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Nancy Pelosi's Impeachment Letter Suggests Sh*t Is Getting Real, Constitution-Wise |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 October 2019 08:27 |
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Pierce writes: "The Speaker will make this examination of the president* seem as integral to the constitutional design as it was meant to be."
Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Getty Images)
Nancy Pelosi's Impeachment Letter Suggests Sh*t Is Getting Real, Constitution-Wise
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
30 October 19
The Speaker will make this examination of the president* seem as integral to the constitutional design as it was meant to be.
 hit continues to get real, Constitution-wise. From Politico:
The resolution — which “establishes the procedure for hearings,” according to a statement by Speaker Nancy Pelosi — will mark the first floor vote on impeachment since Democrats formally launched their inquiry a month ago.
"We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives," Pelosi said in a letter to Democrats obtained by POLITICO.
This is the way it works. The more votes they take, and the more procedures and details they authorize, impeachment moves inexorably away from having been merely something people talked about to a real part of the daily business of the House of Representatives and, as such, a real part of the daily work of the Congress as well, as though recommending the removal of the president* is just another bit of legislative business.
(For all the talk of things being "normalized" concerning this administration*, one thing it doesn't want is for the impeachment of the president* to seem as integral to the constitutional design as it was meant to be.)
One of the lesser-known—but nonetheless pivotal—moments in the pursuit of Richard Nixon came in October of 1973, when Peter Rodino and his staff at the House Judiciary Committee put together a book explaining the impeachment process and how it had worked down through the centuries, its basic principles, and how the Constitutional Convention had adapted it for use within the infrastructure of government. Because he knew the importance of how things work, Jimmy Breslin, in his terrific Watergate book, made a point of using the publication of Rodino's study as one of the first moments in which Nixon's blood was drawn, even though the cut was barely visible to the general public.
And on the cover it said, "Impeachment." It was 718 pages long. Jee-zus! Goddamn big book! Seven hundred-and-eighteen pages long. Keerist! This is gettin' to be important business now. Nobody read a line of the book, but everybody held it and looked at the last page and saw that it was 718 pages long.
After the publication of those 718 pages came a series of votes that nobody noticed—including one that allowed Rodino and his committee the power to subpoena anyone in government and any documents that the committee might deem relevant. It was a party-line vote but, as Breslin shrewdly noted, it was a vote. And it was on impeachment, which, at that point in history, had been a dead letter since 1868. It was a part of the business of the Congress for the first time since Thaddeus Stevens was whipping votes against Andy Johnson. Part of the business of government. Business, as usual.
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The Meaning of Chile's Upheaval |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52002"><span class="small">Camila Vergara, Jacobin</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 October 2019 08:27 |
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Vergara writes: "The ongoing popular upheaval in Chile is the product of thirty years of neoliberal oligarchy and half-hearted democratization. To uproot the existing power structure, the country needs a new constitution."
Firemen work to contain a building fire after massive protests against Sebastian Piñera's policies at Palacio de La Moneda on October 28, 2019 in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Claudio Santana/Getty Images)
The Meaning of Chile's Upheaval
By Camila Vergara, Jacobin
30 October 19
The ongoing popular upheaval in Chile is the product of thirty years of neoliberal oligarchy and half-hearted democratization. To uproot the existing power structure, the country needs a new constitution.
 hile, Latin America’s “oasis” of stability, has been in flames for a week, fueled by an underlying current of socioeconomic oppression. The rapacity of the “Latin American tiger” that accomplished the neoliberal “miracle” of high economic growth from the ashes of socialism, has been revealed in street clashes in which protestors threatening the neoliberal order have become enemies of the state — stripped of their rights in a de facto, and therefore illegal, state of siege. The aggressive, zero-tolerance response of the police to peaceful civil disobedience, and the government’s resort to the use of the military to quell political dissent, is partly the result of three decades of denial vis-à-vis Chile’s growing oligarchization of power. The oppressive conditions facing the working class and the precarious position of an indebted middle class in a system in which all basic necessities have been privatized to make a profit, have been ignored, justified, and normalized during the last three decades of democratic governance in which left- and right-wing governments have alternated power.
Chile is neoliberalism’s ground zero, a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies as well as neoliberal forms of legality. The Constitution of 1980, which has been amended almost forty times and is still in place, was mostly designed by Jaime Guzmán, an ultraconservative jurist and member of the fundamentalist Catholic Opus Dei, with the intention of stabilizing and protecting the newly implemented neoliberal economic model — together with a patriarchal social framework — against popular pushback. Article 8 —repealed in 1989 just few months before the return to democracy — outlawed any doctrines based on “class struggle” or aimed at “attacking the family.” The brutal costs of the “neoliberal adjustment” came shortly after, and the population was forced to endure economic hardship and domination at gunpoint.
During the seventeen years of dictatorship under Pinochet, poverty increased from 20 percent to 44 percent while GDP was distributed more unequally: the share of wages in national income fell from more than half to one-third, while the share of corporate profits rose from 31.4 percent to 42.4 percent. The neoliberal model of accumulation by dispossession created massive wealth on the backs of the working classes and through the savage plundering of public property as well as the Earth. The legal scaffolding of the neoliberal state allowed the oligarchy to disproportionately appropriate this socially created wealth while shielding political elites from popular pressures through procedural arrangements aimed at insulating public officials from electoral accountability. Chile’s particular institutional arrangement has made for a rapid oligarchization of the economy in which oligopolies have given rise to collusion scandals, from the toilet paper industry to pharmacies, and a political system in which elected representatives receive the highest compensation packages in Latin America while consistently endorsing laws and policies favoring the wealthy and further entrenching monopolies, or neglecting to adopt measures to counteract oligarchic outcomes, passively letting the wealthy keep enriching themselves.
The merciless extraction of wealth from humans and nature, at high speed and insulated from popular pressure, has nurtured a new crop of the superrich who own most of the national industries, media outlets, banks, supermarkets, pension investment funds, health insurances, electricity, land, precious metals, and water. Chile boasts ten billionaires in the Forbes list, with a combined wealth of about $40 billion, equal to roughly 16 percent of GDP, while middle- and low-income households spend 45 percent of their salaries to pay off debts just to make it to the next paycheck. It is in this context that the slight increase in transportation tariffs in Santiago sparked what has become a national popular uprising.
Bringing the Military Back in
A successful massive fare evasion action led by students, who have been in the forefront of protests since 2011, turned into popular fury after images of police crackdowns were shared on social media. The people “woke up” in an outpouring of civil disobedience, mass mobilizations, and also targeted violence. Amid declarations that they had lost everything — even their fear — defiance quickly spread from students to workers, from the lower to the middle classes, and from Santiago to Valparaíso, Concepción, and beyond. As ordinary people took to the streets, the government led by right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera mobilized the military to defend the neoliberal order against those who dared to rise up to dismantle it.
After the burning of subway stations and supermarkets, President Piñera stated that Chile was “at war against a powerful enemy,” declared a state of emergency, and summoned more than 9,000 soldiers to the streets to deal with this existential threat. Who is the enemy in this war? What is being defended? The sight of soldiers and heavy armored vehicles on the streets was profoundly shocking to people who thirty years ago were still living under Pinochet’s repressive regime. It was also not surprising, in the sense that calling on the military to “pacify” a popular insurrection against inequality and oppression is predictable behavior from a neoliberal state and its oligarchic ruling class. As the First Lady, Cecilia Morel, put it in a private audio message to a friend, the government was completely overwhelmed by what seemed like an “alien invasion” forcing her and her circle of “people of good will … to decrease our privileges and share with others.”
Though civil disobedience began over the increase in transportation prices, protest quickly spilled over, tapping into a host of other grievances related to inequality and systemic corruption that had mobilized people to protest before but were never fully addressed. Indignation led to apparently organized destruction of subway stations, supermarkets, pharmacies, and electric companies, assaults that were framed by fake news organizations as foreign-led attacks.
As the official narrative quickly turned protestors into “violentistas,” Minister of Interior Andrés Chadwick —cousin of President Piñera and collaborator of the Pinochet regime— threatened to subject them to anti-terrorist provisions for disrupting public services. According to the anti-terrorist law, an action is considered a form of terrorism if it is part of a plan that aims to “eliminate or inhibit resolutions from the authorities or to impose demands on them.” As a result, protestors would risk aggravated penalties of up to ten years in prison, political disenfranchisement, and even loss of citizenship (Art. 9, 16.2 & 17.3). The UN Human Rights Council has argued this law “does not offer the necessary guarantees for a fair trial” and has urged Chile in the past to refrain from using it to penalize “social protests by Mapuche peoples seeking to claim their rights.” This is the first time the government has threatened to use the anti-terrorist law not only against indigenous peoples seeking autonomy in southern Chile, but against anyone attacking the status quo to demand social rights.
It’s also the first time since the end of the dictatorship that a state of emergency has been called to deal with a sociopolitical crisis instead of a natural catastrophe like earthquakes and tsunamis. Not only is the aim of the deployment different, but the prerogatives being exercised by the armed forces far exceed those granted to the President by the Constitution in a state of emergency. According to Jaime Bassa, a constitutional lawyer who offered expert testimony before the Senate’s Commission for Human Rights, Chile is currently under “de facto state violence” since there is no normative basis for the extraordinary authority exercised by the military.
Under the Constitution a state of emergency permits the President only to “restrict” the freedom of movement and assembly. While curfews were enforced at gunpoint and collective dissent was criminalized during the dictatorship, today disrespecting a curfew, like jumping a turnstile, is not a crime but a misdemeanor punishable by a $40 fine (Penal Code art. 495). However, the armed forces have completely suspended the freedom to assemble, arrested protestors, and declared curfews —all measures that are not allowed under a state of emergency. The prerogatives given to the armed forces show that Chile was in a de facto state of siege, a state of exception triggered by internal war. In the past week, more than 3,000 people were detained and clashes with armed forces yielded about 800 injured, most of them shot. At least five of the nineteen reported dead so far are believed to have been murdered by state agents.
A Social New Deal?
After a massive peaceful mobilization of more than one million people in downtown Santiago on Friday, President Piñera addressed the nation and stated: “we all got the message, we all have changed.” Without addressing claims of illegal detentions, use of excessive force, sexual violence. or homicide charges against members of the armed forces during the past week, he lifted the state of exception starting Monday, and called on Chileans to start the week with “institutional and civic normalcy.” He also announced a new cabinet and a social agenda with a price tag of $1.2 billion to tackle popular demands. Congress will discuss a reform package to increase pensions and wages, “stabilize” prices for electricity, water, and urban highway tolls, reduce drug prices, establish an insurance scheme for “catastrophic illnesses,” reduce salaries for elected officials, and increase taxes on “those of higher income.”
If it seems the President has finally listened to the popular cry and changed his agenda of protecting the status quo from social demands, the urgency with which he is attempting to tackle the popular demand for a “more just society” pales in comparison to his swift decision to call in the military to protect property, infrastructure, and the neoliberal model. Moreover, given the severity of the social crisis, it is clear that a few extra subsidies will not be enough to address it effectively.
If we take seriously the role of emergency powers in the Constitution, which are aimed at empowering the president to effectively tackle situations of crisis, then the equivalent to “bringing in the military” would need to be deployed to resolve the crisis of the neoliberal model that has produced high inequality and the increasing oligarchization of power. Proposing a social agenda to be discussed in Congress does not amount to the use of emergency powers, but to politics as usual; a top-down agenda setting, without social inputs other than what government officials decoded from the popular message: immediate relief of material conditions. However, the need for immediate relief does not address the need for structural change.
As a long-term, slow-moving process toward greater oligarchy, systemic corruption produces laws and procedures that benefit the wealthy. In the case of Chile, basic services were commodified, citizens became captive, precarious consumers, and laws have done nothing more than regulate exploitation. Though more public money to subsidize pensions and health care might bring immediate relief to those suffering economic hardship, it does not amount to a structural change in the foundations of the private pension and healthcare systems. It simply subsidizes demand without adding any meaningful control over private industries. Given the nature of the crisis, structural solutions need to go beyond relief packages in which private industries end up receiving public funds and no change is made to the legal and institutional landscape — a landscape that has allowed extraordinary wealth to be appropriated by the 1 percent.
Old Wine in a New Bottle
An increasing portion of the population are in support of a constituent process to establish a legitimate new social pact. With its illegitimate origins in the neoliberal dictatorship and its elitist amendment rule requiring a three-fifths supermajority in both chambers to change provisions — but no popular input or ratification — the Constitution of Chile is in serious need of an overhaul. When in 2005 the framework was unburdened of its last authoritarian enclaves, President Ricardo Lagos, a member of the Socialist Party, replaced Pinochet’s signature in the document with his own, and declared the transition to democracy complete with this “new” constitution. However, instead of replacing the legal framework of the neoliberal model, the amendments further entrenched it by granting it democratic legitimacy backed by the Chilean left.
Learning from the populist constituent revolutions in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008), and Bolivia (2009), a group of academics and activists have begun to push for a constituent assembly, first by calling supporters to mark their votes with an “AC” to gauge support at the national level, and then by influencing Michelle Bachelet into adding the demand to her platform. When she was elected to a second term as president in 2014, Bachelet initiated a sui generis constituent process that ended up a disappointment. Though the stated aim was to design a constitutional plan based on popular input from deliberative citizens’ circles, meetings were informal and their inputs nonbinding. After this miscarried attempt at a popular constituent process, the demand for a constituent assembly went dormant — until the current sociopolitical crisis.
Given that thousands marched to Congress to protest state repression and demand a “new social pact” — even after the President had conceded important demands and declared the country back to normalcy — Chile appears finally ready for a refoundation. If this is the case, it is not yet clear whether the current president —a member of the billionaire class— will be the broker of the new order or the last gatekeeper of the neoliberal experiment.
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Has the Climate Crisis Made California Too Dangerous to Live In? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19600"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 29 October 2019 12:53 |
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McKibben writes: "Monday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary - over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions."
Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
Has the Climate Crisis Made California Too Dangerous to Live In?
By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK
29 October 19
As with so many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow
 onday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary – over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened – indeed, it’s happened every year for the last three – and this time the flames were licking against communities destroyed in 2017. Reporters spoke to one family that had moved into their rebuilt home on Saturday, only to be immediately evacuated again.
The spectacle was cinematic: at one point, fire jumped the Carquinez Strait at the end of San Francisco Bay, shrouding the bridge on Interstate 80 in smoke and flame.
Even areas that didn’t actually burn felt the effects: Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power to millions, fearful that when the wind tore down its wires they would spark new conflagrations.
Three years in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”. Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave.
On the one hand, this comes as no real surprise. My most recent book, Falter, centered on the notion that the climate crisis was making large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans. Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now reaches the upper 120s – levels so high that the human body can’t really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore.
But California? California was always the world’s idea of paradise (until perhaps the city of that name burned last summer). Hollywood shaped our fantasies of the last century, and many of its movies were set in the Golden state. It’s where the Okies trudged when their climate turned vicious during the Dust Bowl years – “pastures of plenty”, Woody Guthrie called the green agricultural valleys. John Muir invented our grammar and rhetoric of wildness in the high Sierra (and modern environmentalism was born with the club he founded).
California is the Golden state, the land of ease. I was born there, and though I left young enough that my memories are suspect, I grew up listening to my parents’ stories. They had been newlyweds in the late 50s, living a block from the ocean in Manhattan Beach; when they got home from work they could walk to the sand for a game of volleyball. Date night was a mile or two up the Pacific Coast Highway to the Lighthouse, the jazz club where giants such as Gerry Mulligan showed up regularly, inventing the cool jazz that defined the place and time. Sunset magazine showcased a California aesthetic as breezy and informal as any on earth: the redwood deck, the cedar-shake roof, the suburban idyll among the eucalyptus and the pine. That is to say, precisely the kinds of homes that today are small piles of ash with only the kidney-shaped pool intact.
Truth be told, that California began to vanish fairly quickly, as orange groves turned into airplane factories and then tech meccas. The great voices of California in recent years – writers such as Mike Davis and Rebecca Solnit – chronicle the demise of much that was once idyllic in a wave of money, consumption, nimbyism, tax dodging, and corporate greed. The state’s been booming in recent years – it’s the world’s fifth biggest economy, bigger than the UK – but it’s also home to tent encampments of homeless people with no chance of paying rent. And it’s not just climate change that’s at fault: California has always had fires, and the state’s biggest utility, PG&E, is at this point as much an arsonist as electricity provider.
Still, it takes a force as great as the climate crisis to really – perhaps finally – tarnish Eden. In the last decade, the state has endured the deepest droughts ever measured, dry spells so intense that more than a hundred million trees died. A hundred million – and the scientists who counted them warned that their carcasses could “produce wildfires on a scale and of an intensity that California has never seen”. The drought has alternated with record downpours that have turned burned-over stretches into massive house-burying mudslides.
And so Californians – always shirtsleeved and cool – spend some of the year in face masks and much of it with a feeling of trepidation. As with so many things, they are going first where the rest of us will follow.
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Why I Weep While I Work, or What It Means to Experience America's Wars From a Computer Screen Away |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50358"><span class="small">Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 29 October 2019 12:53 |
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Harpootlian writes: "Think back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email?"
Bystanders look at damage inside Green Village, a day after a car bomb exploded outside its walls, leaving a massive crater. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/NYT)
Why I Weep While I Work, or What It Means to Experience America's Wars From a Computer Screen Away
By Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch
29 October 19
It wasn’t until this sentence in the sixth paragraph of the September 23rd New York Times article on the killing of Afghan civilians that the wedding slaughter was even mentioned: “But Haji Attaullah Afghan, head of the provincial council in Helmand, said a two-vehicle wedding convoy was fired upon by military helicopters, and that civilians were killed in both vehicles.” And it took 17 paragraphs before it was actually described in any more detail: “Abdul Motalib, a villager in Helmand, said on Monday that he was traveling in a two-vehicle wedding party convoy in Musa Qala the night before when military helicopters opened fire. He said the party was on its way to the bride’s home. The attack killed 15 women and children in one vehicle and five men in another just after the vehicles had stopped and turned on their flashers as the helicopters dropped flares.”
No mention, however, was made of the fact that, in the era of Washington’s war on terror, that was hardly the first wedding party U.S. air power had taken out. In fact, by December 2013, when a “surgical strike” by a CIA drone, supposedly targeting al-Qaeda militants, destroyed a similar wedding convoy in Yemen (“Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road...”), TomDispatch -- and, as far as I know, this website alone -- had already counted seven such weddings, obliterated in whole or in part, killing brides, grooms, guests of every sort, even musicians in Afghanistan and Iraq, with perhaps 250 dead and many other casualties. (One of those slaughters was committed in arid western Iraq in May 2004 by the planes of the 1st Marine Division, then commanded by Major General James Mattis. When asked about the incident, he responded: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?")
It is -- or at least should be -- enough to make you weep. And, in fact, that’s just what often happens to TomDispatch regular Allegra Harpootlian as she does her daily work. But let her tell you how, in her life, America’s wars come home in the most personal way possible.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 hink back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email? Or when you accidentally cc’d (instead of bcc’d) everyone? Maybe you just had a really, really long day and that one last little misstep pushed you over the edge.
In my case, I cry at work -- often quite profusely -- about once every two weeks. And that’s if I’m lucky. The past couple of months? More times than I can count. And not over a nasty email, a rude response, or a mean coworker (of which, I’m proud to say, I have none). No, I’m crying for a simple enough reason: because my job in communications breaks my heart. It does so over and over again. And yet I stay. I keep doing it, tears and all, because I want to make a difference, because I just hate the world I’m trying to change and how cruelly it treats so many people. And I cry because some days (most days, perhaps) I’m not sure I can make a difference at all.
So, what could cause this public relations professional to get that upset? Well, I think it has something to do with what I work on, day in and day out. Most so-called PR flacks I know have portfolios that include things like consumer goods, public health campaigns, or corporations in crisis. Not me. My focus at work is on America’s wars and how they are being waged.
As for the crying, it could have something to do with the uplifting -- I’m kidding, of course (if you can kid about such things) -- Google alerts I receive every single morning, afternoon, and evening. They arrive like clockwork in my inbox just waiting for me to open them and scan the headlines for mentions of drone strikes, airstrikes, or civilian casualties.
On a good day, those headlines in my inbox are, if not uplifting, at least irrelevant to the work I’m doing, which is always a relief: stock market updates or, say, the results of a Jamaican race horse someone thought to name Drone Strike.
But on bad days... On bad days, the e-newsletter I write is filled with weddings that were turned into funerals, civilian death counts that only continue to rise, government denials of wrongdoing, and angry questions like “How could they do this to us?” I wish I could tell you those bad days are rare, but given America’s wars that would be a lie. In all honesty, I don’t recall a single week since I started working on the issue of drones in March 2017 that they haven’t poured in.
For example, in just one week this September, news outlets reported that:
* a US drone strike killed at least 30 farmers harvesting pine-nuts in Afghanistan;
* a US-backed strike in a different region of Afghanistan hit a wedding party killing upwards of 40 civilians;
* a BBC report alleged that, on average, more than a dozen civilians died every day in Afghanistan;
* a TRT World investigation presented evidence that in the span of three months this year, U.S. air strikes killed 21 civilians in Somalia;
* an Afghan airstrike killed two civilians, instead of the Taliban militants it was meant for.
And that was only the worst of that week.
Unfortunately, when it comes to America’s forever wars, such stories are just a drop in the bucket. Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office more than 1,000 days ago, the U.S. has only expanded its war on terror, increasing both the number of countries we’re bombing and the number of people we’re killing. In the Trump administration’s quest for “annihilation,” the president has, in that period, prioritized might over right, letting the military loosen the rules designed to protect civilians in its war zones and then classify the results, which makes it likely that we’ll never know just how many innocent men, women, and children we’ve actually killed.
At first, I tried to keep a spreadsheet on every strike I saw recorded in the news, separating as best I could civilian deaths from those of combatants and unidentified parties. Unfortunately, the task quickly became so overwhelming that I had to let it fall by the wayside, hoping that others were already on the job.
There’s a lot about our wars that we don’t know, however, what we do know isn’t encouraging. A report from the U.N. found that, for the first time since it started tracking the conflict in Afghanistan 10 years ago, U.S. and Afghan government forces had killed more civilians than the Taliban and other militant groups. In Somalia, human rights organizations have accused the U.S. military of recently killing between 17 and 21 civilians (of whom, it has admitted to just two). While in Syria, the city of Raqqa largely remains rubble two years after thousands of American airstrikes left more than 1,600 civilians dead and the entire city in ruins. To this day, Washington has admitted to just 10% of that number and only after Amnesty International and the civilian-harm-monitoring group Airwars spent almost two years compiling “the most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict.”
At the most basic level, my job is to show the world how the U.S. wages war, who it hurts, and why we should care. How do I do that? By tracking all the developments I can in our wars, especially ones involving drones. I particularly focus on stories about and from those most affected by Washington’s policies, working with journalists to make sure that the American public knows what is being done in our name thousands of miles away -- the (rarely) good, (mostly) bad, and (usually) ugly.
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?
When people think of public relations, they generally associate it with mindless press-release blasts, unconvincing or irrelevant sales pitches, and an inability to take no for an answer. On the industry’s worst days, that may be all too true. When national security reporters get emails asking them to cover a documentary on flip-flop injuries or anyone gets a holiday season pitch in August, it makes sense to get annoyed -- especially given that there are now more than six PR professionals for every journalist in this country. And I would totally get hating every one of us, if that’s what we all did. But it’s not.
Journalists despise it when people lump them together. There are tens of thousands of them making millions of individual decisions about how the world is to be characterized and they're regularly all categorized under the behemoth label of “the media.” Yet many of them do the same thing to communications professionals daily. This one-size-fits-all view of us is inherently frustrating for someone like me because it represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of what I -- and others in the peace and security universe -- do everyday. But more important, this kind of attitude breeds a constant cascade of indifference and cynicism towards our attempts to highlight matters of life and death -- and that’s enough to make even the most passionate communications person feel like she’s screaming into the void.
Let me be clear: there are an incredible number of journalists who care deeply about how the U.S. uses force abroad, but for whatever reason that often doesn’t translate into their coverage. Airwars recently conducted a survey of U.S. journalists who report on such issues and while most of them believed that civilian-harm reporting was critical to news coverage about war-making -- particularly when alleged against the U.S. military -- the actual news simply doesn’t reflect that attitude. Airwars’ survey found, for instance, that news reporting on civilian casualties from international and U.S. actions was largely absent during key periods of the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Worse yet, in the Trump era, an already exhausting news cycle has become supersonic and focused largely on you-know-who, making it even harder for issues like civilian casualties in Afghanistan to garner media attention or break through to readers. Trump news is the wave that never ceases to break on all our shores and we’re starting to drown in it. A 2018 Pew survey found nearly seven in ten Americans felt “worn out” by the news cycles of this moment, resulting in what it termed “news avoidance.”
As someone constantly immersed in the news about the costs of war, I’m disappointed by such willful disengagement, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. I’ve often finished the news of the week, only to find myself unable to shake the horrors that I’d read about. Sometimes they even make their way into my dreams. For a while last year, I had a recurring dream that the plan to end the war in Syria was under my pillow, but every time I woke up, it was gone.
The irony is not lost on me that a lot of my job revolves around trying to make others feel like they have the power to change how America engages with the world and yet here I am, regularly overcome by a sense of helplessness.
The Pervasiveness of Vicarious Trauma Today
After Reuters reported that a U.S. drone strike that was meant to hit an Islamic State target killed 30 pine-nut farmers in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Just hours after those farmers, laborers, and children had finished their day’s work of plucking pine nuts in a heavily forested area and lit bonfires near their tents, a U.S. drone hit the site, killing 30 civilians and injuring 40 others.
I sat stunned, staring at my computer screen, unable to comprehend how my own country could repeat the same mistakes over and over again, never thinking to stop and reassess. The rest of my day was a blur of flagging that particular nightmare for anyone and everyone who might be able to bring it to the awareness of the public. In the end, while the strike did garner some outrage from a few political pundits like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, most ignored it. By the next day, of course, the world -- our world, at least, if not the Afghan one -- had moved on.
The silence was so deafening that I did what any self-respecting millennial media professional would do in such a situation: I complained on Twitter. Ab Qadir Sediqi, the Afghan-based Reuters journalist who broke the story, responded that, unfortunately, no, there wouldn’t be any outrage because, “Afghan li[f]e doesn’t matter to the world, the world forgot Afghanistan, if it wasn’t so, we wouldn’t have been suffering since decades.” Reading those words, I felt overwhelmed by the desire to help and then immediately paralyzed by the soul-crushing knowledge that I had next to no power to do so.
I knew, of course, that anyone on the front lines of conflict, from soldiers to civilians to journalists, was regularly exposed to trauma of many sorts and that what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, could result. What I had never really thought about was how those of us separated from such conflict by vast distances but, in another sense, only a computer screen away might be affected.
I should have, though, because my tearful reactions were obvious evidence that repeatedly seeing images of, and learning about, violence and trauma takes its own toll. According to a 2017 report from Eyewitness Media Hub, if you are exposed to distressing experiences, even when not physically present, your brain has the capacity to produce symptoms of distress similar to those you would feel if you had indeed been there. This is sometimes called vicarious trauma, which is acquired through working with people who have experienced trauma, hearing their stories, and becoming a witness to the pain and suffering that they continue to endure.
Common signs of vicarious trauma include experiencing lingering feelings of anger, rage, and sadness. In some more extreme cases, intense exposure to such subject matter can lead to anxiety, stress, burnout, and PTSD. A recent survey of 346 human rights advocates found that 19% of them indeed did appear to have PTSD, or at least symptoms long associated with that syndrome; 15% seemed to be experiencing depression; and 19% reported burnout. Curiously enough, such rates are comparable to those found among first responders and even combat veterans. Additionally, perfectionists who viewed their efforts, no matter how fervent, as ineffective exhibited even more severe symptoms of depression.
I know I’m just one person working on issues that affect millions of people across the world so much more deeply and immediately than me. I also know that many others, including local residents, aid workers, and soldiers experience the brunt of the trauma in such situations. Still, a majority of my day is spent bearing witness to the pain, fear, and terror that America’s actions have been causing across the Greater Middle East and North Africa. I know perfectly well that I can’t necessarily change any of the outcomes there, since I’m not the one directing those strikes or making the rules. However, I also know how important it is to hear directly from those impacted, so I’ll continue to do whatever I can to make sure the stories of the victims of America’s seemingly endless wars are told.
Or at least I can try (and cry).
Allegra Harpootlian, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior media associate at ReThink Media where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. Find her on Twitter @ally_harp or subscribe to her newsletter here.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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