Monday, November 25, 2019
OK Obama, It’s Time to Cancel Centrism
Sonali Kolhatkar
NOV 20, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ok-obama-its-time-to-cancel-centrism/
As we gear up for next year’s presidential race, the only political class in the United States that may be as terrified of losing power as the Republican Party is that of centrist Democrats. Former President Barack Obama embodied this fear in his recent remarks at an event for wealthy liberal donors when he said, “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” It was a not-so-veiled reference to the rising chorus of demands for a “Medicare for All” health care system, a climate action plan like the Green New Deal or taxes on billionaires that redistribute some of their obscene wealth.
Obama’s statements prompted a backlash on Twitter under the hashtag “#TooFarLeft,” with people asserting that if their demands for drastic solutions to solve our many serious problems are seen as too far left, then so be it. It was the second time in the last few weeks that the former president, who still enjoys a great deal of popularity, admonished leftist activists. At an event in late October, he said, “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff … you should get over that quickly.” He was referring to what an older and more conservative generation of Americans have denounced as “cancel culture” on the left.
Presumably, Obama feels threatened by not just the vocal left flank of his party’s base, but also by the two most popular presidential candidates who generally embody leftist politics: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who consistently draw more cumulative support in polls than the centrist front-runner, Joe Biden, Obama’s former second-in-command. Obama’s view is the reason millennials have adopted scathing retorts like “OK Boomer.” They are tired of being told to shut up about injustice.
Centrists are terrified that if the Democratic nominee is far to the left of Biden and Obama, they will be forced to coalesce around a candidate who represents a threat to the establishment of which they are a part. The unflappable Sanders brushed aside Obama’s criticism in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “When I talk about raising the minimum wage to a living wage, I’m not tearing down the system. We’re fighting for justice.” On the health care front, he added, “When I talk about … ending the embarrassment of America being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care for every man, woman and child, that’s not tearing down the system. That’s doing what we should have done 30 years ago.” His words resonate with the millions of Americans who are struggling every day, but they grate on the nerves of those who have thrived in our unequal society.
In a nutshell, American politics have tilted our economic system so far in favor of wealthy elites—and this has been by and large a bipartisan project—that establishment lawmakers are really the ones guilty of “tearing down” a modest (if flawed) system that once upon a time distributed riches more fairly. When Americans—the vast majority of whom are not millionaires—read reports like this one showing that “[f]or the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year,” for Obama to ask us to not tear down the system is deeply insulting. The system has already been destroyed—by billionaires and their backers in Congress and the White House, including Obama.
In realizing that Sanders’ and Warren’s popularity is indicative of a widespread anger at the status quo, wealthy elites are understandably worried. In their clumsy attempts to defend their unimaginable riches (what actual difference does it make to someone’s lifestyle if he or she has $100 million versus $1 billion?), some are attempting to equate their plight with ours. The billionaire Wall Street executive Leon Cooperman has complained bitterly about his pariah status, saying, “What is wrong with billionaires? You can become a billionaire by developing products and services that people will pay for,” as if that’s all it took for him to gather his disgustingly large fortune. Cooperman conveniently left out the unfair tax rates, offshore tax havens, taxpayer subsidies and all the other ways in which the government rigs the system to favor people like him at our expense. He denounced Warren’s wealth tax, saying, “I believe in a progressive income tax and the rich paying more. But this is the fucking American dream she is shitting on.”
Others have gone as far as to label candidates like Warren and Sanders the left-wing equivalents of Donald Trump. One person, identified as a “prominent Wall Street hedge fund manager and Democratic bundler who is raising money for a Warren rival,” said about the Massachusetts senator: “It’s the same thing Republicans went through with Trump. You look at her and think what she is going to do is going to be horrible for the country. But if you say anything about it, you just make her stronger.”
So flustered are the superrich that they have taken to running their own candidates at a relatively late stage in the game. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently joined the race, has so much personal wealth at his command that he doesn’t even need to raise campaign funds and plans to spend $100 million on anti-Trump ads. Thrilled Wall Street executives are lining up to back him.
Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick—another newcomer to a hugely crowded field—has said he will not turn down donations made through super PACs, at a time when other candidates are eschewing what they see as tainted money. Patrick also has centered his candidacy around defending corporations and capitalism, saying, in an interview with The Associated Press, “There’s a lot of good that gets done by private interests investing in the country.” The AP story reminded us that Patrick “served as counsel to an oil and gas company, on the board of a subprime lending company and most recently worked for Bain Capital, the private equity company that became an albatross around Republican Mitt Romney’s neck during his presidential campaign in 2012 after President Barack Obama painted the company as ruthless toward middle-class workers.”
The top two centrists among Democratic candidates—Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg—have been working vainly to rise to the top of the crowded field of candidates. Biden’s star may be fading as the unethical (if not illegal) position that his son Hunter assumed on the board of a Ukrainian oil and gas company continues to make headlines. The former vice president also just can’t help putting his foot in his mouth, as his most recent out-of-touch comments about marijuana being a “gateway drug” illustrated.
While Buttigieg’s star may be rising, he is facing a struggle with black voters, whose support is critical to the Democratic Party. Beyond the simplistic and racist claim that black voters are uncomfortable with an openly gay candidate, he has had trouble with criminal justice issues in South Bend and now faces scrutiny over falsifying support from black voters in South Carolina.
In the coming months, we will hear a lot from centrist forces in the Democratic Party about unifying behind a single candidate in order to beat Trump. But we will be told that such a candidate can only be a moderate centrist who will compromise with Republicans and essentially maintain a less racist status quo, or a pre-Trump status quo. Centrists will blame voters for being reckless and will themselves refuse to unify around a Sanders or Warren candidacy.
At the event where Obama chastised the left, he also claimed, “It turns out people are cautious, because they don’t have a margin for error.” It is as if Obama entirely missed the 2016 election triumph of the least cautious presidential candidate in recent memory. “People” are not cautious; those who want to preserve inequality are the cautious ones, and no amount of wishful thinking on their part will change the reality that their time is over.
Stephen Miller Is Even Worse Than You Thought
Joseph Mangano November 23, 2019
https://citizentruth.org/stephen-miller-is-even-worse-than-you-thought/
At this writing, 107 Democratic members of the House of Representatives and Mike Coffman, a House Republican, have called for Stephen Miller’s resignation or firing. It’s not just members of Congress either.
In case you were previously unaware, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is soulless human garbage in a suit and shouldn’t have a role anywhere near the President of the United States. But Donald Trump is our president, Miller has been one of the longest-tenured members of his administration, and here we are.
You may not know much about Miller other than that he has a receding hairline and pretty much every photo of him makes him look insufferable. He also can claim the dubious honor of having his own uncle call out his hypocritical douchebaggery in an essay that made the rounds online. His own uncle. Let that sink in for a moment.
Of course, resting bitch face and do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior do not a monster necessarily make. Promoting white nationalist propaganda and conspiracy theories, obsessing over conceptions of “racial identity,” and invoking Hitlerian attitudes on immigration, though, are more conclusive signs.
In a series of E-mails between Miller and Breitbart News editors first leaked to the Southern Law Poverty Center by Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart, the depth of Miller’s affinity for white nationalism is laid bare. SLPC’s Hatewatch blog, in reviewing more than 900 E-mails which span from March 2015 to June 2016, characterizes the subject matter of these messages as “strikingly narrow,” unsympathetic, and biased. Regarding immigration, Miller focused only on limiting if not ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. That’s it.
To this effect, Miller’s correspondence included but was not limited to these delightful exchanges and messages:
Sending McHugh stories from white nationalist websites known for promulgating the “white genocide” theory as well as those emphasizing crimes committed by nonwhites and espousing anti-Muslim views
Recommending Camp of the Saints, a 1973 novel depicting the destruction of Western civilization through mass immigration of nonwhites, as a point of comparison to real-world immigration and refugeeism trends
Pushing stories lamenting the loss of cultural markers like the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments
Embracing restrictive American immigration policies of yesteryear, the likes of which were based on eugenics theory and were referenced favorably in Mein Kampf
Offering original conspiracy theories as to why the “ruinous” history of the Hart-Celler Act wasn’t covered in “elitist” publications
Hatewatch also revisited Miller’s history with prominent white nationalist figures to provide context for these E-mails. Specifically, Miller has connections to Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, a white supremacist website, and Richard Spencer, like, the poster child for white nationalism and the alt-right, from his time at Duke. He and Spencer worked together to organize a debate between Brimelow and journalist/professor Peter Laufer on immigration across our southern border. Miller has sought to refute this relationship, but Spencer has acknowledged their familiarity with one another in passing. Miller’s denial is, as far as the SPLC is concerned, implausible.
As noted, these E-mails are several years old and his time at Duke yet further back. Still, not only are these messages not that far behind us, but Miller’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s immigration policy directives. As Hatewatch has also documented, Miller was one of the strongest advocates for the “zero tolerance” policy which saw a spike in family separations at the border with Mexico, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis there. In addition, alongside Steve Bannon, he was a chief architect of the so-called “travel ban,” which is a Muslim ban in everything but the name.
Again, as the leaked E-mails and SPLC’s additional context hint at, there is a path to these policies in Miller’s past associations. As recently as 2014, he attended an event for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative foundation which traffics in Islamophobia, introducing his then-boss Jeff Sessions as a speaker.
There’s his involvement with the Center for Immigration Studies, too, a anti-immigrant think tank (if you can call it that; the inclusion of the word “think” seems like a stretch) whose very founders subscribed to white nationalist and eugenicist world views and of which misleading/false claims about immigrant crime are a mainstay. Miller was a keynote speaker at a CIS conference in 2015 and has repeatedly cited CIS reports in publicly defending Trump administration policy directives.
As always, one can’t know for sure how many of Miller’s professed beliefs are true to what he believes deep down. After all, he, like any number of modern conservative grifters, may simply be leveraging the prejudices of everyday Americans as a means of bolstering his own profile.
Ultimately, however, as with his current employer, it is immaterial what he truly believes. His words and (mis)deeds shared with the outside world are what matter, and the zeal with which he has pursued bigoted, racist, and xenophobic policies and rhetoric conveys the sense he really means it. Like the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. Stephen Miller walks like a racist and quacks like a racist. I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me.
At this writing, 107 Democratic members of the House of Representatives and Mike Coffman, a House Republican, have called for Stephen Miller’s resignation or firing. It’s not just members of Congress either. Over 50 civil rights groups, including Jewish organizations (Miller is Jewish), have likewise condemned Miller’s bigotry. Predictably, the White House has used these calls for the senior adviser’s head as fodder for charges of anti-Semitism, much as the man himself has tried to use his faith as a shield from criticism in the past.
The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, though. You can be a Jew and still suffer from prejudice. None of us are immune herein regardless of our religious or political beliefs. Besides, the nature of the White House’s defense obscures the intent of the growing resignation demand. This isn’t a bunch of totalitarian leftists trying to exploit the E-mail leak as political weaponry. Miller has given his critics across the political spectrum plenty of ammunition throughout his tenure in the Trump administration. The leak is just the racist, Islamophobic straw that broke the camel’s back.
Does all of this outrage matter, though? Will President Donald Trump turn a deaf ear to the controversy surrounding Miller, more concerned with his own concerns over his ongoing impeachment inquiry? Would he consider keeping Miller in his present role just to signify his stubborn will and/or to “own the libs?”
It’s hard to say. On one hand, some of the worst crooks and liars have seemed to do the best (that is, last the longest) in the Trump administration. Betsy DeVos is still carrying water for Trump as Secretary of Education despite a history of evidenced incompetence and notions she, like Trump, is using her position to enrich herself. Kellyanne Conway continues to be employed despite being a professional author of “alternative facts.” And don’t even get me started about Jared Kushner. If that guy has any personality or foreign policy know-how worth sharing, it is unknown to the rest of Planet Earth.
So, yeah, Stephen Miller is a natural fit for the Trump White House and this bit of public outrage may just be a blip on the radar of his career as a political influencer. Then again, it may not. While several Trump administration officials have resigned, Trump has let the ax fall on occasion. Among the figures identified by CNN as either “fired” or “pushed out” are high-profile names like Jeff Sessions (Attorney General and Miller’s one-time employer), John Bolton (National Security Adviser), John Kelly (White House Chief of Staff), Michael Flynn (also National Security Adviser), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), and Steve Bannon (White House Chief Strategist), not to mention holdovers from the Obama administration like Andrew McCabe (FBI Deputy Director), James Comey (FBI Director), and Sally Yates (Deputy Attorney General). Heck, Anthony Scaramucci only lasted 10 days as White House Communications Director.
When not striking a defiant tone, Trump and Co. have also exhibited a sensitivity to low public support. That zero-tolerance immigration policy championed by Miller which will forever serve as a black mark on an already-checkered American legacy? It has been formally ended, though it has been reported that children continue to be separated by their parents and logistical problems facing the reunification of families remain. Alas, nothing goes smoothly with this administration, especially not when cruelty is on the agenda.
The president has additionally and vocally wavered on Syria, not only with respect to withdrawal of troops but whether to support the Kurds fighting there or to roll out the proverbial red carpet for Erdogan and Turkey after widespread bipartisan condemnation of abandoning our allies there. Trump’s not a smart man, but he can tell when the prevailing sentiment is against him. (Hint: If the chowderheads at Fox & Friends and 2019’s version of Lindsey Graham are disagreeing with you, you know you screwed up.)
All this adds up to the idea Stephen Miller’s job may not be as safe as we might imagine. Whatever the outcome, the pressure for him to be fired or resign should continue as long as he is one of the worst examples of what the Trump White House has to offer and one of the ugliest Americans in recent memory given his personally- and professionally-stated beliefs. As his leaked correspondence with Katie McHugh shows, Miller is even worse than we thought. It’s time to get him out before he does any more damage to the country than he already has.
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