Trump Betrays the Military

President Donald Trump on Friday cleared three military service members of war crimes, even after being reportedly advised against doing so by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. Mr. Trump interceded on behalf of Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who had been charged with murdering an Afghan man; Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted in connection with posing for a photo with the corpse of a fighter in Iraq; and Army First Lt. Clint Lorance, who, after nine fellow unit members testified against him, had been convicted of murdering two civilians in Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump may believe that intervening pays respect to those who have served in uniform, that it shows he’s “pro-military.” But if this is his view, he’s wrong. In reality, Mr. Trump’s meddling undermines the military’s institutional values, risks endangering American service members, and disrespects the honorable service of the overwhelming majority of veterans.

The military strives to ensure that its members adhere to the laws of war and respect human rights. Service members are trained, for example, to avoid civilian casualties by understanding rules of engagement and following the proper steps for escalation of force. They also learn the appropriate ways to treat detainees, and interrogators are trained to employ only the approved, legal methods.

During my two deployments to Afghanistan, my intelligence work helped lead to the capture of insurgent leaders. Sharing responsibility for their capture and as a recipient of the intelligence produced by their interrogations, I had a sense of moral reassurance in the understanding that my colleagues handled and interrogated the detainees humanely — just as they had been trained.

The lessons service members learn about the laws of war are not an afterthought. Rather, they are central, emphasized time and again — from training sessions and exercises, to military ethics discussions, to actual combat deployments. The Army’s official values, after all, demand that soldiers “do what’s right, legally and morally” and “treat others with dignity and respect,” making no exceptions for civilians or even enemies.

The military requires its members to operate in accordance with the laws of war for good reason. Disregarding the laws of war — which Mr. Trump has done by intervening in these cases — jeopardizes mission accomplishment and the safety of service members; excessive civilian casualties, for example, can stimulate further violence, turn local populations against American forces, and discourage allies from collaborating with the United States. Mr. Trump should realize that the laws of war actually serve to benefit our armed forces.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Trump’s intervention on behalf of those convicted or accused of conduct falling short of the military’s crucial legal requirements and moral expectations undermines the training in which the military rightly invests so much effort. It trivializes the values the military spends so much time fostering. He could be endangering United States service members deployed to combat zones by handing their enemies propaganda and recruitment material and by degrading support among local populations.

To be sure, war is complex, and service members accordingly face difficult moral choices under extraordinary pressure. But their preparation helps them make sound decisions in these tough situations, and the military justice system considers the factual circumstances of each case and the intent of the actor.

Benjamin Haas

New York Times

Nov. 15, 2019

Letter from an American

I have spent the day madly checking footnotes and making final corrections on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, and I emerged at about 8:00 to look at the news. It hit like a firehose: we have separated almost 70,000 children from their parents under the Trump administration; White House advisor Steve Miller wrote more than 900 emails to a Breitbart reporter advocating white nationalism; Turkey's president Erdogan, the dictator whose troops allegedly committed war crimes when they pushed into northern Syria last month, is visiting the White House tomorrow; Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's associate Rick Gates said at Trump advisor Roger Stone's trial for lying to Congress that Trump knew about the Wikileaks dumps of DNC emails that had been done by Russia; the Department of Justice is trying to finish a report on the attacks on the 2016 election before Attorney General William Barr presents the alternative one he's working on with John Durham...

and I thought: how on earth will I ever make sense of this tonight?

And then I hit upon a Washington Post article outlining the different approaches Democrats and Republicans are taking toward the public impeachment testimony that starts tomorrow: Democrats want "a serious and somber process of publicly exposing Trump’s misconduct, narrated by career diplomats who were alarmed by the president’s push to have Ukraine investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son, as well as a debunked theory concerning the 2016 election, in exchange for military aid and a White House visit coveted by Ukraine’s new leader." Meanwhile "Republicans prepared to fervently defend Trump while painting the impeachment probe as a thinly veiled show trial designed to take down a president who did nothing wrong."

And then it hit me. The story for tonight, and indeed for this administration, and for the last several years of the once great Republican Party, is clear. The people in charge of this country right now have abandoned democracy. They are giving Trump a pass for things that they would never have tolerated in a Democrat because they cannot stand to chance another Democratic president; they think they are our country's only legitimate rulers. The world people like Steven Miller wants is a world in which a few leaders, "only the best people," people like Erdogan and Putin and Trump arrange matters in such a way that they control all the wealth and power, since lesser people-- people of color and women-- cannot be trusted to exercise it. We would demand fairer laws that prevent the concentration of wealth and power, and thus we would hurt the ability of our leaders to, well, solve the Middle East crisis singlehandedly, for example, or win an "easy" trade war, or get Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear ambitions.

With that stark division in mind, the day's news falls neatly into place: The bombshell news from Roger Stone's trial is that Trump appears to have misled Special Counsel Robert Mueller about his knowledge of the Wikileaks dumps before the 2016 election. Wikileaks had access to files from the Democratic National Committee that had been stolen by Russian intelligence, and it dumped them in such a way as to injure the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and help Trump. Trump's associate Roger Stone was apparently the campaign's contact with Wikileaks, and today Rick Gates (I know, I know, we all need scorecards), said he heard Trump talking about the dumps as early as June 2016, suggesting that he was in on the fix. And, for that matter, Gates claims Stone was talking about the stolen emails as early as April, before the DNC had admitted it had been hacked. In his written answers to questions (because he refused to testify in person), Trump told Mueller that he had no recollection of such conversations. (Pundits are saying this means he lied, but it seems to me saying he couldn't remember is hard to challenge, even if it seems a pretty obvious dodge. Still, in 1998, congressional Republicans were nearly unanimous in thinking that lying under oath was an impeachable offense.)

If staying in power is more important than defending the rule of law, it only makes sense for Barr to be rushing to produce a damning report from an investigation into conspiracy theories about Ukraine's complicity in attacking the 2016 election that his man John Durham has undertaken outside of the normal channels of the Department of Justice, and, in turn, for the DOJ Inspector General to try to get out his report first.

It also makes sense to traumatize migrant children to try keep their families out of the country, because letting such refugees in will add voices to the popular dislike of the current regime. And if they are traumatized, what of it? They are really not children like white kids are, immature and needing nurture well into their adult lives, the same as a 17 year old Black Trayvon Martin buying Skittles was really not a child with a sweet tooth, but rather a dangerous thug in a hoodie. All of those people endanger the world's true leaders... just ask Stephen Miller. Or, rather, read his emails warning that immigration and dark skinned people will destroy the white race.

And as for impeachment, it matters not at all that the Democrats have deliberately invited the initial public testimony, starting tomorrow, to be from former Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor, a former military man appointed by George W. Bush, and the State Department official who oversees Ukraine, George Kent, career diplomats both, who have testified carefully and clearly behind closed doors about the rule of law and the undermining of our national interests in Ukraine. Republicans are already jockeying to make the somber hearings a circus.

Why does this all matter? Because this apparent worldview is antithetical to the principles on which America was founded, the principles which once made us great. At a time when the rest of the Western world was based on the idea that some people were better than others, and that noblemen should rule while the peasants labored, our Founders threw off that idea to insist that all men were created equal and could create an even-handed government in which all men were equal under the rule of law. For all that the Founders excluded women and people of color from their vision of the world, they embraced a principle of equality that stood against the idea of a natural hierarchy. It was a principle that could be, and has been, expanded. If we lose that principle to the idea that some men are better than others, and that it's okay for the current regime to cheat to stay in power, we will have lost what made us great. We will have lost democracy.

So what do you look for tomorrow? Taylor and Kent probably won't say much they didn't say already. Tomorrow is less about substance than about performance art, and whether or not the Republicans can muddy the waters enough to so confuse people they give up trying to understand what happened.

What happened is an attack on our nation. The president tried to extort a foreign leader to say he was investigating one of Trump's main opponents, a poisoning of the media conversation that would've hurt Biden much as the announced investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails hurt her candidacy in 2016. It would've helped to rig the election in Trump's favor. And Republican leaders are looking the other way at this fundamental attack on our democracy because they would rather have a dictator in the White House than a Democrat.

No matter what your political affiliation is, you have to see that stance as fundamentally unAmerican.

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov. 12, 2019

The self-pity of the very rich

It must be springtime—or summer, autumn, or winter—because the voice of the billionaire has been heard in the land, and the voice of the billionaire is weepy with self-pity that if the nice lady with plans wins, he might be a slightly smaller billionaire and that some in the world’s wealthiest nation think a little redistribution would mean that, say, thirteen million children don’t have to go hungry anymore. Just for the record the number of billionaires in the USA is about 600; they are a very, very tiny special interest group.

Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though far less rare than it was a few decades ago—except that it’s a disease that’s self-inflicted, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by dispersal of the huge bolus of money choking their empathic awareness. Unlike people with medical conditions, too, their illness is ours, because it warps the very fiber of our republic with its outsize impact on politics—see, for example, Charles and David Koch, Peter Thiel—and newspapers right now are giving them a forum they don’t need or deserve, and by so doing making their wishes and whims seem like important and relevant things.

Often they are framed as the constituency to be listened to when contemplating the economic future of this country, even though they are guaranteed to be fine no matter what, while perhaps a hundred million of their fellow citizens live lives of quiet financial desperation. That’s thanks in no small part to the rarely acknowledged rearrangement of the US economy over the past 40 years to create massive debt and poverty for the many and extreme wealth for the few.

One hundred million is larger than six hundred, but you wouldn’t know it by who we hear from. About 25 times more people live on the Standing Rock Reservation than are billionaires in the USA, and yet our mainstream publications have not felt compelled to run every possible candidate and consequence by the 15,000-plus members of this native community for approval. (It would be so much more interesting if they did.) Meanwhile, “Fully 60 percent of millionaires support Warren’s plan for taxing the wealth of those who have more than $50 million in assets, according to the CNBC Millionaire survey,” but mainstream media outlets have chosen to amplify the voices of those who don’t.

The voice of the billionaire and the white male pundit have been heard, and of an entire army of conservatives who urgently believe that Democrats need to heed their voice (there is not really an equivalent of liberals or leftists who think Republicans need to follow their electoral strategy, because this demographic is apparently not high on its own fumes). It often seems as though the Democratic and Republican parties are unconsciously perceived as the wife and husband in a very, very traditional marriage, since the former is supposed to defer to and please the latter, and the latter is free to run roughshod over the former. To love, cherish, and above all obey. This might be why for the first two years of Trump, the New York Times, like a helicopter parent, was forever running over to see how Trump voters were feeling since last time they checked, without comparable coverage of how other constituencies were feeling. This asymmetry is amplified by their columnists.

New York Times professional hand-wringers David Brooks and Ross Douthat are among the conservative white men who would like to be Democratic election strategists, and also there is a fox that would like to lovingly tend every bird in your henhouse, and a box of mud with some cleaning tips for you. These conservatives giving free advice to their enemies are generally saying that Democrats should run someone Republicans like, even though Republicans are probably going to [plot disclosure] vote for Republicans. The position is ridiculous, but these men believe devoutly in their own gravitas, as does the Times’s Bret Stephens, who publicly fretted that, “Those with plans for everything prove only that they can’t be trusted to plan for anything,” and went on about how untrustworthy Elizabeth Warren is for telling us what she’ll do.

Stephens included this wisdom about her promise to ban fracking on federal lands: “You don’t have to think that fracking is an unalloyed blessing—much less deny that tough safety standards are necessary—to acknowledge its benefits.” Like local pollution and global destruction, that a few might be employed and the wealthiest men and corporations on earth might squeeze a little more money out of the earth by poisoning it, except that even his own former employer, the Wall Street Journal, has reported that fracking was always a bubble and it’s popping. “Frackers Scrounge for Cash as Wall Street Closes Doors” was a June headline, while Bloomberg News noted in August, “Shares of shale producers have taken a beating in recent months as investors grow increasingly impatient with the sector’s track record of burning cash without producing enough returns.” But Stephens chose to link, instead, to a piece at the National Review, written by someone who, speaking of billionaires, works for a Montana think tank funded by the Koch Brothers, who made their billions on climate destruction. Who do you listen to?

The New York Times, in its eternal oscillation between reporting the news and noxious poppycock, ran a few good pieces, earlier this year, by women, of course, about what a totally misogynist bullshit word is “likability.” But the newspaper that in January ran a piece by a woman headlined “Is ‘Likability’ in Politics Sexist? Yes. It’s Also Outdated” ran a piece this week by a man declaring, “The poll supports concerns among some Democrats that her ideology and gender—including the fraught question of “likability”—could hobble her candidacy among a crucial sliver of the electorate.” New York Times, please fucking read the New York Times. Also, is a crucial sliver shaped like a penis? Or is this an analysis based on the idea that Democrats win by kissing up to the wobbly middle rather than by energizing the radical edge? Or by placating, speaking of husbands, the people who hate human rights, feminism, reproductive rights, economic justice, and environmental protection, by abandoning all the ideals that matter to recruit the enemy?

The piece about Warren’s likability ran the same day in the same newspaper as this headline, “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way” by Stephen Rattner, who Wikipedia tells me is “chairman and chief executive officer of Willett Advisors LLC, the private investment group that manages billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s personal and philanthropic assets.” Rattner says of the elite panic we’re seeing everywhere as Warren advances, “She would turn America’s uniquely successful public-private relationship into a dirigiste, European-style system. If you want to live in France (economically), Elizabeth Warren should be your candidate,” and yes I would like to live in France at least in terms of healthcare and trains and college costs, and if our public-private relationship is uniquely successful in any definition that includes Standing Rock and those thirteen million hungry children, then I am the Queen of Sheba.

That likability thing: quite a lot of people do not like men who are running for president, but we do not hear about the likability or lack of likability of them in the same way. A whole army of women might be furious about Joe Biden’s habitual patronization of women—notably young women asking him about climate change recently, Elizabeth Warren testifying on bankruptcy in 2005 and in the recent debate—but apparently this does not raise the question of his likability to the men who do not seem to know that what they mean by likability is that they cannot tell the difference between me and all of us, and they do not like women who want to be president, especially women who might succeed.

“Among the public overall, 38 percent describe themselves as independents,” reports Pew Research Center, “while 31 percent are Democrats and 26 percent call themselves Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2018. An overwhelming majority of independents (81 percent) continue to “lean” toward either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Among the public overall, 17 percent are Democratic-leaning independents, while 13 percent lean toward the Republican Party.” The math says that is 47 percent on the blue side to 39 percent on the red side, which suggests that the next election will depend on turnout of those who already like a progressive platform, not dilution of that platform or abandonment of it for the sake of those who don’t. Perhaps these pundits are advocating for the elections they wish we were having or we used to have, rather than the one we will have next year, with millions more young people and people of color registered to vote and a lot of old conservative white people laid to their eternal rest (Republican voters are almost all white and skew old too; the party has designed its own extinction.)

I crunched the easily crunched numbers last spring and found out that about 11 percent of Democratic voters in the 2016 presidential election were white men. This told me something really important: that in this context white men are a fairly small minority by gender and by race, even under the extraordinary corrupt conditions of that election that held back huge numbers of people of color from full and fair access to the ballot. If and when we have free and fair elections, even leaving out the coming nonwhite majority, the Republican Party will wither away outside its red pockets and the Democratic Party will be accountable to a far more progressive constituency.

If we had editorials that reflected demographics, maybe we wouldn’t have this avalanche of white guys telling us what to think. But too many publications right now are committed to amplifying minority voices to seem like majority voices and vice-versa. Thus we hear disproportionately from billionaires and conservative white men who believe that we should all want what they want and they should decide. That’s a problem.

Rebecca Solnit

Nov. 6, 2019

Trump’s Economic Policies Have Failed US Workers

By far, the largest chunk of the tax cut that President Trump pushed through Congress in 2017 was slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. This was justified in part by the idea that the lower tax rate would go along with an elimination of loopholes.

By closing loopholes, revenues collected would be something closer to the legislated tax rate. It also would reduce the resources wasted in tax avoidance. The other justification for the lower tax rate was that it would lead to an investment boom. This was the basis for the claim that the growth from the tax cut would allow it to pay for itself. More rapid growth was supposed to lead to higher tax revenue, more than offsetting the reduction in revenue from the tax cut.

It is now very clear that neither part of this story is true. While corporations are enjoying the benefit of lower tax rates, they continue to find ways to avoid paying the legislated rate. After the tax cut became law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that corporations would pay $276 billion in taxes this year. This summer, the CBO lowered this projection to just $228 billion — a reduction of more than 17 percent

It would have been nice if the tax cut had been successful in reducing avoidance, but the far more important issue was its impact on investment. By this measure, it has been an even bigger failure.

To have the impact on growth claimed by the Trump administration, we would need increases in investment in the neighborhood of 30 percent annually. Immediately after the tax cut, there was a modest upturn in investment, although it was still in the single digits. The tax cut may have contributed to this upturn, but the increase was no larger than we had seen in several prior years in the recovery.

As the most recent data indicate, even this modest increase has disappeared. Investment fell at a 3.0 percent annual rate in the third quarter, after declining at a 1.0 percent rate in the second quarter. Over the last year, investment has risen just 1.3 percent, less than the growth in the economy. This is not an investment boom.

To be fair, this is not just the failure of the tax cut. Trump’s trade war with China and other countries has led to an enormous amount of uncertainty in the economy. The problem is not simply that he is imposing tariffs; tariffs impose a cost on the economy, but the cost is generally less than the hype around them.

However, Trump’s tariffs are having a larger hit on investment because they are so erratically applied. He seems to take pleasure in threatening and removing tariffs like he is still running a reality TV show. Trump has repeatedly threatened large tariffs and then put off their imposition – or, alternatively, removed tariffs unexpectedly.

This is an environment that makes it very difficult for firms to plan investment. They don’t know what tariffs they are likely to face, both for the products they are selling and for their various inputs, many of which are now imported. In an extreme case, Trump has actually threatened to cut off trade with China altogether, a power he has under provisions for national security.

That sort of uncertainty makes companies put off investment until they can get a clearer view of the future. It’s also worth mentioning in this context that the trade war has not produced benefits in the form of a lower trade deficit. The trade deficit actually rose slightly in the third quarter, as it has throughout Trump’s term.

Trump’s failure on the trade deficit is also visible in manufacturing employment, which hit a record low as a share of total employment in October. This low was partially attributable to the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors. While the jobs lost due to this strike will be regained in November, the fact that we were hovering near a low is due to the weakness of manufacturing job growth under Trump.

The latest data on investment, GDP growth, the trade deficit and manufacturing employment all tell us the same thing. When it comes to producing gains for ordinary workers, Trump’s most-touted economic policies have failed badly. If the issue is giving more money to rich people, he’s doing just great.

Dean Baker

Truthout

Nov. 4, 2019

Biden: the collateral damage candidate

On an October evening in 2002, while quietly embroidering on the porch of her home in Nablus in the West Bank, 60-year-old Shaden Abu Hijleh was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces. A grandmother and community activist involved in promoting the arts, women’s and children’s advocacy, serving the needy and nonviolent resistance to the occupation, she had no links to any violent or extremist organizations. No protests or other violent disturbances were taking place nearby, and her killing is widely believed to have been a targeted assassination.

In July the previous year, Isaac Saada was gunned down by an Israeli helicopter gunship outside of his home in Bethlehem. He was the father of 11 children and a beloved teacher at Terra Sancta, a Roman Catholic school in that West Bank city. Saada was actively involved with the peace education program of the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information. The day he was buried, he had been scheduled to take part in a joint seminar with Israeli teachers on improving understanding and cooperation between the two peoples. Saada was well-respected for his efforts to teach young people to love and work for peace.

Abu Hijleh and Saada were just two of scores of Palestinian activists murdered by Israeli assassins in the early 2000s. Though many of the targets were militants affiliated with armed groups, and included some suspected terrorists, Abu Hijleh and Saada appear to have been targeted simply for being locally prominent Palestinians opposed to the occupation.

The Bush administration condemned the Israeli government’s policy of extra-judicial killings, which a report from the United Nations noted “are grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 147, and of international humanitarian law.”

On Capitol Hill, however, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee defended Israel’s use of these assassination squads, saying, “I don’t believe this is a policy of assassinations” since “there is [in] effect a declared war.”

His name was Joe Biden, a senator from Delaware, future vice president and currently a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

A look at Biden’s Senate career has shown repeated occasions in which he has co-sponsored resolutions and issued statements defending Israeli attacks against civilian targets in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon as legitimate self-defense. Biden has defended Israel despite well-documented reports by human rights groups that Israel had engaged in serious war crimes.

Human Rights Watch, in its investigation of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, noted, “In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.”

Similarly, Amnesty International has reported that Israeli forces “carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale,” including “those on civilian infrastructure” and “direct attacks on civilian objects.” Furthermore, the organization reported, “These attacks seem to have been aimed at inflicting a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people” and that “based on the available evidence and in the absence of an adequate or any explanation from the Israeli authorities for so many attacks by their forces causing civilian deaths and destruction, when no evidence of Hezbollah military activities was apparent, it seems clear that Israeli forces consistently failed to adopt necessary precautionary measures.”

Dismissing such reports, Biden insisted that Israel’s five-week onslaught on Lebanon was a “totally legitimate self-defense effort.” Biden also co-sponsored a resolution offering unconditional support for the war which claimed that the hundreds of Lebanese deaths were the fault of Lebanese, not Israelis, on account of “exploiting civilian populations as shields” despite investigations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Army War College and others finding no evidence that Hezbollah, despite engaging in other war crimes, ever used human shields.

Similarly, during Israel’s 2002 military offensive in the West Bank, Amnesty International documented cases of Israeli forces engaging in “unlawful killings, destruction of property and arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian civilians,” including actions that “targeted medical personnel and journalists, and fired randomly at houses and people in the streets.” Biden, however, co-sponsored a resolution insisting that Israel had simply taken “necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas.”

Much of the criticism of Biden’s foreign policy history has been focused on his key role as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in convincing his colleagues in the Democratically controlled Senate to vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and, more recently, his false claims that he opposed the decision to actually go to war despite the return of UN inspectors and the absence of any of the “weapons of mass destruction” and weapons programs he claimed that Iraq possessed.

However, Biden’s defense of an allied government’s use of lethal force against civilians in the name of fighting terrorism raises serious concerns about his possible future conduct as commander-in-chief. Not only is there little indication that he has changed his position regarding Israeli attacks on civilian targets since his time in the Senate, but he has refused to condemn Trump for the thousands of civilian deaths resulting from the U.S. bombing of ISIS strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul.

It is unlikely that such questions about civilian casualties will come up in any of the presidential debates. That doesn’t mean, however, it shouldn’t be an issue to consider.

Stephen Zunes

Truthout

Nov. 4, 2019

The Real Divide

In the conventional view of American politics,  Joe Biden is a moderate while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are on the left and Donald Trump is on the right.

This conventional view is rubbish. Today’s great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

There are no longer “moderates.” There’s no longer a “center.” The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.

Four decades ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, the left wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. The right sought greater reliance on the free market.

In those days, a general election was like a competition between two hotdog vendors on a long boardwalk extending from left to right. To maximize sales, each had to move to the middle. If one strayed too far left or right, the other would move beside him and take all sales from the rest of the boardwalk.

This older American politics is now obsolete. As wealth and power have moved to the top  and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans have joined the ranks of the working class and poor.

Most Americans – regardless of whether they were once on the left or right – have become politically disempowered and economically insecure. Nowadays it’s the boardwalk versus private jets on their way to the Hamptons.

As Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff and former mayor of Chicago, told the New York Times: “This is really the crack-up. Usually fights are Democrats versus Republicans, one end of Pennsylvania versus the other, or the left versus the right. Today’s squabbles are internal between the establishment versus the people that are storming the barricades.”

In 2016, Trump harnessed many of these frustrations, as did Sanders.

The frustrations today are larger than they were in 2016. Corporate profits are higher, as is CEO pay. Markets are more monopolized. Wealth is more concentrated at the top. Although the official unemployment rate is lower, most peoples’ incomes have gone nowhere and they have even less job security.

Meanwhile, Washington has become even swampier. Big corporations, Wall Street and billionaires have flooded it with money and lobbyists. Trump has given out all the tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and subsidies they have ever wanted. The oligarchy is in charge.

Why hasn’t America risen up in protest? Because American democracy was dysfunctional even before Trump ran for president. The moneyed interests had already taken over much of it.

It’s hard for people to get very excited about returning to the widening inequalities and growing corruption of the decades before Trump. Which partly explains why Biden is foundering.

At the same time, Trump and his propagandists at Fox News have channeled working-class rage against the establishment into fears of imaginary threats such as immigrants, socialists and a “deep state.”

But a large majority of Americans – right and left, Republican as well as Democrat – could get excited about moving toward a real democracy and economy that worked for the many.

This is why the oligarchy is so worried about Warren’s rise to frontrunner status in some polls.

Politico reports that Democratic-leaning executives on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and across the corporate world are watching her with an increasing panic.

“Ninety-seven per cent of the people I know in my world are really, really fearful of her,” billionaire Michael Novogratz told Bloomberg.

These Democratic oligarchs hope Biden, or perhaps Peter Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar, can still take Warren out.

In just the third quarter, Buttigieg raised about $25,000 from executives at Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and hedge fund giants like Bridgewater, Renaissance Technologies and Elliott Management. And another $150,000 from donors who described their occupation as “investor”.

If Biden implodes and neither Buttigieg nor Klobuchar takes the lead from Warren, Wall Street and corporate Democrats hope former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg will ride into the primary at the last minute.

It won’t work. The stark reality is that Democrats cannot defeat Trump’s authoritarian populism with an establishment candidate who fronts for the oligarchy.

The only way Democrats win is with an agenda of fundamental democratic and economic reform, such as provided by Warren and also by Sanders.

Unless Democrats stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy, the risk on election day is that too many Americans will either stand with Trump or stay home.

Robert Reich

Nov. 1, 2019

What happened to real Conservatism?

Today's Republicans call themselves "conservatives," but they are not. They are everything traditional conservatives stood against. Conservatism in America has never been specifically associated with a party; it is a mindset, like liberalism, that shows up in different ways at different times.

Conservatism as a political mindset arrived shortly after liberalism arose in the late 1600s. "Liberals" in the style of John Locke, the English philosopher who is widely acknowledged as the father of liberalism, believed that every man (and by that they meant white men who owned property) was created by God and they were all therefore of equal value. This put paid* to the idea of hereditary political power, and opened the way for American liberals to envision a government in which regular men ruled themselves.

This was the key concept of the American Revolution, and only two years after America's founders wrote the Constitution, patriots in France rebelled against their own monarch using the same principles Americans had. But the revolutionaries in France took these principles to extremes, trying to reorder society quickly, and their fervent beliefs led to instability and violence. Watching the French Revolution, Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke expressed dismay. He began to articulate a world view that later became identified as "conservatism."

Burke recoiled from the leaders of the French Revolution, who tried to make society adhere to an ideology rather than to reality. Burke argued that the role of government was not to advance an ideology, but rather to promote stability by supporting institutions that had proven they worked to advance the well-being of society, institutions like the family, church, schools and so on. Rather than tearing up society to advance radical new ideas, Burke thought leaders should act according to what had been proven to work, conserving the best of past policies.

This was simply a set of ideas, and when those ideas came to America they did not naturally adapt to a single party. But when elite southern slaveholders tried to change the nation, founded in the idea of human equality, to one based in the idea that some men were better than others based upon the color of their skin, Abraham Lincoln claimed that his new political party, the Republican Party, was "conservative" because it stood firm on the position of the founders that "all men are created equal."

That was a long time ago. The roots of today's Republicans lie in the 1950s, when a small group of wealthy businessmen concluded that they must overturn the popular, proven American consensus that the government must regulate business and promote equality for people of color and women. In those days, Republican leaders who embraced conservative ideas pushed desegregation, high taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and reproductive rights for American women to promote family stability,

Although experience had proven that such government activism stabilized society, those furious that they could no longer treat their workers as they wished and accumulate as much money as possible insisted that an active government was, itself, illegitimate. They set out to destroy it. In 1954, William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual leaders of the movement against an active government, insisted that those who wanted government regulation of business to prevent another Depression were "Liberals" who were on a slippery slope toward communism. But Buckley's Liberals were virtually all Americans, Republicans and Democrats both, who believed in a practical government guided by experience to keep the country stable.

Buckley called for true "Conservatives" to stand against these Liberals, rejecting the system that had worked so well in favor of an ideology that Buckley insisted was as inviolable as the Ten Commandments: government should do nothing but promote religion and defend the nation, leaving businessmen to run their businesses however they wished. He planned to overturn the liberal consensus in favor of a system based on his radical ideology. That this radical ideology had been proven disastrous in the 1930s bothered him not at all: it was right on principle, even if it didn't work in reality.

People who thought like Buckley called themselves "conservatives" even though their vision of a world based on an ideology divorced from reality was exactly what Burke and his ilk had opposed when they saw it during the French Revolution. And Americans heard "conservative" and thought of stability, and support for families and church and school, and signed on.

Over time, Movement Conservatives took over the traditional Republican Party and set out to put their extremist ideology into place. They tried to eliminate taxes and any government activism except support for religion and defense. And they have brought us to where we are now, with national leaders destroying all government regulation, inviting evangelical preachers into the White House, and deciding that they will swallow any wrongdoing by their fellow traveler in the White House so long as it means they can keep everyone who does not believe in their ideology out of power.

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov. 2, 2019