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How The Leader of the OAS Became a Right-Wing Hawk—And Paved the Way for Bolivia’s Coup

When former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Luis Almagro took the helm of the Organization for American States (OAS) in 2015, members of the U.S. Right despaired that the intergovernmental body would be headed by yet another Latin American leftist and friend of Washington’s foes. Four years later, those same right-wing forces cheered as Almagro led the charge for the overthrow of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and the OAS contributed to a coup in Bolivia.

The OAS is a regional forum of 34 states that acts something like the United Nations of the Americas. Almagro and the OAS have come under the spotlight in recent weeks, thanks to their controversial role in Bolivia’s most recent presidential election. After winning a fourth straight term last month, longtime indigenous leftist president Evo Morales left office and fled the country in what appears to be a textbook coup: The head of the military called for his resignation, as violence against his supporters surged. The OAS has fallen under increasing criticism in recent weeks, after its contested claims of irregularities and “clear manipulations” by the Morales side were used by the opposition, both Bolivian and American, to invalidate the election results—and intensify pressure to oust Morales.

“The OAS took a political decision, not a technical or legal one,” Morales charged from Mexico, where he had been granted asylum after protesters ransacked his home and kidnapped and abused his allies. “The OAS is in the service of the North American empire.”

The OAS came under similar criticism from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a left-leaning economic think-tank based in Washington, D.C., which disputed the OAS’ claims of election fraud. “There is simply no statistical or evidentiary basis to dispute the vote count results showing that Evo Morales won in the first round,” CEPR Senior Policy Analyst Guillaume Long said on November 8, releasing a paper that showed a step-by-step breakdown disputing the conclusions of OAS.

This incident is just the latest in Almagro’s controversial position as secretary general of the OAS, elected by a majority of member states, a position he hopes to continue for another five years after his current term expires in May 2020. Almagro started his career in Uruguay’s conservative politics before suddenly morphing into a committed Pink Tider, and he once again changed his tune upon becoming OAS secretary general. This shift is particularly evident in his widely-criticized opposition to Maduro—a development successive U.S. administrations have been eager to take advantage of to pursue their interests through an organization they worry they’ve lost control of.

Persistent U.S. influence

The OAS has long been viewed as a tool of U.S. foreign influence, thanks in large part to the U.S. government’s outsized funding of the organization. Even as late as 2018, the U.S. provided 60% of the institution’s annual budget.

From the beginning, the U.S. wielded significant influence over the organization, which excluded Cuba from because its “Marxist-Leninist government” was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system,” as the OAS put it. The subsequent decades would see a range of autocratic—even genocidal—governments remain members of the OAS, while the U.S. mostly made a mockery of its principles, as when Ronald Reagan violated its charter’s ban on the use of armed forces against a fellow member with his administration’s 1983 invasion of Grenada.

U.S. influence over the OAS depleted during the post-Cold War era, and the vast majority of the OAS’ work in observing elections was above board. But the U.S. could still exert influence in strategic moments. During the 2009 coup in Honduras, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leaned on the OAS to back new elections and keep ousted President Manuel Zelaya from returning to power—or as she put it in her memoir, “render the question of Zelaya moot.”

Despite its weakening influence, there is broad acknowledgement within the U.S. government that the OAS continues to be a vehicle for U.S. interests.       

“The United States historically has sought to use the OAS to advance economic, political and security objectives in the Western Hemisphere,” a 2014 Congressional report states. “The organization’s goals and day-to-day activities are still generally consistent with U.S. policy toward the region, but the U.S. government has struggled to obtain support from other member states on some high-profile issues.”

Likewise, a 2018 GAO report found that “the strategic goals of the OAS” and other U.S.-financed organizations “are predominantly aligned with the strategic goals of State, USAID, HHS, and USDA. These goals include “a secure and democratic future for all citizens in Latin America and the Caribbean,” “expanded economic opportunity and prosperity for the hemisphere,” and a “public opinion environment that is supportive of U.S. policy initiatives,” the report states.

A rightward shift

When Luis Almagro became OAS General Secretary in March 2015, it at first appeared he would push against these historical trends. From 2010 on, Almagro had served as the foreign minister for the Uruguyan government headed by Jose “Pepe” Mujica, part of the Pink Tide of leftist governments that had swept to power in Latin America at the dawn of the 21st century. Upon being nominated to helm the OAS, Mujica’s government spent no small amount of political capital making sure Almagro won. Almagro later said Mujica had “played a decisive role.” When his sole rival dropped out of the contest due to health concerns, Almagro ascended to the position.

This was unhappy news to conservatives. Under Mujica, Almagro had pushed to revoke the 1986 amnesty law protecting Uruguay’s former military dictatorship from prosecution for crimes against humanity, reacted to Osama Bin Laden’s 2011 assassination by saying “no death should be celebrated,” and joined Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina in calling for recognition of a Palestinian state in 2010. But most worrying to the Right was his attitude toward Venezuela: On the first anniversary of former President Hugo Chavez’s death, Almagro declared Chavez had “reinvented Latin America.” And when Maduro’s government clashed with protesters and violent right-wing forces in 2014, Almagro blamed “both sides” for the ensuing violence.

Several conservative newspapers and think tanks raised alarm about his support for Chavismo. Right-leaning Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer warned that Almagro and one other candidate were “causing concern—and in some cases, alarm—in international circles for the defense of human rights.” Oppenheimer wrote that Almagro was “Venezuela’s favorite,” warning of his “close ties with Iran,” owing to the five years he had spent in the Uruguayan embassy in Tehran. Sonia Osorio, columnist with the El Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language paper in Florida, likewise called him “a diplomat with close ties to Chavismo who also maintains worrying relations with Iran.”

Upon ascending to the head of the OAS, Almagro appeared to confirm conservatives’ fears. He continued his election-promise call for Cuba’s reintegration into the OAS. In August 2015, he announced he “deplore[d] the acts of the [OAS] that validated” the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, “twisting the sovereign path chosen by its people.” Pledging early on to “leave the OAS behind the Cold War,” he promised to return the OAS to “a credibility that everyone demands,” and be the “facilitator of its renewal.”

But his choice of transition team hinted at the direction he would end up going. Besides Luis Porto, a Uruguayan economist who had served in various positions under Mujica, Almagro’s transition to the new post was also headed by Dan Restrepo. Obama’s Latin America adviser, Restrepo has a long history with the corporate-funded liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), and he continued to advise Almagro for at least the next year.

As special counsel to Washington law firm Jones Walker LLP since 2014—a year before heading Almagro’s transition, and a position he still holds today—Restrepo works “on behalf of a wide range of clients, including multinational media and technology companies, independent energy producers, private equity funds, major consumer products companies, major infrastructure companies, and global law firms,” according to his bio on the firm’s site. While those clients aren’t listed, some of Jones Walker’s lobbying clients over the past five years included Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Sasol Chemicals, tobacco company Pyxus International, and oil-drilling company Hercules Offshore Inc. These are all exactly the kinds of firms that have itched to access the vast natural wealth of Latin American countries governed by leftist populists like Chavez and Morales

Provocations towards Maduro

It took many months for Almagro to become more bullish on Venezuela, following Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s repeated rejection of his offer to send OAS election observers to the country. November 2015 saw Almagro send a harshly worded letter to the president of the country’s National Electoral Council, criticizing the upcoming electoral process and warning it lacked “transparency and electoral justice.” The letter prompted public reproach from Mujica, who rebuked “the direction” Almagro was taking, and formally told him “goodbye.” The letter also garnered public praise from hawkish Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Despite Almagro’s preemptive efforts to cast the elections as illegitimate, the Venezuelan opposition won in a landslide, securing a two-thirds supermajority in the National Assembly with which they vowed to force Maduro from office.

A series of tit-for-tat escalations between the government and the opposition spiraled out of control over the next few years. The Maduro government and its loyalist-controlled Supreme Court took increasingly authoritarian steps to nullify the opposition’s existing and future electoral gains. And the opposition resorted to alarming measures and continued use of violence to foment a crisis it could use to achieve its longstanding goal of ousting Maduro and reversing Chavismo. Rather than choose a path of diplomacy to help end the crisis, Almagro chose a more provocative approach, siding with the country’s violent, right-wing opposition.

As Henry Ramos Allup, the opposition head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, called for the OAS to take a tougher position, Almagro put out a scathing 132-page report that backed the oppositions’ calls for a recall referendum. Almagro also invoked the OAS’ Democratic Charter, suggesting Venezuela could be suspended from the organization. Almagro engaged repeatedly in an inflammatory war of words with Maduro, responding to his insults by calling him a “petty dictator” and a “traitor.” Prior to a July OAS debate over the recall, Almagro met with Allup, and Almagro’s effort to pass the recall was backed by a number of right-wing former Latin American presidents, including Peru’s Alejandro Toledo, Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, and Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla.

The governments of countries like Ecuador, Argentina and Chile, in turn, raised concerns about Almagro’s “systematic aggressions” against the country. When Almagro pushed for the recall at a meeting of the OAS permanent council, member states rejected his call for a more intense intervention in Venezuela, instead urging dialogue. According to CEPR Director of International Policy Alexander Main, member states rejected his call for a more intense intervention in Venezuela, instead urging dialogue. Main toldThe Real News Network that Almagro would become “an instrument of the [U.S.] state department...to intervene in the internal affairs of member states.” In June 2016, the foreign minister of Venezuela—whose backing from OAS member states had by this point taken a ding thanks to Maduro’s actions—urged the OAS General Assembly to put a break on Almagro’s actions. She received a round of applause.

But perhaps most controversial was Almagro’s relationship with Leopoldo López, the right-wing leader of the Venezuelan opposition then under house arrest. In August 2016, Almagro wrote a treacly eight-page letter to his “esteemed friend Leopoldo,” telling López he “felt immensely close to the injustice you are suffering.” López was “one of the few” examples of “public greatness,” Almagro later wrote. In July 2017, the two had a publicized phone conversation, agreeing “to continue working for the return of democracy to Venezuela and the recovery of the rights of the Venezuelan people,” according to an OAS statement.

Far from the Gandhi-like figure painted by Almagro, however, López is an elite scion with Republican ties who was described by a diplomat in Caracas as a “divisive figure within the opposition” who is “arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry.” More alarmingly, he had backed and played a role in the 2002 military coup against the democratically elected Chavez.

This all stood in stark contrast to the 2016 removal of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff by a corrupt right-wing opposition via impeachment, widely characterized as a “parliamentary coup.” The OAS concluded in April 2016 that Rousseff’s impeachment “does not fit within the rules that govern this process.” But in practice, the organization’s response to her removal was muted compared to Venezuela, with the OAS only expressing only vague “concern.”

In concert with a far-right Trump administration, Almagro has continued to intensify pressure on the country, and escalate Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis through a brutal series of sanctions. As the Trump administration worked with opposition leader Juan Guaido to this end, Almagro tweeted in January 2019, “We congratulate [Guaido] as President in charge of Venezuela. He has our full support and recognition to push the return of his country to democracy.” Guiado, who eventually vowed to pursue a program of neoliberalization, was described by the Associated Press as “a loyal acolyte of López for years,” coordinating his speeches and decisions with López, with whom he spoke half a dozen times a day.

Almagro spoke in 2018 to the International Coalition for Venezuela—a group formed partly by former opposition leader Pablo Medina, who once called for Chavez to be “investigated for treason.” During the address, Almagro criticized negotiations between Maduro and the opposition that were happening at the time. “No election that comes out of this dictatorship, under these conditions, will bring a political change for the people of Venezuela,” he said, adding: “We have no time for short and weak steps.”

He insisted in September 2018 the international community “should not rule out any action” to alleviate Venezuelan suffering, including “military intervention aimed at overthrowing the regime.” He repeated this call in 2019, invoking comparisons with Rwandan genocide to argue that military intervention against Venezuela could be justified under international law. Almagro even appeared to back a military overthrow, when Guaido rallied Venezuelan military supporters at an air base in Caracas in April 2019. “We welcome the adhesion of the military to the Constitution and to the President in charge of #Venezuela @jguaido,” he tweeted on April 30.

Meanwhile, Almagro jettisoned his earlier attempts at rapprochement with Cuba. He has labelled the Cubans in Venezuela, many of whom are doctors, “an occupation force that teaches how to torture and repress, that performs intelligence, civil identification and migration services.” In 2018, as the Trump administration reversed his predecessor’s conciliatory approach to the country in favor of another economic squeeze, Almagro ominously intoned that “we cannot allow the Cuban people to continue to be oppressed by an infamous dictatorship.”

Unsurprisingly, the right wing that once despaired over Almagro’s election also did a U-turn. Luis Fleischman is an advisor to the Menges Hemispheric Security Project in Washington—part of the far-right think tank Center for Security Policy, run by the virulently anti-immigrant Frank Gaffney. In November 2017, Fleishman praised Almagro’s his “exemplary leadership,” calling him “the most outstanding and heroic voice fighting for democracy in Venezuela.” Fleischman reported that Almagro had said, “If there is any chance of restoring democracy in Venezuela, it is in the hands of the U.S., whose sanctions can hit the regime hard.”

Those sanctions were calculated by the CEPR as having caused 40,000 extra deaths in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018. And on August 8, United Nations High Commissioner and former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet determined that the sanctions were deepening the country’s economic crisis. Yet Almagro maintained it was “ridiculous” to blame the sanctions for Venezuelans’ suffering, and criticized Bachelet’s words as “another sanction against the Venezuelan people.”

“She should have started off by saying that the principal problem that affects the Venezuelan people are the thieves who are part of the Venezuelan government,” he said. “The attempts to appease an infamous dictatorship … are truly inconceivable.”

Shifting loyalties

What accounted for Almagro’s dramatic about-face?

One must first look at the financial situation of the OAS. The organization had been running deficits for years, not helped by the fact that some of its major contributors, like Venezuela and Brazil, had often failed to pay their dues. Peter Quilter, the OAS’ former secretary for administration and finance, described the OAS in 2018 as operating “in the context of a full-blown financial crisis,” with “nothing left to cut” but staff.

This threatened both Almagro’s stated goal of turning the OAS’ focus on human rights and reviving it into a newly prominent influential body. Further complicating this was that U.S. lawmakers, hostile to Venezuela and struggling to see the point of an organization that regularly defied U.S. geopolitical goals, openly questioned whether they should keep funding the OAS. This included the Trump administration, which floated large cuts to international organizations upon coming into office.

The other is Almagro’s own political history. In January 2016, Antonio Mercader, right-leaning columnist and former Uruguayan ambassador to the OAS, wrote that no one should have been surprised, since “political zigzagging is a constant in Almagro’s career.” He was involved in the conservative Divisa Blanca party that supported military amnesty, and was a member of the center-right National Party before joining Mujica’s Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties. Conservative politician and former National Party candidate, Luis Lacalle Pou, looked dimly on Almagro’s 180 degree turn on Venezuela, stating in 2016, “Such rapid changes are not credible.”

Meanwhile, Almagro’s own party rejected his approach. Tabaré Vázquez, who preceded and then succeeded Mujica as Uruguayan president and Broad Front leader, and is considered a centrist on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts, said in 2016, “We disagree with the attitude he has taken” in regards to Venezuela. Vázquez, whose term ends March 1, 2020, has tactfully declined to support Almagro’s re-election to the position as of August. Almagro has, however, received the backing of the U.S.

Not a neutral arbiter

Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s relationship to the OAS is more complex than many assume. U.S. officials acknowledge that U.S. influence over the organization has waned since its halcyon days during the Cold War, particularly once the Chavez government used its nationalized oil industry to weaken Latin American economic dependence on the U.S., and once the Pink Tide hastened a turn away from the neoliberal economic policies still favored by U.S. officials.

Under Trump, however—and with Almagro at the helm—U.S. officials have begun moving away from their disappointment with the OAS to discussing how they can better use the organization to meet their goals. In February 2018, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing on “Advancing U.S. Interests Through the Organization of American States,” where committee member Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.) said he was “eager to hear from our panel on how we can improve engagement with the OAS and better enable them to be the leader in the region.”

When asked “where is its usefulness” by Sires, the former OAS secretary for administration and finance, Peter Quilter, explained how to strategically make use of the organization’s various bodies and responsibilities, including election monitoring. “For a country like the U.S., the trick is to utilize or to try to get as much done within each of these—each of these—with each of these tools at it can,” he said. “I actually think the OAS has done a decent amount of things on Venezuela,” he added, pointing to, among other things, the 2017 resolution and Almagro’s statements.

“Perhaps that’s as far as we could go as the U.S. on that issue,” he continued. “So you put a momentary stop on that and you look at other issues and try and keep advancing the call. I think that is the way to utilize these organizations.”

Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) resolved, “We must regain the ability to invest in the region so that we could, again, fill that vacuum and we do not yield that vacuum to a country that is already very much present there.”

The strategy outlined in this hearing is the one both U.S. officials under both Obama and Trump have pursued with respect to the OAS. Almagro’s actions on Venezuela have been backed by members of Congress, both in words and in official resolutions, while the U.S. government has used Almagro’s leadership as a way to put pressure on Maduro’s government while removing the taint of Western imperialism.

"If it's the U.S. versus Venezuela, that plays into Maduro's hands," one senior Obama administration official said in 2016. "It has to be led by Latin Americans. It can't be led by us."

This policy has continued under Trump, with right-wing government officials and members of Congress backing Almagro’s efforts or using his statements to push for removing Maduro. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who in 2019 led the administration’s concerted effort to foment the overthrow of Maduro, publicly threatened to cut foreign aid to Haiti, Dominican Republic and El Salvador if they didn’t vote with Almagro’s attempt to suspend Venezuela from the OAS. In January 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited a letter written by Almagro about the situation in Venezuela to urge the United Nations to hold a formal session on the crisis. It has done so selectively, ignoring even the mild expressions of “concern” from the OAS over events in Brazil.

This played into what appears to have been long-running antipathy between Almagro and the Morales government, which has been at loggerheads with the OAS over Venezuela. Morales’ government, together with that of Nicaragua, had demanded Almagro’s resignation over his 2016 132-page report on Maduro’s rule, and called his 2017 attempt to invoke the Democratic Charter a coup d'état inside the OAS. Morales’ representative to the OAS in 2017 called Almagro “an official at the service of the interventionist policies of the United States.”

Once the election finally took place, the OAS’ widely criticized press release alleging unsubstantiated “clear manipulations” was seized upon by media, the Bolivian right-wing opposition and the Trump administration to push for Morales’ ouster. Leveraging the legitimacy of the OAS, the claim that Morales was a dictator who had stolen the election was transformed into an established fact, with the OAS press release and, eventually, its report cited as evidence.

The OAS—just as it had with Brazil—has been curiously muted about events in Bolivia since Morales’ ouster. The organization put out a single, 101-word statement on November 11, the day after, rejecting “any unconstitutional resolution of the situation.” It called “for peace and respect for the Rule of Law,” requested an urgent meeting of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia for a new election, and stressed the importance of continuing to investigate Morales’ alleged “crimes related to the electoral process.” As Bolivia’s new, supposedly interim government violently repressed and killed indigenous protesters, and its new communications director threatened to prosecute reporters “involved in sedition,” Almagro issued yet another statement demanding Cuba “stop repressing” its people, while relaying he had met with Bolivia’s new right-wing president. In an interview about the crisis on November 16, Almagro took the opportunity to blame Morales for seeking a fourth term, something he has previously backed.

Under Almagro, the OAS has neither been a neutral arbiter nor consistent voice for democracy and human rights. Rather, it has aligned itself with the U.S. government, including once the U.S. fell under a racist, far-right administration. And Almagro has been selectively bullish in his supposed pro-democracy efforts—in the direction of replacing the remnants of Latin America’s Pink Tide with right-wing forces more friendly to Western business interests. With Almagro looking to head the OAS until at least 2025, Venezuela and Bolivia may only be the beginning.

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Want More Proof of MSNBC’s Anti-Bernie Bias? Look at Last Night’s Debate.

Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate was hosted by MSNBC, and the result could have been expected for anyone who read In These Times’ recent two-month study of the network’s coverage of the three nationally leading candidates.

In that story (which I authored), In These Times found that the network consistently covers Bernie Sanders the least of the top three candidates, as well as most negatively; that it covers Elizabeth Warren most positively; and that both are dwarfed by the network’s overwhelming focus on Joe Biden, who was often portrayed as the “safest” choice of the field. The network’s political coverage also revolved almost exclusively around fluctuating poll numbers and “electability”—as defined by its hosts and guests.

These features found their way into Wednesday’s debate, which was preceded by a panel discussion devoted, as so much of the network’s 2020 coverage has been, to narrowing the imaginations of its largely older, Democratic-voting viewership. In the wake of two weeks of impeachment hearings, the panelists attempted to frame the debate as a referendum on Trump, with former centrist Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, ousted in 2018 and criticized by local African-American leaders for not doing enough to excite black voters in the state, predicting that “Trump will be front and center in the debate tonight.”

“The party is getting the rap, deservedly so, for becoming this traveling purity test,” said anchor Brian Williams. “Will a day like today force a stage like this one to coalesce around a message of ‘we’ve gotta beat this guy?’”

Chris Matthews, who together with Williams made up MSNBC’s most anti-Sanders contingent of anchors, went on to outline the way the network has allowed its own commercial interests to help shape its news content.

“The Democratic Party right now I believe is an anti-Trump party,” he said. “I can tell from the ratings people would much rather watch the decline and fall of Donald Trump than watch the battle among these people. ... Which tells me, they really, really have one passion going into next year’s election: Beat Trump. I think that’s driving everything.”

It was up to Steve Schmidt—longtime Republican, chief strategist for John McCain’s 2008 campaign, and fresh off of advising Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz’s aborted anti-progressive run—to deliver the left-punching bromides usually taken up by McCaskill.

Warning there was a “danger with some of the ideology that we’ve seen front and center in this field,” Schmidt asserted that “a sociopath will beat a socialist, I think, seven days a week and twice on Sunday,” as the camera cut to Sanders getting ready on stage. Schmidt appeared to forget that his own candidate in 2008 had lost handily after trying to label his Democratic opponent a “socialist.” McCaskill, meanwhile, noted that black women “are overrepresented” in the Democratic primary contest and that candidates should keep in mind “that general election audience in November.”

The dynamics of the debate itself also mirrored In These Times’ recent findings, albeit in subtler ways. Though in the final New York Times tally, Sanders landed fourth in terms of speaking time, he was about a minute behind Joe Biden who sat in third place, and Sanders’ time was in the same vicinity as lower-tier candidates like Cory Booker (barely registering in both early states and nationally), Kamala Harris (polling at single digits), and Amy Klobuchar, another centrist candidate whose “electability” has been talked up by pundits even as she flounders with little support among voters.

Despite the final result, at 40 minutes into the debate, the New York Times clocked Sanders at fourth from the bottom in terms of speaking time, with Booker, Harris, Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg far ahead of him. Thirteen minutes later, he had moved up slightly in the shuffle, with Klobuchar now at the very top. Nine minutes after that, he was again fourth from the bottom, with Klobuchar sitting at third. The moderators threw it to Klobuchar after an answer from billionaire Tom Steyer about special interest money and term limits that name-checked Sanders but didn’t mention her—breaking one of the express rules of the debate format.

Sanders was also notably skipped over on the topics of unaffordable housing (though Tom Steyer, who has no housing plan, spoke on the issue), voting rights (though he made a point about it during an unrelated exchange between Tulsi Gabbard and Buttigieg), and white supremacist terrorism, despite being the only Jewish candidate on stage and having publishing an op-ed about combating antisemitism earlier this month. Sanders was also left out of the discussion about racial justice that followed, which Warren was asked to weigh in on.

Warren wound up markedly ahead of all other candidates in speaking time. This result was similar to the nearly six-minute advantage she held over her closest rival in October’s debate (in which she had a nearly 10-minute lead on Sanders), and her second-place finish in September’s debate, where she held more than a two-minute advantage over Sanders.

This tracks with In These Times’ findings of MSNBC’s coverage over August and September. Warren was not only the most positively covered candidate across the network’s programs—even on shows typically unfriendly to progressivism, such as Matthews’ Hardball—but there was a tangible shift in the way the network covered her candidacy, increasingly elevating Warren explicitly at Sanders’ expense in September, and hyping that month’s debate as a showdown between Warren and Biden, even as Sanders maintained a solid standing in the top three. September’s debate also saw Sanders passed over for a reply to an answer in which he was name-checked, in this case after Klobuchar had explicitly mentioned Sanders in her attack on the Medicare for All bill he authored. The moderator instead chose to seek a reply from Warren.

Though In These Times didn’t analyze coverage of Buttigieg for those months, his candidacy was the wildcard in this debate. Buttigieg’s rise in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire—and only those states, given that the South Bend mayor is enjoying 0% black support in one poll and is a distant fourth nationally—has been a major campaign narrative this month, particularly as enthusiasm for Biden has somewhat dimmed. Buttigieg ended up with the second-most speaking time last night, around the same amount as Biden.

In terms of policy issues, the debate moderators gave short shrift to a number of issues that might have interested Democratic voters. Climate change was discussed, but not in-depth. The coup in Bolivia was ignored. Warren’s new transition plan for Medicare for All—which would delay passing universal healthcare until year three of her presidency, and has been interpreted by Wall Street, the co-founder of centrist Wall Street-funded think tank Third Way, and several media commentators as a sign she’s backing away from Sanders’ policy—went completely unmentioned, even as Matthews had characterized her as “pulling back on Medicare for All” before the debate.

A string of recent controversies around Buttigieg, such as the meager amount of contracts given to minority-owned businesses by his South Bend mayoral office, his claiming of African-American endorsers who had never actually endorsed him, and his campaign’s casting of homophobia as the reason for his non-existent black support, likewise went unmentioned. (The moderators did, however, ask Sanders if he agreed with his supporters chanting “lock him up” at his rallies).

MSNBC’s post-debate discussion returned to business as usual, with commentators once again covering for another poor Biden performance that saw the former vice president claim he had been picked as Obama’s running mate because “I come out of the black community, in terms of my support,” and that he had the endorsement of the “only” black woman senator in history, to which Kamala Harris laughed. (“I thought he did pretty well,” said panelist and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson).

Matthews joined Klobuchar in decrying the policy of “free everything” (“I know these things sound good on a bumper sticker, and maybe they want to throw in a free car…”). Matthews also castigated Sanders for saying that “our system is corrupt,” warning him to “be careful about that language” because “that’s too strong.” Williams cast the contest as between “the side of purity-testing” and middle-of-the-road “electability.” Schmidt declared that “Mayor Pete had an exceptional night” with a “pretty flawless” performance and attacked Gabbard, who had criticized Buttigieg, as “just awful,” “spectacularly bad,” and “dishonest.” (Biden, meanwhile, had “probably his strongest debate performance,” according to Schmidt).

Still, there were some signs things may be changing at the network. Among the guests asked by Williams to weigh in was Michael Moore, who made a forthright and rare (for the network) case for Sanders’ candidacy. Anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, while generally praising Biden’s performance, harshly criticized the front runner’s onstage erasure of Harris, calling it “as bad a moment as he could have had.”

Perhaps the network is realizing that there’s a limit to the extent it can shape political reality. Or, perhaps, reality is starting to push back.

In light of this concerning information, as well as recent news of a now-patched vulnerability that left Ring users vulnerable to hackers, more senators have signed on to an in-depth exploratory letter to Amazon: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/five-senators-join-fight-learn-just-how-bad-ring-really

$44,000 for Air Ambulances, Hour-Long Rides to an ER—The Impossible Cost of Healthcare in Appa

When Heather Edwards’ contractions began three months early, in March, she worried about the long drive to the hospital from her home nestled in the Appalachian Mountains in Jonesville, Va., a town of fewer than 1,000 people. Edwards, 32, was carrying quadruplets and hers was considered a high-risk pregnancy. The nearest hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was an hour away in Kingsport, Tenn., Holston Valley Medical Center.

A decade ago she could have found an emergency room, if not a NICU, 10 minutes up the road at Lee County Regional Medical Center in Pennington Gap, Va., but the hospital closed in 2013 due to low community use, a lack of local physicians and Virginia’s refusal to expand Medicaid, which left the state’s rural hospitals to provide uncompensated care to uninsured patients. In 2012, the Lee County hospital was nearly $2.5 million in the red.

Neighboring counties do have emergency rooms, but none offered the NICU care Edwards needed. She decided to make the 44-mile drive along twisty mountain roads to Holston Valley Medical Center.

“If I went to [a different hospital], they were just going to fly me to Holston Valley or the [next] closest NICU,” Edwards says. “It would have been a waste of time.”

Edwards barely made it. Moments after she arrived, “everything just broke loose, and I went into labor,” Edwards says. “They tried to stop it and couldn’t. I had an emergency C-section.”

Edwards considers herself lucky. For the residents of rural Appalachia, long drives for emergency care are often a matter of life and death.

(Heather Edwards delivered quadruplets at Holton Valley Medical Center in March. Edwards was discharged two days later, but her babies remained in the intensive care unit for weeks. During that time, Edwards drove from Jonesville to Kingsport, a two-hour round trip, almost daily. Photo courtesy of Heather Edwards)

Lee County’s population reflects that of many rural communities in America: aging, mostly poor residents who struggle with long-term conditions that require ongoing, often expensive, care. The median household income in Lee County is $32,590—less than half of Virginia’s $68,766 and slightly more than half of the national $61,937. Lee County’s poverty rate is 28.2%, and about 12.5% of the county’s residents under 65 are uninsured, higher than the statewide average of 10.2%, and the population is aging, with all age groups except 65 and older in decline.

Despite the need, 113 rural hospitals have closed across the United States since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina. Another 673, about a third of those that remain, were at risk of closing in 2016, according to the National Rural Health Association.

“For me to drive five miles more to get access to hospital care is not a big deal,” says George Pink, deputy director of the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. “But if you’re old or disabled, if you’re poor, traveling 4, 10, 16 miles—that could be a big enough barrier to forgo care.”

DOWNGRADING HEALTH

About six months after Edwards delivered her babies, on September 1, Holston Valley Medical Center’s NICU closed. On October 1, Ballad Health, the nonprofit that owns the hospital, also downgraded the trauma center from level 1 to level 3, meaning there would be fewer doctors and a smaller range of medical services. Now, the nearest level 1 trauma center and NICU are in Johnson City, Tenn., 66 miles from Jonesville; the next closest are 97 miles away in Knoxville, Tenn., 166 miles in Lexington, Ky., and 206 miles in Roanoke, Va.

(The 4 closest level 1 trauma centers to Jonesville, Va.)

Protests began outside the Holston Valley hospital May 2, the day after the state of Tennessee approved Ballad’s plans to close the NICU. Dani Cook, 46, joined because her granddaughter was born at Holston Valley weighing just over a pound; she learned about Ballad’s NICU plans a year and a day after her granddaughter came home.

“I jumped on Facebook Live and said, ‘That’s what happens when hospitals put profit over people, in this case babies,’” Cook says. She has been involved in the protest ever since. She posted a widely shared image on Facebook that lists distances from rural area communities to the closest level 1 trauma care center in Johnson City, along with the question, “Will you make it??!”

By late June, on the 58th day of the Holston Valley protest, Ballad banned Cook from the hospital grounds, with then-CEO Lindy White writing that Cook “repeatedly interfered with patient care by entering patient rooms, disagreeing with nurses and physicians over treatment plans.” As this issue went to press in early October, the protests have continued for more than 150 days.

Ballad has a virtual monopoly in the region, part of an emerging trend of rural hospitals owned by large nonprofits operating with little or no competition. With 21 hospitals serving 1.2 million people, Ballad dominates rural, economically depressed southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee as the leading provider of inpatient hospital services.

Ballad emerged in 2018 from the consolidation of two competing nonprofits that ran up big debts: Mountain States Health Alliance and Wellmont Health System. Ballad’s Director of Communications Teresa Hicks says the debts were incurred due to wasteful and unnecessary duplication of services. The nonprofit received a Certificate of Public Advantage (COPA)—which allows states to approve mergers in exchange for various legal commitments—in Tennessee and a similar cooperative agreement in Virginia to escape federal oversight over potential monopoly problems, including effects on pricing, access and quality.

In Virginia, Ballad agreed to 49 conditions as part of its cooperative agreement, including a commitment to provide 11 “essential services” that include things typically found in a hospital, including emergency room stabilization. It was a victory of sorts for the Lee County Hospital Authority (LCHA), a group formed by the county board of supervisors in 2014 in an attempt to keep the hospital going.

As this issue went to press, Ballad officials said the Lee County hospital would reopen as an urgent care center in October, and as a critical access hospital by fall 2020, but the process has dragged on and locals remain skeptical.

Alan Bailey, who heads up Lee County E-911, a rescue squad dispatcher, says, “I’m not going to believe a word I hear out of the Ballad folks until I see the doors open and the people there.”

Even if the hospital’s emergency services return in 2020, J. Scott Litton Jr., 46, a Lee County native and member of the LCHA who has practiced as a family physician since 2003, says he doubts it will ever be what it once was. “We had a fully functional hospital with an intensive care unit, a medical surgeon and an operation surgical suite,” Litton says. “Probably what we’ll get ... is an emergency room and some critical beds for access patients. But anyone requiring a cardiology consultation or surgical consultation is going to be transferred”—to Big Stone Gap, Kingsport, Johnson City or somewhere else.

In their merger application, Mountain States and Wellmont argued that consolidation was the only way to maintain high-quality, cost-effective care and local governance. In 2018, Ballad closed four urgent care centers—in Abingdon, Va., and Johnson City, Kingsport and Greeneville, Tenn.—where its predecessors had maintained competing facilities. In addition to downgrading the trauma level of the Holston Valley hospital in Kingsport, Ballad will downgrade another trauma center in Bristol, Tenn., in 2021.

Ballad officials contend these changes will enable it to survive in the fourth-lowest wage index area in the country while creating a better healthcare system. According to Ballad’s information sheets, the changes will “better integrate our highly-skilled trauma experts ... to ensure assessment and rapid transport of patients to the center most appropriate for the patient’s needs.”

Cook and other local residents believe these changes will mean higher medical bills and a critical loss of care access. Multiple studies have consistently shown that hospital consolidations result in higher prices for services, at least for those with private insurance. Ballad’s Hicks says that, since the merger, charges for physician visits were reduced by an average of 17%, and a 77% discount for uninsured patients was adopted. Hicks also says Ballad has increased eligibility for free care, and offers no-interest payment plans as low as $50 per month.

Whether consolidation causes loss of access to services is more difficult to assess. Nonetheless, consolidation can result in confusion and frustration for patients as they adjust to changes in everything from drug prices to what services are offered at which facilities.

Teresa Allgood, 67, has seen her medical costs skyrocket since the Ballad consolidation. For four years, Allgood received infusions of INFeD every three or four months to treat her lupus and other autoimmune disorders at Kingsport Hematology and Oncology, known locally as Allendale. Each infusion took a day to administer and cost around $3,500, she says. Once Ballad took over, however, her regimen changed. Ballad enrolled in a federal drug discount program called 340B, at which point Ballad took Allgood off INFeD and put her on Feraheme. Feraheme infusions required coming in twice, seven days apart, and were much more expensive.

“The bill for the first infusion that Ballad was responsible for was $13,449.28,” Allgood says.

In late 2018, Ballad closed the Allendale facility and redirected patients to a new cancer center at Indian Path Community Hospital in Kingsport.

Ballad again changed Allgood’s medication, this time to Injectafer. Allgood received two treatments in March and says she is still waiting for the bill.

Although Allgood has now switched back to Feraheme treatments with a different provider, Tennessee Cancer Specialists in Johnson City, she expects her monthly insurance premium to increase because of the more expensive treatments.

“Folks end up in court with the attorneys from Ballad suing these people who never received a bill, and then their bills have been turned to collections,” Allgood says. Hicks says Ballad does not sue patients who have not received a bill.

Ballad filed 5,713 lawsuits against patients in its 2019 fiscal year, seeking payment for unpaid medical bills. In Virginia, Ballad first files a lawsuit against patients, which—if Ballad wins the case—allows it to more aggressively seek payment, sometimes by garnishing a patient’s wages.

Since October 2018, Ballad has filed 88 suits (plus 16 wage garnishments) against patients in Lee County. In neighboring Wise County, Ballad has filed 158 suits (plus 21 wage garnishments). When patients don’t appear in court, which is often, Ballad wins by default; when they do appear, they almost never have a lawyer.

Ballad is not the only nonprofit medical group to pursue debts via lawsuits. It’s a standard industry practice, and one carried out by both of its predecessor companies. To patients struggling on fixed incomes, though, it can feel like a punishment for falling ill.

A STATE OF DECLINE

Rural areas struggle to provide healthcare access for a number of reasons—including depopulation, a national nursing shortage and the departure of talented young people, which leave an older and poorer patient population than in urban areas. Access to health insurance is another issue. George Pink says rural hospitals tend to serve a bigger percentage of uninsured and Medicaid patients than urban hospitals.

Southwest Virginians have had access to only one insurer since 2017. For a brief period in 2018, it appeared that 58 localities, mostly in western Virginia, would be covered by no insurer in the federal marketplace at all, before Anthem eventually became the lone provider.

The majority of the country’s 113 rural hospital closures are clustered in the South, coinciding with the fact that few Southern states have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which provides extra federal funding to benefit rural hospitals. Despite Medicaid expansion’s popularity among voters nationwide, 13 Republican-dominated state legislatures in the South rejected Medicaid expansion over concerns about costs—and, arguably, to deny President Barack Obama a political victory.

Virginia lost two rural hospitals before it finally expanded Medicaid in January. Tennessee, which still has not expanded Medicaid, has seen 12 hospitals close since 2010.

A LONG WAY TO GO

Litton says before Lee County's hospital closed, “we would have patients come to the office all the time who were short of breath, having chest pain—and we’d put them in a wheelchair and roll them down to the ER. Since the hospital closed, we’ve had to call the ambulance or call helicopters to get people to the care they need.”

Not all of those patients make it.

And without a hospital close by, Lee County’s volunteer rescue squads have much farther to travel. For much of the 70-mile-wide county, the nearest hospital is in Big Stone Gap, Va. In the westernmost end, it’s Middlesboro or Harlan, both in Kentucky.

The rural terrain adds to the travel time. “We have isolated areas with one road in and one road out,” says Lee County Sheriff Gary Parsons. “It may take you 45 minutes to get an ambulance in, and 45 minutes out before you hit a main road. That’s if you can even get an ambulance. If there are two crews [on duty], but they’re both taking people to hospitals somewhere else, you could have someone having a heart attack, the dispatcher begging for help—and an ambulance may still be an hour away.”

The county’s rescue squads have seen their time spent on each emergency call swell since the hospital closed. Jonesville Rescue Squad went from an average of 72 minutes to clear a call in 2012, the year before the hospital closed, to 112 minutes for the first eight months of 2019, according to data provided by Alan Bailey. The squad in Pennington Gap went from 63 minutes in 2012 to 101 minutes in 2019.

Ballad hospitals in southwestern Virginia also use ambulance diversion on a regular basis, according to regional Emergency Medical Services. Hospitals go on diversion when they don’t have enough beds or staff to treat new patients in a timely manner, meaning ambulances must take patients elsewhere except in dire emergencies. Hospital diversion has happened so frequently in recent months— including an incident in which three Ballad hospitals in close proximity went on diversion simultaneously—that the Southwest Virginia Regional EMS Council sent a letter in an attempt to relieve tensions between hospital staff and rescue crew volunteers. Hicks says the increased hospital diversion was due to staffing issues, and that diversion rates have since returned to normal.

“I could tell you story after story,” Litton says. “Joe Smith calls the ambulance because he’s having chest pain, and by the time the ambulance gets there and picks him up, Mr. Smith dies. That’s happened multiple times since the hospital closed. Honestly, would a hospital in the area have made a difference? Possibly.”

(Gerri Kulakowsky received a $44,111.71 bill for an air ambulance. Photo by Mason Adams.)

A SKY-HIGH PRICE

In a serious medical emergency, first responders often call helicopters to fly patients to a large, well-equipped hospital. Sometimes the flights are covered under insurance. In other cases, a patient could easily see a bill upward of $40,000.

Over the summer, Ballad signed a contract to partner with Med-Trans, an air ambulance company. Eric Deaton, Ballad’s chief operating officer, says Ballad has no control over what Med-Trans charges, but encourages employers to join the AirMedCare Network membership program, an insurance-like membership that protects against out-of-pocket transportation costs for select companies.

Gerri Kulakowsky, 73, lives in Rogersville, Tenn., a mountain town of about 4,300. When she woke up dizzy one night in November 2018, emergency responders put her on a helicopter to Johnson City Medical Center. Kulakowsky is deaf and says first responders misinterpreted her slurred speech as a stroke; the dizziness was caused by an inner-ear infection.

Kulakowsky did not have specialty insurance for air ambulances and received a $44,111.71 bill for the flight.

Congress held hearings this summer about surprise medical bills. A March 2019 study by the Government Accountability Office found that the median cost for privately insured patients of an air ambulance flight was $36,400, with most flights falling outside insurance networks, leaving patients on their own. The other major private air ambulance company serving people in southwestern Virginia is Air Evac Lifeteam, and then there’s the Virginia State Police. Patients in emergency situations don’t get to choose which helicopter picks them up—it often depends on a patient’s location, weather conditions and the helicopter’s estimated time of arrival—but if the state police arrive, there’s no charge. Even so, “the bill charges are not typically what a patient will pay,” says Shelly Schneider, public relations manager for Air Evac Lifeteam, likely because of insurance or settlements.

Kulakowsky still doesn’t understand her bill, which shows a mysterious credit for $41,672.45, even though she understands her insurance denied her claim.

Legislation to address surprise bills and lower healthcare costs introduced by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has sat in a Senate committee since June. The law would require insurers to pay out-of-network providers the median in-network rate for surprise costs like air ambulances. In response, Global Medical Response, the parent company of Air Evac Lifeteam, Med-Trans and AirMedCare Network, spent nearly $900,000 on ads, many targeting Tennessee and Kentucky, urging people to call their senators and ask them to “protect access to air medical services.”

WHAT TO DO

Following the Ballad merger, Tennessee established the COPA Local Advisory Council to collect community input and to hold forums for public comment on Ballad’s annual report. In February, the council held a public hearing in Blountville, Tenn., in which physicians and activists expressed concerns about the merger and its effect on regional healthcare. In September, Virginia created a similar task force. The Federal Trade Commission also held a public workshop in June to assess the impact of COPAs.

Ballad’s virtual monopoly has also emerged as an issue in a nearby Virginia state house district race. Starla Kiser, a physician with a Norton clinic, is running as a Democrat for an open seat against Republican lawyer William Wampler III, who worked for a consulting firm that helped Ballad’s underwriters refinance its debt after the merger (although Ballad says Wampler himself was not involved). Kiser wrote an op-ed criticizing Ballad and expressing her “fear that patient fatalities will increase due to the lack of local care during a medical emergency.” Kiser faces an uphill battle in a district where Trump won 77% of the vote.

While healthcare politics plays out at the state and federal level, clinics and healthcare providers have sprouted up to fill gaps and provide basic care in southwestern Virginia.

Stone Mountain Health Services operates a number of regional clinics that offer a sliding scale for patients. The Health Wagon, founded by a nun in 1980 operating out of a Volkswagen Beetle, runs mobile clinics used by many regional residents, some of whom are managing long-term ailments like diabetes and heart conditions. And Remote Area Medical, based in Rockford, Tenn., runs free clinics providing dental, vision and medical services to thousands of Appalachians.

Ballad points to one of its rural Tennessee hospitals as a “great prototype” for healthcare’s future in the region, replacing an aging hospital in Unicoi with a new facility with fewer but targeted services and an ER. Ballad COO Deaton says it is “busier than when we had an older facility, because it meets the needs of the population.” Ballad was also required to keep it open as part of its COPA agreement with Tennessee.

Ballad’s new Unicoi facility does address a key reason why rural hospitals close: their inability to invest in new equipment and services to keep patients coming to their local hospitals, instead of bypassing them for more modern facilities.

Overhauling America’s health insurance system with a single-payer Medicare for All system could curb rural hospital closures, says Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician who teaches at Harvard Medical School and serves as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

“There are real challenges to providing comprehensive healthcare in sparsely populated areas that basically every nation faces (including attracting needed personnel) that don’t entirely disappear,” Gaffney cautions. “However, one critical reason for closures and disparities in access is resolved: the fact that healthcare infrastructure follows profits.”

PNHP recommends that in a single-payer system, the federal government provide each hospital a guaranteed global budget to cover operating costs. (This provision is included in the House Medicare for All bill, but not the Senate’s.) Hospitals wouldn’t have to rely on bringing in net revenue— or what nonprofit systems refer to as “operating margins”—to cover investments in new technology, services and facilities.

“In our current system, if you don’t have operating margins, you can’t get the MRI machine or the new ward you need,” Gaffney says. “If your competitor has these new facilities and services, you’re going to start hemorrhaging patients. That’s the essential issue” behind hospital closures.

He notes Medicare for All would solve another major factor in closures: the lack of reimbursement from uninsured patients or those with lower-paying insurance. Government insurance would also protect such patients from shocking bills.

In September, Alexa Begley, 26, friend and coworker of Heather Edwards, was in the midst of her own high-risk pregnancy, due October 17. She had been seeing an OBGYN at Holston Valley. Begley learned, however, that in the wake of the NICU closure, her doctor would no longer deliver babies there as of October 1, meaning Begley would need to travel 63 miles from her home in Pennington Gap to Johnson City to give birth—an hour and a half drive.

“With it being my third pregnancy, you never know how fast the baby can get here,” Begley said. “It’s scary. You may be delivering in the car.”

For better or worse, Begley delivered her baby early, on September 20, at Holston Valley, just 11 days before her doctor moved.

As Ballad and other rural health systems try to serve rural patients without running million-dollar deficits, Begley, Edwards and other residents of southwestern Virginia are left with a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty—not just for themselves, but for their children.

How do you get up each day with that hanging over you? “You just take it as it comes,” Begley shrugs.

Why “High Hopes” Is the Perfect Dance Song for the Buttigieg Campaign

A new dance craze is sweeping New Hampshire. Call it “The Buttigieg,” a team-building bop performed by staff and volunteers on Mayor Pete’s presidential campaign. Videos of the dancers, set to “High Hopes” by Panic! at the Disco, have been making the rounds on social media, shared enthusiastically by Pete fans and mocked mercilessly by his critics.

[embedded content]

The song, which Buttigieg also uses at events, is something of a campaign anthem. And that’s fitting: Its lyrics express something dangerously awry about Mayor Pete’s worldview.

“High hopes” is about the lone individual succeeding against the odds: “I didn’t know how but I always had a feeling / I was going to be that one in a million.”

One reading would be that Buttigieg and his campaign see themselves as optimistic underdogs, scrappy aspirers to the American Dream. But while “underdog” may superficially fit the 37-year-old mayor of a town of 100,000, it does not fit the rest of Pete’s profile. Buttigieg, the son of academics, is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who was earning six figures by the age of 26. He has outraised every Democratic candidate except Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and outraised everyone among big-money donors. His current polling surge required help in high places.

So let’s hope it’s not Pete himself whose successes we’re singing. Charitably, then, Team Pete may see in the song a metaphor for the country—the mayor has high hopes for America.

If so, that metaphor goes to a very dark place in the first verse: “Manifest destiny / Back in the days / We wanted everything, wanted everything.” Were I running for U.S. president, I would probably not embrace a song that positively invokes Manifest Destiny, a stain on our nation’s past, when “we wanted everything” meant pillage and conquest. The 19th century saw tens of thousands of Native Americans displaced, thousands more killed and an unjust war against Mexico, all so that America could stretch from sea to shining sea. To this day, success in America still means competition and exploitation—whether you’re a corporate CEO, a Wall Street banker, or a consultant at a big firm like McKinsey.

If the lyrics are troubling, the music video is worse.

A white man in a suit (the band’s lead singer) exits a Lyft and begins walking up the outside of a building, defying gravity. A multi-racial crowd gathers to cheer him on from below. They applaud him all the way to the top, where he steps onto the roof and finds his band. We never see the crowd again.

[embedded content]

Let’s break this down: A white man, publicly breaking the law (of gravity) with no repercussions, is supported in his climb by a diverse working class, then parties with those who are already at the top. It's not clear if those at the bottom even get to enjoy the concert. The lyrics exhort, “Stay up on that rise and never come down”—no mention of solidarity or bringing others up with you.

Cultural critic John Weeks has argued that the song and its video offer a perfect narrative of white male privilege: “The prophecy to be fulfilled in ‘High Hopes’ is that of the white man’s privileged place within the symbolic order.” “High Hopes” tells us if you’re talented, if your hopes are high, you can be the “one in a million” who succeeds.

I am not saying the man in the video represents Buttigieg himself. But the video does represent Buttigieg’s worldview: Mayor Pete, a privileged white man whose talent, ambition and class background propelled him to academic and professional success, is precisely the kind of person to believe that hard work and vision pay off—it worked for him, right?

Recent comments of Buttigieg’s suggest that he is a true believer in meritocracy. The progressive group People’s Action asked candidates how the government should address inequity. Buttigieg’s answer focused on “uneven distribution of opportunity”; the government’s role is “to ensure equality of opportunity,” he said, through unspecified “federal programs” that “eliminat[e] barriers.” The implication is that if everyone got a fair shot, justice would be achieved. Unlike Sanders and Julián Castro, he did not mention the need for a social safety net or secure economic rights. Unlike Sanders, Castro, Warren or Kamala Harris, he did not assign any blame to corporations or the wealthy.

In fact, compared to his competitors, his hopes don’t really seem that high. He wants to cancel some student debt; Sanders wants to cancel all of it. He opposes a job guarantee, and his proposed version of a Green New Deal is slimmer than Sanders’ or Warren’s.

And his meritocratic vision, focused on equality of opportunity, ignores that so long as some achieve wealth and power and others are left behind, those who succeed will pull the ladder up behind them. His message, and his theme song, are ultimately fine with inequality so long as those at the top can convince themselves they earned it.

So when Buttigieg volunteers dance along to lyrics like “didn’t have a dime, but I always had a vision”—as their candidate stands awash in rich donors’ dimes—they’re dancing to a fairy tale.

The views expressed are the author's own. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose candidates for political office.

Notecards From the Edge

A photographer got an image of Trump’s handwritten notes.

Youtube’s Video Empire

They got your attention. And they’re not giving it back.

The Big Question

God has heard you, His troubled children. What will you ask of Him?

.@SenMarkey asked Ring how it protects the privacy of those filmed by the company's doorbell cameras.

Their answer?

Basically, they don't. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/19/police-can-keep-ring-camera-video-forever-share-with-whomever-theyd-like-company-tells-senator/

Local cops now have access to sophisticated spy tech. Learn more about cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, drones, and more at EFF's Street-Level Surveillance project. https://www.eff.org/sls

#Oxfordshire #parents win right to #prayer-free #school assembly | World news | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/20/oxfordshire-parents-win-right-to-prayer-free-school-assembly

#Secularism #England #UK

Oxidizing Squeekboard: Exploring the popular approach of "Rewrite it in Rust" on a large C code base https://puri.sm/posts/oxidizing-squeekboard/ #Purism #Librem5 #Squeekboard #Eekboard #RustLang #CLang

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