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Can Joe Biden Sell 'No We Can't'? |
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Thursday, 01 August 2019 08:35 |
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Dickinson writes: "The first night of the debate in Detroit turned conventional Democratic political dynamics on their ear."
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks with Al Sharpton during a television interview during the 2019 South Carolina Democratic Party State Convention on June 22, 2019 in Columbia, South Carolina. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty)
Can Joe Biden Sell 'No We Can't'?
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
01 August 19
The triumph of the progressives on night one of the Detroit debates portends trouble for the former vice president
 This piece was written hours before the second 2020 Democratic presidential debate and as a result doesn't reflect Joe Biden's performance. That's all the more significant because it remained apropos after the debate concluded. Dickinson cuts directly to what the heart of the matter has been since Biden announced his candidacy: lack of relevancy. - MA/RSN
 he first night of the debate in Detroit turned conventional Democratic political dynamics on their ear.
In the normal state of affairs, politicians calling for modest course corrections are given the presumption of virtuousness on the public stage, while candidates calling for transformation are forced to make the difficult case for change.
But on the stage at the Fox theater Tuesday night, the candidates who had to fight to justify the righteousness of their path were not the tag-teaming progressives demanding sweeping changes — to health, tax and environmental policy. Rather it was the raft of milquetoast moderates, preaching caution and incrementalism, who had to defend themselves from challenges of being callous, cold hearted, and out of touch. The questions that hit home were not “how can we possibly afford these changes?” but rather, given the challenges Americans face, “how can we possibly afford more of the same?”
If this new dynamic holds for the second night of the debates, it promises to put Joe Biden — whose campaign promises a reversion to the path he helped chart with Barack Obama — on the defensive. Can the former vice president who once campaigned under the slogan “Yes We Can” explain to America why in fact we really can’t?
By luck of the draw, the first night debate stage was anchored by the two strongest change agents in the 2020 race, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Instead of attempting to differentiate themselves, one from the other, the duo locked arms, and made the fierce case for the agenda they agree on: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and new taxes on the wealthiest.
America has seen bold, visionary Democrats on the debate stage before. But even prominent ones — Jesse Jackson in 1988 comes to mind — had to go it alone, swimming upstream against a current of knowing and complacent voices, soberly explaining why it’s too much too soon.
But the celebrity, charisma and moral clarity of Sanders and Warren — he leading with statistics (“49 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent”), she connecting with stories about Americans like ALS sufferer Ady Barkin (“This is somebody who has health insurance and is dying. And every month, he has about $9,000 in medical bills that his insurance company won’t cover”) — gave the pair unprecedented gravity on stage.
Centrists had traveled to Detroit expecting to be rewarded for exposing the difficulty and expense of implementing the Sanders/Warren agenda. And they dutifully unleashed their sound bites. “Wishlist economics,” drawled Montana Governor Steve Bullock. “Impossible promises,” proclaimed millionaire former congressman John Delaney. “An evolution, not a revolution,” preached former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. But rather than connecting as clear-eyed truth tellers, these moderates presented instead as cowardly lions, afraid to stand up for struggling Americans in the face of a corporate-political complex built to grind them down.
And they got savaged by candidates preaching fearlessness in the pursuit of a more just America. “I genuinely do not understand why anyone would go to all the trouble of running for president just to get up on this stage and talk about what’s not possible,” Warren said in a withering exchange with Delaney. Even love warrior Marianne Williamson pulled out the heavy artillery: “I almost wonder why you’re Democrats,” she said, addressing the moderates. “You seem to think there’s something wrong about using the instruments of government to help people.”
Pete Buttigieg, himself far from the most progressive on the stage, cleverly distanced himself from the sour, can’t do spirit of the Delaneyloopers by giving lie to the notion that centrism offers safe harbor in the face of Republican attacks. “If we embrace a far-left agenda they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists,” Buttigieg said. “If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists,” he added. “So let’s just stand up for the right policy,” the millennial South Bend mayor insisted, “and go out there and defend it.”
The change agents in the race are appealing to what a charismatic young presidential candidate once referred to as the “fierce urgency of now.” And if the first debate night is any indication that fierce urgency is a mood, and that mood has gripped the Democratic electorate.
That spells trouble for one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who wants to run on America’s nostalgia for the eight years of sanity and stability under the Obama administration, while simultaneously tamping down on the Democratic base’s hopes for change.
The setup for night two on the debate stage will be different. Biden creates his own gravity, and his top challenger, Kamala Harris, just this week tacked away from Sanders and Warren — introducing a less sweeping path to Medicare for All that would transition to public health care more slowly and leave a greater role for private insurance.
But Biden has others to worry about. The night also features capable, unapologetic progressives who can make the case for Democrats to deliver the full monte — including a member of the Obama cabinet. Julián Castro shined in his Miami debate performance by making a searing moral case for decriminalizing the act of illegal immigration.
Though he’s not a star in the polls, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has proved himself a credible stand in for Bernie on the debate stage, insisting in Miami that the primaries are a “battle for the heart and soul of our party” and insisting that the Democrats are “supposed to be the party of working people… supposed to be for a 70 percent tax rate on the wealthy… supposed to be for free public college for our young people” and “supposed to break up big corporations when they’re not serving our democracy.”
Biden — the resurgent front-runner whose poll numbers have recovered fully from his face plant in the first debate — will face perhaps the trickiest communication challenge of his long and gaffe-filled career. Can he satisfy the base’s thirst for upheaval while staying true to his message that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch?
Biden has some goods to deliver to those seeking change. His plan to close a sweetheart loophole that allows people to inherit assets while skipping out on taxes could raise a lot of revenue, as could his proposal to tax capital gains (i.e. investment earnings) as normal income. His plan to triple funding for struggling public schools also has heart. And the former vice president is uniquely positioned to talk up the Affordable Care Act as a sweeping achievement (a Big Fucking Deal, if you will) that must be defended. But can he make the case without resorting to lazy fear-mongering about Medicare for All?
In short, Biden’s challenge tonight is to thread the needle. He must vow to deliver Just Enough Change, while fundamentally insisting that the righteous path is to take America back to the future.
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Trump's Worldwide War on Women's Rights |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=42736"><span class="small">Belen Fernandez, Al Jazeera</span></a>
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Thursday, 01 August 2019 08:34 |
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Fernandez writes: "A vastly more punishing version of the so-called 'global gag rule' that has been regularly implemented by Republican presidents since 1984, the policy now also applies to organisations that work across a range of health issues."
Abortion rights campaigners attend a rally against new restrictions on abortion passed in eight states, including Alabama and Georgia, in New York City, May 21, 2019. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Trump's Worldwide War on Women's Rights
By Belen Fernandez, Al Jazeera
01 August 19
The Trump administration's anti-abortion measures threaten the lives of women across the world, especially the poor.
  opulation control", as defined by the Collins English Dictionary, is "a policy of attempting to limit the growth in numbers of a population, esp[ecially] in poor or densely populated parts of the world, by programmes of contraception or sterilisation".
The current "pro-life" regime of United States President Donald Trump, of course, is no fan of such programmes. But it is all about controlling human populations and behaviour worldwide in accordance with unhinged religio-imperialist visions - many of them especially damaging to the poor.
In 2017, for example, the Trump administration dramatically discontinued financial support for that diabolically radical outfit known as the United Nations Population Fund, which is allegedly attempting to overthrow civilisation by promoting abortion and other evils.
That same year hosted the unveiling of the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" policy, which cuts US government funding to foreign NGOs considered to be involved in abortion work.
A vastly more punishing version of the so-called "global gag rule" that has been regularly implemented by Republican presidents since 1984, the policy now also applies to organisations that work across a range of health issues. In short, this means that an NGO dealing with HIV/Aids, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, gender-based violence, and so on cannot receive US funds for these activities if it also chooses to inform patients about the existence of abortion as a possible method of family planning.
So much for "protecting life" - not that such a noble concept would ever really be expected of a government that specialises in slaughtering people around the world.
More reasons to gag
In April, a Foreign Policy exclusive reported that the Trump administration had "pressured Germany into watering down a United Nations resolution aimed at preventing rape in conflict situations, forcing it to remove language on sexual and reproductive health that key Trump administration officials say normalizes sexual activity and condones abortion".
All that is missing on the international scene, it seems, is Andrew Bremberg, Trump's nominee for US ambassador to the UN in Geneva. Among his sacred beliefs is that rape victims should not be permitted to abort.
Now, two years after the launch of the new-and-improved global gag rule, Trump is bringing it home with the US's very own domestic gag rule, which will prohibit health clinics that receive funds from the federal Title X family planning programme from referring women for abortions and otherwise assisting them in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.
As the New York Times notes, Title X "serves about 4 million women a year, and many low-income women also get basic health care from the clinics".
So while the anti-abortion campaign constitutes an obvious assault on women everywhere, it is a particularly brutal assault on the poor. After all, both in the US and abroad, females in higher socioeconomic echelons will often have the means to procure a safe abortion, regardless of the obstacles erected.
'Women will die'
Consider the recent finding that 75 percent of abortion patients in the US are "poor or near-poor". In the present milieu of obscene economic stratification, forcing poor women to shoulder the gigantic financial responsibility of unwanted offspring pretty much amounts to a conscious perpetuation of poverty - a vicious cycle that also disproportionately affects poor women of colour, such being the reality of race-class divides in US "democracy".
Anyway, it all works out fine for a capitalist system that thrives on keeping poor people poor.
What to do, then, if you are a poor woman in Alabama, where in May the State Senate voted to criminalise abortion even in cases of rape or incest and prescribed up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform the procedure?
In a Guardian dispatch on the pernicious effects of US abortion bans on the "most vulnerable", the president of Planned Parenthood Southeast Staci Fox is quoted as stressing that, denied legal abortions, females in rural areas are likely to endeavour to terminate their pregnancies themselves: "The outcome of that is clear: women will die."
Again, never mind the old "pro-life" argument.
And women will continue to die elsewhere, too. Journalist Urooba Jamal points out that, in Kenya, seven women perish each day in attempts to induce their own abortions - deaths that might have been preventable, she says, had a local organisation not been forcibly gagged on the reproductive healthcare front as a condition for receiving US funds to provide HIV services to 10,000 people.
Aborting the system
Of course, the current war on abortion is hardly the first time in history that a supposedly morally righteous US campaign - ostensibly being waged for the good of humanity - has played out in destructive fashion on the bodies of the poor, both at home and abroad.
The never-ending war on drugs comes to mind, which has often amounted instead to a war for control of the lucrative drug trade and has been exploited to justify all manner of US militarisation schemes and support for repressive international regimes.
Victims have ranged from Latin American peasants to poor black communities in the US - like the ones ravaged in the 1980s by a crack cocaine epidemic that transpired when members of the US ruling elite thought it would be cool to facilitate drug trafficking by right-wing terrorist mercenaries intent on sabotaging the left-wing government in Nicaragua.
But back to the future and the right-wing fanaticism of the Trump administration, intent on sabotaging the rights and dignity of poor women and numerous other humans in the US and beyond under the guise of "Protecting Life".
Now, as Trump's multifaceted wars rage on, one question remains more crucial than ever: How to go about aborting the whole accursed system?
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Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39255"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website</span></a>
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Wednesday, 31 July 2019 13:14 |
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Reich writes: "Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress claim that America spends too much on things like food stamps, welfare, and foreign aid. But let's look at how the government actually spends your federal tax dollars each year."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
31 July 19
 onald Trump and Republicans in Congress claim that America spends too much on things like food stamps, welfare, and foreign aid.
But let’s look at how the government actually spends your federal tax dollars each year. We’re going to look at what’s known as the “discretionary budget,” which has to be reappropriated by Congress each year.
Start with foreign aid, the conservatives’ favorite boogeyman. It’s $29 billion a year. That may sound like a lot but it’s only 2 percent of all discretionary spending. Add all spending on international affairs, it’s 4 percent.
What about science and technology, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, and research in clean energy, which conservatives love to hate?Just 3 percent.
The environment and natural resources – money for clean air, safe drinking water and protecting public lands? Another 3 percent.
Roads, bridges, highways, airports, all transportation funding: Another 3 percent.
Community and regional development: 2 percent.
Law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the entire federal court system: 5 percent
The Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and rural health clinics: 5 percent.
Food stamps, energy assistance, child care, other income security: Just 6 percent.
Education and workforce training gets just 7 percent.
Veterans benefits account for 7 percent of the budget as well.
All other government services–including Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce–account for only 1 percent of the discretionary budget.
But that’s only 46 percent. The remaining 54 percent of annual spending is on the military, which is more spent on the military than the next 7 nations combined. It’s huge. It’s about the only really big thing the federal government does.
You may be thinking, but what about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act?
By law, these programs are mandatory spending, which don’t require Congress to approve funding every year. Americans have paid into Social Security and Medicare over their entire working lives.
Yet they’re still vulnerable. In fact, if Trump and Republicans in Congress aren’t going to cut discretionary spending – especially on the military – the only places they can look to make way for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
That’s been their goal all along.
Know where the money is really going. And know what they have in mind.
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Ronald Reagan Calls African UN Delegates 'Monkeys' in Unearthed Recording |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51282"><span class="small">Tim Naftali, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Wednesday, 31 July 2019 13:14 |
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Naftali writes: "In newly unearthed audio, the then-California governor disparaged African delegates to the United Nations."
Ronald Reagan described a Tanzanian delegation as 'monkeys' in a call with then-President Richard Nixon. (photo: Getty)
Ronald Reagan Calls African UN Delegates 'Monkeys' in Unearthed Recording
By Tim Naftali, The Atlantic
31 July 19
In newly unearthed audio, the then–California governor disparaged African delegates to the United Nations.
he day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.
The past month has brought presidential racism back into the headlines. This October 1971 exchange between current and future presidents is a reminder that other presidents have subscribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Americans are somehow inferior. The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.
The exchange was taped by Nixon, and then later became the responsibility of the Nixon Presidential Library, which I directed from 2007 to 2011. When the National Archives originally released the tape of this conversation, in 2000, the racist portion was apparently withheld to protect Reagan’s privacy. A court order stipulated that the tapes be reviewed chronologically; the chronological review was completed in 2013. Not until 2017 or 2018 did the National Archives begin a general rereview of the earliest Nixon tapes. Reagan’s death, in 2004, eliminated the privacy concerns. Last year, as a researcher, I requested that the conversations involving Ronald Reagan be rereviewed, and two weeks ago, the National Archives released complete versions of the October 1971 conversations involving Reagan online.
When the UN took its vote to seat a delegation from Beijing instead of from Taiwan in 1971, members of the Tanzanian delegation started dancing in the General Assembly. Reagan, a devoted defender of Taiwan, was incensed, and tried to reach Nixon the night of the vote. Reagan despised the United Nations, which he described as a “kangaroo court” filled with “bums,” and he wanted the U.S. to withdraw from full participation immediately. Nixon was asleep when Reagan called, so they spoke the next morning.
Reagan’s slur touched an already raw nerve. Earlier that day, Nixon had called his deputy national security adviser, Al Haig, to cancel any future meetings with any African leader who had not voted with the United States on Taiwan, even if they had already been scheduled. “Don’t even submit to me the problem that it’s difficult to turn it off since we have already accepted it,” Nixon exclaimed. “Just turn it off, on the ground that I will be out of town.”
Nixon’s anger at the UN delegations from African nations for the loss was misplaced. His own State Department blamed factors other than African voting, including maneuvering by the British and French behind the scenes, for the loss. But Nixon would have none of it. The Africans were to blame.
Had the story stopped there, it would have been bad enough. Racist venting is still racist. But what happened next showed the dynamic power of racism when it finds enablers. Nixon used Reagan’s call as an excuse to adapt his language to make the same point to others. Right after hanging up with Reagan, Nixon sought out Secretary of State William Rogers.
Even though Reagan had called Nixon to press him to withdraw from the United Nations, in Nixon’s telling, Reagan’s complaints about Africans became the primary purpose of the call.
“As you can imagine,” Nixon confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”
The president wanted his patrician secretary of state to understand that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to. “You know, but that’s typical of a reaction, which is probably”—“That’s right,” Rogers interjected—“quite strong.”
Nixon couldn’t stop retelling his version of what Reagan had said. Oddly unfocused, he spoke with Rogers again two hours later and repeated the story as if it would be new to the secretary.
“Reagan called me last night,” Nixon said, “and I didn’t talk to him until this morning, but he is, of course, outraged. And I found out what outraged him, and I find this is typical of a lot of people: They saw it on television and, he said, ‘These cannibals jumping up and down and all that.’ And apparently it was a pretty grotesque picture.” Like Nixon, Rogers had not seen the televised images. But Rogers agreed: “Apparently, it was a terrible scene.” Nixon added, “And they cheered.”
Then Nixon said, “He practically got sick at his stomach, and that’s why he called. And he said, ‘It was a terrible scene.’ And that sort of thing will have an emotional effect on people … as [Reagan] said, ‘This bunch of people who don’t even wear shoes yet, to be kicking the United States in the teeth’ … It was a terrible thing, they thought.”
Nixon didn’t think of himself as a racist; perhaps that’s why it was so important to him to keep quoting Reagan’s racism, rather than own the sentiment himself. But Reagan’s comment about African leaders resonated with Nixon, because it reflected his warped thinking about African Americans.
In the fall of 1971, the Nixon administration was engaged in a massive welfare-reform effort, and was also facing school busing. These two issues apparently inspired Nixon to examine more deeply his own thinking on whether African Americans could make it in American society. Only three weeks before the call with Reagan, Nixon had revealed his opinions on Africans and African Americans in a conversation with the Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had briefly served in the Nixon administration. Nixon was attracted to the theories of Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen, which linked IQ to race, and wondered what Moynihan thought.
“I have reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me … that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, is probably … very close to the truth,” Nixon explained to a quiet Moynihan. Nixon believed in a hierarchy of races, with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and Latinos. And he had convinced himself that it wasn’t racist to think black people, as a group, were inferior to whites, so long as he held them in paternalistic regard. “Within groups, there are geniuses,” Nixon said. “There are geniuses within black groups. There are more within Asian groups … This is knowledge that is better not to know.”
Nixon’s analysis of African leadership reflected his prejudice toward America’s black citizens. This is, at least, what he told Moynihan. “Have in mind one fact: Did you realize there is not, of the 40 or 45—you’re at the United Nations—black countries that are represented there, not one has a president or a prime minister who is there as a result of a contested election such as we were insisting upon in Vietnam?” And, he continued, a little later in the conversation: “I’m not saying that blacks cannot govern; I am saying they have a hell of a time. Now, that must demonstrate something.”
Fifty years later, the one fact that we should have in mind is that our nation’s chief executive assumed that the nonwhite citizens of the United States were somehow inferior. Nixon confided in Moynihan, who had been one of his house intellectuals, about the nature of his interest in research on African American intelligence: “The reason I have to know it is that as I go for programs, I must know that they have basic weaknesses.”
As these and other tapes make clear, the 37th president of the United States was a racist: He believed in treating people according to their race, and that race implied fundamental differences in individual human beings. Nixon’s racism matters to us because he allowed his views on race to shape U.S. policies—both foreign and domestic. His policies need to be viewed through that lens.
The 40th president has not left as dramatic a record of his private thoughts. Reagan’s racism appears to be documented only once on the Nixon tapes, and never in his own diaries. His comment on African leaders, however, sheds new light on what lay behind the governor’s passionate defense of the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa later in the 1970s. During his 1976 primary-challenge run against Gerald Ford, Reagan publicly opposed the Ford administration’s rejection of white-minority rule in Rhodesia. “We seem to be embarking on a policy of dictating to the people of southern Africa and running the risk of increased violence and bloodshed,” Reagan said at a rally in Texas.
These new tapes are a stark reminder of the racism that often lay behind the public rhetoric of American presidents. As I write a biography of JFK, I’ve found that this sort of racism did not animate President Kennedy—indeed, early on he took political risks to help African leaders, most notably Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah. But his reluctance to do more, sooner for African Americans cannot be separated from the paternalism he brought to the Oval Office or the prejudice held by parts of his Boston inner circle.
Kennedy, at least, learned on the job that securing civil rights for all was a moral imperative. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a symptom of a sickness that dwells in American society, sometimes deeply and weakly, sometimes on the surface and feverishly. He bears responsibility for his own actions, but the tropes, the turns of phrase, the clumsy indirection, and worse, the gunk about American society that he and his most devoted followers pass off as ideas, have an ugly tradition. It is not at the core of the American tradition, for what makes us mighty and successful is that we are much more than the narrowest of our minds. But it remains an ineluctable part of American culture, nonetheless.
Nixon never changed his mind about the supposed inherent inferiority of Africans. At the end of October 1971, he discussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. Bebe delighted Nixon by echoing Reagan: “That reaction on television was, it proves how they ought to be still hanging from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed.
These days, though Trump’s imagery is less zoological, it is pretty much the same in spirit. And this president, unlike Nixon, doesn’t believe he needs to hide behind anyone else’s racism.
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