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Blown Up

The US-backed coalition in Yemen can’t agree on WHY they’re bombing it.

Director of National Intelligence Tells Congress to Fuck Off

A few days ago the inspector general for the intelligence community notified Congress of a whistleblower complaint that was both credible and a matter of “urgent concern.” Rep. Adam Schiff, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, naturally asked the Director of National Intelligence to provide a copy of the complaint, as […]

This is the PineTime. A companion for your Linux smartphone, and new side-project of ours. More news coming in the future...

(If you have experience with FreeRTOS or mbed, and are interested, please get in touch!)

Gig Work Is Work—And One State Is Finally Poised to Treat It That Way

The rideshare industry seems to have been on an unstoppable tear, running roughshod over regulations, filling the streets with cars, and making astronomical sums of Wall Street capital. But California just tripped up Uber and Lyft’s business model with pioneering legislation to rein in the freewheeling “gig economy.”

The law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), passed overwhelmingly in the California Senate this week and is expected to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom soon. It lays out a clear standard, the so-called “ABC test,” to ensure employers are properly categorizing workers as independent contractors, taking into account how much control the company exerts over their working conditions. Under the law, an independent contractor is defined as a worker with real autonomy: a person who (a) is not directly controlled by the company, (b) does work in the same trade or field independent of that company, and (c) is “independently established” as a proprietor of a separate business in the same sector. Under AB5, if you’re a rideshare driver whose entire livelihood depends on the rides your app funnels into our smartphone every hour, you’re likely an employee under California law.

The ABC test will codify the decision made in a landmark California Supreme Court case last year, Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles. The Court ruled in favor of delivery service workers who argued they deserved to be classified as employees because they were forced to wear the company’s uniform and display its logo despite being legally deemed “independent.” A major goal of the AB5 legislation is to stop employers' widespread abusive misclassification of workers as independent contractors, in order to deny them regular employment rights and protections, often by insisting that their workers are merely app users.

Once classified as employees under state law, gig workers—not just platform-based workers, but also nail technicians, home-repair workers and dog walkers—would have access to California’s minimum wage, overtime pay, paid rest break, parental leave and workers’ compensation. 

Yet Uber and Lyft both continue toresist AB5, and Uber has even indicated that it does not plan to follow the law once it goes into effect at the start of 2020. The company argues that neither the companies, nor many of their drivers, want to be bound by state labor laws and prefer to drive Uber as a casual side hustle. 

But thousands of drivers are already organizing in California for more power over their working conditions. According to Brian Dolber, an organizer with the California-based Rideshare Drivers United, a fledgling union of 5,000 drivers, AB5 paves the way to formal unionization. But Rideshare Drivers United has not yet decided on what form the union will take. For now, he said, "We're really putting drivers' voices first." Dolber added, "We want to continue organizing drivers and have drivers decide how they want their union to be structured.’ 

Critics of AB5 point to the potential loss of “flexibility” once gig workers are regarded as  employees. However, labor advocates dismiss the flexibility question as concern trolling by the bill’s corporate foes. Nayantara Mehta of the National Employment Law Project argues that current labor laws do not automatically exclude jobs with irregular hours, such as union nurses and construction workers, from being employees. Besides, AB5 deals with the degree of control a company exerts over a worker, not how the schedule is set. “Courts have found that just because a worker has a flexible schedule doesn’t mean she is somehow transformed into the operator of her own business—the true benchmark of independent contractor status,” writes Mehta.

Moreover, the fixation on flexibility elides the reality of many gig jobs. Workers’ schedules may be unstable, but not by choice: Often workers are glued to their phones so they can scramble for whatever rides pop up on their phone, or get paid for each manicure they do or each burger they deliver. Their pay could be so dismal that workers “flex” themselves into exhaustion.

“We drive and we drive and we drive,” said Nicole Moore of Rideshare Drivers United, who helped coordinate a rideshare strike in May. “We don't have dinner with our kids, we don't do all the things that we're supposed to be doing in life. Yet we're expected to pay the rent, we're expected to put food on the table, and try to make a better life for our kids."

This is not the first time Uber’s independent contractor system has been challenged. Various lawsuits in recent months have sought to establish workers' formal employment rights, with mixed results. Uber managed to wriggle out of two lawsuits in March, which together settled for $20 million with 13,600 drivers—but did not address their status as non-employees. Meanwhile, growing efforts to organize rideshare drivers, particularly the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, have helped win increased labor protections at the state and local level, including a minimum wage for drivers in New York City.

Facing the prospect of their payrolls becoming saddled with thousands of brand new workers, gig-company executives are panicking. Uber and Lyft spent a total of about $750,000 lobbying the California legislature, alongside other professional and industry associations that sought exemptions from the law. In the end, Uber and Lyft were not granted the carve-out they were hoping for in the bill, but other trades—including real estate and insurance agents, doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers—were exempted. 

Now Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are reportedly joining forces to fight AB5 using a time-honored California political strategy: investing $90 million on a ballot initiative asking voters to overturn the law and erect a different legal regime for gig workers, which might include some weaker benefits and pay standards.

So the gig economy's leading lights are bent on fighting the law until the bitter end. But in this next round of legal battles, California’s new law, which is based on a Supreme Court ruling and reflects growing public disillusionment with the gig economy titans, might finally put the brakes on the platform economy’s regulatory rollbacks.

Moore is hopeful that the law can help narrow the gulf between Uber executives and drivers. “There's no difference between my humanity and their humanity, sha says, adding: "The basic American agreement is that yes, be innovative, become a millionaire, build your own business, but the American compromise is that you will need to share some of those millions with the people who do the work in your company, so that they can also afford to take a Lyft."

Joe Biden’s Stunningly Racist Answer on the Legacy of Slavery Has Been Overlooked

When asked about the legacy of slavery, Joe Biden lectured black people on their parenting abilities.

The post Joe Biden’s Stunningly Racist Answer on the Legacy of Slavery Has Been Overlooked appeared first on The Intercept.

Joe Biden Lied His Face Off About the Iraq War Last Night

Thursday night’s Democratic debate featured another attempt by Joe Biden to rewrite his record on the Iraq War.

Biden rolled out a familiar rationalization for voting to authorize the war in Iraq—what would become the most disastrous foreign policy venture of the 21st Century. “I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do,” Biden admitted, before stressing that he had believed Bush’s claim that the president needed the war authorization to have the leverage to send weapons inspectors into Iraq.

Biden then attempted to deal with controversy stemming from comments he made to NPR in early September, in which he claimed: “that moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.” As I documented for In These Times in July, Biden, in fact, remained a supporter of the war effort long after it began.

At Thursday’s debate, Biden attempted to clarify:

“I said—from that point on—what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with us; we didn't have our—we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.”

All of these statements are misleading in different ways. And while Bernie Sanders did use the opportunity to draw a contrast between himself and Biden, pointing out that he’d voted against the war because he had “never believed what Cheney and Bush said about Iraq,” Sanders’ criticism continued to let Biden off the hook when it comes to the full history of his record.

For one, Biden continues to wrongly boil down his role in the Iraq War to his 2002 vote for the war authorization. As I reported for In These Times, Biden was a central figure in leading the march to war.

As chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was an influential Democratic voice largely backing President George W. Bush’s calls for regime change in Iraq. As early as February 2002, Biden was telling crowds that “if Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” that “it would be unrealistic … to believe we can claim victory in the war on terrorism if Saddam is still in power,” and that “dialogue with Saddam is useless.”

That July, Biden told “Fox News Sunday” that if the administration could prove Saddam and al-Qaeda were in cahoots, it would justify a pre-emptive war. While a link between the two was fiction, this claim formed a key element of the Bush administration’s case for war.

That month, Biden held congressional hearings on the subject of invading Iraq. Despite reports that top military brass was uneasy about Bush’s push for war, Biden stacked the hearings with pro-war voices, and opened proceedings by warning that weapons of mass destruction “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” Former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who, along with other experts critical of the administration’s war narrative, wasn’t invited to testify, warned that “Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad” could turn the hearings into “political cover” for war.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” Biden later told “Meet the Press” of Saddam Hussein, citing the pro-war testimony he had arranged.

These snapshots illustrate Biden’s leading role in selling the war to the U.S. public. But they also demonstrate he was well aware the Bush administration wasn’t simply planning to send inspectors into Iraq, but rather was set on invading.

If Biden truly believed that his vote in October 2002 wasn’t meant to pave the way for war, he likely wouldn’t have embarked on a world tour two months later that involved meeting an Iraqi resistance leader in Germany, talking to the King of Jordan, and making pit stops in Israel and Qatar. Nor would he have spoken to the Kurd Parliament in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq, telling Saddam’s bitter enemies that the United States would “stand with you in your effort to build a united Iraq.”

Nor does Biden’s description of his actions after the war began tell the full story. It’s true that Biden frequently criticized Bush for the way the war was conducted. But Biden was also one of the increasingly lonely Democratic voices insisting that war had been the right decision all along, despite Bush’s bungling of its prosecution.

In June 2003, Biden told “Fox News Sunday” host Tony Snow that “it was a just war.” The next month he said he’d “vote to do it again” and gave remarks to the Brookings Institution in which he charged that “anyone who can't acknowledge that the world is better off without [Saddam] is out of touch.” In August, he called for sending 20,000-50,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq. And in a September speech to the National Press Club, he criticized “the knee-jerk multilateralists in my own party who have not yet faced the reality of the post-9/11 world.” The list goes on.

The U.S. public must make sure the person they select to be president not only demonstrates wisdom, but also won’t be swept away in a tidal wave of pro-war fervor. By allowing Biden to mislead voters on his Iraq War record, his rivals (and the debate moderators) are doing a disservice to the American public. 

The recently released #GNOME Games 3.34 features an adaptive/convergent UI making it the perfect app to manage your Librem 5 gaming library on the go or in desktop mode https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2019/09/12/gnome-games-3-34/ #librem5 #linuxgames #linuxgaming

Victory! California's Legislature Pulls AT&T and Comcast Bill That Protected Their Monopolies

AT&T and Comcast lobbyists fought hard this year to pass A.B. 1366, a bill that would have protected their broadband monopolies. Thanks to your support, that bill will not move forward this year.

The California legislature in 2012 decided to eliminate the authority of its own telecom regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) through the end of 2019—on the promise that such a move would produce an affordable, widely available, high-speed broadband network. What happened instead: over the past several years, California’s broadband market has been heading into a high-speed monopoly. For many, that’s led to more expensive and slower service than many other markets. In fact, all this law has done is protect broadband monopolies. As a result, the major ISPs were working hard to get it renewed through a new bill introduced this session, A.B. 1366.

EFF has opposed A.B. 1366 from the beginning, making clear that extending this law would leave the majority of Californians with only one option for high-speed broadband—if they had any at all. There was nothing good about the bill and nothing in it for Internet users. It exempted VoIP calls from privacy protections, it deregulated the prison telecom industry to allow for charging inmates' families insane rates, it hindered state public safety efforts, and it prevented the state from addressing its broadband monopoly problem.

Yet our opposition alone was not enough to stop this bill. It also took California residents all across the state contacting their legislators in Sacramento by phone and email to tell them to vote no. When the public speaks out clearly, all the money and influence loses. 

With a Very Bad Law Expiring, We Now Must Fight for a Better Future

With A.B. 1366 defeated—and the law restraining state authority over broadband set to expire at the end of this year—it is critical the state of California use its power to implement a plan to connect all Californians to affordable high-speed fiber access to the Internet. Such an effort is more important now than ever, as companies like AT&T and Verizon have abandoned fiber to the home, allowing cable companies like Comcast to remain unchallenged on high-speed access. Policymakers must do the hard work of identifying why the largest telecoms with billions in capital have willfully decided not to invest in future-proof networks. They must also promote policies that will accelerate the work of the small ISPs and local governments that shoulder the burden of building fiber networks.

As the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to some of America’s largest cities, California can be just as connected as South Korea or Japan. Our rural markets can be connected to a 21st century infrastructure. Every major economy that is roughly the size of California has already adopted universal fiber plans. There is no reason this state can’t follow that example, or even step into a leadership role. In fact, it was historical efforts by California to inject competition in the telecom market in the 90s that lead to the 1996 Telecommunications Act’s foundational competition policies. Many of those federal laws inspired by California’s past efforts are what empower the handful of small fiber providers that exist today. As the FCC and Congress continue to fail to produce the national fiber policy this country desperately needs, California should move forward with its own plan to connect its residents.

Deep Impact

No, the President was only JOKING when he said that asteroid was going to hit Earth.

Newly Uncovered Emails Show Johnson & Johnson Knew Its Opioids Were Being Abused 18 Years Ago

Americans have become all too familiar with the nation’s snowballing opioid epidemic in recent years. Yet new court documents show that as early as 2001, executives at Janssen, the pharmaceutical branch of Johnson & Johnson, knew that their company’s opioid—the first fentanyl patch on the market, Duragesic—was being abused. In February of that year, the […]

A Rising Tide Lifts Some Boats

Trump says there’s some “very bad people” fleeing the damage in the Bahamas.

Elizabeth Warren Is Making a Mistake By Trying to Win Over Democratic Party Elites

With Joe Biden steadily losing ground to his more progressive rivals, the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination is increasingly shaping up into a contest between competing theories of change. As Bernie Sanders continues his ongoing battle with the party establishment, looking to “transform” the party from outside, Elizabeth Warren is reportedly attempting to win over party elites. The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin reports that she is telling party leaders that “far from wanting to stage a ‘political revolution’ in the fashion of Mr. Sanders, she wants to revive the beleaguered Democratic National Committee and help recapture the Senate while retaining the House in 2020.” And on Saturday, NBC News reported that Warren has been speaking with 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton since announcing her campaign, though little is known about their communications due to the “political sensitivity” involved.

Yet for Warren, who like Sanders intends to enact “big, structural change” in U.S. politics, this strategy presents risks. A survey of Warren’s history working with the Democratic Party, and emails hacked from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta by Russian agents and released by WikiLeaks in 2016, suggest the limits of such a non-confrontational approach to party elites.

In 2015, Warren, elevated in 2014 to a leadership position within the Democratic Party as strategic policy adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, faced a choice of how to engage with the party. On the one hand, she could listen to the demands of the party’s base and progressive activists and go to battle with the Democratic establishment by challenging presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. On the other, she could stay out of the race, continue to build her clout in Congress, and work to push Clinton left through a process of sustained diplomatic outreach. Warren opted for the latter.

A survey of the Clinton campaign’s emails, and what happened during and after the election, show that such outreach had minimal impact. By the end of the election, the Clinton campaign had emphatically rejected the “populist” direction that Warren tried to nudge her in. On several issues—such as the influence of Wall Street, Cabinet appointees and trade—the Clinton campaign quietly went against the wishes of Warren and the progressive wing of the party she represented. Emails show that, rather than actually moving left, the campaign sought ways to placate Warren without adopting her policy prescriptions and tended only to shift when prodded by the threat of an electoral challenge.

A stubborn establishment

On August 26, the New York Timesreported that Warren has been aggressively courting Democratic officials behind the scenes, assuring them, in the paper’s telling, that she is a loyal Democrat and does not plan to create her own political or organizing infrastructure outside the party. (The next day, the Association of State Democratic Committees announced that Sanders and a number of other candidates have, like Warren, pledged not to create “any organizing or messaging infrastructure that is parallel or duplicative” to the DNC or state parties.)

Besides trying to convince Democrats that her progressive ideas won’t make her “unelectable,” Warren’s private assurances that she simply wants to breathe new life into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and help the party recapture Congress, the Times notes, also have a politically strategic element. Thanks to a rule change last year, if no single candidate wins an outright majority of delegates in the primaries—a plausible scenario in this crowded field—the decision of which candidate to nominate will exclusively come down to the Superdelegates, who will be allowed to vote on the second ballot. And, should it come down to a second ballot, Warren wants their votes.

It’s unclear how easily these overtures to the DNC will sit with Warren’s plans for major structural change in the United States. To understand why, it’s instructive to look at her attempts to influence the Clinton campaign throughout the 2016 presidential race.

After winning her Senate seat in 2012, Warren became the political tribune for the nation’s progressives. She forged relationships in Congress and she used her national prominence and relationship to the activist community to aggressively challenge the Obama administration on a number of policies. Taking an uncompromising, confrontational approach, Warren succeeded in helping torpedo Wall Street-friendly Larry Summers’ bid for chairman of the Federal Reserve and pushed Obama into issuing an executive order giving relief to student loan borrowers.

After the Democrats’ drubbing in 2014, which saw the party lose the Senate as the GOP increased its House majority, Democratic leadership sought to bring Warren—then preternaturally popular with both liberal groups and the grassroots—into the fold. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid created a special leadership position just for her, and tasked her with reaching out to the party’s progressive wing—the “Warren wing,” as it was referred to then.

“We're going to do things a little differently,” Reid pledged.

Warren began doing things a little differently, too. Though she continued to be an outspoken progressive voice, criticize the administration and lead the charge against appointees she deemed unacceptable, she took care to signal she was also a team player that year. Ignoring progressivecalls to run for president, Warren instead co-signed a letter urging Hillary Clinton to run, and white-washed her previous criticism of Clinton’s support for an industry-favored bankruptcy bill. While in her 2003 book, Warren had scathingly described Clinton’s shift in opinion on the bill since moving from First Lady to the Senate, arguing Clinton “could not afford such a principled position” anymore because she wanted the financial support of banking executives, her 2014 memoir omitted this history entirely, focusing instead on Clinton convincing her husband Bill to veto the bill in 2000. Clinton would run for the Democratic nomination, it seemed, facing little public pressure from prominent Democrats and no convincing primary challenge, the traditional mechanism by which to pull candidates to the left or right. Warren endorsed Clinton on June 9, 2016, after she had clinched the nomination.

The close of 2014 brought a bad omen for progressives. Only one month after elevating Warren to leadership, Congress—over Warren’s objections and urged on by a coalition of Obama, Reid, Republican House Speaker John Boehner, Wall Street lobbyists and JP Morgan CEO Jaime Dimon—passed a government funding bill that contained a provision written by Citigroup lobbyists that weakened the Dodd-Frank financial reform law’s regulation of the derivatives market. Derivatives swaps had contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, and Warren had argued forcefully against the bill, calling it a “giveaway to the most powerful banks in the country.” The measure passed the with the votes of 57 Democrats in the House, and 31 in the Senate.

In other words, almost as soon as they had given Warren a seat at the table, the Democratic Party leadership—over her objections and still largely resistant to turning left and captive to corporate power—linked arms with Republicans and Wall Street to weaken financial regulations.

The “inside” strategy

A similar dynamic would play out during Warren’s engagement with the Clinton presidential campaign. With neither party looking to antagonize the other, Warren and Clinton met in December 2014 at the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, a meeting that, according to leaked emails, was originally supposed to have taken place earlier that June. An anonymous Democrat told the New York Times that Clinton used the meeting to solicit policy ideas from Warren, while for Warren, it served as an opportunity to prod Clinton into moving in a more progressive direction on economic policy. Outlets at the time reported on the meeting as a sign that the Clinton campaign would run a more populist campaign.

As email communications between Clinton staffers reveal, the Clinton camp viewed the tête-à-tête as less of an opportunity to get policy ideas and more as an opportunity to placate and manage a potential political roadblock. Staffers plotted out strategy for the conversation, wondering “what [Clinton’s] goals for that meeting should be,” what Warren might challenge her on, what Clinton could ask Warren for help and advice on, and to be “armed with next steps.”

“It would just be such a big deal for this meeting to go well and have EW walk out feeling positive and on board,” said Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, who floated a plan to “proactively leak” news of the meeting. It was, he wrote, “not a bad thing to put out there that they had a constructive mtg.” When the Times published its report on the meeting that advanced this narrative, Clinton’s Senior Communications Advisor Mandy Grunwald declared privately it was “fine—for both sides.”

Emails show the two camps coordinated after the meeting, working together on a unified post-meeting media strategy and discussing policy. This engagement continued past the December meeting. An early January 2015 email from Clinton’s speechwriter Dan Schwerin to the campaign’s leadership detailed a subsequent hour-and-twenty-minute meeting between him and Dan Geldon, Warren’s longtime adviser.

“He was intently focused on personnel issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers, was very critical of the Obama administration's choices,” Schwerin wrote of Geldon, referencing Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs executive and Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary whose vision shaped the financial policies of both the Clinton and Obama presidencies.

“We then carefully went through a list of people they do like, which EW sent over to HRC earlier,” continued Schwerin. “He spoke repeatedly about the need to have in place people with ambition and urgency who recognize how much the middle class is hurting and are willing to challenge the financial industry.” The Warren camp, he reported, was “wary” and “convinced that the Rubin folks have the inside track with us whether we realize it yet or not,” but were “open to engagement and to be proven wrong.”

The two camps would continue to communicate throughout 2016 even as Warren refrained from endorsing Clinton until the end of the primary contest. Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen reported in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign that Warren maintained a regular back-channel with the campaign to give policy ideas. “We should think about going back to them when we’ve isolated one or two ideas and getting more input on those (without showing our cards, obviously),” Mook wrote in February 2015. “[W]ill probably be in our interest for them to have a sense of where we're headed before HRC delivers to the public.”

The results of this outreach were mixed at best. Despite these overtures, Clinton ran the opposite of a populist campaign, launching conservative attacks on her opponent Bernie Sanders’ left-wing policies, charging they would “increase the size of the federal government by about 40 percent.” In March 2015, shortly after Warren and Clinton’s camps had begun working together, Clinton announced a plan to tackle inequality that relied on an explicitly apolitical approach, including a “partnership with the public and private sector.” (Ann O’Leary, Clinton’s policy advisor and now chief of staff to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, praised that plan as “affirming of our move away from ‘Wall Street as bad guys’ and toward improving community strength and social fabric as a way of tackling inequality.”)

When it came time to pick a running mate, Clinton declined to choose Warren because, as reported by Parnes and Allen, she wanted “someone who saw the world in a similar way” as her and “didn’t know if she could trust Warren to be pragmatic and constructive.” She ended up instead choosing centrist Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Though it’s impossible to know exactly what a Hillary Clinton cabinet would have looked like, the information available on the last days of the campaign suggests Warren hadn’t convinced Clinton on the subject of personnel either. Having laid low during a primary focused on the malign influence of Wall Street and corporate America, lobbyists, wealthy donors and the finance industry returned to the fold during the 2016 Democratic convention, with investor and private equity executive Alan Patricof quipping:: “I think we’re past that.”

Despite criticizing Sanders’ plan to break up big banks for not paying enough attention to “shadow banking,” emails showed that during the campaign, Clinton cultivated a relationship with just such a shadow bank: private equity firm Blackstone, including a February 2016 dinner between two of its executives, as well as Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Geithner and Summers were both members of the “Bob Rubin school” Warren’s adviser had privately complained about, and had both been Obama appointees with whom Warren had long feuded.

Another Blackstone executive was Tony James, a major fundraiser for Clinton who had been angling for a government post since at least 2014 and was reportedly a choice for an economic policy post under Clinton, including, at one point, Treasury secretary. Around this time, James was pushing a plan to put Americans’ retirement savings in the hands of hedge funds and private equity firms like Blackstone, telling attendees of a Washington D.C. cocktail party that Clinton’s policy advisors “have been very encouraging about the plan,” and that “the signals are warm” that she would “grab this issue once elected, and run with it.”

Though other potential Cabinet appointees didn’t come from the financial world, they were also of concern to progressives. Axiosreported in January 2017 that, based on conversations with Clinton staffers, one of her picks for Treasury secretary was Google COO Sheryl Sandberg. (One February 2016 inquiry by John Podesta’s daughter as to whether Warren herself would be considered for the position appears to have been ignored). For Labor secretary, Clinton had reportedly chosen Howard Schultz, the Starbucks billionaire with a long rap sheet of labor abuses who earlier this year threatened to run a third-party campaign if the Democratic Party moves too far left.

On both policy and personnel—the latter being the issue Warren’s team prioritized above all else in early 2015, as Schwerin reported—the more conciliatory “inside” strategy failed to meaningfully sway the Clinton campaign. Indeed, hacked emails paint a picture of a campaign more concerned with how to maneuver around a political headache and quell potential dissent than with genuinely taking on board progressive ideas. This approach mirrored the Democratic leadership’s 2014 elevation of Warren within the party, hoping her presence would get dissatisfied progressives on board even as the Democratic establishment resisted her actual political vision.

Other details from the leaked email tranche support this analysis. Clinton’s staff appeared to be constantly devising ways to placate Warren or prevent her from objecting, without necessarily adopting her views. In one August 2015 email chain, the staff discussed the draft of a joint op-ed by Clinton and Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin about “slow[ing] Wall Street’s revolving door.” While Mook warned that “Warren and others” could easily paint any defense of the status quo as “corrupted,” campaign adviser Jake Sullivan worried that it demonized anyone from the private sector entering government, and that it could cross the line into “demagoguing.” While the op-ed was eventually published, we now know that such a revolving door was likely going to be a major part of Clinton’s cabinet.

A similar dynamic played out when it came to reviving Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation separating commercial and investment banking that Bill Clinton had essentially repealed towards the end of his presidency. Warren had introduced, and Sanders had co-sponsored, a bill for a 21st Century Glass-Steagall act, and as one email shows, had talked to the Clinton camp about it “numerous” times, along with other financial reform policies. Throughout the campaign, Clinton staff would have feverish discussions around whether or not to support the bill. Clinton ultimately declined to back the measure, which proved to be one of the chief differences between her and Sanders throughout the primaries.

Or take the issue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, negotiated and endorsed by Clinton while she served as secretary of state, but opposed by Warren, Trump, Sanders and organized labor. Warren was a longtime critic of the trade deal and would spend much of 2015 inveighing against the Obama administration’s attempt to pass it. But just as with Glass-Steagall, throughout 2015, the Clinton campaign similarly debated where to stand on the TPP and devised strategies for how to muddy the waters and simply dodge it altogether.

In March 2015, the campaign drafted a statement that outlined what the agreement would need to contain in order to garner U.S. support, but, as Schwerin put it, “assumes that she’s ultimately going to support both TPA and TPP.” (“TPA” referred to the so-called “fast-track authority” the Obama administration was seeking from Congress at the time, which would allow a simple up-or-down vote on the deal and barred any filibusters or amendments). The same month, the campaign weighed up various tweaks they could call for that would allow Clinton to safely continue supporting the deal. “What if she's FOR Fast Track, but against the TPP agreement?” one staffer optimistically suggested in another exchange.

The 2016 experience suggests that the threat of a challenge, and the potential loss of power that came with it, was Warren and others progressives’ most potent bargaining chip. Emails show the Clinton campaign and its boosters were terrified of Warren stepping into the race (“I worry if Warren takes the trade issue as central to her platform,” one staffer wrote in April 2015), even as late as October 2015, when Democratic operative Ron Klain warned the campaign to “move 95% to Warren on Glass Steagall” in order to “survive the Warren primary.”

Clinton reportedly came out against the TPP shortly before the first Democratic debate in October, only because the Sanders campaign and the potential late entrance of Joe Biden into the race spooked them into doing so. And as for reviving Glass-Steagall, the demand made it into the 2016 Democratic platform onlybecause Sanders’ primary challenge and subsequent rallying of the Democratic base gave him the bargaining power to get his representatives onto the platform drafting committee.

Warren didn’t leave entirely empty-handed, however. Towards the end of the election, several of Warren’s allies ended up on, and were in contact with, the Clinton administration transition team, hoping to influence the selection of personnel in what was assumed to be the incoming administration. How that would’ve shaped up is impossible to know now. But we do know from later leaks that Clinton had several troubling nominees in mind, and Warren and her team were already gearing up for a fight over the appointments.

Two paths forward

It’s not just the Clinton campaign’s hacked emails. Recent history also shows the pitfalls of cozying up to the Democratic establishment as a strategy to achieve structural progressive change.

While Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn’t instantly transform the Democratic Party, by rallying grassroots support around core left-wing ideas, his campaign helped radically reshape the party’s direction, with Medicare for All becoming a virtual litmus test for candidates running in 2020. (As of last week, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), chairman of the House Democratic caucus and a potential successor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is co-sponsoring Medicare for All). The progressive movement that organized around Sanders forced important changes on the Democratic Party after 2016, such as the weakening of superdelegates’ power, even if the party continues to resist progressive ideas like a climate change debate.

We might also look at the Right as an example. An insurgent movement like the Tea Party made heavy use of confrontational tactics and primary challenges to wrench the Republican Party toward its end of the political spectrum. Donald Trump’s antagonistic relationship with a GOP establishment that largely opposed him didn’t stop him from both winning the Republican primary and the general election, and today’s GOP has been refashioned in Trump’s image, with even his fiercest Republican critics now fully signing on to his agenda.

Trump did this not by convincing members of the GOP establishment that he was correct, but by rallying voters and making it virtually impossible for Republicans to both keep their jobs and oppose him. If the next Democratic president fails to achieve something similar, they won’t just face an obstructionist Republican bloc, but a host of conservative Democrats who will stand as a barrier to their agenda, just as Obama did in 2009.

Both history and Warren’s own dealings with the 2016 Clinton campaign tell us that “big, structural change” can’t be won by coddling the Democratic Party establishment and the corporate money that funds them. Whatever the next Democratic president plans to do—whether embarking on a Green New Deal, breaking up big tech, or even something as paltry as implementing a “public option” for health care—they will run up against potentially fatal opposition from not just the GOP, but from within the Democratic Party itself. Only a direct challenge to the power of those elites will enable a progressive president to overcome it.

The Debates Are Too Important To Be in the Hands of Corporate Media and the DNC

We shouldn’t be surprised that our presidential debates seem aimed less at informing the public than at boosting network ratings and keeping the world safe from so-called radical ideas, given that the parties and major networks dictate the terms—the format, the questions, the audience, who’s in and who’s out. And all are drenched in corporate dollars. The Democratic Party, reliant on big-money donors, has little interest in bolstering the left-wing policies of progressive candidates. And the networks rely on advertisers; as Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) pointed out in the second debate, the healthcare industry ran advertisements during commercial breaks. The millionaire cable news hosts—as much as they might protest that they’re nobody’s puppet—know which questions will please their corporate owners and sponsors and which won’t.

Analyses I did for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting show that the policy questions both NBC and CNN asked, especially on healthcare and the economy, leaned heavily on industry talking points and assumptions. For instance, NBC mentioned “free college” in four questions, but focused entirely on whether the program would cost too much or be “actually achievable” rather than, say, the problem of student debt or socioeconomic disparities in access to higher education.

Other models are available. The League of Women Voters used to sponsor general election debates, and typically tapped more sober print journalists, who lack the same pressure to generate ratings, to lead the questioning. But the Republican and Democratic parties effectively muscled out the League in 1988, forming the supposedly nonpartisan (but actually bipartisan) Commission on Presidential Debates, which demanded full control over choosing questioners, the audience, press access and more. The League minced no words upon its withdrawal:

The demands of the two campaign organizations [the DNC and RNC] would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. … It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. … The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

In the primaries, the parties and their media accomplices try to winnow the field as quickly as possible. This year, Democratic candidates are already being knocked out of the debates for low polling numbers or fundraising dollars—nearly five months before the Iowa caucuses. But early on, most candidates are largely unknown and expected to have low poll numbers; the whole point of the early primary debates ought to be to help people get to know the candidates and their ideas.

Which brings us to the next problem. With 30-and 60-second time limits, what can we expect beyond glossy talking points? Take the climate crisis. In the first debate, Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) was asked to explain, in 60 seconds, her plan for climate change. Gov. Jay Inslee (Wash.), the candidate with the most developed plan thus far, has around 200 pages outlining his proposals. Though Inslee has since dropped out, Bernie Sanders released in August a 13,000-word climate plan, and several of Warren’s famous plans tackle different aspects of the crisis. Sixty seconds is absurd and insulting.

Those in control might argue that we can’t have it both ways, keeping an expansive field of candidates and giving them all adequate time to discuss those complicated issues. But there is an obvious—and easy—solution. Environmental activists, led by the Sunrise Movement, have been calling for a single-issue climate debate, but the DNC under Tom Perez voted down a proposed climate debate in August. In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement called for a BLM-themed debate, which the DNC likewise rebuffed. We should also have single-issue debates on healthcare, gun control, women’s rights and more.

CNN recently agreed to host a town hall on climate, and NBC will be hosting a multi-day climate forum, but it’s not enough. Town halls and forums don’t get the same audience that debates get, though they will give Perez a way to claim the DNC is doing enough on climate—even while we suffer debates like the one July 30, in which the CNN hosts asked more non-policy questions (e.g., are the candidates “moving too far to the left”?) than climate questions.

What it comes down to is this: We’ll never get thoughtful, substantive policy discussions while the debates are controlled by organizations dependent on big money. We need to give the debates to the League of Women Voters or to another independent organization dedicated to democracy rather than dollars.

Want To Fix the Debates? Shut Down the Trump-Style Theatrics.

The verdict came in fast and furious: The Democratic debates were a "debacle” (Poynter Institute), “an unmitigated disaster designed to hype ratings” (Washington Post) and featured a “smackdown aesthetic” intended to provoke discord (New York Times). The CNN moderators were blasted for stoking division, using Republican talking points to goad candidates.

In his very first question at the July 30 debate, directed at Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), moderator Jake Tapper brought up that former Rep. John Delaney (Md.) had called Medicare for All “political suicide.” The TV cut to a split screen of Sanders and Delaney as Tapper demanded, “What do you say to Congressman Delaney?” In case we missed the challenge, the chyron blared the same question. This format—“What do you say to X about their attacks on you?”—dominated the debates.

Moderators do this, of course, to try to build ratings. They aim for soundbites they can use (and attack) the next day, so they can gossip about who dissed who, who got in the best “zingers” and the like. This superficiality has long been a problem, but it’s gotten much worse since 2016, when Donald Trump’s inflammatory, realityTV approach to politics—vulgar insults, adolescent name-calling, ad hominem attacks on opponents—bushwhacked an unprepared yet enthralled news media. The cable channels, in particular, followed the TV-star candidate’s lead and succumbed to the catfight conventions of celebrity journalism—who has Trump trashed now, who’s betrayed whom, who’s on Trump’s shit list today? As Vanity Fair noted, Trump understands the press is “essentially a sensationalistic enterprise,” and made the media “complicit in a highly choreographed distraction.” This lazy and contaminating format has further corrupted the debates.

The Democratic candidates should see this spectacle for what it is: a Trumpian-driven frame that, with its leading, biased gotcha questions, incessant interruptions, and stoking of divisions, results in a circular firing squad, damaging them all. Here’s one thought: Why don’t the Democratic candidates refuse to participate in any more debates until the format is changed?

The first needed change is getting rid of broadcast journalists as the moderators. Their job is to report breaking news and produce ratings, as well as burnish their own celebrity, not to illuminate the substance of policy proposals. Voters, at town halls or online, ask better, more policy-oriented questions than preening and self-serving TV news stars. Questions proposed by voters to the Open Debate Coalition in 2016 eschewed “horse race” queries and instead focused on issues like gun safety, money in politics and climate change. Voters’ questions would make the debates more democratic and more informative. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a researcher on political campaigns, has proposed that historians or retired judges serve as moderators, because they’re not invested in selling conflict-driven news. We could add to that list public policy scholars, political scientists and activists working in nonprofits focused on the environment, healthcare, women’s rights, racial justice and other important issues. Personally, I think smart high school and college students would be great questioners, as so many of today’s pressing issues powerfully affect their futures.

Another of Jamieson’s proposals is to get rid of the live audience—remember, there was none in the Nixon-Kennedy debate—eliminating their laughter, applause, booing and other reactions, which can stoke candidate grandstanding. The Annenberg Public Policy Center has found that studio audience responses cue the home audience reactions and can affect the public’s assessments of candidates.

Yet another proposal, though intended for general election debates, could improve primary debates as well. Intelligence Squared U.S., a nonpartisan group that sponsors debates on pressing issues, advocates for the Oxford style of debate in which a series of motions is put forward—for example, that the United States should transition to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health system—and then each candidate argues for or against it with limited moderator interruption. Then there is time for rebuttal, a closing statement and on to the next motion. And if anyone talks out of turn—why not just cut the mic?

Broadcast and cable TV do have an obligation to air these debates. But with their profit-driven dedication to sensationalist entertainment values, they are the last ones who should be framing or moderating what we need to learn from and about the candidates, especially at this time of national peril.

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https://gizmodo.com/apple-and-foxconn-accused-of-breaking-labor-laws-in-chi-1837975540 # bigtech

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