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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chris-matthews-has-sanders-derangement-syndrome/
Juan Cole
I was watching MSNBC Saturday afternoon during the voting at the Nevada caucuses. I did a little channel surfing, checking in at CNN and at the real news on Al Jazeera. But mostly I had MSNBC on. And I nearly fell off my chair when I saw Chris Matthews compare Bernie Sanders’ victory to the Nazi invasion of France. He said he had been reading about WW II, and told the anecdote of a French general calling Churchill as the war began to tell him “it is over.” He said Churchill asked him how it could be over if it just began. The officer, Matthews smirked, insisted. “It is over.”
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It was a tasteless remark that has led to calls for Matthews’ ouster.
It is not entirely clear to me who the various players in this analogy are supposed to be. Some have assumed that Matthews was comparing Sanders to the invading Nazis, with the French officer corps being the corporate Democrats. But I actually think what Matthews probably meant was that Bernie’s progressive wing of the Democratic Party was a) assured of winning the nomination for Democratic standard-bearer in the 2020 presidential race, and b) was doomed to fall before Trump even as France fell to Hitler.
I think Matthews is just wrong about Sanders not being able to beat Trump. I think Bernie will steal back the white working class from Trump, who is widely and deeply hated and has all the hallmarks of a one-term president. During the impeachment proceedings 57% of Americans said they wanted him removed. Bernie polls well against Trump in swing states like Michigan, and Matthews is discounting the Latino and youth votes and underestimating the hatred white women (the backbone of the Republican Party) have developed for Trump.
In any case, the temptation to make analogies to World War II should usually be resisted.
The anecdote was the most egregious thing a cable news pundit has said about Sen. Sanders. In other respects it wasn’t that unusual. MSNBC commentators notoriously lean toward Joe Biden and the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, and have a weird Sanders derangement syndrome. (Chris Hayes is an exception.)
Matthews himself raised the specter that if “socialists” had won the Cold War, there would have been “executions in Central Park” and that Matthews himself would have been one of the ones executed. He thus equated a Sanders victory to the Soviet Gulag.
The attempt to erase the difference between Stalinism and social democracy or democratic socialism has been typical of corporate ideology in the United States and was deployed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whom Matthews increasingly resembles. I remember the Cold War, too, and remember American fascism railing against Medicare as “socialized medicine” and even against Social Security.
Bernie Sanders is not actually a socialist. Socialism involves the public ownership and control of the means of production. Bernie is just advocating managed capitalism on the Finnish model. Finland is the happiest country in the world. The U.S. is 19th according to the criteria used by Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations. Bernie is also advocating a graduated income tax of the sort Republican President Dwight Eisenhower supported in the 1950s. Matthews is suggesting that Eisenhower was a Communist? I mean, what world does he live in.
The fact is that one of the ways the US and the West won the Cold War was to adopt key socialist programs so as to fend off more extensive working class demands. The alternative to a France with universal health care and strong unions and a social safety net was very likely a Stalinist France.
During Matthews’ political life, the finance sector went from being 10% of the US economy in 1970 to 20% today. This sector does not produce anything of value and it certainly does not produce twice what it did 50 years ago. The top 1% now takes home 20% of the US annual income.
Even Brookings admits, “Before 2010, the middle class owned more wealth than the top one percent. Since 1995, the share of wealth held by the middle class has steadily declined, while the top one percent’s share has steadily increased.”
Now, it adds, “The top 20 percent held 77 percent of total household wealth in 2016, more than triple what the middle class held, defined as the middle 60 percent of the usual income distribution”
While in my and Matthews’ generation, the average income of the average worker increased in real terms from 1945 to 1970, so that ordinary folk got better off, since 1970 the average wage of the average worker has been nearly flat in real terms. Since the US is much wealthier now, somebody siphoned off all that extra wealth and hoarded it for themselves during the past 50 years.
Such an unbalanced economy is bad for growth, since extremes in the distribution of wealth reduce economic demand.
Neoliberal policies (e.g., pretending that “the market” will educate us), have destroyed public higher education and forced enormous numbers of young people into heavy debt.
On top of all that, our corporate elite hid the climate crisis from us for the last 50 years so that they could make a couple extra trillion by wrecking the planet, harming average Americans by destroying forests, shores, fisheries, and other sources of wealth.
Matthews either does not care about these problems or he doesn’t care enough to do anything about them. He is looking out for the people who make $5 million a year and up (he is a small fish in that world).
Our problem today isn’t Communism, which exercises Matthews and which mostly collapsed thirty years ago. Our problem today is capitalism on steroids. Matthews is one of those who takes the steroids and likes them.
Corporate media will not tell you what America’s real problems are, because they are the class that benefits from all the dysfunctional characteristics of our Late Capitalism. Although MSNBC has cultivated the image of an anti-Fox, as sort of Democrat TV, it is part of a corporate media conglomerate and apart from a couple of anchors isn’t actually very progressive. It is part of NBCUniversal, which in turn is owned by Comcast. Trump was promoted by NBC as the star of “The Apprentice” despite allegations of his abuse of women around him, and NBC has protected him by carefully sequestering evidence of his misbehavior.
In other words, the company has coddled a psychopath and helped him into office. In summer-fall of 2016, Chris Matthews regularly turned his show, “Hardball,” over to broadcasting unhinged Trump rallies at 7:30 p.m., and it seems a little unlikely that there wasn’t some collusion there. Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts did a happy dance at Trump’s destruction of net neutrality and his ruinous 2017 tax cut on the super-wealthy (which, no, has not benefited ordinary Americans, and instead will cost them trillions). Roberts is an old golf buddy of Trump’s.
Matthews earns $5 million a year for pontificating on TV and serves Trump’s golfing buddies.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/vendors-push-risky-new-voting-machines-over-safe-paper-ballots/
FRANK BAJAK / The Associated Press
In the rush to replace insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines after Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, state and local officials have scrambled to acquire more trustworthy equipment for this year’s election, when U.S. intelligence agencies fear even worse problems.
But instead of choosing simple, hand-marked paper ballots that are most resistant to tampering because paper cannot be hacked, many are opting for pricier technology that computer security experts consider almost as risky as earlier discredited electronic systems.
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Called ballot-marking devices, the machines have touchscreens for registering voter choice. Unlike touchscreen-only machines, they print out paper records that are scanned by optical readers. South Carolina voters will use them in Saturday’s primary.
The most pricey solution available, they are at least twice as expensive as the hand-marked paper ballot option. They have been vigorously promoted by the three voting equipment vendors that control 88 percent of the U.S. market.
Some of the most popular ballot-marking machines, made by industry leaders Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot decipher. That’s a problem, researchers say: Voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices. Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate.
Even on machines that do not use bar codes, voters may not notice if a hack or programming error mangled their choices. A University of Michigan study determined that only 7 percent of participants in a mock election notified poll workers when the names on their printed receipts did not match the candidates they voted for.
ES&S rejects those scenarios. Spokeswoman Katina Granger said the company’s ballot-marking machines’ accuracy and security “have been proven through thousands of hours of testing and tens of thousands of successful elections.” Dominion declined to comment for this story.
Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. voters will be using ballot-marking machines this year, compared with less than 2% in 2018, according to Verified Voting, which tracks voting technology.
Pivotal counties in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina have bought ballot-marking machines. So have counties in much of Texas, as well as California’s Los Angeles County and all of Georgia, Delaware and South Carolina. The machines’ certification has often been streamlined in the rush to get machines in place for presidential primaries.
Ballot-marking devices were not conceived as primary vote-casting tools but as accessible options for people with disabilities.
Critics see them as vulnerable to hacking. At last year’s DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas, it took tinkerers at the ‘Voting Village’ not even eight hours to hack two older ballot-marking devices.
Tampering aside, some of the newer ballot-marking machines have stumbled badly in actual votes. That happened most spectacularly in November when ES&S’s top-of-the-line ExpressVote XL debuted in a Pennsylvania county.
Even without technical troubles, the new machines can lead to longer lines, potentially reducing turnout. Voters need more time to cast ballots and the machine’s high costs have prompted election officials to limit how many they purchase.
“There are a huge number of reasons to reject today’s ballot-marking devices — except for limited use as assistive devices for those unable to mark a paper ballot themselves,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist who co-authored the voting technology history “Broken Ballots.” ‘
But election officials see ballot-marking devices as improvements over paperless touchscreens, which were used by 27 percent of voters in 2018. They like them because the touchscreens are familiar to voters, looking and feeling like what they have been using for nearly two decades, and officials can use one voting method for everyone.
Michael Anderson, elections director for Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County, said “voters want it.” The county offers voters both machine- and hand-marked ballots.
“When we give them a paper ballot, the very first thing they say to us is, ‘We’re going back in time,’” he said.
New York State election commission co-chair Douglas Kellner was an early critic of paperless electronic voting machines. But he is confident in a ballot-marking device, the ImageCast Evolution by Dominion, certified for use in his state. He said safeguards built into the machines and security protocols make a hack of the Image Evolution “extraordinarily unlikely.”
But Jones is among experts who think today’s ballot-marking devices undermine the very idea of retaining a paper record that can be used in audits and recounts. It’s an idea supported by a 2018 National Academies of Sciences report that favors hand-marked paper ballots tallied by optical scanners. Some 70 percent of U.S. voters used them in the past two presidential elections and will do so again in November.
One state, Colorado, is banning bar codes from ballot-marking voting machines beginning in 2021.
Election administrators who reject hand-marked paper ballots as antiquated, inconvenient or unwieldy have few options beyond ballot-marking devices. That’s because the $300 million voting equipment and services industry is so insular and entrenched.
The industry faces virtually no federal regulation even though election technology was designated critical infrastructure in January 2017. Federal certification guidelines for voting machine design are 15 years old and voluntary. The leading vendors have resisted publicly disclosing third-party penetration testing of their systems.
”It’s a self-reinforcing system that keeps it frozen in a place in the past,” said Eddie Perez, a former product development director for Hart InterCivic, the No. 3 voting equipment company, now with the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that promotes reliable voting solutions. “They don’t want to make any changes in the equipment unless they absolutely have to.”
The Republican-controlled Senate has refused to take up bills that would, among other things, require a voter-verifiable paper trail and require bulletproof postelection audits. Republicans say the federal government should not impinge on states’ authority to oversee elections.
Northampton County, on Pennsylvania’s eastern edge, mirrored the state’s choice in 2016 by voting for Donald Trump after twice choosing Barack Obama. Last Election Day, it became ground zero in the debate over ballot-marking devices.
The county’s new ExpressVote XLs failed doubly.
First, a programming misconfiguration prevented votes cast for one of three candidates in a judge’s race from registering in the bar codes used to count the vote. Only absentee ballot votes registered for the candidate, said the county executive, Lamont McClure. The other problem was miscalibrated touchscreens, which can “flip” votes or simply make it difficult to vote for one’s desired candidate due to faulty screen alignment. They were on about one-third of the county’s 320 machines, which cost taxpayers $8,250 each.
One poll judge called the touch screens “garbage.” Some voters, in emails obtained by the AP in a public records request, said their votes were assigned to the wrong candidates. Others worried about long lines in future elections.
Voters require triple the time on average to navigate ES&S ballot-marking machines compared to filling out hand-marked ballots and running them through scanners, according to state certification documents.
ES&S said its employees had flubbed the programming and failed to perform adequate preelection testing of the machines or adequately train election workers, which would have caught the errors.
Election commissioners were livid, but unable to return the machines for a refund because they are appointees.
“I feel like I’ve been played,” commissioner Maudeania Hornik said at a December meeting with ES&S representatives. She later told the AP she had voted for the devices believing they would be more convenient than hand-marked paper ballots, especially for seniors.
“What we worry is, what happens the next time if there’s a programming bug — or a hack or whatever — and it’s done in a way that’s not obvious?” said Daniel Lopresti, a commissioner and Lehigh University computer scientist.
ES&S election equipment has failed elsewhere. Flawed software in ballot-marking devices delayed the vote count by 13 hours in Kansas’ largest county during the August 2018 gubernatorial primary. Another Johnson County, this one in Indiana, scrapped the company’s computerized voter check-in system after Election Day errors that same year caused long lines.
“I don’t know that we’ve ever seen an election computer — a voting computer — whose software was done to a high standard,” said Duncan Buell, a University of South Carolina computer scientist who has found errors in results produced by ES&S electronic voting machines.
Voting integrity activists have sued, seeking to prevent the further use in Pennsylvania of the ExpressVote XL. Grassroots organizations including Common Cause are fighting to prevent their certification in New York State.
ES&S defends the machine. In a Dec. 12 filing in a Pennsylvania lawsuit, company executive Dean Baumer said the ExpressVote XL had never been compromised and said breaches of the machine “are a practical impossibility.”
ES&S lobbied hard in Pennsylvania for the ExpressVote XL, though not always legally.
After ES&S won a $29 million contract in Philadelphia last year in a hasty procurement, that city’s controller did some digging. She determined that ES&S’ vice president of finance had failed to disclose, in a mandatory campaign contribution form, activities of consultants who spent more than $400,000, including making campaign contributions to two commissioners involved in awarding the contract. ES&S agreed to pay a record $2.9 million penalty as a result. It said the executive’s failure to disclose was “inadvertent.”
The Philadelphia episode contradicts claims by ES&S officials, including by CEO Tom Burt in Jan. 8 testimony to a congressional committee, that the company does not make campaign contributions.
Public records show ES&S contributed $25,000 from 2014-2016 to the Republican State Leadership Committee which seeks GOP control of state legislatures.
ES&S has also paid for trips to Las Vegas of an “advisory board” of top elections officials, including from South Carolina, New York City and Dallas County, Texas, according to records shared with the AP from a Freedom of Information request.
Philadelphia paid more than twice as much for its ExpressVote XL machines per voter ($27) as what Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, disbursed ($12) for hand-marked paper ballots and scanners — plus ballot-markers for the disabled — from the same vendor.
Allegheny County’s elections board rejected ballot-marking devices as too risky for all but disabled voters. Its vice chair, state judge Kathryn Hens-Greco, regretted during a September hearing having to award ES&S the county’s business at all given its behavior in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
But no other vendor offered a hand-marked option with enough ballot-configuration flexibility for the county’s 130 municipalities.
While cybersecurity risks can’t be eliminated, Hens-Greco said, the county would at least have “the ability to recover” from any mischief: a paper trail of hand-marked ballots.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ahead-of-extradition-hearing-hundreds-march-for-assange-in-london/
JILL LAWLESS / The Associated Press
LONDON—Hundreds of supporters of Julian Assange marched through London on Saturday to pressure the U.K. government into refusing to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face spying charges.
Famous Britons, including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood joined the crowd protesting the U.S. espionage charges against the founder of the secret-spilling website. An extradition hearing for Assange is due to begin in a London court on Monday.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told a rally outside Parliament that the prosecution of Assange represented “a dark force against (those) who want justice, transparency and truth.”
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U.S. prosecutors have charged the 48-year-old Australian computer expert with espionage over WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.
American authorities say Assange conspired with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange argues he acted as a journalist and is therefore entitled to First Amendment protection. He also maintains the documents exposed wrongdoing and protected many people.
Civil liberties groups and journalism organizations, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, have urged the U.S. to drop the charges, saying they set a chilling precedent for freedom of the press.
More than 40 jurists from the U.K., the U.S., France and other countries published a letter Saturday asking the British government to reject the extradition request. They accused the U.S. of “extra-territorial overreach” in seeking to prosecute an Australian who was based in the U.K.
Assange is currently incarcerated in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, having previously spent seven years inside the Embassy of Ecuador.
He holed up in the South American country’s U.K. diplomatic mission in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden to face questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations. That case has since been dropped.
Assange was evicted from the embassy in April 2019 and arrested by British police for jumping bail seven years earlier.
Assange’s legal team argues that the case against him is politically motivated. His lawyers said they would present evidence they claim shows that Assange was offered a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.
Emails embarrassing for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked before being published by WikiLeaks in 2016.
Assange’s lawyers say the offer was made in August 2017 by then-Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who claimed to be acting on behalf of President Donald Trump.
The White House called the claim “a complete fabrication and a total lie.”
Rohrabacher said in a statement that he told Assange “that if he could provide me information and evidence about who actually gave him the DNC emails, I would then call on President Trump to pardon him. At no time did I offer a deal made by the President, nor did I say I was representing the President.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/msnbc-melts-down-over-sanders-frontrunner-status/
Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
As it became clear Saturday evening that Sen. Bernie Sanders would run away with the Nevada caucus and secure his position as the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary, MSNBC anchors and contributors lashed out at the senator and his supporters in bizarre and sometimes hysterical fashion, descending into what one observer could only describe as a “full-blown freakout.”
Earlier in the Democratic primary process, the Comcast-owned network was notorious for ignoring the senator from Vermont, and covering him negatively when it covered him at all.
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But Saturday marked a clear escalation in hostility from MSNBC‘s on-air personalities as Sanders’ diverse coalition of supporters propelled him to a landslide victory in Nevada, the third consecutive state in which the senator has won the popular vote.
Nicole Wallace, former communications director for the George W. Bush White House, described Sanders’ multi-racial, multi-generational coalition as a “squeaky, angry minority” and accused the senator of deploying “dark arts” as she introduced Democratic political consultant James Carville, who proceeded to declare Sanders’ win in Nevada a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At one point in his appearance, Carville waved at the camera and said, “Hi, Vlad,” suggesting Putin was likely watching MSNBC‘s coverage of the caucus results.
Ryan Grim
✔@ryangrim
“A squeaky, angry minority.”
MSNBC is gonna be must-watch TV the next few weeks. Carville follows by calling Putin the real winner today.
4,574
4:15 PM - Feb 22, 2020
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Wallace later lamented that she has “no idea what voters think about anything anymore” after her colleague, Steve Kornacki, explained that Sanders performed well in precincts with a large number of Culinary Union workers, despite the union leadership’s antagonism toward the senator.
Ԍεοϝϝ 
@SpittingBack
"Those are the voters that have seen the sheets that Culinary handed them about #MedicareForAll and decided to vote anyway for @BernieSanders" 
#NevadaCaucus
(Nicolle Wallace: "I have no idea what voters think about anything anymore") 
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NPR‘s Maria Hinojosa, a frequent MSNBC contributor, demanded to know what Sanders has done to “actually deliver for Latino and Latina voters” after the senator dominated the Democratic field among those voters in Nevada.
“MSNBC sure has a lot of commentators who hate Sanders,” tweeted Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice who served as national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Justice Democrats
✔@justicedems
"As somebody who has been around for a while...I want receipts. What has he done in all his time to actually deliver for Latino/a voters?"
Strange thing to say on the night @BernieSanders won the Latino/a vote in Nevada by nearly 40 points.
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The most unhinged lines of Saturday night came from “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who compared Sanders’ Nevada win to the Nazi invasion of France.
“I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” said Matthews. “And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.'”
“So I had that suppressed feeling,” Matthews continued. “I can’t be as wild as Carville but he is damn smart, and I think he’s damn right on this one.”
Earlier Saturday, as Common Dreams reported, Matthews suggested that four more years of President Donald Trump might be better for the Democratic Party than a Sanders presidency.
Matthews’ remarks comparing the Sanders campaign to Nazis—not the first time an MSNBC host has made such a comparison—sparked immediate backlash and demands for his resignation.
Mike Casca, communications director for the Sanders campaign, tweeted that he “never thought part of my job would be pleading with a national news network to stop likening the campaign of a Jewish presidential candidate whose family was wiped out by the Nazis to the Third Reich.”
“But here we are,” Casca wrote.
Justice Democrats
✔@justicedems
Chris Matthews just compared Bernie's victory in Nevada to the Nazis taking control of France.
Incredibly offensive thing to say about someone from a family of holocaust survivors.
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“For those of you unfortunate enough to have turned on MSNBC,” wrote Hill TV‘s Krystal Ball, “you have witnessed a full-blown freakout. Nazi comparisons, commentators near tears, and even a stunning admission that maybe they don’t understand the country anymore.”
MSNBC‘s network-wide meltdown was so apparent that commentators on rival networks took notice—and talked about it on live television.
“There’s another station, another channel,” said CNN contributor Van Jones, “where people are freaking out, melting down, all across the country, at least all over the airwaves.”
“He’s not wrong,” Jones said of Sanders. “The establishment is upset.”
Justice Democrats
✔@justicedems
"There is a power that comes from being witnessed and being recognized in your pain and suffering."
"[Bernie] is not wrong. The establishment is upset! There is another station where people are freaking out and melting down...all over the airwaves." -@vanjones68 with the shade
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Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, attempted to explain the corporate media’s open hostility toward Sanders and his supporters in an appearance on CNN Saturday evening.
“I’m a relatively new person here at CNN,” said Rojas, who contributes to the network as a political commentator. “There are not a ton of people that are my age, or that look like me. Most of the people that sit in a lot of the most powerful rooms in the country pushing forward our news are… not the same level of class.”
“Even though it might not be, you know, literally some person pulling the strings,” Rojas said, “there is a worldview that is vastly different from the everyday voter.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/democrats-have-found-their-own-autocrat/
Conor Lynch
Since Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination four years ago, mainstream media across the political spectrum have warned us about the rise of “populism.” The standard narrative goes something like this: those on the political extremes — especially the far-right but also the far-left—are rapidly gaining ground and subverting liberal democracy across the globe, ushering in a new age of authoritarianism.
“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao,” explained former George W. Bush speechwriter turned #Resistance leader David Frum in 2017. “Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.”
When it comes to right-wing nationalists like Trump and others — Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, to name just a few — this critique has largely proved correct. Trump’s authoritarian impulses are undeniable, and he has expressed his fundamental disdain for democratic norms, the free press and the rule of law on an almost daily basis. The former game show host has done extraordinary damage to America’s already deeply flawed institutions, and there’s no telling how much more he would do with another four years in office.
Whatever truth there is to this argument, however, there has always been something deeply disingenuous about veteran neoconservatives and neoliberals positioning themselves as defenders of democracy. Some of the loudest critics of this “new authoritarianism” were devoted supporters of Bush II, who was arguably an even more effective demagogue than Trump. Along with Frum, Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot and Jonathan Chait all supported the Iraq War and an unprecedented expansion of executive power. President Obama, of course, consolidated and strengthened that power by broadening the surveillance state that is now under Trump’s control. None of the aforementioned pundits felt compelled to speak up about these developments before 2017.
It’s not so much Trump’s authoritarianism that centrists object to then but the crude and impudent manner of its implementation. Three years after his election, they still regard him as a kind of aberration. Never has this been clearer than in the mainstream media’s recent embrace of Michael Bloomberg. With former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign in a death spiral, the former mayor of New York City has emerged as an appealing alternative for establishment types who despise Trump but cannot bear the thought of supporting a genuine social democrat like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The irony is that Bloomberg fits perfectly into Frum’s definition of authoritarianism, which he argues is built on “rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.” Not only does the billionaire own a media outlet that bears his name, but as his purchased endorsements make clear, he’s all too willing to subvert our political system for his personal gain. Indeed, he has staked his entire candidacy on his ability to do just that.
Bloomberg is notorious for disregarding rules and norms, infamously strong-arming New York’s City Council to overturn the mayorship’s term limits so that he could run for a third term. “Rules, in the Bloombergian universe, only apply to people with less than ten zeros in their net worth,” observed Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast last month, adding that he is a “far more successful billionaire with the smarts, motivation and elitist mentality not only to propose but actually carry out his own deeply authoritarian vision should he be elected president.”
As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg governed as an authoritarian, from his draconian and racist stop-and-frisk policy to his heavy-handed crackdown on Occupy Wall Street. “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” Bloomberg once bragged. While evicting Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park in 2011, he even made sure to prevent journalists from documenting police brutality, closing airspace in lower Manhattan to block any possible aerial footage.
The former mayor’s disregard for civil liberties and disdain for popular movements is a matter of public record. But whereas Trump’s behavior is almost atavistic, Bloomberg employs what The New Republic’s Alex Pareene calls a “polite authoritarianism.” Comparing the two, Pareene writes that the latter “has explicitly argued that ‘our interpretation of the Constitution’ will have to change to give citizens less privacy and the police more power to search and spy on them. In fact, he does not seem to believe that certain people have innate civil rights that the state must respect.”
That so many talking heads have rallied around somebody like Bloomberg as an alternative to left- and right-wing populism should come as no surprise. A paper from political economist David Adler indicates that contrary to the dominant media narrative, centrists are uniquely hostile to democratic values. “Respondents at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, least committed to its institutions, and most supportive of authoritarianism,” writes Adler, whose findings were based on data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey.
Per his research, less than half of self-identified centrists in the U.S. believe that free elections are “essential to democracy.” Perhaps more troubling, they tend to view basic civil rights as non-essential. While dissatisfaction with democracy is high on both the left and right, Adler is careful to point out that this does not necessarily indicate these groups are ready to abandon it altogether; rather, they want their government to be more democratic than they are at present. There is a difference, he notes, between support for democracy and satisfaction with existing institutions. And while he found “moderate levels of satisfaction” with the current system among centrists, they are the least disposed toward democratic reforms.
What these people fear and abhor, ultimately, is any kind of threat to the status quo and the entrenched power of elites. As Jeet Heer recently argued in The Nation, those on the extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to criticize a state whose violence they frequently bear the brunt of, while centrists who are “safely ensconced in mainstream society and hold positions of high social status, are more likely to take an uncritical view of trampling on democratic norms, since they have the comfort of knowing that the authorities are unlikely to go after reputable figures.”
Bloomberg would govern as a well-mannered neoliberal autocrat, and his assault on American democracy would be more insidious—and perhaps more dangerous—than Trump’s in the long run. He let his mask slip last year when he commented that China’s Xi Jinping is not, in fact, a “dictator,” since he “has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.” The Uighur Muslims currently residing in concentration camps might disagree, but then again Bloomberg never did care much about the civil liberties of Muslims or people of color.
Sanders, the current Democratic front-runner, offers a very different view of Xi. “In China,” he wrote in 2018 article for The Guardian, “an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.” Unlike Bloomberg and his toadies, Sanders is committed to expanding democracy and understands that the neoliberal status quo of the past several decades has fueled the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world today.
Here lies the crucial difference between those who denounce Trump from their armchairs and leftists who join popular movements fighting for radical change. With Bloomberg now set to challenge Sanders for the Democratic nomination, the divide couldn’t be starker. And for those who truly reject authoritarianism, the choice should be easy.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/progressives-will-stay-home-for-michael-bloomberg/
Ilana Novick
Michael Bloomberg is not afraid to use his $60 billion fortune to get a leg up in the presidential race. He pays entry level organizers $72,000 annually. In addition to the salary, he lures them with perks like free iPhones. As The Intercept reported last week, the perks are working so well that Bloomberg is enticing staff away from state and local campaigns. He has poured $400 million of his own money into campaign advertisements featuring platitudes about why his mayoral tenure and his experience building a corporate empire make him the best candidate to beat Donald Trump. Other ads tout his record on climate change and gun control.
The spending did exactly what it was supposed to: It raised the national profile of the billionaire former New York City mayor, who has qualified for the next Democratic debate after earning 19% support from Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters in a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Democrats, terrified of the prospect of another four years of Trump have claimed they’ll “vote blue no matter who.” Ryan Cooper of The Week was among that group, that is, until Bloomberg entered the race. First of all, Cooper writes, “it is not at all obvious that Bloomberg would even be a better president than Trump.”
Per Cooper:
He locked up thousands of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention (where he gave a speech warmly endorsing George W. Bush, and thanked him for starting the war in Iraq), and a judge held the city in contempt for violating due process law. He created what amounted to a police state for New York Muslims, subjecting the entire community to dragnet surveillance and harassment, and filling mosques with spies and agent provocateurs. The city had to pay millions in settlements for violating Muslims’ civil rights. (All this did precisely nothing to prevent terrorism, by the way.)
Arguments for Bloomberg’s candidacy stress his wealth as a plus, a kind of monetary insulation against outside influence, and his self-made billionaire status as a key weapon against Trump. They also reference Bloomberg’s work on fighting for gun control and against climate change.
As Josh Barro writes in New York Magazine, Bloomberg is “17 times wealthier than President Trump.” Plus, Barro adds, “unlike Trump, he’s a self-made billionaire.” In Vox, Emily Stewart argues that the former New York City Mayor and current Democratic candidate for president “has all the resources he needs to combat the Trump machine, and he doesn’t have to spend time and energy courting donors and then returning favors to them if and when he’s in the White House.”
Cooper concedes that while “Bloomberg does have a legitimate history of supporting gun control and climate policy,” including his work with Everytown for Gun Safety, “it is exceedingly unlikely that he will be able to get past a Senate filibuster on gun control, especially given his sneering know-it-all approach.”
Money also can’t prevent journalists from looking closely at Bloomberg’s record. The New York Times observed this past week that the campaign has been “on the defensive over past recordings that showed him linking the financial crisis to the end of discriminatory “redlining” practices in mortgage lending, and defending physically aggressive policing tactics as a deterrent against crime.”
Bloomberg claimed during a campaign stop in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last week that being elected mayor of New York City three times means “the public seems to like what I do.” He neglected to mention, as Politico points out, that the then mayor “orchestrated a change in municipal law so he could run for that third term, vastly outspent his opponent and won the race by fewer than 5 points.”
The ability to buy your way into power is not proof that people like what you do — for Bloomberg or for Trump. As Arwa Mahdavi writes in The Guardian, “If these two billionaires end up battling it out for the presidency, I am not sure it matters who wins in November. Democracy will have lost.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-was-a-cover-up-not-a-cleanup/
Alison Rose Levy
Deepwater Horizon, called “the worst environmental disaster in American history,” was one of the environmental stories I covered at HuffPost a decade ago.
“On April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf,” Grist reported.
For 87 days, the leak was unstoppable.
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“The damaged Macondo wellhead, located around 5,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, leaked an estimated 3.19 million barrels (over 130 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — making the spill the largest accidental ocean spill in history,” according to Grist journalist Mark Hertsgaard, in an article written three years after the accident.
“At risk were fishing areas that supplied one-third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection.”
In revisiting the terrible accident, which produced lasting environmental contamination, it’s important to examine the Obama administration’s “pragmatic” decisions that caused, allowed to proceed, and ultimately failed to remediate the disaster by:
Allowing the driller, BP, to cut corners, and to self-regulate
Ignoring well-known corruption within the federal agency charged with oversight
Dismissing concerns posed by its own scientists
Bypassing authentic remediation and instead pouring 1.84 million gallons of a chemical product called Corexit into the Gulf of Mexico without regard for environmental or health consequences.
This was done, ostensibly, to clean up the contamination. The reality is that Corexit did not clean up the over 92,000 miles of spilled oil. Instead, it visually covered up the extent of the damage done by the fossil fuel industry. Protecting the industry’s image superseded the environmentally sound response to the worst environmental disaster in the U.S.
Unsound Environmental Decisions
Ten years later, it’s easier to recognize that such decisions, which elected officials at the time viewed as pragmatic, can produce major, ongoing negative ramifications when the superficial solution fails to address the problem.
Revisiting the now decade-long evolution of the disaster and the cover-up, a recent article in Common Dreams reports on a study published in Science, which reveals that “a significant amount of oil was never picked up in satellite images or captured by barriers that were meant to stop the spread.”
One of the study’s authors notes that “[o]ur results change established perceptions about the consequences of oil spills by showing that toxic and invisible oil can extend beyond the satellite footprint at potentially lethal and sub-lethal concentrations to a wide range of wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico,” with “invisible oil” reaching an area 30% larger than the 92,500 square miles experts identified at the time.
Public officials may exonerate themselves for a bad decision by claiming that the terrible outcome could only be known with 20/20 hindsight. But in this case, that’s not true.
As a health reporter back in 2010, I always read labels, because products sometimes contain understudied toxic ingredients, which are mistakenly regarded by the general public as harmless when diluted or dispersed — a claim made then and now by industry and its media spokespeople, and ignorantly codified even by journalists well-versed in other areas but overly zealous in a unilateral defense of science. I therefore researched Corexit, which, as I reported back then in HuffPost, is a dispersant that its producer, a company called NALCO, claimed on its website was “safer than dish soap.”
My specific concerns were, first, that the use of the product would spread the oil throughout the waters of the gulf, making it harder to pick up and remove the spilled oil. Because Corexit was known as a dispersant, I could not understand why the government chose to use it.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, “Dispersants are chemicals that are sprayed on a surface oil slick to break down the oil into smaller droplets that more readily mix with the water. Dispersants do not reduce the amount of oil entering the environment, but push the effects of the spill underwater.”
I also was concerned about the biological hazards of exposure to Corexit’s proprietary and undisclosed ingredients. The claim that Corexit was safer than dish soap did not account for possible health impacts of ingredients in soap, when used at such scale in combination with the already toxic oil. It turned out that this concern was shared by scientists.
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.
Government scientists also found that the combination of Corexit and crude oil “caused terrible damage to gulf wildlife and ecosystems, including an unprecedented number of seafood mutations; declines of up to 80 percent in seafood catch; and massive die-offs of the microscopic life-forms at the base of the marine food chain.”
The Government Accountability Project noted that “as a result of Corexit’s perceived success, Corexit … has become the dispersant of choice in the U.S. to ‘clean up’ oil spills.”
Protecting the Fossil Fuel Industry and Destroying the Gulf of Mexico
Proper management of the disaster might have entailed curtailing drilling activities, getting sufficient payback from the offending company to undertake complete environmental remediation, and providing aid to affected communities.
Although BP eventually was held “responsible for the oil spill as a result of its deliberate misconduct and gross negligence” by a federal court in 2014, that did not alter the management of the clean-up. The Obama administration accepted BP’s cosmetic solution — something that improved appearances — and silenced concerns. It was a cover-up, not a cleanup.
Fortified by President Obama’s promise that “the buck stops with me,” the gulf oil spill was deep-sixed, and disappeared from headlines and news accounts. Meanwhile, the very real contamination of the Gulf of Mexico continued, worsened and spread.
The government missed addressing — and, in fact, increased — a vast ecological harm. Contaminating water, creating dead zones and killing off wildlife in order to perpetuate an industry exemplifies a profound disorder in priorities. There is nothing pragmatic about it.
Now, like a toxic salad dressing concocted by industry and government, the blend of Corexit and oil has traveled miles beyond the original spill location, killing 50% of all marine wildlife wherever it spreads.
Environmental Talking Points
The ongoing tragedy of Deepwater Horizon is relevant today, because it challenges both people and government. How can citizens move beyond slick buzzwords and cosmetic approaches to environmental dilemmas embedded in systemic infrastructures? Talking points with an environmental theme don’t really reveal much. When politicians fail to define their plans, they use talking points as a protective cover for just about any policy decision. Some people trust or like politicians and don’t look further into what they are being sold. Blatantly partisan media outlets don’t fulfill their traditional journalistic role by delving into policy differences. They tend to focus superficially, on personalities.
For example, based on New Hampshire exit polls, The Washington Post reported that 29% of voters who view climate as their top issue voted for Pete Buttigeig on that basis. This reveals that some people are unable to distinguish between a verbal assurance, such as Buttigeig provides, and Bernie Sanders’ concrete climate plan, which was rated A+ by the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund’s Environmental Voter Guide. The center gave Buttigeig’s proposed environmental policies a C- rating.
While Republicans are blatantly anti-environmental, Democrats come off as well-spoken and dedicated to climate action. But history tells us that posing as an environmentalist while pursuing anti-environmental policies is a Democratic tradition, which Democratic voters need to acknowledge if we really want to act on climate rather than fall for polished phrases and firm assurances. Joe Biden’s climate change adviser is a fossil fuel industry veteran. Michael Bloomberg supported the use of fossil fuels by pouring millions of dollars into scientific research that aimed (unsuccessfully) to remediate fracking infrastructures from leaking methane. Jay Inslee changed his stance to oppose two gas projects he had previously supported — right before announcing his presidential aspirations. Yet many wrongly considered him the “climate expert” among the Democratic candidates.
The Democratic Party’s track record for timely action in environmental matters can no longer be given a pass. It must be measured by the current state of multiple ecological crises that have taken place under its watch, not merely by comparison to the Republicans’ dire and destructive actions.
It’s time to get real about crucial planning, which Democrats have historically paid lip service to and failed to enact. They defer to industries and billionaires, some of whom like to pose before the life-or-death issue of planetary survival — as if they own that, too.
Ten years after the Deepwater Horizon contamination, the gas and oil industry still has a chokehold on both parties in our political system, the cleanliness of which they pollute.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was a flashing red light to prompt us to stop and reconsider these fossil fuel drilling activities, which had been critiqued a decade ago. But that warning was ignored.
Unless someone at a private dinner records something that was never meant to reach the public, we can never cite evidence of backstage conversations and deals that determine the future of life on this planet.
But more and more people can see the evidence:
A brutal unraveling of sane environmental policies and regulations
A blatantly partisan media funded by corporate interests
A heavy hand on the nomination and electoral process
The condition of the gulf 10 years later
The destruction of Australia right now.
