https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EAQGt-09dU
Sunday, August 9, 2020
Susan Rice Has a Disclosure Problem
The vice-presidential hopeful has some explaining to do.
BY ALEXANDER SAMMON
AUGUST 8, 2020
https://prospect.org/politics/susan-rice-has-a-disclosure-problem/
One of these days, Joe Biden is going to announce his vice president. The latest turn of the rumor mill has Susan Rice as a favorite for the position. Whether or not she’s chosen as Biden’s second-in-command ultimately may not matter much; her mere consideration ensures that she’ll have a major role in the administration.
Rice differs from the other members of Congress and governors on the short list. For one, she’s never held elected office. Elevating her to the second-highest executive post in the country, and making her (like it or not) the most likely post-Biden presidential candidate, sends a strange message for that reason alone. If the Democratic Party is in the business of winning elections, and can pick anyone from its supposedly deep talent pool to put on the fast track, why is someone who’s never won a race its best bet?
More from Alexander Sammon
Here’s what we know about Rice: She’s the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser under Barack Obama. In the Clinton administration, she served at the National Security Council and as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. At 55 years old, that’s the entirety of her political career.
Her résumé from the corporate and government-adjacent world, however, is much lengthier. In the praiseworthy words of The Wall Street Journal, Rice “has more corporate experience than others on Biden running mate list.” Indeed, she currently sits on the board of directors of Netflix, where she’s racked up stock options on more than 5,200 shares of the company, currently worth $2 million alone (according to an August 5 filing, she’s divested about one-quarter of those holdings, netting some $300,000). That, along with a stint at American University as a visiting research fellow, makes up the bulk of her post-Obama professional activity.
Much less is known about her pre-Obama career, starting with her time at the infamous consultancy McKinsey & Company. After earning her doctorate at the age of 25, Rice served as a management consultant at the firm from 1990 to 1992, working out of the Toronto office. That’s the same corporate consultancy that got presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg in hot water during the primary, and his initial refusal to disclose the work he did for them helped stymie his rise. Political rival Elizabeth Warren demanded that Buttigieg provide a list of past clients and what he did for them, eventually resulting in him asking for a release from his nondisclosure agreement with the firm.
When he finally published that information, Buttigieg’s work for the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, which was known to be engaged in price fixing during that same time, gave way to a heated exchange with New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum over whether or not he was involved in fixing bread prices, a viral clip that may have ultimately hastened his demise. McKinsey has been involved in a number of major scandals in recent years beyond just bread prices: helping elevate authoritarianism in places like Russia and China; advising OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” opioid sales; even hosting a summit in Kashgar, where thousands of Uighur minorities are currently locked up. If Buttigieg had to disclose his work at McKinsey to be considered for Democratic president, so, too, should Rice.
While Rice’s stint with McKinsey may not have been focused particularly on authoritarian governments, she’s been no stranger to strongmen at other points in her career. After her time in the Clinton White House, Rice went into private consulting, spending 2001 and 2002 as a managing director and principal at Intellibridge, a geopolitical strategy shop, which eventually became Eurasia Group. Again, we know next to nothing about who Rice was working for during that time, because she has largely concealed who her clients were. But, wrote Akbar Shahid Ahmed in HuffPost, “her closeness to one client whose identity is publicly known―Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame, the country’s president since 2000―has previously raised concerns among human rights groups and fellow officials.”
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president. And given that the one client of hers from that time that we know is someone widely referred to as a “benevolent dictator” and “darling tyrant” who’s been in power since the mid-1990s, there’s plenty of cause for alarm. If Rice was indeed trading off her proximity to policymakers after her White House stint with open opponents of democracy, that would make her an uneasy fit as a leader of the Democratic Party. It’s incumbent upon her, now, to disclose those relationships.
After Intellibridge, Rice moved on to the Brookings Institution, serving as a senior fellow, where “she focused on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security,” before moving on to the Obama White House, where she was dogged by subsequent disclosure problems, this time owing not to her work, but her finances.
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president.
At 44 years old, Rice was the wealthiest person in the entire Obama Cabinet upon her appointment in 2009. Her net worth clocked in between $23.5 million and $43.5 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That made her richer even than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Two years at McKinsey and two years at Intellibridge wouldn’t net that kind of cash. Rice appears to be the beneficiary of substantial family money. While her parents were scholars (her mother helped design the Pell grant system and her father was the second African American on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), her husband Ian Cameron, a former producer for ABC’s This Week, is the scion of a Canadian lumber company.
In 2012, when Rice, then considered a rising star and Obama favorite, was up to replace Clinton as secretary of state, her personal finances proved controversial. Rice was a major stockholder in TransCanada, the company behind the recently shut down Keystone XL pipeline, which transported particularly dirty oil from tar sands in Canada to refineries in the United States. In fact, according to financial disclosures at the time, about a third of Rice’s net worth was tied up in oil producers, pipeline operators, and energy industry affiliates. She and her husband were also invested in Enbridge, the company behind the discharge of more than a million gallons of toxic tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 , the largest inland oil spill in American history, and BP, of 2010’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the largest offshore oil spill in history, period.
Coziness between TransCanada and the State Department, which was elucidated in a cable obtained by WikiLeaks, and then by leaked emails, and finally by a New York Times report that revealed that the State Department contractor tasked with producing an environmental assessment of Keystone XL had close ties the pipeline’s developer, added to outrage from environmental groups. Eventually, Rice was passed over for the job, and became a national-security adviser instead.
This didn’t lead her to rethink those investment choices, however. A 2015 disclosure report obtained by TMI, our last look into even some percentage of her holdings, shows a continued stake in TransCanada of between $50,000 and $100,000, and over $1 million in Enbridge. Between $1 million and $2 million in additional investments are split between three other Canadian fossil fuel companies developing the tar sands in Alberta. Overall, the 2015 disclosure shows holdings of between $15 million and $32.5 million in investments alone. And that’s before the Netflix board seat and whatever other income has been gained in the Trump years.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from. But if that money was enough to functionally disqualify her from secretary of state in 2012, it should certainly have an impact upon deciding her fitness for a higher role. Democratic voters have a right to know who’s being put on their ticket. Certainly, a lack of transparency, financial and otherwise, has been one of the most consistent indictments of Donald Trump from the Democratic side of the aisle.
The financial-disclosure issue has little to do with Rice’s record on foreign policy, which very much merits its own consideration. Rice has coasted on progressive proximity, but has been hawkish enough throughout her career—in particular her record on the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—to merit objections from the DNC Muslim Delegates and Allies and other parts of the party. Her elevation would also allow Republicans to dust off their Benghazi hysteria for the next 12 weeks.
Some detractors of Karen Bass, the California representative who was floated as a VP favorite last week, have claimed she’s too much of a liability after not having been thoroughly vetted by a national election cycle. That logic also applies to Susan Rice, who has never been vetted in any election cycle. If she’s going to be Biden’s number two, she needs to start with a transparency campaign quickly: not just her tax returns but her client list, as well.
GENERAL STRIKE: THE EVICTION CRISIS ESCALATES
By General Strike 2020.
August 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/general-strike-the-eviction-crisis-escalates/
With an estimated 17 to 40 million people at risk of losing their homes by the end of September, and with the failure of the federal government to pass an eviction moratorium or an unemployment benefits extension, the greatest eviction and foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression is now upon us. In some states in the Southeast, as many as 60% of renters are at risk of being evicted, and people of color are likely to be hit disproportionately hard. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey in July, for example, highlighted that 42% of Black renters felt little to no confidence in their ability to pay rent this August, compared to 21% of White renters. For the percentage of renter households at risk of eviction in each state.
It is no surprise that across the country, renters being threatened with destitution are taking a stand to put a stop to this brutal display of Capitalists’s commitment to profit over people. Courthouses have been blocked by protesters in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Brooklyn, and this trend will likely grow in the coming months. Protesters in all 3 cities have been working to disrupt eviction proceedings as much as possible and to publicize the complicity of lawyers and the justice system in the perpetuation of the eviction machine.
“‘Keep trying to evict tenants, and we’ll keep showing up and shutting down your office every day,’ the group Housing Justice for All tweeted alongside a video of one of the protests. ‘Other lawyers working for landlords: watch out, we’re coming for you next.’”
While the housing crisis looms large, there have also been a number of positive developments in the news this week. The New York Attorney General is suing and seeking the dissolution of the NRA; Cori Bush, the original Justice Democrat, has won her primary against William Lacy Clay for Missouri Congressional Seat 1; and scientists have “shown that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies”, an encouraging asset in the fight to decarbonize industry and mitigate climate change.
Last but not least in the news was the establishment of a Worker Council by the city of LA this week that will monitor businesses’ pandemic responses and inform public health officials when business owners are breaking guidelines. This is a positive step forward for the city, where multiple industries’ poor working conditions were contributing to the spread of COVID-19, and it serves as an example for other communities to potentially work to take after and establish for themselves.
If you’d like to increase your involvement in direct action efforts, reach out today to see what opportunities may exist in your community to make a difference helping keep people housed, fed, and in good health.
Aggressive New Guerrilla Tactics Target America’s Eviction Machine
Renters aren’t giving up without a fight! “In a last-ditch effort to fight lockouts… activists aren’t content to go after politicians. Instead, they want to shut down the machinery of the eviction system: the nation’s housing courts and the people who make it run.”
https://popularresistance.org/general-strike-the-eviction-crisis-escalates/
With an estimated 17 to 40 million people at risk of losing their homes by the end of September, and with the failure of the federal government to pass an eviction moratorium or an unemployment benefits extension, the greatest eviction and foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression is now upon us. In some states in the Southeast, as many as 60% of renters are at risk of being evicted, and people of color are likely to be hit disproportionately hard. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey in July, for example, highlighted that 42% of Black renters felt little to no confidence in their ability to pay rent this August, compared to 21% of White renters. For the percentage of renter households at risk of eviction in each state.
It is no surprise that across the country, renters being threatened with destitution are taking a stand to put a stop to this brutal display of Capitalists’s commitment to profit over people. Courthouses have been blocked by protesters in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Brooklyn, and this trend will likely grow in the coming months. Protesters in all 3 cities have been working to disrupt eviction proceedings as much as possible and to publicize the complicity of lawyers and the justice system in the perpetuation of the eviction machine.
“‘Keep trying to evict tenants, and we’ll keep showing up and shutting down your office every day,’ the group Housing Justice for All tweeted alongside a video of one of the protests. ‘Other lawyers working for landlords: watch out, we’re coming for you next.’”
While the housing crisis looms large, there have also been a number of positive developments in the news this week. The New York Attorney General is suing and seeking the dissolution of the NRA; Cori Bush, the original Justice Democrat, has won her primary against William Lacy Clay for Missouri Congressional Seat 1; and scientists have “shown that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies”, an encouraging asset in the fight to decarbonize industry and mitigate climate change.
Last but not least in the news was the establishment of a Worker Council by the city of LA this week that will monitor businesses’ pandemic responses and inform public health officials when business owners are breaking guidelines. This is a positive step forward for the city, where multiple industries’ poor working conditions were contributing to the spread of COVID-19, and it serves as an example for other communities to potentially work to take after and establish for themselves.
If you’d like to increase your involvement in direct action efforts, reach out today to see what opportunities may exist in your community to make a difference helping keep people housed, fed, and in good health.
Aggressive New Guerrilla Tactics Target America’s Eviction Machine
Renters aren’t giving up without a fight! “In a last-ditch effort to fight lockouts… activists aren’t content to go after politicians. Instead, they want to shut down the machinery of the eviction system: the nation’s housing courts and the people who make it run.”
VENEZUELA AND TRUMP’S IRRATIONAL ELECTORAL POLICY
https://popularresistance.org/venezuela-and-trumps-irrational-electoral-policy/
Caracas, Venezuela – Elections always have an interesting effect on public policy, in particular if the person in charge of designing and implementing a certain policy is up for reelection. In politics, it is logical that an incumbent candidate decides to show successful policies and accomplishments while minimizing failures or shortcomings. However, what is irrational is that a candidate insists on presenting, preserving and deepening a policy that has proven to be a failure and that the candidate himself only supports half-heartedly. This is the case of the Trump Administration’s current failed policy towards Venezuela, which is being reinforced despite its failure while a more appropriate approach, dialogue, is being discarded.
On January 23, 2019, as John Bolton points out in his controversial memoirs, Trump advisors pushed for the U.S. Administration to recognize as “interim president”, an obscure young politician, Juan Guaidó, who represented Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), the party of Leopoldo López, Washington’s key ally who masterminded the violent protests of 2014 and 2017. Rather than produce a change of government, this action led to Venezuela’s decision to break diplomatic relations with the United States. Guaidó’s recognition has dragged the U.S. Administration, as well as many of its subordinate allies, down a path of failure after failure in their regime change policy. Furthermore, it has also dragged the people of Venezuela through a vicious blockade that has eroded their living standards and seriously jeopardized their well-being.
Over the course of 2019, the Trump Administration imagined that the whole world would dive into a collective state of denial, would stop recognizing the constitutional government of President Nicolás Maduro and would instead recognize Guaidó who in practice does not even exercise control of any institution in Caracas. A month after his self-proclamation, Guaidó, with U.S. support and propaganda, attempted to force the entry of alleged humanitarian aid into the country while hoping that the Armed Forces would at the same time betray president Maduro. They failed. On April 30, Guaidó and López, with the support of their U.S. partners and military defectors, led a failed coup attempt counting on the support of public officials that never came. This prompted Bolton to send desperate tweets and Elliott Abrams to complain because his phone calls were not answered. They failed again.
Today, more than two thirds of the Member States of the United Nations still recognize Venezuela’s legitimate government and it is Trump himself who is having second thoughts on his erratic choice. The year 2020 came, however, with an unforeseen challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s reelection bid was not counting on the dire impact that this pandemic would have on one of the strong points of his campaign, the economy. Even less, could he have imagined the toll this pandemic would have on the entire population: to date, over 150,000 deaths have been officially attributed to COVID-19 and a crisis with over 45 million new persons unemployed is engulfing the United States. Massive protests have taken place all over the nation, since the murder of George Floyd, an African-American man, at the hands of the police. But they are much more than protests over systemic discrimination; they are protests against a system that has abandoned the majority of its poor citizens.
Trump had in his hands a golden opportunity to show leadership, admit the shortcomings of the system and launch an unprecedented process that would redirect the priorities of the nation, cut back on the aggressive militarization of the police and of foreign policy and turn to a robust policy of relief for workers and the strengthening of the healthcare system. Instead, Trump dug himself into a labyrinth where the desperation to win the reelection clouds his thinking and rather than turning to sound domestic policy, he has opted to put the blame on foreign enemies and to divert attention from his catastrophic mishandling of the situation.
First, he placed the blame on China and resorted to a racist, Cold War-like narrative, as if this would do anything to help the suffering U.S. population. By the end of March, as the death toll increased, Trump announced he was stepping up his “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela. In less than a week, a man who helped justify the 1989 invasion of Panama and was now heading the Department of Justice, presented indictments against President Maduro and other top leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution for “narco-terrorism”, placing a $15 million bounty on President Maduro’s head, as in the Wild West. Then Trump’s State Department, through the voice of Elliott Abrams (whose involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and the massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, is notorious) proposed a “democratic transition framework” built on the principle of delegitimizing the democratic elections of President Maduro in 2018 and offered a negotiation where President Maduro’s separation from office was non-negotiable. Finally, Trump ordered the largest deployment of U.S. military to the Caribbean Sea since the Panama invasion under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking from Venezuela, when the Department of Defense’s records show that the main route for drugs to the U.S. is via the Pacific Ocean, of which Venezuela has no coast.
In May, a group of mercenaries attempted a raid on Venezuelan coasts. Two of them were former Green Berets who confessed to having been employed by a U.S. security firm by the name of SilverCorp. The CEO of this firm presented a contract with the signature of Guaidó and his aides to carry out actions in Venezuela aimed at removing President Maduro from office and targeting other revolutionary leaders. This too, failed, and has been followed by attempts at intimidating and effectively blocking Venezuela’s trading partners from bringing much needed supplies, including gasoline, which in a time of pandemic, is key for moving medical supplies, personnel, and food throughout the country.
Venezuela has stood firm against all of these attacks. International solidarity from countries such as Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey has been key. Strong measures and an organized and community-conscious population have allowed Venezuela to still be one of the countries with the lowest death toll and active COVID-19 cases in the region. In sharp contrast, while Washington imposes repression on cities such as Portland, which has suffered the deployment of federal police agents, Venezuelans will once again be heading to the polls in December with the hopes of electing a renewed parliament that better reflects the political forces in the country and one whose leadership is not compromised with the promotion of sanctions and blockades against their own country, as is Guaidó.
In the distorted view of reality that Trump and his advisors have of the current conjuncture, there is a belief that hard line, regime change policies against Venezuela would lead to electoral success in Florida and therefore, nationwide. It might well be that some of Trump’s base may like to see a coup in Venezuela, but failure after failure, by now should have indicated that Venezuela is not moving in that direction. To continue attempting clumsy solutions will only repeat past frustrations. A sound policy towards Venezuela has to be in line with the aspirations of the Venezuelan people and with the real interests of the people of the U.S. Venezuelans want peace, dialogue, and politics. Trump would do better if he followed his initial instinct of talking to President Maduro. A respectful dialogue with Venezuela is what is really in the interest of the U.S. electorate. Instead of spending U.S. taxpayer money on failed adventures and made up drug cartels, it could be better spent on dealing with the pandemic and other needs of the U.S. Sound policies are more conducive to reelection. Regime change will only lead to more failure.
Jorge Arreaza is the Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
This is an exclusive op-ed for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, (COHA).
GRAD STUDENTS AND FACULTY ‘DIE IN’ TO PROTEST REOPENING
By Kaelan Deese, MSN.
The University Of Georgia Staff And Graduate Students Held A Silent “Die-In” Demonstration Friday To Protest Plans For The Campus Reopening During The COVID-19 Pandemic.
Nearly 50 demonstrators lay scattered 6 feet apart wearing face coverings on the lawn outside the school administration’s building, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Some protesters held signs resembling tombstones with phrases like “R.I.P. campus safety,” or “In loving memory.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in roughly 160,000 deaths in the U.S. since the start of the outbreak in January. Older adults are typically more prone to severe coronavirus infections, although individuals with weakened immune systems are also at high risk.
The demonstrators have a list of demands corresponding to the protest, including petitions for more COVID-19 testing and offering faculty members the liberty to teach remotely. Currently, faculty must seek permission from the school to teach remote online courses.
The group submitted a petition with 1,002 signatures along with the list of demands to an employee in the administration building.
Graduate student Bryant Barnes said the school’s current testing plans would not be enough to accommodate consistently testing all students and employees.
Sujata Iyengar, a professor at the school since 1998 who joined protesters, said she thinks university officials “have not thought this through,” adding that more classes should be held outside rather than indoors, where the virus spreads more easily.
“We have affirmatively addressed the core of these concerns through our comprehensive planning over the summer,” the school said in the statement, adding that the university has committed $250,000 for emergency funds to aid students who have critical and sudden financial emergencies.
The University of Georgia will resume classes for the fall semester on Aug. 20.
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