What's Really Behind Julian Assange's Arrest

APR 26, 2019  

Robert Scheer

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/whats-really-behind-julian-assanges-arrest/

The recent arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has provoked a wide spectrum of responses in the media, but many journalists seem to recognize the Trump administration’s attack on the publisher as setting a dangerous precedent for freedom of the press. Many reports have focused on what Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer deems a mischaracterization of Assange’s character that is used to justify a heinous persecution and bury the fact that Assange, in his publishing of news, has acted much like any newspaper.

“It’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, ‘whatever you think of Julian Assange,’” the Truthdig editor in chief tells his guest, Bruce Shapiro, in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. […] Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly […] distributed at least 700,000 military, war and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information.”

Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is concerned about the ethical question surrounding the alleged assistance the WikiLeaks founder proffered whistleblower Chelsea Manning when she was trying to crack a password. And yet, the potential use of the Espionage Act, which Shapiro reminds us, “has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher” is far more disconcerting to Shapiro.

“The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be,” Shapiro tells Scheer. “I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is … exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.”

What’s at stake, in other words, is not one man’s life but rather the very essence of the press freedoms the U.S. was founded on. Assange’s arrest is about national security reporting, the criminalization of source-journalist relationships involving leaking and, more broadly, an “attempt to criminalize investigative reporting,” Shapiro argues. The Nation contributor also notes the courage behind Manning’s decision to return to jail rather than take further part in the government investigation into Assange.

“Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism,” Shapiro says. “We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist.”

Listen to the entire discussion between the two journalists regarding Assange, the rare heroism of whistleblowers and the government’s menacing assault on the First Amendment. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.  

If you have trouble viewing or hearing the podcast player posted above this notice, click this link.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. And we’re here to discuss–I’m probably misusing the concept of trauma as you define it. But the presence of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, has been traumatic for his critics, and certainly in the Democratic Party and elsewhere, and even for journalists. And he’s now been charged by the U.S. government with a single count of violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for attempting unsuccessfully to understand a password or change it; he failed. And that’s led to the arrest and extradition attempt to take him from England to face this charge, and presumably other charges can be added on. And you have, the reason I wanted to talk to you, Bruce Shapiro, is that you wrote a number of articles, but most recently in The Nation, the indictment of Julian Assange as a threat to press freedom. So can you basically summarize your view of this?

Bruce Shapiro: Sure. And I suppose I should start by saying that my view of this is that it’s a mess. It’s contradictory, it’s complicated. And I think it’s important to separate, for this conversation, whatever personal views or political views we may have of Julian Assange as an individual, or WikiLeaks as an institution. And instead, look at the indictment and say, what are its implications for the work of journalism and journalists, what are its implications for publishing, what are its implications for free expression. That’s what I’ve tried to do. A lot of news organizations, I think, have kind of stepped back from Assange with the revelation in this indictment that he seemed to be actively trying to crack a government password at the request of his source, Chelsea Manning. Usual press practice would be to accept leaked materials, but not to participate actively in the breaking into the file cabinet, whether a real file cabinet or a virtual one. And because he crossed that line, some free press folks have said, Oh, that’s it, we don’t need to worry about it anymore. I disagree strongly. And it’s for a couple of reasons. First of all, the underlying charge is not just the limited charge of having tried to crack a password; that’s sort of a predicate to get him extradited and maybe add more later, who knows. But even in this limited indictment, it’s a conspiracy charge. The indictment charges Assange and Chelsea Manning with conspiracy, and in particular conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, which has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher.

And the nature of that conspiracy is everything surrounding this act of purported password-cracking back in 2010. The indictment details Assange’s conversations with Manning, his attempt to reassure her that the effort was worth it, sort of cajoling, stroking. Talks about them discussing how best to protect her, to cover her tracks. This is the kind of conversation that journalists–especially those who report on national security, but other kinds of investigative reporters, too–have with sources every day. And so this indictment in order to get to this limited act of password-cracking, is criminalizing the work, the day-to-day work of investigative reporting. That seems to me to be very dangerous. I think the government, the Trump administration is counting on a lot of people’s dislike of Julian Assange personally to get this through to, to establish the precedent for criminalizing investigative reporters’ relationships with leakers.

You know, the Obama administration, which was no friend of whistleblowers–which prosecuted more whistleblowers than any administration in history–the Obama administration looked at this same material and concluded that it would intrude on the First Amendment, that it would be a threat to freedom of the press, to prosecute Assange. It wasn’t worth it to them. The Trump administration, now Secretary of State Pompeo, formerly the head of national intelligence, the Trump Justice Department, now under Attorney General Barr, have decided for political reasons, I think, to turn around that decision by the Obama Justice Department and go after Mr. Assange. Again, whatever you think of Assange, the question is, what are the implications of this indictment for the practice of investigative reporting? And that worries me very much.

RS: Yeah, it’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, “whatever you think of Julian Assange.” Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. The fact of the matter is, there’s two points to be made. First of all, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly, and the real victim of prosecution here so far, has–you know, they distributed at least 700,000 military, war, and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information. So the rump of this whole issue here, the documents that were released, that really showed evidence of serious war crimes, the killing of civilians, shooting of reporters, everything else–no one has gone for jail on the other end. No one has, you know, been held accountable for any of those crimes. And Chelsea Manning, of course, has been prosecuted, and then was pardoned and is now back in jail because she won’t cooperate with the grand jury, having said she has said everything she can. The interesting thing here is that Julian Assange is in the position–the same the New York Times and the Washington Post were in the Pentagon Papers case.

BS: Well, you know–yeah.

RS: Ellsberg was Chelsea Manning, and the fact of the matter is, whether you like the publication or not, basically with the exception of this breaking the password charge, Julian Assange is a publisher. And the interesting thing is that Chelsea Manning, who supplied the password, was not charged with this, and with this failed effort. And this was used, again, to drag Julian Assange into a court in England.

BS: Well, it’s interesting. So there’s–let me just unpack a few layers. You know, there’s a big argument within journalism right now about whether Assange is really a journalist and whether WikiLeaks is really journalism. I actually think this is an irrelevant argument, because whether or not you think a public interest document dump is journalism or meets the best ethical standards or whatever, what Julian Assange unquestionably is a publisher. And the First Amendment doesn’t only protect journalists; in fact, journalism as a profession didn’t really exist when the First Amendment was passed back in 1789. The First Amendment protects publication and publishers, and that was the meaning as well of the Pentagon Papers case, right? When the Supreme Court agreed to let the New York Times and Washington Post and everybody else go ahead with publication of the Pentagon Papers, what they found is that under American law there can be no prior restraint. We do not have an official secrets act here that allows the government to put stories on spikes. And I think there’s been a lot of confusion caused by this argument about whether or not Assange is really a journalist or not. I certainly agree that the Iraq War logs, which are the documents at the heart of this conspiracy indictment, that there is an unquestioned public interest in their release. It revealed, you know, all kinds of unknown, previously unknown activity and cover-ups for accountability in deaths of civilians, and the deaths of journalists–the famous collateral damage video. You know, those–there is a public interest. Chelsea Manning is in exactly the same position as Daniel Ellsberg was in when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, with a couple of important differences. Back then, the Nixon administration wanted to use the Espionage Act to go after Daniel Ellsberg; it didn’t only because that would have revealed the Nixon administration’s illegal break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. So Nixonian dirty tricks prevented this kind of a conspiracy charge at that time. And, you know, Daniel Ellsberg was a person at the top of the power pyramid when he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers. He’d been to Harvard, he had been a top Defense Department official, he worked for the Rand Corporation. Chelsea Manning was a lowly private, except a lowly private with access to the goods. And you know, the–in many ways, again, whatever you think of Assange, Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism. We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist. And that’s what’s happened here, with Chelsea Manning now in prison for contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with the investigation and to give more information to back up this indictment. Now, look. That said, I think we would be–Bob, you and I would not be doing our job as journalists if we didn’t acknowledge the fact that Julian Assange is a complicated and contradictory and very messy figure. You know, we’re speaking on the day that the Mueller report was released, which goes into–was just looking at it before we talked–some detail about the nature of Assange’s interactions with some of the Russian operatives behind the Clinton leaks. He’s a person who arguably contributed to the election of Donald Trump, because of his profound hatred of Bill Clinton, through the publication of those leaks. But that’s a historic irony. I mean, it’s an irony that the administration he now, he supported, is now the one to go after him. But that doesn’t diminish the press freedom stakes in this, and it doesn’t diminish the injustice of a criminal conspiracy brought against a public-interest publisher for releasing information.

RS: I understand what you’re saying. I actually consider that to be so irrelevant here. As you’ve pointed out, when we had this protection of freedom of the press, you know, the press–the point of the–same with speech–was not to honor the messenger. The press was quite scurrilous at times. I’m not agreeing with you, by the way, in your characterization of WikiLeaks.

BS: [Laughs]

RS: I’m not. I think–I would take exception. But I don’t think it’s the issue. In fact, you know, Tom Paine was considered a traitor; when he died, they dug up his body and threw his bones out to the countryside, there were plenty of people hated him so much. The press, the freedom of the press that was enshrined, the press was reviled, was attacked, whether it was town criers or wall posters or so forth. The issue–and by the way, I was a witness, a defense witness in the Ellsberg trial, and I can tell you they were digging up a lot of dirt on Ellsberg, on his personal–the reason they went into his psychiatrist’s office, or his psychologist’s office, was to get data to disparage his intention, his motives as a human being. There were even some journalists who went after him in a very scurrilous way, to you know, attack him. And that is not the issue. First of all, WikiLeaks is in a–as you point out–far stronger position than Ellsberg was. Ellsberg has pointed this out. Ellsberg had taken an oath.

Ellsberg had said he would honor classification. And then he had to make the case, this was such an extreme case of hiding information from the public, that he had a constitutional obligation to reveal it. WikiLeaks, and whether the New York Times likes it or the Washington Post likes it, is in the same position they were in, in terms of our Constitution. It is not a question of whether you like the–now the Washington Post is owned by the richest man in the world; does that mean I can go challenge their motives in publishing a story, whether I like it or not? No, that’s a shoot the messenger argument; I’m not saying you’re advancing it, but I am saying I’m hearing that a lot in media circles.

BS: Oh, I–very much. Now, I will say, to its credit, that the Committee to Protect Journalists came out very strongly and very clearly describing this as a very troubling indictment, particularly for the way in which it would seem to encourage prosecutors to root around in the source reporter relationship. And kudos to CPJ for that. There are a lot of corners of American journalism, anyway, that are trying to distance themselves as far as they can from Assange, and therefore are not, I think, living up to their responsibilities to our own free-press traditions. You know, the freedom of the press is rooted not–as you say, not in the likeability or agreeability or whatever of the publisher. In the most famous libel case, the most important libel case in American history, New York Times vs. Sullivan, [Justice] Brennan, who wrote the majority opinion in that, talked about the importance of caustic speak, of offensive, even caustic speech, being protected by the First Amendment. And the same thing is true of investigative matters. Deeply controversial leaks, deeply controversial revelations about the abuse of power–sources who essentially, whether it’s Ellsberg or Manning, who have committed an act of civil disobedience by violating an oath that they took to secrecy–are part of the public interest discussion. Particularly when the stakes are so high on matters of war and peace. The reality of this indictment is that if it, if this were to become the norm, there’s a whole host of important stories from the last 20 years regarding all kinds of institutions, and regarding democratic and republican presidencies alike, that would never have come to light if reporters or publications feared being called co-conspirators for working with their sources to figure out the best way to leak material. This is, it’s a very dangerous act.

RS: Well, in fact, if you apply it to what part of the media has done in their effort to criticize Trump and talk about Russian collusion and using the Steele memo and so forth and so on, you could develop a vast conspiracy. That is the real danger. And you’re absolutely right in pointing out that the use of–and for listeners who don’t understand, let’s just be legally specific. The CFAA, which is the legislation that we’re talking about, is legislation that basically has been–well, it’s been used, it’s the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It’s used by corporations when they want to punish people, it’s used in all sorts of ways; famously, it was used against one of the true heroes of internet freedom in my book and caused his suicide. And that was Aaron Swartz, who downloaded judicial documents, again, that I think the public had a right to see; he downloaded scientific journals from JSTOR, and JSTOR even said they didn’t want him prosecuted, and yet the government used this same CFAA, with its draconian penalties, and Swartz took his own life. I mean, it was so intimidating.

BS: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a troublingly broad and very confusing statute. Which makes it all the more dangerous that it’s sort of the predicate for this conspiracy charge, the kind of thin, thin hook to hang an entire conspiracy case on. You know, I think there is some chance that a British court looking at this, and in particular looking at the Trump Justice Department’s decision to revive a charge that the Obama administration had deliberately chosen not to pursue. There is some chance that a British court, looking at the totality of this, will say that it amounts to a political act of prosecution. Which under international law, and under UK and European law, they’re allowed to refuse extradition for what is deemed to be a political prosecution. You know, that may be a thin chance, but I think it’s a real one.

This is clearly a politically motivated prosecution by an administration looking to distract attention from its own problems, by an administration eager to control the media, and an administration in particular that has threatened and taken action against reporters on other fronts. The administration’s open hostility to what Donald Trump calls “the enemies of the people” makes this a political prosecution. And that’s something, I think, that the British courts will need to pay some attention to in the course of deciding whether to hand Mr. Assange over.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to focus, in the time that remains, just a little bit more on the role of the media, particularly the establishment media. And people are generally, a lot people are very angry with Julian Assange because of what happened in the election, and basically, the release of material that had nothing to do with this charge. But the Podesta file showing that the Democratic National Committee had basically tried to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign. And the other important thing that was revealed, again having nothing at all to do with this charge or Chelsea Manning, was the content of the speeches that Hillary Clinton gave for three quarters of a million dollars to Goldman Sachs, saying that she would like to bring these wonderful bankers back to Washington with her to straighten out the problems that we have, that of course the banks caused. And there’s such a sense of animus to, you know, anybody who hurt the chances of the democrats in that last election, and all other issues seem to be pushed aside. And what is particularly troubling in the whole treatment of Julian Assange–and Chelsea Manning, because she’s, after all, in jail now, and there isn’t much of an outcry–is there seems to be no concern that war crimes were committed by the United States, or at least the very strong possibility of serious war crimes–a war on civilians in Iraq, a country we invaded partially on the basis of misreporting by the New York Times and other establishment papers. And there seems to be no concern, in this zeal to get Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange convicted of additional charges, of what about the crimes that they revealed? What about the killing of civilians? What about the invasion of a country and doing this, the dismemberment of a whole region? And there is absolutely no sense at all–which we usually bring to whistleblowing cases; we usually say, was the information important? Did the public have a right to know it? That is, after all, the First Amendment basic argument in defense of the press, that you need a vital press. And you could not have a better example of the vitality of a press, in terms of the documents revealed by WikiLeaks. No one can challenge that, I don’t think. And yet there’s no mention of it.

BS: Well, I think there’s been some mention of it. And I think, to be fair, that American journalism is divided over Assange, and is divided over this case, and is having exactly this argument. There are an awful lot of reporters I know, editorial page editors and others, who are saying exactly what you’re describing now. Now, listen. I do, I’m going to push back gently in one way. I do think it’s important that we acknowledge that there are ways in which Mr. Assange, through his judgment and I what I think is sometimes poor judgment, has contributed to the situation. And here I’m not talking about the 2016 presidential campaign at all. I think in this case, for example, in the case of 2010, in the War Logs, while I think it is dangerous and wrong for the government to be prosecuting him now–and I’m very strongly writing against this prosecution, OK–I do think it was a poor judgment of Assange to actively participate in cracking a password. And here’s why: it actually put his source in more legal jeopardy. We’ve seen this before; back in the 1990s, the Cincinnati Enquirer had a magnificent scoop that a team of reporters worked on for a year, about corruption and criminality and violence by the Chiquita Banana company. They ran the story, and it turned out that one of the reporters on the team had been quietly, privately hacking into the executive voicemail system with a password he’d been given by a source.

That action, that actually participating in the extraction of files in an active way, or voice mails in an active way, gave Chiquita–which was very politically connected–an opportunity to sue the Enquirer and its publisher. Got to go to prosecutors and get criminal charges against the reporter in that case. And this entire, huge series about crimes against humanity by a major multinational American corporation–that entire series ended up being unpublished, retracted, taken out of LexisNexis–you can find it somewhere on the internet, but it’s hard to find. The reporter ended up being charged criminally, and in order to stay out of jail, ended up giving up his source, who lost his job. When reporters, or when publishers, themselves decide–and sometimes it may be necessary. But when reporters themselves decide to cross a certain line of law, or a certain line of action, the risk to the story itself, the risk to their publications, the risk to their sources rises. I’m, you know, I teach journalism ethics, and I would be irresponsible if I didn’t say that I think Assange made some important mistakes in this case. But so what, right? The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this, far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be. I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is using Julian Assange, and using the controversial nature of his actions, as a smokescreen to cover up a broad attack on national security reporting, a broad attack to criminalize source-journalist relationships involving leaking, a broad attempt to criminalize investigative reporting.

They’re exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.

RS: Yeah. And you know, the complicating factors are always there in every story of this kind. For God’s sake, we’re talking about the area of national security where the government routinely–every government in the world, but ours is masterful at it–routinely lies about every bit of information you need, and anything that would be unflattering to what they’re doing. And you can go here with the Steele memo, and how is that created, and what was this relation to government agencies? You could go through–

BS: Well, that—

RS: Anyway, but let me just, I mean, ‘cause I, I think I take your point. That the whistleblowers, yes; you know, John Kiriakou, who gave the name of a CIA person to a New York Times reporter, ended up spending years in jail. He’s the one who first revealed that we were doing torture, and they used, you know, that passing that card with the name. In this case, by the way, it’s not that he cracked the password; it was part of a password. And Chelsea Manning had asked, would he know anything about it, and they did not crack the password, it did not happen. And if people want to, I mean, I’ll post this at the end of it, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I don’t know if you would agree with me, but I think it’s the most exemplary organization. It has a libertarian bent, but that can be positive in the case of questioning government…

BS: Well, that’s right. And look, I think it’s also important to say, as both in terms of what EFF is saying and as a kind of extension of what I was saying a few minutes ago, that the source has not been born, the whistleblower has not been born who has pure motives. And the journalist has not been born who is pure of motive and character, right? We are, these are complicated, messy motivations; complicated, messy stories. But the First Amendment means nothing if it doesn’t mean the right to publish information gleaned from hopelessly messy, and indeed maybe even compromised, sources. And it means nothing if it doesn’t mean the ability of journalists, for their own complicated reasons and complicated motives and complicated characters, to pursue public interest information about abuses of power by the government.

RS: And so, I take your point, and I’m not trying to glorify anyone, a whistleblower of any sort. But I do want to say something, push back a little bit on the characterization of Julian Assange. This guy has sacrificed a great deal to do what other people have failed to do. There are a lot of people who knew about crimes being committed in Iraq and elsewhere. I always raise this question about whistleblowers. There was one Daniel Ellsberg; there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who had already read the Pentagon Papers and knew that the war in Vietnam was a tissue of lies, and yet millions continued to be killed because of this lie. And in the case of Julian Assange, this incredibly valuable information that he, thanks to Chelsea Manning’s incredible courage, revealed–that seems to be lost. The rest of the media, including the media that celebrated going into Iraq on a lie–that’s the New York Times, Washington Post, and many others–celebrated going into it, bought the lies, takes no accountability for the needless civilian destruction of lives, American troops killed, what have you. And somehow, Julian Assange, who more than any other single figure enlightened us, with Chelsea Manning, about the reality of what our government was doing in Iraq–more than any of those two people–and somehow we’re sitting here nit-picking about their motives. And the scoundrels–the scoundrels who lied, none of them have been prosecuted. None of them–they all feel self-righteous. The people who voted for the war based on the lies, who were in Congress. The people who spread the lies when they were in the government. You know, including democratic and republican governments. None of them are put in our crosshairs the way we’re doing with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

BS: Well, and that’s why, you know, we need to view–I think American journalists, in particular, and American press freedom groups, which are trying to figure out their relationship to this complicated case–need to understand that leaking in a matter like this, and the choices that a publisher like Assange makes in a matter like this that is about war crimes, about cover-up for atrocity, that’s about misleading the public–that sometimes breaking, you know, a computer hacking law, sometimes breaking a secrecy oath, is a kind of civil disobedience as historically significant as Rosa Parks, you know, refusing to sit in the back of the bus. That is what we’re dealing with here. And that’s why I think it’s particularly notable that we pay attention to the courage of Manning at this moment, who as I said, is doing something that as a sort of journalism historian I find unprecedented, which is a source going to jail to protect a journalist. We need to be focused on Chelsea Manning as much as perhaps we are on Julian Assange. And we need to separate out the–look, the very complicated emotions that many folks have in light of the 2016 campaign. Forget about all that. Because what we’re talking about here is the basic ability of journalists to do their job, of sources to act out of conscience, of publishers to publish secrets, which has been protected by the First Amendment, and will be in grave danger if the conspiracy rap is allowed to run its course. If Julian Assange can go to prison for conspiring with Chelsea Manning over a password, really the whole nature of source-reporter relationships in American law is up for grabs.

RS: Yeah, I think that’s an important point on which to end it. I pushed back on–

BS: Yeah, I thought it was good.

RS: I think you’re being very polite. I don’t feel polite about a mainstream media that is quite willing to pass on government lies and rarely apologize for it, but when you have the rare whistleblower–my goodness, we’ve had what, 10, 12 whistleblowers in 40 years of any significance on national security. And we learn that wars were unnecessary and millions died unnecessarily. And yet these whistleblowers are always challenged. Their lives are messed up terribly; divorce, they lose their jobs. You got Thomas Drake trying to hold down a job at an Apple store, losing all their benefits. I can go through the list. And you have to really ask a question: why are there so few whistleblowers? If we’re such a great, free society, you know, where are the people of courage? Are they so worried–what are the risks they would be taking, there would be a slight kink in their career curve? But how many people, how many people on the inside, with security clearances, whether they’re in the academic world, the military world or so forth, have stepped forward and told the American people the truth they need to know in order to make intelligent decisions as an electorate? In national security, 95 to 99 percent of the information we operate on is government-tailored information, quite often fraudulent. You have that rare person, like a Julian Assange, an Edward Snowden, a Daniel Ellsberg and so forth, you can name them all right now on this program in a few minutes, and you have to ask the basic question: Where are the other folks? Where are the people with the security clearances who keep quiet while lies are sold to the American people that they know are lies?

BS: So let me close by drawing your attention and that of listeners to a wonderful organization recently set up, based in San Francisco, actually, called the Signals Network, which was set up specifically to promote the support of and defense for whistleblowers in the wake of Snowden, in the wake of Assange, in the wake of all of these cases. The Signals Network is doing very important work to advance exactly the kinds of questions that you’re asking here, and to say, how do we turn these–how do we give these people who so easily as whistleblowers, as Chelsea Manning, turn in to defendants and pariahs, how do we give them the honor, respect, and support they deserve for the courageous act of telling the public what it needs to know?

RS: Thank you, Bruce Shapiro, for that statement. And yes, those are good sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another one. There are good folks out there–including, by the way, let me hasten to say, Bruce Shapiro and his writings in The Nation magazine [Laughter], which is why I wanted him on this show now. So even though he’s very polite [Laughter] towards, I think, an establishment that’s out of control and can be quite dangerous and deceitful, I do want to thank you for taking the time to do this. Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor to The Nation, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a longtime really important journalist on his own terms, and a media critic. I want to also thank Kat Yore and Mario Diaz, our engineers here at KCRW, and Joshua Scheer, the producer of “Scheer Intelligence,” and we’ll be back with another edition next week. Thank you.

Joe Biden: An Imperial Corporatist Wrapped in the Bloody Flag of Charlottesville

APRIL 26, 2019

by PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/joe-biden-an-imperial-corporatist-wrapped-in-the-bloody-flag-of-charlottesville/

Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion. No elegantly crafted three-and-a-half minute campaign launch video on the horrors of Charlottesville and Donald Trump can change that essential fact.

The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik.

“The Folks at the Top Aren’t Bad Guys”

It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class.

In 1978, Biden worked for Wall Street by voting to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates with federal student loans. Six years later he did the same to vocational school graduates. In 2005, he worked with Republican allies to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans and thousands of small businesses. The bill put bankruptcy filers under far stricter Chapter 13 rules, turning countless citizens into de facto indentured servants of finance capital (including the many credit card companies headquartered in Delaware.) Biden backed an earlier version of the bill that was too corporatist even for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

He voted against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments.

In 1979, Biden recognized campaign donations from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws. That same year he was one of just two Congressional Democrats to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing.

Biden strongly supported the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act. This helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Biden naturally supported the corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade agreement and the globalist investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.

All of this and more in Biden’s record is richly consistent with the beginning of his political career. He’s been an unapologetic corporatist from the start. As Branko Marcetic noted on Jacobin last summer:

“In 1984, the Washington Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’ who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’ Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the retirement age” (emphasis added).

“The Anti-Populist”

Biden is so corporatist and pro-Wall Street that he can’t join the other corporate (neo) liberals in the 2020 presidential horse race in playing what a still-Left Christopher Hitchens once called (in a sharp volume on the neoliberal Clintons) “the essence of American politics”: “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Biden won’t deign to pay lip-service to populism. Indeed, he has billed himself the “anti-populist” – the antidote to both the right-wing reactionary populism of Trump and the leftish progressive populism of Bernie Sanders.

Biden absurdly criticizes those who advocate a universal basic income of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He opposes calls for free college tuition and Single Payer health insurance. He defends Big Business from popular criticism, writing in 2017 that “Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”

That’s called blaming the working-class victim. It’s also called propagating a fantasy – the existence of a political system in which the working-class majority has the power to hold concentrated wealth and power accountable.

“I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys,” he told the Brookings Institution last year – this as he claimed to worry about how the “gap is yawning” between the super-rich and the rest.

“I Have No Empathy…Give Me a Break”

Joe Biden is such a right-winger that he has even gone so far as to say that he has “no empathy” for Millennials struggle to get by in the savagely unequal and insecure precariat economy he helped create over his many, many years of service to the Lords of Capital. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break,” said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times last year. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.”

So what if Millennials face a significant diminution of opportunity, wealth, income and security compared to the Baby Boomers with whom Biden identifies? Who cares if he helped shrink the American Dream for young people with the neoliberal policies and politics he helped advance?

“Reaching Across the Aisle to Get [Capitalist] Things Done”

How Biden has managed to simultaneously distance himself from majority progressive-populist sentiments and pose as a friend of the everyday working man is an interesting question that probably can’t be answered without factoring in the Orwellian role of corporate media in promoting love as hate, war as peace, black as white, and corporate apparatchiks as regular working-class guys.

A critical part of Joe “Anti-Populist” Biden’s media-crafted appeal is his “get things done” claim to be able to “reach out across the aisle” in the famous, hallowed, and CNN- and “P”BS-honored “spirit of bipartisanship.” That’s a shame. Why should we want a president who promises to team up with the widely loathed and creeping fascist white-nationalist Republican Party? And what has the holy bipartisanship that Biden is celebrated for embracing wrought for We the People over the years?

Not much. As Andrew Cockburn wrote last month at Harpers:

“By tapping into…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 a [bipartisan] 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 [Biden backed Bill Clinton’s ‘Three Strikes’ crime and prison bill – P.S.], 1990s welfare ‘reform’ [Biden backed the Clinton-Gingrich abolition of Aid for Families with Dependent Children], 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” (emphasis added).

Biden even took his embrace of the supposedly sacred virtue of bipartisanship to the grotesque level of forming close friendships with vicious southern white racists like Republican Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the frothing warmonger John McCain.

With Biden as with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and a long line of dismal dollar Democrats in the neoliberal era, there’s an accurate translation for “reaching across the aisle to get things done:” joining hands across the two major party wings of the same corporate-imperial bird of prey to make policy in accord with the wishes of the rich and powerful.

“A March to Peace and Security”

Speaking of young people and empire, no assessment of “Lunch Bucket Joe” (LBJ) Biden is complete without reference to what Institute for Policy Studies foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes calls Biden’s “key role in making possible an inappropriate and utterly disastrous war” – the monumentally criminal and mass-murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq. As Zunes explains at The Progressive:

“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.’”

“At the start of hearings before his committee on July 31, 2002, Biden stated, ‘One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power. If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late…

“In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, Biden claimed in Senate session in October 2002, ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.’ This gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States” (emphasis added).

It was an invasion that led to the premature death of 4500 mostly younger U.S. Americans – and of course to much larger Iraqi casualties.

The “Stop Sanders Democrats”

Why is this dirty old imperialist and corporatist dog being rolled out to corporate media acclaim as the supposed people’s alternative to Trump in the White House? It’s all about blocking Bernie Sanders, who is the Democrats’ best chance to win back the presidency since he nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination three years ago (Sanders would have prevailed over the vapid centrist Hillary Clinton but for the corrupt shenanigans of the Democratic National Committee) and is still running (as before) in sincere accord with majority-progressive-populist sentiments on key domestic issues. Norman Solomon has explained it well here at Counterpunch:

“Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders….Urgency is in the media air. Last week, the New York Times told readers that ‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats were ‘agonizing over his momentum.’ The story was front-page news. At the Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: ‘Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.’…Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks—vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Sen. Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA….In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: ‘Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are’” (emphasis added).

Only the popular front-runner Sanders is likely to prevail against Trump even without a recession (certainly a possibility) between now and the election. But, as in the last presidential cycle, corporate-Democratic politicos are working to sabotage the nomination of their most viable candidate in the general election. They are:

+ Flooding the primary campaign with such an absurdly large number of candidates that Sanders will likely be unable to garner the majority of primary delegates required for a first-ballot nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

+ Coordinating among the Democratic Convention super-delegates—the more than 350 county and state party bosses and elected officials who are granted delegate status without election—to vote as a bloc to stop Sanders on the convention’s second ballot. (These super-delegates exist precisely for the purpose of blocking challengers to the party’s corporate establishment.)

+ Working to change state party elections from caucuses to primaries, as caucuses are friendlier to progressive challengers. (Sanders won 11 of the nation’s 18 caucus states three years ago.)

+ Smearing Sanders’ popular social-democratic policy agenda as “fantastic,” “unaffordable,” “unrealistic” and too dangerously “socialist”—this while Democratic elites refuse to acknowledge the fascist tendencies of the president they helped elect in 2016.

+ Branding the electable Sanders “unelectable” on the grounds that he is an “extremist” who is “too far left” for the U.S. electorate generally and independent voters specifically.

The “unelectable” charge is false. Sanders appeals to independents (who are nowhere near as conservative as is commonly reported), people of color, infrequent voters and the white working-class that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party.

His anti-establishment message, coupled with his long record of representing rural voters, makes him highly competitive with Trump, not only in the Rust Belts states where Hillary Clinton faltered but even in some dark red states like West Virginia. Even the likes of Karl Rove believe Sanders could defeat Trump in 2020.

Biden is part of the corporate “Stop Sanders” campaign inside the Democratic Party. It helps that he is a white male in an election cycle shaped by the Democrats’ fear that running a woman and/or person of color might fuel the patriarchal and racist sentiments of the Trump base, increasing its turnout in battleground states.

Look for the Democratic establishment to do everything it can to prevent its party from defeating Trump by running its most popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party exists to serve its corporate clients. Its leaders fear the specter of socialism while the world’s most powerful nation threatens to slide into fascism. (Never mind that democratic eco-socialism—a political project significantly more radical than what Sanders is proposing—is precisely what America and the world need right now.) Establishment Democrats would rather lose to a white-nationalist right than even the mildly social-democratic left within their own party. It’s why the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin labeled them “the Inauthentic Opposition.”

The Best Thing Joe Can Do

Joe Biden can wave the bloody flag of Charlottesville all he wants. He is the distilled essence of neoliberal Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition. Barring an economic meltdown between now and the first Tuesday in November of 2020, look for him to get knocked out by the orange beast in the general election if the “Stop Sanders” Democrats are successful.

Keep your passports up to date. Trumpism is Amerikaner fascism, eager to up its ugly game by stepping beyond mere flirtation with mass violence. As Paul Krugman recently told a nonplussed Anderson Cooper on CNN, “if you’re not terrified” yet, then “you]re not paying attention”:

Cooper: “You write that it’s very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.”

Krugman: “Institutions depend upon the willingness of people to obey norms, and occasionally to say, okay, ‘this is not how we do things in our country.’ …This didn’t start with Trump. There’s been a steady erosion of those norms. This has been building for a long time, and we’re very close to the edge right now.”

Cooper: “When you say close to the edge, what does that mean to you?”

Krugman: “You know, on paper, we’ll stay a democracy, but I worry very much about a sort of Hungary-type situation where you have on paper the institutions of democracy. You even hold votes, but the system is rigged, and in fact, it’s become effectively you have a one-party rule…We’re very close. If Trump is re-elected if the Republicans retake control of the House, what are the odds that we will really have a functioning democracy after that?”

Cooper: “I mean, that’s a pretty terrifying idea”

Krugman: “If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention”

What Biden said in his launch video yesterday morning is correct: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation…We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville.” A second Trump term is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Biden says he “can’t stand by and let that happen.”

The irony is the best thing he could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside and tell the rest of the candidate field and voters to congeal behind Sanders. The corporate-neoliberal Democratic Clinton-Obama model is what put the supremely dangerous orange monster in the White House in the first place in 2016. The establishment Democrats, who prefer barbarism to even the mildest hint of socialism, are working to give the monster a second term. If Joe really hates fascism as much as his launch video suggests, then he needs to de-launch. Maybe some activists in Iowa or New Hampshire can set up for his final, politically fatal gropes.

Extreme times call for extreme measures. His candidacy is terrifying.

Nearly 102 Million Americans Do Not Have A Job Right Now – Worse Than At Any Point During The Last Recession

April 25, 2019 by Michael Snyder

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/nearly-102-million-americans-do-not-have-a-job-right-now-worse-than-at-any-point-during-the-last-recession

Wouldn’t it be horrible if the number of Americans without a job was higher today than it was during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009?  Well, that is actually true.  As you will see below, nearly 102 million Americans do not have a job right now, and at no point during the last recession did that number ever surpass the 100 million mark.  Of course the U.S. population has grown a bit over the last decade, but as you will see below, the percentage of the population that is engaged in the labor force is only slightly above the depressingly low levels from the last recession.  Sadly, the truth is that the rosy employment statistics that you are getting from the mainstream media are manufactured using smoke and mirrors, and by the time you are done reading this article you will understand what is really going on.

Before we dig into the long-term trends, let’s talk about what we just learned.

According to CNBC, initial claims for unemployment benefits just rose by the most that we have seen in 19 months…

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits jumped 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 230,000 for the week ended April 20, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The increase was the largest since early September 2017.

And considering all of the other troubling economic signs that we have been witnessing lately, this makes perfect sense.

In addition, we need to remember that over the last decade lawmakers across the country have made it more difficult to apply for unemployment benefits and have reduced the amount of time that unemployed workers can receive them.  In reality, the unemployment situation in this nation is far worse than the mainstream media is telling us.

When a working age American does not have a job, the federal number crunchers put them into one of two different categories.  Either they are categorized as “unemployed” or they are categorized as “not in the labor force”.

But you have to add both of those categories together to get the total number of Americans that are not working.

Over the last decade, the number of Americans that are in the “unemployed” category has been steadily going down, but the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has been rapidly going up.

In both cases we are talking about Americans that do not have a job.  It is just a matter of how the federal government chooses to categorize those individuals.

At this moment, we are told that only 6.2 million Americans are officially “unemployed”, and that sounds really, really good.

But that is only half the story.

What the mainstream media rarely mentions is the fact that the number of Americans categorized as “not in the labor force” has absolutely exploded since the last recession.  Right now, that number is sitting at 95.577 million.

When you add 6.2 million “officially unemployed” Americans to 95.577 million Americans that are categorized as “not in the labor force”, you get a grand total of almost 102 million Americans that do not have a job right now.

If that sounds terrible to you, that is because it is terrible.

Yes, the U.S. population has been growing over the last decade, and that is part of the reason why the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has been growing.

But overall, the truth is that the level of unemployment in this country is not that much different than it was during the last recession.

John Williams of shadowstats.com tracks what the real employment figure would be if honest numbers were being used, and according to him the real rate of unemployment in the United States at the moment is 21.2 percent.

That is down from where it was a few years ago, but not by that much.

Another “honest” indicator that I like to look at is the civilian labor force participation rate.

In essence, it tells us what percentage of the working age population is actually engaged in the labor force.

Just before the last recession, the civilian labor force participation rate was sitting at about 66 percent, and that was pretty good.

But then the recession hit, and the civilian labor force participation rate fell below 63 percent, and it stayed between 62 percent and 63 percent for an extended period of time.

So where are we today?

At this moment, we are sitting at just 63.0 percent.

Does that look like a recovery to you?

Of course not.

If you would like to claim that we have had a very marginal “employment recovery” since the last recession, that is a legitimate argument to make.  But anything beyond that is simply not being honest.

And now the U.S. economy is rapidly slowing down again, and most Americans are completely and totally unprepared for what is ahead.

The good news is that employment levels have been fairly stable in recent years, but the bad news is that unemployment claims are starting to shoot up again.

A number of the experts that I am hearing from expect job losses to escalate in the months ahead.  Many of those that are currently living on the edge financially suddenly won’t be able to pay their mortgages or their bills.

Just like the last recession, we could potentially see millions of middle class Americans quickly lose everything once economic conditions start getting really bad.

The economy is not going to get any better than it is right now.  As you look forward to the second half of 2019, I would make plans for rough sailing ahead.

Biden Says He’s the Workers’ Candidate, But He Has Worked To Cut Medicare and Social Security

FEATURES » APRIL 26, 2019

The universal retirement programs are Biden’s go-to sacrificial lambs.

BY BRANKO MARCETIC

http://inthesetimes.com/article/21856/joe-biden-cut-medicare-social-security-retirement-age

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who officially announced his presidential campaign on Thursday, is positioning himself as the defender of the embattled working class: giving speeches to union audiences, tapping organized labor for early support, walking the Stop & Shop picket lines, and pairing his announcement with a reportedly impending endorsement from the International Association of Firefighters, who have pledged to help him raise money.

However, an episode from the not-so-distant past cuts against this “friend of the working man” image: Biden's leading role in the Obama administration's 2011 efforts to slash the deficit by offering Republicans spending cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

At the time, the GOP had just finished giving then-President Obama a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms, with a brand new majority in the House to show for it. Obama was largely focused on three things: raising the debt ceiling to avoid a looming and potentially catastrophic debt default; avoiding a government shutdown; and reaching a “grand bargain” with Republicans over spending, including to so-called entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare that had long been in the crosshairs of the GOP and other deficit hawks.

Obama had been open about his plans to take on Social Security and Medicare, pledging to the staff of the Washington Post only a few days before his 2009 inauguration that he would “spend some political capital on this.” He tasked Biden, a veteran of congressional wheeling and dealing, with spearheading negotiations.

Biden had an ambivalent relationship with government spending. Considered in the 1980s to be one of the Democratic Party's new “neoliberals,” Biden called then for a spending freeze on Social Security and a higher Social Security retirement age. In 1995, he cast his vote for a balanced budget constitutional amendment, despite his earlier criticisms of it. The choice was, he said, “an imperfect amendment or continued spending.” When he ran for president 12 years later, he again called for the Social Security retirement age to go up.

In journalist Bob Woodward's 2012 book The Price of Politics, he portrays Biden during Obama’s first term eager to sacrifice Social Security and Medicare for the sake of bipartisan compromise and achieving what would be, in the eyes of Washington, a political victory.

Biden first displayed his friendliness to GOP entitlement hawks when he appointed former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson to co-chair the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, created in February 2010 via executive order. Simpson was one of Congress's most high-profile foes of entitlements and a proponent of Social Security privatization. In Woodward's telling, Biden even had to lightly pressure a somewhat reluctant Simpson to take the role.

Sure enough, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, as it came to be known, recommended cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, leading liberal economist Paul Krugman to label the commission “terrible.” Failing to secure enough votes from the commission to recommend the plan to Congress, the proposals were never taken up.

But Biden took a far more direct role in undermining Social Security and Medicare when he headed tax policy negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in December 2010. In Woodward's telling, Biden's eagerness to cut a deal with the Republicans sometimes elicited outrage from his fellow Democrats, who felt he was giving too much away.

An Obama priority was to end the Bush tax cuts on top earners. Woodard reports that, to achieve this, Biden's team at one point considered dropping the poorest citizens—anyone who didn’t pay income taxes—from the Obama stimulus payments of $400 a year. Economist Gene Sperling, then a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, strongly objected, calling the idea “immoral.” At Sperling’s urging, Biden’s team instead proposed a holiday for payroll taxes, which are used to fund Social Security and Medicare.

The final deal extended the Bush tax cuts, cut payroll taxes by $112 billion and met a host of other Republican demands: a lower estate tax with a higher exemption, new tax write-offs for businesses, and a maximum 15 percent capital gains tax rate locked in for two years. In return, unemployment insurance was extended for 13 months and the Opportunity Tax Credit for two years.

House Democrats were furious at both the estate tax provision and the Bush tax cut extension, partly because, according to Woodward, Biden had failed to mention the extension was on the table when he briefed Democratic leaders during the talks. Even conservative Democrats like House Whip Steny Hoyer had strongly opposed the extension, and the deal drew consternation from across the party. Dianne Feinstein balked at its size, and Bernie Sanders and two other senators interrupted Biden's presentation of the package. Sanders later vowed to “do everything I can to defeat this proposal,” including filibuster it. However, enough Democrats eventually capitulated, with some grumbling, for the deal to pass, overcoming an eight-hour filibuster by Sanders.

Biden subsequently led the debt negotiations with then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Sen. Jon Kyl and other Republicans. Biden's “opening bid” was cutting $4 trillion in spending over ten years, with a 3 to 1 proportion of cuts to revenue. Biden later proposed $2 trillion in cuts to general spending, federal retirement funds, Medicare and Medicaid, and, at Cantor's urging, food stamps.

At one point, Biden suddenly called for $200 billion more in cuts that had never been discussed, which, according to Woodward, led then-Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen—also involved in the negotiations—to believe Biden had gone over to the Cantor-Kyl side. Biden again crossed Van Hollen when he offered to take revenue-raising out of the “trigger”—a combination of revenue raising and spending cuts meant to be equally unpalatable to both parties, which would automatically kick in if a deal failed to be reached.

Later in the negotiations, Biden dangled the possibility of Medicare cuts in return for more revenue—meaning higher taxes. Soon after, he suggested Democrats might be comfortable raising the eligibility age for entitlements, imposing means testing and changing the consumer price index calculation, known as CPI. (Means testing is often seen a Trojan horse for chipping away at these programs, because their universality is one of the reasons they've remained virtually untouchable for almost a century. It’s also been criticized for imposing an unnecessary and discouraging layer of bureaucracy.)

At one point, Biden reportedly called the Medicare provider tax a “scam.” “For a moment, Biden sounded like a Republican,” Woodward notes. Biden’s team was forced to remind him that such a move would force states to cut services to the poor, to which he replied, “We're going to do lots of hard things,” and so “we might as well do this.”

As Woodward writes, “this was a huge deal” for Cantor (“Biden had caved”), and showed the administration had adopted the Republican view on the matter of the Medicare provider tax. Despite this giveaway, the Republicans continued their stubborn opposition to any revenue increases in the proposed deal.

The negotiations were ultimately scuttled by Cantor, after Biden inadvertently revealed to him that then-Speaker of the House John Boehner was secretly holding his own “grand bargain” talks with Obama. But the Biden portrayed in Woodward's book continued this pattern of bending over backwards to achieve the Republicans' cooperation in subsequent negotiations.

When Obama later in 2011 put forward what he called the “big deal”—$4 trillion in deficit reduction, namely through “bend[ing] the cost curve” of Medicare, Medicaid, and possibly even Social Security—Biden insisted to Republicans this approach was the best way forward on cutting spending. According to Woodward’s account, Biden later appeared to offer Boehner a deal of one dollar cut from Medicare and Medicaid for every dollar of revenue.

Months into the negotiations with recalcitrant Republicans, Biden admitted that he and the administration had given away everything in their attempt to strike the “grand bargain.”

“We've given up on revenues, we've given on dollar for dollar,” Woodward quotes Biden telling McConnell. “All the major things we're interested in we've given up. So basically you've pushed us to the limit.”

Ironically, the fact that the “grand bargain” never happened—and that the Obama administration failed to team up with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare—was a result of a stubborn GOP's refusal to give ground on just about any issue.

Yet there are indications that another “grand bargain” may be in the cards should Biden win the presidency. In a speech last year at a joint event held by the Brookings Institution and the Biden Foundation, Biden said, “Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code. What’s the first thing he decided we needed to go after? Social Security and Medicare. We need to do something about Social Security and Medicare.” At the event, Biden suggested the programs should be means tested, and would require “adjustments.”

Biden’s willingness to go after the last remnants of the New Deal may well win him points from the political establishment, which has long treated such an approach as a mark of seriousness. Whether it wins him points among voters, who are overwhelmingly supportive of such programs, is another story altogether.

Joe Biden Is a Fraud, Plain and Simple

Norman Solomon

APR 24, 2019

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/joe-biden-is-a-phony-plain-and-simple/

Let’s be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a phony. And now that he’s running for president, Biden’s huge task is to hide his phoniness.

From the outset, with dim prospects from small donors, the Biden campaign is depending on big checks from the rich and corporate elites who greatly appreciate his services rendered. “He must rely heavily, at least at first, upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers — political insiders, former ambassadors and business executives,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy for regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story.

During the 1970s, in his first Senate term, Biden spouted white backlash rhetoric, used tropes pandering to racism and teamed up with arch segregationists against measures like busing for school integration. He went on to be a fount of racially charged appeals and “predators on our streets” oratory on the Senate floor as he led the successful effort to pass the now-notorious 1994 crime bill.

A gavel in Biden’s hand repeatedly proved to be dangerous. In 1991, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden prevented key witnesses from testifying to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. In 2002, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was the Senate’s most crucial supporter of the Iraq invasion.

Meanwhile, for well over four decades — while corporate media preened his image as “Lunch Bucket Joe” fighting for the middle class — Biden continued his assist for strengthening oligarchy as a powerful champion of legalizing corporate plunder on a mind-boggling scale.

Now, Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders.

Urgency is in the media air. Last week, the New York Times told readers that “Stop Sanders” Democrats were “agonizing over his momentum.” The story was front-page news. At the Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: “Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.”

Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks—vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Sen. Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA.

In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

Overall, in sharp contrast to the longstanding and continuing negative coverage of Sanders, mainstream media treatment of Biden often borders on reverential. The affection from so many high-profile political journalists toward Biden emerged yet again a few weeks ago during the uproar about his persistent pattern of intrusively touching women and girls. During one cable news show after another, reporters and pundits were at pains to emphasize his essential decency and fine qualities.

But lately, some independent-minded journalists have been exhuming what “Lunch Bucket Joe” is eager to keep buried. For instance:

**  Libby Watson, Splinter News: “Joe Biden is telling striking workers he’s their friend while taking money from, and therefore being beholden to, the class of people oppressing them. According to Axios, Biden’s first fundraiser will be with David Cohen, the executive vice president of and principal lobbyist for Comcast. Comcast is one of America’s most hated companies, and for good reason. It represents everything that sucks for the modern consumer-citizen, for whom things like internet or TV access are extremely basic necessities, but who are usually given the option of purchasing it from just one or two companies.” What’s more, Comcast supports such policies as “ending net neutrality and repealing broadband privacy protections. . . . And Joe Biden is going to kick off his presidential campaign by begging for their money.”

**  Ryan Cooper, The Week: “As a loyal toady of the large corporations (especially finance, insurance, and credit cards) that put their headquarters in Delaware because its suborned government allows them to evade regulations in other states, Biden voted for repeated rounds of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy — often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.”

**  Paul Waldman, The American Prospect: “Joe Biden, we are told over and over, is the one who can speak to the disaffected white men angry at the loss of their primacy. He’s the one who doesn’t like abortion, but is willing to let the ladies have them. He’s the one who tells white people to be nice to immigrants, even as he mirrors their xenophobia (‘You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,’ he said in 2006). He’s the one who validates their racism and sexism while gently trying to assure them that they’re still welcome in the Democratic Party. . . . It’s not yet clear what policy agenda Biden will propose, though it’s likely to be pretty standard Democratic fare that rejects some of the more ambitious goals other candidates have embraced. But Biden represents something more fundamental: a link to the politics and political style of the past.”

**  Rebecca Traister, The Cut: “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights. . . . In his years in power, Biden and his party (elected thanks to a nonwhite base enfranchised in the 1960s) built the carceral state that disproportionately imprisons and disenfranchises people of color, as part of what Michelle Alexander has described as the New Jim Crow. With his failure to treat seriously claims of sexual harassment made against powerful men on their way to accruing more power (claims rooted in prohibitions that emerged from the feminist and civil-rights movements of the 1970s), Biden created a precedent that surely made it easier for accused harassers, including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, to nonetheless ascend. Economic chasms and racial wealth gaps have yawned open, in part thanks to Joe Biden’s defenses of credit card companies, his support of that odious welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to support the repeal of Glass-Steagall.”

One of Biden’s illuminating actions came last year in Michigan when he gave a speech—for a fee of $200,000 including “travel allowance”—that praised the local Republican congressman, Fred Upton, just three weeks before the midterm election. From the podium, the former vice president lauded Upton as “one of the finest guys I’ve ever worked with.” For good measure, Biden refused to endorse Upton’s Democratic opponent, who went on to lose by less than 5 percent.

Biden likes to present himself as a protector of the elderly. Campaigning for Sen. Bill Nelson in Florida last autumn, Biden denounced Republicans for aiming to “cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” Yet five months earlier, speaking to the Brookings Institution on May 8, Biden spoke favorably of means testing that would go a long way toward damaging political support for Social Security and Medicare and smoothing the way for such cuts.

Indications of being a “moderate” and a “centrist” play well with the Washington press corps and corporate media, but amount to a surefire way to undermine enthusiasm and voter turnout from the base of the Democratic Party. The consequences have been catastrophic, and the danger of the party’s deference to corporate power looms ahead. Much touted by the same kind of insular punditry that insisted Hillary Clinton was an ideal candidate to defeat Donald Trump, the ostensible “electability” of Joe Biden has been refuted by careful analysis of data.

As a former Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and a current coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network for 2019, I remain convinced that the media meme about choosing between strong progressive commitments and capacity to defeat Trump is a false choice. On the contrary, Biden exemplifies a disastrous approach of jettisoning progressive principles and failing to provide a progressive populist alternative to right-wing populism. That’s the history of 2016. It should not be repeated.

Books You Need to Read to Understand Marxism

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