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Putin Denies Mitch McConnell Is Russian Asset: "He Has Never Been an Asset to Any Country" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 July 2019 12:55 |
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Borowitz writes: "Pushing back against charges that Senator Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said on Tuesday that McConnell 'has never been an asset to any country.'"
Mitch McConnell. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Putin Denies Mitch McConnell Is Russian Asset: "He Has Never Been an Asset to Any Country"
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
30 July 19
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 ushing back against charges that Senator Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said on Tuesday that McConnell “has never been an asset to any country.”
“You can scour the four corners of the globe, and you will not find a nation that would ever in a million years consider Mitch McConnell an asset,” Putin said.
The Russian President urged pundits who have called McConnell a Russian asset “to look up the word ‘asset’ in the dictionary.”
“You will find that ‘asset’ means a useful or valuable thing,” Putin said. “The only part of that definition that fits McConnell is ‘thing.’ ”
Pressing his case further, he said that it was debatable whether McConnell was even an asset to his home state of Kentucky. “Maybe compared to Rand Paul he is, but that’s setting the bar ludicrously low,” he said.
Concluding his remarks, Putin said that people who ask, “Who does Mitch McConnell work for?” are asking the wrong question. “The question should be ‘When has Mitch McConnell ever worked?’ ” he said.
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Medicare Turns Fifty-Four Today. We Need to Defend and Expand It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51274"><span class="small">Luke Thibault, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 July 2019 12:54 |
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Thibault writes: "Fifty-four years ago today, Medicare became the law of the land. The program has been massively successful despite continued efforts to destroy it."
Protesters supporting Medicare for All hold a rally outside PhRMA headquarters April 29, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Medicare Turns Fifty-Four Today. We Need to Defend and Expand It
By Luke Thibault, Jacobin
30 July 19
Fifty-four years ago today, Medicare became the law of the land. The program has been massively successful despite continued efforts to destroy it. While defending Medicare, our next step is clear: Medicare for All.
 n July 30, 1965, Medicare was signed into law. In eleven months, 19 million Americans were automatically enrolled, half of whom were previously uninsured. And within that same transition period — as a direct result of the policy — every segregated hospital in the South took down their “Whites only” signs, integrating their services for the first time.
Medicare came in three parts: a universal hospital plan for the elderly (part A), voluntary doctor insurance for the elderly (part B), and a means-tested health care plan for the poor (Medicaid). At the age of sixty-five, virtually all Americans would become eligible for Medicare. Echoing the debut of Britain’s National Health Service, Lyndon B. Johnson framed Medicare “not as an act of charity, but as the insured right of a senior citizen.”
On its birthday, we must fiercely and proudly defend Medicare, while recognizing that its protection relies on expanding it to all. Doing so — achieving Medicare for All — means providing comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion. It means providing health care to all residents, regardless of immigration status. And it means creating a system that covers everyone equally, without means-testing.
The history of Medicare can teach us how to get there. Universal programs don’t simply generate solidarity once they’re won — they require solidarity to win in the first place.
From Medicare for All to Medicare for Some
Why didn’t America pass a national health insurance plan that covered all ages, as other Western democracies did after World War II? Before Johnson passed Medicare, both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman supported such a program, but only timidly. They caved to the zealously anti–single payer American Medical Association (AMA) and Southern Democrats who feared desegregation. In 1957, the scope of American health reform narrowed to a program for the elderly: Medicare.
Morally, the case for seniors was obvious. In 1962, Michael Harrington stirred the nation with his book The Other America, which devoted an entire chapter to the elderly: “Loneliness, isolation, and sickness are the afflictions of the aged in every economic class. But for those who are poor, there is an intensification of each of these tragedies: they are more lonely, more isolated, sicker.”
Economically, the case for seniors was equally apparent. In Health Care for Some, Beatrix Hoffman describes the history of America’s unequal health care system, explaining that the failures of the market were glaring when it came to seniors. Seen by the insurance industry as risky (and therefore costly) customers, seniors were dealt high premiums and sudden or outright denials. Many were put in the undignified position of having to ask for charity — or, worse, simply foregoing desperately needed care.
It was clear that if seniors were to gain access to care, the state had to take on the responsibility.
The Coalition That Won Medicare
Harrington’s book deeply moved John F. Kennedy, who made Medicare a central piece of his domestic agenda. Kennedy, unlike his predecessors, actually went to war with organized medicine. He toured the country, speaking to tens of thousands of senior citizens at Medicare rallies organized by the AFL-CIO.
Organized labor was one of the staunchest proponents of Medicare, pouring heavy resources into Congressional pressure campaigns. The most prominent union fighting for universal health care at the time was the United Auto Workers, led by Walter Reuther. Reuther himself debated the president of the AMA on network cable in 1961. The AMA’s propaganda, which included a red-baiting LP recorded by Ronald Reagan, prompted Reuther to joke about the anti-Medicare campaign: “If they put it in bags, it would help your lawns grow better.”
Following Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson made Medicare a central piece of his presidential campaign. He won in a landslide, alongside the most liberal Congress since 1938.
Johnson saw Medicare as inseparable from his civil rights agenda, raising it in the same breath as voting rights on calls with Martin Luther King Jr. King similarly connected these issues, and in a speech rebuking the AMA he delivered an enduring rallying cry: “Of all the inequalities that exist, the injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.”
The Jim Crow hospital system was a deadly one, in which even emergency care was regularly denied on the basis of race. Prematurely discharging patients in need of emergency care is known as “patient dumping,” and still happens today to people who are uninsured (often homeless or undocumented). An Afro American editorial in 1952 blasted the practice for what it was: “This exclusion is another form of lynching by proxy.”
Unlike Social Security, which left out agricultural, domestic, and unwaged workers, Medicare was a universal program. And because Title VI of the Civil Rights Act required federally funded programs to prohibit discrimination, Medicare could be a weapon for fighting both disparities in health outcomes and segregation in hospitals.
Though it required presidential leadership, Medicare was not a gift from on high — it was a concession made after social movements created unignorable crises. The 1960s was an explosive period for militant protest and mass activism. Medicare would never have been won without such a mass movement in the streets. Euthanizing the insurance industry today will be no different.
Beyond Medicare
Medicare is a simple, cost-effective program that keeps millions of people out of poverty and has helped raise the life expectancy of seniors by over four years. It’s a monumental starting point, but we must go beyond it with Medicare for All.
Medicare’s Part B (voluntary physician insurance) includes barriers to care such as premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. It excludes long-term care, dental services, eyeglasses, and hearing aids. These shortcomings resulted in a new market for selling supplemental private insurance plans (e.g., Medigap and Medicare Advantage) that receive generous government subsidies and shrink the insurance pool of Medicare.
This privatization threatens Medicare by shifting it from a single-payer to a multi-payer program, driving up the cost of overhead, co-pays, and deductibles. If this continues, out-of-pocket health expenses for Medicare beneficiaries are projected to take up half of their Social Security income by 2030. This is why Medicare for All advocates don’t want a public option, or mere “access” to care; we want guaranteed health care for everyone, free at the point of service.
Despite its weaknesses, Medicare is one of America’s most beloved social programs. This is because Medicare is a universal program that is not based on charity. Most people use it or know someone who does — and it works well. Medicare’s universality makes it an engine of solidarity, binding large swathes of the population together in a collective project. By covering both the working class and the middle class, Medicare combats the politics of resentment that otherwise fuels the Right’s agenda.
Take Medicaid, in contrast: means-tested and relegated to state-level provision, it has proven far more susceptible to right-wing cuts and work requirements. By holding firm to Medicare’s principle of universality, Medicare for All will improve the lives of all working people, regardless of age, race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Medicare at its best demonstrates the state’s ability to effectively administer public health in the interest of the many, not the few. Decades of neoliberalism has not reduced the size of the state, especially in the case of health care. In fact, public spending on health care is at an all-time high — but much of that money currently subsidizes private insurance. Neoliberalism simply reshaped the state to serve the interests of economic elites. Medicare for All can dispel the anti-state ideology of the Right and change the whole American attitude to social services.
We can’t simply map the class struggle of the past onto that of the present, but a hopeful political climate is emerging thanks to similar ingredients as the ones present during Medicare’s passage. Mass social movements are in the streets defending abortion rights and immigrant rights. Militant teachers are bringing back the strike. Organized labor may not be all-in on Medicare for All, but National Nurses United is leading the charge. Bernie Sanders, who is willing to go to war with the insurance industry, could provide the necessary presidential leadership.
We are in an opening for serious health reform that hasn’t existed since Medicare was signed into law fifty-four years ago. We must revive the universality of Medicare and demand nothing less than Medicare for All.
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FOCUS: Trump Doesn't View Himself as the President of the United States |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 July 2019 11:52 |
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Rather writes: "Does Baltimore have problems? Of course. And so does Appalachia, and Beverly Hills and every part of this nation."
Dan Rather in his office in Manhattan in 2009. (photo: Jennifer S. Altman/NYT)
Trump Doesn't View Himself as the President of the United States
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
30 July 19
 oes Baltimore have problems? Of course. And so does Appalachia, and Beverly Hills and every part of this nation. We have struggles with disease, and addiction, and poverty, loneliness and job insecurity, education, health care, child abuse and natural disasters. And so much more. Some of the problems are concentrated and some are more diffused. Some are new challenges and some are the result of systematic abuses, like white supremacy, with deep roots in our national fabric. But the very notion of our nation, the very ideal enshrined in that beautiful phrase e pluribus unum (out of many, one), is that we are one nation and the struggles of our citizens are the struggles for all of us.
There are many reasons why President Trump’s attacks on Congressman Cummings were bigoted and thus un-American. Why are the struggles of some Americans in the president’s eyes to be blamed on forces such as immigrants or unfair government practices while others (and mostly those of minority districts) are to be blamed on the diverse politicians who represent those districts? The answer obviously speaks for itself.
President Trump does not view himself as the President of the United States, or at least the United States of 2019. He views himself as the president of his base. He sees his path to reelection as stoking the indignant outrage of enough Americans to overwhelm those (at least in the right battleground states) who believe in a pluralistic and more just America. For someone who sanctimoniously lectures on not hating America, to love to or leave it, the president spends a lot of time saying how horrible this country is. His is of course a grossly distorted view but it will be on center stage in the upcoming campaign.
The great sadness is that we do have challenges, we do have problems, we do have needs. From climate change to income inequality to health care, we face forces that we will have to face together if we have the courage to move beyond the dangerous rhetoric meant to divide us, shame us, and diminish us for short-sighted political gain.
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Mike Pompeo Is Donald Trump's De Facto Intelligence Czar |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 July 2019 08:29 |
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Risen writes: "Mike Pompeo is still heavily influencing the U.S. intelligence community, more than a year after he left the CIA for the State Department, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials."
Mike Pompeo. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Mike Pompeo Is Donald Trump's De Facto Intelligence Czar
By James Risen, The Intercept
30 July 19
 ecretary of State Mike Pompeo is still heavily influencing the U.S. intelligence community, more than a year after he left the CIA for the State Department, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Pompeo, who was Donald Trump’s first CIA director, is now serving as a key intermediary between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community, the officials say, a very unusual role for the secretary of state, who is supposed to be a customer of the intelligence community, not its master.
The intermediary role Pompeo has largely usurped is supposed to be filled by the CIA director and the director of national intelligence, a post created after 9/11 and designed to coordinate the work of all of the nation’s intelligence agencies. But CIA Director Gina Haspel seems to have accepted the fact that Pompeo continues to help set the agenda on intelligence in the Trump administration from the State Department, the officials say. And after months of rumors that Dan Coats, Trump’s longtime director of national intelligence and nominal head of the U.S. intelligence community, would soon be replaced, Trump announced Sunday that Coats will step down on August 15. The president said he would name John Ratcliffe, a pro-Trump, Republican representative from Texas, to take Coats’s job. Ratcliffe, one of Trump’s most ardent defenders during special counsel Robert Mueller’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last week, will likely be far less independent of the Trump White House than Coats was.
Meanwhile, Pompeo has emerged as the administration’s de facto intelligence czar. Although some officials say that both Haspel and Coats have been present when Trump receives his intelligence briefings and so have had regular, direct access to the president, Pompeo has gained Trump’s trust in a way they haven’t.
Spokespeople for the CIA, the State Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Haspel, whose ties to the CIA’s torture program made her anathema to Democrats, has been in an unfavorable political position since she became CIA director. She was chief of base at a secret CIA black-site prison in Thailand in 2002, when a detainee was subjected to waterboarding and other torture tactics. In 2005, when she was chief of staff for Jose Rodriguez, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, Haspel drafted an order for Rodriguez to destroy videotapes of CIA interrogations.
During Haspel’s 2018 confirmation hearings, Sen. Kamala Harris asked her whether, in hindsight, she believed that the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program had been “immoral.” Haspel refused to give a straight answer to the California Democrat, who is now running for president. Haspel briefly considered withdrawing her nomination in the face of the Democratic resistance, before finally winning a narrow confirmation vote in the Senate.
Haspel skated by, but her lack of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill put her deeply in Trump’s debt. She has little room to maneuver to maintain her independence from Trump, or even from Pompeo. The agency’s independence and integrity have been threatened as a result.
One of the first signs that Haspel would not be a fully independent CIA director came in the months just after her May 2018 confirmation. Insiders say that Pompeo was able to reassure Trump that he could keep an eye on the CIA while at State. At the same time, the White House considered imposing its own choice for deputy director at the CIA, a move that would have virtually eliminated Haspel’s ability to keep the agency free of the White House’s gravitational pull. After what some in the intelligence community saw as a rather unseemly delay, Haspel was finally able to make her own selection, but she chose someone who was sure to be considered harmless by the White House. Vaughn Bishop, 72, one of Haspel’s old agency friends from her time dealing with Africa, came out of retirement to take the post.
Since then, Haspel has been most notable for her absence from high-profile appearances expected of a CIA director, while Pompeo has sometimes taken the lead in dealing with Congress on intelligence-related matters in her stead. Last November, for instance, Pompeo led an administration briefing for the Senate on Saudi Arabia and refused to answer reporters’ questions about why Haspel did not make an appearance.
At the time, the most sensitive issue in the U.S.-Saudi relationship was the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, specifically whether the CIA had evidence of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s complicity in the killing. Not long before the November hearing, the press reported that the CIA had determined that the Saudi crown prince, known as MBS, had ordered Khashoggi’s murder, so senators from both parties wanted to hear from the CIA director.
Instead, Pompeo merely told journalists that there was “no direct reporting” that linked MBS to the order to kill Khashoggi.
It seemed clear that Trump didn’t want Haspel to share with Congress the CIA’s evidence linking MBS to the murder because the president wanted to continue working with MBS and the Saudis without interference.
Sen. Dick Durbin said after the briefing that the lawmakers were told that Haspel didn’t show at “the direction of the White House,” adding that he couldn’t remember a similar briefing on a sensitive matter “where we have been denied access to the intelligence agencies of the United States.”
More recently, Pompeo has been the bearer of bad news from Trump to Haspel. Pompeo has relayed to Haspel that Trump has been unhappy with some of the agency’s Iran-related intelligence, according to former intelligence officials. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment.
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Pompeo’s outsized role is yet another sign that the former tea party congressperson from Kansas is one of the only high-profile officials in the U.S. national security apparatus who has cracked the code on how to flourish under Trump.
Of course, that’s a dubious distinction, given that it means Pompeo has learned how to properly suck up to a racist, misogynist, would-be autocrat who gained power with the illicit help of Russian intelligence. It also means that Pompeo has learned how to turn a blind eye to the fact that Trump has bullied the CIA ever since he took office and constantly downplayed the intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians intervened in the 2016 election to help him win.
In fact, one of the secrets to Pompeo’s success is that he has become Trump’s willing partner in the politicization of intelligence.
Before joining the administration, Pompeo had plenty of practice in leveraging national security policy for partisan political gain. While in Congress, he belonged to the Republican-led committee that sought to use the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi as a cudgel with which to beat Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state when the attack occurred.
While he was CIA director, Pompeo frequently enabled Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community and the Trump-Russia case. In 2017, he said publicly that the intelligence community had concluded that Russian intervention in 2016 did not affect the election’s outcome, a false statement that the CIA’s spokesperson had to publicly deny. (The U.S. intelligence community did not issue an assessment on whether the Russian intervention affected the outcome of the election.) Pompeo also held a private meeting with a former intelligence official who had become an advocate for the disputed theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence. Pompeo took the meeting at the urging of Trump.
As director, Pompeo also reportedly grilled agency officers involved in the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win and required the agency’s counterintelligence center, which was involved in the Russia investigation, to report directly to him.
As a result, Trump has enthused about Pompeo in a way that he rarely has about any other top official in his administration. “We’re always on the same wavelength,” Trump said last year when he named Pompeo secretary of state.
By contrast, almost everyone else who held a senior national security job at the start of the Trump administration is now gone. The firings, resignations, and other forms of defenestration have led to the departures of one or more occupants of the posts of defense secretary, national security adviser, attorney general, FBI director, secretary of state, White House chief of staff, secretary of Homeland Security, and director of the Secret Service. The national security apparatus is bereft of leadership, as it gets more difficult for Trump to attract talent. The Pentagon has been virtually rudderless since December, when Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in protest over Trump’s policies on Syria. He is finally being replaced by Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist.
Pompeo has taken advantage of the power vacuum.
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Coats never bonded with Trump as Pompeo has. A former Republican senator from Indiana, Coats has repeatedly irritated the president by doing what Pompeo seemed reluctant to do: forcefully and publicly defend the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win.
Coats also stood by the intelligence community’s assessment that Iran was abiding by its nuclear agreement with the West — at least until Trump withdrew the United States from the deal. Intelligence officials say that this may have also led to friction with Trump and Pompeo.
There have been rumors for months that Coats was about to be fired, but Coats’s strong ties to Senate Republicans, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, the former governor of Indiana, protected him until now. Trump seems to have waited to move against Coats until after Mueller’s report was issued and the special counsel had testified before Congress.
Now, Trump will rely ever more heavily on Pompeo as the dominant figure in his administration on national security and intelligence.
Haspel may not last long at the CIA either. But the fact that both she and Coats have survived this long speaks to an oddity of the Trump administration: The U.S. intelligence community that Trump and his far-right supporters have railed against as the supposed bastion of “the deep state” had for two years avoided the kind of high-level personnel purge that is Trump’s trademark. Instead, Trump found that Mike Pompeo was the right man to keep it on a leash.
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rom painfully canned lines to paint-by-the-numbers tales of personal triumph in the face of adversity, last night’s Democratic debate in Detroit bore every hallmark of the genre. But amid scripted and focused-grouped flourishes (“wish list economics!”, “bold AND realistic!”, “Medicare for all…who want it!”, “not left and right but new and better!”), there was little doubt about one thing: the two candidates charting a more transformative and confrontational course for the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, set the terms of the evening.
