Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP

Isle of Wight, UK street punk trio Grade 2 have signed to Hellcat. The band are to release their third album, Graveyard Island, via the label on October 11th. The album was produced by Tim Armstrong himself. To mark the announcement, a video for the title track from the album has been released. Have a […]

The post Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP appeared first on Dying Scene.

Scientists can now manipulate brain cells using smartphone

A team of scientists have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device could speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, addiction, depression, and pain.

The Bad-Apple Myth of Policing https://prismo.xyz/posts/93f7ad8e-0fd3-4a54-a614-5d8c7cc782a3

Joe Biden Didn’t Just Vote for the Iraq Invasion—He Helped Lead the March to War

AS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S SABER-RATTLING TOWARD IRAN THREATENS ANOTHER DISASTROUS WAR in the Middle East, foreign policy has gained newfound focus in the 2020 presidential race. And former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War leaves him with a particularly glaring vulnerability.

Biden’s vote had already become a sticking point in the race before President Trump began his provocations toward Iran in earnest. Bernie Sanders has used Biden’s record to draw a contrast with his own opposition to the Iraq War. Rep. Seth Moulton, another 2020 candidate, has called for Biden to admit he was wrong for casting the vote. And a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed more than 40 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 were less likely to back Biden because of it.

But to say the now-Democratic frontrunner voted for the Iraq War doesn't fully describe his role in what has come to be widely acknowledged as the most disastrous foreign policy decision of the 21st century. A review of the historical record shows Biden didn't just vote for the war—he was a leading Democratic voice in its favor, and played an important role in persuading the public of its necessity and, more broadly, laying the groundwork for Bush's invasion.

In the wake of September 11th, Biden stood as a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, chairing the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As President Bush attempted to sell the U.S. public on the war, Biden became one of the administration’s steadfast allies in this cause, backing claims about the supposed threat posed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and insisting on the necessity of removing him from power.

Biden did attempt to placate Democrats by criticizing Bush on procedural grounds while largely affirming his case for war, even as he painted himself as an opponent of Bush and the war in front of liberal audiences. In the months leading up to and following the invasion, Biden would make repeated, contradictory statements about his position on the issue, eventually casting himself as an unrepentant backer of the war effort just as the public and his own party began to sour on it.

FROM DOVE TO HAWK

Biden hadn't always been a hawk on Iraq. He had voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, though even his opposition to that war had been tepid at best, focused mainly on badgering George H.W. Bush into having Congress rubber stamp a war Bush had already made clear he was intent on waging with or without its approval.

In 1996 Biden criticized Republican claims that then-President Bill Clinton wasn’t being tough enough on Iraq amid calls to remove Saddam Hussein from power, labeling an ouster “not a doable policy.” Before the War on Terror drove U.S. foreign policy, Biden criticized Bush during his first year in office for the then-president’s hawkish position on missile defense.

September 11th changed all this. Only one day before the attacks, at a speech in front of the National Press Club, Biden had called Bush’s foreign policy ideas “absolute lunacy” and charged that his missile defense system proposal would “begin a news arms race.” But the  nearly 3,000 Americans who were killed on U.S. soil that day upended the political consensus. Bush’s approval rating shot up to a historic 90 percent, and any elected officials who failed to match the president’s zeal for military retribution became vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on terror.”

“Count me in the 90 percent,” Biden said in the weeks after the attack. There was “total cohesion,” he said, between Democrats and Republicans in the challenges ahead. “There is no daylight between us.”

In November 2002, just a little over a year following the World Trade Center attacks, Biden faced re-election amidst a political climate in which the Bush administration had incited nationalist sentiment over the issue of terrorism. In October 2001, Biden had been criticized in Delaware newspapers for comments that were perceived as potentially weak, warning that the United States could be seen as a “high-tech bully” if it failed to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and instead relied on a protracted bombing campaign to oust the Taliban.

Consequently, Biden, then deemed by the New Republic as the Democratic Party’s “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism,” quickly became a close ally of the Bush administration in its prosecution of that war. The White House installed a special secure phone line to Biden’s home, and he and three other members of Congress met privately with Bush in October 2001 to come up with a positive public relations message for the war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s stance on Iraq soon began to change, too. In November 2001, Biden had batted away suggestions of regime change, saying the United States should defeat al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before thinking about other targets. By February 2002, he appeared to have creaked opened the door to the possibility of an invasion.

“If Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” he told a crowd of 400 Delaware National Guard officers that month at the annual Officers Call event.

“It would be unrealistic, if not downright foolish, to believe we can claim victory in the war on terrorism if Saddam is still in power,” he said around the same time, echoing the language of hawks like Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Biden soon developed the position he would hold for the following 13 months leading into Bush’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq: While the Bush administration was entirely justified in its plans to remove Hussein from power in Iraq, it had to do a better job of selling the inevitable war to the U.S. public and the international community.

“There is overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power,” he said in March 2002, while noting that divisions remained about how exactly that would be done. If the administration wanted his support, Biden continued, they would have to make “a complete and thorough case” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and to outline what they envisioned a post-Hussein Iraq would look like.

It was a stance well-calibrated for the political climate. Biden could continue to point to disagreements with the administration for liberal audiences, even if they were merely procedural, while putting his weight behind the ultimate goal of war with Iraq. At the same time, Biden’s apparent criticisms doubled as advice for the administration: If you want buy-in from liberals for your war, this is what you’ll have to do.

“I don't know a single informed person who is suggesting you can take down Saddam and not be prepared to stay for two, four, five years to give the country a chance to be held together,” Biden recounted telling Bush privately in June 2002. It was a talking point he would repeat often over the next year, that regime change in Iraq was the correct thing to do, but would require a long-term commitment from the United States after Hussein’s removal.

SETTING THE GROUND RULES

During frequent television appearances, Biden didn’t just insist on the necessity of removing Hussein from power, but appeared to signal to the Bush administration on what grounds it could safely seek military action against Iraq.

When Bush’s directive to the CIA to step up support for Iraqi opposition groups and even possibly capture and kill Hussein was leaked to the Washington Post in June, Biden gave it his approval. Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the plan gave him any pause, Biden replied: “Only if it doesn't work.”

"If the covert action doesn't work, we'd better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action, and it seems to me that we can't afford to miss," he added.

“Prominent Democrats endorse administration plan to remove Iraqi leader from power,” ran the subsequent Associated Press headline.

A month later in July, Biden affirmed that Congress would back Bush in a pre-emptive strike on Iraq in the event of a “clear and present danger” and if “the president can make the case that we’re about to be attacked.”

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” the same month if a discovery that Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda would justify an invasion, Biden replied: “If he can prove that, yes, he would have the authority in my view.”

“And this will be the first time ever in the history of the United States of America that we have essentially invaded another country preemptively to take out a leadership, I think justifiably given the case being made.”

These themes would be used by the Bush administration in the months ahead to sell the war to the American public. The non-existent ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda became one of the most high-profile talking points for the war’s proponents. And the Bush administration would publicize the supposedly imminent threat Hussein posed to the United States, including then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous September declaration that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

By July Biden appeared to rule out a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “Dialogue with Saddam is useless,” he said.

 

NOT A SKEPTIC TO BE HEARD

It was also in July 2002 that Biden carried out one of his most consequential actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he held several days of congressional hearings about the then-potential invasion.

Biden stressed the hearings weren’t meant to antagonize the White House. Rather, as he explained, they would inform the American people about the stakes of the conflict and the logistical issues involved in waging it.

At the time, the pro-war stance shared between the administration, much of the press, and Democrats like Biden was by no means unanimous. Many of the United States’ closest allies in Europe (apart from Tony Blair’s British government) were wary of the war drums beating from Washington, as were many Arab states. In July, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a U.S. ally in the Middle East, called the idea of an invasion “somewhat ludicrous.”

The same month, the Houston Chronicle reported, based on interviews with anonymous officials, that a number of senior military officials, including members of the joint chiefs of staff, were in disagreement with the White House’s drive for war with Iraq, and believed that Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States. The day before the hearings, Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector at the UN, cautioned that it was far from “inevitable” that Iraq had restarted its weapons program, and warned that “Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad” threatened to make the hearings “devolve into a political cover” for Congress to authorize Bush’s war.

Yet as Stephen Zunes reported for The Progressive in April 2019, none of these views were aired at Biden’s hearings, which opened with Biden stating that WMDs “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power,” and that “if we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” Ritter himself was never invited to testify.

Neither were other experts critical of the Bush narrative on Iraq, including Rolf Ekéus, the former executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, the inspection regime set up after the Gulf War to deal with WMDs, and former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, who complained that he was “very agitated by the deliberate distortions and misrepresentations” that made it “look to the average person in the U.S. as if Iraq is a threat to their security.” According to Biden, Bush later thanked him for the hearings.

By Zunes’ count, none of the 18 witnesses who were called objected to the idea that Hussein had WMDs, and all three witnesses who testified on the subject of al-Qaeda claimed the organization received direct support from Iraq—the very red line Biden had said would give Bush the authority to invade the country. Out of the 12 witnesses who discussed an invasion, half were in favor and only two opposed. Biden himself said throughout the hearings that Iraq was a national security threat.

It was largely up to Republicans on the committee—namely Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel—to voice skepticism about a war effort. Ritter accused Biden and other members of congress of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts.” Indeed, on the day of the hearings, Biden had co-authored a New York Times op-ed suggesting that continued “containment” of Hussein “raises the risk that Mr. Hussein will play cat-and-mouse with inspectors while building more weapons,” and that “if we wait for the danger to become clear and present, it may be too late.”

Having given a platform to pro-war talking points, Biden then hit the talk show circuit to cite the lopsided testimony he himself had arranged in order to argue for war. Determining Hussein’s intentions was “like reading the entrails of goats,” Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and what mattered more was Hussein’s ability to use WMDs, whatever those intentions might be. He pointed to testimony in the July hearings to argue it was clear that Iraq had such weapons.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” he said. “This is a guy who’s an extreme danger to the world.”

While the mainstream press featured few skeptical and anti-war voices at the time, a number of them assailed Biden for going along with the Bush administration.

“Biden apparently believes that he fulfills the constitutional function of advise and consent by merely being the cheerleader for the administration's rising chorus demanding war with Iraq,” wrote Stanley Kutler in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “When and how are the only questions in his repertoire.”

 

“A COURSE OF MODERATION AND DELIBERATION”

By fall 2002, Bush appeared to have heeded Biden’s frequent exhortations for how to sell the war.

On September 12, almost a year to the day of the terrorist attacks that had sparked the march to war, Bush went before the UN to make a case for an invasion directly to the international community. Biden praised him for doing “a very good job” in making that case with a “brilliant” speech, and again stressed that “this is the world’s fight,” though cautioning that “the worst option is going it alone, but it is an option.”

That September, Bush also finally asked Congress for a war authorization. While the president backed an expansive resolution in the House, Biden and fellow Foreign Relations Committee member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) put forward their own rival resolution in the Senate that scaled back some of the House version’s more alarming language and stressed the themes Biden had been articulating for the better part of a year. The Senate resolution limited the use of force to Iraq, made dismantling WMDs the primary justification for war, and stressed the importance of international support (though reserving the right to act unilaterally if the UN Security Council moved too slowly).

“We are trying to give the president the power that he needs and get a large vote,” Biden explained.

Bush quickly routed Biden by making a compromise with Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt that swung momentum behind the House resolution. Deciding it was too late, and that there was no way of stopping its passage, Biden simply resigned himself to the compromise House resolution.

“In this place, everybody's pretty practical at the end of the day,” he said.

Bush ultimately won over Biden by incorporating several of his suggestions into the final resolution and a speech he gave on October 7, 2002, in which he painted Iraq as a “grave threat to peace” creating an “arsenal of terror.” He had “made a compelling case,” said Biden, who was “very pleased with his rationale that he laid out.”

While Biden reportedly wavered at the last moment on his promise to cast his vote, he ultimately fell in line, arguing the resolution would “give the president the kind of momentum he needs” to get Security Council backing. On October 11, Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to give Bush the authorization to wage war on Iraq, joining fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein. Twenty-one Democratic senators, including Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy, voted against it.

“At each pivotal moment, [President Bush] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation,” Biden said on the Senate floor. “I believe he will continue to do so … the president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”

A month later, Biden sailed to a sixth term to the Senate with 58 percent of the vote.

“POWERFUL AND IRREFUTABLE”

Biden wasn’t as eager to tout his leading role in the lead-up to the Iraq War in front of all audiences.

On November 11, 2002, Biden gave a speech at a meeting of the Trotter Group, an organization of African-American columnists. Perhaps owing to strong black opposition to the war, including the NAACP board’s October 28, 2002, adoption of a resolution opposing the invasion, Biden sounded very different notes in front of the audience. He denied there was a direct link between Hussein and al-Qaeda (“I don’t consider the war on Iraq the war on terror”) and struck a less hawkish note (“My hope is that we don’t need to go into Iraq”).

After chairing hearings filled with pro-war testimony, Biden told the Trotter Group crowd that “the guys who have to fight this war don't think it's a good idea,” and that doing so would be “the dumbest thing in the world.” Discussing the war authorization he had voted for, he claimed that Republicans had taken “something that nobody, including the president, believes is an imminent danger and moved it up in the election cycle,” and that he reluctantly supported the final resolution in order to give then-Secretary of State Colin Powell leverage to get a resolution out of the UN that would slow the administration’s march to war.

Yet even as he painted himself as a war opponent, Biden’s role in making the war happen wasn’t finished.

In December 2002, Biden embarked on a trip to Germany and the Middle East with Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to cobble together a coalition for the impending war. He first flew to Germany to meet with an Iraqi resistance leader, then headed to Jordan to meet with its monarch, before stopping in Israel and Qatar. The Delaware Republican Party sent him its best wishes.

“We wish the senator good luck and hope he continues to support the president on foreign-policy matters,” its chairman said.

At one point, Biden spoke to the Kurd Parliament in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, carved out in the wake of the first Gulf War. Biden made clear to the Kurds, longtime opponents of Hussein’s regime, that the United States had their back.

“We will stand with you in your effort to build a united Iraq,” he told them, adding that “the mountains are not your only friends,” playing off a local saying.

As Colin Powell prepared to present supposed evidence of Iraq’s WMD program to the UN in February—a factually flawed address that Powell two years later would call a “blot” on his record—Biden hyped the presentation to the press, saying the administration “has evidence now that can change people's minds.”

“I know there's enough circumstantial evidence that if this were a jury trial, I could convict you,” he said. After Powell’s address, Biden called his case “very powerful and I think irrefutable,” and told him, “I am proud to be associated with you.”

At the same time, Biden spent much of the rest of the month leading up to invasion painting himself as its opponent. He criticized Bush for everything but the actual decision to remove Hussein: for failing to make a sufficiently strong case to the public, for not securing more international buy-in for the invasion, for keeping Congress out of the loop and for grossly lackluster planning for postwar Iraq.

“As every hour goes by, I think the chance of war is increasing,” he said in early March, five months after voting to give Bush the power to invade Iraq. “I was hoping it wasn't, hoping there was a shot at doing this peacefully, but that looks slimmer and slimmer.”

Yet even after Bush failed to secure the international cooperation Biden had spent months insisting was necessary, the lack of support wasn’t enough to convince Biden to abandon his support. As Bush issued an ultimatum to Hussein on March 17—leave or be invaded—Biden was behind him.

“I support the president,” he said after meeting with Bush and other officials before the ultimatum. “Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. ... I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.”

Biden portrayed himself as someone who had been powerless to stop the conflict.

“A lot of Americans, myself included, are really concerned about how we got to this stage and about all the lost opportunities for diplomacy,” he said. “But we are where we are. ... Let loose the dogs of war. I'm confident we will win.” He and the rest of the Democrats voted to pass a Senate resolution 99-0 supporting Bush and commending the troops.

Months after the war was launched and Hussein was deposed, any reservations Biden claimed to have had about the war appeared to melt away.

“I, for one, thought we should have gone in Iraq,” he told CNN in June 2003, while noting that not all Democrats had been as enthusiastic about invading the country.

With the much-ballyhooed WMDs failing to materialize, Biden cast himself as a skeptic about the administration’s claims about their existence.

“I also said at the time, as far back as August, that I thought the administration was exaggerating the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” he told CNN.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” later that month, he told host Tony Snow that he had never believed the Bush administration’s rhetoric on the issue, and that it had erred in exaggerating the threat, as there was sufficient grounds to invade Iraq based on the weapons it was reported to have in 1998.

“So you think, looking back on it, still, that it was a just war, in your opinion?” asked Snow.

“Oh, I do think it was a just war,” said Biden.

After playing a clip of then-presidential candidate Howard Dean boasting of his opposition to the war even at the height of its popularity, Snow asked Biden if Dean’s position should be the consensus view of the Democratic Party.

 “No,” Biden flatly replied.

Even as the war effort rapidly went awry in the months that followed, with U.S. soldier deaths continuing to climb after major combat operations were declared over on May 1 and terrorist attacks becoming a regular feature of Iraqi life, Biden continued to insist that war had been the right course of action.

“I voted to go into Iraq, and I'd vote to do it again,” he said at a July 2003 hearing.           

As growing numbers of Democrats, and even members of the general public, turned against the war, Biden rebuked them, implicitly and explicitly.

“In my view, anyone who can't acknowledge that the world is better off without [Hussein] is out of touch,” he said two days later.

“Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” he insisted.

An increasingly lonely voice in a party that would soon make common cause with the growing anti-war movement, Biden continued to back Bush.

“The president made [the case against Saddam] well,” he concluded on July 31. “I commend the president.”

NO REGRETS

In the eyes of the public, a vote for the resolution that gave Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq is enough to cast serious doubt on a candidate’s judgment, as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016. But the fact is, Joe Biden did a lot more than cast a vote.

As an experienced and respected voice on foreign policy, a powerful Democrat, and someone widely perceived as a dove due to his opposition to the Vietnam war, Biden’s backing of regime change in Iraq was crucial to Bush’s effort of selling the public on the war. Biden’s insistence that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States, possessed WMDs and needed to be removed from power helped create momentum for the rising pro-war campaign. And as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, rather than question the prominent voices of doubt, including senior members of the U.S. military, Biden stacked his Iraq hearings with voices in agreement with Bush’s fallacious case for war.

Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness—including her vote for the Iraq war—was one of several factors that likely contributed to her 2016 loss to Donald Trump in key traditional Democratic states. But beyond arguments about electability, the next president will inherit a volatile world on the brink of several different conflicts, including a possible showdown with Iran. When voters chose the next Democratic nominee, they’ll have to decide whether someone who helped lead the march to war in Iraq is really the best person to take on Trump—and guide U.S. foreign policy as president. 

This investigation was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. 

 

Alexander Herbert Announces Dates For “What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk From The Soviet Era To Pussy Riot” Book Tour

For many people in the West, knowledge of the punk rock scene in Russia and the former Soviet Union starts and ends with Pussy Riot and maybe Svetlanas and probably Gogol Bordello who are technically from New York. As you should expect, however, a part of the world that has long been ruled by authoritarian […]

The post Alexander Herbert Announces Dates For “What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk From The Soviet Era To Pussy Riot” Book Tour appeared first on Dying Scene.

The El Paso Manifesto: Where Racism and Eco-Facism Meet

This story was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A manifesto posted online shortly before Saturday’s massacre at a Walmart in El Paso that the suspected shooter may have written blamed immigrants for hastening the environmental destruction of the United States and proposed genocide as a pathway to ecological sustainability. Filled […]

Kentucky Miners Are Blocking a Coal Train for Backpay. We Talked to One About a Just Transition.

On July 29, coal miners in Cumberland, Kentucky began blocking a train carrying over $1 million worth of coal to protest their former employer, Blackjewel LLC, which declared bankruptcy on July 1. According toCNN, the company wrote bad checks to 350 miners in Harlan County alone, prompting the workers to stage the protest until they are paid what they are owed. Holding signs that say, “No pay, we stay,” the coal miners have been buoyed by community support, with churches and restaurants donating food and supplies. They say they will stay on the tracks until they get the wages they’re owed for the work they’ve already done. While Harlan County stands as the site of militant coal-miner labor struggles in the 1930s and 1970s, these workers are all non-union.

Socialists of Color to the Front

One evening in late May, upward of 50 grassroots organizers from different groups around the country gathered at a union hall in Dorchester, Mass. They were grappling with some of the Left’s age-old questions: In a future where the Left wins political power, what would we like to see happen? And more pragmatically: What would it take to get there?

A local community organizer sets the scene: “It’s 2019. Burning issues are facing our communities.” She lists off galloping inequality, a trigger-happy white nationalist movement, looming environmental disaster. It’s urgent, she says, to do “more cross-fertilization work” to harness progressive forces (like the striking teachers around the country) to build solidarity across issues.

This discussion of base-building to include more different types of people is typical of many Left gatherings. But what’s noteworthy is the faces in the room, who reflect the kind of diverse base the Left has aspired to build for decades.

That’s by design. The meeting host is LeftRoots, a five-year-old socialist group that offers a hub for on-the-ground organizers around the country to strategize together. LeftRoots’ membership includes “super-majorities both of people of color, and of women and other gender-oppressed people.” Co-founder NTanya Lee says this isn’t “just a racial critique that the contemporary U.S. Left is too white” (though “that is a fact,” she adds). Instead, it’s vital, she says, that any movement to transform the world be “rooted in the struggles of working-class communities of color who are the ones who have the most at stake in defeating the system and winning the liberation that we really want.”

In the American political imagination, talk of the working class still conjures an image of gruff, salt-of-the-earth white men in the Rust Belt. While they’re certainly out there, at 59% of 25–64-year-olds, white people (and white men, especially) make up a declining share of the working class. The Economic Policy Institute projects that, by 2032, a majority of the American working class will be people of color. Women already make up nearly half of working-class adults in the country at 46%.

That LeftRoots even exists might send much of established media stumbling back on their heels. The chattering classes have been quick to interpret the surging interest in socialism as a fad for a loud (but small!) band of white millennials. (A snarky New York magazine piece published in March reports on the silly quirks of the “young socialist power elite” in Brooklyn, who supposedly live on Twitter and believe socialism to be “sexy” without really knowing what it means.)

Of course, there’s a long history of socialism in communities of color in America, from what historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls pre-colonial “indigenous socialism” (and its radical heir, the American Indian Movement) to spirited traditions of Chinese American socialism in San Francisco in the early 20th century and the radical Chicano movements of the Southwest in the late 20th century. Black socialists have been a pain in the ass to many of their white counterparts for more than a century, relentlessly insisting that white supremacy is chief among the Goliaths that socialism must slay. In a 1913 essay, noted socialist W.E.B. Du Bois famously described “The Negro Problem” as “the great test of the American Socialist.”

Lee launched LeftRoots in 2014 with a crew of three other San Francisco Bay Area organizers who thought the political Left was failing to bridge the gap between urgent, daily, in-the-trenches action and a longer-term vision and strategy. “It wasn’t enough to cross our fingers and be like, ‘One day this shit is all going to get connected and we’re going to win,’ ” says Lee, 50, the former executive director of San Francisco-based community organizing group Coleman Advocates.

It’s worth emphasizing what LeftRoots is not. LeftRoots does not initiate or run campaigns, whether issue-based or electoral, like the Democratic Socialists of America and many other socialist groups. Nor does it organize protests. LeftRoots’ focus is simply on its stated purpose: to strategize around “21st-century socialism” and then bring people together to help get there.

LeftRoots offers regular branch meetings and other training events. Members also work through an online curriculum they call the Little Red School, covering topics from political economy to cultural hegemony to strategies for building organizational power. This breadth is also apparent in LeftRoots’ Out to Win! journal. At 150 pages, it makes references from Engels and Marx to American Idol, includes quotes from Paulo Freire to Langston Hughes and Grace Lee Boggs, and explores ideas from cis-heteropatriarchy to neoliberalism, all while citing sources and marking points of debate.

Today, LeftRoots has more than 200 members spread across seven branches—Boston, Philadelphia, New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and two at-large branches that meet online. While their numbers may seem small, their influence is multiplied by the simple fact that nearly everyone is already involved in other grassroots work aimed at improving their communities. Members say LeftRoots has deeply informed that work.

Sometimes when you’re in the day-to-day of the work, you’re [only] focused on what’s right in front of you,” says Mike Leyba, 31, an electoral strategist and organizer in Boston who sits on the LeftRoots National Coordinating Committee. It’s LeftRoots’ job “to zoom out and … see where our potential for really strategic action is.”

Leyba, who spent his formative years in Compton, Calif., became a political organizer in 2008, when he joined the fight against a California ballot proposal banning same-sex marriage. He joined LeftRoots in April 2016. For Leyba, LeftRoots has “really honed my political strategy around electoral work.” Since 2010, he has staffed or managed four local electoral campaigns in Massachusetts and California, including state house races and a Boston mayoral campaign.

(Activist Mike Leyba says his work with LeftRoots keeps him from becoming “much more cynical” about electoral politics. Electoral campaigns, he now says, can help build a socialist base. Photo by Flavio DeBarros.)

“If I weren’t a part of LeftRoots, I probably would be much more cynical about working in electoral politics,” Leyba says. “If progressive candidates, once elected, don’t always deliver,” he says, the feeling becomes, “I worked so freaking hard for this person and they didn’t do shit for me or my people, and we’re still in crisis.”

But Leyba says LeftRoots helped him see that electoral campaigns can be a way to build a socialist base, regardless of the election’s outcome or how the official performs once elected. For example, Leyba “deep canvasses” Boston neighborhoods; rather than just reciting a candidate’s biography to potential voters, he now asks questions rooted in race and class, such as, “When was the last time you got a rent increase?” Those conversations can spin out into deeper discussions about rent control or funding public schools. He says “It’s putting an ear to the ground and seeing where people are at. Where are they feeling the squeeze? Where should we be focusing our energy? Where is the transformative potential?

“Now multiply this by tens of thousands of conversations. You’re able to see much bigger than any particular candidate. Whoever wins will have very real limits on their power. But there aren’t the same limits on social movements.”

Paige Kümm, 32, another member of the LeftRoots National Coordinating Committee, serves as a national organizer with Right to the City, an alliance of social justice organizations that aims to offer “a unified response to gentrification” nationwide. At a March staff retreat in Brooklyn, Right to the City discussed LeftRoots’ newly expanded working definition of class, laid out in the first issue of Out to Win. Here, LeftRoots sees potential allies for working-class issues in the lower tiers of the ownership class, like taxi drivers and corner store owners. While the upper layer of capitalists (“the executives, board members and major shareholders”) may fight socialist change tooth and nail, this lower-tier group still faces significant hardship and could be moved to join a movement to redistribute wealth and power.

LeftRoots’ layered definition of class helped Right to the City “better understand the layers of the working class,” says Kümm. Some homeowners may technically be landlords, in that they rent to tenants and depend on rent to make their payments to the bank, but these homeowners are still “bank tenants,” as Kümm describes them, who face foreclosure if they fall on hard times. LeftRoots’ definition was a helpful reminder to not pit these homeowner-tenants against subtenants, Kümm says, since both have interests in fighting the power that banks have to make them homeless.

“We’re trying to better understand: What are the different strata of the working class and how can we speak to their interest?” Kümm says. “How can we make them feel like they are a part of this movement?”

There are two ways to join LeftRoots, which holds no membership drives and no purity tests beyond its “points of unity,” which includes notes like “socialism is the future” and “the planet is not a commodity.” The first is as a “compa” (from the Spanish for “friend”), an ongoing financial and political supporter, important for an organization that doesn’t apply for philanthropic foundation grants. 

The second way to become a member is by invitation only. To be eligible, you must complete the General Baker bootcamp, named after a giant of Black socialist organizing in Detroit. In one-day sessions over eight weeks, held simultaneously around the country and online, participants share their ideas about socialism and their own journeys as activists. Afterward, some are invited to become full-fledged members, called cadre.

That word, “cadre,” may be off-putting for those who remember it mainly as a description of various leftist factions with top-down leadership structures, the kind that aspired to be revolutionary vanguards—an elite tier supposedly most qualified to lead radical change—in the 1960s and 1970s. These groups based themselves on a particular interpretation of socialist theories of change in which a leadership role in working-class politics was guaranteed by devotion to a particular ideology and intellectual rank, rather than earned by a practice in mass struggle to help forge and unleash the power of workers and oppressed peoples.

Most on the Left now reject that particular version of cadreism as both fundamentally anti-democratic and doomed to failure—and the dozen or so LeftRoots cadres I spoke with agree. They use the term in a much more generic sense, to mean the activists who believe in a political project; devote a considerable portion of their time, energy and talent to moving it forward; and are serious about developing the intellectual and practical skills to do so effectively. Thus they see no contradiction between the importance of developing revolutionary cadre and rejecting the vanguardist practices of the past. In fact, the LeftRoots website has an explicit “against vanguardism” section: “Challenging the practice of many 20th century cadre organizations on the Party Left, we reject the vanguardism and the associated practices of operating secretly within mass organizations while trying to control them; creating front groups; or being opportunist and leeching onto authentic mass struggles to avoid doing the long hard work of building a real base.”

LeftRoots insists that “the people that are doing the strategy” should be “really grounded in the work,” Leyba says. “Otherwise, you’re just an armchair activist and we don’t need more of those.”

Instead, LeftRoots refers to a cadre as a committed member who “willingly makes sacrifices, learns skills and plays roles that are required in order to fight for the change we wish to see.” Here, “cadre” acts as a small way to highlight, yet again, that isolation can be overcome, because the walls that separate those who are hungry for an egalitarian world are thinner than they imagine.

LeftRoots doesn't see itself as the final home of this 21st-century socialism. Rather, it is “attempting to lay the groundwork for the launching of a political instrument in the future,” Kümm says. LeftRoots, she says, is a way to “train up social movement leftists to be prepared to take part in the launching of that political instrument.” LeftRoots folks are candid about how far the Left has to travel before it can flex its political muscle the same way as robust cadre movements of the past (the radical Black socialist autoworkers in Detroit in the late 1960s and 1970s, for example). But LeftRoots intends, after a couple years of rigorous study, experimentation and analysis, to draw a clearer picture of the sorts of vehicles the Left needs to bring its vision to life.

In that union hall near Boston (which LeftRoots requested not be named, out of “an abundance of caution” about redbaiting), close to 100 area organizers also participated, representing groups like City Life/Vida Urbana, Dominican Development Center, New England United for Justice, Boston Liberation Health and Right to the City Boston, groups fighting for everything from racial, economic and environmental justice to land, labor and housing rights.

The discussion closed with long-term questions: Should the Left prepare to launch a third party or commit to a takeover of the Democratic Party? And speaking of takeovers, how cool would it be if workers in weapons factories just took the damn things over and retrofit them for green purposes?

After decades in the political wilderness, the American Left is aware of the obstacles to a more egalitarian world. But in rooms like this, where political imagination and analytic rigor walk hand in hand, you can see possibilities unfold, a tapestry of radical hopes and ideas. In an increasingly desperate moment, it’s a refreshing revival: an old socialist tradition being built upon and refined and expanded to ensure meaningful participation for all, particularly working-class communities—of color, especially.

Amid Conservative Assault on Organized Labor, Democratic Lawmakers Are Advancing Laws to Expand Workers’ Rights

Nevada and Delaware passed laws this summer giving public-sector workers the right to collectively bargain. Colorado is expected to follow suit next year.

The post Amid Conservative Assault on Organized Labor, Democratic Lawmakers Are Advancing Laws to Expand Workers’ Rights appeared first on The Intercept.

Americans Trust Scientists, Until Politics Gets in the Way

This story was originally published by Wired. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nothing’s more American than a science-hero—an indomitable, big-brained hasher-out of ideas that change the world, that make the impossible possible. At least since Ben Franklin sat with the founders, and certainly since Vannevar Bush explicitly connected the US’ future to federal funding of […]

After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings

The United States saw two mass shootings in the span of 24 hours. At least one of them appears to have been inspired by Donald Trump.

The post After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings appeared first on The Intercept.

Joe Biden and the Perils of Bipartisanship

The Democratic presidential campaign playbook has, for decades, included grand promises to reach out to the GOP to solve the nation’s ills.

In 2020, some candidates are throwing that playbook out the window.

“If the Republicans are going to try to block us on key pieces that we’re trying to move forward, then you better believe we gotta keep all the options on the table,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, referring to the possibility of eliminating the filibuster. In a speech to the 2019 California Democratic Convention, Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) pledged “no middle ground” on issues dear to progressives. Even centrist Michael Bennet, at the June Democratic debate, acknowledged that working with Republicans would be impossible in 2021: “Gridlock will not magically disappear.”

Four progressive lawmakers elected in 2018— Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—model what a rebellious Democratic approach can look like. The “squad,” as they’re known, has proposed far-reaching measures like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while combating right-wing attacks and calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. While mainstream Democrats still pledge to build bridges, this new generation is more likely to occupy them.

It’s a remarkable turnaround. If worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship has become its holy sacrament.

This uncompromising approach from young progressive legislators and presidential candidates like Warren and Sanders is also an implicit rebuke of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is campaigning on the promise of an outstretched, bipartisan hand.

For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. “This nation cannot function without generating consensus,” Biden said in May. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, “It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.”

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

In the first round of the Democratic primary debates, Biden was the only candidate (besides little-known centrist John Delaney) to say “bipartisan.”

Biden, however, is not the only one clinging to faith in cross-party cooperation.

In April 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks speculated that, assuming the departure of Trump in 2020, Congress would again enjoy a “world with the possibility of bipartisanship.” Politico Magazine’s Michael Grunwald explained that Biden’s “bipartisan friendships, Washington experience and genial Uncle Joe approach really can help produce results.”

Indeed, “discomfort with open division is part of the DNA of the nation,” says historian Rick Perlstein, author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. “It’s all about repressing this original fissure: Slavery. The entire history, for the first half of the 19th century, is this all consuming attempt to keep this genie in the bottle.”

To get slave-owners to at least pay lip service to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Founders compromised that three out of every five slaves would be counted in a state’s population when apportioning congressional seats. Slave states wielded this inflated electoral power to ensure slavery continued in the new republic, while the Compromise of 1850 facilitated slavery’s westward spread and made the federal government responsible for recovering “fugitive” slaves.

These compromises “came at a tremendous cost,” says historian Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. “If you think of slavery as a gross abuse of human rights, then compromise doesn’t sound so good.”

This compromising dynamic outlived slavery. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, made room for Jim Crow and, by pulling federal troops out of the South, gave a green light to racist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet Biden and others who yearn for the “pragmatism” of days past aren’t inventing things. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days—so consequential they would turn that number into a measure of success for every president thereafter—likely would have failed had he not secured pivotal support from Republicans and even put several in his cabinet. Four-fifths of Republicans in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

All of this was possible, says historian Thomas Frank, in part because “there was a time when the parties were not divided by ideology or by their place on the political spectrum. The parties were regional and ethnic.”

In the early 20th century, Republicans dominated politics as a party of the Northeast, white Protestants, business owners, African Americans and the middle class, while Democrats foundered as a largely agrarian party of the South and Great Plains. Things changed when Roosevelt cobbled together an ultimately unstable coalition of Southerners, Catholic immigrants in urban areas, bluecollar workers and, crucially, African Americans, who fled the GOP as they began economically benefiting from the New Deal. In practice, this meant progressive politicians from both parties could work together to get things passed.

So what happened? Commentators across the spectrum name one culprit: Partisanship.

“Too much estrangement on both sides,” groused Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in 2018. A 2017 Atlantic Council report on U.S. political dysfunction blamed a “dangerously codependent” partisan divide birthed by gerrymandering that made officials accountable to partisan radicals. Bruce Wolpe, who worked on the Democratic staff in Congress during the first Obama administration, charged that Congress was beset by “hyperpartisanship” defined by “no compromise, no consensus” and “no working together in the national interest.”

In June, Biden echoed these sentiments, bemoaning the loss of “civility” that marked his salad days in Congress when he worked with segregationists despite disagreements.

“We got things done,” Biden said. “We got it finished.”

These analyses omit, however, the key agent of this growing political polarization: the GOP.

Soon after FDR took office in 1933, a coterie of conservative intellectuals, prominent political figures and wealthy businessmen (such as the Du Pont brothers) began organizing against what they saw as the “socialistic” overreach of the New Deal. With a messianic resolve and a seemingly bottomless pit of cash, they created think tanks, books, periodicals, colleges, television and radio programming and more. The result was an alternative intellectual landscape that demonized government and deified the free market.

Electoral politics followed. Frustrated with the “dimestore New Deal”-ism of the postwar GOP, what came to be called the “New Right” engineered a grassroots takeover of the Republican Party, resulting in the 1964 presidential nomination of hardline conservative Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost spectacularly, liberalism’s triumphs only fueled right-wing organizing. A well-cultivated conservative and evangelical backlash against the civil rights victories of the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision culminated in the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan, previously viewed largely as an unelectable ideologue out of step with the times.

“The election of Ronald Reagan was a symbol of the eclipse of the Rockefeller Republicans by the Barry Goldwater wing, sending a signal to the party to get on board,” says Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Reagan used his bully pulpit to popularize the idea of getting “the government off the backs of the people.”

“The conservative wing of the GOP established hegemony over not just the Republican Party, but the American political order,” says Robin.

Testimonies from the conservative Hoover Institution at the close of Reagan’s presidency attest to that fact. As historian Stephen Ambrose put it, while Reagan “failed to break the Democratic hold on Congress, he did force the Democratic Party to move to the right.” Historian Karl O’Lessker wrote that “Reaganomics may well have caused a fundamental shift in the political community’s approach to fiscal policy. … There has been little if any disposition among congressional Democrats to advocate, still less vote for, big new spending or taxation programs.” 

The GOP came to explicitly align itself with the agenda of super-rich, right-wing patrons like the Koch brothers, while the Democrats, shell-shocked from electoral defeats, began relying on big-dollar fundraisers that hastened a rightward turn.

“[Republican Party patrons have] turned the GOP into a kind of Leninist party of the Right, one in which no dissent is allowed after the course has been set,” says historian Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. “It wants to dramatically diminish the power of the federal government in order to remove the reins from capitalists.” And yet, she says, “We are still operating as a nation as if there is a Republican Party.”

The newer, more strident class of Republicans who entered Congress in 1979 “had not been exposed to the demoralizing impact of Watergate, the Agnew and Nixon resignations, the Ford defeat, and maneuvering in a Congress dominated by two-to-one Democrats,” read a 1979-1980 internal report commissioned by GOP congressional leadership. “Where older members saw persistence and shrewdness, the freshmen saw timidity and indecision.” Newt Gingrich was one of them. In the 1990s, he would continue the process that Reagan began by spearheading the tactic of obstructionism by the minority.

Gingrich fancied himself “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times” and called for “large-scale, radical change.” Working to polarize debate between the parties, he pioneered the threat of a government shutdown as a political strategy. He calculated that obstructionism would nurture popular contempt toward the institution of Congress, which would serve the Right’s anti-government agenda.

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who served as House Majority Whip when Gingrich was Speaker, later wrote about the GOP’s strategy under Clinton. Knowing that Clinton and the Senate would tack to the center, he explained, the GOP would “start every policy initiative from as far to the political right as we could” to move “the center farther to the right” and achieve a “much greater success rate than we had ever known.” DeLay boasted in his memoirs, “We moved the whole of American governance to the right.”

The old-guard Republicans joined in. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole pioneered the filibuster-threat strategy now synonymous with Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), making 60 votes necessary for anything to get done, from healthcare reform to a stimulus package.

This rightward shift led scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein—at the Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, respectively— to declare in 2012 that the GOP had “become an insurgent outlier.” The party was “ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”

Joe Biden’s political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North. … because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Nancy Kassebaum (Kan.), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress. 

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship. 

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”

A Teen Scientist Figured out How to Suck Microplastics from the Ocean. There May Be Hope for Humanity.

On Monday, Fionn Ferreira, an 18-year-old from Ireland, took home the top prize—which includes, in addition to a lifetime of bragging rights, a $50,000 educational scholarship—at the Google Science Fair for his project on microplastic pollution. Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 millimeters in size and they pose serious environmental and a public health risks. They […]

Amazon quietly removed a line from its transparency report saying it had "never participated" in the NSA's PRISM program.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-prism-transparency-data/

The Big Idea: Right to Repair

right to re• pair

noun

1. The principle that people should be allowed to fix their own stuff

“Right to repair just basically says, ‘Hey guys, you got to make the information and the parts available.’" —Elizabeth Warren, speaking on All In With Chris Hayes on March 27

Wait, we don’t have the right to repair stuff now? 

Maybe no one’s physically stopping you, but they sure are making it hard—and the implications are huge, from consumer electronics to farm equipment.

Many manufacturers are putting up obstacles one way or another, from special service codes meant to halt third-party repairs to creating proprietary parts that tinkerers can’t get without skirting patent law.

And when you do take a broken item back to the manufacturer, you are often encouraged to just buy a new one, or at least buy expensive replacement parts, when the original part would be perfectly possible to fix.

Beyond being annoying, what’s the impact? 

For one thing, electronics are the fastest growing part of our waste stream and often include toxic elements that get thrown out. Recycling programs, which often just ship the waste to poor countries, aren’t the answer, either. 

And while a few hundred dollars to repair a phone may simply be a nuisance for some, it can be a major burden for others. Manufacturers’ monopolies on repairs can be even more damaging when someone’s livelihood depends on the equipment—which is a huge problem for farmers right now.

So that’s why Bernie and Warren have been talking about John Deere tractors? 

Yep! John Deere has made the extremely bold claim that people who buy their equipment don’t own it, they’re just, like, renting it. Some farmers are forced to scrape together thousands of dollars for repairs during their narrow planting and harvesting seasons—because the equipment software locks up, and only John Deere holds the key. 

Sanders and Warren have both endorsed a “national right to repair” in the ag industry, which requires making repair instructions and equipment parts available.

Right to repair for cars and trucks passed in Massachusetts in 2012, and the auto industry agreed to implement the same standards nationwide. This year, 20 states considered right-to-repair legislation, though opposition from Apple and other corporations makes victories hard to come by.

So for anyone who’s ever felt irrational rage toward a broken inanimate object, it’s worth remembering: You don’t hate your cracked iPhone screen; you hate capitalism.

This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage of right to repair, see, “Apple Doesn't Want You To Be Able To Fix Your iPhone—Here's Why.”

How an Investigative Journalism Center Helped Oust Puerto Rican Gov. Rosselló

On July 24, following nearly two weeks of massive protests, Puerto Rico’s embattled Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced that he would resign. The shocking development followed the release of secret chats that showed Rosselló and other members of the government using sexist and homophobic language to refer to political rivals and victims of the deadly Hurricane Maria. It also marked the first time in Puerto Rico’s history that a governor was removed from office without an election.  

The cache of secret chats was released through Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI), an organization that has long been at the forefront of battles for public information. The CPI has become a safe haven for journalists who share a commitment for government transparency and who have been pushed out of news outlets that have either eliminated or significantly downsized their investigative reporting units.

Recent CPI reports have revealed government corruption and neglect of marginalized groups, as well as the real death toll of Hurricane María. These reports have challenged the Rosselló administration’s culture of obscurity, fuelling the protests against the Rosselló administration.

In These Times recently spoke with Carla Minet, executive director of the CPI, about the organization’s role in the protests, the importance of government transparency, and what’s next for Puerto Rico.

One of the things that led to the current uprising in Puerto Rico was an almost 900-page chat that was leaked, and that was administered by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló himself, alongside some of his top aides. Your organization, CPI, was one of the outlets that published the chats and was the first outlet to publish it in its entirety. When did you realize what you had with this leak?

CM: *Laughs* As soon as we were able to scroll down the document, I think it took, like, maybe 10 to 15 minutes to understand, you know, the implications of the documents. At that point we had seen the previous leaked pages.

I think that small leaks that have happened at points were not, they didn't have the impact of the whole document. They were like pieces that didn't communicate how deep the problem was, in terms of possible offenses, in terms of ethics and violations of not only the law but protocols and, of course, common sense.

At that point when we saw the whole document, we were really astonished. We were like, “What is this? How this has happened?” So we were in shock, let's say. And immediately we knew that we had to start working on a story and report on the patterns that we saw in the documents. We have been already investigating some of these figures who were close to the governor, so we had a lot of background on each of them. Besides the name-calling and the bullying, and the insults, all of which are important, the leaks show the character of the officials in government.

Did you expect an uprising to come out of this leak?

CM: No, never. At the point when we published the documents there had been protests because of the previous partial leaks, but we hadn’t even thought about this, to be very frank. We only thought about the importance of people knowing how their officials were behaving among these potential conflicts and these potential breaches. This is like the tip of the iceberg in terms of corruption—a very big and deep corruption scheme within the government.

How do you think this will affect the ongoing debt negotiations, which you wrote about in 2017 for In These Times?

This has affected the governance of the country at all levels. Any important officials who dealt with the fiscal control board and the negotiation process are now out of the government. And the governor is going out. And still we don't know who will replace him. So I think this will delay the processes. Will it be favorable? I don't have an answer to that. I really have no idea if this will benefit or make that process worse. Because things are very fluid and it is very difficult right now to predict where things are going.

What is the mission of the CPI moving forward?

After these revelations, we've had a very heavy process in terms of not only the workload but also the sudden recognition of our journalists, and the amount of tapes we are getting. So we have our hands full right now, trying to just think—what is the best way in which we can contribute to this stage of the process that the country is going through?

We are trying to work hard, but I think the future is a little bit blurry right now. We just know that we are doing our best. We were in the right place in the right moment. We are grateful for that, because we think this has been an important process for our country.

How has investigative journalism been suppressed in other local news outlets in Puerto Rico?

There is no investigative news outlet in Puerto Rico besides the CPI. Local media does very little reporting. El Nuevo Día newspaper has developed an investigative unit, but if you see the trajectory of that unit, you'll see that they have published very few stories. They've only had like two journalists for that unit, who do also daily coverage sometimes. So it's not a real effort to do investigations. In television, there are a few efforts, but that's what we have.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the CPI engaged in a series of investigations, many of which were subject to a series of blockages from the Puerto Rican government. The center had to sue the government to gain access to public records. Can you talk to us about some of those efforts?

CM: During the Ricardo Rosselló administration, we've been to court five times. One of those occasions was the case of the death database. Following Hurricane Maria, we were also in court for asking for the emergency plans of the government before and after the hurricane. We were also in court for the documents exchange between the government of Puerto Rico and the fiscal control board. We were also in court for asking for lists of lobbyists. And most recently, we were in court for the implementation plans and the progress reports for all agencies produced by the government of Puerto Rico to the fiscal control board.

All those efforts have made a point in terms of public opinion about how difficult it is to get public records here, and how unfair it is that we have to go to court to get documents which are public. We've been successful in all the lawsuits. In the end, we've gotten the documents. Only one of those lawsuits is still in process. But the rest have been successful. So I think it shows that there is a culture of opacity in the government and they have a culture of denying documents for no reason.

They make us use our very few resources to go to court, sometimes for six months. It’s a waste of public money, just a waste.

Making all of this public is a way for the people to understand that we need policies and protocols or even laws that expand and enforce the right we have to public documents in the Puerto Rican Constitution.

The CPI has been incredibly successful with gaining access to this information for the public interest. How has this success served as an example for other states that may or may not have open records acts or sunshine laws, among other kinds of mechanisms by which they can gain access to information?

CM: To be fair, in the U.S. there is no constitutional right to public information as there is in Puerto Rico, so I think that puts us in a better position to go to court. But in the U.S. certainly there is a culture in terms of open government, in terms of using technology, that is not so well developed in Puerto Rico. And even this [Rosselló ] administration that came to power with the promise of open government and transparency definitely has done nothing in that matter.

Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists

Demands that CBP spend millions to upgrade cameras used to read license plates were orchestrated in part by a company that hoped to profit.

The post Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists appeared first on The Intercept.

After 2 Decades, Democrats Still Don’t Agree on When to Leave Afghanistan

Two Democratic candidates who served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made unambiguous pledges during this week’s debates: They promised to bring home the roughly 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of their first year in office. Those two veterans—South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—are the only Democratic […]

McKinsey and Company Is an Elitist Cult. Why Is Buttigieg Defending It?

Pete Buttigieg has emerged as one of the most talked-about candidates of the 2020 election cycle. With his glittering resume—Harvard, a Rhodes, a stint in the military—and his compelling story as the young gay mayor of an Indiana city, Buttigieg has appeared on the covers of Timeand New York. While a small-city mayor may be an unlikely presidential contender, Buttigieg continues making headway, polling fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire in a notoriously crowded field. The New York Timesreports that “voters and donors in the party” embrace him “with steadily growing enthusiasm,” noting the keen interest from Wall Street.

While Buttigieg sometimes speaks the language of the Left on the campaign trail and will likely embrace some crowd-pleasing progressive policy plans, one chapter of his past raises the question: Is Mayor Pete someone who will challenge the status quo?

After graduating Oxford, any career path in the world was open to him, and Buttigieg chose McKinsey & Company, the cult-like management consulting firm. Buttigieg writes in his memoir, Shortest Way Home, that he became a consultant because he “wanted to get an education in the real world.” The real world exists in many places on this planet; McKinsey & Company is not one of them. People seek to join the world’s number one consulting behemoth to secure a place in the ranks of the American elite.

In 1993, Fortunemagazine put it this way: “These fellows from McKinsey sincerely do believe they are better than everybody else. Like several less purposeful organizations—Mensa, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Banquet of the Golden Plate—McKinsey is elitist by design.” 

The firm has produced at least 70 Fortune 500 CEOs. Buttigieg’s three-year stint is par for the course at an organization that takes pride in “counseling out” 4 in 5 hires before they become partner. They then proudly join what McKinsey calls its “alumni network,” and what Duff McDonald, author of The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, calls “the McKinsey Mafia.” As they fan out among the world’s C-suites and B-suites, they remain McKinsey loyalists. “There is no McKinsey boneyard, in other words; you’re still McKinsey after you’ve left,” McDonald writes. “Perhaps the only alumni network with more reach and lifelong relevance to its members is that of Harvard University.”

McKinsey’s internal churn fits perfectly with the company’s consulting philosophy. McKinsey, which in 2003 advised 100 of the world’s top 150 firms, “may be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs,” writes McDonald. “Its advice: Identify your bottom 10 percent or 25 percent or 33 percent, and get rid of them as soon as possible.”

McKinsey is also an infamous mercenary for the world’s most unethical corporations and authoritarian governments, from China to Saudi Arabia. McKinsey allegedly advised Purdue Pharma, the progenitor of today’s opioid crisis, on how to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales and keep users hooked.

“We are now living with the consequences of the world McKinsey created,” writes a former McKinsey consultant in an exposé for Current Affairs. “Market fundamentalism is the default mode for businesses and governments the world over.”

So what kind of presidency would the McKinsey mindset produce? Former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas observes, in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, business consultants ignore how political and economic power actually works. “These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action,” Giridharadas writes. “And that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.”

As McKinsey comes under heavier scrutiny for its role in the crimes of governments and powerful corporations, any “progressive” who worked there and wants to be taken seriously should have a rather critical perspective. Buttigieg has shown no such reflection. Instead, he calls his time at McKinsey his most “intellectually informing experience”; he left only because it “could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.” Buttigieg has said he didn’t follow the story of McKinsey’s OxyContin push. On McKinsey’s Saudi and South African government ties, he said: “I think you have a lot of smart, well-intentioned people who sometimes view the world in a very innocent way. I wrote my thesis on Graham Greene, who said that innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

This excuse is remarkable. Buttigieg suggests that the savvy Harvard grads who populate McKinsey are childlike innocents who simply don’t notice they’re working for Mohammed bin Salman.

It is not terribly surprising that Wall Street has embraced Buttigieg, a product of their world. But anyone who hopes to be president should have a better-tuned moral sense. They should have no doubt where they stand on that old labor question, “Which side are you on?” Buttigieg’s roots in elite consulting suggest, at best, he doesn’t know; at worst, that he’s chosen poorly.