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Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=60597"><span class="small">Alexander Stockton and Lucy King, The New York Times</span></a>
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Tuesday, 24 August 2021 08:30 |
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Excerpt: "It's hard to watch the pandemic drag on as Americans refuse the vaccine in the name of freedom."
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: BioSpace)
Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom
By Alexander Stockton and Lucy King, The New York Times
24 August 21
 lexander Stockton, a producer on the Opinion Video team, explores two of the main reasons the number of Covid cases is soaring once again in the United States: vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
“It’s hard to watch the pandemic drag on as Americans refuse the vaccine in the name of freedom,” he says.
Seeking understanding, Mr. Stockton travels to Mountain Home, Ark., in the Ozarks, a region with galloping contagion and — not unrelated — abysmal vaccination rates.
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The Endless Shadow of the War on Terror |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29696"><span class="small">Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 23 August 2021 12:54 |
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Greenberg writes: "Is the war on terror itself over? Apparently not."
President George W. Bush walks towards microphones to speak to the press, Dec. 22, 2005 at the White House. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The Endless Shadow of the War on Terror
By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch
23 August 21
If it hasn’t been forever, it’s certainly felt like it. Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the American-installed government there collapsed, its leader fled the country, and its American-trained military (already well staffed with plenty of “ghost” troops) evaporated. Many of the government soldiers and police who remained officially on duty hadn’t been paid for months, amid massive corruption and a staggering expenditure of American taxpayer dollars. Four administrations had spent at least $2.26 trillion fighting the war itself and more than $88 billion arming and supplying a military that, in the end, wouldn’t fight. It should be the ultimate lesson in forever disaster, but don’t count on the U.S. military learning much from it.
After all, the very generals who, year after endless year, oversaw such disasters, while lauding “progress” in Afghanistan and Iraq, were almost inevitably promoted or sent via golden parachute into the other half of the military-industrial complex. Lessons? Us? If anyone in Washington was into such lessons, the Pentagon might have learned something from the 2014 collapse of the Iraqi military that it also funded, organized, and trained in the face of the relatively modest forces of the Islamic State. But no such luck, as recent events in Afghanistan suggest.
Yes, the blame game is now on here at home and the insults are being hurled, but a serious reconsideration of the last 20 years of forever wars? Don’t count on it. Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, whose new book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump is being published this week, suggests: if you think it’s been forever and a day so far, just wait.
True, no one talks about the “war on terror” anymore. Even its proprietors now tend to refer to it by what was once a phrase used by its critics, “the forever war.” As Greenberg makes clear, however, whatever they may or may not be called, don’t be surprised when, in some fashion, they prove ongoing. No less sadly, the world of power and privilege they created in this country won’t be ending either. As former Yankee catcher and manager Yogi Berra might have put it, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” When it comes to forever disaster and this country in the twenty-first century, it’s a reasonable bet that you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Donald Trump.)
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 t ended in chaos and disaster. Kabul has fallen and Joe Biden is being blamed (by congressional Republicans in particular) for America’s now almost-20-year disaster in Afghanistan. But is the war on terror itself over? Apparently not.
It seems like centuries ago, but do you remember when, in May 2003, President George W. Bush declared “Mission accomplished” as he spoke proudly of his invasion of Iraq? Three months later, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed, “We are winning the war on terror.” Despite such declarations and the “corners” endlessly turned as America’s military commanders announced impending successes year after year in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, abroad and on the home front, has been never-ending, as the now-codified term “forever wars” suggests.
By 2011, following the death of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama admitted that the killing of the head of al-Qaeda would not bring that war to a close. In May 2011, he informed the nation that bin Laden’s “death does not mark the end of our effort” as “the cause of securing our country is not complete.” As President Biden signals his intention to bring the war on terror as we know it to an end, the question is: What will remain of it both abroad and at home, no matter what he tries to do?
The Pivot Abroad
As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks looms, the Biden administration is making it crystal clear that it intends to finally bring the most obvious aspects of that war to a close, no matter the consequences. “It is time,” Biden, the fourth war-on-terror president, said in April, “to end the Forever War.” Although mired in controversy, turmoil, and bloodshed, the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan did indeed take place, even if several thousand were then sent back to Kabul Airport to guard the panicky removal of the vast American embassy staff and others from that city. That was, as the administration announced, only a temporary measure as Taliban troops entered the Afghan capital and took over the government there.
Eighteen years after the invasion of Iraq, a shifting definition of the role of the 2,500 or so U.S. troops still stationed there is also underway and should be complete by the end of the year. Instead of more combat missions, the American role will now be logistics and advisory support.
Putting a fine point on both the Afghan withdrawal and the Iraqi change of direction, many in Congress have acknowledged the need to remove the authorizations passed so long ago for those forever wars. In June, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Force (AUMF) in Iraq that paved the way for the invasion of that country. And this month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed suit — 18 years after George W. Bush deposed Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and disaster followed.
The removal of that 2002 AUMF remains, of course, painfully overdue. After all, it has been used through these many years to cover this country’s disastrous occupation of and attempts at “nation-building” in Iraq. Eventually, during Donald Trump’s last year in office, it was even cited to authorize the drone assassination of a top Iranian general at Baghdad International Airport. Like so many war-on-terror policies, once put in place, successive administrations showed no urge to let that AUMF go. In that way, what had once been a regime-change directive (based on a set of lies about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) morphed into a long-term nation-building scheme, without any new congressional authorizations at all.
Plans are also now on the table for the repeal of the even more impactful 2001 AUMF, passed by Congress one week after 9/11. Like the Iraq War authorization, its use has been expanded in ways well beyond its original intent — namely, the rooting out of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Under the 2001 AUMF’s auspices, in the last nearly two decades, the United States has conducted military operations in ever more countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa. But in Congress, what’s now being discussed is not just repealing that act, but replacing it altogether.
Traditionally, when a war ends, there’s a resolution, perhaps codified in a treaty or an agreement of some sort acknowledging victory or defeat, and a nod to the peace that will follow. Not so with this war.
However unsuccessful, the war on terror, experts tell us, will instead continue. The only difference: it won’t be called a war anymore. Instead, there will be a variety of militarized counterterrorism efforts around the globe. With or without the moniker of “war,” the U.S. remains at war in numerous places, only recently, for instance, launching airstrikes on Somalia to counter the terrorist group al-Shabaab.
In Africa, Syria, and Indonesia, experts warn, the continued spread of ISIS, the reinvigoration of al-Qaeda, and the persistence of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah demand a continued American military counterterrorism effort. All of this was, in a strange way, foreseeable in the drafting of the 2001 AUMF in which no enemy was actually named, nor were temporal or geographical limits or conditions laid down for the resolution of the conflict to come. As the war on terror’s spread to country after country has demonstrated, once unleashed, such a war paradigm takes on a life of its own.
After 20 years of various kinds of failure in which the goals of the war on terror were never truly attained, the U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the Biden administration are now focused elsewhere. According to the latest government threat assessment issued in April by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), terrorism is far from the most serious threat the nation faces today. As Emily Harding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies sums it up, reflecting on the DNI’s report, the intelligence community’s priorities “are shifting… from a focus on counterterrorism to addressing near-peer competitors.”
“The United States is transitioning,” Harding explains, “from mostly low-tech, low-resourced adversaries (e.g., the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and their subsidiaries) to a focus on great power competition, in particular with China and Russia, both of whom have invested in sophisticated technical tools and are armed with robust conventional and nuclear forces.”
Still, however much the Biden administration may be pivoting to a new cold war with China in particular, just how long such a pivot lasts remains an open question, especially given the recent Afghan disaster. And despite the coming 20th anniversary of 9/11, no matter what Congress does or doesn’t rescind when it comes to those AUMFs, the U.S. forever war with terrorism will persist, even if, for a while, the threat of Islamic terrorism takes a back seat to other potential dangers in official Washington.
The Pivot at Home
On the home front, there’s a similarly disturbing persistence when it comes to the war on terror. Like that set of conflicts abroad, counterterrorism efforts against Islamist terrorists at home have given way to other issues. Mirroring the reduced importance of international terrorism in the report of the director of national intelligence, for instance, Attorney General Merrick Garland recently highlighted a domestic shift away from Islamic terrorism in a memorandum to Department of Justice (DOJ) personnel.
Outlining the “broad scope” of the Department’s responsibilities, his priorities couldn’t have been clearer. His first commitment, he insisted, was to restoring the integrity of the Department, a clear reference to the DOJ’s rejection of independence from the White House during the Trump years. Meanwhile, he explained, the Justice Department will focus on its primary mission — protecting Americans “from environmental degradation and the abuse of market power, from fraud and corruption, from violent crime and cyber-crime, and from drug trafficking and child exploitation.” Only as a seeming afterthought did he add, “And it must do all of this without ever taking its eye off of the risk of another devastating attack by foreign terrorists.”
But his words hid a more subtle reality. Much of the domestic architecture created in the name of the war on terror persists at home as well as abroad. At its height, the counterterrorism movement at home involved an expansive and aggressive use of law enforcement and intelligence tools that readily — often with the assent of Congress and the courts — tossed aside constitutional protections and reinterpreted laws in ways that privileged American security over rights.
Passed in October 2001, the Patriot Act, for example, downgraded Fourth Amendment protections, enabling law enforcement to conduct mass warrantless surveillance on Americans. Muslims as a group — rather than based on individual suspicion — were detained without charge, targeted in stings and terror investigations, and threatened with imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.
During President Obama’s term in office, some of these measures were revised for the better in the Freedom Act. Meant to replace the Patriot Act, while leaving many broad authorities in place, it banned the bulk intelligence collection of American telephone records and Internet metadata. For the most part, however, law enforcement’s counterterrorism powers, created to defeat al-Qaeda, have remained robust and are there for use against others.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created in the wake of 9/11, has also turned its attention elsewhere. Almost from its inception, the agency used the powers granted to it in the name of counterterrorism in other ways entirely. It soon turned its attention to dealing with drug crimes, the control of the border, and immigration matters, all outside the realm of post-9/11 terrorist threats.
Under President Trump, in particular, DHS (by then, remarkably enough, the country’s largest law enforcement agency) refocused its resources on matters that had little or nothing to do with counterterrorism. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, for instance, its officials deployed helicopters, drones, and other forms of group surveillance to monitor protests and, in Portland, Oregon, even to quell them with force. In other words, the agency built for counterterrorism had, by then, become whatever a president wanted it to be.
A Call for Review
The future of such powers and policies at home and abroad is now in a strange kind of limbo. Addressing the Trump administration’s misuse of the Department of Justice, for instance, Attorney General Garland did indeed signal his intent to limit any use of it for political purposes. In the process, he issued a clear directive against any possible White House politicization of the department. But not a mention has yet been made of authorizing a much-needed thorough review of the powers the DOJ gained in the forever-war years in the name of counterterrorism.
When it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, the path to reform is even less clear as, in its repurposed mission, counterterrorism aimed at foreign groups may be among the least of its tasks. As a recent report from the Center for American Progress points out “What America needs from DHS today… is different from when it was founded… [W]e need a DHS that prioritizes the rule of law, and one that protects all Americans as well as everyone who comes to live, study, work, travel, and seek safety here.”
In fact, in these years, both at home and abroad, counterterrorism agencies and the military were granted vast new powers. While they may now all be pivoting elsewhere in the name of new threats, they are certainly not focused on limiting those powers in any significant way.
And yet such limits couldn’t be more important. It would, in fact, be wise for this country to pause, review the uses of the post-9/11 powers granted to such domestic institutions, and revise the policies that allowed for their seemingly endless expansion at home and abroad in the name of the war on terror. It would be no less wise to place more confidence in the country’s ability to keep itself safe by embracing its foundational principles. At home, that would mean honoring fairness and restraint in the application of the law, while insisting on limits to the use of force abroad.
If only.
At present, it looks as if those forever wars have created a new form of forever law, forever policy, forever power, and a forever-changed America. And count on one thing: if changes aren’t made, we in this country will find ourselves living forever in the shadow of those forever wars.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), 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.
Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of the newly published Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press). Julia Tedesco helped with research for this piece.
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How California's Bizarre Recall System Could Elect a Republican Governor |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33017"><span class="small">Andrew Prokop, Vox</span></a>
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Monday, 23 August 2021 12:54 |
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Prokop writes: "There's an odd asymmetry in what Governor Gavin Newsom needs to stay in office, versus what his replacement would need to win."
California Gov. Gavin Newsom pauses during a news conference after touring Barron Park Elementary School on March 2, 2021 in Palo Alto, California. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
How California's Bizarre Recall System Could Elect a Republican Governor
By Andrew Prokop, Vox
23 August 21
There’s an odd asymmetry in what Gov. Gavin Newsom needs to stay in office, versus what his replacement would need to win.
f you haven’t been following California’s recall election battle, you might scoff at the idea that Gov. Gavin Newsom is fighting for his political life — and perhaps even to safeguard Democratic control of the US Senate. California is a deep-blue state, after all; could a Republican really win?
But the strange design of California’s recall system, and Newsom’s strategy for navigating it, make a Republican win more plausible than might be expected. That’s one reason the conservative activists who started the recall effort are pushing to remove Newsom from office this year rather than waiting until the 2022 election: They believe they have a better shot of winning now.
The first question voters will see on the ballot: Should Governor Newsom be recalled? Voters get to answer yes or no.
The second question: If Newsom is recalled, who should be his replacement? Here voters are presented with 46 candidates (Republicans, Democrats, and others) — but not Newsom. Mail-in voting has already begun, and in-person voting will take place September 14.
Here’s where it gets bizarre. Newsom needs to win a majority of the vote to stay in office. If he fails to get that majority, his replacement can win merely by being the top-vote getter in a crowded field. Two recent polls have shown conservative talk radio host Larry Elder (R) in first place with 23 percent of the vote — a small plurality that could still make him governor if Newsom loses the recall question.
It gets weirder. Newsom and top Democrats are specifically urging their voters to leave the replacement question blank. That makes sense as a political strategy: Newsom wants to frame the choice as between him and a Republican. But if Newsom loses the recall vote and many Democrats follow this advice, it will make it easier for a conservative Republican to get into office as his replacement, rather than a moderate Republican or one of the nine little-known Democrats in the field. Replacement candidates include 2018 GOP nominee John Cox (R), former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer (R), celebrity Caitlyn Jenner (R), and developer/YouTuber Kevin Paffrath (D).
A Republican win would have major implications for the state’s pandemic response policies over the next year (the governorship will be up for election again in November 2022). But the biggest consequence could be national: The United States Senate is divided 50-50, and the oldest senator is 88-year-old Dianne Feinstein (D) of California. If she were to die in office, as octogenarians occasionally do, California’s governor would choose her replacement — and a Republican governor could flip control of the Senate to Mitch McConnell’s GOP.
Democrats are optimistic that all of these challenges will be overcome, and that the fundamental partisan dynamics of California will reassert themselves and save Newsom. Most polls show Newsom narrowly leading on the recall question. But that outcome can hardly be taken for granted. In oddly-timed elections, weird things can happen, as Democrats learned when Scott Brown won a Massachusetts Senate seat in January 2010, or as Republicans learned from Doug Jones’s Alabama Senate seat victory in December 2017.
So there is a possible slow-motion disaster unfolding in California for Democrats — but there’s also still time for them to avert it, if they can communicate the stakes to their base voters.
The weirdness of California’s recall system
The recall effort was launched by conservative activists who were generally dissatisfied with Newsom’s governance. The incident that got the most attention was Newsom flouting his own pandemic guidelines by dining maskless at the French Laundry restaurant last November, but conservatives also point to Newsom’s handling of the pandemic generally, the state’s serious homelessness problem, and a high level of unemployment benefits fraud. The motivation for the timing of this push, though, is likely that they think they have a better shot at winning in the recall than in next year’s ordinary election.
Now, in theory, the recall process is all about giving more power to the people so they can boot out politicians they think need to go. Who could be against that? But the devil’s in the details about just who “the people” happen to be, and how that choice is structured.
For one, to get the recall on the ballot, activists needed to meet a relatively low signature threshold: 12 percent of the voters who turned out in the last governor’s election. Even in a deep-blue state like California, 38 percent of voters backed Newsom’s GOP opponent last time around, so with the proper shoe leather and funding, that wasn’t a very hard threshold to meet.
Turnout is another issue. The nature of a recall means it’s an election that happens at an odd time, and oddly-timed elections can have a different electorate, in which those who are more fired up are more likely to turn out. So in practice, what the recall can do is give an impassioned minority of voters a chance at scoring an unexpected victory, due to low turnout from the less-engaged majority. (Though it doesn’t always work that way — turnout ended up being higher in the 2003 recall than in the governor’s election the previous year.)
The handling of the replacement candidates is also unusual because, unlike in typical elections, there are no primaries beforehand in which the field is sorted. So this time around there are 24 Republican candidates, 9 Democrats, and 13 others from third parties or with no party preference. With only a plurality necessary to win if Newsom loses the recall question, and no runoff, this poses the possibility that someone with a small slice of the vote would end up governor. This thrills conservatives, since a conservative candidate would have little chance of winning a typical two-candidate California election.
Another feature of the system takes away one possible choice from voters: Newsom is prohibited from appearing as a replacement candidate. That creates the strange asymmetry where Newsom needs a majority on the recall question to stay in office, but his replacement does not need a majority to be elected.
Put another way: If Newsom loses the recall question 51-49, and his replacement wins with 30 percent of the vote in a split field, would that really be what “the people” wanted? In that scenario, more Californians would have wanted Newsom than any one other candidate. Of course, it’s inherently tougher for a replacement candidate to get a majority since they have so much competition, but that only drives home how odd it is that these two differently-designed election systems are juxtaposed.
Why does California do things this way?
Like the other notable “direct democracy” feature of California politics — the state’s frequently-used ballot initiative and referendum system — California’s recall system was created in 1911, during the Progressive Era. Contrary to the modern-day use of “progressive” as a term for those on the left, these capital-P Progressives were “an anti-party, anti-partisan, anti-special interest movement of reformers” in both parties, says Raphe Sonenshein, a political scientist at Cal State LA.
In California, Progressives were mainly concerned with corruption — specifically, the enormous influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad over state politics. But to build a “big tent” coalition to win power, these anti-corruption reformers sought allies. And one valuable ally was John Randolph Haynes, a wealthy doctor and investor who had an idiosyncratic interest in issues of direct democracy.
Haynes had studied direct democracy examples from around the world and from history, and he was taken with the idea that giving the people more power over politicians and lawmaking would improve society, according to an article by historian John Allswang. So he founded a group called the Direct Legislation League, and had already helped make Los Angeles the nation’s first city to give its voters the recall power back in 1903. (Voters approved it overwhelmingly, along with the ballot initiative and referendum reforms.)
So when a faction of California Progressives later launched an effort to take over the state’s Republican Party, they found Haynes’s money and organization helpful, and incorporated his proposals into their platform with little debate. Haynes “often seemed the only person in California who really cared about the initiative, referendum, and recall,” Allswang writes.
Progressive Republicans took over the state party and won the governorship, and they set about enacting their agenda in 1911. The legislature approved Haynes’s reforms and other sweeping changes, including women’s suffrage. Those reforms were put to a statewide vote later that year, and again won overwhelmingly. Haynes had put the idea on the agenda, but it was clear voters quite liked the idea of giving themselves more power.
The reasons for the specific design of California’s recall system are murkier. For instance, historian Tom Sitton says that the recall system Los Angeles created a few years prior allowed the incumbent to run as a replacement candidate. But when the state-level reform was drafted, a provision prohibiting that was included, and it’s not clear why the change was made.
The other notable choice was not requiring a runoff for the replacement candidate — letting a new candidate win with just a plurality. One possible motivation here is to save on money: A statewide election is expensive; a recall already adds one new costly election, and a runoff would add another. Another possibility, Sonenshein speculates, is that drafters may have wanted the recall process to be “as simple and quick as possible,” limiting “shenanigans” of any kind from the recalled incumbent.
Newsom’s risky strategy
The recall did not revolutionize state politics immediately. A few state legislators faced recall attempts in the 1910s, but then nobody successfully got a recall on the ballot again for another 80 years, when ideological conservatives embraced the tool to try and oust state legislators who’d taken positions they disliked.
But the person who first put a gubernatorial recall on the ballot was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who funded a push to oust the unpopular Gov. Davis in 2003. Issa’s key insight was that, with modern communication technology, the signature-gathering requirement was trivial as long as you were willing to spend the money to pay organizers. So he spent big, intending to run for the office himself. In a Hollywood twist, though, Schwarzenegger jumped in the race, and, knowing he couldn’t compete with Arnold’s celebrity, Issa tearfully quit.
In the end, 55 percent of voters opted to recall Davis. Among a crowded field to replace him, with over 100 candidates, Schwarzenegger won 48 percent of the vote. That wasn’t quite a majority, but another Republican candidate got 13 percent of the vote, so together well over half of voters wanted a Republican. And Schwarzenegger governed as a moderate, winning an easy reelection in 2006.
Newsom’s situation is different in many respects. He is more popular than Davis was at the time, and there is no formidable celebrity like Schwarzenegger in the race. (Caitlyn Jenner is running, but she has not been doing well in polls.)
But he still faces the inherently difficult challenge of winning a vote between “Newsom or not Newsom” — which is much more difficult than a typical election, when the choice is between one politician or another politician.
As a result, Democrats have tried to reframe that choice as being really about “Newsom or Republicans.” They made sure no credible Democrats entered the race as a replacement candidate (unlike in 2003, when Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante jumped in). The nine Democrats who did make the ballot this time are all little-known, with 29-year-old developer and YouTuber Kevin Paffrath being the only one who’s gotten some attention.
Democrats are going even further in trying to draw a contrast. They’re outright urging voters to leave the replacement question blank, even though voting on it would not hurt Newsom in any way.
The calculation seems to be that Democrats don’t want anyone thinking about a second choice or a backup plan. They want the election to be a choice between Newsom and Republicans, and they think this message will most effectively communicate that choice.
But it’s not advice that actually makes sense for individual voters, who are being asked to voluntarily forfeit their say over who the next governor would be if Newsom loses. Do they really want to hand the state over to Larry Elder, a far-right conservative, rather than Paffrath, who is at least a Democrat, or Kevin Faulconer, the former San Diego mayor who is a moderate Republican and at least has governing experience?
And if large numbers of Democrats do abstain from the replacement question, the math for a Republican victory gets even easier — again, since only a plurality win is necessary.
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that state Democratic leaders might prefer, if Newsom loses, to have a deeply conservative Republican in the governor’s office, who would be easier to beat in 2022.
But Democratic voters who care about the state’s governance over the next year — or about whether the US Senate remains in Democratic hands — might think it best to fill out the whole ballot, to have a backup plan. Just in case.
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RSN: Will Senate Democrats Stoop to Confirming Rahm Emanuel as Ambassador? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 23 August 2021 11:35 |
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Solomon writes: "The White House described Emanuel as having 'a distinguished career in public service,' but several progressive Democrats in Congress quickly went on the attack."
Rahm Emanuel. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Will Senate Democrats Stoop to Confirming Rahm Emanuel as Ambassador?
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
23 August 21
 hen President Biden announced late Friday afternoon that he will nominate Rahm Emanuel to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, the timing just before the weekend was clearly intended to minimize attention to the swift rebukes that were sure to come.
The White House described Emanuel as having “a distinguished career in public service,” but several progressive Democrats in Congress quickly went on the attack. “This is a travesty,” Rep. Mondaire Jones tweeted. “Senators of good conscience must not vote to confirm him.” Another African-American representative, Cori Bush, said that Emanuel “must be disqualified from ever holding an appointed position in any administration. Call your Senator and urge them to vote NO.”
The response from Rep. Rashida Tlaib was pointed: “If you believe Black lives indeed matter, then the Senate must reject his appointment immediately.” Tlaib accompanied her tweet with a link to an article that The Nation magazine published in the fall of 2018, when Emanuel was nearing the end of his eight years as Chicago’s mayor, with this sum-up: “The outgoing mayor's legacy will be defined by austerity, privatization, displacement, gun violence, and police brutality.”
All three congressmembers mentioned Emanuel’s responsibility for the notorious cover-up of the Chicago police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. For 13 months, during his campaign for re-election in 2015, Mayor Emanuel’s administration suppressed a ghastly dashboard-camera video showing the death of McDonald, an African American who was shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked away.
After Emanuel emerged as Biden’s likely choice for the ambassador job a few months ago, longtime Chicago journalist and activist Delmarie Cobb wrote a scathing assessment of his mayoral record. While mentioning that Emanuel “closed 50 public schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods,” Cobb also pointed out that “he closed six of 12 mental health clinics in these communities.” She added: “Now, who needs access to mental health care more than Chicago’s Black and brown residents who are underserved, underemployed and under constant threat of violence?”
Emanuel’s dreadful record as mayor of Chicago was in keeping with his entire career, spanning several Machiavellian decades that included stints as a member of Congress, a high-level aide for Presidents Clinton and Obama, and an investment bank director using his connections to make $18 million in two and a half years. Emanuel cemented his reputation as a combative and powerful player in the Clinton White House, pushing through policies that harmed the working class and people of color, including the NAFTA trade deal, the infamous 1994 crime bill and punitive “welfare reform.”
That Biden has now chosen Rahm Emanuel to be the U.S. envoy to Japan – the world’s third-largest economy – is, among other things, a distinct presidential middle finger to the constituency that gave him the highest proportion of support among all demographic groups in last year’s general election: Black voters.
High-profile corporate Democrats were quick to lavish praise on the Emanuel nomination. Both of the Democratic senators from Illinois helped lead the testimonials. Dick Durbin said in a statement that Emanuel “has a lifetime of public service preparing him to speak for America.” Tammy Duckworth chimed in, saying that his “years of experience make him well suited to represent the United States of America in this important role.”
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blew hazy blue smoke to an absurd degree, declaring: “In the House and, indeed, across the nation, Rahm Emanuel is known and respected by all for his relentlessness and track record of success. His great experience, from the U.S. House to the White House, will serve our nation well, as he works to deepen one of our nation’s most important alliances, champion American interests abroad and advance regional security and prosperity.”
After the nomination announcement, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that “the Biden administration is apparently willing to spend some domestic political capital with an Emanuel nomination,” and the newspaper noted that “progressives mounted a drive to block the nomination of Emanuel.” That drive, being coordinated by my colleagues at RootsAction.org, has already generated several thousand individual constituent emails to senators urging them to oppose the nomination. As RootsAction co-founder Jeff Cohen told the Sun-Times, “the #RejectRahm/‘NoToRahm’ campaign has virtually organized itself.”
A coalition of 20 organizations, mostly national while including several Chicago-based groups, has launched a grassroots campaign so that every senator will hear from constituents urging a “no” vote on Emanuel. In June, 28 victims and relatives of victims of police violence in Chicago released a joint statement, along with a poignant video, denouncing Emanuel and decrying the prospect that he’ll be rewarded with an ambassador post.
Despite the pressure for party-line conformity, Democratic support for the nomination could fracture in the Senate. Replying to letters from constituents urging him to oppose Emanuel for ambassador, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley – who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – seemed responsive.
“I have heard from Oregonians who are concerned about certain aspects of Mr. Emanuel’s record during his tenure as Chicago’s mayor, in particular his administration’s response to the tragic shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager who was killed by Chicago police in 2014,” Sen. Merkley wrote. He added that “at a time of a national conversation about police accountability and combatting systemic racism, there is so much more that we can and must do to address racism and discrimination in our law enforcement practices.… Please be assured that I will keep your views in mind should Mr. Emanuel’s nomination come before the Senate for consideration.”
Merkley is one of 11 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which will convene a public hearing with Rahm Emanuel before voting on his nomination. Whether Merkley and other senators will be open to preventing an Ambassador Emanuel from going to Tokyo is unclear at best. But it’s possible.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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ost won’t say it, so I will:
