Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Tuesday, 22 August 2017 13:31
Tomasky writes: "The Trump era demands a re-examination of some basic questions that we might have thought were settled. And here's one that may well one day become an urgent matter: What's a high crime or misdemeanor?"
Donald Trump. (image: Daily Beast)
Yes, Trump Could Be Impeached for Pro-Nazi Talk
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
22 August 17
‘The president would be sabotaging, not defending the Constitution… by applauding the ideas or actions of tyrants from his bully pulpit.’
he Trump era demands a re-examination of some basic questions that we might have thought were settled. And here’s one that may well one day become an urgent matter: What’s a high crime or misdemeanor?
The Constitution, as we all know, doesn’t define the phrase. The language in Article II, Section 4 refers to “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes or Misdemeanors.” And usually, that’s how we think about the definition of the key phrase. Serious, Nixon-level corruption and illegality.
But the combination of reading recently about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and watching Donald Trump’s horrifying press conference last week about Charlottesville got me wondering: Is espousal of un-American beliefs an impeachable offense in a president? And if not, why not?
Bear with me—the answer is less cut-and-dried than you think it is, and I have a few constitutional scholars backing me up here.
First, a bit on Johnson. He was Lincoln’s vice president, as you know, but a Southern Democrat, chosen by Abe for an 1864 national unity ticket. He was not a secessionist but was definitely a racist. As president after Lincoln’s assassination, he got into huge fights with the Republican-controlled Congress over Reconstruction: how amnesty should be granted to ex-Confederates, what seceding states would have to do to get back in the Union, and so on. To make a long story short, Congress passed a law forbidding him from firing his pro-Reconstruction secretary of war. He promptly turned around and did exactly that. Impeachment began immediately. The House passed charges, but the Senate failed to convict by one vote.
Johnson was impeached, in other words, over political disagreements with Congress. Very intense ones, resulting in the most vetoes and overrides of those vetoes of any president, and culminating in his use of the Union army to defy Congress’ wishes. But ideological disagreements all the same. Historians have generally judged the Johnson impeachment to have been unjustified because what he was doing, however objectionable from a moral point of view (i.e., imposing policies that upheld racism), broke no laws.
So that’s one extreme. At the other sits Nixon, whose offenses, nearly everyone agrees, were criminal and worthy of removal.
And that’s how impeachment conversations tend to be framed: either Nixon or Johnson. Yes, there’s Bill Clinton, but that was nonsense—revenge for Nixon, basically. No reasonable person who wasn’t already ideologically committed to Clinton-hating thought that lying under oath about a legal (however distasteful) act was an impeachable offense, which helps explain why Clinton not only survived but saw around 65 percent of Americans approve of his performance of president as it played out.
But what if there’s space between Nixon and Johnson? This is the question that occurred to me as I watched our president, the president of the United States, speak last week of a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and people protesting neo-Nazis.
What if a president espouses views that are so plainly un-American, so clearly at odds with American creedal belief, that they constitute not mere political disagreement but something that is at war (as Steve Bannon might put it) with the values embedded in the Constitution?
Let’s imagine an extreme hypothetical. Say a president takes office and installs a bust of Hitler in the Oval Office and starts quoting from Mein Kampf. Or does the same with Stalin, or Mao. Americans would be horrified; surely (hopefully!) 97 percent of the people would instantly decide that this man should not be the president. Would Congress be within its rights to start impeachment proceedings against this president?
I asked six constitutional experts what they thought, and four said, to varying degrees, that this could constitute legitimate impeachment grounds.
Here’s Bruce Fein, the conservative legal scholar who worked in the Reagan administration: “I think the mere holding of beliefs as an academic matter would not be impeachable. But if the president advocated or endorsed the beliefs of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or other notorious tyrants through words or body language or otherwise, the advocacy or endorsement would conflict with the presidential oath of office in Article II to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ The president would be sabotaging, not defending the Constitution—including its separation of powers, due process, and equal protection—by applauding the ideas or actions of tyrants from his bully pulpit. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence posits that citizens are saddled with a ‘duty’ to overthrow tyranny.”
Next up Sanford Levinson, liberal, of the University of Texas School of Law. Levinson is a noted critic of the Constitution. “Gerald Ford in 1971 (in)famously said that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is,” he wrote to me last week. “So why shouldn’t a majority of Republicans and Democrats alike declare that Donald Trump has so blasphemed the American civil religion as set out in the Preamble and such statements as the Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech that he deserves to be fired? And perhaps two-thirds of the Senate would agree? But we should recognize that this is a decidedly inadequate way to get rid of a president who might truly be a menace to everything this country stands for.” He would like to see two-thirds of Congress be able to remove a president via a no-confidence vote.
Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School said: “The head of state is the embodiment of the nation. When he defies bedrock propositions of the American creed, if he doesn’t understand that basic creed, that might be grounds for impeachment. But—Republicans have to say it. Not we who voted against him. The people who have to undo the mandate are the people who gave him the mandate.”
Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School thought such a case is potentially valid, but more so if the president concealed his real ideology during the campaign. “Well you don’t necessarily need a traditional crime,” Posner emailed me. “A president could be impeached for staying in the basement and not running the government. Your case is more complicated. I think Congress could impeach, say, a mole. But not sure this would make sense if voters knew of or suspected the president’s real ideology.”
Two scholars I asked, Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley and Bruce Ackerman of Yale, took the more traditional view of impeachment.
Chemerinsky: “In one sense, high crimes and misdemeanors means whatever a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate says it means. On the other hand, I think that it clearly connotes an abuse of power. Espousing un-American views is not enough for that.”
And Ackerman: “Impeachment should be reserved for cases in which presidential conduct breaks fundamental constitutional limits. Impeachment for mere belief creates a precedent that would transform it into a ‘vote of no confidence’ device, generating deep pathologies, given the evolution of Congress.”
I’m not saying we’ve reached that point with Donald Trump. I don’t think we have. We don’t know for sure, for example, that he is a white supremacist. But what’s disturbing is that we don’t know that he isn’t. He sure sounded pretty close to one last week at Trump Tower, when he was obviously telling us how he really felt about Charlottesville.
And what if after a few more of these episodes it becomes undeniably apparent to just about everyone that we have a racist in the White House? We’ve had them before, and not just Johnson. But that was when such views were widely held, accepted, and (in a number of places and/or ways) legal. Now, racism is very clearly understood to be un- and anti-American.
In terms of removing a president, there’s also the 25th Amendment solution, but that’s a higher bar than impeachment, since it involves both Congress and Cabinet members. Besides, the fact is that “we the people” theoretically have our will expressed by Congress. Should the people’s representatives tolerate a racist president because he’s broken no criminal laws?
I see the dangers that lurk in asserting such a standard. But if you don’t see the danger in not asserting one, you haven’t been paying much attention to this man and his lack of compunction about tearing this nation in two.
Trump's Afghanistan War Plan: Fight Forever and Call It 'Victory'
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45434"><span class="small">Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Tuesday, 22 August 2017 13:28
Ackerman writes: "Donald Trump took ownership of the Afghanistan war on Monday night with an incoherent strategy that combined maximal promises with uncertain commitments of blood and treasure to achieve them."
Donald Trump. (photo: Lyne Lucien/Daily Beast)
Trump's Afghanistan War Plan: Fight Forever and Call It 'Victory'
By Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast
22 August 17
The president announced Monday he’s going to dispatch more troops to die in Afghanistan—without a coherent plan for what those young men and women might give their lives for.
onald Trump took ownership of the Afghanistan war on Monday night with an incoherent strategy that combined maximal promises with uncertain commitments of blood and treasure to achieve them.
In a metaphor for his presidency, Trump hewed to the core of his political brand—promising victory through maximum machismo—while reversing wholesale what his slogans are supposed to mean. Trump has consistently criticized the Afghanistan war as a wasteful folly. He said again on Monday that withdrawal remains his instinct, “and historically I like following my instincts.” Yet now, the message Trump seeks to send is one of indefinite commitment and additional forces.
The tension between these two irreconcilable assertions is likely to be the defining feature of the Afghanistan war under Trump. “America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out,” he said, following shortly later with a warning, aimed at the region and at his more restive nationalist supporters, that “our patience is not unlimited.”
The centrifugal force meant to hold these things together are the generals—H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and Joe Dunford—whose counsel Trump, after months of indecision, has accepted. They now have to know they are on notice for a war plan that Trump has accepted kicking and screaming. Administration officials were already telling The Daily Beast hours before the speech that they think he’s liable to abruptly change his mind—which is an inauspicious way to begin a strategy predicated on resolve.
After insisting beyond the limits of credulity that he has “studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle,” Trump made an expansive pledge of what the purpose of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will be. The “clear definition” of victory, he said, will be “attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.”
It does not take Carl von Clausewitz to immediately see that this conception of victory is not an end state at all but rather a process. To give it perhaps more credit than it deserves, it would be called a strategy of attrition, something no one who has studied either Afghanistan or counterterrorism in great detail and from every conceivable angle thinks is achievable. An Obama-era surge that totaled 100,000 American troops, by any measure an unsustainable effort, did little more than cause the Taliban tactical setbacks.
Put more descriptively, Trump is defining victory in terms of things the military must keep doing—attacking, obliterating, crushing, preventing, stopping. That gives the lie to Trump’s hand-wave that “our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check.” The only way for the Trumpist conception of victory to mean anything is for American troops to patrol Afghanistan indefinitely, until the ever elusive and indefinable point when their Afghan protégés can outlast the Taliban.
Those who have studied Afghanistan, including those who have bled for it, like retired Army Col. Chris Kolenda, think there is only one real option to extricate the U.S. from Afghanistan without risking a fiasco. That’s to find a third-party country to mediate excruciating peace talks among the U.S., the Afghan government, the Taliban, Pakistan, and other regional stakeholders.
Not for Trump. “Someday,” perhaps, he said, it might be possible to have a “political settlement.” But, he said, “nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.” In a trivial sense, yes, no one can predict what degree of military pressure can finally cause the Taliban to sue for peace, in large part because 16 years of warfare has not.
But Trump gave no indication that he realizes such an observation is a fatal flaw for his strategy. Trump is correct that America is sick of war without victory, yet more of the same is all his strategy can offer. If there is no confidence that military pressure can force the Taliban to bend, all Trump is doing is ordering U.S. troops—and, inevitably, Afghan civilians—to their deaths for the latest installment of an open-ended mission.
And not just them. Years of frustration with Pakistan’s complex perception of its security interests in Afghanistan, which prompts its sponsorship of the Taliban and its at best deliberate neglect of al Qaeda and aligned groups, led Trump to nebulously threaten Islamabad with the end of American “partnership.” Yet much of Islamabad’s security calculations are driven by Afghanistan’s alignment with nuclear-powered enemy India, whose “strategic partnership” Trump explicitly sought for Afghanistan. That is likely to alarm Pakistan, which recent history suggests will not lead Islamabad to abandon its militant Plan B.
What remains in Trump’s speech is a lobotomized echo of the similarly incoherent approach taken by his hated predecessor. Like Barack Obama, Trump is escalating the war—the details, this time, to be left to Mattis. Like Obama, Trump pledges the D.C. think-tanker’s favorite banality, that All Elements of National Power Will Be Finally Brought to Bear on the Problem, and not just the military. Like Obama, Trump pledges a regional approach. Like Obama, Trump pledges not to nation-build while drawing Afghanistan deeper into the U.S. Treasury. Like Obama, Trump pledges both a major military effort with no clear endpoint (remember “breaking the Taliban’s momentum”?) and a Limited Amount of Patience. Like Obama, Trump is unwilling to withdraw, even while every ounce of analysis thrown at the war indicates it cannot be won.
Another uncomfortable similarity is that both presidents considered themselves boxed in, against their instincts, by their generals (and in Obama’s case, Mike Mullen, an admiral). Once Obama saw that his surge would not have the effect that his military advisers assured, his relationship with them never recovered, and Afghanistan strategy regressed to the morass that appears to be its natural resting state.
For all Obama’s myriad faults—especially his unwillingness to follow through on the dovishness he knew was right—he was a thoughtful and patient man. Trump is not. His generals may soon come to regret winning the fight for Trump’s strategy, because no one in the United States after 16 wrenching years knows how to win the Afghanistan war.
Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party
Tuesday, 22 August 2017 13:26
Pareene writes: "I hope you appreciated your recent introduction to the future leadership of the Republican Party this past week. It happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched under the banner of 'uniting the right.'"
Charlottesville. (photo: Getty Images)
Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party
By Alex Pareene, Splinter
22 August 17
hope you appreciated your recent introduction to the future leadership of the Republican Party this past week. It happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched under the banner of “uniting the right.”
Among those white nationalists was James Allsup, a speaker at the rally, who was also the president of the Washington State University College Republicans, until his resignation this week. He was elected to that position in 2015, and “radicalized” the organization, according to a fellow students.
I’m far from the first to make this joke, but one way Senator Heller might’ve been able to tell that this kid was racist was that he was a member of the College Republicans.
I’m not merely being glib: Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?
Everything that has happened in American life since the election of George W. Bush, the last point at which the generation currently entering its 30s was “up for grabs,” has only served to drive young people away from the Republican Party. At the absolute most, based on polling and election data, only about a third of adults under 30 are Republicans. According to Pew, nearly half of those young Republicans left their party at some point in 2016, with 23 percent of them changing their affiliation for good.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the broadly defined Millennial generation, and even many among the more-conservative Generation X, has become more liberal over the last decade. The Republicans have essentially lost a generation. (Republican pollster and author Kristen Soltis Andersen is my favorite authority on this subject, because she is watching her own movement refuse to grapple with these facts).
Despite that, the Republican Party will continue to field candidates and win elections for the foreseeable future. The two existent parties are entrenched in our electoral system—they effectively control ballot access at every level—so a Whig-style collapse seems out of the cards. The GOP, despite the aging and eventual die-off of its current base of support, will continue to win lots and lots of elections. So they’ll continue to need candidates.
Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause.
While only a few hundred white nationalists descended on Charlottesville to unite the right, and only a couple of those white nationalists have been identified as active College Republicans, College Republican chapters have been signaling their sympathies for the goals of the marchers ever since the rise of the alt-right.
Cast your mind back to the time when the greatest threat to free speech in American civic life was liberal students attempting to shut down conservative celebrities on college campuses. What was the actual cause of that spate of stories? It was college Republican groups constantly inviting alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at campuses in order to drum up controversy. It is a trolling tactic, yes, but it is also a pretty clear sign that college Republicans are allied with Milo Yiannopoulos.
Elliot Kaufman, writing in The National Review, blames College Republicans for elevating alt-right figures like Milo. He points out that the Columbia College Republicans—Columbia! Surely the last vestige of legacy admissions drawn to conservative politics mainly to protect their inheritances, right?—have already extended speaking invites to Pizzagate propagandist Mike Cernovich and, even more bizarrely, Tommy Robinson, founder of the crypto-fascist English Defence League. They could not be making their affiliations any clearer.
The pool of people the Republican Party will be drawing from when selecting candidates a generation from now will contain these men and hardly anyone else. Cvjetanovic wasn’t the only marcher photographed with a current Republican elected official. Allsup, the erstwhile WSU College Republicans president, was photographed with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. “I communicate with people from their office on a fairly regular basis,” he told his student paper a few months ago, also mentioning that members of his organization had earned internships and jobs in her office.
This is the state of the GOP leadership pipeline. In a decade, state legislatures will start filling up with Gamergaters, MRAs, /pol/ posters, Anime Nazis, and Proud Boys. These are, as of now, the only people in their age cohort becoming more active in Republican politics in the Trump era. Everyone else is fleeing. This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.
These future Republican elected officials could easily look very much like rally attendee Nicholas Fuentes, a Boston University student until his decision this week to leave the school. He didn’t appear to be a formal member of any young Republican organizations, but he was a self-described Republican. In interviews, he denies being a white supremacist. On Facebook, after the rally, he wrote: “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”
That “tidal wave” represents a fraction of the actual American populace, but it will have an outsize grip on the Republican Party for years to come.
Excerpt: "As activists unite to confront white supremacy in the United States, it is important for us to study other societies outside the U.S. that have made true strides in racial and economic justice, in order to better envision the world that we want to create."
Afro-Cubans in Havana Plaza. (photo: EFE)
Black Lives Matter in Cuba
By Andrew King, teleSUR
22 August 17
It is precisely because of Cuba's anti-racist and pro-worker policies that the U.S. government has labeled the country “a violator of human rights.”
s activists unite to confront white supremacy in the United States, it is important for us to study other societies outside the U.S. that have made true strides in racial and economic justice, in order to better envision the world that we want to create.
After listening to President Donald Trump’s June speech on Cuba, in which he reversed all the steps that the Obama administration had made to improve relations, one might not think to look towards this island nation as such an exemplary society. However, one must understand the history of Cuba to see why the U.S. government is escalating the six-decade war and embargo against the socialist country. It is not hard to see that the issue of race is central to the capitalist empire’s war on this socialist stronghold.
The Revolution’s Early Measures Against Racism
Like most colonial nations, institutional racial oppression was brutal in pre-revolution Cuba. Black Cubans formed the most oppressed sector of society: they faced rampant job discrimination in which they had no access to most positions in government, health care, transportation, and retail. A system of Jim Crow-style segregation relegated Afro-Cubans to specific neighborhoods and schools, and they were banned from hotels and beaches.
Illiteracy was widespread among the most oppressed sectors, and medical care was out of reach. Few know that after Castro’s failed guerilla attack on the Moncada Garrison in 1953, it was a black lieutenant from then Dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army that found him in the hills, and — sympathizing with the rebel cause — saved Castro’s life by sending him to jail in Santiago rather than to the Moncada Barracks where he would have been shot and killed along with the 70 guerilla soldiers who met such a fate. History works in mysterious ways.
When the revolution triumphed six years later, one of new government’s first measures was to abolish racial discrimination in employment and recreational sectors. When the rebel army tanks entered Havana, they crushed the hotel fences, which represented the old racial order signifying where the black and poor could not go. Castro’s government abolished the private school system of the white Cuban elites and established a well-funded and integrated public school system for all.
Revolutionary laws were passed to outlaw racial discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare and education. Hence, while the white upper class Cubans fled to Miami, there were no questions of loyalty from working class blacks as to whether they would support the socialist government. The fight against racism and the struggle for socialism go hand in hand.
The revolution dramatically improved the socioeconomic conditions of black workers and farmers, cutting rents in half, redistributing land, and providing universal free education and healthcare to all. Before 1959, over a quarter of Cubans were illiterate. The revolution launched a massive literacy campaign, sending brigades of student teachers into the most remote areas of the countryside, and in 1961, Cuba was declared free of illiteracy. Today Cuba has a 99.8 percent literacy rate, the highest in Latin America.
Solidarity with African-Americans
Cuba has always been a guiding light in the black freedom movement. Fidel’s historic visit with Malcolm X in Harlem’s Theresa hotel in 1960 was symbolic of the Cuban revolution’s blow against colonialism and world white supremacy. Both Malcolm and Castro understood the centrality of racism to the capitalist system: “you can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm once famously said. Along the same vain, at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Castro argued that:
“Racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia are not naturally instinctive reactions of the human beings but rather a social, cultural and political phenomenon born directly of wars, military conquests, slavery and the individual or collective exploitation of the weakest by the most powerful all along the history of human societies.”
Assata Shakur, former leader of the Black Liberation Army and one of “America’s Most Wanted’, escaped prison in the 1970s, and sought refuge on the socialist island. Cuba has vowed to protect this revolutionary heroine, a crime for which the empire will never forgive her. This past June, when President Donald Trump demanded that Cuba return Shakur, Cuba’s Deputy Director of American Affairs said: “It is off the table.” Throughout the ‘70s, other African-American revolutionaries such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael all visited the revolutionary Caribbean nation. Over the decades, black pastors and community leaders have led key US-Cuba solidarity initiatives such as Pastors for Peace which has made over 20 annual trips to Cuba and raised awareness to end the embargo of the island. Indeed, the African-American people have been the most consistent and loyal of friends to the Cuban people.
Cuba’s Contribution to African Liberation Movements
Less well-known is Cuba’s historic and pivotal role in supporting the African Liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. For a period spanning over a decade, the small island nation sent over 300,000 volunteer soldiers to Angola, not in pursuit of diamonds, oil or natural resources like the imperialist nations, but to assist the anti-colonial fighters of Angola in their struggle against the South African apartheid army which had invaded the newly independent nation.
As Guinea Bissau’s legendary independence leader Amilcar Cabral once said of this selfless solidarity: “When the Cuban soldiers go home, all they will take with them are the remains of their dead comrades.” Cuban forces struck the decisive blow to defeat the apartheid army in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.
“Half a million Cubans have carried out internationalist missions in numerous countries in different parts of the world, especially Africa. They have been medical doctors, teachers, technicians, construction workers, soldiers and others. When many were investing in and trading with the racist and fascist South Africa, tens of thousands of voluntary soldiers from Cuba fought against the racist and fascist soldiers.”
It was these historic feats of internationalist solidarity that prompted Nelson Mandela to visit the Caribbean nation after his release from prison, where he proudly stated : “The Cuban people have a special place in the hearts of the people’s of Africa.”
Socialist Health Care
One of the landmark pillars of the revolution has been the establishment of a world-class health care system which provides free, quality medical care to all Cuban citizens, and has disproportionately benefitted the island’s black and historically marginalized citizens. While all Cubans have free access to comprehensive medical care, people of color in the United States (the richest country on earth) face extreme health disparities and make up over half of the 32 million nonelderly uninsured. Cuba has twice as many primary care doctors per capita than the United States, due to its prioritization of community-level preventative care.
Infant mortality rate is an important indicator of a country’s health. In pre-revolution Cuba, the infant mortality rate was over 50 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. Now it is down to 4.3 . Meanwhile the United States, one of the richest nations on earth, has a rate of 7.7 . Further, when you look at underserved regions of the US like Mississippi — which has the largest black population of any state – the infant mortality rate is 9.6 , double that of the Cuba’s. In other words, Black babies matter in Cuba — more so than they do in the US.
Revolutionary Doctors
If there’s one accomplishment the international community cannot ignore it is Cuba’s ‘medical internationalism’ which in 2014, saw 50,000 Cuban doctors saving lives in over 60 developing nations across the globe. While activists around the world attend protests, Cuba demonstrates her belief that black lives matter by sending doctors and medical personnel overseas to African and Caribbean nations to literally save black lives. Cuban doctors operate a comprehensive health program, which makes 3,000 doctors available for the region of Sub-Saharan Africa. Speaking on Zimbabwe, a nation where the former apartheid regime did not train any black doctors, Fidel explains that, “We sent teams of 8 to 10 doctors to every province: specialists in comprehensive general medicine, surgeons, orthopedic specialists, anesthiologists and x-ray technicians.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Cuban government assembled the Henry Reeve Brigade — 1,500 fully equipped health professionals trained in disaster medicine — which were brought together on an airstrip, ready to depart for New Orleans immediately to help save black lives.
President Bush rejected the offer. Many of these same doctors then went to Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s first free black republic, where today there are several hundred Cuban doctors and specialists providing free health care to 4 million people. After the deadly 2010 earthquake, Cuba health professionals arrived within 72 hours as some of the first responders.
The United States, on the other hand, sent thousands of marine soldiers to the island. This juxtaposition speaks volumes regarding the values of capitalist and socialist societies. In the aftermath of catastrophic disaster, one society exploited the crisis and sought to control black life; the other sought to save it. More recently, the same international Medical brigade spearheaded the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, sending surgeons, intensive-care doctors, epidemiologists and pediatricians. These efforts earned Cuba an award from the World Health Organization.
If it were not enough to export its own doctors to countries in need, the Cuban revolution has also taken up the admirable task of training doctors from other countries free of charge in Havana’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). ELAM currently has an enrollment of over 19,000 students most of which are from Africa and Latin America. Medical school is free for all students, and this includes over 100 scholarships for African American and low-income students from the United States who have agreed to use their training to serve low-income communities at home.
Despite these social gains, Cuba is far from a racial utopia; blacks are still underrepresented in high-level government positions and in the lucrative tourism industry, and whites have had disproportionate access to the new market-driven sector of the economy that emerged during the special period. However, most can acknowledge that it is quite difficult for a society to overcome a racial legacy of 400 years of colonialism, in just 50 years of revolution. The struggle against racism in Cuba is an ongoing process.
It is precisely because of these anti-racist and pro-worker policies, and Cuba’s audacity to stand tall in the face of empire, that the U.S. government has labeled her “a violator of human rights.” On the contrary, it is the U.S. government whose police forces continue to take black lives with impunity, and wage a war on the poor, who is the real human rights violators. Let us lift the embargo on Cuba and put the embargo on US capitalism and racism. Let us not forget that if there ever was a place where black lives truly matter, it’s Cuba.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45897"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Fortune</span></a>
Tuesday, 22 August 2017 11:38
Sanders writes: "Despite major improvements made by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), our health care system remains in crisis. Today, we have the most expensive, inefficient, and bureaucratic health care system in the world."
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Medicare-for-All Is Good for Business
By Bernie Sanders, Fortune
22 August 17
espite major improvements made by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), our health care system remains in crisis. Today, we have the most expensive, inefficient, and bureaucratic health care system in the world. We spend almost $10,000 per capita each year on health care, while the Canadians spend $4,644, the Germans $5,551, the French $4,600, and the British $4,192. Meanwhile, our life expectancy is lower than most other industrialized countries and our infant mortality rates are much higher.
Further, as of September 2016, 28 million Americans were uninsured and millions more underinsured with premiums, deductibles, and copayments that are too high. We also pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
The ongoing failure of our health care system is directly attributable to the fact that it is largely designed not to provide quality care in a cost-effective way, but to make maximum profits for health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and medical equipment suppliers. That has got to change. We need to guarantee health care for all. We need to do it in a cost-effective way. We need a Medicare-for-all health care system in the U.S.
Let’s be clear. Not only is our dysfunctional health care system causing unnecessary suffering and financial stress for millions of low- and middle-income families, it is also having a very negative impact on our economy and the business community—especially small- and medium-sized companies. Private businesses spent $637 billion on private health insurance in 2015 and are projected to spend $1.059 trillion in 2025.
But it’s not just the heavy financial cost of health care that the business community is forced to bear. It is time and energy. Instead of focusing on their core business goals, small- and medium-sized businesses are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and resources trying to navigate an incredibly complex system in order to get the most cost-effective coverage possible for their employees. It is not uncommon for employers to spend weeks every year negotiating with private insurance companies, filling out reams of paperwork, and switching carriers to get the best deal they can.
And more and more business people are getting tired of it and are asking the simple questions that need to be addressed.
Why as a nation are we spending more than 17% of our GDP on health care, while nations that we compete with provide health care for all of their people at 9, 10, or 11% of their GDP? Is that sustainable? What impact does that have on our overall economy?
Why are employers who do the right thing and provide strong health care benefits for their employees at a competitive disadvantage with those who don’t? Why are some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America, like Walmart, receiving massive subsidies from the federal government because their inadequate benefits force many of their employees to go on Medicaid? Why are most labor disputes in this country centered on health care coverage? Is it good for a company to have employees on the payroll not because they enjoy the work, but because their families need the health insurance the company provides?
Richard Master is the owner and CEO of MCS Industries Inc., the nation’s leading supplier of wall and poster frames—a $200 million a year company based in Easton, Pa. “My company now pays $1.5 million a year to provide access to health care for our workers and their dependents,” Master told Common Dreams. “When I investigated where all the money goes, I was shocked.”
What he found was that fully 33 cents of every health care premium dollar “has nothing to do with the delivery of health care.” Thirty-three percent of his health care budget was being spent on administrative costs.
“I came to realize that insurers comprise a completely unnecessary middleman that not only adds little if any value to our health care system, it adds enormous costs to it,” Master said.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Every other major country on earth has a national health care program that guarantees health care to all of their people at a much lower cost. In our country, Medicare, a government-run single-payer health care system for seniors, is a popular, cost-effective health insurance program. When the Senate gets back into session in September, I will be introducing legislation to expand Medicare to cover all Americans.
This is not a radical idea. I live in Burlington, Vt., 50 miles south of the Canadian border. For decades, every man, woman, and child in Canada has been guaranteed health care through a single-payer, publicly funded health care program. Not only has this system improved the lives of the Canadian people, it has saved businesses many billions of dollars.
The American Sustainable Business Council, a business advocacy organization, started a campaign in April in support of single-payer health care. To date, more than 170 business leaders have signed on to this initiative in more than 30 states.
Here is what these business leaders have written:
“All supporters of the campaign believe that a single-payer health care system, which is what the vast majority of the industrialized world embraces, will deliver significant cost-savings, in large part by eliminating the wasteful practices of the insurance industry that are designed for financial advantage.”
In my view, health care for all is a moral issue. No American should die or suffer because they lack the funds to get adequate health care. But it is more than that. A Medicare-for-all single-payer system will be good for the economy and the business community.
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