Monday, December 9, 2019
Bernie Sanders Has the Backing of Leftists Worldwide
Ilana Novick
DEC 03, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-is-an-ally-of-leftists-worldwide/
Leftist leaders from the United Kingdom to South America have a clear ally in the U.S. presidential election. In a crowded presidential primary, Bernie Sanders has distinguished himself from centrists like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and even fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren by calling the ouster of Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales a coup, praising Brazil’s former President Luiz InĂ¡cio Lula da Silva and drawing parallels between his campaign and mass protests in Chile, Lebanon and Iraq.
Sanders’ support for international far-left leaders, Politico explains, “are a clear mark of distinction from Warren in a race in which their domestic agendas are viewed as very similar.”
“Bernie is the only candidate who has a comprehensive foreign policy vision to stand up to the growing movement of anti-democratic authoritarianism worldwide and find solidarity with working people around the world who, in many cases, share common needs,” Josh Orton, Sanders’ national policy director, told Politico.
During a Democratic candidate forum hosted by Spanish-language channel Univision, Sanders said, “I think Morales did a very good job in alleviating poverty and giving the indigenous people of Bolivia a voice that they never had before.” Of Morales’ ouster, Sanders added, “When the military intervenes … in my view, that’s called a ‘coup.’ ”
Sanders also said that Lula “has done more than anyone to lower poverty in [the country] and to stand up for workers.” In 2017, he said he was “very impressed” by UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, he saw “a real similarity” between their positions, and that he particularly appreciated Corbyn’s willingness to take on class issues.
Sanders’ commitment to worldwide leftism was apparent even before he announced his second run for president. In one 2017 speech, he called interventions in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America “just a few examples of American foreign policy and interventionism which proved to be counterproductive.”
So far, the world leaders appear to return the affection. Morales called him “hermano Bernie Sanders.” Lula thanked him for the solidarity.
As Truthdig’s Jacob Sugarman has observed about Morales’ ouster, “the response of leading Democrats and presidential hopefuls has been one of almost total silence, even among the party’s putative progressives.” Warren, Sugarman observes, “declined to comment publicly despite the gruesome precedent in the region.” Politico points out that a few days after Sanders’ initial comments, when pressed by The Young Turks on whether Morales’ ouster was a coup, Warren changed her tone and said, it “sure looks like that.”
In general, Warren has attempted an “all things to all people” approach on foreign policy. In a 2018 speech at American University, she described America’s involvement in international politics thusly: “It wasn’t perfect — we weren’t perfect — but our foreign policy benefited a lot of people around the world.”
Read the full Politico story here.
We Need to Talk About Joe Biden
DEC 06, 2019
Carl Beijer
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-need-to-talk-about-joe-biden/
I am a partisan for Bernie Sanders, but six months ago, if you asked me who could beat Trump, I would give you two names: Sanders and Joe Biden. Everyone else has extremely shaky numbers against Trump, and some candidates in particular (Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg) seem personally ill-matched for his combative, reactionary populism. Biden, meanwhile, has polled well against Trump, which is why my argument against him was entirely political: I saw no reason to expect him to lose.
So when I say that I’ve changed my mind, please for the love of God do not read this as a cynical argument for Sanders. I was not saying this six months ago. Even now I don’t have to say it for Sanders, because he doesn’t need it. The case for Sanders is still that he is the best candidate who can beat Trump, and this is true even if worse candidates (like Biden) can also beat Trump.
But I don’t think Biden can. Not anymore.
Biden’s behavior in this primary has been erratic and bizarre. This is not just the goofy, gaffe-prone Biden we remember from the years before his retirement—that Biden was undisciplined, but he was diplomatic and sharp. This Biden is unpredictable, often confused, and occasionally flat-out disturbing. When he speaks he spins his wheels, meanders into bizarre tangents, and stumbles over simple points of fact. When he interacts with people he veers from uncomfortably familiar to wildly aggressive.
Just look at this video. Joe Biden:
Calls a voter a liar
Flirts with calling him fat
Challenges him to feats of strength
Challenges him to an IQ test
And makes fun of his age
This is completely unhinged. More importantly, this will not win votes. People will suspect that Biden is ridiculous, or cruel, or creepy, or dim-witted, or unwell, or simply a bad politician—and some, inevitably, will decide that they just can’t vote for him.
Biden’s behavior is especially damaging in a race against Trump for two reasons:
Biden is going to run as a return to normalcy and respectability from the embarrassing aberration of Trump. Most other candidates (including Hillary Clinton, by the way) could pull this off. The Biden we remember from a decade ago could pull this off. But the Biden we are seeing today is going to leave voters wondering if they are just trading one embarrassing weirdo for another.
Trump is going to say that Biden is senile and unfit for office. He is not going to just imply it or let attack dogs say it like other Republicans might – he is going to say this explicitly and repeatedly and make it a major part of his campaign. He is not going to care that one might say this about him because he has the shamelessness and audacity of a sociopath. He is going to be cruel and bullying about it, and he will have the benefit of low expectations because no one expects anything else from him. This will be especially brutal in debates, because for all of his faults, Trump is still very quick on his feet verbally, and is very conscious of this advantage.
For the first several months of his campaign, Joe Biden did what all front-runners do: he attempted to stay above the fray of the primaries, limiting his public appearances and coasting on his reputation. It is only in recent months, first in debates and then during his forays into early-state retail politics, that he gained significant public scrutiny. That’s why it has been extremely easy to miss the change: we began the year with memories of the old Joe Biden, and have only seen the new one emerge quite gradually.
But I am telling you now, this is not a Joe Biden who can beat Donald Trump. The Democratic establishment sees this, which is why they’ve hedged their bets on so many other candidates. The public sees this, which is why Biden has struggled with donations. And I promise you that the media sees it too, even though they are not saying it out loud. If you want to beat Donald Trump, there is one safe bet—one candidate that we need to rally behind yesterday. And it’s not Joe Biden.
Of Course John Kerry Endorsed Joe Biden
Norman Solomon
DEC 06, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/of-course-john-kerry-endorsed-joe-biden/
On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post sent out a news alert headlined “John Kerry Endorses Biden in 2020 Race, Saying He Has the Character and Experience to Beat Trump, Confront the Nation’s Challenges.” Meanwhile, in Iowa, Joe Biden was also touting his experience. “Look,” Biden said as he angrily lectured an 83-year-old farmer at a campaign stop, “the reason I’m running is because I’ve been around a long time and I know more than most people know, and I can get things done.”
But Kerry and Biden don’t want to acknowledge a historic tie that binds them: Both men were important supporters of the Iraq war, voting for the invasion on the Senate floor and continuing to back the war after it began. Over the years, political winds have shifted — and Biden, like Kerry, has methodically lied about his support for that horrendous war.
The spectacle of Kerry praising Biden as a seasoned leader amounts to one supporter of the Iraq catastrophe attesting to the character and experience of another supporter of the same catastrophe.
The FactCheck.org project at the Annenberg Public Policy Center has pointed out: “Kerry agreed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and should be overthrown, and defended his war authorization vote more than once — including saying in a May 2003 debate that Bush made the ‘right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein.’ . . . Kerry also told reporters in August 2004 that he would have voted for the resolution even if he had known that the U.S. couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.”
As for Biden, he can’t stop lying about his major role in pushing the war authorization through the Senate five months before the March 2003 invasion. During his current presidential campaign, more than 16 years after the invasion, Biden has continued efforts to conceal his pro-war role while refusing to admit that he was instrumental in making possible the massive carnage and devastation in Iraq.
Three months ago, during a debate on ABC, Biden claimed that he voted for the war resolution so it would be possible to get U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq — saying that he wanted “to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.” But that’s totally backwards.
It was big news when the Iraqi government announced on September 16, 2002 — with a letter hand-delivered to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — that it would allow the U.N. weapons inspectors back in “without conditions.” The announcement was a full 25 days before Biden joined with virtually every Republican and most Democratic senators voting to approve the Iraq war resolution.
That resolution on October 11 couldn’t rationally be viewed as a tool for leverage so that the Iraqi government would (in Biden’s words) “allow inspectors to go in.” Several weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had already agreed to allow inspectors to go in.
Biden keeps trying to wriggle out of culpability for the Iraq war. But he won’t be able to elude scrutiny so easily. In a mid-October debate, when Biden boasted that he has a record of getting things done, Bernie Sanders (who I actively support) made this response: “Joe, you talked about working with Republicans and getting things done. But you know what you also got done? And I say this as a good friend. You got the disastrous war in Iraq done.”
Indeed, Biden — as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — presided over one-sided hearings that greased the war-machine wheels to carry the war resolution forward. He was the single most pivotal Senate Democrat for getting the Iraq invasion done. While sometimes grumbling about President George W. Bush’s diplomatic performance along the way, Biden backed the invasion with enthusiasm.
Now, dazzled by Kerry’s endorsement of Biden, mainstream news outlets are calling it a major boost. Media hype is predictable as Kerry teams up with Biden on the campaign trail.
“The Kerry endorsement is among Mr. Biden’s most significant to date,” the New York Times reports. “His support provides Mr. Biden the backing of the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential nominee and a past winner of the Iowa caucuses.” Kerry praised Biden to the skies, declaring that “I believe Joe Biden is the president our country desperately needs right now, not because I’ve known Joe so long, but because I know Joe so well.”
This year, many progressives have become accustomed to rolling their eyes at the mention of Biden’s name. A facile assumption is that his campaign will self-destruct. But that may be wishful thinking.
The former vice president has powerful backers in corporate media, wealthy circles and the Democratic Party establishment. Deceitful and hidebound as he is, Joe Biden stands a good chance of becoming the party’s nominee — unless his actual record, including support for the Iraq war, catches up with him.
Are Democrats Blowing Trump's Impeachment?
DEC 06, 2019
Andrew O'Hehir
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/are-democrats-blowing-trumps-impeachment/
Thursday’s announcement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Democrats are ready to vote articles of impeachment against President Trump — presumably on the narrowest possible terms, after a constrained and foreshortened process — is hardly surprising. It is, however, disheartening. Why they would even consider moving to a floor vote on impeachment without doing whatever is necessary to compel testimony from John Bolton, who is now a private citizen and has always been a blast-hardened neocon Republican, and who is clearly eager to roast Donald Trump’s gizzard on a fork and then eat it, is profoundly baffling.
Or maybe, sadly, it isn’t. So far, this spectacle confirms my sense that the Democratic Party is strikingly ill-prepared for the historical role it ought to play in this moment of small-d democratic crisis. Driven as usual by fear, excessive caution and a morbid fascination with identifying the middle of the middle of the political middle (and then veering slightly to its right), the Democrats are entirely likely to screw things up, whether morally or tactically or politically or all at once. (See also David Masciotra’s excellent Salon essay last weekend.)
Actually, the Democrats have already screwed it up. Let’s be clear that the Republican defense of Trump is completely incoherent, because there is no defense for his actions. But on a generic or abstract level, Republicans have floated halfway-valid concerns about the process of the impeachment inquiry and the motivations behind it — which Democrats have done little to dispel.
Republicans claim that Democrats have been itching for a pretext to impeach Trump since before he took office, and finally landed on one. That’s at least partly true, although the Angry White People Party is too consumed by paranoid delusions to understand the ways in which it is both true and untrue, and how those reflect the deep and wide schism within the Democrats over how to respond to the Trump era. Sure, Rashida Tlaib got elected in Detroit vowing to “impeach the motherf***er,” but a whole lot of other Democrats got elected while not talking about that at all, and explicitly or otherwise espousing the “back to normal” politics that have made Joe Biden the 2020 frontrunner all year long.
In case you haven’t been keeping score, there is no “normal” to go back to, history never flows backward and that whole approach is a dangerous delusion, as we will all learn the hard way soon enough. Biden would be a disastrous nominee and a terrible president, which is not to say there’s an obvious alternative who inspires immense confidence. But for our present purposes all that is a side issue, even if it’s also a yawning abyss beneath our feet.
Speaking of delusions, Republicans’ elaborate conspiracy theories about how Ukraine and the Democrats (with the help of the CIA and FBI) faked the Russian hack of the DNC in order to launch an investigation of the Trump campaign add up to something like a masterful work of literary parody, out of an unwritten Don DeLillo or Colson Whitehead novel. It’s complete nonsense, of course, but it’s admirably creative nonsense, and you might say it gestures at something real, which is that the “Ukraine scandal” refers to deeply buried issues in U.S. foreign policy that are virtually never discussed in public.
Why exactly is the United States so deeply entangled in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, two bordering nations on the other side of the world — not to mention two nations with a long history of deeply fraught relations, none of which has anything to do with us? I don’t claim that there are no explanations, only that no one outside the national-security priesthood of people like John Bolton and Fiona Hill (or Nancy Pelosi, for that matter) really understands them. Furthermore, no one in either political party is particularly eager to debate such questions on TV, so that while the facts of the Trump-Biden-Giuliani-Zelensky morass have more or less come out, the deeper questions beneath them are never asked, let alone answered.
Before you get worked up to tweet at me about how I’m spewing Putin’s talking points or whatever, let me assure you that I don’t exactly know what those would be, but I’m pretty sure they’re crap also. Putin isn’t my problem! What I’m noticing here is Democrats’ eagerness to turn the impeachment inquiry into a display of flag-waving patriotism and unanimous agreement on what is essentially a neocon foreign-policy consensus.
Nothing about the Trump presidency is more deeply perverse (to me, anyway) than the Democratic Party’s abrupt rebranding as woke BFF of the national-security state. I hope people whose villages get droned in Afghanistan or Somalia are comforted by the increasing intersectionality of our WorldCop force. (People reference “Idiocracy” a lot to explain the Trump era, but I would also refer you to Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” in which the fascist dictator of Earth is a black woman.)
How many “liberals” of the so-called resistance even noticed the U.S.-endorsed coup in Venezuela (which failed) or the one in Bolivia (which was a glorious success), let alone raised any questions about them? Former CIA head John Brennan has become a resistance hero, which if you do even minimal research on the guy’s career is darkly hilarious. We have all, apparently, agreed to pretend that Abu Ghraib and the black sites are ancient, irrelevant historical footnotes or events in an alternate timeline.
Here’s a detour; it’s somewhat relevant, I believe. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973, which I watched as a child, pretty much gavel-to-gavel, perched on my dad’s moldering horsehair sofa and riveted to his black-and-white portable TV, which was normally shoved in the corner of his study like an unwelcome guest. (We had been one of those irritating no-TV families until he bought it to watch occasional baseball games and irritate my mother.)
I didn’t know much about the Democratic Party at that time, for one thing. I certainly didn’t grasp that it was going through a period of remarkable internal turmoil — arguably more severe than anything inflicted by Bernie Sanders or “the Squad” — even as it tried to drive a Republican president from office. I definitely didn’t know that Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, the bourbon-voiced Southern gentleman who chaired that committee, was an old-line segregationist, then making an uneasy peace with the civil rights era. Ervin was a creature of that era and not this one, so the comparison may be nonsensical, but almost any white Southern man of his background and inclinations would be a Republican in 2019.
To be fair, my dad probably didn’t grasp those nuances either. He was an Irish immigrant who viewed the Democratic Party with an almost mystical veneration. He certainly supported some Democrats and opposed others, more on emotional grounds than ideological ones: Heartbroken by the death of Bobby Kennedy and the social schism of the Vietnam War, he had refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. But an elected Democrat, for him, was something like a Roman Catholic priest: Whatever his (or, hypothetically, her) personal failings, he carried the authority of an institution that spoke for the people.
Republicans of that time absolutely argued that the Democrats’ Watergate investigation was an illegitimate attempt to undo an election defeat, one of many echoes from that era heard in this one. (And boy howdy, had the Democrats suffered an election defeat in 1972, when George McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, losing to Richard Nixon by almost 18 million votes.) In our household, that argument rang hollow, but then our partisan loyalty was not in question.
It never occurred to me to doubt that Democrats held the moral and political high ground when it came to Watergate (and pretty much everything else), or that they had gravely and soberly embarked on a search for the truth, taking no pleasure in unmasking a low-grade criminal scheme masterminded by the increasingly paranoid occupant of the Oval Office. In the end, of course, as we are repeatedly reminded, Republicans bowed before the irresistible logic of mounting evidence and shifting public opinion.
There were definitely some hard-line true believers who wanted to back Nixon to the end, and who felt their party had capitulated to the treasonous libtards and the New York Times. I think there’s no doubt that the bitter, half-remembered residue of that sentiment fuels Republican intransigence today, when the president they must defend makes Nixon look like Lorenzo de’ Medici.
In any event, a few GOP members even voted for articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, and a bunch more waffled over it. Finally a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative godfather Barry Goldwater, went to the White House to tell Nixon the jig was up: If he didn’t resign, he’d be convicted by the Senate and forced from office, something that, to date, has never happened in American history and probably never will.
Of course there are some striking similarities between that era and this one, but I think the differences — both grand and subtle — are more important. Any number of pundits have lamented that the Republican Party of 2019 isn’t remotely interested in facts or evidence, and will continue to defend Donald Trump up to and beyond a video of the president stuffing bundles of Vladimir Putin’s rubles down his pants. Fair enough: The “moderate,” statesmanlike Republicans of Nixon’s era, who thoughtfully crunched the ice cubes in their bourbon-and-soda at the country club, and who valued continuity and stability over raw power or loyalty to a noxious figurehead, are gone forever.
But the Democrats, as mentioned above, have been changed by history too. What we’re seeing now, to a significant extent, is a resurgence of the factional conflict that had been almost completely suppressed across 40-odd years of compromise, triangulation, recalibration and defeat. The actual left — meaning both the socialist Old Left and the 1960s-radical New Left — had either been purged or reduced to an irrelevant rump faction. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio ran for president a couple of times, made no serious impact and was treated with benign condescension — which was what nearly everyone in the party expected would happen with Bernie Sanders in 2016.
With the growth of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the election of the Squad — and scores or hundreds of allied office-holders at the state and local levels — a broader range of left and center-left positions is represented among Democratic elected officials than at any time since at least the “New Democrat” era of Bill Clinton. Much has been made of how diverse the House Democratic caucus is in terms of color, ethnicity and gender (which is surely important), but the renewed ideological diversity is every bit as striking.
This has clearly raised the temperature of internal dialogue within the party (and not just in the tedious Twitter wars between “stan” armies), which is sometimes visible — as in the public spat between Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this year — and sometimes not. It seems apparent that dynamic is playing out behind the scenes in the impeachment debate. If Tlaib became famous for promising she was going to Washington to impeach Trump, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who took the House Judiciary Committee gavel last January — a CPC member who is ideologically closer to Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez than to Pelosi — was making similar promises, much more discreetly.
Many House progressives, Nadler likely included, wanted to pursue an impeachment of Trump on the widest possible terms: for the corrupt and unethical conduct exhaustively detailed in the Mueller report, for his many violations of the emoluments clause and blatant self-dealing, for his usurpation of congressional appropriations to build his stupid wall, for his campaign-finance violations, for his relentless efforts to undermine or defy the constitutional separation of powers. I mean, we could keep going. That approach would have had the obvious merit of seeking full transparency and exposing a widespread pattern of criminality that would be impossible to explain away, and would not have relied exclusively on anti-Russia hysteria or the contentious “collusion” questions surrounding the 2016 campaign.
It also, without doubt, would have taken a long time, quite possibly as long as the 16-month investigation of Sam Ervin’s Watergate committee. For Pelosi, whose primary goal was and is preserving the House majority in 2020, that looked like an unacceptable risk. No one disputes that she’s good at political arithmetic, but this kind of short-term calculus was precisely not what the moment required. As I’ve argued previously, a younger speaker who wasn’t so concerned with her legacy might have been more willing to roll the dice and stand up for a clear set of values.
Pelosi is eager to protect her supposedly vulnerable House freshmen, and a lot of them are centrists who want no part of the CPC, the Squad or the left. But it’s a mistake to perceive her tactics as purely pragmatic or strategic: Pelosi can call herself a “San Francisco progressive” all she likes, but ideologically she is strongly aligned with the liberal and/or neoliberal tradition that stretches from Hillary Clinton back to Hubert Humphrey, which favors incremental social-justice reforms at home (in fairness, sometimes quite significant reforms) coupled with unquestioned support for American exceptionalism, empire-building and military intervention abroad.
For Pelosi, the swing-district moderates, and especially the former military or intelligence professionals sometimes dubbed the “CIA Democrats” — a group that includes Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Andy Kim, Tom Malinowski and Mikie Sherrill, all of New Jersey — are much closer to the future she imagines for the Democratic Party than are AOC and Rashida Tlaib.
Maybe it doesn’t matter why Pelosi made the deal she made. But when the Ukraine scandal almost literally fell out of the sky in late summer, she seized upon it as the catalyst for a compromise within her caucus. The lefties were eager to impeach Trump, and Pelosi got the hawkish moderate freshmen to go along as long as it was a “clean,” narrowly focused process that was all wrapped up by Christmas and provided an opportunity to grandstand about national security, roll out a bunch of witnesses with impressive credentials of patriotic service and expose Republicans as a bunch of weaselly hypocrites who have taken a vow to love Sluglord Trump more than they love America. (Which is of course accurate.)
But the problem, as I’ve tried to explore in roundabout fashion, is that there’s nothing clean about the Ukraine scandal or this impeachment, which is why we all feel profoundly dissatisfied with it. Essentially, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are patting the left-progressive base on the head and sending it to bed with a hastily constructed impeachment-theater skit, full of high-flown rhetoric and largely drained of meaning.
I’m not excusing the gangsterish conduct of Trump and his minions in any way. But here’s what they did: They tried to pull a murky criminal scheme in a legendarily corrupt country where the U.S. has played a mysterious sponsorship role ever since the Ukrainian revolution and/or coup of 2014 (reports vary!) overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. We aren’t, of course, supposed to think too hard about that background, or about exactly why the U.S. is involved in this particular proxy war on the other side of the world. Why not, I guess? There are loads of others!
By the way, can we stop pretending that whatever Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine was fine and squeaky-clean and totally above board? That’s all a parenthesis, of course, and there’s no evidence that his dad was directly involved, even if the optics were kind of un-good. But Hunter was getting paid a one-percenter salary to do absolutely nothing because he was the vice president’s son. If you are truly committed to constructing that as “well, he didn’t do anything wrong,” you’re either a shameless party hack or you’ve been thoroughly gaslit by end-stage capitalism. Probably both.
Trump’s Ukraine extortion campaign didn’t work. The Democrats’ quick and dirty impeachment won’t work either. Those things are metaphors, but what the hell for? Maybe for all the deeper, darker crimes we don’t know about, and all the hard questions we should ask ourselves but don’t. The impeachment of Donald Trump has just started, and now it’s almost over. Soon it will be just as if it never happened at all.
Andrew O'Hehir
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/are-democrats-blowing-trumps-impeachment/
Thursday’s announcement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Democrats are ready to vote articles of impeachment against President Trump — presumably on the narrowest possible terms, after a constrained and foreshortened process — is hardly surprising. It is, however, disheartening. Why they would even consider moving to a floor vote on impeachment without doing whatever is necessary to compel testimony from John Bolton, who is now a private citizen and has always been a blast-hardened neocon Republican, and who is clearly eager to roast Donald Trump’s gizzard on a fork and then eat it, is profoundly baffling.
Or maybe, sadly, it isn’t. So far, this spectacle confirms my sense that the Democratic Party is strikingly ill-prepared for the historical role it ought to play in this moment of small-d democratic crisis. Driven as usual by fear, excessive caution and a morbid fascination with identifying the middle of the middle of the political middle (and then veering slightly to its right), the Democrats are entirely likely to screw things up, whether morally or tactically or politically or all at once. (See also David Masciotra’s excellent Salon essay last weekend.)
Actually, the Democrats have already screwed it up. Let’s be clear that the Republican defense of Trump is completely incoherent, because there is no defense for his actions. But on a generic or abstract level, Republicans have floated halfway-valid concerns about the process of the impeachment inquiry and the motivations behind it — which Democrats have done little to dispel.
Republicans claim that Democrats have been itching for a pretext to impeach Trump since before he took office, and finally landed on one. That’s at least partly true, although the Angry White People Party is too consumed by paranoid delusions to understand the ways in which it is both true and untrue, and how those reflect the deep and wide schism within the Democrats over how to respond to the Trump era. Sure, Rashida Tlaib got elected in Detroit vowing to “impeach the motherf***er,” but a whole lot of other Democrats got elected while not talking about that at all, and explicitly or otherwise espousing the “back to normal” politics that have made Joe Biden the 2020 frontrunner all year long.
In case you haven’t been keeping score, there is no “normal” to go back to, history never flows backward and that whole approach is a dangerous delusion, as we will all learn the hard way soon enough. Biden would be a disastrous nominee and a terrible president, which is not to say there’s an obvious alternative who inspires immense confidence. But for our present purposes all that is a side issue, even if it’s also a yawning abyss beneath our feet.
Speaking of delusions, Republicans’ elaborate conspiracy theories about how Ukraine and the Democrats (with the help of the CIA and FBI) faked the Russian hack of the DNC in order to launch an investigation of the Trump campaign add up to something like a masterful work of literary parody, out of an unwritten Don DeLillo or Colson Whitehead novel. It’s complete nonsense, of course, but it’s admirably creative nonsense, and you might say it gestures at something real, which is that the “Ukraine scandal” refers to deeply buried issues in U.S. foreign policy that are virtually never discussed in public.
Why exactly is the United States so deeply entangled in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, two bordering nations on the other side of the world — not to mention two nations with a long history of deeply fraught relations, none of which has anything to do with us? I don’t claim that there are no explanations, only that no one outside the national-security priesthood of people like John Bolton and Fiona Hill (or Nancy Pelosi, for that matter) really understands them. Furthermore, no one in either political party is particularly eager to debate such questions on TV, so that while the facts of the Trump-Biden-Giuliani-Zelensky morass have more or less come out, the deeper questions beneath them are never asked, let alone answered.
Before you get worked up to tweet at me about how I’m spewing Putin’s talking points or whatever, let me assure you that I don’t exactly know what those would be, but I’m pretty sure they’re crap also. Putin isn’t my problem! What I’m noticing here is Democrats’ eagerness to turn the impeachment inquiry into a display of flag-waving patriotism and unanimous agreement on what is essentially a neocon foreign-policy consensus.
Nothing about the Trump presidency is more deeply perverse (to me, anyway) than the Democratic Party’s abrupt rebranding as woke BFF of the national-security state. I hope people whose villages get droned in Afghanistan or Somalia are comforted by the increasing intersectionality of our WorldCop force. (People reference “Idiocracy” a lot to explain the Trump era, but I would also refer you to Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” in which the fascist dictator of Earth is a black woman.)
How many “liberals” of the so-called resistance even noticed the U.S.-endorsed coup in Venezuela (which failed) or the one in Bolivia (which was a glorious success), let alone raised any questions about them? Former CIA head John Brennan has become a resistance hero, which if you do even minimal research on the guy’s career is darkly hilarious. We have all, apparently, agreed to pretend that Abu Ghraib and the black sites are ancient, irrelevant historical footnotes or events in an alternate timeline.
Here’s a detour; it’s somewhat relevant, I believe. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973, which I watched as a child, pretty much gavel-to-gavel, perched on my dad’s moldering horsehair sofa and riveted to his black-and-white portable TV, which was normally shoved in the corner of his study like an unwelcome guest. (We had been one of those irritating no-TV families until he bought it to watch occasional baseball games and irritate my mother.)
I didn’t know much about the Democratic Party at that time, for one thing. I certainly didn’t grasp that it was going through a period of remarkable internal turmoil — arguably more severe than anything inflicted by Bernie Sanders or “the Squad” — even as it tried to drive a Republican president from office. I definitely didn’t know that Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, the bourbon-voiced Southern gentleman who chaired that committee, was an old-line segregationist, then making an uneasy peace with the civil rights era. Ervin was a creature of that era and not this one, so the comparison may be nonsensical, but almost any white Southern man of his background and inclinations would be a Republican in 2019.
To be fair, my dad probably didn’t grasp those nuances either. He was an Irish immigrant who viewed the Democratic Party with an almost mystical veneration. He certainly supported some Democrats and opposed others, more on emotional grounds than ideological ones: Heartbroken by the death of Bobby Kennedy and the social schism of the Vietnam War, he had refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. But an elected Democrat, for him, was something like a Roman Catholic priest: Whatever his (or, hypothetically, her) personal failings, he carried the authority of an institution that spoke for the people.
Republicans of that time absolutely argued that the Democrats’ Watergate investigation was an illegitimate attempt to undo an election defeat, one of many echoes from that era heard in this one. (And boy howdy, had the Democrats suffered an election defeat in 1972, when George McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, losing to Richard Nixon by almost 18 million votes.) In our household, that argument rang hollow, but then our partisan loyalty was not in question.
It never occurred to me to doubt that Democrats held the moral and political high ground when it came to Watergate (and pretty much everything else), or that they had gravely and soberly embarked on a search for the truth, taking no pleasure in unmasking a low-grade criminal scheme masterminded by the increasingly paranoid occupant of the Oval Office. In the end, of course, as we are repeatedly reminded, Republicans bowed before the irresistible logic of mounting evidence and shifting public opinion.
There were definitely some hard-line true believers who wanted to back Nixon to the end, and who felt their party had capitulated to the treasonous libtards and the New York Times. I think there’s no doubt that the bitter, half-remembered residue of that sentiment fuels Republican intransigence today, when the president they must defend makes Nixon look like Lorenzo de’ Medici.
In any event, a few GOP members even voted for articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, and a bunch more waffled over it. Finally a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative godfather Barry Goldwater, went to the White House to tell Nixon the jig was up: If he didn’t resign, he’d be convicted by the Senate and forced from office, something that, to date, has never happened in American history and probably never will.
Of course there are some striking similarities between that era and this one, but I think the differences — both grand and subtle — are more important. Any number of pundits have lamented that the Republican Party of 2019 isn’t remotely interested in facts or evidence, and will continue to defend Donald Trump up to and beyond a video of the president stuffing bundles of Vladimir Putin’s rubles down his pants. Fair enough: The “moderate,” statesmanlike Republicans of Nixon’s era, who thoughtfully crunched the ice cubes in their bourbon-and-soda at the country club, and who valued continuity and stability over raw power or loyalty to a noxious figurehead, are gone forever.
But the Democrats, as mentioned above, have been changed by history too. What we’re seeing now, to a significant extent, is a resurgence of the factional conflict that had been almost completely suppressed across 40-odd years of compromise, triangulation, recalibration and defeat. The actual left — meaning both the socialist Old Left and the 1960s-radical New Left — had either been purged or reduced to an irrelevant rump faction. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio ran for president a couple of times, made no serious impact and was treated with benign condescension — which was what nearly everyone in the party expected would happen with Bernie Sanders in 2016.
With the growth of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the election of the Squad — and scores or hundreds of allied office-holders at the state and local levels — a broader range of left and center-left positions is represented among Democratic elected officials than at any time since at least the “New Democrat” era of Bill Clinton. Much has been made of how diverse the House Democratic caucus is in terms of color, ethnicity and gender (which is surely important), but the renewed ideological diversity is every bit as striking.
This has clearly raised the temperature of internal dialogue within the party (and not just in the tedious Twitter wars between “stan” armies), which is sometimes visible — as in the public spat between Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this year — and sometimes not. It seems apparent that dynamic is playing out behind the scenes in the impeachment debate. If Tlaib became famous for promising she was going to Washington to impeach Trump, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who took the House Judiciary Committee gavel last January — a CPC member who is ideologically closer to Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez than to Pelosi — was making similar promises, much more discreetly.
Many House progressives, Nadler likely included, wanted to pursue an impeachment of Trump on the widest possible terms: for the corrupt and unethical conduct exhaustively detailed in the Mueller report, for his many violations of the emoluments clause and blatant self-dealing, for his usurpation of congressional appropriations to build his stupid wall, for his campaign-finance violations, for his relentless efforts to undermine or defy the constitutional separation of powers. I mean, we could keep going. That approach would have had the obvious merit of seeking full transparency and exposing a widespread pattern of criminality that would be impossible to explain away, and would not have relied exclusively on anti-Russia hysteria or the contentious “collusion” questions surrounding the 2016 campaign.
It also, without doubt, would have taken a long time, quite possibly as long as the 16-month investigation of Sam Ervin’s Watergate committee. For Pelosi, whose primary goal was and is preserving the House majority in 2020, that looked like an unacceptable risk. No one disputes that she’s good at political arithmetic, but this kind of short-term calculus was precisely not what the moment required. As I’ve argued previously, a younger speaker who wasn’t so concerned with her legacy might have been more willing to roll the dice and stand up for a clear set of values.
Pelosi is eager to protect her supposedly vulnerable House freshmen, and a lot of them are centrists who want no part of the CPC, the Squad or the left. But it’s a mistake to perceive her tactics as purely pragmatic or strategic: Pelosi can call herself a “San Francisco progressive” all she likes, but ideologically she is strongly aligned with the liberal and/or neoliberal tradition that stretches from Hillary Clinton back to Hubert Humphrey, which favors incremental social-justice reforms at home (in fairness, sometimes quite significant reforms) coupled with unquestioned support for American exceptionalism, empire-building and military intervention abroad.
For Pelosi, the swing-district moderates, and especially the former military or intelligence professionals sometimes dubbed the “CIA Democrats” — a group that includes Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Andy Kim, Tom Malinowski and Mikie Sherrill, all of New Jersey — are much closer to the future she imagines for the Democratic Party than are AOC and Rashida Tlaib.
Maybe it doesn’t matter why Pelosi made the deal she made. But when the Ukraine scandal almost literally fell out of the sky in late summer, she seized upon it as the catalyst for a compromise within her caucus. The lefties were eager to impeach Trump, and Pelosi got the hawkish moderate freshmen to go along as long as it was a “clean,” narrowly focused process that was all wrapped up by Christmas and provided an opportunity to grandstand about national security, roll out a bunch of witnesses with impressive credentials of patriotic service and expose Republicans as a bunch of weaselly hypocrites who have taken a vow to love Sluglord Trump more than they love America. (Which is of course accurate.)
But the problem, as I’ve tried to explore in roundabout fashion, is that there’s nothing clean about the Ukraine scandal or this impeachment, which is why we all feel profoundly dissatisfied with it. Essentially, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are patting the left-progressive base on the head and sending it to bed with a hastily constructed impeachment-theater skit, full of high-flown rhetoric and largely drained of meaning.
I’m not excusing the gangsterish conduct of Trump and his minions in any way. But here’s what they did: They tried to pull a murky criminal scheme in a legendarily corrupt country where the U.S. has played a mysterious sponsorship role ever since the Ukrainian revolution and/or coup of 2014 (reports vary!) overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. We aren’t, of course, supposed to think too hard about that background, or about exactly why the U.S. is involved in this particular proxy war on the other side of the world. Why not, I guess? There are loads of others!
By the way, can we stop pretending that whatever Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine was fine and squeaky-clean and totally above board? That’s all a parenthesis, of course, and there’s no evidence that his dad was directly involved, even if the optics were kind of un-good. But Hunter was getting paid a one-percenter salary to do absolutely nothing because he was the vice president’s son. If you are truly committed to constructing that as “well, he didn’t do anything wrong,” you’re either a shameless party hack or you’ve been thoroughly gaslit by end-stage capitalism. Probably both.
Trump’s Ukraine extortion campaign didn’t work. The Democrats’ quick and dirty impeachment won’t work either. Those things are metaphors, but what the hell for? Maybe for all the deeper, darker crimes we don’t know about, and all the hard questions we should ask ourselves but don’t. The impeachment of Donald Trump has just started, and now it’s almost over. Soon it will be just as if it never happened at all.
Pete Buttigieg Faces New Scrutiny for McKinsey Past
Julia Conley / Common Dreams
DEC 06, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/pete-buttigieg-faces-new-scrutiny-for-mckinsey-past/
Days after reports surfaced about the global consulting firm McKinsey’s work advising the Trump administration on immigration policy, calls are growing louder for South Bend, Indiana mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to disclose details about the work he did for the company.
Political observers took notice Thursday evening when the New York Times editorial board joined ethics watchdogs in demanding that Buttigieg release the information, saying his claims that he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) create a situation that is “untenable.”
“Mr. Buttigieg owes voters a more complete account of his time at the company. Voters seeking an alternative to Mr. Trump should demand that candidates not only reject Mr. Trump’s positions, but also his behavior—including his refusal to share information about his health and his business dealings,” the editors wrote. “This standard requires Mr. Buttigieg to talk about his time at McKinsey.”
Buttigieg worked for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010 and claims he worked in a junior position. He wrote briefly about his time at the company in his memoir, “Shortest Way Home,” acknowledging consulting work he did in Iraq and Afghanistan and in retail and corporate sectors.
The company, denounced by one critic as a “corporate greed machine,” has advised authoritarian regimes, including Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, state-owned companies in China, and the autocratic government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In 2017 McKinsey consultants advised President Donald Trump’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency on “detention savings opportunities,” recommending ways to reduce the amount of food and medical care immigrants were given while being detained by the U.S. government. The proposed cuts made “some career ICE workers uncomfortable” with the effects they would have on immigrants’ wellbeing, the New York Times and ProPublica reported.
Although Buttigieg no longer worked for McKinsey when the company advised CBP and ICE, Jeff Hauser of the government watchdog Revolving Door Project told the Huffington Post that Buttigieg must confirm whether his work was guided by the same worldview that led the company to recommend letting asylum-seekers go hungry to save money.
“We have plenty of experience that shows us how seeing the whole world in dollars and cents can be pretty harmful to vulnerable and poor people,” Hauser said. “Is that Pete Buttigieg’s approach to governance? If he can show he rebelled against that approach, that would be material to people, too.”
Hauser was among the critics who scoffed this week at the notion that McKinsey would take legal action against a high-profile presidential candidate who counts McKinsey employees among his top donors:
The NDA is about as legitimate an excuse as Donald Trump claiming an IRS audit is the reason he can’t release his tax returns to the public. There is no scenario whereby McKinsey would sue Pete Buttigieg, a rising political star and possible president of the United States, for violating a nondisclosure agreement.
The political risk is not that his former employer, a multibillion-dollar corporate entity that promotes fraud across the globe, will be mad at him. It’s what he would have to disclose.
On social media, journalist Irin Carmon agreed.
Irin Carmon
✔@irin
In the past 2-3 years, scores of women and men have broken their NDAs at great personal risk to inform the public interest. And anyway, what are the odds McKinsey goes after Buttigieg for disclosing client names and projects, in this political environment?
1,443
10:49 PM - Dec 5, 2019
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“Looking afraid of a company that advised cutting food and medical services to immigrant detainees is a great look for a Democratic primary,” Carmon added sarcastically.
On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) demanded transparency from her opponent in the Democratic presidential primary, noting that aside from the secrecy surrounding Buttigieg’s work for McKinsey, the mayor should “open up the doors” to his private high-dollar fundraisers and let the media and the public know the names of his bundlers—major donors who solicit large contributions from others.
“Those doors shouldn’t be closed, and no one should be left to wonder what kind of promises are being made to the people that then pony up big bucks to be in the room,” Warren said.
Buttigieg’s campaign attempted to turn Warren’s comments back on her, with communications advisor Lis Smith calling on the senator to release her tax returns from her time as a corporate lawyer.
But unlike Buttigieg, Slate journalist Jordan Weissman wrote, Warren has a long, public record of fighting powerful corporations on behalf of working people. She has also released a list of clients she worked for in the private sector.
“This whataboutism might be more effective if Warren hadn’t gotten into politics by fighting the bankruptcy bill and creating the CFPB,” tweeted Weissman.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said Buttigieg’s refusal to release information about his time at McKinsey could soon draw comparisons to President Donald Trump’s failure to disclose his tax returns.
“It’s a real fear of ours that Democrats and future Republican candidates for president will say, ‘Well, Trump got away with it, so we are going to, too,'” CREW communications director Jordan Libowitz told the Huffington Post. “Part of that is not letting Trump get away with it, part of that is holding Democrats to the same standard.”
Is capitalism past its expiry date? Munk Debate
Is capitalism past its expiry date? Munk Debate (K, Vanden Heuvel & Y. Varoufakis vs A. Brooks & D. Brooks)
Yanis Varoufakis
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2019/12/08/is-capitalism-past-its-expiry-date-munk-debate-k-vanden-heuvel-y-varoufakis-vs-a-brooks-d-brooks/
The capitalist system is broken. It's time to try something different.
There is a growing belief in western societies that the current capitalist system no longer works for average people. Economic inequality is rampant. Life expectancy is falling. The environment is being destroyed for profits. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. For capitalism’s critics, the answer is a top to bottom reform of the “free market” along more socialist and democratic lines. For proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of economic and social progress, full stop. Not only has capitalism made all of us materially better off, its ideals are responsible for everything from women’s rights to a cleaner environment to greater political freedoms. The answer to society's current ills is more capitalism, more economic freedom, and more free markets.
THE DEBATERS
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation, a leading American source of progressive politics and culture, and served as the magazine’s editor from 1995 to 2019. She is a frequent TV news commentator on U.S. and international politics, and she writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, bestselling author and a Washington Post columnist. He left college age 19 to work professionally as a classical musician. In his late 20s, he earned a bachelor of arts in economics, mathematics and modern languages by correspondence. He got a master’s degree in economics at Florida Atlantic University and a PhD in public policy at the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica.
David Brooks is an American cultural and political commentator who was born in Canada when his father was earning his PhD at the University of Toronto. He is a bi-weekly columnist for The New York Times’ op-ed pages and a regular analyst on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered
For the site of the Munk Debates click here
https://munkdebates.com/debates/capitalism
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2019/12/08/is-capitalism-past-its-expiry-date-munk-debate-k-vanden-heuvel-y-varoufakis-vs-a-brooks-d-brooks/
The capitalist system is broken. It's time to try something different.
There is a growing belief in western societies that the current capitalist system no longer works for average people. Economic inequality is rampant. Life expectancy is falling. The environment is being destroyed for profits. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. For capitalism’s critics, the answer is a top to bottom reform of the “free market” along more socialist and democratic lines. For proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of economic and social progress, full stop. Not only has capitalism made all of us materially better off, its ideals are responsible for everything from women’s rights to a cleaner environment to greater political freedoms. The answer to society's current ills is more capitalism, more economic freedom, and more free markets.
THE DEBATERS
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation, a leading American source of progressive politics and culture, and served as the magazine’s editor from 1995 to 2019. She is a frequent TV news commentator on U.S. and international politics, and she writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, bestselling author and a Washington Post columnist. He left college age 19 to work professionally as a classical musician. In his late 20s, he earned a bachelor of arts in economics, mathematics and modern languages by correspondence. He got a master’s degree in economics at Florida Atlantic University and a PhD in public policy at the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica.
David Brooks is an American cultural and political commentator who was born in Canada when his father was earning his PhD at the University of Toronto. He is a bi-weekly columnist for The New York Times’ op-ed pages and a regular analyst on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered
For the site of the Munk Debates click here
https://munkdebates.com/debates/capitalism
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