed by both countries, among other mutual benefits. This, despite the U.S. blockade and destabilizing policies of the Trump administration compared to the productive policies established by the Obama administration.

“There is widespread debate in Cuba among citizens and government officials about the virtues, achievements, errors and failures of their economic and political system.” Early noted “the damaging U.S. blockade which all but literally a few countries in the world condemn. … Sanders and other U.S. officials and mainstream media should respectfully go to Cuba and exchange” ideas without castigating or attempting to dictate how Cubans determine the future of their country.

See in-depth interviews with Early from The Real News, including on Cuba.

See documentary “Maestra (Teacher)” at the Zinn Education Project by Catherine Murphy about the successful 1961 literacy campaign in Cuba.

CNN Business yesterday published an op-ed by Chuck Collins that lays out why we should have fewer billionaires.

CHUCK COLLINS, chuckcollins7 at mac.com, @Chuck99to1; or Bob Keener, bobknr at gmail.com
Collins is senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author and co-author of many books and reports, including with Bill Gates Sr., Wealth and Our Commonwealth.

He said today: “The problem isn’t really individuals making money. The problem is having an entire system that grows the wealth of billionaires at the expense of everything else we care about — including our democracy.

“Billionaire charity may be directed toward noble endeavors, but it is not a substitute for billionaires paying their fair share of taxes that provide essential services like health care, schools or infrastructure.

“Living under an oligarchic system, we should develop a healthy skepticism of the actions of billionaires, whether they are running for office, bankrolling other candidates or giving billions to charity. If we want to make the bold investments we need to expand the middle class, lift up workers and protect the environment, we’ll first need to protect our democracy from extreme billionaire influence.

“At the very least, that means campaign finance reform, targeted taxes on the very wealthiest Americans and reforming philanthropy. And ultimately, it means having fewer billionaires.”

A regular accusation from more establishment candidates of Sen. Bernie Sanders is that he is rigid and doesn’t get practical legislation done. This view is seriously contested by some who have followed his career most closely.

GREG GUMA, mavmedia at aol.com
Available for select media interviews, Guma has been interviewed by the Jacobin, the Washington Post and a host of other media about Sanders, who he first met in 1971. Guma is author of several books include The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. His latest book is Green Mountain Politics: Restless Spirits, Popular Movements. His most recent pieces for VTDigger.org about his decades-long relationship with Sanders include “Through the years with Bernie Sanders” and “Poisoned Press: The original plot to stop Bernie Sanders … and why it didn’t work.”

He said today: “Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric has always been righteous, radical and unequivocal — a class-based battle between the people and the one percent. Yet, as a Burlington mayor in the 1980s and Vermont’s only congressman for 16 years, before moving on to the U.S. Senate, he quickly learned the necessity and effectiveness of forming alliances, particularly with unexpected partners.

“In Burlington, he sometimes worked with Republican members of the City Council, who were ready to be more cooperative than many of the Democrats his victory had displaced. He even made peace with major developers like Antonio Pomerleau, whom he had attacked during his first mayoral race.

“In Congress he became known as the ‘amendment king,’ passing more amendments than any other member of Congress during his years in the House of Representatives. That impressive record, somehow ignored by the same politicians and pundits who decry a lack of bipartisan cooperation, began with an amendment to launch a National Program of Cancer registries, now maintained by every state. In 2001, he successfully passed an amendment to the appropriations bill banning the import of goods made with child labor, as well as an amendment to increase funding for community health centers by $100 million.

“As an Independent in Congress, many of Bernie Sanders’ legislative successes came through forging deals with conservatives. An amendment to bar spending in support of defense contractor mergers, for example, was pushed through with the aid of Chris Smith, a prominent opponent of abortion. John Kasich (later Ohio governor and presidential candidate) helped him phase out risk insurance for foreign investments. Their views on welfare, the minimum wage and foreign policy could hardly have been more different. A ‘left-right coalition’ he helped to create also derailed ‘fast track’ legislation on international agreements pushed by Bill Clinton, one of the many sources of tension between Sanders and the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the party.

“During the 1990s, Sanders and libertarian Republican Ron Paul also joined forces at times. Later, the godfather of the Tea Party movement and the junior Senator from the People’s Republic of Vermont teamed up to propose military budget cuts and push for more oversight of the Federal Reserve. The impact of Bernie’s legislative strategy was clearly felt in May 2010 when his campaign to bring transparency to the Federal Reserve resulted in a 96-0 Senate vote on his amendment to audit the Fed and conduct a General Accounting Office audit of possible conflicts of interest in loans to unknown banks.

“In 2014, Sanders struck a deal with John McCain on legislation to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs to expand veterans’ access to health care and make it easier to fire VA officials for misconduct. During the floor debate, McCain remarked, ‘I respect the fact that Bernie Sanders is known as a fighter, and it’s been a pleasure to do combat with him.’ And Sanders acknowledged  that ‘reaching a compromise among people who look at the world very differently is not easy,’ yet he and McCain had ‘tried our best.’ Five days later, the Senate passed the Sanders-McCain bill 93-3.

“When I asked Sanders about his approach during a wide-ranging interview in early 1999, he criticized the urge to ‘moralize and be virtuous and not talk to anybody.’ While acknowledging that it felt odd at times having ultra-conservatives as political allies, he argued that ‘the job is to pass legislation — and I say that in a positive sense — so you seize the opportunity to make things happen.’

“Contrary to the firebrand image he forged over the years, he argued that a key part of his job was to understand the constraints of politics and ‘do the best you can with the powers you have. You don’t just stand on a street corner giving a speech.'”

ANDREW BACEVICH, bacevich at bu.edu, @QuincyInst
President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Bacevich said today: “Polls suggest that Americans have had their fill of ‘endless wars.’ Yet the questions posed by journalists at the most recent Democratic presidential debate never bothered to explore even the possibility of a less bellicose approach to U.S. policy.  A missed opportunity, to put it mildly.”

SAM HUSSEINI, sam at accuracy.org, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini said today: “The CBS debate last night echoed a familiar pattern: Corporate media outlets, especially during presidential debates, questioned candidates from a more militaristic, at times xenophobic perspective.” See @accuracy2020.

Husseini continued: “Moderators in South Carolina speaking in a hall where people paid thousands of dollars to enter perpetuation the claims of U.S. government officials,  that have been disseminated without supporting evidence (that Russia is helping Bernie Sanders for example). They questioned how withdrawing troops would help security — without questioning how continuing U.S. wars would help security. They questioned in the strongest terms the conduct and trustworthiness of other countries — China, Cuba, Russia, Syria — which is fine in principle except the U.S. establishment and its allies are effectively immune from any meaningful scrutiny whatsoever. Rather, U.S. government action and intervention was continuously depicted as the solution to problems, not the origin of them. The only foreign government whose point of view was sympathetically cast was Israel. Such framing completely warps the world view presented to the U.S. public so that it is aligned with the U.S. foreign policy establishment as much as possible. This process is anathema to meaningful journalistic principles.

“The previous debate virtually completely ignored foreign policy. The word ‘Iraq’ was uttered exactly once last night.” Husseini’s pieces include “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years.”

The major foreign policy questions asked by the CBS moderators were:

Gayle King: “Mayor Buttigieg…why would the Russians to be working on behalf of Bernie Sanders?”

Norah O’Donnell: “You said, Senator Warren, you said you wanted to bring home all troops from the Middle East and then you walked that back to say you want to bring home combat troops. … How does that protect America’s national security?”

King: “Would you close the borders to Americans who have been exposed to the coronavirus in order to prevent an outbreak here in this country?”

Margaret Brennan: “Would you allow Chinese firms to build critical U.S. infrastructure?”

Brennan: “Can Americans trust that a democratic socialist president will not give authoritarians a free pass?”

Whitaker: “If it is proven that Russia has interfered in the 2020 elections, would you, as president, launch a retaliatory cyber attack?”

Major Garrett: “What would you say to American Jews who might be concerned you’re not, from their perspective, supportive enough of Israel? And specifically, sir, would you move the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv?”

O’Donnell: “Senator Klobuchar, if you were commander-in-chief, would you meet with the North Korean leader?”

Brennan: “The Syrian regime and Russia are targeting schools, bakeries, and hospitals. What would you do as president to push back regime and Russian forces and stop the killing of innocent civilians?”

Brennan: “Senator Warren …. What would you do to stop the mass murder in Idlib, Syria?”

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY, kevinagray57 at gmail.com, @KevinAGray
Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina. His books include The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama (2008). He has also contributed to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (2012) and Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (2014). He was more skeptical of the Sanders campaign in 2016 — see IPA news release: “What’s Wrong With Black South Carolina Voters Not ‘Feeling the Bern?’”

Gray was just on “Democracy Now“: “Sanders did like Jesse Jackson did between ’84 and ’88: He’s been organizing around the country. And a lot of the criticisms that I had in the beginning was, you know, you start out a campaign, start out with that coalition, you start out around that table with black people and people of color and women, and you build from there; you just don’t to start out with a group of white folk around the table. I think that Senator Sanders has learned that lesson well if you look at his campaign. That’s not an endorsement, but that’s to say that’s how he has conducted his campaign. And his campaign is connected to a historic progressive movement, which is what frightens people.”

Jesse Jackson was just on the podcast “Intercepted“: “The Democratic machinery lined up for Biden. But his message does not address the pain of our people. I’m not sure what moderate means [if] people don’t have affordable health care. I’m not sure what moderate means to us. As a matter of fact it means very little to us.”

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
Hoh resigned his position as a State Department political officer in Afghanistan in 2009 in protest of the Obama administration’s escalation of the war. Prior to being in Afghanistan, Hoh was a U.S. Marine Corps officer and was in the war in Iraq twice, once with the Marines and once on a State Department team. Since 2010, Hoh has been a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.

He said today: “The first part of a peace deal for Afghanistan, set to be signed Saturday between the U.S. government and the Afghan Taliban in Doha, Qatar, has a host of uncertainties attached to it, both in terms of the details of the agreement and what the deal between the U.S. and the Taliban means for the Afghan people. What is not uncertain is the immense suffering the Afghan people have endured and that this is a peace process that could have begun years ago.

“Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. For all 40 years, the war in Afghanistan has been funded, supported and participated in by outside nations — in all but seven of those years the U.S. has been involved as one of those outside powers, including supporting Afghan Islamist militants in the year prior to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and for four years after the Soviet Union exited. The suffering of the Afghan people has resulted from a myriad of causes, yet seemingly only those who are either on the payroll of the U.S. government or whose legacy is tied to the U.S. role in Afghanistan will not offer that the largest reason for the suffering of the Afghan people and the continued devastation of Afghanistan has been U.S. war and political policy.

“The war in Afghanistan has been a mirror for the United States for the last 40 years — the dysfunction of the U.S. political system, America’s failed war on drugs, the prioritization of war over all else, and the blowback from ignorant and arrogant decision-making is revealed through the war in Afghanistan as a fundamentally American story. By no means has the U.S. endured the costs that Afghanistan and its people have endured, yet it should be lost on no one that Afghanistan is as much an American story as it is anything else.”

Some of Hoh’s recent writings relevant to the war in Afghanistan include: “Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies,” “And the Armies That Remained Suffer’d: Veterans, Moral Injury and Suicide,” “Authorizations for Madness; The Effects and Consequences of Congress’ Endless Permissions for War” and “The Killing of General Soleimani: Hail Mars! Hail Pluto!”

In the past year, Hoh has been interviewed a number of times regarding the war in Afghanistan, including on C-SPAN and “Democracy Now.”

ANDREW COCKBURN, amcockburn at gmail.com, @andrewmcockburn

Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, Cockburn wrote the piece “No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy.” While Joe Biden is continuously depicted as a friend of working people, the piece documents many aspects of his actual record, including:

• “An earlier iteration [of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act] had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper: ‘His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.'”

• “Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.”

• “Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools.”

• Biden worked diligently to strengthen the hand of credit-card firms against consumers. At the same time, “the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.”

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco.

He said today: “Having Medicare for All would encourage promptly seeking needed medical treatment for individuals with symptoms that may indicate a disease like coronavirus. This means that cases would be detected earlier, speeding treatment and epidemic control. Some candidates and commentators have argued that any method to achieve universal coverage would work. However, this misses the mark. We need not only insurance but insurance without financial barriers  — deductibles and copays. You get that with Medicare for All but not other currently contemplated universal coverage approaches.”

Kahn adds, “There’s another important advantage to having a single billing system — rapid and standardized data on clinical encounters, including diagnoses and treatments. This would be immensely valuable for public health officials who are tracking epidemic patterns. Knowing when and where cases happen, and how they are handled, is critical. Our current highly fragmented insurance system and any piecemeal reform can’t do that.”

Kahn’s work includes “Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses” and more than 160 scientific articles on the costs and health effects of disease prevention and treatment interventions in the U.S. and globally.

JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar at fair.org, @FAIRmediawatch
Hollar is senior analyst for the media watch group FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project which is regularly producing well-documented analysis of corporate media bias. Recent pieces include “Media Stoop to ‘Russian Assistance’ to Explain Sanders’ Rise,” “NYT’s Look at Democratic Tax Plans Is an Orgy of Really Big Numbers” and “Bernie Sanders Can’t Win (by as Much) Unless Youth Vote Surges (Like It Recently Has).”

Hollar just wrote the wrote the piece “Debate Moderators Frame Questions to Define Acceptable Politics,” which analyzes how the corporate networks have dealt with the three most frequent topics:

• Healthcare

“The moderators have asked more questions about healthcare (161) than any other issue. When Medicare for All has been raised (specifically named in 24 questions, plus many more followups), it has been overwhelmingly associated with negative impacts: ‘forcing’ people off their private insurance (7/30/19), paying more in taxes, getting Donald Trump reelected (or ‘cost[ing] you critical votes’ — 11/20/19), forcing people in the health insurance industry out of work. … By contrast, Biden has gotten next to no scrutiny of his healthcare plan. In fact, he has received the same number of questions about the flaws of his opponents’ plans as he has questions — seldom critical — about his own plan. ‘You were an architect — one of the architects of Obamacare. So where do we go from here?’ (6/27/19)”

• Military Intervention

“A similar skew against positions that challenge the political establishment was apparent in questions about military intervention. Of the questions on Afghanistan, seven exhibited a distinct bias toward intervention, while only two framed intervention as potentially negative. … Five of the pro-intervention questions came from ABC. For example, when Elizabeth Warren was asked by David Muir (9/12/19)  whether she would ‘keep that promise to bring the troops home starting right now with no deal with the Taliban,’ and she answered in the affirmative, George Stephanopoulos badgered her further. …”

• Electability

“A perennial favorite topic among journalists is the question of electability, and the debates proved no exception. As we have pointed out many times, it’s an empirical question better left to voters and to head-to-head polls, but in the hands (and mouths) of journalists it becomes instead a tool to push Democratic candidates to the center (FAIR.org, 10/25/19, 2/11/20). In the debates, candidates were roped into conversations about electability 80 times by our count — but in a far from evenhanded way.

“Moderators raised the issue of Sanders’ electability three times as often as that of any other candidate. …

“It’s a remarkable skew, which could only begin to be justifiable if Sanders showed tremendous weakness in polling against Trump. But he doesn’t. Sanders has consistently topped Trump in head-to-head polls since the beginning of his campaign and is currently beating him by an average of 4.7 percentage points — as compared to 4.8 for Biden, 4.0 for Bloomberg, 2.0 for Warren and Buttigieg and 1.6 for Klobuchar.

“But that political reality — like the reality of Medicare for All’s popularity, and the unpopularity of the country’s ‘forever wars’ — is distinctly unfavored in the media. Hence the incentive for corporate media to use their control of debate questions to try to reshape those realities.”

BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich
Marcetic is author of the recently released book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. See his pieces on Biden at In These Times and Jacobin.

He said today: “Biden launched his 2020 campaign boasting about his liberal bona fides, and now stresses that he is a ‘proud’ and ‘lifelong Democrat.’ Yet not only did not become a Democrat until he was 27, for much of his career, Biden has run away from the ‘liberal’ label, telling the press in 1972 he was ‘not as liberal as most people think,’ a belief repeated by local Democrats who believed he was to the right of his Republican opponent. As one former state party chairman recalled: ‘he had no substantive ideology.’

“Rather than follow his principles, Biden instead chased the political winds. After a winning 1972 campaign that rivaled Bernie Sanders in its economic progressivism, Biden lurched in a conservative direction for re-election six years later, calling for a ‘massive tax cut,’ across-the-board cuts to federal agencies, and calling himself a fiscal conservative. Endorsed by conservative businessman Howard Jarvis, a backer of California’s anti-tax Proposition 13, he was first ‘delighted’ he’d been recognized for ‘consistently vot[ing] for lower taxes and lower government spending;’ days later, as he warned about Proposition 13, he told a mostly black audience he didn’t ‘have any feelings’ about the endorsement.

“Biden welcomed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election, believing it was ‘more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for for the past few years.’ Reagan’s first budget, passed with votes from Biden and 29 other Democrats, was recognized by the New York Times and Washington Post as a milestone reversing the New Deal and Great Society. As Biden had begun saying, ‘we can’t solve all social problems by an endless succession of government programs.’

“Biden’s duplicity hit a peak with his 1987 presidential campaign. After boasting of his civil rights activism for years, he was forced to confess it wasn’t true. Having spent years alluding to his anti-Vietnam War protesting, he admitted he had never been one — an old friend even said he was ‘for a long time pretty much a supporter.’ This was compounded by scandals around plagiarizing his own family history from a British politician and a series of false statements about his academic record, forcing him to drop out. He has lately begun repeating some of these claims.

“He increasingly became cozy with wealthy donors. After refusing to ‘prostitute’ himself to such donors who ‘always want something,’ and complaining that all campaign donations came with an ‘implicit’ quid pro quo, from 1978 on, Biden increasingly drew money from big business and the rich, by which he outraised his opponents. By the 1990s, Biden was caught in scandals for weakening criminal penalties for bank fraud at the behest of a disgraced savings-and-loan executive.

“’It’s going over my dead political body that they succeed,’ Biden said in 1995 about the new, Newt Gingrich-led House GOP majority. ‘I’m looking forward to beating the hell out of Republicans.’ Instead, Biden spent the decade working with those same Republicans to pass their agenda, passing NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1994 crime bill, anti-immigration powers that would later be used by Trump, and welfare reform, which Republican Senate Majority Leader called ‘the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan.’ Another plank of that plan, a balanced budget amendment, narrowly failed three separate times, with Biden voting for it with a lockstep Republican Party on each occasion.”

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes

Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is among several prominent analysts featured in a recently-released mini-documentary narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War,” and produced by Mark Weisbrot.

Biden has continued making misleading claims at many of the debates so far with minimal scrutiny. On ABC last month, Biden claimed “I trusted George Bush to keep his word. He said he was not going to go into Iraq. He said he was only using this to unite the United Nations to insist we get inspectors in to see what Saddam was doing.”

Zunes debunked this false narrative, which Biden has repeated over and over, in a piece last year, “Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies.” Well after the invasion, Biden continued supporting Bush: “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today,” Biden said at the Brookings Institution on July 31, 2003. “It was a right vote then, and it’ll be a correct vote today.”

Zunes wrote: “Biden had been calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq since 1998, pushed the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate, and abused his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to suppress testimony by scholars, former U.N. inspectors, and other knowledgeable authorities opposed to the war. However, it is his support for the invasion long after it became evident that Iraq was not actually a threat to its neighbors — much less the United States — which raises the question as to whether his motivation was not in fact about national security as he claimed, but about oil and empire.

“Indeed, after the U.S. conquest, he began pushing the dangerous and destabilizing divide-and-rule strategy of splitting Iraq into three countries along ethnic and sectarian lines.”

Zunes said today: “Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican mayor of New York, was a staunch supporter of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As recently as last month, Bloomberg stated that he has no regrets over supporting the illegal conquest. Though he acknowledges that it was a ‘mistake,’ he insists that Bush, Cheney and others who pushed the country to war based on false claims that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems ‘did it honestly.’ In the aftermath of the invasion when no such weapons were found, Bloomberg then tried to justify it by making the bizarre claim that the secular Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks by the Islamist Al-Qaeda network. As the war dragged on four years after the invasion and Congressional Democrats proposed legislation to set up timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, he blasted the proposed legislation as irresponsible and ‘untenable.’ Like Biden, Bloomberg is a dangerous militarist who as president could very well get the United States involved in other illegal, unnecessary, and disastrous wars.”

For more: Sam Husseini, senior analyst with accuracy.org on the podcast “Intercepted”: “Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and the Rewriting of Iraq War History” with journalist Jeremy Scahill. Also see Husseini’s piece from January on Salon: “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years” and relevant past accuracy.org news releases.

BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich
Marcetic is author of the recently released book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. He was just on an accuracy.org news release.

His recent articles for Jacobin include: “Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans What They Want,” “Joe Biden Jumped at the Chance to Help George W. Bush Sell the Invasion of Iraq,” “Joe Biden Helped Pull the Democrats to the Right,” “Joe Biden, the Unreliable Pro-Choice Advocate” and “Joe Biden Tried to Cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare for 40 Years.”

His pieces for In These Times include: “Want More Proof of Corporate Media’s Anti-Bernie Bias? Look at MSNBC’s Democratic Debate,” Superdelegates Were Designed To Stop a Candidate Like Bernie” and “In His Lies, Joe Biden Is Sounding a Lot Like Trump.”

The leading business journal Barron’s is reporting today in “Health-Insurance Stocks Are the Real Super Tuesday Winners” that: “Joe Biden, the former vice president, outperformed expectations in key primary states on Super Tuesday, setting up a rally in the stocks of the health-insurance companies threatened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

“Shares of UnitedHealth Group (UNH) were up 8.9 percent in premarket trading on Wednesday, while shares of Cigna (CI) were up 7.3 percent and Anthem (ANTM) had gained 8.8 percent. S&P 500 futures were up 2.3 percent, likely driven by Biden’s success.”

Commondreams reported Monday: “‘Which Side Are You On?’ Ask Progressives as Health Insurance Stocks Spike After Centrists Coalesce Around Biden.”

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco.

He said today: “Improved nomination prospects for Joe Biden could increase the stocks of for-profit health companies, with perceptions that a public financing approach — Medicare for All, supported by Bernie Sanders — is less likely. Medicare for All would shift profits and excess paperwork waste into health care, ending uninsurance and under-insurance.”

Kahn was recently on the accuracy.org news release: “Can Medicare for All Help Deal with Pandemics?”

Kahn’s work includes “Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses” and more than 160 scientific articles on the costs and health effects of disease prevention and treatment interventions in the U.S. and globally.

ANDREW COCKBURN, amcockburn at gmail.com, @andrewmcockburn
Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, Cockburn wrote the piece “No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy,” which states: “By tapping into these popular tropes– ‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’ — the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare ‘reform,’ Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

“Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill — in other words, men such as himself.”

On Anita Hill, Biden “wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As [Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson report in Strange Justice], ‘Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,’ and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities.” See from January: “Anita Hill to Iowa crowd: ‘Statute of limitations’ for Biden apology is ‘up.’”

He was recently on an accuracy.org news release: “Biden’s Record Serving Credit Card Companies.” 

The Economic Policy Institute just released a report: “Fundamental health reform like ‘Medicare for All’ would help the labor market.”

JOSH BIVENS, via Kayla Blado or Nick Kauzlarich, news at epi.org, @EconomicPolicy
EPI Research Director Bivens said today: “A fundamental health reform like Medicare for All would be an unambiguously good policy for the labor market, for the economy overall, and for U.S. workers. Besides the obvious benefits of expanding health care to millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans, Medicare for All could raise wages, boost productivity, and help small business owners.”

The group notes: “Opponents of a single-payer health care system have quoted an analysis of the economic effects of Medicare for All that includes the projection that up to 1.8 million jobs in the health insurance and billing administration sector could be eliminated if the policy were implemented. Bivens notes that this number has been stripped of all context that is included in the original study, and is often misleadingly presented as the predicted net employment effect of Medicare for All. But while Medicare for All would indeed lead to lower demand for labor in the health insurance and billing administration sector, it would boost demand for other types of jobs overall. For example, expanded access to health care could increase demand for health services by up to $300 billion annually, which would translate into an increased demand for 2.3 million full-time health care workers.”

In addition, the report finds that Medicare for All would:

* “Lessen the income loss, stress, and economic shock of unemployment and job transitions by eliminating the loss of health care that accompanies job-loss.

* “Support self-employment and small business development — which is low in the United States relative to other rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries — by eliminating the daunting cost of health care from startup costs.

* “Inject new dynamism into the overall economy by reducing ‘job lock,’ by allowing workers to go where their skills and preferences lie, not just to workplaces with affordable health plans.

NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive at gmail.com, @Roots_Action
Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He recently wrote the piece “A Profound and Historic Question for Elizabeth Warren: Which Side Are You On?” and appeared on “Democracy Now!” this morning.

Solomon wrote: “For much of the past year, in many hundreds of speeches and interviews, Warren has denounced the huge leverage of big money in politics. And she has challenged some key aspects of corporate power. But now we’re going to find out more about how deep such commitments go for her. …

“‘Here’s the thing,’ Warren said in a speech to a convention of the California Democratic Party nine months ago. ‘When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations come first … they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you.'”

Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

CommonDreams reports in “Will Biden’s Trade Policy Record Come Back to Haunt Him in Midwest?” that: “Sen. Bernie Sanders and supporters of his presidential campaign took on 2020 Democratic primary foe former Vice President Joe Biden’s record on trade to sharpen the contrasts between the two candidates ahead of … contests in six states, including the Rust Belt state of Michigan [on Tuesday].”

The piece notes that if Biden were the Democratic nominee, he would be vulnerable to attacks from Trump for his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other such deals — indeed, CommonDreams reports: “Joe Biden made a deal, NAFTA,” the president said Thursday at an event in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “He approved it, he was pushing it. It’s the worst trade deal ever made.”

LORI WALLACH, via Matt Groch, mgroch at citizen.org, @PCGTW
Director of Global Trade Watch, a division of Public Citizen, Wallach — a leading expert on such trade deals — has worked to document the results of NAFTA over the years and has summarized her findings regarding Michigan: “We’ve received a lot of requests for data on NAFTA’s effects in Michigan. [A summary is available here.] Michigan lost 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA with 170,000 government-certified as lost to trade just under the narrow Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program.

“With respect to the auto sector, before NAFTA, there were only a handful of carmakers producing in Mexico. Now major automakers operate almost two dozen assembly plants in Mexico, which thanks to NAFTA provides a duty-free export platform into the U.S. market for goods made by workers who earn less per day than many U.S. auto workers earn per hour. General Motors is now the top carmaker in Mexico, locating production of bestselling models like the Chevy Blazer in Mexico while it closed U.S. plants. Also producing in Mexico are Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Honda, Volkswagen and Audi.

“Despite there being no Mexican auto companies, Mexico’s auto sector employment rose from 120,000 before NAFTA to more than 735,000 today. More than 350,000 U.S. auto sector jobs were lost during the NAFTA era, one-third of all jobs in the sector. … Prior to NAFTA, Mexico did not have a major auto parts sector but currently more than 1,000 factories are producing auto parts and other inputs.

“NAFTA facilitated the shift of U.S. auto production to Mexico by providing investor protections and investor compensation guarantees that effectively subsidized outsourcing and investments in new multi-million dollar facilities in Mexico while simultaneously guaranteeing a duty-free export platform into the U.S. market for goods made by workers making a fraction of U.S. wages. Bank of America noted that Mexican manufacturing wages are 40 percent lower than manufacturing wages in China. Wages in Mexican auto assembly plants range on average between $2-$4 per hour.”

DAVID MOORE,  david at readsludge.com, @ppolitics
Moore is founder of Sludge, which focuses on investigative journalism on corruption and money in politics.

He said today: The DNC does not make public which of its 447 voting members serve on standing or Convention committees, which are at-large members, which are currently or have been registered as corporate lobbyists, and which are affiliated with firms that have major corporate clients or do business with Democratic party groups. Sludge is producing a reporting series on DNC members whose votes raise a potential conflict of interest due to financial interests in presidential campaigns or with heavy-lobbying companies: on the 47 Executive Committee members and DNC officers, Sludge found that 17 have backgrounds in promoting corporate interests, including at least three at-large members; of the 32-member DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, 20 members have backgrounds in promoting corporate interests, including at least ten at-large members.

“For specific background on individuals and their corporate ties, see Moore’s recent pieces: “Top DNC Committee is Packed With Corporate Lobbyists” and “Corporate Lobbyists Control the Rules at the DNC.”

For example:”James Roosevelt III — at-large DNC member and DNC Executive Committee member:

“The standing Rules and Bylaws Committee has been co-chaired since 1995 by attorney James Roosevelt III, a former board member of the health insurance company trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) who currently chairs AHIP’s Policy and Regulatory Committee. At the beginning of the Obamacare health care reform debate, Roosevelt — then a board member of AHIP — defended the group’s alternative proposal that sought to subsidize the existing employer-based healthcare system and opposed a Medicare-like public option. AHIP, which represents insurers including Kaiser Permanente, Anthem, and Humana, is a founding member of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a health care industry coalition and ‘dark money’ non-profit created last year to defeat single-payer Medicare for All. AHIP spent $9.5 million on lobbying the federal government last year.”

Earlier this year, Sludge published the pieces “MSNBC’s Owners Shower Biden With Campaign Cash” and “Co-Chair of Conservative Blue Dogs Hosts Fundraiser for Joe Biden.”

Biden made a series of false assertions on Iraq during an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday night.

Biden claimed: “I didn’t believe he had those nuclear weapons, I didn’t believe he had those weapons of mass destruction” as MSNBC’s O’Donnell nodded approvingly. But in his floor speech for war in October 2002, Biden claimed Saddam Hussein “possesses chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons” and “for years he has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons.”

Two U.S. soldiers were just killed in Iraq. See video of a veteran recently confronting Biden.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, Zunes said today: “As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’

“After refusing to allow former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter to testify before his committee that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament, Biden defended his false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on ‘Meet the Press‘ in 2007, by insisting that ‘everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them.'”

SAM HUSSEINI, cell: samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini said today: “Biden has been lying about Iraq for years, at times brazenly. When the Iraqis honestly were saying in 2002 that didn’t have WMDs, Biden said Saddam Hussein was lying. When he was asked about his record in 2007, Biden replied: ‘The real mystery is, if he [Hussein], if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so?’ And Tim Russert let him get away with that then. Instead of scrutinizing claims, major media have continuously both pushed lies about the Iraq war and enabled politicians who did so. And the lies never really stopped. Unlike Trump who just repeats the same brain dead lie over and over, many of the Iraq war lies morphed and became more sophisticated.

“On Monday, Biden claimed that he voted for the war authorization ‘to try to prevent a war from happening’ to get the UN Security Council to approve inspectors. But the congressional vote happened on October 11 — well after Iraq had agreed to the UN’s demand that the inspectors be allowed back in. (See Sept. 16, 2002 New York Times report: “UN Inspectors Can Return Unconditionally, Iraq Says.” This was immediately after a delegation organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy had gone to Iraq.)

“And Biden posing last night as though he was a statesman by asking for a second UN resolution on Iraq before the invasion (as with this falsehood-laden Washington Post oped published exactly 17 years ago today) is completely disingenuous. In early March, British intelligence analyst Katharine Gun had exposed that the U.S. and Britain were illegally spying on the UN in order to coerce other members to vote for war. This was widely ignored in the U.S. media, but caused many UN Security Council members to resist a second forced resolution. So Biden asking for a second resolution but still backing invasion, as he did, is completely dishonest.” (See piece for FAIR on the Katharine Gun case: “Film ‘Official Secrets’ Is Tip of Mammoth Iceberg.”)

“As for Biden’s claim that Hussein ‘for years [Hussein] has prevented the UN inspectors from uncovering those weapons,’ the fact is that the 90s inspection regime, UNSCOM, ended in 1998 not because of Iraqi action as was constantly claimed by the establishment, but because Bill Clinton withdrew the inspectors to launch the Desert Fox bombing campaign just before his scheduled impeachment vote. Withdrawing the later inspections regime, UNMOVIC, was also be how Bush launched the 2003 invasion.”

Husseini’s recent pieces include “It Is Remarkable — and Dangerous — How Little Scrutiny Biden Has Received for Supporting Iraq War.” See related accuracy.org news release, including “Kerry Covers up Iraq War Falsifications” about when he appeared on Chris Hayes’ show.

Zunes is among several prominent analysts featured in a just-released mini-doc narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” and produced by Mark Weisbrot.

Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote the piece “It’s propaganda, all right — against Bernie Sanders,” published Tuesday by the Washington Post about efforts by the corporate media to depict Sanders as a stooge of the Soviet Union. (Also see today’s New York Times: “Intelligence Officials Temper Russia Warnings, Prompting Accusations of Political Influence.”)

Norman Solomon, founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, just wrote the piece “‘In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See’: The 2020 Bernie Campaign Represents a Fight That Must Continue,” which states: “On Tuesday night, there was no mistaking the smug joy of studio pundits and Democratic Party operatives on networks like AT&T-owned CNN and Comcast-owned MSNBC. Meanwhile, the New York Times rushed into print yet another all-out attack piece masquerading as a ‘news’ article about Sanders.”

JEFF COHEN, jcohen at ithaca.edu, @Roots_Action
Available for interviews beginning Thursday, Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founder of the media watch group FAIR, which has been running Election Focus 2020. He said today: “Corporate centrist media have pushed a mantra — perhaps more dubious than the Hillary mantra four years ago — that Biden is the candidate to beat Trump and they constantly poll the public and then pretend to be startled that their drumbeat assertion of electable Biden/risky Bernie is accepted by a big sector of the electorate.”

Cohen’s most recent pieces include: “When CNN Introduces Bernie-Bashers Only as ‘Former,’ CNN Is Lying To You,” “7 Pointed Questions for Corporate Media About Their Anti-Progressive Biases” and “Did Chris Matthews Reveal That Democratic Establishment’s Real Fear Is a Bernie Win?”

MELINDA ST. LOUIS, via Mike Stankiewicz, mstankiewicz at citizen.org, @Public_Citizen
Director of Public Citizen’s Medicare for All Campaign, Melinda St. Louis said today: “On Wednesday, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the main health insurance lobbying group, contradicted President Donald Trump and said that health insurers have agreed to waive copays only for coronavirus testing, not treatment.

“It’s outrageous that during the worst health crisis facing our country in decades, insurers want to make clear that they still plan to profit from the treatment of coronavirus victims.

“This is just the most recent egregious example of the greed of the for-profit health insurance system and highlights why we need a Medicare for All system, which would guarantee testing and health care to everyone living in the U.S.

“If costs are waived for tests, but not for treatment, people who test positive for the coronavirus may not be able to afford treatment and will continue to infect others.

“There is bipartisan agreement that all tests, treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus must be made available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, if we want to stem this public health emergency. The federal government must intervene to require that all private insurance providers eliminate any out-of-pocket costs for both testing and treatment.”

The Los Angles Times reports: “Trump administration blocks states from using Medicaid to respond to coronavirus crisis.”

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is an emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco.

He said today: “The federal government is hampering efforts by state governments, including California, to slow the spread of the deadly COVID-19 by refusing to declare a national emergency and broaden access to Medicaid funding. This could have disastrous consequences for the health and safety of our residents. Previous administrations facing past medical emergencies such as the H1N1 virus and Hurricane Katrina eased eligibility rules to support efforts to address the medical needs of affected communities. This highlights once again the inadequacy of the fragmented and inefficient U.S. healthcare system which so far has failed to test — much less treat — patients for the virus on a scale necessary to control this pandemic.

“By contrast, a national Medicare for All system would strengthen our ability to respond to pandemics in four major ways. First, every resident would be covered. Second, patients would have no financial barriers to testing and/or treatment. Third, it would unify the coverage ‘patchwork quilt’ that characterizes the U.S. healthcare system, giving all residents seamless, comprehensive and dependable access to care. Fourth, with a single billing system, rapid and standardized data on clinical encounters would be available to public health officials, enabling earlier detection, accelerating treatment and expediting epidemic control.

Kahn adds, “The federal government continues to miss opportunities to provide resources that are essential to reining in the growing crisis, the likes of which have not been seen in a century. This latest refusal to loosen Medicaid restrictions advances the federal coronavirus response from indifferent and incompetent, to callous and obstructionist. Now, more than ever, Americans need the healthcare security that Medicare for All would provide, saving lives and saving dollars.”

Kahn’s work includes “Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses” and more than 160 scientific articles on the costs and health effects of disease prevention and treatment interventions in the U.S. and globally.

This evening, the Institute for Public Accuracy — through its @accuracy2020 project — was scheduled to project a message with giant lettering onto the CNN building in Washington while Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden debated inside.

The planned projection:

CORPORATE MEDIA:
NOW DO YOU GET IT ABOUT
MEDICARE FOR ALL?

Unfortunately, the noted multimedia artist Robin Bell, who was set to do the projection, fell ill. Bell said today: “The fact that we can’t do this highlights even more why we need tests and healthcare for everyone. For the safety of the people we work with and anyone in the public I would interact with, we decided we would release the mock-up of the projection we were planning to do on CNN, rather than project onto the building tonight.”

Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy said this evening: “We’re of course concerned about Robin. The projection was to illustrate how this issue looms over us all — and major responsibility exists with CNN and every other major media institution given how they’ve dismissed Medicare for All and overall have provided paltry coverage to key issues of public health. We genuinely hope that they’re now realizing what is at stake.”

Available for interviews:

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco. He was recently on an accuracy.org news release: “Can Medicare for All Help Deal with Pandemics?”

He said today: “An effective pandemic response requires many actions, including (1) a strong public health infrastructure, with experts and resources; (2) rapid recognition of the problem by public health and political leaders and well-designed responses; and (3) a strong coverage / insurance system (universal first-dollar coverage and excellent data from a strong electronic health record and a single coherent billing system). You need all three legs. Taiwan showed it can work. Without leg #3, we’re handicapping ourselves. In other words, Medicare for All is not sufficient — but it is necessary.”

DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., himmelhandler at comcast.net
Himmelstein is a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College. He said today: “Our fragmented system leaves public health separate and disconnected from medical care, and provides no mechanism to appropriately balance funding priorities. As a result, public health accounts for less than 3 percent of overall health expenditures, a percentage that has been falling for decades, and is about half the proportion in Canada or the UK. One result is that state and local health departments that are the front lines in dealing with epidemics have lost 50,000 position since 2008 due to budget cuts.”

See pieces on media coverage of this issue from the media watch group FAIR including: “Corporate Journalists Push Tax Attack on Medicare for All,” “Corporate Media Are Here to Warn You: Medicare for All Is a Very Bad Idea,” “As Biden Invokes Dead Family Members Against Medicare for All, Media Play Along” and “Insurance Lobby Talking Points Don’t Come With Warning Labels.”

CommonDreams reports: “‘Depraved’: Trump Reportedly Offered German Firm ‘Large Sum’ for Exclusive Rights to Coronavirus Vaccine.”

DEAN BAKER, dean.baker1 at verizon.net, @DeanBaker13
Baker is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor at University of Utah.

He just tweeted: “It is unbelievably absurd that the world is not working collectively towards a vaccine and effective treatments. That means open research. Unfortunately, our elites are so brain dead, no one talks about this.”

He said today: “In the 21st century, we are relying on patent monopolies, a relic of the medieval guild system, to finance the research leading to a vaccine and effective treatment. While we do have teams all over the world racing to develop vaccines and treatments, the problem is that the quest for patent monopolies means that they are working in competition rather than cooperation. We should want these researchers sharing results as soon as possible so that all could benefit from their findings. The model for this sort of cooperation is the Bermuda Principles, with the Human Genome Project, where results were posted nightly on the web.”

We also want whatever vaccines or drugs are developed to be available as cheap generics. It is absurd that we are in a situation where governments may have to beg the drug companies to sell these items at affordable prices. If they didn’t give them patent monopolies in the first place, affordability would not be an issue. And, in this case, since so much of the research money is coming from governments anyhow, there is no logic to giving a patent monopoly to reward the portion of the funding paid by the drug companies.”

“Governments should just pick up the entire tab. If the drug companies are paid to do the research, there is no reason to pay them a second time with a patent monopoly.” Baker recently wrote the piece “Can Coronavirus Force Policy Types to Think Clearly About Intellectual Property?”

He also recently wrote the piece “Educating the Washington Post: We Did Not Have to Bail Out the Banks in 2008.” (Biden claimed in last night’s debate: “Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble.”)

Baker also recently wrote the piece “Wanting to Cut Social Security, Along with Everything Else, Is Still Wanting to Cut Social Security.” (See from Newsweek “During Democratic Debate Joe Biden Denies Advocating For Social Security Cuts — Here’s Video Showing He Did.”)

CORPORATE MEDIA:
NOW DO YOU GET IT ABOUT
MEDICARE FOR ALL?

The projection was not done because the multimedia artist, Robin Bell, fell ill.

See pieces on media coverage of this issue from the media watch group FAIR including: “Corporate Journalists Push Tax Attack on Medicare for All” and “As Biden Invokes Dead Family Members Against Medicare for All, Media Play Along.”

BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich

Marcetic is author of the recently released book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. He just wrote two pieces on Biden.

One piece is pegged to the pandemic: “Joe Biden’s Budget-Cutting Dogma Is a Threat to Public Health.”

Marcetic also just wrote a piece documenting Biden’s lies during Sunday’s debate: “Multiple times, Biden charged Sanders ‘still hasn’t told us how he’s going to pay for’ Medicare for All, even though he released a detailed funding plan last month. He misleadingly charged that Sanders had voted against the 2008 auto bailout. He accused Sanders of having ‘nine Super PACs’ and threatened to ‘list them,’ then backed down when challenged to do so. (For the record, one of those supposed ‘Super PACs’ took only six donations over $5,000 in 2019).

“But it was on his own record that Biden was particularly dishonest. Directly and repeatedly asked by Sanders if he had been on the Senate floor calling for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, Biden repeatedly flat-out lied, saying he hadn’t — a fact easily disproved by the video of Biden doing exactly that in 1995.

“As has been amply documented, Biden has spent his career taking aim at the program: he targeted it in his 1984 spending freeze proposal; he called for raising the retirement age and reducing its cost-of-living increases in 1996; he voted three years in a row for the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which, as Sanders warned at the time, would have imperiled the program; he called again for raising the retirement age in 2007, as well as introducing means-testing to the program; and as Obama’s vice president, he repeatedly rolled over for Republicans in negotiations, offering them significant cuts to Social Security and other vital programs.

“Biden even managed to squeeze one more lie into the exchange. ‘I was not a fan of Bowles-[Simpson],’ Biden said, referring to the commission set up by Biden’s administration to recommend cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, it was Biden who persuaded former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, known since the 1990s as an uber–deficit hawk who wanted to privatize Social Security, to co-chair the commission. Simpson later got in trouble for calling the program ‘a milk cow with 310 million tits.’

“This was only the beginning. ‘I’m talking about a ban on fracking,’ Sanders at one point said. ‘So am I,’ replied Biden. In fact, Biden has never supported a fracking ban, and his campaign helpfully clarified today that he misled viewers last night. Biden changed his position on the Hyde Amendment ‘a while ago,’ he said; in fact, he supported it until the middle of last year, when, under a torrent of criticism, he abruptly flipped, taking two contradictory positions on the measure in the same week. He ‘helped put together’ the Paris climate accord, he claimed. In fact, no Obama officials can remember him being particularly involved in the effort. He again absurdly claimed that his vote for the Iraq War was actually an attempt to stop the war.

“Perhaps Biden’s most outrageous lie was over his bankruptcy bill. Biden claimed that it ‘was passing overwhelmingly and I improved it,’ that he ‘made it clear to the industry, I didn’t like the bill,’ and that he ‘did not support the bill.’ When Sanders said Biden ‘helped write that bankruptcy bill,’ Biden replied, ‘I did not.’

“These are all lies. Biden had been backing the bill since at least 1998, when he first voted with the rest of the Senate to end a filibuster against it, then voted again to pass it.”

LISA GILBERT, via Angela Bradbery, abradbery at citizen.org, @Public_Citizen

Gilbert is vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen. The group is stressing that testing and treatment for the coronavirus should be free. (This approach, taken by South Korea, of containing the virus by extensive testing rather than “mitigating” its effects, has been praised by scientists.)

Public Citizen notes that while “Jeff Bezos makes $8,961,187 per hour,” Vice is reporting: “Whole Foods Suggests That Workers Share Paid Time Off During Coronavirus.”

Public Citizen produced a list of some of the U.S. companies denying workers paid sick leave:

McDonald’s – 517K workers
Walmart – 347K workers
Kroger – 189K workers
Subway – 80K workers
Burger King – 165K workers
Pizza Hut: – 156K workers
Marriott – 139K workers
Wendy’s – 133K workers

Target changed their policy, Business Insider reports: “Target is offering up to 14 days of paid time off for workers in quarantine and those confirmed with coronavirus.”

Also see from Public Citizen: “Coronavirus Vaccine Must Not Be Exclusive to U.S.“

AP is reporting today: “Iranian state TV warns ‘millions’ could die from coronavirus.”

KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

She just wrote the piece: “Stop Tightening the Thumb Screws, A Humanitarian Message.”

Kelly writes: “U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. ‘maximum pressure’ policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.

“Addressing UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Zarif detailed how U.S. economic sanctions prevent Iranians from importing necessary medicine and medical equipment.

“For over two years, while the U.S. bullied other countries to refrain from purchasing Iranian oil, Iranians have coped with crippling economic decline.

“The devastated economy and worsening coronavirus outbreak now drive migrants and refugees, who number in the millions, back to Afghanistan at dramatically increased rates.

“In the past two weeks alone, more than 50,000 Afghans returned from Iran, increasing the likelihood that cases of coronavirus will surge in Afghanistan. Decades of war, including U.S. invasion and occupation, have decimated Afghanistan’s health care and food distribution systems. …

“Jonathan Whitall directs Humanitarian Analysis for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors without Borders. His most recent analysis poses agonizing questions:

‘How are you supposed to wash your hands regularly if you have no running water or soap? How are you supposed to implement ‘social distancing’ if you live in a slum or a refugee or containment camp? How are you supposed to stay at home if your work pays by the hour and requires you to show up? How are you supposed to stop crossing borders if you are fleeing from war? How are you supposed to get tested for #COVID19 if the health system is privatized and you can’t afford it? How are those with pre-existing health conditions supposed to take extra precautions when they already can’t even access the treatment they need?’

“I expect many people worldwide, during the spread of COVID-19, are thinking hard about the glaring, deadly inequalities in our societies, wonder how best to extend proverbial hands of friendship to people in need while urged to accept isolation and social distancing. One way to help others survive is to insist the United States lift sanctions against Iran and instead support acts of practical care. Jointly confront the coronavirus while constructing a humane future for the world without wasting time or resources on the continuation of brutal wars.”

The invasion of Iraq began 17 years ago from Thursday.

As the nation and the world face the coronavirus pandemic, Stephen Zunes is among several prominent analysts featured in a recently-released mini-documentary narrated by Danny Glover, “WORTH THE PRICE? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War” about the crisis of the Iraq war and Biden’s pivotal role in backing the invasion with disastrous results.

At the Sunday night CNN debate, Biden again falsified his support of the war: “I learned I can’t take the word of a president when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context, the context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors in to determine whether or not they were in fact producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not.”

STEPHEN ZUNES,  zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

He just wrote the piece “Would Joe Biden, Like Hillary Clinton, Lose to Donald Trump Over the Iraq War?”

Zunes said today regarding Biden’s claims at the debate: “Bernie Sanders correctly observed that everyone knew at the time that this was a vote for war. The bill’s title, ‘Authorization for the Use of Force’ was just that: an authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq. There were no conditions regarding the return of inspectors or anything else. Furthermore, at the time of the vote, the Iraqi government had already agreed unconditionally to the return of the weapons inspectors and it was already clear that the UN Security Council was going to rigorously enforce their resolution regarding Iraqi compliance with the inspections regime regardless of what the Senate did. Finally, Biden at the time never said anything about finding out whether Iraq had chemical weapons, biological weapons, and a nuclear weapons program. As he had been doing even prior to the Bush administration, he was insisting categorically that they did.”

This Financial Times chart (3/16/20) indicates where countries are headed if they continue on their present pandemic path.

JIM NAURECKAS, jnaureckas at fair.org, @JNaureckas

Editor of FAIR’s magazine Extra!, Naureckas just wrote the piece “To Defeat Coronavirus, Media Need to Look at Real-World Examples, Not Play ‘Simulitis,’” which states: “The idea that the best one could hope for is to slow, not stop, the spread of the coronavirus leads to the advice to ‘flatten the curve’ of the peak of infections, as featured in” various media. “The idea is that measures like social distancing and washing one’s hands can lower the rate of infection, spreading cases out enough to keep the healthcare system from collapsing. …

“If the disease is allowed to spread until it’s naturally halted by herd immunity — which is what the ‘flatten the curve’ model presumes — this would mean (assuming a final infection rate of 40 percent) that more than 20 million Americans would need to be hospitalized, and more than 4 million would require intensive care (Health Affairs, 3/17/20)…in a country with less than a million hospital beds and less than 70,000 adult intensive care beds. There is no feasible way to redistribute these cases enough to prevent a total swamping of our hospital capacity. ….

“It’s hard to escape the impression that ‘flattening the curve’ has been offered as a solution because any strategy that aimed at actually stopping the spread of the virus would necessarily have a ruinous economic impact. China’s economy has been ‘devastated’ by the anti-coronavirus drive (CNN, 3/16/20) — though it will no doubt turn out to be doing quite well in comparison with countries that had to impose nationwide lockdowns after acting too late. The price of not stopping the coronavirus, it turns out, is too great for any nation to pay; that’s the lesson the real world is teaching us, and one we have to heed.”

CommonDreams reports: “‘Literally Weaponizing Coronavirus’: Despite One of World’s Worst Outbreaks of Deadly Virus, U.S. Hits Iran With ‘Brutal’ New Sanctions.” In These Times reports: “U.S. Sanctions on Iran Are Increasing Coronavirus Deaths. They Need to Be Stopped Now.”

The U.S. government should instead be lifting economic sanctions against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries to avoid unnecessary deaths and more extensive propagation of the pandemic, said economist Jeffrey Sachs, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

In a statement, the Center for Economic and Policy Research said: “While sanctions already cause tens of thousands of needless deaths, the lethal toll during the novel coronavirus pandemic will be made far worse in countries where imports of medications, medical equipment, and the maintenance of water, sanitation, and health care infrastructure are restricted due to the impact of U.S. sanctions. These restrictions will also make it harder for health authorities to control the spread of the disease within their countries.”

“The Trump administration is using sanctions against Iran and Venezuela to pressure those governments by inducing widespread suffering,” Sachs said. “This policy is unconscionable and flagrantly against international law. Yet worse, it is now feeding the coronavirus epidemic. It is imperative that the U.S. lift these immoral and illegal sanctions to enable Iran and Venezuela to confront the epidemic as effectively and rapidly as possible.”

CEPR noted: “The crippling economic sanctions in place against Venezuela and Iran, and a number of the sanctions targeting North Korea, were unilaterally imposed by President Trump, thanks to the broad sanctions powers accorded to the U.S. president under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) recently introduced legislation that would reform these two laws in order to reestablish congressional control and oversight over executive branch sanctions powers.”

See more statements from economists on this effort from CEPR.

For interviews, contact: Dan Beeton, (202) 239-1460, beeton at cepr.net, @ceprdc

JAMES GALBRAITH, Galbraith at operamail.com

MICHAEL LIND, mlind40 at outlook.com
Lind is a New America fellow and Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. They recently wrote the piece “Needed: A Finance Agency to Handle the Financial Meltdown from the Coronavirus” for the Boston Globe. They write: “Congress should create a time-limited government corporation, a Health Finance Corporation. It should be modeled on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created during the Depression and used to support the New Deal and the World War II mobilization.”

NANCY ALTMAN, via Linda Benesch, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @SSWorks
Altman is president of Social Security Works and just wrote the piece “Learning From FDR: The Coronavirus Pandemic Requires Long-Term Solutions” for Forbes. The piece quotes one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. She explained the thinking in a nationwide radio address: “We cannot be satisfied merely with makeshift arrangements which will tide us over the present emergencies. We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent, as far as it is humanly possible to do so, their recurrence in the future.”

EILEEN APPELBAUM, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Appelbaum is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which just released the report “Concrete Solutions to Mitigate the Health and Economic Impacts of the Pandemic.” It includes many recommendations, such as: “Inject immediate economic stimulus to develop the expansion of physical space dedicated to urgent medical care. That includes both the conversion of appropriate spaces as well as, where applicable, adding tents, trailers, and other temporary adjuncts. …

“Make paid sick leave expansion both real … and permanent. A minimum number of paid sick days should be no less than 80 hours for full-time workers, pro-rated hours for part-time, and should be a federally-mandated employment standard, similar to minimum wage.”

A section is titled: “Avoid Bailout for Highly-Concentrated Industries that Could Have Taken Out Insurance Policies,” and states: “If the current cruise ship industry couldn’t foresee health issues, given its history, its shareholders deserve to be cleaned out on their investment. Bankruptcy law exists for a reason — a bankrupt cruise industry does not mean additional unemployed cruise ship workers, it means they will be working for new owners who, in theory, have the foresight to buy insurance that includes pandemics.”

The same applies to other massive businesses. If airlines go bankrupt, the retirement benefits of tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of workers could be damaged through no fault of their own. It is not a worker’s job to make decisions on insurance! We recommend ensuring a prepackaged bankruptcy policy that protects these benefits, which are often the lowest priority under bankruptcy law, as was done with the auto industry. Some federal money as an inducement might be necessary, but that’s significantly less money than if shareholders were to be made whole for investing in imprudent management.”

ProPublica reports: “Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness.” Bloomberg reports: “U.S. Senators Sold Stock After Coronavirus Briefings in January.”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is a leading scholar on money in politics — author of Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems and many essays. He is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and senior fellow at Better Markets.

He warns that public money must not set up a vicious cycle of public bamboozlement and profits for politicians.

Ferguson commented: “The news that U.S. senators, including the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were saying one thing in public and doing another after receiving confidential briefings on the coronavirus is both a vivid reminder and a warning. It’s a reminder, because the evidence that the U.S. is a money-driven political system is overwhelming.

“But it’s also a warning. Right now the U.S. government is laying plans for sweeping bailouts of individual firms and sometimes whole industries. Any such bailouts need stringent regulations about disclosure. Firstly, if we, the people, are not to finance our own bamboozlement, any company receiving bailout money must be required to file at the end of each month full reports on political contributions and lobbying expenditures to candidates and parties. So-called ‘Dark Money’ funneled through fake charities should not be exempted from those requirements nor should ‘527’ funds. Firm and top executives’ contributions to trade associations and other groups that lobby or make political expenditures of their own must also be disclosed. Donations to think tanks and ‘gifts’ from corporate foundations, which we now know are often politically motivated, also need disclosure. Not only money from the companies, but contributions of their executives and PACs need to be included in these reports.

“We cannot set up a closed loop in which voters and taxpayers subsidize companies and then those companies recycle some of the funds back into Congress and the political system and political parties. And it’s high time to put some teeth in the Stock Act, that supposedly stopped individual representatives from engaging in such disgraceful practices.”

Ferguson just co-wrote the piece “Coronavirus Means Zero Hour for the European Union” which cautions against German banks aggravating the pandemic in Italy.

He emphasizes that his views are his own and not that of any institution he is affiliated with.

ROBERT GREENSTEIN, via Jacob Kaufman-Waldron, jkaufmanwaldron at cbpp.org, @GreensteinCBPP
Greenstein is president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. See his thread on Twitter on “glaring gaps” in current Senate proposals.

He also just wrote the piece “Low-Income People Must Be Eligible for Stimulus Payments — and Actually Receive Them,” which states: “Stimulus payments need to reach as many low-, moderate-, and middle-income households as possible to soften the COVID-19 pandemic’s financial blow to individuals and shore up the economy. That means that lawmakers must not only make low- and moderate-income people eligible for the full payments; they must also ensure that the government delivers the payments without imposing new requirements on individuals to file tax returns or fill out and submit other complex paperwork. …

“The IRS should be able to send stimulus payments quickly to most people who file tax returns. But some 30 million people don’t file returns, including those with incomes so low that they aren’t required to file returns for federal taxes and millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and veterans. …

“States can reach many of the millions of low-income people who aren’t receiving benefits (such as Social Security) from federal agencies by delivering the payments through state-administered programs such as SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). …

“Former IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has urged lawmakers to avoid this mistake of 2008 and, instead, to use federal agencies such as SSA and the VA to quickly deliver stimulus payments to people who don’t file tax returns. We agree, and lawmakers should also ensure that the millions of people who neither file a tax return nor receive federally administered benefits actually receive stimulus payments through state governments, as explained above.

“This seemingly technical issue will determine whether millions of low-income people in fact receive stimulus payments. These are the very people who struggle the most to make ends meet and, thus, are the likeliest to spend every additional dollar they receive, providing the greatest potential boost to the economy. Ensuring that they get stimulus payments is not just the right thing to do from a humanitarian standpoint; it’s also the essential thing to do for the U.S. economy.”

DEAN BAKER, EILEEN APPELBAUM, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Baker is co-founder and senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research and just co-wrote the piece “Yes, This is an Emergency. No, That Doesn’t Justify a $500 Billion Trump/Mnuchin Slush Fund.”

Appelbaum is co-director of the group, which recently released the report “Concrete Solutions to Mitigate the Health and Economic Impacts of the Pandemic.”

THOMAS HANNA, tmhanna at democracycollaborative.org, @DemocracyCollab
Hanna is director of research at the Democracy Collaborative, and works with the Next Systems Project. He has researched and written extensively about how to deal with financial crises in a way that fosters democracy rather than produces giveaways to major corporations.

His pieces include:
* “The Crisis Next Time: Planning for Public Ownership as an Alternative to Corporate Bank Bailouts,” which states: “During the next crisis, a robust policy response can and should convert failed banks to permanent public ownership, rather than merely using public money to make corporate America whole again.”

* “A History of Nationalization in the United States: 1917-2009,” which states: “Nationalization is the process of bringing previously privately controlled assets under public authority.”

* “Constructing the Democratic Public Enterprise,” which states: “There is a great opportunity to develop forms of organization, governance, and regulation that stimulate public participation, increase accountability, and empower communities and individuals that have traditionally been excluded from economic decision-making in publicly owned enterprises and services.”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
ROBERT JOHNSON, raj at ineteconomics.org
Ferguson is professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts Boston and director of research, Institute for New Economic Thinking. Johnson is president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and former chief economist, Senate Banking Committee.

They just co-wrote the piece “Rule Number 1 for Government Bailouts of Companies: Make Sure Voters and Taxpayers Share in the Upside,” which states: “The model for any bailout by the government should be a variant of Warren Buffett’s famous bailout of Goldman Sachs during the last blowout. Buffett guaranteed himself against a loss by structuring the deal as a sort of convertible bond by combining preferred shares and warrants. The bond part of the deal — the preferred shares — guaranteed that he got paid ahead of any other shareholders. But the bond part also came with warrants that were convertible into stock: if the firm prospered, then the stock component ensured that he shared in the upside.”

This time, unlike last time [in 2008], when Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke failed to give the public any of the upside, the bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government. Those bonds should make the government the senior creditor to the firm for the value of the principal as long as the debt is unpaid. At low interest rates like those prevailing today, there is no reason to burden the firm with additional coupon payments that impair the working capital of firms.”

The media watch group FAIR just published the piece: “Can the U.S. Pull Off a November Election? Journalists Play a Critical Role.”

The UCLA Voting Rights Project just released a white paper “Protecting Democracy: Implementing Equal and Safe Access to the Ballot Box During a Global Pandemic.” [PDF]

The paper urges Congress to “immediately provide funding and guidance for a national vote-by-mail effort as part of current relief proposals to help with the economic impacts of the coronavirus. If Congress fails to act, the paper calls on state and local officials to step in. The paper also seeks to highlight the low-health risks and general safety to the public that voting by mail provides during this national emergency.”

“States around the country are pushing back primary and runoff elections in the hope that election procedures can return to normal at a later time,” said Chad Dunn, co-founder of the UCLA Voting Rights Project and co-author of the report. “But hope is not a plan. We must prepare now to protect the fundamental right to vote.”

The white paper offers the following solutions to implement a universal vote-by-mail program by November:

1. Enroll voters immediately in a vote-by-mail program, allowing for an online registration option.
2. Provide a universal mail ballot and envelope to standardize the process and education efforts.
3. Work with the U.S. Postal Service to design a reliable and convenient program to return mail-in ballots.
4. Create security measures for vote-by-mail ballots.
5. Create a process for voters to address any issues with their vote-by-mail ballots so as to ensure all lawful votes are counted.
6. Modify any in-person polling places to maintain social distancing and minimize public health concerns for at-risk populations.
7. Improve sanitation efforts at polling places to provide public health assurances for in-person voting.
8. Increase voter education efforts on reforms implemented.

The group states that six states can take immediate action to move the November election to universal vote-by-mail because of existing programs: Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Utah and California. Further, the coronavirus pandemic provides a crucial opportunity to put benefits in place that will last beyond this election by reducing costs, making it easier to engage communities of color and voters with disabilities, and protecting elections from hacks or other tampering attempts, according to the report.

Contact: Eliza Moreno, lppipress at luskin.ucla.edu

The Washington Post reports: “Trump says he wants ‘country opened’ by Easter.” His stance prompted #GeneralStrike to trend on social media.

MIKE ELK, mike.elk at gmail.com, @MikeElk
Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report and correspondent for Business Insider.

He said today: “People should not discount the possibility of a general strike by workers now. I was covering the lead up to the West Virginia teachers strikes in 2018 and that took people by surprise. It inspired strikes across the nation.

“Now, you are seeing strikes of bus drivers in Birmingham and poultry workers in Georgia. Workers are mobilizing and this could inspire a massive strike wave.

“And you have a clear precedent for this. After the 1918 influenza pandemic, you had the 1919 general strike. (See recent piece in The Nation.)

“It’s dawning on more people how critical their labor is and how little these corporations care about them. The veneer of we’re-going-to-take-care-of-you has dropped away.

“Health care workers are having their lives endangered by corporate moves. (See piece in The Intercept: “Kaiser Permanente Threatened to Fire Nurses Treating Covid-19 Patients for Wearing Their Own Masks, Unions Say.)

“The lack of sick days is endangering workers and everyone. Nashville is set to have an enormous outbreak of COVID-19. It’s huge tourist center with many services workers without paid sick days.

“We’re talking about possibly 20 to 30 percent unemployment. That will lead employers to be even more callous.

“Meanwhile, Boeing has $15 billion in the bank and is set to get a bailout.

“Nissan has worked to hinder its workers in Alabama from unionizing and now the company is forcing them to work and risk their lives.” (See Elk’s latest on Nissan here.)

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco.

He said today: “Tuesday, Donald Trump floated the idea of ending the stay-at-home guidance currently widely in effect to suppress COVID-19 transmission. This strategy is central to the critical goal to ‘flatten the curve’ — aiming to sharply reduce cases in the short-term to minimize total pandemic cases and also to prevent overwhelming of hospital capacity to handle serious cases.

“Trump’s proposal could worsen this crisis to a catastrophe. It prioritizes the economy over saving lives. This action seems aimed to increase economic activity to aid his re-election.

“However, it’s wrong on several levels. First, and most important, it is mean-spirited — amplifying pandemic spread and associated deaths for a political purpose. Second, it is misguided — weakening pandemic control measures now will lead to an even more serious public health and economic crisis later. Third, it supports the false narrative that the pandemic is a hoax. It’s not, it’s very real.”

MERYL NASS, MD, merylnass at gmail.com
Available for a limited number of interviews, Dr. Nass blogs at Anthrax Vaccine, which includes her own analysis as well as resources from around the world, including a just-completed English translation of the Chinese guidebook for care of COVID-19, which has a section on “Isolation Area Management.”

She notes that in a recent JAMA interview, an Italian doctor, Maurizio Cecconi, talks about having tried to “separate our patients” on different floors as “much as possible.”

Her most recent posting is “An Important Proposal That Ameliorates Our Lack of Protective Equipment and Spares Both Patients and Healthcare Workers,” which states: “There is a huge disconnect between the personal protective equipment healthcare workers (HCWs) should be wearing to protect themselves from coronavirus, and what actually exists right now for them to use. The White House has told the governors to find their own supplies. The equipment market is in chaos. Nurses and doctors deserve congratulations for their bravery and commitment to continue working, even without adequate protective equipment.  CDC is now telling them to make their own equipment. But Kaiser Permanente threatened to fire nurses for wearing their own N95 respirators.

“Having doctors and nurses work under these conditions is extremely shortsighted. Given the tremendous propensity of the virus to spread — U.S. deaths are doubling every three days, and are believed to lag infection by a month — healthcare workers will be infected disproportionately, as in Wuhan and northern Italy. But worst of all, HCWs may become viral spreaders, transmitting infection to patients who are in their healthcare facility for other reasons. Doctors in Italy have warned that hospitals might be ‘the main’ source of COVID-19 transmission. …

“There is only one solution: keeping patients with COVID-19 in facilities that treat only COVID-19. And treating other patients in separate facilities. This requires government to take control of a very messy situation: Hospitals and clinics are about to become, if they are not already, the locations that put their patients at highest risk. Hospitals will not suddenly create separate COVID facilities by themselves. Government needs to step in to make this happen.

“Creating designated COVID-19 facilities would allow healthcare workers to put on a complete set of protective garments: masks, goggles, face shields and head to toe gowns and shoe covers, at the beginning of their shift. They would then not change out of the garments between patients, since all the patients are already infected. It would save tremendous amounts of equipment and time, since HCWs would not have to change up their gowns, gloves, etc. between each patient, and would have enough protective equipment to work in safety.

“How do you identify the COVID patients, when PCR [polymerase chain reaction] tests have again slowed due to lack of reagents and swabs?

“In Italy and China, ultrasound exams of the lungs, or CT scans, have been used to differentiate the specific lung pattern caused by this coronavirus (a bilateral ground glass appearance, especially in the lung periphery) from other infections. This can provide a faster diagnosis than a lab test, with almost as much accuracy, at the point of patient contact. Ultrasound machines may be portable and inexpensive.” See full posting, with extensive links.

CommonDreams reports: “‘Looting of America by Big Corporations’: Progressives Appalled as Senate Unanimously Passes Largest Bailout Bill in US History.”

See interview with David Dayen on “Rising”: “It’s not a bailout, it’s corporate robbery” and his piece at The American Prospect.

Newsweek reports: “Bernie Sanders Scolds Republicans Opposed to Unemployment Benefit Boost in Stimulus Bill.”

RICHARD ESKOW, rjeskow at gmail.com, @rjeskow
Eskow is senior advisor for health and economic justice at Social Security Works and the host of “The Zero Hour” on Free Speech TV. He recently wrote the piece “7 Rules for the Boeing Bailout” for Naked Capitalism.

He said today: “As the world struggles with the pandemic, corrupt corporations like Boeing should be held accountable for their failure to prepare for a known risk, and for their destructive social behavior. That behavior has been lethal at times, and socially destructive at others. In Boeing’s case, passengers died on its 737 MAX, while banks and other corporations ruined millions of people’s lives and cost many people their homes.

“Self-interest was their primary motivator. Instead of preparing for known risks, including a pandemic, corporate leaders looted the coffers while exploiting both their workforce and their customers. They ignored their own organizations’ long-term financial needs — and sometimes the law — to indulge in a 10-year sybaritic feast of reckless profit-grabbing.

“This reflects an unsustainable and inhumane economy, led by amoral and out-of-control executives. Instead of being held accountable, however, the government is putting those executives first in line for rescue — before working people, before sick people, before the poor and vulnerable.

“The picture’s still unclear, but it appears that the U.S. government will spend money at levels never seen before – not to save the planet or its people, but to save the executives and corporations that are destroying it.

“And now, the malefactors are coming forward triumphantly, one by one, to exult in their victory. Executives from Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, dens of serial corporate criminality, are openly pontificating about the need to risk human lives to pump up an economy that works only for them. The secret is out: it’s an economy of death, and apparently they no longer feel the need to hide it.

“Unless something changes quickly, future generations will look back on this moment with regret and fury. They have turned our economy into a Boeing 737 MAX, and it has just been cleared for takeoff.”

Eskow also recently wrote the pieces “No, I Will Not Die for This Damned Economy” and “Health Benefit Plans Are Making the Pandemic Worse.”

See recent accuracy.org news releases including: “When Warren Buffet Bails Out Companies, He Shares in the Upside. Why Doesn’t the Taxpayer?” and “Slush Fund or Democratic Economy?“

Newsweek reports: “U.S. Adds Iran Sanctions, Indicts Venezuela President as Countries Fight Coronavirus.”

ALFRED DE ZAYAS, alfreddezayas at gmail.com, @Alfreddezayas
Alfred de Zayas was the first UN rapporteur (independent expert) to visit and report from Venezuela in 21 years. In his recent interview “U.S. sanctions on Iran, Venezuela during pandemic could be genocidal” with The Grayzone, he calls such sanctions “insane” and a “crime against humanity.” His most recent interview is in Spanish with Swissinfo. See also his other recent interviews and writings.

KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Kelly just wrote the piece “Making the Pandemic Worse” for The Progressive. She writes: “U.S. sanctions against Iran, which the Trump administration has cruelly strengthened, continue to collectively punish extremely vulnerable people. The United States’ current ‘maximum pressure’ policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the disease.”

LEONARDO FLORES, leonardo at codepink.org, @codepink
Flores recently wrote the pieces “Venezuela’s Coronavirus Response Might Surprise You” and “‘Maximum-Pressure March’: U.S. Hybrid War on Venezuela Heats Up.” He was born in Venezuela and is a Latin America campaign coordinator for CODEPINK.

Al Jazeera reports: “Venezuela says U.S. drug charges against Maduro show ‘desperation.’”

Flores said today: “A day after President Maduro offered to hold talks with the opposition about the country’s response to COVID-19, the Trump administration did its utmost to once against sabotage an opportunity for dialogue. For years the U.S. government has accused Venezuela of narcoterrorism, without ever presenting evidence. The biggest consumer of cocaine in the world is the United States and the biggest producer is Colombia. Venezuela doesn’t grow coca, doesn’t produce cocaine and according to the U.S. government’s own statistics, only a small fraction of the cocaine in the U.S. transits through the country.”

CommonDreams reports: “After Repeatedly Downplaying Threat, Trump Now Says Keeping U.S. Coronavirus Deaths to 100,000 Would Be a ‘Good Job’” and “‘Abolish For-Profit Health Insurance’: Analysis Warns Companies Could Hike Premiums by 40 Percent Amid Pandemic.”

The New York Times reports: “The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.”

The Hill reports: “Teen who may have died of coronavirus was turned away from urgent care due to lack of insurance.”

JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu
Dr. Kahn is emeritus professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Institute for Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco. He said today: “This one case report of a teen with possible COVID-19 is the tip of the deep, deep iceberg of deaths caused by our fractured and dysfunctional health insurance system. It is profoundly sad that this young man died due to delayed medical care because he lacked insurance. What is untold is the hundreds or thousands like him across the country during this pandemic. And the tens of thousands who die each year in the U.S. because of being uninsured.

“Our country is working collectively to fight the coronavirus. At the same time, the pandemic is revealing the frailties, inefficiency, and inhumanity of a broken health insurance system. We must pull together to move to a public-spirited, public-facing, and publicly-funded health insurance system — Medicare for All.”

The New York Times reports: “Pentagon Order to Plan for Escalation in Iraq Meets Warning From Top Commander.”

Mehdi Hasan just wrote the piece in The Intercept: “Beware of Trump Using the Coronavirus as a Cover for War With Iran.”

REESE ERLICH, reeseerlich at yahoo.com, @ReeseErlich
Erlich‘s syndicated column “Foreign Correspondent” appears in 48 Hills. He just wrote the piece “U.S. Beats War Drums in Middle East” in The Progressive which states: “While the world focuses on the coronavirus pandemic, tensions between the United States and Iran are heating up.

“The two countries are engaging in tit-for-tat military attacks that threaten a wider war. In mid-March, Washington officials accused an Iran-allied militia of launching rockets at a U.S. military base in Iraq, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier. The Pentagon retaliated with a missile strike against the group Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, killing militiamen, five Iraqi servicemen, and a civilian who were also at the base. On March 26 rockets once again hit near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

“The Pentagon sent two aircraft carriers to the region, claiming in a March 19 Navy statement that the United States is protecting ‘freedom of navigation and [the] free flow of commerce.’ Threatening a possible military attack on Iran, the Navy said the carriers ‘provide the combatant commander significant striking power for contingency operations.’

“Leaders in Washington and Tehran say they don’t want a full-scale war, but they are playing a dangerous game. And the people of Iraq will suffer the consequences. …

“So the ball is in the United States’ court. Trump can continue his ‘maximum pressure campaign’ against Iran and face continued Iraqi attacks on U.S. troops. Or he can back off to focus on domestic concerns and avoid a wider war.”

DAVID DAYEN david.dayen at gmail.com, @ddayen
Executive editor of The American Prospect, Dayen has written a series of pieces about different aspects of the government response to the pandemic.

On Wednesday, the Prospect published a several pieces on especially vulnerable groups, such as people detained by ICE, prisoners and farmworkers.

Dayen tweeted: “Every broken piece of our society restricted us from responding to this crisis, from welfare reform to post-2008 austerity to the war on crime. You can’t divorce any of it.”

In the piece “Unsanitized: Covidien’s Story Is Corporate America’s Story,” he examines how a maker of cheaper portable ventilators was effectively hindered because it got bought up by a bigger medical company not wanting to see a cut into its profits in its existing ventilator business.

See his other recent pieces, including today’s “Unsanitized: It’s the First of the Month,” which notes that today “most residential and commercial rents and mortgages are due. This is the biggest financial expense for most ordinary people and businesses. None of the relief in the $2.2 trillion survival aid package passed last week has gone out the door. And many have spent several weeks without salaries or revenues; those in the underground or cash economies will likely get little or no relief.”

His other recent pieces include “The Dangerous Life of an Amazon Worker,” “The Gaping Hole in the Defense Production Act” and “Unsanitized: The Federal Reserve Loads the Cannon,” which states: “Incredibly, the Fed put BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, in charge of this and two other bond-buying programs. One of the programs involves buying up exchange-traded funds, and nobody has issued more of those than BlackRock. The firm can theoretically direct itself to buy up its own troubled funds and take fees on it! Whatever the purchases, BlackRock unquestionably stands to make hundreds of billions of dollars.”

In his piece Tuesday, “Unsanitized: Stimulus, Episode IV, A New Hope,” he writes Democrats “now want to bargain over all the things Republicans rejected in the first three bills. On a conference call [Monday], House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her caucus was ‘taking inventory’ on what the public needed, throwing out ideas like a surge of funds for hospitals for personal protective equipment and coronavirus testing, full paid medical leave, more state and local government aid, assistance for overburdened pension funds, guaranteed free treatment of COVID-19 cases for everyone, an OSHA emergency temporary standard to mandate safety rules in workplaces kept open through the crisis, and longer-term goals like a buildout of broadband to secure access to telehealth. …

“It’s amazing that Democrats had to re-learn this lesson. They gave up all their leverage in stimulus III. Maybe economic conditions will wither to the point that stimulus IV will become necessary, but that’s going to be well in the future for Republicans as long as their business base is satiated. The whole point of doing the bailout and the individual relief together was to maximize both. If you left a bunch of individual relief on the table, you did it wrong.”

DAVID BACON, dbacon at igc.org, @photos4justice
Bacon is a California writer and photojournalist. He just wrote the piece “America’s Farmworkers — Now ‘Essential,’ but Denied the Just-Enacted Benefits” for The American Prospect.

He writes: “In fields and rural communities across the United States the nation’s 2.5 million agricultural laborers are waiting for the shoe to drop — for the first cases of coronavirus among farmworkers. As they wait they are already feeling sharply the effects of the measures taken to contain the virus’s spread.

“Francisco Lozano, a farmworker in Santa Maria on California’s central coast, says poverty makes this crisis much worse. In the winter, when there’s no work, families live off meager savings from the previous season, and when those are exhausted, they borrow from family and friends. ‘This is the time work starts up again, picking strawberries,’ he says. ‘But instead of pulling ourselves out of debt, our situation is worse now than ever. … they’re paying by the hour — minimum wage [California’s minimum wage is $13 per hour.] That’s not enough to live on.’

“Working conditions themselves have deteriorated. ‘Because of the rains we’re working in the mud,’ he explains. ‘We work close to each other so social distancing is impossible. They tell us to wash our hands, but there are lots of people for each station and the soap runs out. People normally have colds at this time of year, and many of us have to work anyway because of the economic pressure. With the virus, that’s dangerous. But the growers just want production.’ …

“The final $2 trillion bailout and relief package adopted by Congress, however, includes a bar forbidding the undocumented from receiving its benefits. The legislation, the CARES Act, provides extended unemployment and one-time cash payments to low and middle-income families. People who lack legal immigration status, and even U.S. citizen children who have at least one undocumented parent, are excluded, however. That exclusion encompasses the majority of the nation’s farmworkers, and in California, as many as 70 percent of them.”

Bloomberg reports: “Hospitals Tell Doctors They’ll Be Fired If They Speak Out About Lack of Gear.”

See accuracy.org news release from March 25: “Does COVID-19 Require Separate Medical Facilities?”

See COVID-19 resource page from National Nurses United.

MIKE ELK, mike.elk at gmail.com, @MikeElk
Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report and correspondent for Business Insider.

He just wrote the piece “After 42 Test Positive for COVID-19, Nurses in Western PA Walk Off Job,” which states: “On Thursday, dozens of nurses, members of SEIU Healthcare PA, walked off at the Brighton Rehab and Wellness Center in Western Pennsylvania’s Beaver County.

“The walk-off came after 36 elderly residents and six healthcare workers at the nursing home tested positive for COVID-19. Already, two senior citizens at the facility have died of COVID-19.

“Nurses at the facility say that they haven’t been given N-95 masks to wear around residents. After days of the union being rebuffed in its attempt to meet with management to discuss safety issues and hazard pay, nurses on the job walked off on Wednesday.

“’Financially, I probably shouldn’t make that decision, but it’s not about finances. It’s about my health and another person’s health,’ Nurse Tamera Witherspoon told CBS Pittsburgh.

“The union says that it won’t go back in until they get proper protective equipment for the staff at Brighton Rehab. …

“The strike comes as the Trump administration killed a provision in the new COVID-19 bailout package that would have forced OSHA to institute an emergency rule standard to protect healthcare workers from COVID-19.

“The provision was killed at the behest of the American Hospital Association. Now, many frontline healthcare workers say they lack basic protective equipment.

“Increasingly, frontline workers from healthcare to warehouses to manufacturing are walking off the job across the country to protest unsafe working conditions.
“With a lack of federal regulations, SEIU Healthcare PA says that its willing to take action into its own hands to force employers to protect frontline healthcare workers.”

DAN KOVALIK, dkovalik at outlook.com, @danielmkovalik
Kovalik is a human rights lawyer and author of the recently-released book The Plot To Overthrow Venezuela and the forthcoming No More War.

He said today: “While countries like Cuba, China and Russia are sending personnel and aid to other countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has sadly pivoted in the other direction — tightening sanctions against countries like Iran and Venezuela, and even sending warships to the Caribbean on the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, allegedly from Venezuela. However, the U.S. government’s own data belies the Trump administration’s claims about Venezuela as some type of narco-state.”

“Instead, the White House’s current actions are about old-fashioned imperial plunder, and in particular, the plunder of Venezuela’s oil. And, the U.S. government appears fully prepared to exploit the current pandemic crisis to achieve its aims of Empire. The current naval build-up in the Caribbean appears to be the carrying out of Trump’s threats early this year to blockade Venezuela in an effort to bring about regime change. This action, combined with U.S. sanctions which have already killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans, will only increase the suffering of the Venezuelan people, especially as they struggle against the coronavirus outbreak.”

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Investigative historian and journalist on the national security state, Porter recently wrote: “On Thursday, the captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on which the virus was reportedly spreading, was relieved of command. He was blamed by his superiors for the leak of a letter he wrote warning the Navy that failure to act rapidly threatened the health of his 5,000 sailors.

“Secretary of Defense Mark Esper justified his decision to continue many military activities as usual by declaring these activities are ‘critical to national security.’ But does anyone truly believe there is a military threat on the horizon that the Pentagon must prepare for right now? It is widely understood outside the Pentagon that the only real threat to that security is the coronavirus itself.

“Esper’s decisions reflect a deeply ingrained Pentagon habit of protecting its parochial military interests at the expense of the health of American troops.” See his latest piece in the American Conservative: “How Generals Fueled 1918 Flu Pandemic To Win Their World War.”

Porter also recently wrote: “Pompeo and Netanyahu paved a path to war with Iran, and They’re Pushing Trump Again” which states: “Shockingly, Pompeo has exploited the coronavirus pandemic to impose even harsher sanctions on Iran while intimidating foreign businesses to prevent urgently needed medical supplies from entering the country. The approaching presidential election gives both Pompeo and Netanyahu a powerful reason to plot another strike, or a series of strikes aimed at drawing the U.S. into a potential Israeli confrontation with Iran.”

And in “As Washington Privatized Pandemic Preparation, the National Security State Left Americans Defenseless Against Coronavirus” for The Grayzone, Porter writes: “Donald Trump’s failure to act decisively to control the coronavirus pandemic has likely made the COVID-19 pandemic far more lethal than it should have been. But the reasons behind [the] failure to get protective and life-saving equipment like masks and ventilators into the hands of health workers and hospitals run deeper than Trump’s self-centered recklessness.

“Both the Obama and Trump administrations quietly delegated state and local authorities with the essential national security responsibility for obtaining and distributing these vital items. The failure of leadership was compounded [by] the lack of any federal power center that embraced the idea that guarding for a pandemic was at least as important to national security as preparing for war.”

KWEKU RAMEL SMITH, ramel.blaquesmith at gmail.com
Smith is a licensed psychologist, president of his local chapter of Kappa Phi of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and a registered chief election inspector in Wisconsin. He is available for a limited number of interviews.

He said today: “Our state, specifically our Wisconsin Supreme Court, has forced in-person voting to take place [today], when there were other options. We are in the midst of the worst week [of the pandemic] according to the surgeon general and we decide to make people vote. … Even states like Ohio, who are similar to Wisconsin, had the common decency to protect the people above partisan politics. We failed to do so!”

On April 3, he sent a letter to Wisconsin Gov. Anthony Evers: “We implore you to postpone the Tuesday, April 7, 2020 election being that the pandemic shows no sign of subsiding. The resulting depressed voter turnout on April 7, 2020 will disenfranchise thousands of voters, who will be either unwilling or unable to vote without subjecting themselves and others to unsafe conditions for not just themselves and their families, but for all residents of our state. …

“To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, protect the public health, and provide essential protections to vulnerable Wisconsinites, it is crucial that all Wisconsinites take steps to limit in-person contact. …

“Although protective and sanitation gear will be provided by the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, over 180 polling locations have recently been reduced to eight due to the lack of election inspectors. As such, voters have less than a week to determine their new polling location and will now be forced to go to a polling location where there will be more people due to the consolidation of the voting sites.”

See video of Smith on Facebook about the election. He recently spoke at the Governor’s Conference on Emergency Management and Homeland Security about first responders and trauma.

The Hill reports: “Black people are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.”

See FAIR reports: “To Stop Bernie Sanders, WaPo Willing to Risk Americans’ Lives” and “Media Silent as Poll Workers Contract COVID-19 at Primaries That DNC, Biden Campaign Claimed Were Safe.”

STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER, M.D., M.P.H steffie_woolhandler at hms.harvard.edu
DAVID U. HIMMELSTEIN, M.D. dhimmels at hunter.cuny.edu
Clare Fauke, Physicians for a National Health Program, clare at pnhp.org
    In a study just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers estimate that layoffs triggered by the COVID-19 epidemic have already caused more than 1.5 million American workers to lose health insurance, with 5.7 million more likely to become uninsured by June 30, for a total of 7.3 million newly uninsured.

    The study’s authors urge states that have not yet expanded Medicaid to do so immediately. However, because states are limited in their financial abilities to provide coverage, the authors recommend that the federal government authorize Medicare coverage for anyone eligible for unemployment benefits, and eventually implement universal Medicare for All.

    “Millions of Americans are newly vulnerable to financial catastrophe, as we face an epidemic of life-threatening illness,” said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a primary care doctor, distinguished professor at Hunter College and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “The COVID-19 epidemic highlights the folly of tying health coverage to jobs. Our health care system saddles people with medical bills when they’re least able to afford them because they’ve been laid off or are too sick to work. Health insurance in the U.S. is like an umbrella that melts in the rain.”

    “The federal government must step up in this crisis,” added study co-author Dr. David Himmelstein, an internist and distinguished professor at CUNY’s Hunter College and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “The states can’t do it because tax revenues are plunging, and they’re required to balance their budgets. Congress and the President have provided free testing for coronavirus, but no new coverage for those who need treatment. In this emergency, Congress should make all of the uninsured automatically eligible for Medicare.”

SARAH LAZARE, sarah.lazare at gmail.com, @sarahlazare
Reporter and web editor for In These Times magazine, Lazare just wrote the piece “As the World Economy Grinds to a Halt, the U.S. War Machine Churns On.”

She writes: “As the vast majority of people in the United States are being told to stay at home, weapons manufacturers are allowed to keep their doors open. On March 20, the Department of Defense declared the ‘Defense Industrial Base’ to be essential work during the COVID-19 crisis after, as the DOD put it, working closely with ‘the Hill and the Department of Homeland Security.’ …

“This support is going to an industry that is being deemed ‘essential’ during the COVID-19 crisis. But by the Pentagon’s own admission, the goal is to continue business as usual — i.e. maintain the U.S. military apparatus. That the weapons industry is being kept afloat at a time healthcare systems, and millions of ordinary Americans, are sinking, reveals a great deal about the militaristic bent of our government — and the political muscle of the companies that profit from it. As Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni-American anti-war activist, writer and scholar, put it to In These Times, ‘Even at a time of vulnerability at home, we’re still thinking about ways to expand our military and to show our imperial militaristic dominance across the globe.’

“As the Washington Post explains, ‘The Senate package includes a $17 billion federal loan program for businesses deemed “critical to maintaining national security.” The provision does not mention Boeing by name but was crafted largely for the company’s benefit, two of the people said.’

“But perhaps the strongest praise came from Lockheed Martin … Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer of the bomb that was used by the U.S.-Saudi coalition to strike a school bus in northern Yemen on August 9, 2018, killing 40 children between the ages of six and 11, and wounding a total of 79 people. Just as the cash has continued flowing to this company, the U.S-Saudi coalition has continued launching air strikes on Yemen. On March 30, the U.S.-Saudi coalition launched several air strikes in Sanaa, with residents reporting loud explosions throughout the city. This was despite the U.N.’s call days earlier for a truce in light of the global pandemic, and despite warnings that five years of air strikes targeting infrastructure and hospitals have left Yemen highly vulnerable to a potential COVID-19 outbreak.”

DAVID BACON, dbacon at igc.org, @photos4justice
Bacon is a California-based writer and photojournalist. He just wrote a piece for The Nation: “Iraq’s Coronavirus Crisis Was Made Possible by Decades of War and Occupation.”

He writes: “On paper, the virus’s toll in Iraq today stands at 1,031 officially confirmed cases, with 64 deaths. … This past week Reuters reported that confirmed cases numbered instead between 3,000 and 9,000, quoting doctors and a health official — a report that led the Iraqi government to fine the agency and revoke its reporting license for three months. The higher figure would give Iraq a per capita infection rate higher than South Korea, one of the virus’ early concentrations. …

“Economic desperation contributes to the impact of the virus, but another factor makes it much more lethal. The spread of COVID-19 is taking place in a country with a devastated healthcare system. The U.S. owns a great part of the responsibility for this. Two invasions, a decade of sanctions and the occupation largely caused the ruin of Iraq’s medical and public health systems.

“According to an analysis by the Enabling Peace in Iraq Center, ‘Before the imposition of international sanctions in 1991, Baghdad operated some of the most professional and technologically advanced healthcare and public health institutions in the Arab world.’ The Ministry of Health operated 172 modern hospitals, 1200 primary care centers and 850 community clinics, providing free healthcare with an annual budget of $450 million. While the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s produced enormous casualties, the infrastructure itself was not attacked.

“Instead of rebuilding the healthcare system and basic infrastructure, the occupation introduced private ownership. Now Iraq has a two-track system in which basic services are provided by the Ministry of Health, although they’re no longer free. Sami Adnan, an activist in Workers Against Sectarianism, which helped organize the protests that began last October, charges, ‘Today we have to pay for every single visit and often, in order to get treatment, we are obliged to give a bribe to the few remaining doctors in the country.’ …

“Sami Adnan says, ‘the reasons why we took to the streets in recent months were precisely these: the social and health system is totally insufficient to meet people’s needs. Inside our tent village in Tahrir Square we are disinfecting everything: clothes, tents, mattresses, blankets, tools and utensils. We are distributing personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves.’

“Iraqi journalist LuJain Elbaldawi agrees: ‘The situation in Iraq is heading toward a comprehensive health crisis that the government is unable to cope with; thus, has resorted to drawing from civil society institutions, religious organizations and charities.'”

Bacon also recently wrote the piece “America’s Farmworkers — Now ‘Essential,’ but Denied the Just-Enacted Benefits” for The American Prospect.

Earlier this week, a new study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine: “Intersecting U.S. Epidemics: COVID-19 and Lack of Health Insurance.”

Various media reported on the study, see Newsweek: “Over 7 Million Americans to Lose Health Insurance During Coronavirus Pandemic, 1.5 Million Have Already Lost Coverage, New Study Predicts.”

However, new unemployment data was released since the research was published which nearly doubles the numbers. Using the latest available unemployment figures, and including a new estimate of dependents who become uninsured when a breadwinner loses a job, the researchers now estimate that nearly 5 million have lost their insurance the last three weeks alone — and a total of 13.5 million people are projected to join the ranks of the uninsured by June 30.

STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER, M.D., M.P.H, steffie_woolhandler at hms.harvard.edu
DAVID U. HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., dhimmels at hunter.cuny.edu
Clare Fauke, Physicians for a National Health Program, clare at pnhp.org

The research was carried out by Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein. Both authors are internal medicine specialists who serve as distinguished professors at Hunter College and Lecturers at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Woolhandler commented: “Our health financing system is in tatters, as our nation faces the biggest health crisis in a century. Millions are losing coverage each week and hospitals are struggling to make payroll. States can’t fill the gaps because tax revenues are plummeting and they, unlike the federal government, are required to balance their budgets each year. In this emergency, Washington must step in to protect beleaguered families by expanding Medicare to cover all of the uninsured.”

The researchers found: “4,805,894 American workers and their dependents have lost health insurance coverage in the past three weeks … The researchers also estimate that a total of 13.475 million will join the ranks of the uninsured by June 30, raising the number of uninsured Americans to about 43 million.

“The new figures include coverage losses among newly-unemployed workers as well as their dependents covered under job-based family policies. The figures update previous estimates that the same researchers published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine on April 7, 2020. Those previous estimates only included workers themselves who were laid off during the last two weeks of March, and did not include dependents losing family coverage because of layoffs, or the most recent week of data.

“The new estimates analyzed U.S. Labor Department data on the number of new unemployment claims in each state, and differences in the likelihood of being uninsured among workers with jobs (and their dependents) and those who have lost jobs (and their dependents).

“Based on an analysis of Census Bureau surveys of health insurance coverage, the researchers estimated that 15.6 percent of laid-off workers become newly uninsured, and that for every 100 workers who lose coverage, about 83.7 dependents also lose insurance. They applied those estimates to the Labor Department’s figures (released on April 9) indicating that 16.780 million people filed new unemployment claims in the past three weeks. The June 30 coverage loss estimate was based on a Federal Reserve economist’s projection that 47.05 million workers will lose jobs by the end of June. The researchers noted that their figures do not include coverage losses among self-employed persons or other job losers who did not file unemployment claims, or their dependents.”

ELLEN BROWN, ellen at publicbankinginstitute.org, @ellenhbrown
WALT MCREE, walt at publicbankinginstitute.org, @PublicBanksNow
Brown is founder and chair and McRee is senior advisor to the Public Banking Institute, which recently released an open letter to Congress: “A ‘Critical-Care’ Bailout for Main Street in the Face of COVID-19 — How Public Banks Can Reboot the Real Economy.”

In the letter, the Public Banking Institute details four immediate actions that will prevent financial catastrophe in our communities and set them up for future fiscal health:

1. “Put real money into the real economy. At least $1,200 per month to all U.S. adults as long as needed.

2. Put money in people’s hands now. Get relief funds to people immediately by restarting Post Office Savings Accounts to direct deposit relief funds and/or by using Treasury Direct accounts to direct deposit newly-issued Treasury dollar bills.

3. Get money to the states. States can get 0 percent loans by forming their own public banks.

4. Cancel debts held by the federal government, starting with student debts.” [Note: “Bank of North Dakota Announces Student Loan Relief Options” — background: “The How One State Escaped Wall Street’s Rule and Created a Banking System That’s 83 Percent Locally Owned.”]

They write: “These relief measures can be funded by tapping into the same money tree Congress and the Fed just used to fund a $4 trillion-plus bailout for Wall Street and Corporate America, as detailed below. States and municipalities can tap into the Fed’s 0 percent rates by setting up their own publicly-owned banks by emergency powers. These banks can provide the low-cost credit communities urgently need during this pandemic, granting 1 percent loans as Germany’s public bank KfW does, vs. the complex SBA programs charging 3.75 percent.”

Brown says: “The same Congress that has insisted we cannot afford a universal basic income, Medicare for All, free state college tuition, and other critically needed programs has suddenly discovered that it has unlimited funds to ‘do whatever it takes’ to rescue corporations and the stock market. Meanwhile the individuals, local governments, and local businesses suffering the devastating consequences of the shutdown have essentially been left out of this bailout. But relief for all is possible, if the central bank is run as a true public utility. The same sort of Treasury-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) set up in the CARES Act to bail out businesses and financial institutions can be used to bail out the people and states. The systems are already in place to issue relief funds immediately by direct deposit, and this can be done for as long as needed.”

Brown recently wrote two pieces “Was the Fed Just Nationalized?” and “Socialism at Its Finest After Fed’s Bazooka Fails” for her blog Web of Debt.

DAVID BACON, dbacon at igc.org, @photos4justice
Bacon is a California-based writer and photojournalist and recently wrote the piece “America’s Farmworkers — Now ‘Essential,’ but Denied the Just-Enacted Benefits” for The American Prospect.

Bacon said today: “Empty shelves in supermarkets are proof that the work of farmworkers is essential, if we didn’t know it already. But instead of rewarding this work, and the courage of farmworkers as they continue laboring in the fields, the Trump administration wants to punish them by trying to cut their wages.

“Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows are trying to breathe new life into an old proposal to lower, and even abandon, the guaranteed wage received by hundreds of thousands of guestworkers in the H-2A visa program.

“Last year over 250,000 H-2A guestworkers were recruited by U.S. growers. While halting asylum claims on the border, alleging that claimants might bring the virus with them, the administration is pushing growers to bring in even more guestworkers. Field labor in the U.S. already has the lowest possible wages. Now the administration wants to cut them even further, to make the labor of guestworkers even more attractive to growers. When the wages for guestworkers go down, the wages of all farmworkers plummet as well.

“Trump and his political allies already have excluded half of the farmworkers living in the U.S. — over a million people — from any benefits under the recent CARES Act. Their work is certainly essential, but they are working and living in conditions where the spread of the virus is an immediate danger.

“Farmworkers are being treated as cheap and disposable labor, rather than being honored for the work they do. They should get hazard pay instead, on top of a true living wage, and the basic healthcare and economic benefits afforded to other workers.”

COSTAS PANAYOTAKIS, [in NYC] cpanayotakis at gmail.com
Panayotakis is a professor of sociology at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology and the author of Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy and of the forthcoming The Capitalist Mode of Destruction (Manchester University Press).

He just wrote the piece “The Uses and Abuses of Social Distancing Under Capitalism,” which states: “Critical accounts of the current pandemic have explained how social distancing is often an unaffordable luxury for the most underprivileged groups in rich and low-income countries alike. One thing that has not received critical attention, however, is the term ‘social distancing’ itself. Its use as a synonym for physical distancing is an ideological misnomer. Social distancing suggests a loosening of social ties, when, in fact, the pleas that authorities and public health officials make on behalf of physical distancing appeal to such feelings of social solidarity as still exist in otherwise competitive and individualistic capitalist societies.

“Using the term social distancing to designate a public health strategy that seeks to combat a pandemic ironically vilifies the very sense of social solidarity necessary if people are to sacrifice, for the good of the broader community and the most vulnerable to the disease, the habits on which their economic survival and general sense of well-being depend. …

“The lethal connection between capitalism and pandemics is also revealed in the brazenly hypocritical use that the beneficiaries of the prevailing order make of the concept of social distancing. Corporate giants, like Amazon, in their bid to capitalize on the pandemic by making their workers labor in hazardous conditions, fire labor activists who initiate protests against this situation by claiming that these activists were not practicing social distancing! …

“Capitalism’s erosion of social solidarity is already rearing its ugly head. Reports multiply that corporate and Wall Street elites are increasingly pushing President Trump to ‘reopen the economy,’ even as public health experts warn of the lethal consequences of doing so prematurely.”

The group The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 notes: “On March 23, the Tribune & Georgian announced the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Camden County. That same day, the U.S. Navy announced that it had awarded a contract for up to $592.3 million to prepare the Kings Bay Naval Base [which is in Camden County] for new Trident nuclear submarines. The plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal is projected to cost as much as $2 trillion. Meanwhile, there are major failures to keep people healthy and safe during the COVID-19 crisis. Clearly, priorities ought to change.”

Two years ago, on April 4, 2018, seven activists — the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 — entered the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia, the “largest U.S. nuclear submarine base in the world which houses has one-quarter of the U.S. deployed nuclear weapons.” They sought to “symbolically disarm” the weapons. They spray painted “disarm” on a monument to Trident missiles, spilt their own blood on the base emblem and left an indictment of the activities at the nuclear weapons base.

At their trial in October, the judge prevented them from mounting a series of defenses, including presenting a justification or necessity defense with Daniel Ellsberg testifying on their behalf or invoking international law with professor of international law Francis Boyle.Fordam University theologian Jeannine Hill Fletcher called them “prophets,” but that was outside the court room. Inside, she was not allowed to testify on their behalf either.

This week, after a six-month wait, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood has set two May dates for sentencing those who were found guilty on Oct. 24, 2019 for their nonviolent symbolic disarmament action at Kings Bay Naval Base. See news release from the group for details.

The group states: “There is a possibility that they may be sentenced by video conferencing with the judge, but as of today, we don’t know.”

Mark Colville, one of the KBP7, asks us to “all step back and consider the absurdity of sentencing people by video conference to federal prison. To tell us it’s too dangerous to be in a court and at the same time to order people to prison during this deadly virus pandemic is inhumane. People are dying in prisons right now. It shows that the prison industrial complex takes a higher priority in the eyes of this government that human life. All prisoners should be set free.”

The group stresses: “There are a number of petitions and campaigns circulating calling for the release of prisoners in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic causing widespread death in all prisons and jails. Here are two: Faithful America Petition, or the RAPP Campaign, Release Aging Persons in Prison.”

See previous news releases from the group. For more information or interviews with the activists:

Bill Ofenloch, billcpf at aol.com, @kingsbayplow7
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08 at gmail.com

RICHARD SILVERSTEIN, richards1052 at comcast.net, @richards1052
Silverstein writes on security and other issues at Tikun Olam and for numerous other outlets. He just wrote the piece “Israel Is Militarizing and Monetizing the COVID-19 Pandemic” for Jacobin, which states: “Coronavirus is ravaging the globe right now. It’s a perfect time for the Israeli state to figure out how to expand its already vast surveillance powers.”

Silverstein writes: “As the number of Israeli victims and the first death from coronavirus was announced, Netanyahu saw an opportunity to revive his political relevance. Actually, Netanyahu acted even before the first death, which was on March 20.

“Only a few days earlier, on March 16, he asked the Knesset intelligence committee to approve the use of a hitherto secret national database compiled by the Shin Bet and comprising private personal data on every Israeli citizen, both Jewish and Palestinian. In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel’s Knesset secretly assigned its domestic intelligence agency the task of creating the database, which was ostensibly meant as a counterterrorism measure.

“The data included puts Edward Snowden’s alarms about the NSA’s mass surveillance to shame. It not only contains the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every citizen; it also records every phone call made, and the recipient of these calls, including name and phone number. It uses geo-location to track where every citizen has traveled within the country, and it maintains records of all online activity, including internet searches.

“The top-secret project was couched by Netanyahu as a powerful tool to monitor victims of the epidemic and all who had social contact with them. Few Israelis, aside from privacy advocates and related NGOs, raised any alarms about the obvious violations of individual privacy and rights entailed in both the database itself, whose codename was ‘the Tool,’ and its use to compel suspected coronavirus victims to self-quarantine. They remained silent — even though health ministry officials urging them to approve use of the database suggested that the epidemic would force the state to ‘suspend personal freedoms.'”

“In the last few days and weeks, media outlets around the world have been publishing shocking stories and images of the COVID-19 crisis in Ecuador,” Guillaume Long writes. “Scenes of corpses abandoned in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second-largest city, have shaken audiences in Latin America and beyond. Statistics, even the highly untrustworthy official ones, have confirmed the dire picture of a fast accelerating crisis.”

The BBC reports: “The government said 6,700 people died in Guayas province [which includes Guayaquil] in the first two weeks of April, far more than the usual 1,000 deaths there in the same period. … According to the government’s figures, 14,561 people have died in Guayas province since the beginning of March from all causes. The province normally sees 2,000 deaths a month on average.”

GUILLAUME LONG, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net, @ceprdc
Guillaume Long is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, DC. Prior to joining CEPR, Guillaume held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently, he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva.

Long’s latest post is titled “How Ecuador Descended into COVID-19 Chaos.” He writes: “Ecuador now has the highest per capita COVID-19 death toll in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the second-highest per capita number of COVID-19 cases. …

“From early on, Guayaquil and its surroundings seemed to be the most affected by the spread of the virus. Despite this, initial measures to slow infections were late coming and even slower to be implemented. On March 4, the government authorized the holding of a Libertadores Cup soccer game in Guayaquil, which many commentators have blamed as a major contributor to the massive outbreak of COVID-19 in the city. Over 17,000 fans attended. Another smaller national league game was held on March 8.

“By mid-March, and despite numbers of infected people quickly rising, many guayaquileños continued to go about their lives with minimal — if any — social distancing. Contagion also seems to have spread aggressively in certain well-to-do areas of the city, for example in the wealthy gated communities of La Puntilla in the suburban municipality of Samborondón, where, even after authorities had issued stay-at-home ordinances, inhabitants continued to mingle. A high-profile wedding was attended by some of the city’s ‘finest,’ and authorities later intervened to cancel at least two more weddings and a game of golf. On the weekend of March 14 and 15, guayaquileños congregated on the nearby beaches of Playas and Salinas.

“By the end of the first week of March, the situation had deteriorated sharply. On March 12, the government finally announced that it was closing schools, establishing checks on international visitors, and limiting gatherings to 250 people. On March 13, Ecuador’s first COVID-19 death was reported. The same day, the government announced it was imposing quarantines on incoming visitors from several countries. Four days later, the government limited gatherings to 30 people and suspended all incoming international flights. …

“Yet, the Moreno government’s response has been denial. Government ministers and diplomatic representatives abroad were told to give interviews denouncing it all as ‘fake news.’ …

“There are other, more structural and long-term problems related to the COVID-19 crisis. Convinced of the need and under pressure by the IMF to reduce the size of the state, the Moreno government has made damaging cuts to public health. Public investment in health care fell from $306 million in 2017 to $130 million in 2019. Researchers from the Dutch International Institute of Social Studies have confirmed that in 2019 alone, there were 3,680 layoffs from Ecuador’s Health Ministry, amounting to 4.5 percent of total employment in the ministry.”

The Washington Post is reporting: “White House readies push to slash regulations as major part of its coronavirus economic recovery plan.”

ROBERT WEISSMAN, via Mike Stankiewicz, mstankiewicz at citizen.org, Angela Bradbery, abradbery at citizen.org
Public Citizen just issued a statement: “Trump Uses the Coronavirus as a Pretext to Reward Corporate Predators, Polluters,” quoting Weissman: “The shameless exploitation of the coronavirus crisis to advance a precooked agenda to let corporations pollute our air and water, rip off consumers, endanger workers and trample on civil rights will leave the nation economically weaker and will worsen public health.

“How does it help the economy if banks can prey on consumers?

“How does it help us emerge from the public health crisis if corporations can pump more toxins into the air, worsening lung health? …

“The deregulatory measures the administration has already taken during the pandemic — rolling back a smog rule, gutting the clean cars fuel economy rule (the most important U.S. climate change program), effectively waiving enforcement of environmental rules — have done far too much damage already. The last thing we need is more.”The Trump deregulatory scheme will do nothing to get money back into the pockets of consumers, workers and small business owners, or to put people back to work.

“It is an evidence-free, ideological and corporate-driven illusion that public health regulations will hold up the economic recovery from the pandemic.

“Beyond the lethality of the coronavirus itself, the real and most serious impediment to restarting the economy as quickly and sustainably as possible is the failure to provide adequate testing and tracing measures. Focusing on that problem is where the administration should be devoting its energies.

“Public Citizen will closely monitor the administration’s deregulatory moves. If it fails to follow appropriate process or exceeds presidential authority, we anticipate suing immediately to block its destructive efforts.”

NANCY ALTMAN, via Linda Benesch, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @ssworks

Altman is president of Social Security Works. The group just put out a statement: “Trump Admin Throws Up Yet Another Barrier for Social Security Beneficiaries to Get Their Full CARES Act Payments.” Altman states: “The just passed CARES Act is supposed to provide emergency payments as quickly as possible to the American people suffering from the pandemic and the resulting economic collapse. To ensure that they can get the payments automatically and quickly, Congress authorized the Social Security Administration to share data with Secretary Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, the agency in charge of the payments.

“At first, the Trump administration informed the lowest-income Social Security beneficiaries, those who have too little income to file income tax returns, that, instead of getting their payments automatically, they would have to provide the government with information the government already has. After enormous pushback from Congress and Social Security advocates, the Trump administration reversed course.

“Outrageously, the Trump administration has now created a new roadblock. It just announced that Social Security beneficiaries who did not file tax returns have only one day to prevent having a portion of those payments — the $500 payments for dependent children — delayed until 2021!

“Adding insult to injury, the Trump administration is requiring that, to avoid that delay, they have to go online – notwithstanding that many of them do not have computers or internet service and are supposed to be sheltering in place — to provide the government with information that it already has.

“While the extremely short deadline is a disgrace, just pushing it back isn’t good enough. Since the Trump administration already has the information it is seeking, it should pay these benefits automatically without putting additional burdens on Social Security beneficiaries.

“It is impossible to tell from the outside if this latest outrage is the result of incompetence, mean-spiritedness or both.”

RANI MARX, PhD, MPH, r_marx at pacbell.net
JAMES G. KAHN, MD, MPH, JGKahn at ucsf.edu,
Marx is an epidemiologist and health services researcher who currently directs the Initiative for Slow Medicine.

Kahn is emeritus professor of health policy, University of California, San Francisco.

They just wrote the piece “COVID-19 and the Myth of ‘Choice’ in American Healthcare,”

They write: “The empty White House promises of paying for COVID-19 services gloss over the messy and painful reality. While $100 billion designated for doctors and hospitals to provide care for patients with COVID-19 includes treating the uninsured, it is unclear how to disentangle who and what is covered and which conditions can be attributed to the virus. It’s crazy: you may get help for medical costs, but only if you can prove that COVID-19 caused your illness. No other wealthy country does this; they have universal standard medical coverage.

“To make matters worse, many of the 6.6 million newly jobless who filed unemployment claims near the end of March will now join the ranks of the uninsured and under-insured whose COVID-19 treatment will not be covered. All of these problems are exacerbated in states that opted out of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. To add insult to injury, an outsized chunk of the $100 billion will go to hospital administration instead of critically needed care and resources. Insurers stand to realize a big profit from the pandemic due to indefinite cancellation of non-urgent procedures, a high prevalence of deaths among patients with costly co-morbidities, and a projected increase in premiums next year.

“How did we get here? As Wendell Potter (a former public relations executive in the health insurance industry) explained in a New York Times op-ed in January, American choice in healthcare is a ‘P.R. concoction’ that obscures the lack of real choice — of doctors and hospitals. This choice is an unpleasant, ill-informed selection among highly restrictive plans. Not to mention having few options, and loss of coverage due to changes made by employers or job loss. Industry lobbying and advertising have so successfully promulgated the myth that Americans have choice, it was advanced even by many Democratic presidential candidates.”

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says states should consider declaring bankruptcy, independent analysts are advocating that states set up their own banks to readily tap into newly created financial options to deal with the pandemic-induced economic crisis.

ELLEN BROWN, ellen at publicbankinginstitute.org, @ellenhbrown
ROBERT HOCKETT, rch37 at cornell.edu, @rch371
Brown is the chair and Hockett is an advisory board member of the Public Banking Institute, which Wednesday sent an open letter to state governors and treasurers: “How State Officials Can Save Main Street in the Face of COVID-19: Three Urgent Actions“.

The letter outlines three important new funding possibilities for states:

#1: “States can borrow from the Fed at 0.25 percent through state-owned public banks established by emergency executive order. According to banking experts, a public bank could be set up in a matter of a month if fast tracked by executive order, using a portion of the funds allocated to states under the CARES Act for capitalization. The bank could then borrow from the Fed at 0.25 percent to provide 10 times its capital in low-cost credit to communities. It could also work with community banks to fund loans for small and medium-sized businesses that are too small to qualify for the Fed’s new Main Street Lending Program.

#2: Use the Federal Reserve’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) to sell bonds directly to the Fed. With this new MLF, states and cities can sell short-term notes of 24 months or less directly to the Fed without going through the private bond market, saving related fees. Hockett has proposed a game plan for how states can put this facility to immediate use.

#3: Get low interest loans under Federal Reserve Act 14(2)(b). This section of the Act already allows the Fed to buy six-month debt instruments from states and municipalities. Governors need to collaborate to urge the Fed to activate this section, lend to state and municipal governments on the same favorable terms banks are getting, and roll over the loans, as the Fed is now doing for financial institutions in the repo market.”

The group added: “As states and cities face a tsunami of emergency expenses, imploding tax revenues, and a shrinking bond market, the actions listed above can provide a real financial lifeline to struggling communities desperate for funds. Taking these steps and using emergency powers to establish publicly-owned state banks will not only help stave off crushing economic disaster for their constituents but will create an honest and efficient financial infrastructure that can keep communities productive and healthy long into the future.”

Brown said today: “The Federal Reserve has stepped up to the plate by relaxing some of its rules and dropping interest rates to zero, but only for banks. States could take advantage of this opportunity by having their own banks, something that could be done quickly by executive order. Newly created state banks could follow the example of Germany’s public bank KfW and grant one percent loans directly to Main Street businesses. Building a public bank network accountable to the public is a crucial part of the solution communities need.”

VICTOR WALLIS, zendive at aol.com

Wallis is author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (2018), Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics (2019) and the recently released Socialist Practice.

He just wrote the piece “COVID-19, Capitalism, and Socialism,” which states: “The COVID-19 emergency underscores longstanding truths about capitalism and socialism. Acting on the most immediate demands that it raises draws us directly into a confrontation with core issues. …

“The clash between capitalist principles and human need is especially striking in the sphere of healthcare because we find here an extraordinarily glaring discrepancy between the potential cost of a recommended medical procedure and the capacity of a person of average or low income to pay for it. The notion of measuring need through the market fails here so completely that even in otherwise capitalist countries, it has been widely recognized that the provision of healthcare must be informed by socialist principles. Still, the actual implementation of such an approach depends on pressure from the organized working class (which, as a political force, has been notoriously weak in the United States). …

“A socialist approach to healthcare thus goes beyond responding just to market demand or to private interests and instead builds an infrastructure that can respond to emergency needs. This was strikingly shown just now in China, where urgently needed temporary hospitals were built (in Wuhan) in just two weeks. Moreover, a fully socialist approach, with its corresponding culture of cooperation, makes it possible, as Cuba has repeatedly shown, to extend health services on a large scale to people in other countries.

“The capitalist framework, by contrast, not only suffers from the above-noted drawbacks; in addition, in its current ‘neoliberal’ form, it has increasingly prioritized cost-cutting. In the same way that manufacturing industry, using new technologies, turns more and more to ‘just in time’ production (not building up inventories, thereby risking sudden shortages), so also the healthcare industry, in its drive for ‘efficiency,’ closes down hospitals and reduces its total numbers of beds, which then come up short in the event of an emergency. Ironically, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has emerged as a prominent critic of the federal government’s failures, was himself responsible for reducing from 50,000 to 30,000 the number of hospital beds in his own state.”

CHUCK COLLINS, chuck at ips-dc.org; also via Bob Keener, bobk at ips-dc.org
Collins is co-author of the just-released study “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers,” which found: “Between January 1, 2020 and April 10, 2020, 34 of the nation’s wealthiest 170 billionaires saw their wealth increase by tens of millions of dollars. Eight have seen their net worth surge by over $1 billion.”

He is with the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits Inequality.org. In a just-published piece on CNN Business: “Billionaires are getting even richer from the pandemic. Enough is enough,” Collings writes: “Extreme wealth inequality is America’s ‘preexisting condition.’ And unless we act intentionally — with ambitious public policies aimed at reversing inequality — the pandemic recovery will supercharge our existing inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity. …”There are huge disparities in who suffers from the resulting economic fallout [of the pandemic].”Columbia University researchers project that poverty rates in the United States could soon reach their highest levels in half a century. Yet as my colleagues and I track in a new report for the Institute for Policy Studies, the wealth of America’s billionaires actually increased by nearly 10 percent over just three weeks as the COVID-19 crisis took hold. …

“Already, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires is higher than a year ago, according to our study. At least eight of these billionaires have added another $1 billion to their wealth during the pandemic.

“Among these ‘pandemic profiteers’ are Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, which owns Skype and Teams. Both Yuan and Ballmer are profiting off the boom in videoconferencing.

“But no one has benefited as handsomely as Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who has seen his wealth skyrocket by $25 billion since January 1 as homebound customers lean heavily on online shopping, grocery delivery and streaming. This wealth surge for one individual — greater than the entire GDP of Honduras — is unprecedented in the history of modern markets.”

Collins writes that congressional action so far has meant “ordinary households got a one-time $1,200 check. People earning over $1 million, however, could receive an average tax windfall of $1.6 million, according to analysis released by two congressmen.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.

“Instead, Congress should design stimulus bills to put more money in the pockets of ordinary people. An initial six-month universal basic income of $1,500 a month per adult, for households with incomes under $70,000, would reduce economic stress and destitution and boost struggling local communities.”

JONATHAN LATHAM, jrlatham at bioscienceresource.org, @BioSRP
Executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, Latham said today: “Everyone wants to know how a bat coronavirus got into humans. That is to say, how did this virus make the leap from not infecting humans at all to being a virulent pathogen. There almost has to have been some kind of intermediate host and many observers have seen the exotic animal trade as the probable intermediary. As time has gone on, however, evidence to support Wuhan’s Huanan ‘wet’ market as the location for this has weakened since the very earliest known patient had no specific connection to it. Equally, a plausible animal intermediary species has not emerged either. With very little, and sometimes no evidence at all, snakes, civets, and pangolins have been suggested. At the very same time, it has emerged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), just eight miles from the epicenter, has a large collection of bat coronaviruses and was actively working on them. Moreover, like quite a few virologists, I have strong concerns about coronavirus recombinant DNA research in general, about gain-of-function and passaging research in particular, and about the competence and safety record of BSL-4 labs around the world. Given as well the proximity between the lab, I agree with Professor [Nikolai] Petrovsky who was quoted by the Australian Science Media Centre: ‘this either is a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention’ i.e. that it was research at the WIV that bridged the gap.”

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Husseini is an independent journalist. He asked the CDC’s Principle Deputy Director Anne Schuchat if it was a “complete coincidence” that the outbreak happened in Wuhan given the presence of labs there. The questioning was at a news conference at the now-shuttered National Press Club on Feb. 11. (See writeup, video and audio here.)

In a new in-depth piece published by Salon “Did This Virus Come From a Lab? Maybe Not — but It Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race,” he writes: “While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.

“But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in secret, and are also known to be accident-prone. …

“‘Biodefense’ implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such ‘defense’ research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic. …

“Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the U.S. government paused funding for what are known as ‘gain-of-function’ research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017. …

“During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina and Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work — which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged — was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine. …

“At least one Chinese government official has responded to the allegation that the labs in Wuhan could be the source for the pandemic by alleging that perhaps the U.S. is responsible instead. … Obviously the Chinese government’s allegations should not be taken at face value, but neither should U.S. government claims — especially considering that U.S. government labs were the apparent source for the anthrax attacks in 2001. Those attacks sent panic through the U.S. and shut down Congress, allowing the Bush administration to enact the PATRIOT Act and ramp up the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, in October 2001, media darlings like Richard Butler and Andrew Sullivan propagandized for war with Iraq because of the anthrax attacks.

“The 2001 anthrax attacks also provided much of the pretext for the surge in biolab spending since then, even though they apparently originated in a U.S. or U.S.-allied lab. Indeed, those attacks remain shrouded in mystery.” Husseini is also senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy.

The Intercept reports in “How New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is Using the Pandemic to Consolidate Power” that: “New York election officials’ decision on Monday to cancel the June Democratic presidential primary was just the latest in a series of moves by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration to consolidate power and shut out progressives in the state.”

The group New York Progressive Action Network held an emergency meeting Monday night and Wednesday issued the following statement, saying their activists “plan to reverse the unprecedented decision by two unelected Democratic Board of Election officials, appointed by Cuomo and convicted former Speaker [Sheldon] Silver, to knock off the ballot Senator Sanders and his 184 pledged delegates, who together filed over 65,000 petition signatures to get on the ballot.

“Attendees agreed to file a complaint with the Democratic National Committee, since NY’s action violated its rules which require pledged district delegates to be chosen at an election open to all registered Democrats. In fact, NY violated its own plan which was approved by the DNC. The remedy is that all of NY’s unelected delegates chosen in violation of these rules not be credentialed at the Convention.

“Activists also approved the filing of a federal lawsuit against the outrageous denial of basic right to vote. Also illegal was the fact that the BOE relied on a new law which Cuomo attached to his budget, passed in early April, which for the first time allowed the BOE to involuntarily remove from the ballot candidates who had ‘suspended’ their campaigns, even if they objected and had never formerly ended their campaign. This placed a retroactive requirement onto candidates, who had satisfied all ballot access requirements prior to the new law, that didn’t exist at the time they petitioned.”

George Albro, NYPAN downstate co-chair, stated: “Canceling elections is something that is supposed to only happen in dictatorships, ruled by one strongman, and not in the USA. This violation of a sacred right has angered not only Bernie supporters, or even only Democrats, but all Americans who cherish their democracy, no matter what their politics are. We Democrats rightly are appalled at Republican attempts to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters — people of color, youth, students — by imposing unreasonable voter I.D. laws, etc — but NY Democrats have topped them all: canceled the entire election and disenfranchised the whole Democratic electorate.”

Kathryn Levy, NYPAN Long Island leader added: “Unfortunately, the Governor has decided to try to shut out of the political process all forces that he doesn’t control: progressives, (by canceling the primary), minor parties (by placing new, onerous burdens on their maintaining ballot lines), and even the Legislature (which has effectively been shut out of the budget process). We now have one-man rule in NY State, and it is un-American and disgraceful.”

The group added: “While the BOE claimed to be chiefly motivated by health concerns for voters and poll workers, this was on its face disingenuous since there will still be in-person voting allowed on the same day in the overwhelming majority of districts and because EVERY registered Democrat will have the opportunity to vote by mail. Unfortunately, the media has not widely reported on these facts and most political leaders have sheepishly remained silent. So NYPAN will also start a campaign to educate the voters, and even the media, about the real motivation to their action, which is to suppress the Bernie vote, while at the same time shore up incumbents.

“Finally, the Governor’s false claim that he had nothing to do with this, and that the BOE acted on its own, must also be exposed, since the BOE expressly relied of the new law which Cuomo alone put in HIS budget without legislative involvement other than a vote on the entire budget.”

Contact:

George Albro, Co-Chair gwalbro at aol.com
Traci Strickland, Co-Chair traci.strickland at gmail.com
Jay Bellanca, Co-Chair jvbellanca at gmail.com

See piece from the media watch group FAIR: “Media Need to Scrutinize Andrew Cuomo’s Record, Not Crush on His Words.”

MIKE ELK, mike.elk at gmail.com, @MikeElk

Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report which features a map showing strikes around the U.S.

He also just wrote the piece “The Power to Slow Down Reopening” for The American Prospect. He writes: “Some employers will doubtless take advantage of 20 percent unemployment rates to make it clear to workers that they can easily be replaced if they try to unionize, or even if they organize just to block a dangerously premature back-to-work order from their boss. With an inadequate social safety net, many workers may feel compelled to go back to work, even if it risks contracting COVID-19, in order to keep a roof over their heads. …

“By pausing and creating a more equitable framework for recovery, many workplace advocates believe that workers could find their voices and assert their power — a development that could build on a massive strike wave already hitting the country.”

JAISAL NOOR, jaisal at therealnews.com
CHRIS SMALLS, chrismalls21 at gmail.com
Noor is a reporter with The Real News and has extensively covered labor issues. He just put out the report: “Fired Amazon Worker Chris Smalls: Support May Day Strikers.

“Said Noor: “Dozens have actions have taken place across the country to demand basic safety protections and hazard pay during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s possible we see more walkouts and protests on Mayday or International Workers Day, which is observed in most countries except the United States. Despite its rich militant often bloody history of working class struggle that’s secured major victories like the eight hour workday.  Mayday 2020 could see the reawakening of this more radical tradition in the US as workers with Amazon, Target, Whole Foods and other retailers are holding mass sick outs and other protests to demand fair pay and workplace protections during the coronavirus pandemic.”

In The Real News report, Noor said Small “was fired from Amazon in March after working there for five years. Amazon said Smalls was fired for not social distancing, but his firing is widely seen as retaliation for organizing a walkout at the Staten Island Amazon warehouse where he’s worked.”

Said Small: “We are doing a service for the consumers, but if we’re not healthy, we’re doing a disservice. Meaning we’re bringing this virus back to the communities. So we need to stay together in this aspect. And for the consumers, don’t purchase anything from these types of companies until they protect us. By doing that, you’re standing with us, you’re standing with your loved ones.”

SUSANNA BLANKLEY, susanna at righttocounselnyc.org, @RTCNYC
Blankley is coalition coordinator for the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, one of several groups backing a #CancelRent policy.

On Friday, the groups, with rent strikers and housing advocates, will target Gov. Andrew Cuomo with multiple actions, including “a caravan surrounding the executive mansion in Albany, a protest at his New York City office, banner drops at apartment buildings, a raucous rally online, and a cacerolazo.”

Simultaneous rallies are scheduled at 10:30 a.m., Executive Mansion, State Capitol, Albany, NY, and Cuomo’s New York City office, 633 3rd Avenue, near East 41st Street, Manhattan. There will also be a 1 p.m. Zoom press conference and rally — to attend, please go to: https://zoom.us/j/99190878708.

The group, which is working with the Housing Justice for All campaign, says: “Across the state, May Day will be a major day of escalation for New Yorkers who can’t pay rent, and have joined a growing movement to pressure Cuomo to #CancelRent and demand federal action that will address the financial crisis facing tenants who have lost income and jobs during the current COVID-19 pandemic.”

See the groups’ demands.

Spanish-language media can dial-in at 1 p.m. at (929) 205-6099; Meeting ID: 83968702242#

A cacerolazo will begin around 2 p.m. after the press conference and rally online. It will be viewable online via Zoom.

SARAH ANDERSON, sarah at ips-dc.org, @ips_dc
SCOTT KLINGER, scottklinger at earthlink.net
Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is a co-editor of Inequality.org. Klinger is senior equitable development specialist at Jobs with Justice and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

They just co-wrote the piece “Postal Bankruptcy Would Hit Rural America Hardest” and wrote a report on the subject. They write: “A USPS shutdown would be devastating for the entire country, but especially for the rural communities that rely most on a public service with a universal mandate to serve every address, no matter how remote.”

They find that “the 15 most rural U.S. states would face heavy blows to jobs, revenue, mail and package deliveries, and voting rights.”

In these states with the “largest share of their population in rural areas, more than 75,000 people work directly for the Postal Service — more than are employed in many other major job categories. The total mailing industry employs nearly 700,000 people and generates more than $150 billion in revenue per year in these heavily rural states. Twelve of these states have larger than average shares of 65 and older residents, a group that tends to rely heavily on USPS for medicine, bill paying, and other services.

“USPS provides service at uniform and reasonable rates, delivering to 157 million addresses at least six days a week, no matter where they live. The Postal Service uses revenue from more profitable services to cover much more expensive rural services. …

“Across the country, an estimated 20 percent of all Americans over 40 who are prescribed medication for a chronic condition get their prescriptions exclusively through the Postal Service. An even greater share of the rural population relies on mail order prescriptions since so many pharmacies in rural communities have shut down. Veterans, nearly one-quarter of whom live in rural communities, receive 80 percent of their prescriptions through the mail. …

“Even in ‘normal times’ (without a pandemic), many rural residents either must vote by mail or find it much more convenient to do so. In Minnesota, for example, 130,000 people in towns and townships with less than 400 voters automatically get mail ballots because they do not have physical polling sites. Rural voters are older on average than other voters and often have long drives to their nearest polling places. Vote by mail helps them exercise their fundamental democratic right to vote.

“Although bipartisan lawmakers agreed to an emergency direct aid plan in March, President Trump intervened to strip it from the $2.3 trillion stimulus bill and has vowed to block any future proposals for USPS grant aid of the type offered to the airlines, small businesses, hospitals, and Amtrak. Instead, the CARES Act included only the possibility of a $10 billion loan, subject to draconian conditions that the PMG [postmaster general] and postal board have thus far rejected.”

Earlier this year, Anderson and Klinger co-wrote report the “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis — And How to Fix it.”

CNN is reporting Tuesday morning: “Venezuela claims to have captured two Americans involved in failed invasion.”

DAN KOVALIK, dkovalik at outlook.com, @danielmkovalik
Kovalik is a human rights lawyer and author of the recently-released book The Plot To Overthrow Venezuela and the just-released No More War.

He said today: “On Sunday, May 3, the Venezuelan government foiled what appears to have been a joint U.S./Colombia attempt to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro.” See AP report.

According to Kovalik, who teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, “this type of coup operation, reminiscent of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba decades ago, is not only a clear violation of international law, but is simply unconscionable during a worldwide pandemic.”

Kovalik states that “Venezuela, despite heavy U.S. sanctions which are undermining its economy and healthcare system, is struggling mightily, and with considerable success, to fight the COVID-19 virus. The U.S. is hampering this effort by backing Colombian paramilitary forces to invade and attempt to destabilize Venezuela.”

Kovalik added, “The UN and Pope Francis have quite reasonably called for the lifting of sanctions and the end of hostilities during this time to allow countries to fight this pandemic.  Instead of heeding such calls, the U.S. is doing the opposite — increasing sanctions against and hostilities with countries like Venezuela. This is simply unacceptable.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

May 5, 2020
Institute for Public Accuracy
980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
@accuracy * ipaccuracy

DIANE RAVITCH, gardendr at gmail.com, @DianeRavitch
Ravitch just wrote the piece “Beware! Cuomo Adds Another Billionaire to ‘Reimagine’ Post-Pandemic Public Education.”

She said today: “Governor Cuomo has invited Bill Gates to help him ‘reinvent’ education in New York, along with experts identified by Gates. The assumption is that ‘the new normal’ will depend on technology. This is a huge mistake. Parents, students, and teachers are well aware of the boredom of distance learning. They are eager for real schools to reopen with real teachers.

“The Gates Foundation has sponsored a series of disastrous interventions into education, such as the Common Core standards and test-based evaluation of teachers. Furthermore, Governor Cuomo is bypassing the state Board of Regents, which is legally responsible for education policy in the state of New York.”

Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University. Her most recent book is Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Her previous books include: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. 

RICHARD JOHN, rrj2115 at columbia.edu
John is author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard University Press) and recently wrote the piece “The Founders never intended the U.S. Postal Service to be managed like a business” for the Washington Post.

John writes that since the start of the pandemic, “Congress has seemingly tried to bail out everyone: Millions of individuals, airlines, restaurants, retail businesses and even golf courses are among the beneficiaries of the government’s largesse. But so far, one struggling institution has come up empty: the U.S. Postal Service. …

“The Founders intended the Postal Service to be a pillar of the republic, binding together millions of Americans, urban and rural, for the common good. It therefore always had congressional oversight limiting what management can do to make a profit. Rather than being mismanaged, the Postal Service is — and has long been — one of America’s great successes. Instead of privatizing it, we should take inspiration from the Founders and re-envision its mission for the 21st century. …

“Most critically, the [Postal Service Act of 1792] subsidized the circulation of newspapers throughout the country on a nonpreferential basis and at extremely low cost. Not only pro-government ideas but also anti-government ideas could circulate throughout the length and breadth of the republic. Before 1792, newspapers had been officially excluded from the mail; after 1792, they circulated in numbers unmatched by any other country in the world. …

“Rather than pushing for privatization — a move that might well oblige online behemoths such as Amazon or Walmart to consider buying up postal assets at bargain basement prices — public officials mindful of the wisdom of the Founders might well consider expanding the ambit of the Postal Service to include high-tech ‘last mile’ capabilities. [This could include] the reestablishment of a low-cost consumer banking system, a popular service the Postal Service maintained for much of the 20th century, or even the rollout of low-cost municipal broadband. Rural electrification transformed vast swaths of the hinterland; might not rural Postal Services be configured as hubs for the digital economy of tomorrow? The Postal Service also will play a crucial role in ensuring trustworthy mail balloting, a major issue in the age of COVID-19.”

SUSANNA BLANKLEY, susanna at righttocounselnyc.org, @RTCNYC
While CBS and other outlets have run stories like “Cuomo: No one in New York can be evicted for not paying rent until August 20,” housing rights groups are saying that’s not accurate.

Blankley is coalition coordinator for the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, which just put out a statement: “On Friday, May 7, New York Governor Cuomo issued an executive order, which he claimed extended the existing eviction moratorium. However, Cuomo’s executive order actually ended rather than extended our current eviction moratorium, putting thousands at risk of displacement. While Governor Cuomo’s public remarks gave the impression that he extended the moratorium until August 20, his order offers tenants very limited protections. It allows landlords to bring cases against renters who cannot pay rent, while offering limited protections to a limited number of households.

“The eviction moratorium that’s currently in place protects all tenants, commercial and residential, from eviction across New York State. Until June 20, no tenant can be evicted for any reason, period. But on Friday, May 7th Governor Cuomo issued a new executive order that ends the eviction moratorium on June 20th, and forces thousands of tenants facing lawsuits to risk their health to fight for their homes.

“By opening the door to all these new eviction cases and evictions, the new Executive Order will quickly take us back to overcrowded housing courts and families facing homelessness — both of which are guaranteed to endanger individual and public health.”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of many books and articles. His podcast interview with “The Analysis” on COVID-19 and the workforce is available here.

He said today: “We all know that the U.S. response to COVID-19 has lagged far behind other countries. But now a real trap is closing. The public premise of the government stimulus programs was that they would be needed only for a short period and channeling aid to businesses would enable them to retain workers on their payrolls. So vast sums were handed out while the Federal Reserve intervened massively in financial markets. But now unemployment is soaring, in a country whose health insurance system is keyed to the workplace. Small businesses are collapsing and plainly never got much aid. Workers are also dropping out of the workforce in enormous numbers while a major health and safety crisis rages. Government policy has got to address these issues before it’s too late. It can’t simply grant blanket immunity to businesses for the sake of a hasty, premature reopening. A major re-calibration of policy is in order.”

SEAN VITKA, sean at demandprogress.org, @demandprogress
Vitka is senior policy counsel at Demand Progress, which just released a statement: “Senate adopts key privacy protection measure for the USA PATRIOT Act.”

The group states: “The Senate just adopted the Lee-Leahy amendment to the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act (H.R. 6172). The amendment creates critical safeguards that help address well-documented problems with FISA surveillance, for instance by ensuring independent review of applications targeting religious groups and the media.

“The deeply flawed underlying legislation would revive Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, as well as the ‘lone wolf’ and ‘roving wiretap’ authorities, which expired on March 15, 2020, until December 1, 2023.

“Senators Daines, Leahy, Lee, Paul, Udall, Wyden, and others were able to guarantee two other votes on amendments. All amendments require 60 votes to be adopted. Earlier today, Senators Daines and Wyden’s amendment failed — 59 to 37 — after ten Democrats sided with Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr and voted against protecting internet browsing and search histories with a warrant. Votes on Senator Paul’s amendment and final passage are expected in the near future.”

Vitka said: “No committee of jurisdiction marked up or passed the underlying legislation. Instead, through a backroom deal between Adam Schiff and Jim Jordan, leadership rammed the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act through the House without any chance to fix the glaring problems in the underlying bill. Majority Leader McConnell tried to do the same thing, but thanks to the courage of reformers in both chambers of Congress, as well as an outpouring of support from constituents, we were able to stop him.

“With today’s vote on the Daines-Wyden amendment, most Senators, and the vast majority of Democrats, voted to protect Americans’ internet activity with a warrant. It is unconscionable that ten Democrats instead voted against that amendment, siding with Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell.

“Nevertheless, adoption of the Lee-Leahy amendment is a major victory for Americans’ civil liberties. The Lee-Leahy amendment ensures an independent voice has access to and can raise issues with FISA surveillance targeting religious groups, political groups, and the media. The underlying bill remains broken, but adoption of the Lee-Leahy amendment represents a privacy victory well beyond what many believed to be possible.”

SEAN VITKA, sean at demandprogress.org, @demandprogress
Vitka is senior policy counsel at Demand Progress. He said: “After strong bipartisan support for the Daines-Wyden amendment in the Senate, the House of Representatives must stop Attorney General Bill Barr from spying on Americans’ online activity without a warrant.

“Thursday, the Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act (H.R. 6172), which would reauthorize three expired Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorities, including Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Wednesday, the Senate adopted the Lee-Leahy amendment, which established a meaningful privacy protection for the public, religious groups, and the media. [See IPA news release: “Schiff and McConnell Fail to Increase Barr’s Surveillance Powers.”]

“However, the Senate failed to adopt the Daines-Wyden amendment, which would have made clear the government may not use Section 215 to surveil internet browsing and search histories without a warrant. Thursday, the Senate also failed to adopt the Paul amendment, which would have prohibited the use of FISA, as well as surveillance conducted under claimed Article II power, against people in the United States or in proceedings against them.”

Demand Progress Education Fund and the FreedomWorks Foundation have released a number of materials on Section 215 — including visual and written histories of how “the government has repeatedly misused” this specific authority — at Section215.org.

Vitka added: “It is now critically important that the House of Representatives add the Daines-Wyden amendment to the underlying bill. Attorney General Bill Barr personally approved the first known bulk surveillance program targeting people in the United States. That DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] program operated for over two decades, collecting billions of records, but was only publicly revealed two years after it was shut down, in 2015. Just last year, an Inspector General report concluded that Barr initiated the DEA program without first reviewing its legality.

“We cannot wait to find out what Bill Barr’s second attempt at a mass-surveillance program looks like, and this is all the more true while Donald Trump occupies the White House. Now that we know a filibuster-proof majority of senators supports prohibiting the government from using the PATRIOT Act to spy on our online activity without a warrant, it would be dangerously irresponsible for the House to pass this reauthorization without that protection.”

RICARDO SALVADOR, via Ja-Rei Wang, JWang at ucsusa.org, @cadwego
Salvador is senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He wrote the piece “Agribusiness Is Using the COVID-19 Crisis to Slash Food-Worker Wages” and was recently interviewed on FAIR’s show “CounterSpin.”

Salvador said: “We recently have been forced to recognize how essential these workers are, by actually giving them that official designation. ‘Essential’ means, ‘Without you, the whole thing doesn’t work.’ But there are asymmetries here. … There’s a mismatch of supply and demand.” Workers are brought in from outside the U.S. and are exploited and not paid “the fair value of their labor. So that’s the structure of our food system. It’s very much modeled on antebellum plantation economics.

“Probably the single most influential agricultural lobby is the American Farm Bureau Federation. They say they represent farmers, but they actually represent agribusiness. And the president of that organization is Zippy Duvall. …

“The person who is carrying the water for all of this in the White House is President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. He very much says his whole career has been about small government. And by the way, I’ll remind everyone that we’re living in a time where, to quote Noam Chomsky a couple of weeks ago, every fiscal conservative is hiding their copy of Ayn Rand and lining up for benefits from the nanny state. There’s a lot of hypocrisy that we need to throw in these people’s faces, because that’s the urgency that the degree of exploitation and dysfunction that we’re living through demands.”

Salvador also highlighted the role of those who run meatpacking industry in the country, such as “Larry Pope, who heads Smithfield Foods, and Noel White, who heads Tyson Foods, because these are the folks who are making the decisions to force people to show up to work. They’re interested in maintaining share value more than they’re interested in preserving the health of their workers. They put out press releases saying that they value nothing more than the health of their workers, but they’re forcing them to work under highly unsafe conditions, given the etiology of this particular pandemic, the coronavirus.”

Al Jazeera reports Monday: “Afghan intelligence officials killed in Taliban car bombing.”

JUNAID AHMAD, [in Islamabad, Pakistan], junaidsahmad at gmail.com
Ahmad is director of the Center for Global Dialogue and professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. See his interviews on The Real News.

He said today: “With the recent spate of attacks in Afghanistan, the so-called ‘peace agreement’ between the U.S. and the Taliban signed just a few weeks ago seems to be in tatters. The purported truce that was to be had went to shreds the moment the negotiations ended in some resolution. The only provision that seems to have been implemented is a prisoner exchange.

“After dragging its feet” in the prolonged war, the U.S. government “was now willing to meet the principal Taliban demand: withdrawal of all U.S. forces, gradually over the next fourteen months. However, the absence of, and indifference toward, the Afghan government itself was glaringly visible in these U.S.-Taliban peace talks.

“Observers now widely believe that an Afghan ‘puppet’ government, utterly reliant on U.S. protection, is outraged by these negotiations. President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, along with his close Indian allies, do not seem to be keen on any U.S. withdrawal that would almost certainly lead to the Taliban, or what is more appropriately considered the ethnic Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, to win over both more territory and loyalties from the other ethnic forces in the country. The latter has already begun to happen.

“The latest Taliban attack on Afghan intelligence personnel in the city of Ghazni rests upon a strong belief that the Afghan intelligence services, alongside their Indian counterparts, are engineering a number of spectacular attacks within the country precisely to prevent the Americans from considering to withdraw. All of the attacks are routinely condemned by the Afghan government as the work of the Taliban, who on the surface of it, would have no interest in breaking the truce and peace accord since the Americans agreed to their main demand.

“What began as a hopeful sign of the ending of the two-decade bloody American occupation of the country, torn by internecine warfare for four decades now, has now (re-)turned into a chaotic war zone where the geopolitics of the region, and outside actors, prevent any steps toward reconciliation and peace.”

JAMES BRADLEY, james at jamesbradley.com
Bradley is author of several nonfiction bestsellers focused on the American experience in the Pacific and Asia, including Flags of Our Fathers and The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. 

Bradley has lived in Asia off and on since he went to university in Tokyo in 1974. He is currently in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand and producing a series on “War With China?” on his “Untold Pacific” podcast channel. Recent episodes include “America’s New McCarthyism,” “U.S. Military: ‘War with China Inevitable'” and “U.S. Military Has China Surrounded” with author and documentary filmmaker John Pilger.

In 2016, Pilger released the documentary “The Coming War on China,” which Bradley is featured in — the documentary is now online.

Bradley said today: “We’re seeing both Trump and Biden ratchet up the anti-Chinese rhetoric and it is incredibly dangerous. There’s a great deal of propaganda that depicts China as this great threat and that taps into a long history of anti-Chinese sentiment and misinformation in the U.S.

“Well before the outbreak of this pandemic, elements of the U.S. establishment have been itching in one way or another for increased conflict with China.” This includes the U.S. building “more and bigger military bases that ring China. You have the reconstitution of groups like the Committee on the Present Danger: CHINA with members like Frank Gaffney, Steve Bannon, William Bennett and the CIA’s Bradley Johnson.

“And of course, the pandemic is being exploited by many to ratchet up tensions around a trade war with China and foster resentment.”

Bradley elaborated on the work behind his book The China Mirage — today the U.S. media feature “many who are disappointed that American outreach to China over the last 20 years didn’t liberalize China, make it more American. The China Mirage focuses on this continuing U.S. delusion; the ‘mirage’ in the American mind is that China will become something more like America. Pearl Buck — a huge 20th century author — preached this mirage to the American public in the 1930’s and the U.S. made the Chinese Civil War inevitable.” As Bradley told NPR when the book came out: “Chiang Kai-shek was the China mirage incarnate. He was going to lead China to become an Americanized, Christianized country.”

The book also tracks wealthy U.S. individuals and families like the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt “who dealt with Chinese gangs to inject illegal opium into China and how many prominent East Coast families accumulated massive fortunes as drug dealers during China’s century of humiliation.” The China Mirage traces the American experience with China from presidents George Washington to Richard Nixon.

See from FAIR: “Media Fail to Identify Xenophobia as Biden Says Trump ‘Rolled Over for Chinese.’“

The New York Times is reporting in “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show” on a study from Columbia University disease modelers that found that if physical distancing measures had begun “on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.”

ALISON GALVANI, alison.galvani at gmail.com
Galvani is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale University. She said today: “This study makes a lot of sense and is consistent with some of our own modeling. It’s undeniable that more rapid implementation of public health interventions would have saved lives. The non-linearity of epidemiological dynamics means that the impact of early action or inaction is amplified over time as an outbreak progresses. The window of opportunity for the prompt containment of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States closed while messages of denial were being propagated by our President. Overall, we were exceedingly slow to implement control strategies.”

Galvani added that lifting distancing measures is now being done prematurely and such actions have “cost thousands upon thousands of lives. I fear that still many more Americans will die unless a more sustained and concerted effort is made to overcome this pandemic.”

The COVID-19 Global Solidarity Coalition will launch on May 23, 2020, unveiling a manifesto signed by “thousands of people and organizations worldwide. The launch will take place over a live video streaming through Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube. The goal is to establish guidelines, principles, and priorities for dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic to end the neoliberal assault on the environmental and social structures that protect the health and well-being of billions around the world.

“We call upon the global community to rethink the self-destructive path that humanity is presently following as demonstrated by the devastation and the continuing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, the existential threats of climate change and nuclear war, the waste of lives and resources due to ongoing warfare and unbridled militarism, and the deplorable living conditions that billions of our sisters and brothers face daily.”

A sample of founding members is available here.

As the manifesto — which people will be able to sign here — states, “The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the urgency of changing global structures of inequity and violence. We, people around the world, will seize this historical moment … We declare our manifesto today to offer a vision of the world we are building, the world we are demanding, the world we will achieve. …

“In a world where the gap between rich and poor is obscene, with the world’s richest one percent having more than twice the wealth of 6.9 billion people, a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power globally and within nations is imperative. Every human being must have the opportunity to live a healthy, creative, and fulfilling life, free from the ravages of poverty, exploitation, and domination.”

The manifesto (found here) will be publicly launched twice on Saturday, May 23 to accommodate people in different time zones around the world: 9:00 (9 a.m.) and 21:00 (9 p.m.) New York City time. It is available in 18 languages.

More information can be found on the Coalition’s website: CovidGlobalSolidarity.org.

Contact the Coalition’s media team contact at: Covid19GlobalSolidarity at gmail.com; or:

Peter Kuznick, kuznick at american.edu
Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

DEBORAH BURGER, ZENEI CORTEZ, JEAN ROSS, COKIE GILES, press at nationalnursesunited.org, @NationalNurses
Burger, Cortez, Ross, and Giles are members of the Council of Presidents of National Nurses United. For the last month, the group has been “conducting a nationwide survey of registered nurses. More than 23,000 nurses filled out the survey about their experiences working during the COVID-19 pandemic and the responses are loud and clear:

“While it’s been months since COVID-19 struck the United States, our employers and the government are STILL not protecting us nurses and our patients.

“Despite having months to produce more PPE, the Trump administration and Congress have refused to get us the protection we need to stay safe on the front lines of this crisis. Some 87% of nurses reported having to reuse a single-use disposable respirator or mask with a COVID-19 patient.

“Here are some other troubling statistics about nurses’ lack of safety from the survey:

“Over 33 percent of nurses reported that their employer requires them to use their own sick leave, vacation, or paid time off if a nurse gets COVID-19 or is exposed to COVID-19 and needs to self-quarantine.

“Some 84 percent of nurses reported they have not yet been tested and, of those who have been tested, more than 500 nurses reported a positive result.

“More than a quarter — 28 percent  — of respondents had to reuse a so-called ‘decontaminated’ respirator with confirmed COVID-19 patients.

“We can’t allow nurses to continue to work in these conditions, leaving them vulnerable to the virus and putting their patients at risk. When nurses aren’t safe, patients aren’t safe. That’s why NNU is standing up to fight for the highest level of protections.”

CHUCK COLLINS, chuck at ips-dc.org; also via Bob Keener, bobk at ips-dc.org, @chuck99to1
Collins is co-author of the study “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers,” which came out in April. He is with the Institute for Policy Studies and is co-editor of Inequality.org.

They have updated the analysis and find that “between March 18 and May 28, over 40 million applied for unemployment. Over the same ten weeks, the wealth of U.S. billionaires surged $485 billion, a 16.5 percent increase.” See “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.”

Collins said today: “The surge in billionaire wealth during a global pandemic underscores the grotesque nature” of inequality in the U.S. today. “While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and frontline workers, these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Steny Hoyer in the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 13, 2009

CommonDreams is reporting: “Pelosi Accused of ‘Trying to Do an End-Run Around Her Own Party’ by Sending Spy Powers Bill to Conference.”

Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, on Thursday wrote the piece “Congress Is Alarmingly Close to Handing Trump Dangerous Spying Powers: And Adam Schiff, of all people, is the one giving it to him.”

Reporter Dell Camron writes: “Democratic leaders are doing anything and everything they can to prevent privacy protections from being added to FISA. People need to be asking themselves why this is happening. What do Pelosi/Hoyer/Schiff have to gain by defending warrantless surveillance?”

Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer said: “At the request of the Speaker of the House, I am withdrawing consideration of the FISA Act. The two-thirds of the Republican party that voted for this bill in March have indicated they are going to vote against it now. I am told they are doing so at the request of the President. I believe this to be against the security interest of the United States and the safety of the American people.”

Politico reports: “Effort to renew FISA crumbles: It was a rare legislative setback for Pelosi, and Trump rejoiced.”

EVAN GREER, evan at fightforthefuture.org, @fightfortheftr

Greer is deputy director of Fight for the Future. She tweeted Thursday: “I just want to be extremely clear that right now Nancy Pelosi the so-called leader of ‘The Resistance’ is actively trying to gut a bipartisan amendment that specifically protects journalists & religious groups from abusive surveillance, so she can reauthorize FISA & Patriot Act.”

See statement by the group Demand Progress.

TREVOR TIMM, trevor at freedom.press, @trevortimm
Executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, Timm tweeted a string of links to videos of police attacking journalists, writing: “Police are purposefully targeting reporters all over the country, in video after video. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Another tweet reads: “This might be the worst one yet. Journalist complies with order to get down, while making it known he’s press. While he is on the ground defenseless, a cop pepper sprays him at point blank range.”

Timm is a columnist for GEN magazine. In response to a Twitter thread about a series of videos showing a pattern of police violence against protesters from a fellow columnist, he tweeted: “I’ve been watching cable news for the last two hours, it is completely devoid of this reality. It’s been almost all about random looters, virtually zero coverage of the dozens of truly disturbing videos of cops brutalizing civilians for no reason.”

Timm has done extensive work on drones and notes that a Predator Drone launched from Grand Forks Air Force Base was deployed over the Minneapolis protests.

See past accuracy.org news releases on the militarization of the police.

Protestors face off with MPDC officers in riot gear at Lafayette Square following the murder of George Floyd.

Rev. GRAYLAN S. HAGLER, gshagler at verizon.net, @graylanhagler
Rev. Hagler is senior pastor of Plymouth United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C. and chairperson of Faith Strategies, an interfaith coalition. He tweeted about Trump using militarized forces to clear Lafayette Square so that he could hold a Bible in front of a church — and about how some esteem property over human life.

On Sunday, he delivered a sermon, “Divided We Fail,” saying: “I can’t stop thinking about where we are as a country because I do not see this unity or this sacred essential purpose in our existence as people in this America.”

Describing the death of George Floyd, Hagler asked: “Why didn’t the other cops hear [Floyd’s words, ‘I can’t breathe’] and respond? It was because they protect their own, occupy us, for the purpose of keeping us in our places.”

He spoke of “the long-held truth that whites see the police as their protectors of property and themselves against people who are black and not like them.”

In contrast to how police treat African Americans, he pointed to how “gun-touting white men can storm the Michigan Statehouse. …

“The problem with white America [is the] deluded and myth-based thinking that they built this country and made it wealthy. No, its wealth is because of exploited and enslaved labor” concluding that “unless the nation can confess … it will remain divided.”

NETFA FREEMAN, netfa at ips-dc.org, @Netfafree
Freeman is a policy analyst with the Institute for Policy Studies and an organizer with Pan-African Community Action. He was interviewed late last year on FAIR’s program CounterSpin: “Community Control Over Police Should Be a Democratic Right.”

He said today: “People most impacted by police repression have a legacy of struggle that should inform what demands any allies support. Black radical tradition of the 60s and 70s has conceived of and fought for Community Control Over Police (CCOP) as a solution and this was readopted by the more contemporary Movement for Black Lives policy platform released in August 2017.

“CCOP would make other demands, like ending qualified immunity or defunding the police redundant and unnecessary. These sorts of reforms are a deterrent away from the more grassroots and power shifting demand for CCOP. With CCOP, communities would be empowered to hire, fire, set priorities and duties of the police, as well as establish the consequences for misconduct. CCOP is actually a democratic human right to self-determination and a recommendation to the U.S. by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent in 2016.”The other reforms can be won without achieving any power shift at all, but will invariably compel proponents to claim a relatively easy victory [rather than] shifting power to the people most impacted.

“As an institution with origins in the slave patrols and, at the turn of the century, private security agencies hired by owners, policing is about enforcing the laws of white supremacy and capitalism.

“All U.S. armed forces — whether police, National Guard, active-duty military — serve the same essential purpose, to protect the settler colonial and imperialist paradigm. The distinction between them is like that between the FBI and CIA; one enforces domestic domination and the other foreign.”

Freeman is also on the coordinating committee of the Black Alliance for Peace, which works on a host of issues, including calling for shutting down AFRICOM.

Mass on the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 home base porch, August 8th, 2019, Brunswick, Ga. | Courtesy of Bones Donovan

On April 4, 2018, on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, seven activists — following the Biblical edict to “beat swords into plowshares” — used bolt cutters to enter one of the largest nuclear weapons bases in the world at the Kings Bay Trident submarine base in Georgia.

On Monday, the first of the defendants, Elizabeth McAlister, a long time peace activist who founded Jonah House in Baltimore with her late husband Phil Berrigan, is scheduled to be sentenced. For public access to audio of this hearing, dial 1-888-684-8852, enter the call access code 2296092 and enter the security code 1234.

The support group for the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 states that the Catholic Worker activists, after entering the nuclear weapons facility “then split into three groups and prayed, prayerfully and symbolically poured blood, spray-painted messages of disarming nuclear weapons and to love one another. They hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles, hung banners quoting Dr. King, ‘the ultimate logic of racism is genocide’ and another naming the ominicidal logic of Trident. The seven waited to be arrested.”

A year ago, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel Prize winners wrote to Attorney General William Barr asking the charges against the activists be dropped. Instead, at their trial in October, the prosecution and judge prevented the activists from mounting a series of defenses, including presenting a justification or necessity defense with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg testifying on their behalf — or invoking international law. The prosecution and judge even effectively kept the reality of the nuclear weapons at the base from the jury. The activists were convicted on October 24.

The group states that the defendants “asked for home confinement during this time of COVID-19, as entering prison could be a death sentence. Their request was denied by the prosecution. Elizabeth McAlister, at 80 years old, the eldest of the KBP7 defendants, was notified that her court date was changed from May 28 to June 8. She is to be sentenced by video while she stays at her home in Connecticut. McAlister will probably not face additional prison time because she served over 17 months before trial.

“Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was granted an adjournment and given a new date on June 29, 3:30 p.m. in Brunswick, Georgia.

“Patrick O’Neill, Clare Grady, Mark Colville, Carmen Trotta, and Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J. (who has been detained in jails in Camden County and Glynn County for more than 25 months) also asked for an adjournment and were given June 29 and 30 as their new dates to appear with no times specified yet. They were not told whether they’ll be allowed to be sentenced in person in open court or whether they’ll have to travel to Brunswick to be sentenced remotely by video once they get there. …

“As they wait for sentencing, each of the defendants and their families continue to serve as their communities’ human needs grow exponentially during this COVID-19 pandemic. The defendants call for the release of people in prisons, in federal and state prisons, county and city jails, especially the elderly, the infirm and all non-violent offenders.”

Interviews are available with:

MARK COLVILLE, markcolville9761 at gmail.com
One of the seven Plowshares activists, Colville is co-founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven with his wife Luz Catarineau. In late December, the New Haven Register wrote: “For their sustained, compassionate approach to building and supporting their community and for their lived opposition to war and violence, the Colvilles are the New Haven Register’s Persons of the Year.”

More information and interviews with other Plowshares activists are available via the group’s extensive website and via the media team:

Bill Ofenloch, billcpf at aol.com, @kingsbayplow7
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08 at gmail.com

Early Friday, IPA put out a news release “Barr Prosecuting Pacifists: Activists Face Prison for Action at Huge Nuclear Weapons Base” about the years-long prosecution and the sentencing of Plowshares activists, which begins Monday morning with the sentencing (by video conference) of Elizabeth McAlister, who founded Jonah House in Baltimore with her late husband Phil Berrigan.

The elderly man who Buffalo police shoved to the sidewalk and lay bleeding from his head has been identified as Martin Gugino.
Gugino is a long-time peace activist and recently made a series of video statements about the sentencing of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists who entered a major nuclear weapons facility on April 4, 2018, on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination to “nonviolently, symbolically disarm” the weapons there.

The support group for the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 states that the Catholic Worker activists, after entering the nuclear weapons facility in Georgia “then split into three groups and prayed, prayerfully and symbolically poured blood, spray-painted messages of disarming nuclear weapons and to love one another. They hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles, hung banners quoting Dr. King, ‘the ultimate logic of racism is genocide’ and another naming the ominicidal logic of Trident. The seven waited to be arrested.”

One of them, Father Steven Kelly, remains in jail. Others, like McAlister, have spent over 17 months in jail prior to trial with little media attention and is scheduled to be sentenced at 9 a.m. ET Monday. The unusual sentencing will take place by video conferencing while she remains at home in Connecticut. For public access to audio of this hearing, dial 1-888-684-8852, enter the call access code 2296092 and enter the security code 1234.

The group reports that “Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was granted an adjournment and given a new date on June 29, 3:30 p.m. in Brunswick, Georgia.”

The other activists — Patrick O’Neill, Clare Grady, Mark Colville, Carmen Trotta, and Kelly — have asked for an adjournment “and were given June 29 and 30 as their new dates to appear with no times specified yet. They were not told whether they’ll be allowed to be sentenced in person in open court or whether they’ll have to travel to Brunswick to be sentenced remotely by video once they get there.”

In one of his videos supporting Mark Colville and other Plowshares activists, Gugino addresses the federal court in Brunswick, Georgia where Colville is awaiting sentencing in support. Gugino cites Martin Luther King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Gugino added: “What he doesn’t say there, is that it doesn’t bend itself; we have to bend it. We have to go out into the culture and act justly, act morally, do good, and little by little it will bend the culture towards justice. And some of the time, the culture doesn’t want to be bent, and so there will be conflict, and that’s just part of it. And Martin Luther King knew very well the possibilities.”

A year ago, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel Prize winners wrote to Attorney General William Barr asking the charges against the activists be dropped. Instead, at their trial in October, the prosecution and judge prevented the activists from mounting a series of defenses, including presenting a justification or necessity defense with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg testifying on their behalf — or invoking international law. The prosecution and judge even effectively kept the reality of the nuclear weapons at the base from the jury. The activists were convicted on October 24 to minimal major media coverage.

Interviews are available with:
MARK COLVILLE, markcolville9761 at gmail.com, @amistadobrero
One of the seven Plowshares activists, Colville is co-founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven with his wife Luz Catarineau. He used a hammer made from melted-down guns to smash parts of a shrine to nuclear weapons at the facility. In late December, the New Haven Register wrote: “For their sustained, compassionate approach to building and supporting their community and for their lived opposition to war and violence, the Colvilles are the New Haven Register’s Persons of the Year.”

More information and interviews with other Plowshares activists are available via the group’s extensive website and via the media team:

Bill Ofenloch, billcpf at aol.com, @kingsbayplow7
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08 at gmail.com

Nearly eight months after incumbent Bolivian president Evo Morales was ousted in a coup d’etat amid allegations of electoral fraud, The New York Times reports that the Organization of American States’ (OAS) claims of fraud in the 2019 general election “relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques.”

However, the new New York Times report makes no mention of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which sounded the alarm on the OAS’s false claims in real time.

CEPR now notes: “On October 21, 2019, just one day after Bolivia’s election, the OAS denounced — without providing any evidence — a ‘drastic’ and ‘inexplicable’ change in the trend of the vote count following an interruption of the transmission of the election results. At the time, CEPR was quick to note that the data simply did not back up the OAS claims.”  Despite CEPR’s documentation, the OAS claims were widely echoed through major media.

In February, findings by John Curiel and Jack R. Williams at MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab — contracted by CEPR to verify the numerical and statistical results of CEPR’s November 2019 study of the Bolivian election — were published by the Washington Post: “Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to suspect fraud.” These findings also are unmentioned by the New York Times.

An in-depth report by CEPR issued in March addresses the claims that the OAS is now making. “For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS’ claims of fraud were bogus,” said CEPR Research Associate Jake Johnston, coauthor of an 82-page report on the Bolivian election and the OAS audit of that election. “Just days after the election, a high-level official inside the OAS privately acknowledged to me that there had been no ‘inexplicable’ change in the trend, yet the organization continued to repeat its false assertions for many months with little to no pushback or accountability.”

“The OAS bears responsibility for the significant deterioration of the human rights situation in Bolivia since Morales’s ouster,” CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. He noted that this was not the first time the OAS had played a damaging role in an electoral crisis, citing the 2010 elections in Haiti as an example. “If the OAS and Secretary General Luis Almagro are allowed to get away with such politically driven falsification of their electoral observation results again, this threatens not only Bolivian democracy but the democracy of any country where the OAS may be involved in elections in the future.”

CEPR was a main source for the Institute for Public Accuracy after the 2019 Bolivian coup. See IPA news releases including: “Is the OAS Interfering in the Bolivian Election?” “Bolivia: What a Coup Looks Like” and “Bolivian Coup Targeting Indigenous People.”See piece by Gregory Shupak for FAIR in November, which criticized the New York Times and other major media for accepting the false OAS narrative when it most mattered: “Unpacking Media Propaganda About Bolivia’s Election.”

For interviews with CEPR specialists, contact:
Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net, @Dan_Beeton

JEREMY VARON, jvaron at aol.com, @WitnessTorture
Varon is professor of history at the New School and an activist with the group Witness Against Torture. He just wrote the piece “Martin Gugino – The ‘Buffalo Protestor’ and our Friend,” which states: “None of us is surprised that it was Martin meeting the police line in a posture of non-violence. Martin is gentle, principled, and undaunted. Allied with the Catholic Worker tradition, he is also deeply committed to a tapestry of causes, from fair housing to immigrant rights. Guiding his activism is belief in the sacred power of non-violent resistance to injustice. If that makes him an ‘agitator,’ as Buffalo’s police chief slandered him, then the world needs more agitators.” [See accuracy.org news release from Monday: “Today, Sentencing for Pacifist Jailed for Protesting ‘Omnicidal’ Weapons — Supported by Activist Thrown to Ground by Police.”]

Varon continued: “In his eulogy for George Floyd, attorney Benjamin Crump named what was done to him as ‘torture.’ It was a striking description I had not heard before. Floyd’s lynching needs no added indignity to stir our outrage. But torture has a special sting, both because of its willful cruelty and its supposed alienness to America.

“For years, we in Witness Against Torture vigorously protested what was in fact America’s systematic use of torture after 9/11. Like other human rights groups, we wanted the detained men to be subjects before the law, with basic protections and access to U.S. courts. In our work, we did not think much about race.

“Yet Black Lives Matter and other activists impressed on us an uncomfortable truth: that many of the abuses in War on Terror prisons, like solitary confinement, are routine in America’s domestic prisons, holding predominantly people of color. Access to the law, moreover, is no guarantee of justice. Sometimes the law is the problem.

“We began to see torture as part of a continuum of state violence, including in its racial aspect. Almost exclusively, the victims of post-9/11 torture have been brown-skinned Muslim men, demonized with the label ‘terrorist.’ Despite the innocence of most of the men historically held at Guantanamo, the law has been all but useless in freeing them. No one responsible for their torture has been held to legal account, including during the Obama administration. Going forward, our group sought to highlight the parallels between domestic and overseas abuses in a vast system of dehumanizing violence.

“Dismantling anti-black racism is today’s urgent priority. But abuses of power crave synergies, making other causes relevant. Recall that President Trump is an avowed supporter of torture.”

MAX RAMEAU, afrimax at niainteractive.com
NETFA FREEMAN, netfa at ips-dc.org, @Netfafree
Rameau and Freeman are writing a book, Community Control Over Police, and just wrote the piece “Community Control vs. Defunding the Police: A Critical Analysis” which was published by Black Agenda Report.

They write that it is “undeniable that policing in the U.S. is out of control and outrageously overfunded. Since 1977 crime has continued to fall, but police budgets have almost tripled to a staggering $115 billion per year.”

But, they argue, “Defunding the police will not abolish the police. Far from purging classism, racism and patriarchy from its ranks, defunding the police is likely to bring them back in their purest form and with a vengeance.”

They note that historically, “the shift from private security to public utility created the contradiction that allowed civil rights organizations to fight for equal protection under the law, public transparency and other reforms. Of course, this did not end police brutality or alter the fundamental function of police as protectors of wealth and enforcers of the will of the ruling class, but turning the police into a public utility did provide some important tools necessary for the reduction of harm and heightening contradictions when those harms came.”

They point to other examples around the world to illustrate their argument: “South Africa is a modern capitalist country that is mostly post-industrial and features pockets of development that mirror the wealthiest western nations. Yet, the government there does not spend anywhere near the amount of resources on police as the United States. So how do upscale malls, financial districts, wealthy white neighborhoods and other configurations of the ruling class protect themselves from the majority of residents living in poverty? They hire private security firms to enforce the rules of the establishment — not the laws of the province or country.”

Rameau is a Haitian-born Pan-African author and organizer with Pan-African Community Action. Freeman is on the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an organizer in Pan-African Community Action which published a longer version of their new piece.

Sam Gillies via Storyful

ADAM HOCHSCHILD, adamhochschild at earthlink.net
Hochschild has written about the conquest of the Congo in his King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

He said today: “As the impact of the video of George Floyd’s killing continues to ricochet around the world, one result has been an epidemic of toppling statues. In the United States, longstanding monuments to Confederate generals have fallen. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold II, the ruthless colonizer of the Congo, have been splashed with red or taken down, and in Australia a mountain range named after him lost its name. In Britain, a statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol merchant and slave trader, was tossed into the city’s harbor.”

Hochschild specifically mentions the statue of Edward Colston in his book on the British antislavery movement, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.

“When people get shocked by an injustice today,” says Hochschild, “it’s only natural that they look around and realize that, on all sides of us, we have symbols of injustices in the past. We would be shocked if Germany had statues of Hitler in prominent places, but Leopold, like Hitler, was responsible for millions of deaths. I sympathize with the Belgians who want to see him gone. Congo today still suffers from the legacy of its ruthless colonization, and some modern corporations — Unilever, for instance — have roots that go back to the forced labor system founded by Leopold. And in so many ways, in Britain, the United States, and other countries, we are still dealing with the heritage of slavery.”

Hochschild teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of ten books.

Several statues of Christopher Columbus have recently been brought down. In Albuquerque, Steven Ray Baca shot someone at a protest at a monument to a conquistador. Baca has reportedly been charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

ROXANNE DUNBAR ORTIZ, rdunbaro pacbell.net, @rdunbaro
Author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz said today: “As the movement for black lives protests against police violence … has spread to every part of the United States and around the world, some have turned to the glaring public symbols of the history that empowers such violence — colonialism and slavery. Statues celebrating Confederate officers and slavers have come down, as well as those of Columbus, who is best known for pioneering European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and genocide of the Indigenous Arawaks in the Caribbean; he also brought the transatlantic African slave trade, as well as returning to Spain with enslaved natives who were sold on the European slave market.”

Dunbar also wrote the book Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She continued: “In New Mexico, which was first colonized by the Spanish in 1598, the descendants of those first settlers have in the past several decades erected statues of the genocidal conquistador, Don Juan de Oñate, as well as annually celebrating what they call the entrada, the arrival of the gifts of Christianity and European culture to people they considered savages. Actually, the Indigenous Peoples in New Mexico, called Pueblos, live in small city states with multi-storied communal homes made of adobe or cut granite and practiced irrigation agriculture all along the North Rio Grande River. The Spanish reduced the 98 city-states to 21 within ten years of ‘arrival.’ Today, most of the New Mexico state, county, and cities/towns, as well as the police are controlled by the Hispanos, as the descendants of the Spanish invaders call themselves. On Monday, June 15, one of these Hispanos shot into a group protesting the Oñate statue in Albuquerque, seriously injuring two protestors.”

AP reports this morning: “1.5 million more laid-off workers seek unemployment benefits.”

CHUCK COLLINS, chuck at ips-dc.org; also via Bob Keener, bobk at ips-dc.org
Collins is co-author of the recently released study “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers.”

U.S. billionaires saw their wealth “increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic, as 45.5 million Americans lost their jobs and the economy cratered,” according to a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies — Program on Inequality, where Collins works.

Overall, “between March 18 — the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place — and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643.

“The top five billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison — saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26 percent. They captured 17.4 percent of the total wealth growth of all 600-plus billionaires in the last three months. The fortunes of Bezos and Zuckerberg together grew by nearly $76 billion, or 13 percent of the $584 billion total.”

“The last thing U.S. society needs is more economic and racial polarization,” said Collins. “The surge in billionaire wealth and pandemic profiteering undermines the unity and solidarity that the American people will require to recover and grow together, not pull further apart.”

WILLIAM LAZONICK, william.lazonick at gmail.com
Lazonick is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network.

He co-authored a new paper: “How the Disappearance of Unionized Jobs Obliterated an Emergent Black Middle Class” for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

See summary blog post: “The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep-rooted racial divide that infects American society. According to APM Research Lab, the Covid-19 mortality rate for blacks has been 61.6 per 100,000 compared with 28.2 per 100,000 for Latinos, and 26.2 per 100,000 for whites. It’s another abhorrent statistic to add to the highly disproportionate number of African Americans who are poor, unemployed, and incarcerated.

“The longer life-expectancy of white men compared with black men in the United States has narrowed in recent years, but that is because of a significant drop in longevity of white working-class males, who, even before the pandemic, were succumbing to ‘deaths of despair.’ The fact is that blacks are doing terribly in a nation wracked by extreme economic inequality, which is dragging down the whole working class, irrespective of race or ethnicity. In a nation that once advertised itself as the land of upward socioeconomic mobility through equal employment opportunity, intergenerational downward mobility has become the norm.

“As a new generation has taken to the streets with demands for social transformation, we need to look back a half century to a time when the quest for equal employment opportunity gave rise to an African American blue-collar middle class. During the 1960s and 1970s, blacks with no more than high-school educations gained significant access to well-paid unionized employment opportunities, epitomized by semi-skilled operative jobs in the automobile industry, to which they previously had limited access. Anti-discrimination laws under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with oversight by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) supported this upward mobility for blacks in the context of a growing demand for blue-collar labor in the United States.

“From the late 1970s, however, the impact of global competition and the offshoring of manufacturing combined with the financialization of the corporation to decimate these stable and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Under the seniority provisions of the increasingly beleaguered industrial unions, blacks tended to be last hired and first fired. As U.S.-based blue-collar jobs were permanently lost, U.S. business corporations and government agencies failed to make sufficient investments in the education and skills of the U.S. labor force to usher in a new era of upward socioeconomic mobility. This organizational failure left blacks most vulnerable to downward mobility.

“Central to this corporate failure was a transformation of corporate resource allocation from ‘retain-and-reinvest’ to ‘downsize-and-distribute.’ Instead of retaining corporate profits and reinvesting in the productive capabilities of employees, major business corporations became increasingly focused on downsizing their labor forces and distributing profits to shareholders in the form of cash dividends and stock buybacks. Legitimizing massive distributions to shareholders was the flawed and pernicious ideology that a company should be run to ‘maximize shareholder value.’ Eventually, the downward socioeconomic mobility experienced by blacks would also extend to devastating loss of well-paid and stable employment for whites who lacked the higher education now needed to enter the American middle class. By the twenty-first century, general downward mobility had become a defining characteristic of American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or gender.”

KEVIN KUMASHIRO, kevin at kevinkumashiro.com
Author of ten books on education, Kumashiro is former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco and co-founder of Education Deans for Justice and Equity,

He has helped organize a statement signed by over “650 educators of color and educational scholars of color across the U.S.” calling for a “retreat from the market-based initiatives (like the so-called ‘portfolio model,’ expansion of choice, and deprofessionalizing of teaching) being foisted by billionaires upon poorer communities of color.”

The statement — “This Must End Now: Educators & Scholars of Color Against Failed Educational ‘Reforms’” begins: “The public is being misled. Billionaire philanthropists are increasingly foisting so-called ‘reform’ initiatives upon the schools that serve predominantly students of color and low-income students, and are using black and brown voices to echo claims of improving schools or advancing civil rights in order to rally community support. However, the evidence to the contrary is clear: these initiatives have not systematically improved student success, are faulty by design, and have already proven to widen racial and economic disparities. We must heed the growing body of research and support communities and civil-rights organizations in their calls for a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the problems facing our schools, a retreat from failed ‘reforms,’ and better solutions.”

Kumashiro recently wrote the piece “Corona-Capitalism and the Racialized Looting of Public Schools,” which states: “As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, proponents of market-based reforms have wasted little time capitalizing on the same two conditions that propelled privatization post-Katrina, except at a scale and level without precedent: school closures and federal funding.”

ELLEN BROWN, ellenhbrown at gmail.com, @ellenhbrown
Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling The Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free.

She just wrote the piece “Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid,” which states: “To most people, if they are familiar with it at all, BlackRock is an asset manager that helps pension funds and retirees manage their savings through ‘passive’ investments that track the stock market. But working behind the scenes, it is much more than that. BlackRock has been called ‘the most powerful institution in the financial system,’ ‘the most powerful company in the world’ and the ‘secret power.’ It is the world’s largest asset manager and ‘shadow bank,’ larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China), with over $7 trillion in assets under direct management and another $20 trillion managed through its Aladdin risk-monitoring software. BlackRock has also been called ‘the fourth branch of government’ and ‘almost a shadow government’, but no part of it actually belongs to the government. Despite its size and global power, BlackRock is not even regulated as a ‘Systemically Important Financial Institution’ under the Dodd-Frank Act, thanks to pressure from its CEO Larry Fink, who has long had ‘cozy’ relationships with government officials.

“BlackRock’s strategic importance and political weight were evident when four BlackRock executives, led by former Swiss National Bank head Philipp Hildebrand, presented a proposal at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2019 for an economic reset that was actually put into effect in March 2020. Acknowledging that central bankers were running out of ammunition for controlling the money supply and the economy, the BlackRock group argued that it was time for the central bank to abandon its long-vaunted independence and join monetary policy (the usual province of the central bank) with fiscal policy (the usual province of the legislature). They proposed that the central bank maintain a ‘Standing Emergency Fiscal Facility’ that would be activated when interest rate manipulation was no longer working to avoid deflation. The Facility would be deployed by an ‘independent expert’ appointed by the central bank.

“The COVID-19 crisis presented the perfect opportunity to execute this proposal in the U.S., with BlackRock itself appointed to administer it. In March 2020, it was awarded a no-bid contract under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to deploy a $454 billion slush fund established by the Treasury in partnership with the Federal Reserve. This fund in turn could be leveraged to provide over $4 trillion in Federal Reserve credit. While the public was distracted with protests, riots and lockdowns, BlackRock suddenly emerged from the shadows to become the ‘fourth branch of government,’ managing the controls to the central bank’s print-on-demand fiat money. How did that happen and what are the implications? …”

Brown concludes: “If the corporate oligarchs are too big and strategically important to be broken up under the antitrust laws, rather than bailing them out they should be nationalized and put directly into the service of the public. At the very least, BlackRock should be regulated as a too-big-to-fail Systemically Important Financial Institution. Better yet would be to regulate it as a public utility. No private, unelected entity should have the power over the economy that BlackRock has, without a legally enforceable fiduciary duty to wield it in the public interest.”

Brown’s other books include The Public Bank Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity and most recently, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.

Photo credit: Fincantieri

KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Kelly is co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and just wrote the piece “Battleground States.” She writes: “On Thursday, June 25th, President Trump’s re-election efforts took him to the ‘battleground’ state of Wisconsin, where he toured the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard. He railed against the Democrats as a scarier enemy than Russia or China. He also celebrated Wisconsin’s win over domestic enemies like the state of Maine in securing a key shipbuilding project. ‘The first-in-class FFG(X) [frigate] will not just be a win for Wisconsin workers; it will also be a major victory for our Navy,’ Trump said. ‘…The stunning ships will deliver the overwhelming force, lethality, and power we need to engage America’s enemies anywhere and at any time.’ On many military minds, it seems, was China. …

“Before the pandemic hit, and before this U.S. Navy contract was awarded to Marinette, my fellow activists at Voices for Creative Nonviolence were planning a protest walk to the Marinette shipyard. As Trump noted in his speech at Marinette, they are currently building four Littoral Combat Ships for sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. … In late 2019, with the U.S. Navy no longer interested in purchasing Littoral Combat Ships from the yard, the Marinette shipyard had been ‘saved by the Saudis’ and by Lockheed Martin, which had helped arrange the contract.

“The Saudi military has been using U.S.-supplied Littoral (near-coast) Combat Ships to blockade the coastal ports of Yemen, which is undergoing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis due to a famine exacerbated by the Saudi-led blockade and an invasion involving relentless aerial bombardment. Actual cholera epidemics, reminiscent of centuries past, were another result of the war’s creation of lethal delays and shortages for Yemeni people in desperate need of fuel, food, medicine and clean water. Yemen’s humanitarian situation, worsened by the spread of COVID-19, is now so desperate that the United Nations humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, warned Yemen will ‘fall off the cliff’ without massive financial support. President Trump took full credit for the Saudi contract at [Thursday’s] rally. …

“We must resist signing contracts with weapon makers profiting from endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war. Such contracts, inked in blood, doom every corner of our world to perish as a battleground state.”

The New York Times on Friday published a piece titled: “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.”

The following analysts are scrutinizing this story:

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
Hoh resigned in protest from his State Department position in Afghanistan in 2009 over the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama administration; he also served in Iraq with the Marines.

He said today: “This is not the first time Russia has been accused of trying to harm U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. In 2017 and 2018 accusations were that Russia was supplying weapons to the Taliban were loudly repeated by the U.S. press, however, when put on record about such accusations, senior U.S., Afghan and NATO officials admitted there was no evidence to back such claims. In fact, the only confirmation of Russian involvement militarily in Afghanistan was the provision of 10,000 weapons to the Afghan government in 2016 by the Russians.

“This is more a story of the abdication of journalistic standards and critical practice than it really is about the war in Afghanistan. That nearly all corporate-owned media in the U.S. are simply repeating the claims of anonymous officials, claims that are made without any evidence, just demonstrates U.S. corporate media has become a public relations tool of the U.S. government. After corporate media’s willingness to repeat the baseless and unfounded claims, lies really, made by the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump in justifying U.S. war in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and now throughout Africa, it is no surprise they would go along, willingly and enthusiastically, with anonymous statements made without evidence, once again, in order to justify war in the Muslim world, to increase tensions with Russia, and to stoke Pentagon and military industry budgets. It should be noted nearly all the experts quoted in print or appearing on television/radio to speak about these claims are retired generals who are on the boards of military companies or residents of think tanks that receive funding from the U.S. government and/or the military industry.

“This has always been the nature of U.S. war in its imperial form, with false accusations supported by an excited media to create the domestic political support for war, or continued war. This is true of U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, the Spanish American War, the acquisition of Hawaii, the Mexican American War, U.S. support for the British Opium Wars, and, for hundreds of years, wars of genocide against the Indigenous people of this land.

“Of course, these dangerous accusations come at a time when peace efforts have reached a point in Afghanistan not seen since the early 1990s. Such an attempt to stop efforts to end a war with a continued value to the U.S. military industry, and elements within the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, should be expected.”

Hoh, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy, who is also a 100 percent disabled veteran, has written extensively about U.S. wars for the last decade and has conducted hundreds of media interviews. See an appearance on CSPAN last year discussing the war in Afghanistan. His pieces include “Authorizations for Madness; The Effects and Consequences of Congress’ Endless Permissions for War,” “And the Armies That Remained Suffer’d: Veterans, Moral Injury and Suicide” and “Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies.”

SCOTT HORTON, via ed at scotthorton.org, @scotthortonshow
Horton is author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan and editorial director of Antiwar.com. He said of the recent reports: “The NYT, WSJ and Washington Post stories all rely only on anonymous officials’ claims. These sources did not even describe the nature of the supposed intelligence to the reporters, much less prove their case. The journalists who wrote the articles have all cited each other as ‘confirming’ their stories on Twitter, when they all are still only repeating the same hearsay. (In a later follow-up, the Times added a few details, but still no reason to believe.)

“The timing is of course very suspicious due to impending negotiations with the Taliban and current negotiations with Russia, on U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and nuclear arms.

“After the intelligence agencies lied directly to the American people about Iraq’s unconventional weapons, Libya’s impending genocide, Syria’s ‘moderate rebel’ terrorists and especially the late-Russiagate hoax, every claim they make should be considered an outright lie until proven otherwise.

“Russia has supported U.S. efforts in Afghanistan since 2001. If they are now trying to give our government an excuse to stay bogged down in that no-win quagmire, then what does that say about our current occupation there in the first place?

“In 2017, the army admitted that there was no evidence for claims by officials to the media, such as CNN, that Russia was supplying weapons to the Taliban. War veteran journalists at Task and Purpose handily debunked those claims as well.

“There is no reason at all to believe the current accusations are any more credible.”

Others critics cited examples of U.S. policy killing or targeting Russians in Syria and in Afghanistan.

RAMZY BAROUD, ramzybaroud at gmail.com, @RamzyBaroud
Baroud is editor of The Palestine Chronicle, which reports on a new congressional letter “spearheaded by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and signed by Reps. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, along with Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont” warning: “Should the Israeli government move forward with the planned annexation with this administration’s acquiescence, we will work to ensure non-recognition as well as pursue conditions on the $3.8 billion in U.S. military funding to Israel, including human rights conditions.”

Other recent pieces include: “Palestine Chronicle Explains: What You Need to Know about Israel’s Annexation Plan.”

Baroud also wrote the piece “Palestine is Not Occupied, It is Colonized,” which states: “In some sense, the ‘Israeli occupation’ is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine, a process that began over a 100 years ago, and carries on to this day.”

He just wrote the piece “Why Israeli weapons should scare everyone,” which states: “Israeli officials are brimming over with pride. The country’s military exports are recovering very well, despite ‘intense international challenges and competition,'” as Israel has “managed to rake in $7.2 billion in so-called defence contracts last year alone.” The Chronicle also recently published the pieces “George Floyd and the Uprising: How Israel Contributes to the Militarization of American Police” and “Speaking against Settlement Expansion is just a Chore for the EU.”

Baroud also just wrote the piece “Tearing down the idols of colonialism: Why Tunisia, Africa must demand French apology.”

The Chronicle also reports on different forms of activism, including in the recent article “Pro-BDS Store Wins Major Legal Victory against Pro-Israel Advocates in the U.S.,” which states: “Advocates for the state of Israel have suffered a historic defeat in a decade-long legal battle to sue Olympia Food Co-op over its decision to boycott Israeli goods.

“The U.S. grocery store, which campaigns for ethical food consumption, was fully vindicated by a Washington appeals court on February 20 in a legal case that is likely to have positive ramifications for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights.”

ABC reports Thursday: “Top intel officials brief Pelosi, congressional leaders on reported Russian bounty on U.S. troops.”

The Daily Beast reported in 2018: “Report: U.S. Forces Killed More Than 200 Russian Fighters in Syria Attack.”

Excerpts from Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [PDF is here], a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Tim Weiner:

The CIA’s biggest gun running mission was its global pipeline to the mujahideen, the holy warriors of Afghanistan, who were fighting the 110,000-man Soviet army of occupation. It began under Jimmy Carter in January 1980. Because it was Carter’s idea, Casey did not embrace it wholeheartedly—not at first. But soon he saw the opportunity at hand. “I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: ‘Go kill Soviet soldiers,’ ” said Howard Hart, who arrived as the chief in Pakistan in 1981. “Imagine! I loved it.” It was a noble goal. But the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan. No one believed that the Afghans could actually win. From the start, the Saudis matched the CIA’s support for the rebels, dollar for dollar. The Chinese kicked in millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, as did the Egyptians and the British. The CIA coordinated the shipments. Hart handed them over to Pakistani intelligence. …

The Soviets were trying to build a natural-gas pipeline from Siberia into Eastern Europe. They needed computers to control its pressure gauges and valves. They sought the software on the open market in the United States. Washington rejected the request but subtly pointed to a certain Canadian company that might have what Moscow wanted. The Soviets sent a Line X officer to steal the software. The CIA and the Canadians conspired to let them have it. For a few months, the software ran swimmingly. Then it slowly sent the pressure in the pipeline soaring. The explosion in the wilds of Siberia cost Moscow millions it could ill afford to spare. The silent attack on Soviet military and state engineering programs went on for a year. …

The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-a-year program. It represented about 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service. Armed with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, the Afghan rebels were killing Soviet soldiers, downing Soviet helicopter gunships, and inflicting deep wounds on the Soviet self-image. The CIA had done what it set out to do: to give the Soviets their Vietnam. “One by one we killed them,” said Howard Hart, who had run the mission to arm the Afghans from 1981 to 1984. “And they went home. And that was a terrorist campaign.”

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
Hoh resigned in protest from his State Department position in Afghanistan in 2009 over the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama administration; he also served in Iraq with the Marines. On Monday, he was featured on an accuracy.org news release: “Is Big Media Echoing Accusations to Demonize Russia and Continue Afghan War?“

WHITNEY WEBB, wwebbmpn at protonmail.com, @_whitneywebb
Webb is author of the forthcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail about the Jeffrey Epstein scandals.

She stressed that the indictment released today against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, is “for only three victims — [from] 1994 to 1997 — and the indictment states that Maxwell was involved in their sexual abuse directly (in terms of the sex acts themselves) but NOT charged for that.”

Webb tweeted: “They waited until after Bill Barr fired [United States attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey] Berman” and “They reportedly arrested her in [New Hampshire], they’ve known where she is this whole time, waited till now. Why now?”

She also notes on Twitter: “The fact the FBI won’t even touch or question Les Wexner (‘head of the snake’ of the whole op) tells you that any effort to go after Ghislaine is superficial.”

Webb was featured on an acccuracy.org news release last year that drew on a series of her reports including “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,” in which Webb examines the role of Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner.

She highlights that a main goal of the Epstein-Maxwell operation was to blackmail prominent individuals and “it’s important to mention that it was state-sponsored and involved compromising politicians [and] individuals so they would be supportive of policies pursued by that state. Sexual blackmail by intelligence has a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and Epstein and Maxwell were merely using that same playbook (on a grand scale) for the benefit of their sponsors.”

Webb also wrote about Maxwell’s father, Robert, who worked with the Mossad “according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.” She adds: “In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, [whom] ‘the service maintained for blackmail purposes.’” [Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas]

See Webb’s interview last year with The Real News: “Epstein May Be Just One Part of an Intricate Network of Sex and Power.”

Webb wrote her series on Epstein for MintPress. She is now with The Last American Vagabond. Her reporting there has included the pieces “Techno-Tyranny: How the U.S. National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision” and “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter.”

DAVE LINDORFF, dlindorff at gmail.com
Editor of ThisCantBeHappening.net and 2019 winner of an “Izzy” Award for Outstanding Independent Media, Lindorff just wrote the piece “Tear Gas and Clubs in Lafayette Square Were Just the Beginning” for The Nation.

Lindorff reports: “On June 1, President Trump ordered National Park Police and troops from the District of Columbia National Guard and some other federal law enforcement agencies to drive peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, north of the White House, to clear the way for his Bible-holding photo op. The same day, Trump and his Attorney General William Barr, along with Defense Secretary Mark Esper, also placed a call to the nation’s 50 governors.

“A leaked transcript of that taped conversation, published in full by a number of major news organizations [audio], shows both Trump and Barr referring in glowing terms to the way the Obama administration, almost nine years earlier, had crushed the months-long Occupy Movement across the country in a matter of a few days.

“Trump told the governors, many of whose states were experiencing massive protests against police brutality in the wake of the brutal videotaped police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, ‘This is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster until one day somebody said, “That’s enough.” And they just went in and wiped them out. And it’s the last time I heard the name Occupy Wall Street. …’

“Trump was followed at that point in the call by Attorney General Barr, who told the assembled governors that the Trump administration planned to use the same Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) the Obama administration had relied on to spy on and then crush the Occupy Movement to shut down the current wave of urban uprisings and protests over police brutality.

“As Barr put it, ‘The structure we’re going to use is the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which I know most of you are familiar with. Tried and true system. It’s worked for domestic and homegrown terrorists, and we’re going to employ that model.’

“It’s important to remember what actually happened with the Occupy Movement, a remarkable protest against inequality, corporate power, and the corrupt Wall Street banks whose recklessness had caused the 2008 financial crisis. Occupy was a spontaneous grassroots protest that sprang up in September 2011 in Lower Manhattan with the occupation of a one-block space called Zuccotti Park located just two blocks north of the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway. That encampment was quickly replicated in over 18 cities across the nation as part of a movement that introduced into popular discourse the class-conscious notion of ‘the 1 percent and the 99 percent.’

“As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Washington, D.C.–based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) recalls, the Occupy movement” was targeted by the government. She said, “That’s why you saw encampments wiped out by police with over 7,000 arrests.”

“PCJF, following that shutdown of Occupy, turned to the Freedom of Information Act, seeking all documents relating to efforts to crush that movement from both the FBI and the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, as well as the Pentagon and other intel agencies. After appeals, the organization received thousands of pages [see BigBrotherAmerica.org] of heavily redacted documents that made it clear that even as the FBI was reporting that the Occupy movement was peaceful, it had been classified as a domestic terrorist threat by both the FBI and DHS, ‘before even the first encampments were set up in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere in mid-September,’ with the FBI already providing detailed warnings of Occupy Wall Street’s plans to Wall Street banks and US corporations as early as August, 2011.”

NICK ESTES, nicholas.w.estes at gmail.com, @nick_w_estes, @The_Red_Nation
Estes is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and host of the Red Nation podcast. His latest book is Our History is The Future.

He was on “Democracy Now!” Monday morning, noting that while Trump talks about preserving history, protestors were just arrested for asserting history and standing for treaties at Mount Rushmore. One protestor, Nick Tilsen, is still being held. Estes also addressed the impact of the pandemic on native people in the U.S. and the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore.

Bloomberg Law reported Monday: “Dakota Access Oil Line to Be Shut by Court in Blow for Trump.” Estes is co-editor of Standing with Standing Rock — see an in-depth interview with Estes on “Flashpoints” last year.
He notes the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, also created the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Estes recently appeared on the podcast Intercepted, stating that colonialism revolves around “God, gold, and glory,” noting: “Mount Rushmore is named after a gold prospector who had illegally entered into Lakota treaty territory to begin prospecting. … The Black Hills [where Mount Rushmore is located] were also a place of origin and a place of cultural and spiritual significance for over 50 Indigenous nations.”

George Washington “was known as ‘town destroyer.’ He was given that name by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy because he led a scorched-earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee prior to the Revolutionary War, but also during the Revolutionary War, to push them further westward. …

“Thomas Jefferson was really the architect of Indian removal as we now know it, like the Trail of Tears or the removal of the southeastern tribes from what we now know as the South, places like Georgia and North Carolina. But he was the one who really envisioned that, and that’s why he facilitated something like the Louisiana Purchase, because he imagined moving — basically creating a large Indian reserve — west of the Mississippi River. And of course, that, later on, became Oklahoma Territory. He also envisioned that the entire western hemisphere would be dominated” by Anglo-Saxons and “this was really the foundation of what we know as Manifest Destiny. …

“Lincoln himself is a very controversial figure for our people because he signed the death sentence for 38 Dakota patriots who took up arms against the United States after a breakdown in treaty obligations happened during the Civil War. … In 1862, you had the passage of the Homestead Act. … Dakota Uprising, as it’s known [happened] in 1862 … because the United States failed to live up to its treaty obligations to the Dakota people and … they took up arms. … But as the state of Minnesota reorganized itself for retaliation, they began organizing these irregular settler militias that were composed” of “recent European immigrants to basically create what we now know as the National Guard to crush the Indigenous uprising.”

The fourth face blasted into the mountain is that of “conservationist” Theodore Roosevelt. He is known for his role in the Spanish-American War with the “Rough Riders” and then for “gunboat diplomacy” during his presidency. Estes notes that even his role as “preservationist” is an ominous one for native people since “for settlers to appreciate nature, Indigenous people had to be ‘removed’ from nature.”

Estes notes that with respect to Minneapolis: “Leading up to the uprising and the killing of George Floyd, the conversation that I was hearing on the ground there, not just from Indigenous people but all people in that community … was the question of housing because housing prices were skyrocketing. So the intensification of police violence always correlates with profound inequality and we can trace that inequality in a place like Minneapolis back to its colonial origins when they expelled my ancestors.”

Intercepted played audio of Russell Means of the American Indian Movement: “And originally AIM, of course, was organized to combat police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it grew, because the ideas of self-determination, the idea of being able to stand on your own two feet, eye-to-eye with the white man and say, ‘Wait a minute. Stop.'”

JEFFREY KAYE, jeffkaye at sbcglobal.net, @jeff_kaye
Author of Cover-up at Guantanamo, Kaye said today: “According to former Obama senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, putative Democratic Party candidate for president Joe Biden picked a ‘superstar‘ when he appointed ex-CIA Deputy Director and White House attorney Avril Haines to head his national security and foreign policy team.

“No matter how much Obama/Biden administration officials praise her, Avril Haines’ role always seems to be making the unpalatable palatable, whether it’s prettifying companies like [data mining] contractor Palantir, agencies like the CIA, policies like ‘targeted killing,’ or war criminals like current CIA chief, ‘Bloody’ Gina Haspel.

“During Haspel’s contentious Senate confirmation, the Trump administration turned to Haines to legitimate Haspel, whose crimes included helping destroy CIA torture tapes, as well as participating in an unspecified management role at more than one CIA black site. Haines called Haspel ‘intelligent, compassionate, and fair.’ But that wasn’t all that Avril Haines has done for the CIA. She also participated in an ‘accountability board’ inquiry into CIA interference in the Senate investigation of CIA torture. She, of course, found no wrong-doing by the CIA.

“Haines claims to find torture immoral, yet she supports known torture official Haspel. Additionally, she was a White House lawyer when the UN Committee on Torture condemned the Obama-supported Army Field Manual on interrogations for using methods of interrogation, including sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation, that can cause psychotic reactions in prisoners, raising serious concerns of U.S. current use of torture. Did Haines agree with the Obama administration’s decision to defend the condemned techniques?

“We don’t know, as many questions haven’t been asked in the rush to anoint her a ‘superstar’ appointment. One anonymous progressive leader told The Daily Beast, ‘Being where any decent person should be on a few issues doesn’t cancel out an endorsement of torturers.’ It is sad that in 2020 ‘the leader of a progressive nonprofit that works on national security issues’ would fear ‘professional reprisal’ for daring to criticize Biden’s choice!

“The problems with Haines don’t stop with her shady connections to torture. It’s known that Avril Haines was Obama’s CIA deputy director. But most of the public doesn’t know she was also Obama’s direct advisor in constructing his targeted assassination ‘Kill List’ policy.

“Haines supposedly made Obama’s drone assassination program more transparent and less liable to kill innocents. But a 2016 ACLU examination of the policy Haines helped construct concluded it fell ‘far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.’ In particular, the Haines-influenced policy relied on ‘looser, law-of-war standards that govern conduct in war, rather than the more protective rules that apply under international human rights law.’

“Avril Haines is presented as a humane, intelligent and compassionate alternative to the typical white male elite that run the CIA and other such agencies. But her record is clear. She is an apologist for torture operations. She helped create kill lists for the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. She is not an alternative to the barbarism of the Trump administration, but a dire predictor of Biden’s obeisance as president to an out-of-control national security establishment.”

Independent investigative reporter Gareth Porter just published the piece “How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to U.S. intelligence agencies” at The Grayzone, which summarizes his findings thus: “Another New York Times Russiagate bombshell turns out to be a dud, as dodgy stories spun out by Afghan intelligence and exploited by the Pentagon ultimately failed to convince U.S. intelligence agencies.” [Also see 2017 article — “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?” — by Sam Husseini for the media watch group FAIR.]

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
Hoh resigned in protest from his State Department position in Afghanistan in 2009 over the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama administration; he also served in Iraq with the Marines. He has recently been featured on two accuracy.org news release: “Is Big Media Echoing Accusations to Demonize Russia and Continue Afghan War?” and “Inconvenient Facts: U.S. Killed Russians in Syria and Afghanistan.”

Hoh said today: “I think it is all more of the same: anonymous, unverifiable and evidence free accusations that have blatant domestic political beneficiaries, breathlessly exclaimed by a press which cheerleads constantly for U.S. foreign policy, as well as U.S. intelligence and military agencies, without regard for or acknowledgment of the vast catalogue of lying by those same intelligence and military agencies for political and institutional purposes. The question that should be asked by everyone is why should any of these institutions or individuals be believed.

“If these accusations of Russian bounties are true, than rather than reporting and responding to them as a chain of Russian conspiracies in Afghanistan against a benevolent and passive United States they should be understood for what they are: the consequences of U.S. war in Afghanistan, not only for the last 19 years, but the last 40 years, as well as the eternal consequences of waging these unending wars in the Muslim world.

“These too are the consequences warned of in the 1990s as the United States and NATO expanded its military presence eastward towards the Russian border. The Doomsday Clock is now at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to midnight since its inception in 1947. The people of the world are trapped in-between the 6,000 active and armed nuclear weapons of the United States and Russia, and further surrounded by climate change, pandemic, and exploitative neo-liberal economic policies. Meanwhile, both U.S. political parties utilize these accusations, and resulting tensions with Russia, for their own political benefit, while politicians, retired generals, the weapons industry and other elements of the $1.2 trillion annual war machine are using these well timed accusations to destroy peace attempts in and U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as justify $15 billion aircraft carriers, $2 billion bombers and $10 million tanks, along with a plan to spend $1.5 trillion on new nuclear weapons, resume nuclear testing and put weapons in space.”

Tom Vilsack (right) and Joe Biden (left) at An America Built to Last event at Iowa State University on March 1, 2012, in Ames, IA, where they spoke about the role of manufacturing in America.

BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich
Marcetic is author of the recently released book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. He just wrote the piece “The People Who Will Draft the Democratic Platform Have a Conflict of Interest Problem” for In These Times.

Marcetic writes: “Several of the [platform drafting] committee’s members, announced last month by DNC Chair Tom Perez, have corporate ties. Delaware State University President Tony Allen, for instance, worked for years as a speechwriter and special assistant to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, before moving into the world of banking.

“Allen first joined MBNA, the credit card company that infamously served as Biden’s all-time top donor and pushed for his 2005 bankruptcy bill, assailed by bankruptcy judges around the country for the onerous restrictions it placed on households trying to expunge their debts, including one who called it ‘the most poorly written piece of legislation that I or anyone else has ever seen.’ Allen worked at MBNA from 2004 through 2006, just as the bankruptcy bill was being ushered to passage. At the same time, the company was paying Biden’s son, Hunter, a $100,000-a-year retainer, criticized as an attempt to curry favor with Biden as he shepherded the bill through Congress.

“After Bank of America acquired MBNA in 2006, Allen left the latter for the former, where he stayed for the next eleven years. He spent much of that time working on ‘corporate reputation,’ which, according to his university bio, involved ‘reputation analysis’ and ‘developing programming to influential media elites, national social justice advocates, academics and elected officials.’ Such tasks were no doubt a tough-job at the scandal-plagued bank, which in that period paid out multiple settlements over racist predatory lending, signing up 1.4 million customers to expensive credit card programs they never authorized, and pushing homeowners into foreclosure.”

Another one of the several members of the committee that Marcetic examines is Tom Vilsack. “Days after stepping down as agriculture secretary, Vilsack spun through the revolving door to the U.S. Dairy Export Council, where he now earns nearly $1 million as the top executive at its parent organization, Dairy Management Inc. The powerful Council boasts a who’s who of big agriculture and even pharmaceuticals as members, and last year, Vilsack urged Democratic candidates not to criticize or target agricultural monopolies, citing the potential of job losses. Vilsack was also a major booster of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. …

“[Sen. Tammy] Duckworth’s husband draws a salary from VAE Inc. and Foxhole Technology Inc.” — two military contractors — “to the tune of millions of government dollars per year.”

“Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, also on Biden’s VP shortlist with a particularly influential role as the chair of the drafting committee, likewise has potential financial conflicts. Bottoms’ husband, Derek Bottoms, is vice president of employment practices and associate relations at Home Depot, a company he’s been with for 18 years, and one with a dreadful record on workers’ rights.”

A U.S. Postal Service letter carrier delivers mail while wearing PPE | Credit: In the Public Interest (ITPI)

LISA GRAVES, via Evan Vorpahl, evan at truenorthresearch.org,
Graves is the executive director of True North and has led several investigations into those distorting U.S. democracy and public policy. She just wrote the brief “The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service,” which states: “The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the already-struggling U.S. Postal Service to the brink of financial collapse. But the most trusted and popular institution in America hasn’t been struggling by accident.

“Since the 1970s, a concerted effort to popularize the fringe idea of privatizing the Postal Service has been advanced for nearly five decades with the support of one man: the billionaire and libertarian ideologue, Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries.”

The brief traces Koch’s connections, influence, and ideological push to “weaken and ultimately privatize one of America’s most essential public services — and, along with it, the jobs of hundreds of thousands of public servants. …

“The Postal Service has lost revenue since COVID-19 started spreading exponentially in the U.S., with its revenues down more than 30 percent as many businesses have closed or reduced operations. But the real reason for its financial crisis is not only the pandemic. The agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which ‘requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,’ on a 50-year basis. (John Oliver’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ did an in-depth show on this manufactured crisis earlier this year.)

“The HEROES Act would fund a portion of the Postal Service’s request to keep it from going bankrupt, but Koch’s groups oppose even that, seeking to achieve his longtime goal of eliminating one of the most trusted of American institutions and one vital to our democracy. The question is: will the American people stand up to Koch’s radical efforts to defund and destroy one of our most essential public services, wreak havoc on our economy, and privatize the good jobs of thousands of public servants? Or will we stand up to this billionaire and his bullying, say ‘NO!,’ and punish any politician who toes the Koch party line?” See PDF of the brief.

Harvard Health reports: “When lockdown is not actually safer: Intimate partner violence during COVID-19.”

STACY BANNERMAN, stacy at stacybannerman.com, @StacyBannerman
Bannerman is author of HOMEFRONT 911: How Families of Veterans Are Wounded by Our Wars. She is able to speak to issues of domestic violence by both police and military personnel. [See recent piece by retired colonel Ann Wright “Fort Hood a Dangerous Place for Women in the Military.”]

Bannerman said today: “Police violence does not stop on the streets. There is a black-and-blue line of domestic violence in the households of policemen. Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population. and some 40 percent of police have reported having participated in domestic violence in the previous year.

“The uniform has protected police abuse at the expense of the spouse and family. It is the same Code of Silence that ensures the women and children who are victims of veteran domestic violence are invisible collateral damage that America refuses to acknowledge or discuss.

“According to the National Center for Women and Policing, The reality is that even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution, raising concern that those who are tasked with enforcing the law cannot effectively police themselves.”

The socially sanctioned horror of domestic violence by uniformed personnel is also suffered by the wives of combat veterans with PTSD, said Bannerman, who has written about it extensively and experienced it first-hand. Once married to a two-time Iraq War combat vet with severe PTSD, Bannerman said, “Domestic violence and sexual assault by military, particularly combat veterans with PTSD, is a serious problem, but these are problems among police, too. It is a hidden issue that, were it extrapolated to the general population, the epidemic of potentially lethal domestic violence in the homes of those who’ve worn the uniform would be a public health crisis.

“Research has found that veterans diagnosed with PTSD were significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward their partners, with over 80 percent committing at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least one severe act, including strangulation, stabbing and shooting.

“Taxpayer dollars provide funds for training of police and military in use of force. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to constrain the use of force after the fact. Our collective failure to identify and address human-made and intergenerational trauma is especially egregious with far reaching negative ramifications.

“The issues involved are toxic masculinity, a culture centered on domination by brute force, and a process of dehumanizing and defining difference as deviance; rendering certain people ‘the other’ — typically people of color and/or women.”

Bannerman’s past articles include “High risk of military domestic violence on the home front.”

MARJORIE COHN, marjorielegal at gmail.com

Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law recently wrote “Trump’s Illegal Use of Military Against Anti-Racist Uprisings Portends Battles Ahead” and “Protesters Attacked by Police Are Suing to Vindicate Their Constitutional Rights.”

She said today: “In a continuation of his cynical abuse of power in the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump’s secret paramilitary force is illegally terrorizing the people of Portland. One man who was holding a speaker was shot in the head with an impact munition that fractured his skull and shattered his face. Unidentified federal agents in unmarked vehicles are snatching peaceful protesters off the streets, transporting them to unknown locations, without informing them of why they’re being arrested, and later releasing them with no record of their arrest. These actions are reminiscent of dictatorships’ secret police who kidnap and ‘disappear’ opponents of the regime. They are calculated to deter people from exercising their First Amendment right to protest” against racism and white supremacy.

Cohn added: “The seizures and detentions without probable cause violate the Fourth Amendment. Trump targeted Portland, which has seen 53 straight nights of demonstrations since the public lynching of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Trump is reportedly planning to take his illegal tactics nationwide. Fortunately, lawsuits are being filed to stop these egregious constitutional violations.”

Cohn is former president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her other recent pieces include “Trump Is Trying to Hide U.S. and Israeli War Crimes by Attacking the International Criminal Court.” She is author of several books and editor of Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues and The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.

Dodd-Frank was signed into law ten years ago today. Edward Kane, a leading expert on banking, argues that contrary to the praise heaped upon it, it’s an “example of counterfeit reform” that was “designed principally to benefit very big banks and it has helped these banks to increase their market share greatly during the last ten years” — and that it set a dangerous, elitist precedent that is operating today with government action since the pandemic.

EDWARD KANE, edward.kane at bc.edu
Professor of finance at Boston College, Kane has held a number of notable positions including past president of the American Finance Association. He just wrote the paper “Immaculate Deception: How and Why Bankers Still Enjoy a Global Rescue Network” for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Kane writes: “Today, as during the Great Financial Crisis, the Fed’s policy strategy has been to prevent open insolvencies at U.S. megabanks by making subsidized loans to U.S. megabanks’ insolvent foreign counterparties (and to the foreign taxpayers that would otherwise have been asked to rescue them). At the same time, Fed leaders have resisted a broad-based bailout of insolvent U.S. homeowners and landlords. During the GFC, they stood by as U.S. banks foreclosed on all but a few privileged categories of distressed mortgage borrowers. Although households are receiving some help in the current go-around, forbearance is not forgiveness. Unpaid rents and mortgage payments are still mounting up.

“The overwrought praise that Wall Street and the media subsequently heaped on Treasury and Federal Reserve leaders for being willing to punish lower-income households to get the rich through the Great Financial Crisis established a nasty precedent that is guiding monetary policy today. This unspoken precedent is ‘Bankers and Brokers first.’ …

“The 2008 troika of [Ben] Bernanke, [Timothy] Geithner, and [Henry] Paulson congratulated themselves for having the ‘courage’ to put the interests of foreign bankers and major U.S. financial institutions (including a few of its automobile makers — think the airlines and tourism industry today) ahead of ordinary U.S. citizens. The victory laps that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are taking this week for passing Dodd-Frank not only celebrate this approach, but provide opportunities for them to claim that they rescued rich and poor alike from complete and utter ruin.

“This portrait of distributional neutrality is propaganda of a high order. Current and former Fed and Treasury officials cannot fail to understand that, in accepting so much adulation, they have cemented a series of dangerous precedents. …

“Aggressively devising creative, nontransparent, and arguably extralegal ways to transfer massive amounts of U.S. taxpayer resources to wealthy stakeholders in zombie megabanks around the world is a dangerously elitist strategy.

“Experience teaches us that corporate-level reforms do not and cannot hold their effectiveness over time. Rules beget regulation-induced innovations and these burden-reducing innovations become more and more successful over time. The difficulty governments face in devising and enforcing appropriate punishments for individual bankers that knowingly exploit safety-net protections converts national and regional safety nets into what amounts to a global Protection Racket operated by — and for the benefit of — thieving megabankers.”

Kane concludes: “Genuine reform will require changes in fraud laws and an effort to post on a continuing basis the value of the safety-net subsidies individual megabanks enjoy.” See PDF of the paper.

STAN COX, cox at landinstitute.org, @CoxStan
Cox is lead scientist at The Land Institute and just wrote the piece “The coronavirus-climate-air conditioning nexus” for The Hill.

He is author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World and the recently released The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can.

He said today: “With heat waves like the one that much of the country is getting hit with this week, we gather almost entirely in enclosed, air-conditioned spaces, and that’s going to further raise the risk of coronavirus infection. A recent article signed by more than 240 scientists warned that in spaces that aren’t ventilated with outside air, airborne ‘microdroplets’ exhaled by a person infected with coronavirus can easily travel the full length of a room and be inhaled by another person. In that case, the six-foot social distancing rule doesn’t help. The scientists wrote that there’s an easy remedy for this: keep windows and doors open, to let the indoor air out and let in fresh air. Of course, open windows aren’t compatible with air conditioning, so groups of people gathering in air-conditioned spaces may be at higher risk.”

Cox writes: “Home air conditioning should be turned off on those many summer days when shade and fans can provide sufficient comfort. Offices should never be so frigid that workers resort to wearing sweaters or keeping space heaters under their desks in July. Every building should have windows that can be opened and that stay open as much as possible.

“And, at least for the rest of this summer, let’s all get together outdoors.”

ASHIK SIDDIQUE, asiddique at nationalpriorites.org, @natpriorities
Siddique is a researcher focused on the federal budget and military spending with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. He recently wrote the piece “Americans Want to Reinvest Ten Percent of the Military Budget Against Coronavirus.”

CommonDreams reports: “Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, two leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic vice presidential nomination, voted opposite ways Wednesday on an amendment” to reduce the Pentagon budget by 10 percent and “invest the savings in healthcare, housing, and education in impoverished U.S. communities. The amendment, led by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), was defeated by a margin of 23-77, with 24 Democratic senators voting no.” A similar vote in the House was defeated 93-324. See piece in Sludge noting that Democrats who voted against the Pentagon cuts got 3.4 times more money from military contractors than those who didn’t.

Siddique said today: “It’s disappointing that majorities of the House and Senate voted this week against something as sensible as redirecting 10 percent of the bloated $740 billion Pentagon budget, which is unaccountably wasteful and enables the harmful and reckless use of U.S. military force in ways that make the whole world less safe. A new poll shows that a majority of Americans support this shift, including half of Republican voters.

“74 billion dollars could disappear from the Pentagon budget and barely be noticed by most current military operations, but would make a massive difference to any number of social priorities that currently receive fractions of military funding — especially during an ongoing pandemic and intensifying economic crisis.

“We’ve laid out some incredible trade-offs for $74 billion, including ending homelessness, deploying enough renewable energy to power almost every household in the country, closing the racial funding gap for public schools, or giving every American six free COVID tests to help contain the pandemic over the next year.

“But this is the first time in decades that Congress has seriously considered reinvesting away from the Pentagon budget, and it’s important to note how quickly the political landscape is shifting around this issue. Just a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine getting even 93 votes in the House and 23 in the Senate — or nearly 40 to 50 percent of the Democratic Caucus — to cut military spending by 10 percent, as they did this time.

“That sets up a much stronger baseline to work from next year — especially since the budget caps put in place by the Budget Control Act of 2011 will expire, giving Americans the chance to more deeply transform this country’s militarized agenda in a way that has not been on the table for decades.”

More than 20 former presidents and high-level government officials in Latin America are “denounc[ing] and reject[ing] the decision made by the National Election Council of Ecuador to eliminate the electoral registration of the party Fuerza Compromiso Social, which is partly formed by the members of the Revolución Ciudadana [Citizens’ Revolution] movement, led by former President Rafael Correa,” saying “This act of political bias calls into question the legitimacy of the election that will take place on February 7, 2021 in Ecuador. …”

GUILLAUME LONG, via Dan Beeton, beeton@cepr.net, @Dan_Beeton, @ceprdc
Guillaume Long is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining CEPR, he held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently, he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva.

Long is one of the signers of the Puebla Group statement condemning the CNE’s actions barring Correa’s party from the ballot. He said today: “In an outrageously antidemocratic move, on July 19, Ecuador’s CNE [National Electoral Council] suspended former president Rafael Correa’s party, FCS [Fuerza Compromiso Social], from the register of political parties. This decision followed pressure by the central government, the Attorney General’s Office, and the State Comptroller’s Office.

“This means that, as things currently stand, candidates from FCS, and thereby from Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution, will not be able to run in February 2021’s presidential and legislative elections.

“The CNE’s move went back on eight previous decisions ratifying FCS’s legitimacy and legal status as a political party. FCS was already an established party, which had competed in three national elections.

“The FCS’s suspension follows a series of legally questionable efforts to slap Correa with dubious criminal charges, which, if upheld, could see Correa barred from the ballot as a candidate in the upcoming elections, even aside from the FCS party suspension. Correa had been planning a run for vice president, and had been leading in polls. The prosecution’s case against Correa relies mostly on testimony from former Correa advisor Pamela Martinez, who claimed to have accepted bribes in 2013 and 2014, with Correa’s knowledge, from several people. Martinez presented a notebook detailing these transactions down to the dollar and the exact date — all written, incredibly, from memory during a 45-minute plane trip from Quito to Guayaquil years later, in 2018.

“Unsurprisingly, few people familiar with the facts of the case, and who are not aligned with the prosecution or the current government, headed by President Lenín Moreno, have found this evidence credible.

“The Moreno government, meanwhile, has become increasingly unpopular due to its notorious mismanagement of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which led to bodies piling up on the streets of Guayaquil earlier this year, and due to its commitment to IMF-supported austerity policies that prioritize the interests of foreign creditors over health spending and other social needs — even in the midst of the pandemic.

“Moreno had been Correa’s vice president, but turned to the right once in office, reversing many policies of the Correa administration that had prioritized the needs of Ecuadorian citizens over foreign investors, and which had fostered Latin American unity over U.S.-Ecuadorian relations. Moreno has pursued a series of IMF agreements, Washington-backed cuts in spending programs, and foreign policy maneuvers aimed at pleasing the Trump administration (including the hand-over of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to British authorities).”

Several leading scholars are available for interviews on the decisions to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago (on Aug. 6 and 9).

Barbara Cochran, former news executive at NPR, NBC, and CBS and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri recently moderated a discussion with the analysts and historians, available online.

They will also be featured in a media briefing on Wednesday, July 29 at 9 a.m. (Tokyo time), July 28 at 8 p.m. (New York time) — click here.

Gar Alperovitz, formerly a Fellow of Kings College Cambridge, the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is the author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. He is currently a Principal of The Democracy Collaborative, an independent research institution in Washington, D.C.

Martin Sherwin, University Professor of History, George Mason University, is author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, winner of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relation’s Bernath Book Prize, co-author with Kai Bird of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and author of Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, forthcoming in September 2020.

Kai Bird, Executive Director, CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography, co-author (with Martin Sherwin) of Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, co-editor (with Lawrence Lifschultz) Hiroshima’s Shadow, and author The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment.

Peter Kuznick, Professor of History, Director, Nuclear Studies Institute, American University, co-author (with Akira Kimura), Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives, co-author (with Oliver Stone) of the New York Times best-selling The Untold History of the United States (books and documentary film series), and author “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative.”

The historians are also available for individual interviews:
Gar Alperovitz, garalper at gmail.com
Kai Bird, kaibird at mac.com
Martin Sherwin, martysherwin at gmail.com
Peter Kuznick, pkuznick at aol.com

For more information, contact Glenn Marcus, dcguy614 at aol.com

Also, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee is organizing a number of talks and vigils in the Washington, D.C. area — see schedule.

Note to producers: You may want to use the song “Enola Gay” by OMD as a musical lead-in; this version by Elisa Salasin includes audio clips of President Harry Truman claiming that Hiroshima was “a military base” and J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” See video.

ALEXANDER SAMMON, asammon at prospect.org, @alex_sammon, Sammon just wrote the piece “How Kamala Harris Fought to Keep Nonviolent Prisoners Locked Up” for The American Prospect: “Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate, repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general, according to legal documents reviewed by the Prospect. Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.

“The intransigence of this legal work resulted in the presiding judges in the case giving serious consideration to holding the state in contempt of court. Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.

“Despite a straightforward directive from the Supreme Court to identify prisoners for release over a two-year period, upholding a 2009 ruling that mandated the same action over the same timeline, the state spent the majority of that period seesawing back and forth between dubious legal filings and flagrant disregard. By early 2013, it became clear that the state had no intention to comply, leading to a series of surprisingly combative exchanges.

“While Harris’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign saw questions raised about her criminalization of truancy and her tough-on-crime reputation during her time as San Francisco’s district attorney, her role in California’s prison reduction case largely flew under the radar, though it was decried at the time. As concerns grow about Donald Trump’s subversion of the law — he, along with his attorney general, William Barr, is currently defying a Supreme Court ruling by refusing to restart the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — the potential Democratic vice-presidential nominee engaging in relatively similar obstinacy is jarring.

“Sen. Harris’s office has yet to respond to a set of questions from the Prospect.”

Aug 4, 2020 is the 10th anniversary of the “Giving Pledge,” started by billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. (See New York Times piece from Aug. 4, 2010.)

CHUCK COLLINS, chuck at ips-dc.org; also via Bob Keener, bobk at ips-dc.org

Collins is director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the report “Gilded Giving 2020: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy” and “The Giving Pledge at 10: A Case Study in Top Heavy Philanthropy.”

He said today: “Private philanthropy has always been a form of power for wealthy donors. But as wealth inequality has exploded in recent decades, it has concentrated that private power in even fewer hands — and all subsidized by private taxpayers.”

The findings include: “Of the 62 living U.S. Pledgers who were billionaires in 2010, their combined wealth has increased from $376 billion in 2010 to $734 billion as of July 18, 2020, an increase of 95 percent, in 2020 dollars.

“Of these 62, 11 have seen their wealth go down either because of aggressive charitable giving or market changes. But the remaining 51 have seen significant increases in their net worth. Nine of the billionaires have seen their wealth increase over 200 percent over the decade, adjusted for inflation. These include Mark Zuckerberg (1783 percent), John Doerr (416 percent), Marc Benioff (400 percent), Bernie and Billie Marcus (311 percent), Ken Langone (288 percent), Ray Dalio (280 percent) Arthur Blank (277 percent) Stephen Schwarzman (245 percent), Scott Cook and Signe Ostby (221 percent).

“The 100 living U.S. Pledgers who were billionaires on March 18, 2020 had a combined wealth of $758.3 billion at that time. This is the date of both the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns in the U.S. and the publication of Forbes‘ annual global billionaire survey. By July 17, 2020, their assets had surged to $971.9 billion. This means that over the four worst months of the pandemic in the United States to date, their collective wealth increased by $213.6 billion — an increase of 28 percent.”
Collins also just wrote the piece “In a pandemic, billionaires are richer than ever. Why aren’t they giving more?” in The Guardian. 

Said Collins: “Philanthropy should not become a taxpayer-subsidized extension of private wealth, power, and influence for the richest 0.1 percent. … Congress needs to update the rules governing philanthropy to prevent abuses to the tax code and protect our democracy and nonprofit sector.”

The “Gilded Giving 2020” report finds that top-heavy philanthropy poses considerable risks to “the independence of the nonprofit sector, the integrity of the tax system, and to democracy itself.” It also suggests that the 2017 tax cut and the COVID-19 pandemic will worsen this drift toward inequality in philanthropy.

Collins and his fellow analysts found: “Small donor giving has been steadily declining for two decades. Between 2000 and 2016 (most recent data), the percentage of households giving to charity has dropped from 66 percent to 53 percent. Wage stagnation, unemployment, declining homeownership all contribute to economic insecurity and declines in giving.

“The increase in charitable giving has been driven by donations by wealthy donors and mega gifts over $300 million.”

August 4, 2020

Various media outlets are reporting that former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice is on Joe Biden’s “short list” to be his running mate.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes at usfca.edu, @SZunes
Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He said today: “Should Susan Rice be chosen as Biden’s running mate, it would serve as yet another signal that the likely next Democratic administration would embrace a foreign policy similar to that of Bush and Cheney. Rice’s decision to repeat the lies of the Bush administration regarding the supposed threat from Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of that oil-rich country in order to undermine the anti-war movement, her support for autocratic Middle Eastern and African leaders, her attacks against the United Nations, her support for the Israeli occupation, and her defense of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law will result in further alienating the progressive Democratic base from the national ticket. Already troubled over Biden’s hawkish foreign policy views, his lies about Iraq, and his successful insistence on including center-right foreign policy planks in the Democratic platform, his possible choice of a vice-president with a record of stating demonstrable falsehoods to defend actions by the United States and its allies that violate international norms could end up suppressing turnout and enhance the appeal of leftist third parties.”

In 2013, Zunes wrote the piece “Troubling Implications of Susan Rice’s Appointment as National Security Adviser,” noting that during the buildup to the Iraq invasion, she rose to the Bush administration’s “defense by insisting that, ‘It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat.’ This claim came despite the fact that Iraq had disarmed itself of its chemical and biological weapons and eliminated its nuclear program at least eight years earlier. Moreover, despite the success of the UN’s disarmament program, Rice asserted that Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on.'” [Audio and video clips of Rice’s statements cited by Zunes are here and here.]

RANIA MASRI, [in Beirut], rania.z.masri at gmail.com, @rania_masri
Masri is a lecturer and political and social justice activist. She is an elected representative of the political party Citizens in a State, which seeks to end Lebanon’s sectarian political system. She just appeared on the program “Flashpoints” with Dennis Bernstein and was interviewed by the Afro-Middle East Centre, which is based in South Africa.

She said today: “We know that a port hangar containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that was improperly stored six years ago was the cause of the large explosion on August 4, an explosion that has so far claimed more than 150 deaths, 5,000 wounded and missing, 300,000 families made homeless, and destruction in the $3 to 6 billion range. (For the record, Timothy McVeigh used 2.3 tons of ammonium nitrate in the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing.)

“This catastrophe was neither a natural disaster, nor an accident, nor an external act of terror. This explosion was caused by the criminal negligence of men — encouraged by a political system designed to build clients and not see citizens. There are many official reports that warned of the danger of keeping a similar amount of highly flammable ammonium nitrate stored in a manner that does not take into account public safety conditions, and despite this information, they did not move to disassemble the sleeping bomb before it exploded.

“The coalition of sectarian leaders was aware of this time bomb at the Beirut Port. This catastrophe comes on top of, not only the COVID pandemic, but also a financial and economic bankruptcy. They were also quite aware of the bankruptcy, particularly since they are responsible for it!

“Neither declaring public mourning, nor enforcing a state of emergency for Beirut, nor forming investigation committees (and most definitely not this humiliating farce of a foreign investigation committees) are the solution. The people responsible for this massacre are known. It is the authority of the coalition of leaders of the sects, and their agents and representatives in Parliament, the government, the judiciary, and the administration and the security.”

YASHA LEVINE, mail at yashalevine.com, @yashalevine

Levine is author of the book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. He just wrote the piece “TikTok, imperialism, and the end of internet utopianism,” which states: “‪You’ve probably heard about this whole TikTok business. Donald Trump has given the company 45 days to either sell itself to an American firm or be banished from our borders. So it looks like TikTok is going to be forced to sell to a bunch of drooling Silicon Valley oligarchs for pennies on the dollar. ‘Nice viral app you got there, kid. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Hey, we just want to help out!’

“A bipartisan War With China campaign has been building for quite a while now, so something like this ban was just a matter of time. What’s incredible is how many influential people on the prog-left are cheering it on. …

“To me the most interesting part of this ban is that it shows that Internet utopianism is pretty much dead. Don’t know about you, but the sooner we bury that corpse the better.

“From the start of the dot com boom, Silicon Valley and America’s political elite have done a great job of marketing the Internet as a totally new type of technology — a utopian system that’s removed from American imperial and business interests. Google? Facebook? Apple? eBay? These companies aren’t extensions of American imperial power. No way! They’re neutral technological platforms involved in connecting and empowering people. They’re serving users with digital democracy, regardless of their nationality or politics. They’re post-ideological and post-historical!

“For a long time a lot of people believed this sales pitch. Even Silicon Valley bought into its own hype.

“Of course, this idea of technological neutrality was itself extremely ideological and underpinned by massive historical revisionism. As I show in my book Surveillance Valley, the Internet has always been an instrument of American economic and military power. The Internet has always been a weapon — ever since it was developed by the Pentagon in the 1960s and then unleashed on the world in the early 1990s.

“This ban of TikTok proves my point.

“But there’s something bigger going on, too. It shows that no one really believes in Silicon Valley global utopianism anymore.

“Read reporting on the issue and you’ll find that a kind of paranoid realpolitik prevails these days. No one talks about the Internet being a post-political platform. Now it’s all about how technology can be weaponized by a rival power against American interests. If an Internet company is Chinese, it naturally must be an extension of Chinese national power. If a company is Russian, the Russian government must be benefiting from its use somehow. And if a company is American — like Google or Facebook — it of course must pledge allegiance to American imperial interests. And Google and Facebook publicly agree.”

Newsweek reports: “Is Trump Defunding Social Security and Medicare? Concerns Mount After President’s Executive Order.” Forbes opines: “Will Trump’s Payroll Tax Cut End Social Security As We Know It? Let’s Hope So.”

Ralph Nader tweeted: “The Executive Order deferring indefinitely a portion of payroll taxes funding Social Security and Medicare usurped the congressional taxing power. Both constitutional violations are indisputable.”

NANCY ALTMAN, via Linda Benesch, lbenesch at socialsecurityworks.org, @ssworks
President of Social Security Works, Altman is author of The Battle for Social Security and The Truth About Social Security: Exploding Five Destructive Myths. She noted that Trump in the past has repeatedly said he was the only Republican candidate who didn’t want to cut Social Security.

She said: “Donald Trump’s executive order, which seeks to defer Social Security contributions, is bad enough. But his promise to ‘terminate’ FICA contributions if he is reelected is a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries.

“Social Security is the foundation of everyone’s retirement security. At a time when pensions are vanishing and 401ks have proven inadequate, Trump’s plan to eliminate Social Security’s revenue stream would destroy the one source of retirement income that people can count on. Moreover, Social Security is often the only disability insurance and life insurance that working families have. If reelected, Trump plans to destroy those benefits as well.”

STEVE HORN, steve at therealnews.com, @steveahorn
Horn is an investigative climate reporter regularly filing reports for The Real News’ Climate Crisis News Roundup. He writes that with the presidential election three months away, “President Donald Trump is down in the polls, but was up for a speech at a fracking rig in a COVID-19 hotspot, one with no masks in sight. As he spoke, a company with operations nearby and ambitions to boost an obscure drilling technique joined a legion of other companies who have declared bankruptcy.”

Horn’s latest pieces include: “Climate official pushing controversial sun-blocking plan resigns,” which states: “Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), a controversial program aimed at reversing the climate crisis that we covered here several weeks ago suffered a recent blow after its chairwoman stepped down.

“The program is based at Harvard University and until July 22 had an advisory council chaired by the director of the California Strategic Growth Council, Louise Bedsworth. But after coming under scrutiny both from global climate justice groups and in a June 19 story by The Real News Network, Bedsworth has stepped down from the post.

“The scrutiny was aimed at the technology for which the research group is pushing to develop a governance mechanism, called solar geoengineering or solar radiation management, for reflecting sunlight away from the Earth to halt the greenhouse effect of climate change. That technofix — which involves spraying aerosols into the atmosphere for an indefinite period of time to shield the Earth — is seen by many as both potentially dangerous to deploy and also a way to continue business as usual in emitting greenhouse gases.”

He also recently wrote “California greenlights ‘Orwellian’ solar-powered fracking scheme” and “New DNC Platform Could Make The Bleak Climate Forecast Even Worse,” which states: “The 2016 platform had much more grassroots pressure behind it, and didn’t need to navigate the pressure of an ongoing pandemic. It called for a phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands backed by the ‘Keep It in the Ground’ movement, an end to industry exemptions like the Halliburton Loophole (Biden voted against the 2005 energy bill containing this provision). It said that fracking ‘should not take place where states and local communities oppose it.’ It called for phasing out coal production and ensuring a just transition for industry workers, winding down fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks, and legal accountability for the fossil fuel industry for misleading the public about the impact of the climate crisis by funding denial campaigns.

“None of that stuff made it into the 2020 draft platform.

“Instead, the 2020 version continues Biden’s call for a ‘double down’ on the expansion of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, and for ‘breakthrough opportunities’ for ‘direct air capture and net-negative emissions technologies.’ As explained in last week’s edition, CCUS means capturing carbon at the point of emissions at the industrial smokestack, storing it in underground pipelines and then utilizing the CO2 for future industrial processes like cement and plastics production (which are climate change-causing petrochemicals). In the U.S., most of the time the stored carbon is used to extract more oil in a process called enhanced oil recovery.

“In reality, this all will mean more fracking for oil and gas and more growth of the sector overall.

“Some of the people running climate policy for the Biden campaign may explain why this policy platform has arisen. Campaign advisor Heather Zichal, formerly a top climate aide for President Barack Obama, was until recently on the board of directors of gas exporting company Cheniere. Zichal’s fellow campaign advisor, Ernest Moniz, is partial owner of a proposed liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal called G2 Net Zero LNG. He is also currently on the board of directors of the predominantly gas-powered electricity sector giant Southern Company, a major proponent of CCUS and direct air capture.”

Sen. Kamala Harris — chosen on Tuesday by Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential pick — has been criticized by Homewreckers author Aaron Glantz for “spiking an investigation against” current Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for foreclosure fraud while he headed up OneWest Bank. See IPA news release: “Kamala Harris’ Claims About Her Record on Big Banks ‘Doesn’t Withstand a Moment’s Scrutiny’.”

She has also been criticized by progressives for her relationship with AIPAC, see “‘More AIPAC Than J Street’: Kamala Harris Runs to the Right on Foreign Policy” by Stephen Zunes.

According to OpenSecrets, Harris’ top career contributors are: University of California, Alphabet Inc. (Google), WarnerMedia Group (a division of AT&T which includes CNN and HBO), Walt Disney Co. (owns ABC) and the State of California. She also received campaign donations in 2014 from Donald and Ivanka Trump.

But her record on civil liberties has perhaps drawn the most scrutiny. Parts of that record have been closely investigated by:

ALEXANDER SAMMON, asammon at prospect.org, @alex_sammon
Sammon recently wrote the piece “How Kamala Harris Fought to Keep Nonviolent Prisoners Locked Up” for The American Prospect.

CHRISTOPHER W. SHAW, christophershaw.ca at gmail.com, @chris_w_shaw
Shaw is a historian and author of Preserving the People’s Post Office. He recently had an oped in the Washington Post: “Postal banking is making a comeback. Here’s how to ensure it becomes a reality.“

He said today: “The U.S. Postal Service has served the American people day in and day out since 1775. Time and again, the Postal Service rose to the occasion in moments of national crisis, and millions of Americans will rely on the U.S. Mail to cast their vote this November. But recent actions taken by newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are jeopardizing the Postal Service’s ability to perform its mission. With a presidential election fast approaching, this is the worst possible time to slow down mail delivery, reduce post office hours, remove processing equipment from postal facilities, and uproot collection boxes.

“While these recent developments are troubling, they also are consistent with a long-term attack on the Postal Service. For decades, corporate interests have lobbied to undermine this government agency’s public service commitment. These attacks have weakened the institution, setting the stage for our current crisis. Nevertheless, our postal system remains an essential infrastructure and the one universal means of communication — providing uniform service at uniform rates to all Americans. Older, low-income, and rural Americans are particularly reliant on the U.S. Mail. The Postal Service delivers over 470 million pieces of mail every day. But although its delivery network has expanded, there are approximately 100,000 less career employees compared to a decade ago.

“Privately owned corporations have received billions in federal funding during this crisis, even as our public Postal Service has not received a cent. Adapting to vote by mail on a national scale presents challenges, so the postal system needs funding now. Longer term, for too long, the emphasis has been cutting service by closing post offices, removing collection boxes, and ending door delivery. It’s now time to expand the Postal Service. Until 1966, post offices offered banking services, and reviving this service would aid the unbanked and underbanked. The Postal Service was founded to promote communication and circulate information, and today this means helping to provide equitable internet access and public social media platforms.”

Shaw also wrote the book Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic.

LISA GRAVES, via Evan Vorpahl, evan at truenorthresearch.org, @itstruenorth
Graves is the executive director of the policy research group True North. A month ago, she wrote the brief “The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service,” about Charles Koch. Now she is pointing to connections in the Post Office itself that brought us to this point. She said today:

1) “Donald Trump is obstructing any infusion of funds to help the Postal Service have enough staff and staff time to process ballots in this election because he said so. He and Mnuchin have opposed the HEROES Act provision that would give the Postal Service $25 billion as part of Covid relief and any additional funding to help ensure there is enough staff time available to handle the potential surge in mailed ballots from people choosing this method of voting due to the deadly pandemic, in the states that allow vote by mail.

• “We know that the Trump administration went to bat for private industry, including the airline industry, to get massive bailout funds in the first rounds of Covid relief this spring — while the Postal Service got none, even though it is funded primarily through the sale of stamps and contracts with businesses. (Congress did approve a $10 billion loan, which Mnuchin dragged his feet on until last month, but the previous Postmaster General detailed to Congress that it needed at least $25 billion in the near term and $75 billion total to survive due to revenue losses during the pandemic — like almost every other business, except the Dow.)
• “We know that one of the provisions the administration and GOP included in the CARES Act resulted in oil companies getting billion dollar refunds by allowing them to carry back losses from this year to offset taxes paid on revenues in prior years. So there’s plenty in the budget to bail out private, for-profit oil companies but not our Postal Service, and this is on top of the Trump tax cut which took nearly a trillion in tax revenue away.

2) “We know that the current Postmaster General is the most partisan political person to hold this position in our lifetimes.

• The new Postmaster, Louis DeJoy gave Trump’s campaign more than $360,000 earlier this year after the opening to become Postmaster was announced. It was a substantial set of gifts over just five weeks. DeJoy gave an additional more than $400,000 to [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and leadership PACs, as well as four U.S. Senate candidates between the announcement last December and his appointment.
• “DeJoy has hosted personal fundraisers at his home for Trump during his presidency, raising at least $2 million at one of them which included a six-figure sum he contributed. …
• “DeJoy also holds millions in stock in competitors of the Postal Service, like his former firm XPO Logistics, UPS, and more. He previously ran a shipping company that his private equity partners arranged to merge with XPO Logistics; he is still invested in that private equity firm, which has been helping other package delivery firms acquire expanded operations, such as UPS.
• “DeJoy is the first Postmaster General who never worked in the Postal Service. (His companies were contractors of the U.S. Postal Service.)

3) “We know that DeJoy was chosen by a Board of Governors entirely nominated by Donald Trump.

• “That was made possible by McConnell, who blocked President Obama’s nominees so that the Board did not have a working quorum for more than five full years.
• “With all the openings available due to the McConnell obstruction and partisan-packing playbook — which he has also fully deployed to pack our federal courts with unqualified extreme partisans — Trump was able to install a Chairman of the Postal Board to preside over the hiring process that chose DeJoy. The majority of Board members are Republicans.
• “That man’s name is Mike Duncan and he raised more than $100 million to help keep McConnell in power (through the Senate Leadership PAC), which gave Trump and the GOP control of the Senate — helping to protect his administration from accountability (and facilitating the packing of our Supreme Court and lower courts, too), as David Sirota reported.
• “Chairman Duncan also helped start and lead Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC as well as the GOP Data Trust, which has data on more than 200 million Americans.”

OMAR OCAMPO, via Olivia Alperstein, olivia at ips-dc.org, or Bob Keener, bobk at ips-dc.org, @IPS_DC
Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, just co-wrote the report “Twelve U.S. Billionaires Have a Combined $1 Trillion,” which states: “For the first time in U.S. history, the top twelve U.S. billionaires surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion. On Thursday August 13, these 12 held a combined $1.015 trillion.

“This is a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power. This is simply too much economic and political power in the hands of twelve people. From the point of view of a democratic self-governing society, this represents an Oligarchic Twelve or a Despotic Dozen.

“The Oligarchic Dozen are Jeff Bezos ($189.4b), Bill Gates ($114b), Mark Zuckerberg ($95.5b), Warren Buffett ($80b), Elon Musk ($73b), Steve Ballmer ($71b), Larry Ellison ($70.9b), Larry Page ($67.4b), Sergey Brin ($65.6b), Alice Walton ($62.5b), Jim Walton ($62.3b), and Rob Walton ($62b).

“Since March 18, the beginning of the pandemic, this Oligarchic Dozen have seen their combined wealth increase $283 billion, an increase of almost 40 percent.

“Elon Musk has been the biggest pandemic profiteer, seeing his wealth triple from $24.6 billion on March 18th to $73 billion on August 13, an increase of $48.5 billion or 197 percent.

“Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos was worth $189.4 billion on August 13, up $76 billion or 68 percent since March 18.

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was worth $95.5 billion on August 13, up $40.8 billion or 75 percent since March 18.”

ROBIN ANDERSEN, andersen at fordham.edu
Andersen is professor and director of graduate studies in the department of communication and media studies at Fordham University. She just wrote the piece “Not All Criticism of Kamala Harris Is Created Equal,” part of the media watch group FAIR’s focus on the 2020 election.

She writes: “Yet emerging as a corporate media frame is a sloppy, mystifying confusion that refuses to distinguish the racist and sexist slurs against Harris from an authentic discussion of the trajectory of her political positions, and what they might mean for her as a serving vice president and a potential future leader of the Democratic Party. Within this frame, criticisms from the left and the right are treated as equally offensive.

“This was evident early on in an opinion piece penned by Anthea Butler for NBC News (8/11/20), which asserted that after the announcement of Harris on the ticket, ‘the attacks and criticisms began flying across the web from conservatives and liberals alike. She’s ‘extraordinarily nasty.’ She’s ‘a cop.’ She’s too conservative — or she’s too liberal. She changes her mind constantly.’

“Criticizing the word ‘cop’ when applied to Kamala Harris makes little sense. In fact, the word comes from Harris herself. Harris served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017. Amid the fanfare of winning the position of California attorney general, speaking behind a podium with a victorious smile on her face, Kamala accepted her new position by saying, ‘And I now stand before you as the Top Cop in the biggest state in the country.’ To illustrate the sloppy nature of this frame that all criticism is equal, Harris is shown calling herself a ‘cop’ on a video segment sandwiched into Butler’s piece.”

BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich
Marcetic is author of the book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. See his recent pieces at In These Times and  Jacobin.

He said today: “Last night and since April, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his advisors have insisted the former vice president is planning what New York magazine in May called ‘an FDR-sized presidency.’ These claims have been amplified by a hopeful liberal press.

“Over the past week, however, Biden and his team have signaled they will not be following through on this promise. Last Saturday, Democratic congressional aides told the Hill the party likely wouldn’t push forward with Biden’s public health insurance option should he win, and would instead pursue tweaks to Obamacare, a claim the Biden campaign didn’t correct. Meanwhile, the Democratic convention featured hard-right Republican John Kasich assuring conservative viewers Biden wouldn’t ‘turn sharp left and leave them behind,’ in a four-day program targeted chiefly at Republican voters.

“Even Biden’s promise in his DNC speech last night to ‘protect Social Security and Medicare’ should be viewed with caution. A President Biden could try, as he suggested in 2018 and in private in 2014, to means-test Social Security and claim he is ‘protecting’ it from insolvency, without having technically cut it.

“Wall Street has happily highlighted similar, earlier signals. One financial advisory firm called the Biden-Bernie Sanders unity task forces ‘a very successful effort by Biden and his team to control the narrative and policy direction,’ while the chairman of another celebrated that ‘his pick of Harris reinforces’ that he won’t move left. Biden is now outraising Trump among Wall Street donors, with some of them giving the campaign policy advice, with one reportedly telling his staffers to match any big federal spending with budget cuts.

“Longtime Biden advisor Ted Kaufman has now told the Wall Street Journal Americans shouldn’t expect more spending should Biden win, warning that ‘what Trump’s done to the deficit’ means ‘we’re going to be limited.’ This appears to directly contradict Biden’s claim in May that he wanted something ‘a hell of a lot bigger’ than the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus and that massive public investment was the only way out of a deficit.

“All of this signals not just a narrowing of Biden’s ambitions, but the alarming prospect of austerity during the Covid recession. Biden is uniquely susceptible to budget-cutting dogma. He quickly became a fiscal hawk after entering the Senate in 1972, introducing the Federal Spending Control Act five years later to potentially put all federal spending programs on the chopping block, and musing that Reagan’s 1980 victory was ‘more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for.’

“From the 1980s on, Biden has called for and introduced legislation aimed at slashing federal spending, including by cutting Medicare and Social Security. He voted three times for a balanced budget constitutional amendment, and as vice president, repeatedly made deals with Mitch McConnell and other Republicans to choke off government revenue and make drastic cuts to programs.

“By no means does this make Biden worse than President Trump, who has cut taxes for the rich while seeking massive cuts to these and other vital social programs, and recently proposed to do so again if he’s re-elected. But it’s a reminder that socialists, progressives, and rank-and-file Democratic voters must organize to hold Biden’s feet to the fire right now and after his prospective win in November, and be willing to take to the streets whether it’s a Republican or Democratic president who implements austerity.”

The House is having hearings with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Monday, see here for livestream. The following two analysts have done extensive research on the issues and are available for interviews:

CHRISTOPHER W. SHAW, christophershaw.ca@gmail.com, @chris_w_shaw   

Shaw is a historian and author of Preserving the People’s Post Office. He recently had an op-ed in the Washington Post: “Postal banking is making a comeback. Here’s how to ensure it becomes a reality.”

He said today that since taking office, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “actions have targeted the agency’s civic role and jeopardized voter participation in the 2020 election.

“People are starting to wake up to the need to regard the Postal Service not as a government agency that should emulate a business, but as a great public institution — enshrined in the Constitution — that has been under constant attack for decades, now accelerated under the Trump administration.

“The Postal Service is an essential public service offering a whole range of social benefits that are now under threat. By offering universal service at uniform postage rates, the U.S. Mail has bound the nation together for more than two centuries. By connecting every corner of the United States — no matter how remote — the Postal Service provides a crucial lifeline for low income Americans and residents of rural areas who otherwise would not receive affordable delivery. Post offices are centers of community life and local identity. Special postage rates for news and nonprofit organizations facilitate democracy and the public interest. Americans depend on the Postal Service for the delivery of 4 million critical prescription medications every day.”

LISA GRAVES, via Evan Vorpahl, evan@truenorthresearch.org, @itstruenorth

Graves is the executive director of the policy research group True North. She was recently on an IPA news release: “Behind the Attacks on the Post Office,” that scrutinized the conduct of DeJoy and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. A month ago, she wrote the brief “The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service,” about Charles Koch.

She said today: “Congress must insist that the mail sorting and delivery capacity be restored to the pre-Louis DeJoy level of this spring and machines that were removed be restarted or repaired. Congress must also restrict the power of Steve Mnuchin to interfere with the timely delivery of mail, including medicines and ballots, and provide the funding requested by the prior Postal leadership.

“Never before in the past century has the Postal Service leadership been held by such partisans as DeJoy and Mike Duncan [chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service], both of whom have financially aided not just the political campaigns of President Trump but also Senator Mitch McConnell. Never before has the Postal Service faces such a grave risk from the privatization pressures unleashed by billionaire Charles Koch.

“Congress should scrap the stacked and packed current Board of Governors, and take measures to ensure to restore its political independence and integrity and make sure future appointees are genuinely devoted to preserving and expanding the vital public service our Postal Service and its dedicated public servants provide.”

PATRICK WOODALL, via Carter Dougherty, carter@ourfinancialsecurity.org,  @RealBankReform
Woodall is senior researcher at Americans for Financial Reform, which just put out the study: “The Deadly Combination of Nursing Homes and Private Equity During a Pandemic.”

Woodall said today: “The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged nursing homes around the country and has highlighted the role played by Wall Street private equity firms in degrading care when it buys up facilities and cuts costs while reducing staffing, all to fatten the bottom line.

“Our new study study on this phenomenon reviews data from nursing homes in New Jersey during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. It found that 59 percent of private equity-affiliated nursing home residents contracted COVID-19 — an infection rate 25 percent higher than the state average and 57 percent higher than at public nursing homes. The resident COVID-19 fatality rate at private equity nursing homes was nearly 29 percent, more than 10 percent higher than the state average.

“Private equity firms raise money from pension funds, wealthy individuals, and endowments and use it to buy control of companies, often by saddling their takeover targets with a heavy debt load. These Wall Street behemoths now sit atop a cash pile of $3.9 trillion. Over the last decade, the industry’s growth has been marked by looting-like behavior in industries as diverse as retail, media, and health care.

“Extensive studies and reporting have revealed poorer quality of care at private equity-affiliated nursing homes in recent years. This study is the first to document the negative impact of private equity nursing homes during this deadly pandemic.

“The study concluded that the racial gap was especially pronounced at private equity facilities, with staff at private equity facilities seven times more likely to die working at nursing homes in counties where people of color make up the majority of the population than in 80 percent white counties. Residents were 9 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 in communities of color than in predominantly white areas.

“Private equity has always had a troubling record of degrading the care offered in nursing homes, but the quality issues during this pandemic can have particularly deadly consequences. The nation will have to come to grips with the often-poor treatment residents face in the nursing home business, with chronic understaffing, too little investment in facilities, and lax enforcement of regulations. But private equity’s business model of siphoning profits away from providing adequate care now appears especially deadly.”

MICHAEL F. BROWN, michael@electronicintifada.net, @intifada
Brown is a journalist with The Electronic Intifada covering the intersection of white supremacy in the U.S. with anti-Palestinian sentiment and backing for an expansionist Israel. His recent pieces on the election include “Biden-Harris ticket a blow to Palestinian hopes” and “Marjorie Greene, the QAnon anti-Semite gun fanatic who loves Israel.”

He said today: “The Republican Party has made clear this month its absolute support for Israel and its de facto annexation of the West Bank. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s in-your-face land-grabbing convention speech from Jerusalem with the occupied Old City as a backdrop is one smug signal from the top, but Republican voters have also sent the same message with strong backing from Islamophobes such as Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia and Laura Loomer in Florida. Both are staunch supporters of Donald Trump’s moves in Jerusalem that seek to diminish the rights of Palestinians. The QAnon, reactionary wing of the Republican Party is overjoyed at its success in making life as miserable and painful as possible for Palestinians. Four more years of depraved anti-Palestinian policies will serve only to entrench the Israeli occupation and apartheid and make more certain that the Palestinian struggle is transformed into one for equal rights in one state as in South Africa and the Jim Crow American South.

“Yet the Democrats are only marginally better. And in some ways worse because expectations for Democrats to stand up to racism are higher. But Democratic leaders consistently indulge Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism. Their platform fails to name the occupation. It criticizes the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights and freedom while deigning only to accept it as a free speech right, saying nothing about the many U.S. states limiting BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] free speech rights. The platform rejects Israeli annexation of the West Bank, but delegates voted against taking any meaningful action against future annexation or illegal settlements through limiting or altogether stopping the annual $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. Democrats also openly accept Israel as a Jewish state, disregarding the presence and rights of Palestinians there. People who would never accept the U.S. as a white, Christian state are encouraging Joe Biden to promote Israel as a discriminatory ethnonationalist state. There is, however, a disconnect between Democratic leaders and pressures emanating up from a grassroots increasingly aware of the injustices pervading U.S. policies against Palestinian rights and freedom.”

MIKE ELK, mike.elk@gmail.com, @MikeElk
Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report — which has featured a map showing strikes around the U.S.

He said today: “The NBA strike — which is unprecedented in many ways — could inspire a whole new round of BLM strikes across the United States, much how George Floyd’s murder sparked more than 500 strikes in less than a month. And with Labor Day coming up, the NBA strikes could open the door to a whole new round of strikes in various industries.

“The strikes come as many teachers feel unsafe about returning to teach in classrooms across the U.S. Already, both major teachers’ unions, the AFT [American Federation of Teachers] and NEA [National Education Association] have pledged their financial support to support ‘safety strikes’ over unsafe school reopenings. In June, there were hundreds of strikes.”

Elk’s past pieces include “COVID & Disaster Capitalism: Busting Unions in Baseball” and “As South Carolina Teachers Walkout, 10,000 Storm State Capitol in Columbia.”

President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, where Jacob Blake was shot repeatedly by police in the back.

DENNIS J. BERNSTEIN, dennisjbernstein at gmail.com, @burn_stick
Bernstein is the executive producer of the program “Flashpoints” and just wrote the piece “Don’t Expect Justice for Black People in Kenosha if Sheriff Beth Has His Way.”

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY, kevinagray57 at gmail.com, @kevinagray
Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina. He co-edited Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence which scrutinizes the impunity of perpetrators of violence to African Americans in U.S. society.

He is also author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics, which connects various issues, such as the drug war, to issues of oppression of African Americans and police violence. The book also lists Confederate and other memorials.

Many of his writings — including his essays “Rolling Back the Police State,” “What It Feels Like to be Black in America” and “Back to the Jim Crow Future” are available at Counterpunch and The Progressive.

TIM SCHWAB, timschwab2020@gmail.com, @TimothyWSchwab

Available for a limited number of interviews, Schwab just wrote the in-depth investigative piece “Journalism’s Gates Keepers” for Columbia Journalism Review. He writes: “Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works.

“During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from ‘false conspiracy theories’ and ‘misinformation,’ like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.”

Schwab writes that he examined “twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made” and found “$250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’ supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a ‘news site’ to promote the success of aid groups.”

Schwab scrutinizes NPR’s coverage and writes that “since 2000, the Gates Foundation has given NPR $17.5 million through ten charitable grants—all of them earmarked for coverage of global health and education, specific issues on which Gates works.”

Earlier this year, Schwab wrote the piece “Bill Gates’s Charity Paradox” for The Nation which documents how the Gates Foundation has given hundreds of millions of dollars to companies it is invested in, including Merck, Unilever and Novartis. It also documents how the Gates family and Foundation’s assets continue to grow, “raising questions about the long-term influence of billionaire philanthropy” in politics.

Labor Day is Monday. Many restaurant workers are increasing their organizing and their demands for ending the tipped minimum wage. Last year, the House passed a bill doing just that, but the Senate refused to consider it.

ABBY GINZBERG, abbyginzberg@gmail.com, @wagingchange
Ginzberg is a Peabody award-winning director, producing documentaries about race and social justice for over 30 years. She has just released the film “Waging Change.”

She said today: “In honor of Labor Day, we are doing a national free virtual screening of ‘Waging Change,’ which reveals a disaster hiding in plain sight — that restaurant workers in 17 states make only $2.13 an hour and have to get to minimum wage by relying on their tips. Only seven states require that workers be paid the full minimum wage plus tips. With the pandemic, the situation for tipped workers has gone from bad to horrendous as many do not qualify for unemployment due to their low wages.” The trailer is here.

SARU JAYARAMAN, saru@onefairwage.org,   NIKKI COLE, nikki@onefairwage.org, @onefairwage
Jayaraman is the president of One Fair Wage, Cole is the group’s national policy director. Jayaraman said today: “Coronavirus shutdowns throughout the pandemic have exacerbated the problem of the tipped minimum wage. Many service workers are being denied unemployment insurance because their wages were literally too low to qualify. And now they’re being forced back to work without safety protocols and paid sick days for a sub-minimum wage of under $5 an hour in most states, when tips are down 75-90 percent in most parts of the country. … Black workers are tipped less because of implicit bias, and women are subject to twice the rates of sexual harassment when they aren’t paid a base, living wage.”

CHIEADZA KUNDIDZORA, ladychikundi@gmail.com
A restaurant worker, Kundidzora said today: “As an African American woman who has worked in the restaurant industry for over a decade, I have seen and experienced the damage done to women workers who are forced to rely on tips to survive and feed their families. It is past time to end the tipped minimum wage so that restaurant workers have the opportunity to earn a living wage without being dependent on sexual harassment in order to survive.”

Ginzberg is making segments of the film available to news outlets, including clips covering the following topics: overview of tipped minimum wage by states; wage theft in the restaurant industry; sexual harassment in the restaurant industry (featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez); racial inequities in front vs. back of the house; reliance on public assistance; the tipped minimum wage as a legacy of slavery; and the little known fact that the House of Representatives passed a bill to end the tipped minimum wage in 2019, which has not been considered by the Senate.

MARSHA COLEMAN-ADEBAYO, nofearcoalition at aol.com, @BethAfrCemetery
Coleman-Adebayo is the president of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, which is organizing the largest of a series of protests on Friday at noon to “honor the dead at Moses Cemetery” in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of D.C. (Moses Cemetery 5204 River Road Bethesda, Maryland.)

Last year, the Washington Post published her piece:”I was Arrested for Defending a Cemetery in Montgomery County.” On Wednesday, she was interviewed for a major segment on “The Kojo Nnamdi” Show on WAMU, the main NPR station in D.C. Also see recent piece in National Geographic: “The Fight to Save America’s Historic Black Cemeteries,” which quotes her.

Coleman-Adebayo said today that the “Black burial site at Moses Cemetery, a historic 18th century site, is being destroyed” to put up self-storage units. “Hundreds of trucks have removed massive amounts of dirt and potential remains, funerary items, and graves. Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition has been protesting desecration of this site since 2017.

“Recent developments have influenced the protest. … Observers have photographed a gravestone being dug up and ignored by the archeologist hired” by the builders.

The group states that letters and protests directed at various political figures such as County Executive Marc Elrich and State’s Attorney John McCarthy have produced no meaningful results.

Coleman-Adebayo is also a former senior policy analyst with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S. government is seeking to extradite WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange from Britain. This relates to his release of U.S. government material like the “Collateral Murder” video from Iraq, which provided evidence of war crimes. (See from FAIR: “Assange’s ‘Conspiracy’ to Expose War Crimes Has Already Been Punished.”)

Assange’s hearing in London began on Monday and is expected to go on for three weeks. If extradited to the U.S., Assange faces 175 years in prison and is being charged with the Espionage Act, a World War era statue.

As his administration seeks to prosecute Assange for exposing war crimes, President Donald Trump has been claiming that soldiers love him while “the top people in the Pentagon probably” don’t “because they want to do nothing but fight wars.” Meanwhile, Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, while Vice President, was an outlier in the Obama administration in calling for Assange’s prosecution, claiming the publisher of WikiLeaks was more like a “high-tech terrorist” than a journalist.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reports: “At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror.”

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, [currently in London] kevin@shadowproof.com, @kgosztola
Managing editor of Shadowproof, Gosztola is in London covering the trial. His two most recent pieces are: “Judge Railroads Assange As Legal Team Objects To Fresh Extradition Request” and “What To Expect During Three-Week Hearing In Julian Assange’s Extradition Case.”

See his Twitter thread for Tuesday’s proceedings. He noted: “Witnesses likely to testify on Day 2 are Patrick Cockburn, Nicolas Hager, and Daniel Ellsberg.”

Gosztola writes: “The proceedings will focus on the political nature of the prosecution, the misrepresentation of facts, Assange’s political opinions, the risk of denial of justice at a U.S. trial, the risk of cruel and inhuman treatment in U.S. jails and prisons, Assange’s health, and the passage of time since materials were published.

“Assange’s legal team contends President Donald Trump’s administration pursued charges against Assange for ‘ulterior political motives,’ and they were not brought in ‘good faith.’ They indicted Assange under the Espionage Act, which makes the extradition a case involving classic ‘political offenses’ that should not be covered by the treaty between the U.S. and U.K.”

See from Gosztola from earlier this year: “Interview With James Goodale: Stunning How Few in U.S. Care About Threat Posed by Assange’s Case” with the noted First Amendment lawyer who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case. Goodale told Gosztola that the “United States is going to end up with an Official Secrets Act, by which leaking not only is criminalized but receiving leaks in the capacity of a leakee is also going to be criminalized. And that is really bad because you’re just inviting governments, particularly authoritarian governments, to control their information.”

Gosztola is author of Truth and Consequences, a book about the U.S. government prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who was the alleged source for WikiLeaks, who was subjected to prolonged solitary confinement in the U.S. that the UN said amounted to torture. Many expect Assange will be subjected to similar methods if extradited to the U.S.

See video of “The Media Trial of the Century” from Consortium News.

Reuters is reporting “JPMorgan Probing Alleged Misuse of PPP Funds by Employees, Memo Shows.”

Last month, The American Banker reported: “JPMorgan Chase in Talks to Offer Services in Post Offices: Report.”

PORTER McCONNELL, via Carter Dougherty, carter at ourfinancialsecurity.org, @RealBankReform
McConnell is Take on Wall Street campaign director at Americans for Financial Reform.

She said today: “Apart from politically motivated attacks on the Postal Service before the election, there’s another malevolent force at work on this important institution: Wall Street. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is in talks with JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, on an exclusive contract to put that private bank’s branches inside post offices. At the same time, JPMorgan employees appear to have misused aid intended as relief for small businesses during the pandemic.

“JPMorgan and DeJoy are trying to head off rising support for what is known as ‘postal banking’ — a plan to revive the post office as a place where people can go to get low-cost, non-predatory banking services. (One version of this plan would have the Federal Reserve provide the accounts through its infrastructure, while ordinary people access them through postal branches.) This plan has won support from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, his top rival in the primaries.

“One in four U.S. households are either unbanked or underbanked. That’s an astonishing number. Even before the pandemic, bank branches were closing across the country, creating more rural and urban ‘banking deserts’ and ATM fees are as high as $7.50 in some places. These households are unbanked or underbanked because traditional banks like JP Morgan Chase don’t want low-income customers. A postal banking system would create a universal option for banking while leaving private banks to offer the services they choose.

“We should treat the U.S. Postal Service as a service, not a business, and certainly not a plaything of Wall Street. We should roll back all of the artificial barriers that hamper the Postal Service — notably the requirement that it break even, which creates pressure for it to close rural branches, cut service hours, and limit delivery, as well as raise prices.

“Instead, the Post Office can be a local hub for services. They already provide money orders and manage passport applications. What if they could provide everything from basic bank accounts to remittances to fishing licenses? We could join our OECD peers, and indeed most nations around the globe, in using the over 30,000 post offices around the country to provide the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure needed to serve every community in the digital age.

“There is nothing inevitable about letting the USPS atrophy. Why not instead invest in a national treasure with a storied past, and turn it into a practical tool to reduce inequalities, geographic or otherwise? Let’s lead with what works for people, not Wall Street.”

Commondreams reported recently: “Postmaster General Urged to ‘Immediately Step Aside’ as North Carolina AG Backs Probe Into Campaign Finance Fraud Allegations.”

CLARENCE LUSANE, clusane@igc.org
Lusane is author of $20 and Change: Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson, and the Struggle for a Radical Democracy (forthcoming from City Lights Books) and The Black History of the White House.

He said today regarding Trump’s repeated attacks and statements about the Postal Service and mail-in balloting: “Regrettably, the Post Office has been used politically before by past administrations to disrupt efforts at racial justice or black progress. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite predecessor, sided with local officials in South Carolina who stopped the mail distribution of abolitionist materials. … Jackson, who had been a slave trader and a slaveowner … proposed federal legislation that would ‘prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.’ …

“In the early 20th century, the postal service went after Nashville black activist Callie House. In 1894, she founded and led the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association that sought to win pensions for African Americans who had survived slavery. The movement grew to over 800,000 according to researcher Mary Francis Berry. Like other organizations of the period, she used the mail to solicit and receive donations for her movement. Unhappy with the effort by this black group, Postmaster General A. S. Burleson charged her and other Association leaders with using the mail to commit fraud in 1915. The U.S. government argued that since black survivors of slavery would never receive a pension, her campaign was criminally misleading. After her arrest and nearly year-long imprisonment in 1917-1918, the organization faded.

“Perhaps, most famously, the same law used to go after House was used against Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey. Long under scrutiny by U.S. law enforcement for his strong advocacy of black repatriation to Africa, the newly formed Bureau of Investigation searched for a means to destroy him politically. Garvey’s Black Star Steamship Line, funded in part by mail solicitations, was in financial trouble, and this became an opening for his enemies. Using informants and perjured witnesses, Garvey was charged with mail fraud and convicted. He was sent to prison in 1925, although he was released and deported two years later.”

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported: “CZU [Santa Cruz County] fires’ aftermath points to emerging threat for California: water contamination.”

Michael Dorsey is a leading environmentalist who has been warning of this problem for years.

MICHAEL K. DORSEY, mkdorsey@aya.yale.edu
Dorsey, sits on the board of the Center for Environmental Health, headquartered in Oakland, California. For Fall 2020 he is the global affiliate of the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont.

He recently wrote the piece “We Can Still Win the War on Plastic,” which states: “Across the United States, melted PVC piping destroyed by intense fires has long threatened communities by exposing groundwater supplies to a litany of carcinogens and poisons, from benzene to toluene and much more. Analysis by municipal authorities following the catastrophic 2017 Tubbs fire that destroyed over 3,000 residential and commercial buildings across California found that ‘Benzene was detected at levels above the allowable regulatory limit (Maximum Contaminant Level, MCL)’ in local drinking water. …

“The heat from the August 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains melted a 7.5-mile-long plastic water pipe. The pipe was part of a water system, and an official for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District said that ‘They found that there was a lot of water quality contamination from that melting plastic. The polyethylene put out volatile organic chemicals, benzene. So those are concerns that we are monitoring and we will be sampling for.’

“It could take months to determine the full scope of the damage, but one thing is certain: People returning home after evacuating may very well find themselves without certified clean, fresh water to drink. The 2018 Camp fire, which similarly melted plastic pipes in Paradise, California, forced residents there to rebuild their entire water distribution system due to widespread contamination by toxic chemicals like benzene.

“We’ve been fighting the war on plastic for decades, and at times, it can feel like we’re losing. Big Plastic is a global behemoth — consistently misleading consumers and communities with industry-backed ‘studies’ and corporate-funded ‘research.’ Its latest ploy, led by major oil companies, is to ‘flood Africa with plastic’ since it can no longer send plastic waste to China.”

In 2018, Dorsey wrote the report: “Our Health, PVC, and Critical Infrastructure.” He also recently wrote the piece “Renewables’ potential depends on transparent and fair policies, not special interest giveaways.”

President Donald Trump is holding a ceremony Tuesday at the White House for the recent deals between Israel and the small Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. See “Trump ‘peace’ deals for Israel, UAE and Bahrain are shams. They boost oppression, not amity” by Noura Erakat at NBCNews.com.

A coalition of over 50 groups are simultaneously holding a protest (from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET) and a news conference (at 1:30 p.m.) outside the White House at BLM Plaza.

HUWAIDA ARRAF, huwaida.arraf@gmail.com, @huwaidaarraf
RANIA QAWASMA, raniaqawasma@gmail.com, @raniaqawasma
Arraf is a Palestinian-American human rights attorney and Qawasma is a Palestinian-American architect. They are among the activists organizing the protests.

Arraf said today: “The U.S.-brokered agreements of the UAE and Bahrain to normalize relations with Israel are predicated on sidelining the most impacted population — the indigenous Palestinian people upon whose land and lives Israel has built its settler-colonial state. These cynical attempts to paint arms deals and cyber-spying contracts as efforts to promote peace, while Palestinians continue to suffer the indignities of violent occupation, racism and apartheid, should be widely condemned.

“Israel’s systemic and systematic violations of Palestinians’ most basic rights must be sanctioned, not rewarded, as the governments of the UAE and Bahrain have done and as the US continues to do by providing Israel with $3.8 billion per year of American taxpayer money.”

The coalition of groups, which include American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Solidarity Movement and the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, referred to the deals as “fake peace plans.” They also noted regarding the UAE agreement that “within a week of the deal’s announcement, a secret clause within the deal to sell tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the UAE was revealed. On September 11, 2020, it was announced that Bahrain — another repressive Gulf country involved in the brutal war in Yemen — will also sign a deal to normalize relations with Israel, also without any concessions for Palestinians. It is understood that Bahrain would not be able to make such an agreement without the tacit approval of Saudi Arabia, the leader of the war in Yemen.”

Background: See The Real News interview from 2018 with scholar As’ad AbuKhalil: “Saudi Arabia’s Unholy Alliance with Israel.”

See from Krystal Ball on “Rising” on Hill TV: “Dem WAR on Green Party Exposes Voter Suppression Hypocrisy.”

RICHARD WINGER, richardwinger@yahoo.com
    Winger is editor of Ballot Access News. He said today: “The Green Party presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, is being kept off the ballot in certain states by Democrats, not because he is likely to poll a small vote, but because in the recent past his party has polled too many votes. Every article always mentions how many votes [2016 Green Party presidential nominee] Jill Stein got in 2016 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. If she had polled a tiny vote, no one would be trying to keep the Green Party off this year.

“Ballot access jurisprudence says the purpose of ballot access restrictions is to block candidates without a modicum of support. But they are being used for the opposite purpose, to block a candidate because he is likely to have a modicum of support.

“Jill Stein got 1,457,217 votes in 2016.”

On Thursday Trump attacked the work of Howard Zinn, whose books include A People’s History of the United States. Until his death in 2010, Zinn was repeatedly featured on accuracy.org news releases.

KEVIN KUMASHIRO, kevin@kevinkumashiro.com,
Kumashiro is former dean, University of San Francisco School of Education. His books include Teaching toward Democracy.
He said today, “Here we go again. Yesterday’s attacks by the Trump administration on efforts to raise awareness about the historical and systemic nature of race and racism are not new.

“Divisive, un- or anti-American, biased, inflammatory — for decades, such were the claims made about efforts to teach a more accurate and complete history of the United States. From the multicultural curriculum of the Civil Rights era and the ‘people’s history’ by Howard Zinn, to recent struggles to include ethnic studies curriculum and the 1619 Project in schools, scholars and educators have long argued that curriculum is irresponsible, misleading, and undemocratic when it fails to include the experiences of marginalized groups, as well as the dynamics, systems, and ideologies that caused or perpetuated their disenfranchisement. Such inquiry is particularly important to make visible the many ways that race and racism are invisible, normalized, obscured, or rationalized, including in the curriculum itself. Not surprisingly, it is this whitewashed curriculum that often gets framed as objective and neutral, whereas efforts to raise awareness about the discomforting realities of race and racism get framed as, in Trump’s words, ‘toxic propaganda.’

“Two weeks ago, the White House directed against using taxpayer dollars to support ‘divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions’ — and by explicitly flagging trainings about ‘critical race theory’ and ‘white privilege,’ demonstrated once again the easy tendency to conflate studying racism with being divisive or weakening the nation. Yesterday, at the White House History Conference, Pence warned that, in schools, ‘some are seeking to erase our history.’ Trump attributed this erasure to ‘decades of leftwing indoctrination’ by the likes of Zinn and others, even threatening to withhold funding from California schools that teach the 1619 Project. Earlier that day, Education Secretary DeVos praised the ‘1776 Unites Curriculum’ for its more positive portrayal of the experience” of African Americans in the U.S. when “compared to the 1619 Project, and Trump echoed this praise and suggested that the government should support the creation of more such ‘pro-American’ curriculum.

“Our country cannot become more just and democratic without illuminating, addressing, and healing from its long legacies of injustices, including imperialism, colonialism, and racism, which means that continuing to deny or ignore the legacies and systems of racism that have defined the United States for centuries will only perpetuate the problems. The battle over what story about the United States gets taught in schools, and who gets to tell that story, is what makes education, at its core, one of the main sites of ideological struggle for any democratic society — and is, therefore, a battle that the general public must engage.”

See talk by Howard Zinn at MIT in 2005: “The Myth of American Exceptionalism.” “Democracy Now” played a clip from an interview with Zinn Friday morning that talked about overlooked heroes in U.S. political history, like Mark Twain, who was the Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League and Helen Keller, who was a socialist.

On Saturday The Guardian reported: “Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said: ‘From [Republicans’] perspective, this is the chance of a lifetime to turn the court to the right.

“’If you have a look at the opinions coming down this term, several of them were five to four, waffling on both sides of the issue, but now you’re definitely going to have six to three. So I don’t I think the Republicans will pass this opportunity.'”

NBC reports: “Amy Coney Barrett, a federal appellate court judge, has emerged as one of the front-runners to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, three sources told NBC News.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle@illinois.edu
The New York Times in “To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court” quotes Barrett mentor Judge Patrick J. Schiltz: “The question of what we believe as a religious matter has nothing to do with what we believe a written document says.”

Said Boyle: “That’s rubbish. It’s like John Roberts saying that he was just going to be calling balls and strikes. And she was at Notre Dame Law School. When I interviewed with them in the late 1970s, I was told by the dean that law professors took a required pledge that they had to conduct themselves consistent with ‘Catholic values,’ which I took to mean I would not teach, write or advocate in favor of abortion rights. Has Barrett taken any kind of pledge that’s relevant to her being on the Court? She is being positioned for the Supreme Court to do a job and overturning Roe v. Wade will be part of it.”

Barrett is a member of the rightwing Federalist Society and Boyle has been a longtime critic of the group (see “Hijacking Justice” from 1999 in Emerge magazine), which is now widely acknowledged as being remarkably influential in shaping the Federal judiciary.

Since the Kavanaugh nomination, Boyle has advocated that when the Democrats obtain control of the presidency and both Houses of Congress, they should increase the number of members of the Supreme Court, an idea that has recently gained wider attention, see recent episode of “The Katie Halper Show.”

Boyle added: “Biden has come out against packing the Supreme Court. No surprise there. This is not a symmetrical situation. The Republicans have always played hard-ball on judicial appointments. They have been packing the Federal courts with Federalist Society members since Ronald Reagan and his White House Counsel and then Attorney General Edwin Meese, a leader of the Federalist Society. Establishment Democrats don’t care all that much despite what they say.”

Boyle was the lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war and genocide against them before the International Court of Justice. In that capacity, he represented the 40,000 raped women of Bosnia, argued their case for genocide before the World Court, and won two World Court Orders protecting them.

JAMES CARDEN, jamescarden09@gmail.com

Carden is the executive editor of the American Committee for East-West Accord where Cohen was a board member and is a contributing writer with The Nation, where Cohen was a longtime contributing editor.

Carden said today: “As was reported in the New York Times on Friday, professor Stephen F. Cohen passed away after a valiant battle with lung cancer at the age of 81. Stephen Frand Cohen was by many lights the nation’s leading and at times most controversial Russia expert. He was emeritus professor of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and, later, New York University where he influenced generations of students. He would often joke that being emeritus at two universities just meant that he had a lot of health insurance. His reach was felt beyond the classroom: his influential biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, had an outsized impact in the trajectory of Soviet history. He found an avid reader and friend in Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev with whom he and his wife, The Nation magazine’s guiding light, Katrina vanden Heuvel, remained close. Steve’s columns and radio broadcasts regarding post-Soviet developments made him a lightning rod for controversy — but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. I believe the record speaks for itself. Steve’s output was voluminous and he will be dearly missed.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel’s obituary for Stephen Cohen in The Nation notes: “He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize.”

Cohen was on numerous accuracy.org news releases including “Motives of the ‘Cold-War Hysteria’ in U.S. Establishment.”

See speech by Professor Cohen at the Commonwealth Club on the Ukraine Crisis (2015) and discussion of his last book War with Russia? at the 92|Y with Cohen, Katriana vanden Heuvel and Dan Rather (2019).

His numerous pieces for The Nation include “How the Russiagate Investigation Is Sovietizing American Politics.” Carden adds: “Stephen Cohen began sounding the alarm over the danger of a new cold war long before most.” See piece from 2006.

MARJORIE COHN, marjorielegal@gmail.com
Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, recently wrote the piece “Ginsburg’s Legacy Is Vast, But a Trump Appointee Could Overturn Her Best Rulings.”

She said today: “The Supreme Court now has eight members — three liberals and five conservatives. Until Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Chief Justice John Roberts had been the swing vote. Roberts, concerned with the legacy of the Roberts Court, voted with the liberals to strike down an abortion restriction and uphold the Affordable Care Act. A Trump appointment would substitute a right-wing member for Ginsburg, resulting in a 6-3 conservative majority. They would most likely overrule Roe v. Wade and strike down the Affordable Care Act.

“As it increasingly appears Mitch McConnell has the votes to proceed with filling Ginsburg’s seat before the election or inauguration, the Democrats must play hard ball. They should pledge that if Joe Biden wins the election and the Democrats assume control of the Senate, they will raise the number of members on the Supreme Court from 9 to 13. The Constitution does not prescribe how many members will sit on the high court so Congress can raise the number.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle@illinois.edu
Boyle is law professor at the University of Illinois. He was recently on an accuracy.org news release “Supreme Court: After Ginsburg — Barrett?” and was interviewed on the program “Sojourner Truth” with Margaret Prescod on KPFK. He was also recently quoted in the Guardian.

He said today: “We cannot rely upon the Democrats to do the right thing here. And the Courts have already been stacked with Federalist Society nominees by Trump — 200 of them. People need to take to the streets in peaceful nonviolent protests on a massive scale if they want to stop this. It was mass public revulsion at Bork that stopped his nomination. Unlike Bork, whoever Trump nominates will be slickly packaged by the White House handlers. People should not be fooled by that. This is a far rightwing agenda at play that seeks to overturn meaningful primacy of the law and equality for all under the law.

“Otherwise it will have to be Supreme court-packing if and when the Democrats get both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. Franklin Roosevelt threatened up to 15. Sounds good to me.”

The Washington Monthly just published the piece “What Drives Leonard Leo’s Campaign to Remake the Courts?” that examines the role of the Opus Dei-founded Catholic Information Center on K Street in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Attorney General William Barr denounced “a new orthodoxy that is actively hostile to religion,” arguing that “militant secularists” are trying to move religion out of the public square and out of conversations on the common good. Trump also spoke and Barr accepted an award from the group. The event was held online and was delayed from its originally scheduled date in March.

The Catholic News Agency reported: “‘Separation of church and state does not mean — and never did mean — separation of religion and civics,’ said Barr, as he insisted Catholics should be more involved in public life through advocating for religious freedom.”

As Attorney General, Barr has continued to prosecute seven Catholic activists who attempted to fulfill the Biblical calling to turn swords into plowshares. At their trial last year, they were prevented from mounting a series of defenses, including invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Six of the defendants have sentencing dates currently scheduled for Oct 15 and 16.

MARK COLVILLE, markcolville9761@gmail.com, @amistadobrero
One of the seven Catholic Plowshares activists, Colville is co-founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven with his wife Luz Catarineau. In late December, the New Haven Register wrote: “For their sustained, compassionate approach to building and supporting their community and for their lived opposition to war and violence, the Colvilles are the New Haven Register’s Persons of the Year.”

Colville, with the other six activists — known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 — entered a major nuclear weapons facility in Georgia on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They were protesting U.S. nuclear weapons policy and sought to “nonviolently and symbolically disarm the Trident nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay.” Colville used a hammer made from melted-down guns to smash parts of a shrine to nuclear weapons at the facility.

One of the seven, Father Steven Kelly, a Jesuit priest, is in jail, where he has been for 29 months. Others, like Elizabeth McAlister, the elderly widow of Philip Berrigan, spent over 17 months in jail prior to trial with little media attention. Colville spent over a year in jail. The other defendants are Clare Grady of Ithaca, New York, Martha Hennessy from Vermont (the granddaughter of Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement), Carmen Trotta from New York and Patrick O’Neill of North Carolina — who gave oral arguments regarding religious freedom.

They were supported in their efforts by many in the clergy, including Rev. Desmond Tutu of South Africa.
Said Colville: “The Trident Submarine is an idolatrous blasphemy against God. It’s mere existence refutes all of the basic tenets of faith that I have embraced as a Christian. While our leaders frequently invoke Christianity as this nation’s heritage, they wantonly violate its most basic command, namely, that we are to place our ultimate security in God alone, not in a weapon or a nation. Trident is an omnipresent threat to all life on the planet, and it has never been more urgent that the human community, and particularly the people of the United States, confront exactly what that reality means: We stand poised to murder our own children, for no other reason than to preserve our nation’s dominance in the world. This is the definition of idolatry. This is the definition of insanity.”

Bill Ofenloch, billcpf@aol.com, @kingsbayplow7
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08@gmail.com

Trump has stated that he will announce his nominee to the Supreme Court on Saturday.

BETTY CLERMONT, bettyclermont@gmail.com
Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America. She writes at The Open Tabernacle blog.

She said today: “Leonard Leo selects Trump’s judicial nominees. In addition to his role at the Federalist Society, Leo is a board member of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center. Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone have also been board members. See recent piece from The Washington Monthly: “What Drives Leonard Leo’s Campaign to Remake the Courts?” Barr just received an award from the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast; Leo is also president of the board of that group.

“Indeed, at the top, Opus Dei ‘is an efficient machine run to achieve world power,’ investigative reporter Penny Lernoux wrote in her book People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism.

“As Lernoux’s remark indicates, there is a struggle inside Catholicism and Opus Dei and groups it founded like the innocent-sounding Catholic Information Center are not at all representative of Catholics, rather it uses the garb of faith for political power for a narrow elite. The people Leo chooses are selected for their proven adherence to right-wing ideology of power at any cost. Whomever Leo gets Trump to nominate and Mitch McConnell’s Senate is set to approve, it will lead to further decay of our national wellbeing.”

Martin A. Lee, a specialist on far-right movements has written: “Opus Dei has emerged internationally as one of the most powerful and politically committed of the Catholic lay groups. Detractors have likened the organization to a ‘saintly Mafia,’ for its members control a large number of banks and financial institutions. … In the latter stages of the Franco regime, ten out of 19 cabinet officers belonged to or were closely allied with Opus Dei.”

“Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth — ‘holy discretion’ — and practice ‘divine deception,’” Robert Hutchison stated in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei.

See pieces by Clermont: “Opus Dei’s Influence on the U.S. Judiciary,” “Opus Dei’s William Barr, the Trump Whisperer” and “Opus Dei’s Influence is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power.”

Nora Barrows-Friedman reports in the Electronic Intifada: “Major Silicon Valley companies censored an event at San Francisco State University on Wednesday.

“This means that during the pandemic, private companies closely aligned with the government have immense power over what can be said, even in an academic setting.

“Zoom, the web-based videoconferencing platform, announced Tuesday evening that it was prohibiting SFSU from using its software to host a planned webinar on Wednesday with Leila Khaled, the Palestinian resistance icon who is now in her seventies and lives in Jordan. … A member of the left-wing political group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Khaled is best known for her role in a series of plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970. She has not been involved in any armed resistance activities in decades.”

RABAB ABDULHADI, rabab.abdulhadi@gmail.com, @abdulhadirabab
Abdulhadi is director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora program at San Francisco State University. She co-moderated the event with Tomomi Kinukawa. They said in a statement: “This censorship violates our freedom of speech and academic freedom as faculty to teach, deprives our students from the right to learn, and denies the general public the right to hear from speakers who are not readily available in mainstream media.” Other panelists were a former member of the armed wing of the African National Congress, a current member of Jewish Voice for Peace and a former member of the Black Liberation Army.

DIMA KHALIDI, dkhalidi@palestinelegal.org, @pal_legal
Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal, said: “This is a dangerous attack on free speech and academic freedom from Big Tech: Zoom cannot claim veto power over the content of our nation’s classrooms and public events. The threat to democracy is elevated by the fact that Zoom’s decision to stamp out discussion of Palestinian freedom comes in response to a systematic repression campaign driven by the Israeli government and its allies.”

Jillian York, author of the forthcoming book Silicon Values tweeted: “Note that this is ToS [terms of service] and not law, despite what Facebook and co have repeatedly and incorrectly claimed. … The New York Times can and has hosted op-eds from US-designated terrorists; so too can Facebook host their page or Zoom their call. They just don’t want to so they conveniently claim it’s the law.”

See also from CommonDreams: “Advocates Demand Facebook #StopCensoringPalestine After Platform Blocks Livestream Featuring Palestinian Rights Defenders.”

President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are scheduled to have their first debate on Tuesday.

JEFF COHEN, jcohen@ithaca.edu, @Roots_Action
Cohen recently wrote the piece “Earth to Presidential Debate Moderators: ‘I’m Burning Up‘” and is co-founder of RootsAction Education Fund which launched a petition to the moderators of this fall’s four planned debates organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates: Chris Wallace of Fox News, Susan Page of USA Today, Steve Scully of C-SPAN, and Kristen Welker/NBC News.

The petition highlights: “In 2016, not a single question about global warming and the climate crisis was asked by mainstream media moderators in the four general election debates (three presidential and one vice-presidential). The term ‘climate change’ was only uttered a few times, in passing, because Hillary Clinton brought it up.

“In 2012, in the four general election debates, moderators asked no questions about climate change — and neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney (nor VP candidates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan) ever mentioned the issue.

“In hours of debates in 2012 and 2016, there were zero questions on the climate crisis from moderators hand-picked by the two major parties.

“In 2020, end your silence on this crucial issue!”

Cohen notes that “Fox’s Chris Wallace announced six topics for the first debate that he’ll moderate on Tuesday. Climate was not on the list.”

Cohen is also a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media and founder of the media watch group FAIR.

See recent piece from FAIR: “With Planet at Stake, Moderators Must Make Climate a Focus of Debates.”

See recent Washington Post column by Margaret Sullivan quoting Cohen: “Rewrite that list of debate topics, Chris Wallace. And put the climate crisis at No. 1.”

Newsweek reports in “Did Donald Trump Condemn the Proud Boys and White Supremacists?” that at last night’s debate moderated by Chris Wallace, President Trump, when asked to condemn white supremacist violence, said “Sure I’m willing to do that,” but then told the group the Proud Boys to “stand by.”

NETFA FREEMAN, netfa@ips-dc.org, @Netfafree
Freeman is co-writing a forthcoming book, Community Control Over Police, and recently wrote the piece “Community Control Vs. Defunding the Police: A Critical Analysis.” He is also an organizer with Pan-African Community Action and an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Freeman said today: “Corporate media’s moderation and coverage of the debates is just as complicit in mass confusion. Biden’s rejection of community control over police is comparable to Trump’s refusal to denounce the white supremacist Proud Boys.

“Everyone knows Trump is racist. But for the questions not to be softballs they should have asked Biden about the connections between racism and policing. Only a month ago we saw in Kenosha and other places amiable interactions between police and right-wing militias mobilized against anti-racism and anti-police brutality activists. Yet Biden manages to get in praise of police and a denunciation of so-called violent activists with no interrogation from Wallace.”

On Sept. 15, the New York Times reported: “U.S. Military Seeks Authority to Expand Counterterrorism Drone War to Kenya.”

The Times reported: “The U.S. military’s Africa Command is pressing for new authorities to carry out armed drone strikes targeting Qaeda-linked Shabab fighters in portions of eastern Kenya, potentially expanding the war zone across the border from their sanctuaries in Somalia, according to four American officials. …

“Col. Christopher P. Karns, the command’s chief spokesman, declined to comment on the new authorities. ‘AFRICOM certainly recognizes the need to apply consistent international pressure on Al-Shabab and to monitor their activity, presence, and actively confront them in order to prevent their spread,’ he said in an email. ‘This can take several forms.'”

TUNDE OSAZUA,  jebho108@gmail.com, @osazuae
Osazua is coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network, a project of the Black Alliance for Peace, which is having an International Day of Action on AFRICOM on Thursday.

The group notes: “October 1, 2020 is the 12th anniversary of the launch” of AFRICOM, “a command structure with bases that are now in dozens of African nations. Yet, the existence of AFRICOM has escaped the awareness of not only the general public in the United States and the world. When four U.S. soldiers were killed in the small African nation of Niger, even members of the U.S. Congress were unaware of the U.S. military’s presence in the country and the extent of the U.S. military presence throughout Africa.”

Osazua said today: “U.S. military efforts and drone bombing through AFRICOM are typically portrayed as an attempt to fight terrorism, but, instead, they have been shown to increase terrorism as civilians in the countries that the U.S. bombs are driven to oppose the forces that kill their friends and family members and join terrorist groups. AFRICOM’s operations have also caused untold numbers of civilian deaths, and the U.S. fails to properly account or atone for these civilian casualties, despite the slightly increased media scrutiny.

“The International Day of Action on AFRICOM on Oct. 1 provides an opportunity for all of us to call on the U.S. to respect the wishes of African people and demilitarize the African continent, so Africa can begin to be a zone of peace. That way African countries can begin to provide for the needs of their people without the burden of AFRICOM and U.S. involvement.”

CARTER DOUGHERTY, carter@ourfinancialsecurity.org, @RealBankReform
Dougherty is communications director for Americans for Financial Reform. He said today: “Ten years after Congress passed a major reform of Wall Street in response to the financial crisis, voters continue to overwhelmingly support more and tougher regulation of finance and they strongly approve of the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a new survey by Lake Research Partners.

“This support has proven remarkably durable and stretches across lines of party, race and ethnicity, age, and region. Support remains broad and deep despite the numerous events and issues demanding people’s attention, according to the surveys, which were commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending.

“And, as the decade after the 2008 crisis unfolded to reveal continuing abuses by Wall Street, and the growth of predatory financial practices, the public’s appetite for additional reform has strengthened.

“The continuity, breadth and depth of public support for restructuring finance and Wall Street, and for tough oversight to protect the public interest remain extremely striking. Policymakers and candidates should pay attention. Transforming finance is one key to building a more just and equitable economy.

“Policy priorities in the future include a reform of private equity, an influential, multi-trillion-dollar industry, cancelling student debt, and providing consumers nationwide relief from sky-high interest rates among other things.

“Despite recent failures to protect consumers during the pandemic, the mission of the CFPB — to be an advocate for consumers vis-a-vis Wall Street and predatory lenders — remains immensely popular. An overwhelming majority (83 percent) support CFPB’s mission, the highest level since the question was first posed in 2013.

“Many voters are also concerned that the federal government’s response to the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has mostly benefited Wall Street and big corporations, instead of those who have been hit hardest.

“According to the poll, 56 percent of voters feel that Wall Street and big corporations are receiving too much help compared to families and small businesses. A majority of Democrats and independents, and a near-majority of Republicans hold this view. About 13 percent of voters were unsure.”

See: “Polling Memo: Voters Support Strong Consumer Financial Protections and Tough Regulation of Wall Street.”

David Sirota wrote the piece “Dems Have A SCOTUS Opportunity Tomorrow — Will They Use It?” on Sunday, noting that “McConnell desperately wants unanimous consent to pass a measure keeping Trump’s Supreme Court nomination on track. Democrats could potentially stop it. Will they use their power?”

Sirota cites the work of David Segal and Zephyr Teachout.

DAVID SEGAL, davidadamsegal@gmail.com, @davidsegalri
Segal is the executive director of Demand Progress. With Teachout, an associate law professor at Fordham University, he wrote the piece “To keep Barrett off the Supreme Court, Schumer must fight like a defense attorney with a client on death row” for the New York Daily News.

They write: “The person with the power to organize top Democrats to confront this confirmation is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. … We all know that if the roles were reversed, McConnell would do all in his power to whip the Republican Conference into line and slow things down. …

“During the days after Ginsburg’s death, we scrambled to identify a dozen experts who told us the insiders were too pessimistic, and circulated a memo with 19 different ideas of what the Senate could do. We aren’t Pollyannish — we know that Republicans have the upper hand — but the prospect of extending the timetable beyond is a procedural possibility.”

JAMIE LOVE, james.love@keionline.org, @jamie_love

A just published in-depth report by Tim Schwab in The Nation focusing on the Gates Foundation states: “James Love, director of the NGO Knowledge Ecology International, says the foundation’s decades of work on vaccines, along with its sprawling financial ties, allowed it to assert influence early in the pandemic.

“’He had enough money and enough presence in the area for a long enough period of time to be positioned as the first mover and the most influential mover. So people just relied upon his people and his institutions,’ says Love, ‘In a pandemic, when there is a vacuum of leadership, people that move fast and seem to know what they’re doing, they just acquire a lot of power. And he did that in this case.’

“Gates’s leadership in the pandemic has been widely, almost universally, praised, with The New York Times calling him a ‘vocal counterweight to President Trump,’ and Madonna making a million-dollar donation to support the foundation’s work. But because Gates is not an elected representative or public official, the details of his far-reaching influence — and finances — have largely eluded public scrutiny.

“’You have an enormous amount of power that affects everyone around the globe, and there should be some accountability, some transparency,’ says Love. … ‘It’s a charity. … [We’re asking], “Can you explain what you’re doing, for example? Can you show us what these contracts look like?” Particularly since they’re using their money to influence policies that involve our money.’

“The Gates Foundation declined requests for interviews and did not respond to detailed questions sent by e-mail, including about its investments in pharmaceutical companies working on Covid.

“Love and other critics say a key role Gates has played in the pandemic has been elevating the pharmaceutical industry — for example, pushing the University of Oxford to deliver its leading Covid-19 vaccine platform into the hands of Big Pharma. The resulting partnership with AstraZeneca had another effect, as Bloomberg and Kaiser Health News recently reported, changing the university’s distribution model from an open-license platform, designed to make its vaccine freely available for any manufacturer, to an exclusive license controlled by AstraZeneca.”

See Love’s blog — recent posts include: “DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] letter to KEI confirming investigation of Moderna for failure to report government funding in patent applications.” In another post, Love writes: “Trump’s Executive Order on international reference pricing is a lot less than promised.” Another posting is about “Senator Durbin’s letters to vaccine manufacturers.”

Schwab, who wrote the recent Nation piece, in August wrote the piece “Journalism’s Gates Keepers” for Columbia Journalism Review about Gates’ influence over a host of media organizations. Earlier this year, Schwab wrote the piece “Bill Gates’s Charity Paradox” for The Nation which documents how the Gates Foundation has given hundreds of millions of dollars to companies it is invested in, including Merck, Unilever and Novartis. It also documents how the Gates family and Foundation’s assets continue to grow, “raising questions about the long-term influence of billionaire philanthropy” in politics.

[The Washington Post reports: “Yes, Senate Republicans could still confirm [Amy Coney] Barrett before the election.” Also see analysis in The Intercept. The vice presidential debate is scheduled for this evening and the issue of the Supreme Court is likely to be discussed.]

MATTHEW FOX, via Dennis Edwards, 33dennis@sbcglobal.net, @RevDrMatthewFox

Fox is a theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist. He has written 37 books including A Spirituality Named Compassion, The Reinvention of Work, The Order of the Sacred Earth and A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey.

He recently wrote “A Public Letter to Supreme Court Nominee Amy Barrett” which was published by Tikkun magazine. Fox writes: “With the nomination of a new supreme court judge, some are being accused of ‘anti-catholicism’ for posing questions about your religious beliefs. I, however, think questions like the following are important and I am sure that you are open to discussing them with the American public whose job it is [for you] to serve.

1) “Since you are a practicing Catholic, have you studied Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment (‘Laudato Si‘)? What are your positions on environmental justice? On climate change? Are you as passionate about them as you are about opposing abortion? …

2) “Have you studied Pope Francis’ statements on the ‘idolatry of money‘ that dominates so much of our economic system? Where do you stand on that subject and on unbridled Wall Street power? And on tax breaks for the very rich vs. for the poor and middle class? (Revelations on President Trump’s non-taxes being very relevant to the question.)

3) “Where do you stand on the long-standing teaching of the right for unions to organize that are embedded in papal documents dating all the way back to Pope Leo XIII in the nineteenth century?

4) “As for abortion, surely you know the distinction in Catholic philosophy between what makes good law and what makes good morality. They are not always the same. Since women are going to have abortions (and not all American women are Catholic, by the way), isn’t it preferable to make abortion as safe as possible than to make abortion go underground? …

11) “… Speaking anecdotally, in my interactions with charismatics over the years, I have hardly ever met one who considered the struggle for justice for the poor and oppressed as part of their religious consciousness. In fact, it was precisely the charismatic groups in South America who were financed to oppose and replace base communities and liberation theologies, while buttressing right-wing political fanatics.

“My question is this: What does the canonization of Saint Oscar Romero mean to you and your community? How does his struggle on behalf of the poor resonate with your version of Christianity?”

Media analyst Jeff Cohen comments: “When you see the VP candidates ignoring most questions and giving stump speeches that make the ‘debate’ look more like a ‘NATIONALLY TELEVISED JOINT APPEARANCE,’ that’s by design. Literally. It happens because nonpartisan groups and independent journalists don’t run the debates.

“Instead, the debate rules and moderators are dictated by the two major parties — operating behind the fig leaf of a ‘Debate Commission’ set up to remove control over debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters (which had run the presidential and VP debates in 1976, ‘80 and ‘84). In 1985, as the national chairs of the two major parties — Democrat Paul Kirk and GOPer Frank Fahrenkopf — moved to sideline the League and set up their Commission, they signed a remarkable agreement that referred to future debates as ‘nationally televised joint appearances conducted between the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parties … It is our conclusion that future joint appearances should be principally and jointly sponsored and conducted by the Republican and Democratic Committees.’ (Joint Memorandum of Agreement on Presidential Candidate Joint Appearances, Nov. 26, 1985.)

Thus, Susan Page was inaccurate when she claimed at the beginning of the event last night that it was sponsored by the “nonpartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates. The group is a creation of the Democratic and Republican parties, and is bipartisan.

ELI BECKERMAN, eli@openthedebates.org, @OpenTheDebates
Beckerman is the founder and director of Open the Debates, “a cross-partisan effort to open up and elevate the political debates of our nation.” The group states: “Three-quarters of U.S. voters agree that if you are on enough state ballots to win the Electoral College, you should be in the debates. But the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates has squashed that principled sentiment like a bug, cycle after cycle.”

He just co-wrote the piece “The Two-Party System’s Failure Opens Door for Independent Debate,” for Independent Voter News, which notes: “This week, at least five presidential contenders will join us in Denver for another open presidential debate. With the Commission on Presidential Debates reeling from its poor stewardship of the debate process, Thursday’s cross-partisan debate is an opportunity for the nation to advance a much more meaningful political discourse — one that represents our deep yearnings for a more perfect union.”

The Nobel Peace Prize is to be announced Friday at 11 a.m. Norway time. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their work on CRISPR, a controversial method of editing DNA.

FREDRIK S. HEFFERMEHL, fredpax@online.no, @nobelpeacewatch
Heffermehl is with Nobel Peace Prize Watch and wrote the book The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted. He is critical of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which picks the recipients. Heffermehl states that it has not followed Alfred Nobel’s criteria for the Prize. His most recent book is Behind the Medals, a study of the Committee’s internal archives. See: “The Nobel Committee condemned in new book.”

STUART NEWMAN, stuart_newman@nymc.edu, @sanewman1
Newman is co-author of the book Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial Bioscience (Routledge, 2019) and recently co-wrote the piece “Engineering Future People Would be a Disaster,” which states: “Modifying genes shows promise in curing medical conditions in sick people. Should it be used to make irreversible changes in people who don’t yet exist? Current research suggests that this would be a big mistake.

“Studies in animals, including one described recently in Wired, show that the gene manipulation technique CRISPR has a habit of inserting bacterial DNA along with the desired sequences into various sites in chromosomes, with unknown consequences. Even more alarming was a news article last month in the scientific journal Nature that bore the title ‘CRISPR Gene Editing in Human Embryos Wreaks Chromosomal Mayhem.’ It reported results described in three preprints — ready-to-be-published studies — by several prominent investigators in the field that attempted to make specific, targeted changes in the embryos’ DNA, the sort of alterations that might be tried to prevent a newborn from inheriting a gene associated with a disabling condition. There was no intention by the scientists to bring these embryos to birth. They were just being used experimentally to see if the technique worked. It didn’t.

“Thus, even if the modification method were perfect, the variability of human biology means that we won’t know what the outcome will be. The new results, however, cast strong doubt on the CRISPR technique itself. In the words of the Nature news story, ‘the process can make large, unwanted changes to the genome at or near the target site.’

“Genetic modification of animals such as humans can be either somatic or embryonic. Somatic modification affects limited tissues or organs in an existing person who is ill. Certain forms of blindness, sickle cell disease, and some other conditions are today targeted by such treatments. We take no issue with somatic modification provided it is carefully monitored as to medical need and conflicting commercial interests.

“With embryo engineering, however, changes made, including mistakes, will be passed on to future generations via the reproductive cells (or germline). In fact, every cell in the body of the new individual is affected, making that person something different from what they would have been without the intervention. This may be done, at least initially, to prevent the transmission of disease-associated genes. But with outcomes so uncertain, what will be the fate of children resulting from these experiments?

“Entrepreneurial scientists eased the way to acceptance of embryonic editing by downplaying technical problems and by issuing vague reassurances that they will not go too far, too fast. Yet they never explained what they meant by this. …

“Any line that once existed between academic research and commerce has worn thin. Researchers at universities and institutes who were once relatively shielded from business interests now sit on the boards of and own shares in biotech companies that are major sources of scientific funding and infrastructure. Scientists who overstep cultural norms or federal restrictions rarely suffer consequences beyond the loss of their federal funding. In the U.S., private corporations or even states will define their own acceptable practices regarding embryo engineering. How these entities define too far, too fast, is completely subjective — a recipe for human disaster.

“The techniques of embryo engineering have now been shown to be flawed. Embryos are just too complex to engineer. We must ban, not simply pause, gene editing of human embryos before biomedical entrepreneurs start offering clients the opportunity to modify their offspring, threatening their health and hijacking their identities before they are even born.”

See interviews with Newman by The Real News (2018), the Organic Association of America (2020) and his talk with the group Genetics and Society (2008).

Hearings for the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to begin Monday. (See IPA news release of exactly a week ago: “Will Schumer Try to Stop Trump SCOTUS Pick?“)

MARJORIE COHN, marjorielegal@gmail.com, @marjoriecohn
Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, recently wrote, “From a Justice for Gender Equality to a ‘Justice’ for Gender Oppression.”

She writes: “Donald Trump rushed to nominate Barrett and enlisted his consigliere, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), to ram her nomination through the Senate so she can support Trump’s legal challenges to any election results that favor Joe Biden. Trump, who refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, has been conducting a misinformation campaign about (non-existent) voter fraud and signaling that he will lose only if the election is ‘rigged’ against him with expanded mail-in voting.

“During her three years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Barrett demonstrated her racist bona fides when she countenanced what her fellow judge called a ‘separate-but-equal arrangement’ in which a Black American was transferred in order to segregate a workplace. In EEOC v. Autozone, the EEOC claimed Autozone segregated employees based on race by assigning Black employees to work in Latinx neighborhoods. After a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit denied the EEOC’s claim, Barrett voted against the entire 7th Circuit rehearing the case.

“Barrett criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act. She wrote in a 2017 law review article that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law ‘pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.’

“An avowed opponent of reproductive rights, Barrett called Roe v. Wade a ‘judicial fiat,’ stating, ‘The framework of Roe essentially permitted abortion on demand, and Roe recognizes no state interest in the life of a fetus.’ As a judge on the Court of Appeals, she wanted to rehear a case that could limit the right to a pre-viability abortion, sought to overturn Supreme Court precedent allowing states to regulate protestors who block abortion access, and voted to require that parents of girls under 18 be notified before abortions are performed. She has also opposed access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as ‘an assault on religious liberty.’

“Barrett has consistently sided with corporations over workers. She voted to restrict enforcement of laws against age discrimination, sought to limit the power of federal agencies to hold accountable companies that lie to consumers, and cut back on the rights of consumers against predatory debt collectors.” Cohn also wrote the piece “Ginsburg’s Legacy Is Vast, But a Trump Appointee Could Overturn Her Best Rulings.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle@illinois.edu
Boyle is a law professor at the University of Illinois. He said today: “Barrett promises to be Scalia on steroids. She has criticized his ‘faint-hearted’ version of ‘originalism.’

“Scalia himself was the first proponent of ‘originalism’ on the Supreme Court. He got it from Robert Bork and Ed Meese, who controlled judicial nominations during the Reagan administration. It was their litmus test for all judicial appointments and nominations.

“But ‘originalism’ is a farce. Justice [Robert H.]Jackson’s landmark opinion in the Steel Seizure case in 1952 actually debunked it decades earlier.” Jackson wrote: “Just what our forefathers did envision, or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions, must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh. A century and a half of partisan debate and scholarly speculation yields no net result but only supplies more or less apt quotations from respected sources on each side of any question. They largely cancel each other.”

This largely overlooked point was made by Anthony Lewis in 1988 while he was a leading author and The New York Times columnist specializing in legal affairs. See his book review: “Like Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh.”

Lewis also noted that Bork began “originalism” in a “law review article that stated conclusions without any detailed historical research. He restated his position many times, making a large political mark, but he never did any real scholarship on what the Framers intended — or whether, indeed, they wanted their intentions to be our guide.” Lewis also wrote that many of those who argue for “originalism” also argue against the clear words of the Constitution when it is convenient for them to do so, for example regarding war powers.

Boyle added: “At the same time, many of the Democrats are obviously not serious about trying to stop this nomination. It’s Kabuki theater to them. It’s part of a long pattern: The Republicans in recent decades have packed the courts with Federalist Society ideologues and the Democrats have let it happen, nominated moderates and in this case didn’t take concrete steps they could have to stop the nomination. The only exception to this was the nomination of Bork himself which was stopped by mass public revulsion and protest.”

The New York Times reports in “Ardeth Platte, Dominican Nun and Antinuclear Activist, Dies at 84” that “Sister Ardeth spent years behind bars for her beliefs and was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix hit ‘Orange Is the New Black.'”

On Thursday and Friday, sentencing will take place for Fr. Steven Kelly, a Jesuit priest, and his co-defendant Patrick O’Neill, who co-founded a Catholic Worker house in Garner, North Carolina. Kelly has been in jail for the last two and a half years. They are part of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Catholic Worker activists who entered the largest U.S. nuclear weapons facility in Georgia on April 4, 2018, exactly 50 years after Martin Luther King’s assasination. See KingsBayPlowshares7.org for background and @kingsbayplow7 for up-to-date information, including how to listen to the sentencing.

Plowshares activists follow the biblical edict to “beat swords into plowshares.” (See O’Neill’s oral arguments on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an act championed by William Barr and Mike Pence — and mentioned by Ted Cruz during Barrett’s hearings — but prohibited by the court in this case.)

PAUL MAGNO, pmagno56@gmail.com
Magno is with Jonah House, an activist spiritual community in Baltimore, where many of the 100 Plowshares actions originated. It was founded by the late Philip Barrigan and Liz McAlister (see below) where Sister Ardeth lived for many years. He is currently in Brunswick, Georgia where the sentencing for Fr. Kelly and O’Neill will take place.

He said today: “It is a shame that Amy Coney Barrett didn’t pursue college or law school locally in her native New Orleans. If she had, she might have met and been mentored by a great lawyer, Bill Quigley, who is also a Catholic driven by his faith. He understands that social justice needs to be an intrinsic component of law in order to make justice a widely available resource for poor and marginalized constituencies in U.S society.

“Quigley has trained and mentored a host of advocacy-focused attorneys over the years from his place as professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, defended peace activists as part of the SOA Watch legal collective for over 30 years and the faith-based disarmament activists of the Plowshares movement. Notably he won an appeal for the three Transform Now Plowshares activists convicted in Tennessee after gaining entry to the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons complex in July of 2012. Their sabotage conviction was overturned and they were released from prison after serving two years apiece of much longer sentences imposed after their trial in Knoxville in the Spring of 2013. This week two other clients of his will face sentencing in Brunswick Georgia for their Kings Bay Plowshares incursion onto a Trident submarine base in April of 2018.”

Instead, said Magno, Barrett “has advanced professionally under the aegis of the Federalist Society and the influence of figures such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. With her opening remarks, ‘courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life,’ she embraces the notion of judicial indifference to social injustice and a judiciary that makes a virtue of that helplessness.

“A saying of medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas is worth remembering. He said: ‘Law, when it ceases to be justice, ceases even to be law.'”

Liz Mcalister, who is also one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, and was represented by Quigley, said: “This isn’t the first time that Steve Kelly faces the court of law — not the court of justice. I don’t think he even keeps count of how many times he’s stood before courts, or how long he has spent in jails and prisons. He enters all those spaces with grace and peace, knowing that the work that he can do there is welcome and needed and a gift to all of us. I trust that he will put any additional time in prison to good use, and that it will be a time of deep prayer, oriented toward transforming our world into a more just and peaceful place. We are grateful for his witness and I am called to a deeper commitment to the work for peace and justice by my brother Steve Kelly.”

THOMAS FIELD, thomas.c.field@gmail.com
Field is author of several books on Bolivia and U.S.-Latin American relations, and is media contact for the Academics for Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean delegation of scholars currently in Bolivia to observe the elections. The officially accredited delegates include Bolivia experts with years of on-the-ground experience, as well as experts in U.S.-Latin American relations, and they come from the academic fields of anthropology, Latin American studies, and history. They note: “Bolivia’s 2019 elections, and the role of the Organization of American States in observing and auditing them, were highly controversial (see these reports from The New York Times and the Washington Post). This prompted academics in ADLAC to join as observers and help ensure the elections are free and fair, as well as to document any irregularities, voter suppression, or other issues they may encounter.”

JAKE JOHNSTON, via Dan Beeton, beeton@cepr.net @ceprdc

Johnston is a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He co-authored an 82-page report debunking claims of fraud in the OAS’s final audit report on Bolivia’s 2019 elections and showed how the OAS’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud helped to pave the way for the November 2019 coup that ousted democratically elected president Evo Morales two months before his current term had ended.

Johnston contributed to CEPR’s live blogging of the Bolivian elections yesterday, where he wrote: “De facto president Jeanine Anez has posted a message on Twitter congratulating Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca [of Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism party] on their apparent victory in today’s election.

“Just after midnight, Unitel reported results of its quick count, conducted by Ciesmori. These are unofficial results from a private company, the official results are still processing and will take days. Nevertheless, the results of the quick count show Luis Arce of the MAS party receiving 52.4 percent of the vote and Carlos Mesa of the [Civic Community] party receiving 31.5 percent of the vote. [The leading candidate must obtain at least 40 percent of the vote and a 10-point margin over the next runner-up in order to achieve a first-round victory.] …

“In a surprise last-minute announcement, Bolivia’s electoral authorities, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), [had] said that there will not be a preliminary count on election night.

“It is interesting to note that allegations of electoral fraud in last year’s vote focused predominantly on the non-binding preliminary results system. In the OAS’s audit of the election, the vast majority of findings related to the [preliminary count]. In March, CEPR published 82-page report detailing myriad errors in the OAS’s audit. One critique was that the OAS focused on a legally non-binding preliminary vote count. That the OAS would now ratify the decision to stop the preliminary system all together is yet another indication that allegations of fraud in last year’s vote were unsubstantiated.”

ROB RICHIE, rr@fairvote.org and via Ashley Houghton, ahoughton@fairvote.org, @fairvote
Richie is president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for electoral reform. Houghton is communications director for the group. He said today: “Barring unlikely legal outcomes, for the first time in U.S. history, voters will consider a field of more than two presidential candidates without any finger pointing about ‘spoilers.’ Every voter in Maine will be able to vote for the candidate they like the most without fear of helping electing the candidate they like the least. And Mainers will be sure their electoral votes go to candidates who have truly earned them.”

“Opponents of ranked choice voting have tried to roll back progress again and again, but this battle is over. Mainers stand by this reform: we’ve voted for it, we’ve fought for it, and we’re ready for it,” shared Anna Kellar, executive director for The League of Women Voters. “Finally, Mainers will have greater choices and stronger voices this November.”

Ritchie added: “Maine has undergone a multi-year legislative and legal battle to allow Mainers to rank candidates in elections. Maine first passed a state-wide ranked choice voting ballot measure in 2016, allowing voters to rank candidates in federal and state elections. Mainers then successfully used ranked choice voting to vote for statewide and federal offices in 2018 and legislation expanding the system to presidential primary and general elections passed August 30, 2019.

“In Maine, electoral votes are decided based on the votes cast in each congressional district as well as statewide. Recent polls suggest that the presidential vote in the second congressional districts may result in an instant runoff tabulation to determine that electoral vote; in 2016, Maine was won statewide by Hillary Clinton with less than half the vote.”

See: “Ranked Choice Voting 101” and  “Ranked Choice Voting In Use Across America.”

NANCY ALTMAN, via Linda Benesch, lbenesch@socialsecurityworks.org, @ssworks
President of Social Security Works, Altman is author of The Battle for Social Security and The Truth About Social Security: Exploding Five Destructive Myths.

She just wrote the piece “Is Social Security Safe from the Courts?” which states: “Because of Social Security’s overwhelming popularity among even self-described Tea Partiers, conservative politicians generally say that they love Social Security. But at candid moments, they make clear that they would like the courts to do what they have been seeking (so far unsuccessfully) to do sneakily, behind closed doors and by ‘starving the beast’: End Social Security.

“Former Republican presidential candidate and former Trump Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has said and written that he believes Social Security is unconstitutional. Former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney even voted, when serving in the South Carolina General Assembly, in favor of an amendment, which declared Social Security unconstitutional. …

“Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have been systematically stacking the courts with young, extremist judges” and Supreme Court members for the last four years. “The courts on which they likely will sit for decades have the power to end Social Security.”

“It is important to remember that when Social Security became law, most thought it would be struck down as unconstitutional. There was good reason for their concern. At the start of President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court,” led by four conservatives “colloquially known as the ‘Four Horsemen of Reaction,’ systematically struck down New Deal laws. …

“Out of concern for Social Security as well as other key legislation pending before the court, Roosevelt put forward his so-called court packing plan. Though the plan failed, the court held Social Security constitutional in what was coined ‘the switch in time that saved the nine.’ [The Supreme Court largely reoriented when faced with Roosevelt’s threat of court packing.]

“Today’s court is more conservative than any court since 1937.” Judge Amy Coney Barrett, “who is just 48 years old, shares the same conservative views as the Four Horsemen of Reaction. If it were 1937 and Social Security were a new question in front of the Supreme Court, how would she have ruled? How would she rule if the issue were before her at some point in the future, once she has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?

“Revealingly, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Barrett to comment on the constitutionality of Social Security and Medicare during her confirmation hearings, Barrett refused to answer.”

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini@gmail.com. @VotePact
Husseini is founder of VotePact.org, “a voting strategy that advocates that people vote for their actual preferences by pairing up with someone on the other side of the Democratic-Republican divide. So people can strategically vote for the candidates they most like without fear of helping those they most fear. Instead of effectively cancelling each other out — one for Trump and one for Biden — they can both vote Libertarian or Green or whatever they want.

He just wrote the piece “VotePact Gives You Leverage Over the Duopoly” which states that VotePact “is effectively DIY ranked choice voting, which allows voters to list their preferences 1-2-3. …

“A related problem is polling. Most polls are phrased something like ‘if the election were held today, which of the following would you vote for: Democrat Joe Biden, Republican Donald Trump, Libertarian Jo Jorgensen or Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate.’ But that just echos the voting bind and doesn’t get at voter preference.

“If pollsters cared to measure actual voter preferences, they would ask people to rank candidates 1-2-3, RCV style. Or they could ask: ‘Biden, Trump, Jorgensen and Hawkins are in a four-way tie. You personally are the tie-breaker, the deciding vote. Who do you vote for?’ That would get at actual voter preference.

“But voter preference and control are hindered, including by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a creation of establishment Democrats and Republicans that is sponsoring what should be called a joint televised appearance Thursday night between Trump and Biden. Third party candidates are having their own debate with the group Free and Equal on Saturday.” See his letter ‘The Huge Problem with Polls‘ to Frank Newport of Gallup and the CPD. Husseini is also senior analyst at the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Amy Coney Barrett is expected to be voted in as a member of the Supreme Court today.

Al Jazeera reports: “Treaty banning nuclear weapons to enter into force,” which states: “Fifty countries have ratified an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, the United Nations has announced, allowing the ‘historic’ text to enter into force in 90 days.

“Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the UN said on Saturday, in a move hailed by anti-nuclear activists but strongly opposed by the United States” and the other nuclear powers.

“UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres commended the 50 states and saluted ‘the instrumental work’ of civil society in facilitating negotiations and pushing for ratification. …

“The UN chief said the treaty’s entry into force on January 22, 2021, crowns a worldwide movement ‘to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons’ and ‘is a tribute to the survivors of nuclear explosions and tests, many of whom advocated for this treaty.’ …

“The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning coalition whose work helped spearhead the nuclear ban treaty, called the development a ‘historic milestone.'”

PATRICK O’NEILL, via Bill Ofenloch, billcpf@aol.com;
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08@gmail.com