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RSN: Socialism? Let's Cut to the Chase |
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Sunday, 10 March 2019 08:46 |
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Ash writes: "You are going to be hearing a lot about 'Bernie Sanders, the Radical Socialist' in the coming months. So before that bandwagon rolls off down the great American highway let's pin a little truth to its tail."
The downfall of Detroit. Detroit's former Lee Plaza Hotel, closed in the 90s. (photo: Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre/TIME)
Socialism? Let's Cut to the Chase
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
10 March 19
 This article was originally published in September of 2015. JA/RSN 
“This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
– The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.”
– Noam Chomsky
 ou are going to be hearing a lot about “Bernie Sanders, the Radical Socialist” in the coming months. So before that bandwagon rolls off down the great American highway let’s pin a little truth to its tail.
Socialism is nothing new in American politics or economics. Of course it’s not called “Socialism,” that would screw up the corporate 1% media’s branding. They call it good economic policy or bailouts or quantitative easing or free trade – but it’s Socialism.
You will also hear a great deal about “wealth redistribution.” You will be encouraged to fear that. You should. Yes, wealth redistribution is a reality and an American tradition, but it never goes from the top to the bottom, it goes from the bottom to the top. At this point the pace is rapacious. When Donald Trump talks about making America great again, he’s talking about the traditional bottom-to-top form of wealth redistribution. Yes that would make America great – for him, and those precious few who share his tax bracket.
Recent painful examples of the nation’s wealth being redistributed from working class Americans to the wealthiest include the Iraq war and the so-called housing bubble collapse.
The Iraq War transferred, by all accounts, trillions of US taxpayer dollars into the coffers of arms manufacturers and contractors. It was in all likelihood the largest and most rapid such transference in history.
The housing boom-to-bust “Recession of 2008,” arguably continuing today, turned American homes into Wall Street commodities. The result was that millions of Americans lost their homes. Wall Street investors got rich betting on the bust, and those who lost money recovered it from investment insurers, who were then bailed out by the American taxpayer. Wealth redistributed – big time.
The conflict isn’t over Socialism, it’s over who should be allowed to enjoy its benefits. The nation’s wealthiest 1% of individuals and corporations do. Everyone else does not, but certainly should.
What makes Sanders’ ideas radical is that he wants all Americans to enjoy the benefits of Socialism, not just the top 1%. So he will be labeled a “radical,” and the average American who would benefit most from his policies will be pressed to fear him. The most fertile breeding ground for that fear will be ignorance, ignorance of course being the anvil of oppression.
Wall Street cares nothing for “the economy.” Wall street is absolutely, categorically dedicated to profit, 1% profit foremost. Whoever gets hurt, gets hurt. In case you haven’t noticed, Wall Street is running the country. Sanders’ radical policies are very unpopular there.
So while your television or other corporate media outlet conjures up visions of Joseph Stalin when describing Sanders’ “Socialist agenda,” remember, America has always had Socialism, working people have always paid for it, and the wealthiest Americans have always enjoyed it.
Socialism for working people, maybe not so radical. Want to really make America great again? Do it the way FDR did it in the 1930s. That is where Sanders is leading the 99%.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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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Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23323"><span class="small">Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Sunday, 10 March 2019 08:43 |
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McCarthy writes: "Many Americans watching the turmoil in US institutions and political norms are yearning for the day when Donald Trump is no longer president. But whether he leaves after 2020 or 2024, Trump has built a legacy in one vital area that can be expected to stand for decades, long after his Twitter feed has fallen silent, analysts across the political spectrum agree."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades
By Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
10 March 19
Republicans have confirmed 89 Trump-nominated judges, far in excess of appointments under Obama and Bush
 any Americans watching the turmoil in US institutions and political norms are yearning for the day when Donald Trump is no longer president. But whether he leaves after 2020 or 2024, Trump has built a legacy in one vital area that can be expected to stand for decades, long after his Twitter feed has fallen silent, analysts across the political spectrum agree.
That legacy comprises the 89 judges, and rapidly counting, that Trump has nominated, and Senate Republicans have confirmed, to serve at all levels of the federal court system. They are taking up posts from the district courts (53 Trump nominees confirmed out of 677 total) to the appellate courts (34 out of 179) to the US supreme court (two out of nine). Put together they form a kind of conservative judicial revolution that could impact all aspects of American life.
In the past week, Trump’s judges tally notched up by three, with the confirmation to appeals courts of Chad Readler, who previously ran the legal effort to dismantle Barack Obama’s healthcare law; Eric Murphy, who undermined voting rights, marriage equality and reproductive rights as a state solicitor in Ohio; and Allison Jones Rushing, who has past ties to an anti-LGBT group and who at 37 years old is the country’s youngest federal judge, a lifetime appointment.
As with previous Trump nominees, Readler, Murphy and Rushing were confirmed over the impassioned protests of progressive groups who warned the judges were out of step with the country on crucial issues including immigration, abortion, climate change, LGBT rights, healthcare, voting rights and more.
The overarching concern, said Daniel L Goldberg, the legal director at the Alliance For Justice, is that Trump’s judges will now shape American life according to the narrow conservative vision of the elite, predominantly white and male groups guiding Trump’s hand as he makes his picks – a vision that is divergent not only from the political left but also from the center.
“I don’t think most Americans realize, long after Donald Trump and his repeated attacks on the rule of law – on the independent judiciary and our constitutional rights – long after Donald Trump has left the scene, his judges will still be interpreting the constitution and our laws for the next two, three, four decades,” Goldberg said.
“And for millions of Americans, who rely every day on critical protections for workers, for clean air and water, for healthcare, for critical rights for women and LGBTQ Americans, there’s going to be an attack coming from our courts on some of our most precious rights and legal protections.”
The Trump judge-confirming machine has arguably been run better than anything else in his administration – perhaps because he has had relatively little to do with it. Unlike past presidents, Trump has turned the job of picking nominees over, almost wholly, to the White House counsel’s office, which in turn has worked from lists drawn up by the Federalist Society, the country’s premier network of conservative lawyers.
The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has done his part by clearing long-standing hurdles in the nominating process, including one by which home-state senators from either party could veto an undesirable pick. On Wednesday, Politico reported that McConnell planned to go further, by ending a rule requiring 30 hours of debate on each judicial nominee.
“This is a Republican hijacking of the third branch of government,” said Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, in reaction to the news. “[McConnell] will be setting a new precedent that it is OK to change the Senate rules in order to get more of your preferred judges onto the federal bench.”
Republicans would argue that Democrats changed the rules first. In any case, the current state of play has worked well for Trump, who has succeeded in confirming 24 judges to appellate courts during the first two years of his term, about 50% more than Obama (15) and George W Bush (16), and a third more than Bill Clinton (18), George HW Bush (18) and Ronald Reagan (19).
“The nomination of judges has been one of the few bright spots of the Trump administration by a long shot,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law specializing in the supreme court and constitutional law.
While Trump’s supreme court picks, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, have received a lion’s share of the public’s attention, his appeals and district court picks could have more influence over the life of the nation, because of the relatively limited number of cases the US supreme court hears.
“The appeals courts are crucially important, because every year they resolve 50,000 or so cases, and the supreme court decides fewer than 100,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at Richmond School of Law specializing in federal judicial selection. “And so for 99.9% of cases, the court of last resort is the appeals court in your region, and so it really is critically important.”
Blackman said “conservatives are by and large happy” with Trump’s judicial picks.
“The Kavanaugh and Gorsuch nominations are sort of the icing on the cake,” Blackman said. “But I think the real action is in the lower courts, which most people don’t even know about.”
The power of federal judges in American life is tremendous – and has also worked in favor of progressive ideals. In rulings cheered by progressives since the 2016 election, judges have ordered families separated by the Trump administration at the border to be reunited; blocked the Keystone XL pipeline on environmental grounds; vacated an executive order to weaken federal unions; blocked Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; upheld a Trump ban on bump stocks for semi-automatic rifles; and sentenced former Trump aides including Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort to prison.
But federal judges have not always been antagonistic to the president. In the past year, the supreme court has allowed Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the military to stand, upheld a revised Muslim travel ban, complicated abortion access in California and approved a Republican-led voter purge in Ohio that disproportionately targeted racial minorities, among other measures.
But so questionable has been the quality of some of Trump’s nominees that even Republicans have taken pause. On Wednesday, Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted against Readler, saying that his attack on Obamacare amounted to an attempt to deny health insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. Republican senator Tim Scott opposed the nomination of Thomas Farr, who defended a North Carolina voter ID law that a federal appeals court said was enacted “with racially discriminatory intent”, and of Ryan Bounds, who wrote controversial undergraduate newspaper columns at Stanford University including one comparing campus diversity efforts to Nazi Germany.
Trump’s nomination of Matthew Spencer Petersen, a federal elections commissioner who had never tried a case, fell apart embarrassingly at Peterson’s confirmation hearing when he could not answer basic legal questions. Trump’s nomination of Texas lawyer Jeff Mateer fell apart when it emerged that Mateer had endorsed “conversion therapy” for LGBT individuals and called transgender children proof that “Satan’s plan is working”.
Despite those stumbles, Trump has succeeded in placing enough judges to begin to shift the ideological makeup of the judiciary, including on two appellate courts. Under Trump, the 11th circuit (Alabama, Georgia and Florida) has gone from a Democratic majority to a 6-6 split, and the 3rd circuit (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware) went from a 7-5 Democratic majority with two vacancies to what is likely to be a 7-7 split.
On the question of how the courts might be changing, Tobias said “we just don’t have that much data yet.”
“The longest anybody’s been on the bench is two years, and most of them much less time than that, so it’s really hard to draw conclusions, but they will begin to make a difference I think in the coming years, that’s for sure,” he said.
As for long-term change, Tobias noted that in short order, Trump most likely will have filled every vacancy among the 179 active circuit court judges.
“Trump is not going to have a lot more nominees at that level unless he is reelected,” Tobias said. “I think it depends on whether Trump has a second term.”
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The Ilhan Omar Controversy Is a Turning Point for the Jewish Left |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50327"><span class="small">Sofie Werthan, Slate</span></a>
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Sunday, 10 March 2019 08:41 |
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Werthan writes: "The tide seems to be turning for Rep. Ilhan Omar. Last week, she made critical comments about American supporters of Israel that were interpreted by some as a reference to the anti-Semitic trope of 'dual loyalty.' This sparked swift and widespread condemnation, including from the leaders of the Democratic Party who put forward a planned resolution condemning anti-Semitism as a rebuke of the congresswoman."
Ilhan Omar has repeatedly clashed with Democratic leaders on Israel. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Did Pro-Israel Lobby Funding Influence
Democrats' Responses to Ilhan Omar?
The Ilhan Omar Controversy Is a Turning Point for the Jewish Left
By Sofie Werthan, Slate
10 March 19
 he tide seems to be turning for Rep. Ilhan Omar. Last week, she made critical comments about American supporters of Israel that were interpreted by some as a reference to the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.” This sparked swift and widespread condemnation, including from the leaders of the Democratic Party who put forward a planned resolution condemning anti-Semitism as a rebuke of the congresswoman.
But an increasing number of progressives, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, have come to Omar’s defense in recent days. Many see a double standard at play. They argue that Omar, a black Muslim woman, is being unfairly singled out for a misstatement while the party’s leaders stay silent on offensive remarks by other politicians. (After dissent from the progressive wing of the party, the Democratic resolution was amended to denounce all forms of hate. It passed in the House 407 to 23 on Thursday, with all Democrats ultimately voting for it.)
Alongside the intraparty squabble, Jewish American leftists have emerged as a key source of support for Omar, writing a flurry of op-eds, petitions, and social media posts with the hashtag #IStandWithIlhan. Progressive Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice are responding to the Omar flap by emphasizing the difference between anti-Semitism and legitimate critiques of Israel and pivoting to discuss the threat of white supremacy to all minority groups. (Disclosure: I was a summer intern at Jewish Voice for Peace in college and am still a member.) This source of full-throated support of the congresswoman has the potential to shift the national conversation over anti-Semitism and how it operates. It’s also a sign of the growing rift within the American Jewish community over Israel-Palestine, as leftist Jewish movements gain momentum.
Leo Ferguson, the movement building organizer at Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, expressed hope that this controversy could serve as a valuable learning experience for the Jewish community and the American public more broadly. “The opportunity here, if we take it, is for all of us to become much sharper in our understanding of anti-Semitism,” Ferguson told me. “There is an incredibly powerful opening for white Jews to understand their deep mutual interest and potential solidarity with black people, because white supremacy is coming for all of us.”
Rebecca Pierce, a member of the Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Caucus, which organizes in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace, agrees. (“Sephardi” refers to Jewish communities whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492. “Mizrahi” refers to Jewish communities from the Middle East, west Asia, and North Africa.) Pierce said the most important way to respond to this controversy is to develop a robust definition of anti-Semitism that goes beyond the context of Israel.
“Anti-Semitism is hatred, animus, bias toward Jewish people as a whole, and this is a historical thing … that predates the existence of the state of Israel,” Pierce explained. Therefore, “to have a definition of anti-Semitism that is totally wrapped up in how we’re allowed to talk about this modern ethno-state—it really is a disservice to the history of anti-Semitism and also to understanding how it operates in our society.”
Pierce continued: “If our definition of anti-Semitism is reduced to ‘Are you criticizing Israel?’ you have no ability to grapple with someone like Richard Spencer.” The prominent American white supremacist activist is also an avowed supporter of Israel.
“It’s completely understandable that Jews are on edge and are concerned and are looking around, trying to figure out who their allies are and who they can trust,” Ferguson said. At the same time, he cautioned that Jewish Americans’ legitimate fears have at times been exploited by figures on the right as a way to pit Jews against other marginalized communities.
“There is definitely a pattern of … [hyperpolicing] the language of black activists and leaders when it comes to showing solidarity with Palestine,” Pierce said. “The pattern that I’ve noticed is that someone will say something, and then critics … will twist their words in such a way that they’re really changing the fundamental point that was being made and trying to make it a generalization about Jews when someone is talking about Israel. And we’ve seen this over and over again.”
This scenario has played out numerous times over the past few months. Since December, black activists including Marc Lamont Hill, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and Ilhan Omar have all faced substantial blowback for their support of Palestinian rights.
“A lot of this is backlash to progress that’s happening, and we need to refuse to cede that ground,” Pierce said. “Our struggles are connected, and we’re going to continue to … [acknowledge] that our common enemy is white supremacy, so we need to be working together to fight it.”
Imogen Page, an IfNotNow member who is active in the Twin Cities branch, explained why she felt it was significant for Jewish activists to express support for Omar: “What we’re doing right now is standing up and saying no, you cannot use … our history and our pain and our trauma to drive a wedge between [Jews] and the other people you are marginalizing and putting in danger.”
Activists like Ferguson, Pierce, and Page acknowledge that their strategy is more challenging than condemnation and rejection, and requires far more patience and soul-searching, but they also hope that it will strengthen their movement.
The campaigns to defend Omar could be seen as a detour from these organizations’ primary advocacy work around Israel-Palestine, but some activists see defending Omar as part of a broader push to shift conversations within the Jewish community.
“There’s really an attempt to paint the people supporting Ilhan Omar as totally outside the norm, totally outside the Jewish community. We’re actually all very involved in the Jewish community,” Pierce said. Pierce explained that advocating for Omar is inherently “connected to this issue of more recognition for diverse voices … in the Jewish community, and not letting the same [several] organizations—that are incredibly out of touch a lot of the time with what our needs and experiences are—speak for us.”
Progressive Jewish activists have secured numerous victories in recent years: Public opinion on Israel-Palestine is moving to the left, especially among young people, and Jewish Americans are increasingly critical of Israeli government policies and the occupation. Vocal politicians like Omar are bringing these once-fringe positions further into the mainstream, and American Jewish leftists see this as a moment to amplify their message and pitch their position to a national audience.
“I’ve been in Palestine solidarity for a long time—since I was in college—and I’ve seen huge changes. Leaps and bounds,” Pierce said. “On Palestine, so many things that were taboo are now mainstream, and I don’t think there’s a way to shut it down.”
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FOCUS: Paul Manafort Didn't Get Off Easy - Unless You Compare Him to Whistleblower Reality Winner |
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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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Saturday, 09 March 2019 11:38 |
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Risen writes: "Paul Manafort didn't get off easy. He is going to prison, and anyone who has stared down that prospect knows that there is nothing easy about it."
Reality Winner. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Paul Manafort Didn't Get Off Easy - Unless You Compare Him to Whistleblower Reality Winner
By James Risen, The Intercept
09 March 19
 aul Manafort didn’t get off easy. He is going to prison, and anyone who has stared down that prospect knows that there is nothing easy about it. Prison is so awful that American history is filled with cases of the rich and powerful using all of their influence to avoid doing time altogether.
But Manafort, sentenced by a federal judge in Virginia on Thursday, did get a shorter term than Reality Winner. While Manafort was sentenced to 47 months for bank fraud and tax crimes, Winner last year got 63 months for leaking a classified document about Russian hacking attempts. And that should bother anyone who cares about equality under the law and press freedom in the United States.
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, has been a central figure in the Trump-Russia investigation. His past ties to a pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, as well as to a Russian oligarch and a potential Russian intelligence agent, have all raised questions about his activities while he was with the Trump campaign.
Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor, wanted the American people to know about the threat Russia posed to the U.S. electoral system. She pleaded guilty last year in a case in which she was charged in connection with the disclosure of an NSA document that detailed efforts by Russian intelligence to hack American voting systems. The Intercept published a story based on that document in 2017.
In 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that showed it was the press, not the federal government, that deserved credit for warning state elections officials to the growing Russian threat to their voting systems. The federal government had done next to nothing to alert them to the problem, and many state officials didn’t realize that there even was a threat until they learned about it from the press.
In other words, Winner performed a public service, one that even the U.S. Senate has indirectly, and grudgingly, acknowledged.
As Will Bunch wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, “Winner did what Daniel Ellsberg, Mark Felt and others whose difficult decisions made in real time have long since been vindicated by history had done: She blew the whistle. In sending her evidence to the news media, Winner took down a cover-up of information that the Russians had, in fact, been far more aggressive — and successful — in targeting voting systems.”
Yet while Manafort was given a 47-month sentence that was below the federal guidelines for his crimes, Winner was sentenced to 63 months, which is the longest ever handed down to someone accused of leaking to the press.
The bottom line is this: The person who tried to warn America about Russian interference in the 2016 election has been punished more severely than one of the most important figures in the Trump-Russia case.
“When whistleblowers like Reality Winner, whose disclosures serve the public interest, are punished more severely than someone like Paul Manafort, who consistently put his own interests over the country’s, it sends a deeply troubling message that the system values abusers of public trust over those who expose abuse,” observes Dana L. Gold, senior counsel and director of education at the Government Accountability Project in Washington.
“The sentencing of Reality Winner to 63 months in prison, the longest prison sentence in the history of federal leak cases, was a clear threat to investigative journalism, freedom of information, and the public’s right to know,” adds Noni Ghani, a spokesperson for Reporters Without Borders.
To be clear, I don’t think Manafort’s sentence should be increased. Instead, I think Winner’s sentence should be shortened.
In fact, I don’t think whistleblowers who perform a public service should be imprisoned at all. But that is a lesson the federal government has yet to learn, as became clear once again on Friday, when Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was sent to jail for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that is apparently investigating WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
But for those who still believe that equality should be achieved by longer sentences rather than shorter ones, just wait a week. Manafort will be sentenced in a second case next week, in which he faces a tougher judge and potentially more prison time.
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