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Chicago Teachers Prepare for Battle |
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Wednesday, 05 October 2016 09:13 |
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Sustar writes: "Chicago teachers have voted overwhelmingly to strike in the face of concession demands and austerity."
Striking Chicago teachers. (photo: The Daily Wire)
Chicago Teachers Prepare for Battle
By Lee Sustar, Jacobin
05 October 16
Chicago teachers have voted overwhelmingly to strike in the face of concession demands and austerity.
 he Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has authorized a strike by a huge majority vote of its membership, and the union’s House of Delegates voted to issue a ten-day notice to the Board of Education, making October 11 the date of a possible walkout.
If the board refuses to give ground on its demands for drastic concessions, this would be the second CTU strike in four years — but this time with political stakes that go far beyond the schools.
An unpopular Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to turn the public against teachers as City Hall struggles with a big spike in violence, a scandal over racist police violence, and discontent about the one-two punch of a weak economic recovery and budget cuts and tax increases that hit working people hardest.
In this context, the CTU’s fight for a contract has become a touchstone for a wider struggle against austerity and for economic and racial justice.
Michelle Gunderson, a three-decade veteran of Chicago schools and member of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, expressed the sober sentiment of teachers outside the September 28 House of Delegates meeting. “We come here not to celebrate,” Gunderson said, “but with a sense of resolve.”
With the city’s economic model broken, Chicago’s real decision-makers — hedge fund managers, bondholders and assorted CEOs — are demanding that the corruption-riddled political establishment extract ever-greater concessions from working people. From the bosses’ point of view, that means making an example of the CTU, which dared to fight back with its 2012 strike — and stopped Emanuel’s arrogant union-busting assault in its tracks.
Conventional collective bargaining of the last few decades — the give-and-take in negotiations within a shared framework of labor-management “partnership” — is irrelevant here. The employers have made it clear that they are preparing for an old-school class struggle, Chicago-style.
“I figure I’m striking for my job,” said a teacher who was laid off from one position this summer because of budget cuts and who nearly lost a second already this fall before a Local School Council intervened. “The only way to get more money is to strike.”
There is a palpable feeling of looming social and political confrontation in Chicago. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, with its anti-corporate, pro-socialist message, showed that there was an audience for taking on the 1 percent — and a CTU strike could turn those sentiments into active solidarity.
That’s why reports of the union’s overwhelming strike authorization vote by the 28,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union dominated the local news media this week.
Television news trucks even turned up outside the September 20 organizing meeting of the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign (CTSC). There, some 70 activists from key community groups and unions heard CTU members describe the issues facing teachers — before breaking up into working groups to get started building support for the struggle.
City in Crisis
The union’s strike authorization comes nearly six months after the union organized a one-day walkout on April 1, linking the CTU’s struggle to wider protests over state budget cuts that hit both K–12 and higher education as well as social services.
The downtown CTU rally that day drew in not only members of unions in higher education, but also college students and a new generation of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s apparent that Emanuel is worried — rightly — that an all-out teachers’ strike will add to a sense of political crisis in the city. The mayor saw his popularity plummet following the exposure of a cover-up of the fatal police shooting of a black youth, Laquan McDonald — an event captured on video that drew worldwide attention when it was released late last year.
Emanuel is also under pressure to come up with a solution to the sharp increase in the number of shootings that are concentrated in heavily African-American neighborhoods on the West and South Sides.
Meanwhile, he’s alienated working people citywide with labor agreements that slashed pensions and increased property taxes. And the mayor’s controversial closure of 50 schools in 2013 failed to produce the promised educational gains for students who moved to new schools — as teachers and other activists predicted.
The mayor’s strategy for a political comeback is straightforward: plead poverty, blame Illinois’ Republican governor Bruce Rauner for state budget cuts and accuse the CTU of refusing to make sacrifices.
Emanuel wants the teachers to take an effective 7 percent pay cut by shifting pension costs to them — reversing a decades-old setup in which the schools paid part of the teachers’ pension contributions in lieu of a raise. In reality, teachers have endured layoffs and a freeze on pay raises based on seniority and education advancement.
Wider Struggle
But Emanuel’s ability to defeat the CTU is far from assured. The once-invincible political operative who served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff is now highly vulnerable.
In a much-hyped September 22 speech on violence in Chicago, Emanuel’s solution for black youth was a proposed “mentoring” program — and hiring nearly 1,000 more police officers at a moment when the Chicago Police Department’s long history of racist violence is on full display.
By contrast, the CTU has proposed funding the schools by, for one, shifting money from the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) system — effectively a mayoral slush fund accumulated by diverting tax revenue from public education to politically connected development projects.
According to a July report from Cook County Clerk David Orr, $461 million in taxpayer revenues flowed into the TIF system this year, an $89 million increase over last year. Much of that money is committed to projects that are already underway. But CTU supporters who have examined the numbers believe the city could shift between $150 million and $200 million out of the TIF system to meet the union’s demands and much more besides.
The union has also released a report titled A Just Chicago: Fighting for the City Our Students Deserve, which, as the union puts it, “details the intimate connection of health, housing, jobs, segregation and funding to education” and “demonstrates that challenges in housing, employment, justice and health care relate directly to education; solutions require a narrowing of the opportunity gap brought on by poverty, racism and segregation.”
By tying its own battles to the wider debate about the future of Chicago school students — the majority of them black and Latino and nearly all working class — the CTU is preparing the ground for a wider social struggle that can force the mayor, City Council and state legislature to come up with the money to fund our schools and provide them with the urgently needed social services and school-based programs for young people who face the threat of violence.
Slew of Opposition
Mayor Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools aren’t the only opponents that the CTU faces in this fight.
Rauner, the near-billionaire who literally bought his way into office in November 2014, is on a mission to cut corporate taxes, slash social spending and crush public-sector unions. Rauner has repeatedly focused on the CTU, demanding that the Chicago Public Schools declare bankruptcy so it can void its contract with the CTU and impose massive concessions on pay and working conditions.
So far, Rauner’s efforts have gone nowhere — the Democratic majority in the state legislature has blocked him. But his threatened vetoes prevented passage of a budget for more than a year, leading to huge cuts in a variety of social programs.
Rauner has given every indication that he will attempt to intervene in the event of a CTU strike. He issued a statement denouncing the one-day strike on April 1 as “shameful,” declaring that “children are the victims in this raw display of political power.” The governor could try to go over Emanuel’s head to seek an injunction against the strike or even invoke the Illinois School Board of Education’s authority to take over “failing” districts.
Emanuel himself may well move for a court injunction to halt a CTU strike — perhaps on the grounds that a walkout would pose a “safety” issue. His attempt to do so in the closing days of the 2012 strike fizzled when a judge, his finger to the political winds, decided not to act.
Whatever the details, it is clear that the union will face all manner of political attacks in the event of a strike.
The Chicago Tribune, channeling its union-hating editorial boards of the 19th century, has issued a barrage of editorials against the CTU. The Chicago Sun-Times, which has long sold itself as the blue-collar paper, has been dogging the CTU as well — a sharp change in tone from its coverage of the 2012 battle.
Few CTU members will be surprised by the attacks in the mainstream media. But pressure to settle for a lousy contract will come from labor’s “friends” in the Democratic Party as well.
In 2012, the union came under tremendous back-channel pressure from its parent union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), not to strike in Barack Obama’s hometown on the eve of what was then considered to be a close presidential election.
With Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump evaporating in this year’s presidential race, the pressure will be far greater. The Clinton team fears that a strike in Chicago will play into Trump’s law-and-order message, which has focused on this city in particular.
The pressure from the Clinton campaign won’t come only through Emanuel, but also the liberal wing of the local Democratic establishment, with which the CTU has strong ties.
The CTU has spent heavily and devoted countless person-hours on backing Democrats at the local and state level, including former Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, even after he had turned on labor supporters.
The union was also central to the campaign of Chuy Garcia, a county commissioner who forced Emanuel into a runoff vote in last year’s mayoral election. Figures like Garcia, while to the left of Emanuel, nevertheless openly accept the austerity agenda and will pressure the union to moderate its demands. Even the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, which often takes up CTU issues, is mostly missing in action.
Toward Broader Solidarity
The prospects for labor solidarity for the CTU are better. Support for the teachers, however, isn’t coming from traditionally powerful unions or the Chicago Federation of Labor. Many Chicago unions are openly or quietly aligned with Emanuel in the hopes of getting jobs for members. Others are intimidated into silence.
Nevertheless, the CTU has important labor allies — and the potential to tap into broader support from the union rank and file.
The main statewide public-sector union, AFSCME Council 31, has been sympathetic to the CTU, even though its own strategy in its contract battle with Rauner has been to avoid confrontation, even seeking legislation that would ban strikes or lockouts. SEIU Healthcare, which represents home care workers, has been allied with CTU on several fronts. The same is true of the new leadership of both Amalgamated Transit Union locals that represent bus and train workers.
Several of these unions were represented at the September 20 solidarity meeting. If they join the CTU in the streets — and take solidarity action themselves — it would have a powerful effect on this struggle.
The bigger the labor solidarity for the CTU, the better the union and its allies will be able to build support among parents, community groups and faith-based organizations.
All those elements were present in the 2012 strike, but they will need to play an even greater role this time around. Emanuel’s — and for that matter, Rauner’s — strategy to defeat the CTU hinges on their ability to create a backlash against the teachers. The greater the outreach of the CTU and its allies, the greater the chance of a favorable outcome for the union.
CTU President Karen Lewis clearly acknowledged the importance of solidarity in this struggle at the House of Delegates meeting. “We want parents to join us on the picket line and teach their kids the importance of standing up for themselves,” Lewis said.
This militant spirit isn’t new. The CTU was formed in 1937 as a merger of several unions that had been struggling separately against budget cuts and payless paydays during the Great Depression, including actions such as storming the banks. The union kept building for another thirty years despite the lack of formal collective bargaining.
A wildcat strike of black teachers in 1969 led to the ouster of a conservative leadership and heralded the rise of union militancy that saw nine strikes in 18 years. The 1960s school boycotts by African-American children against segregation, followed by the influx of black teachers into the CTU, had created a strong connection between the union and the wider working class.
The 2012 CTU strike — the union’s first in a quarter century — saw a rediscovery of those fighting traditions. Now, as the union faces its biggest challenge in decades, union members can tap into that tradition as they prepare for the battle ahead.
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When Are We Going to Answer for Torture? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 04 October 2016 13:48 |
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Pierce writes: "Only one of the two major-party candidates in this year's presidential election has addressed at length the fact that the United States became one of too many nations around the world who torture people. That would be Donald Trump, who said he was going to bring back waterboarding and much, much more."
Activists wear orange jumpsuits as they protest against torture in Washington, D.C. (photo: Armando Gallardo)
When Are We Going to Answer for Torture?
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
04 October 16
And when is John Brennan going to get fired?
o my knowledge, only one of the two major-party candidates in this year's presidential election has addressed at length the fact that the United States became one of too many nations around the world who torture people. That would be Donald Trump, who said he was going to bring back waterboarding and much, much more. (For her part, Hillary Rodham Clinton has evolved. In 2007, when she last ran, she jumped through the "ticking bomb" loophole. Now, though, she seems categorically opposed to any torture at all.)
The Guardian, on the other hand, has been working the story of the horrors done in our name as hard as anyone, and it now brings us news of a new report from Human Rights Watch that gives us another look at the policies in which we were all made complicit.
The men, who were released to Tunisian custody in 2015, described being threatened with placement in an electric chair at a black site prison in Afghanistan in 2002; being beaten with metal batons while their arms were suspended by a bar above their heads; and having their heads pushed into barrels of water. One of the men, Ridha al-Najjar, was a pivotal detainee for the CIA, which believed him to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. Najjar was the first man taken by the CIA to the black site, which was code-named Cobalt and was where at least one detainee is known to have died. His interrogation became a template for others at the site, according to the CIA inspector general. Najjar said the interrogators forcibly inserted something into his anus. According to a footnote in the 2014 Senate intelligence committee's investigation into torture, John Brennan, now CIA director, was among the senior CIA officials briefed in the summer of 2002 on the interrogation plan for Najjar. According to the Senate report, the plan included isolation, "'sound disorientation techniques', 'sense of time deprivation', limited light, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation".
Suggested question for the upcoming town hall debate: John Brennan clearly knew that this country was torturing people in contravention of 200 years of American military history, several treaties this country had freely ratified, and every possible consideration of human decency. Why does he still have a job and will you fire him?
"The US should provide these men with adequate compensation and redress," said Human Rights Watch's Laura Pitter. "It is under an obligation to do so under treaties it has ratified and there is still time to act. If it doesn't respect its obligations when it comes to its own very serious human rights violations, it undermines US credibility when urging other governments to respect theirs."
Somebody needs a refresher course in American Exceptionalism—we do not torture so, when we do torture, it can't be torture because we don't torture.
The report describes extensively the insertion of water or pureed foods into the anuses of detainees, which the CIA denies was sexual assault.
Opinions vary. We need further research to establish who's right here. Any volunteers from Langley?
Najjar told Human Rights Watch that in addition to having his head dunked in a barrel of water between interrogators' questions, he was also strapped to a board and lowered by his head, upside down, into the barrel. In a description consistent with other accounts of water dousing, he reported being placed within a tarpaulin full of cold water that zipped closed at the top with minimal space for air. The CIA has maintained that it only waterboarded three detainees: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Earlier accounts of water dousing come from Mohammed and 12 other detainees, none of whom are Najjar or El Gherissi. In 2015, a lawyer for a detainee subjected to water dousing told the Guardian: "You would laugh the next time you heard the government try to minimize its wrongdoing by drawing a distinction between waterboarding and other forms of water torture."
I don't think I would, but I take his point.
Within the first month of his captivity at the black sites, according to the Senate torture report, CIA cables described Najjar as "clearly a broken man … on the verge of a complete breakdown". His torture "became the model" for others at the black site, according to the CIA inspector general.
The model.
Fcking monsters, the lot of them.
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Where the Veep Candidates Stand on Climate and Energy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36376"><span class="small">Katie Herzog, Grist</span></a>
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Tuesday, 04 October 2016 13:39 |
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Herzog writes: "The Tuesday vice presidential debate may not get as much attention as the main show, but the rivals are nearly as polarized on the issues - especially when it comes to climate and energy."
Mike Pence and Tim Kaine. (photo: Grist/Shutterstock)
Where the Veep Candidates Stand on Climate and Energy
By Katie Herzog, Grist
04 October 16
he Tuesday vice presidential debate may not get as much attention as the main show, but the rivals are nearly as polarized on the issues — especially when it comes to climate and energy.
On the left, we’ve got former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine — whose pitch to voters on the campaign trail includes, “Do you believe in climate science or don’t you?”
On Team Trump, it’s more complicated. Veep candidate Mike Pence is an Indiana governor and former member of Congress who has previously said that creationism should be taught in schools, smoking won’t kill you, and global warming is a myth. Pence has also, however, recently reversed himself on global warming, splitting from Trump’s position: “Well, look,” he told CNN after the first presidential debate, “there’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate.”
Here’s where the two stand:
Mike Pence
In his 2012 gubernatorial campaign, Pence received at least $850,000 from the energy sector, including $95,000 from coal magnate Robert Murray and $300,00 from David Koch. The friend of fossil fuels has also said that Trump will “end the war on coal,” and opposes President Obama’s signature environmental legislation, the Clean Power Plan. Indiana, the nation’s eighth largest coal producer, is one of 29 states currently fighting the legislation in court.
In 2014, Pence overturned an energy efficiency program enacted by his Republican predecessor, despite that fact that the Indiana Public Utility Commission estimated the program would create more than 18,600 jobs. That same year, Indiana ranked second among all states for industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
While in Congress, Pence also voted to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and voted in favor of opening the Atlantic to offshore oil drilling. In fact, he voted against nearly every piece of environmental legislation during his 12 years in Congress, earning a lifetime score of 4 percent by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV).
Tim Kaine
Kaine supports the Clean Power Plan and introduced a budget amendment to help the Department of Defense prepare for climate change. The avid outdoorsman and conservationist has a lifetime score for 91 percent by the LCV.
He was an early opponent of the Keystone XL Pipeline, coming out against it in 2013.
During his tenure as governor, however, Kaine’s administration approved plans for a 668-megawatt coal plant in southwest Virginia. He’s also been in favor of offshore drilling in the Atlantic (although that changed after he joined the Clinton ticket).
Kaine says he views natural gas a “bridge fuel,” and — despite his opposition to Keystone — penned an an op-ed referring to himself as a “pro-pipeline senator.” According to ClimateWire’s Emily Holden, he supported fracking in national forests as governor, and he voted to fast-track natural gas export terminals.
Yet he’s endorsed the goal of transitioning the U.S. to 25 percent renewable energy by 2025, and Kaine protected 400,000 acres of land from development and worked to help coastal communities prepare for climate change.
If history is any indication, climate change won’t get much attention in Tuesday’s debate — in all presidential and vice presidential debates in the past five election seasons, climate change had a grand total of 37 minutes and 6 seconds.
If it were up to us, we’d want to hear a lot more about Pence’s recent comments on human-made climate change. Hearing from Pence and Kaine for a few minutes on climate would hardly be the most shocking turn of this election. After all, we’ve been surprised before.
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FOCUS: What We Talk About When We Don't Want to Talk About Nuclear War |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27509"><span class="small">Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 04 October 2016 11:29 |
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Bacevich writes: "During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question."
A mushroom cloud. (photo: Medium)
What We Talk About When We Don't Want to Talk About Nuclear War
By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch
04 October 16
Last month, near the end of the first presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton laid a masterful trap for her Republican rival. Reminding viewers of Donald Trump’s frequent crude comments about women, she mentioned “a woman in a beauty contest,” and then unpacked the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.
“And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy,’” Clinton told around 80 million Americans. “Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina.”
Clinton paused, waited, and revealed her name.
“Where did you find this? Where did you find this?” Trump sputtered, to which Clinton countered with a kicker: “She has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.”
A more conventional candidate than The Donald might have spent that night and the next day carefully prying the jaws of the bear trap off his leg and licking his wounds, but Clinton and her coterie knew their opponent well. No doubt stung by his overall poor performance and a wave of withering criticism over his treatment of Machado two decades earlier, Trump figured out a way to squeeze his other leg into the vice grip of that metal maw. As Machado and the Clinton campaign carried out a masterfully orchestrated media blitz, the Republican hopeful went on Fox News to double down. “She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem,” he told the seemingly shell-shocked hosts of Fox and Friends.
Days later, the story was still going strong, garnering media attention, generating headlines, and prompting discussions about everything from Trump’s own weight (five pounds shy of clinical obesity) to his past comments about the size of a pregnant Kim Kardashian culminating in an early morning Twitter storm last Friday.
This is American politics today: crude, crass, freewheeling, and tending toward the frivolous. America has had sexist, misogynist presidents, of course. Some have been astonishingly lewd and crude. I’m looking at you, LBJ!
Lyndon Baines Johnson may have been an incorrigible bully and inveterate womanizer -- to say nothing of the copious amounts of Vietnamese blood on his hands -- but his 1964 campaign featured a nuclear war-themed political attack ad that, though only aired once, is still lodged in the American consciousness.
At the end of that so-called Daisy ad, as a mushroom cloud rises onscreen, we hear Johnson’s voice: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” The implication was clear. Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was too dangerous to entrust with America’s nuclear arsenal.
Clinton has made a similar point about Trump. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she’s said -- a suitable enough line but without a Daisy punch. Barring a Trump win and a resulting nuclear exchange, don’t expect people to remember it 50 years from now. Don’t even hold your breath about whether it might affect a single news cycle between now and Election Day or morph into the kind of substantive discussion of nuclear policy that spawns 100 headlines and a million tweets. There have been many scandals deserving of mention during this long presidential campaign, many controversies demanding attention, many travesties deserving of discussion but as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, observes today, the biggest travesty may be that an issue with the potential to end life as we know it on this planet can’t compete with one candidate’s seemingly hysterical obsession with publicly criticizing women’s bodies.
-Nick Turse, TomDispatch
What We Talk About When We Don’t Want to Talk About Nuclear War
Donald and Hillary Take a No-First-Use Pledge on Relevant Information
 ou may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question. His purpose was to test whether the candidates understood the essentials of nuclear strategy.
A moderator given to plain speaking might have said this: "Explain why the United States keeps such a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and when you might consider using those weapons."
What Holt actually said was: “On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation's longstanding policy on first use. Do you support the current policy?”
The framing of the question posited no small amount of knowledge on the part of the two candidates. Specifically, it assumed that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each possess some familiarity with the longstanding policy to which Holt referred and with the modifications that Obama had contemplated making to it.
If you will permit the equivalent of a commercial break as this piece begins, let me explain why I’m about to parse in detail each candidate’s actual answer to Holt’s question. Amid deep dives into, and expansive punditry regarding, issues like how “fat” a former Miss Universe may have been and how high an imagined future wall on our southern border might prove to be, national security issues likely to test the judgment of a commander-in-chief have received remarkably little attention. So indulge me. This largely ignored moment in last week’s presidential debate is worth examining.
With regard to the issue of “first use,” every president since Harry Truman has subscribed to the same posture: the United States retains the prerogative of employing nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies against even nonnuclear threats. In other words, as a matter of policy, the United States rejects the concept of “no first use,” which would prohibit any employment of nuclear weapons except in retaliation for a nuclear attack. According to press reports, President Obama had toyed with but then rejected the idea of committing the United States to a “no first use” posture. Holt wanted to know where the two candidates aspiring to succeed Obama stood on the matter.
Cruelly, the moderator invited Trump to respond first. The look in the Republican nominee’s eyes made it instantly clear that Holt could have been speaking Farsi for all he understood. A lesser candidate might then have begun with the nuclear equivalent of “What is Aleppo?”
Yet Trump being Trump, he gamely -- or naively -- charged headlong into the ambush that Holt had carefully laid, using his allotted two minutes to offer his insights into how as president he would address the nuclear conundrum that previous presidents had done so much to create. The result owed less to early Cold War thinkers-of-the-unthinkable like Herman Kahn or Albert Wohlstetter, who created the field of nuclear strategy, than to Dr. Strangelove. Make that Dr. Strangelove on meth.
Trump turned first to Russia, expressing concern that it might be gaining an edge in doomsday weaponry. “They have a much newer capability than we do,” he said. “We have not been updating from the new standpoint.” The American bomber fleet in particular, he added, needs modernization. Presumably referring to the recent employment of Vietnam-era bombers in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, he continued somewhat opaquely, “I looked the other night. I was seeing B-52s, they're old enough that your father, your grandfather, could be flying them. We are not -- we are not keeping up with other countries.”
Trump then professed an appreciation for the awfulness of nuclear weaponry. “I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over.”
Give Trump this much: even in a field that tends to favor abstraction and obfuscating euphemisms like “fallout” or “dirty bomb,” classifying Armageddon as the “nuclear alternative” represents something of a contribution.
Still, it’s worth noting that, in the arcane theology of nuclear strategy, “first strike” and “first use” are anything but synonymous. “First strike” implies a one-sided, preventive war of annihilation. The logic of a first strike, such as it is, is based on the calculation that a surprise nuclear attack could inflict the “nuclear alternative” on your adversary, while sparing your own side from suffering a comparable fate. A successful first strike would be a one-punch knockout, delivered while your opponent still sits in his corner of the ring.
Yet whatever reassurance was to be found in Trump’s vow never to order a first strike -- not the question Lester Holt was asking -- was immediately squandered. The Republican nominee promptly revoked his “no first strike” pledge by insisting, in a cliché much favored in Washington, that “I can't take anything off the table.”
Piling non sequitur upon non sequitur, he next turned to the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, where “we’re doing nothing.” Yet, worrisome as this threat might be, keeping Pyongyang in check, he added, ought to be Beijing’s job. “China should solve that problem for us,” he insisted. “China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea.”
If China wouldn’t help with North Korea, however, what could be more obvious than that Iran, many thousands of miles away, should do so -- and might have, if only President Obama had incorporated the necessary proviso into the Iran nuclear deal. “Iran is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran has power over North Korea.” When the Obama administration “made that horrible deal with Iran, they should have included the fact that they do something with respect to North Korea.” But why stop with North Korea? Iran “should have done something with respect to Yemen and all these other places,” he continued, wandering into the nonnuclear world. U.S. negotiators suitably skilled in the Trumpian art of the deal, he implied, could easily have maneuvered Iran into solving such problems on Washington's behalf.
Veering further off course, Trump then took a passing swipe at Secretary of State John Kerry: “Why didn't you add other things into the deal?” Why, in “one of the great giveaways of all time,” did the Obama administration fork over $400 million in cash? At which point, he promptly threw in another figure without the slightest explanation -- “It was actually $1.7 billion in cash” -- in “one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history.”
Trump then wrapped up his meandering tour d’horizon by decrying the one action of the Obama administration that arguably has reduced the prospect of nuclear war, at least in the near future. “The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems,” he stated with conviction. “All they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don't have to do much. And they're going to end up getting nuclear.” For proof, he concluded, talk to the Israelis. “I met with Bibi Netanyahu the other day,” he added for no reason in particular. “Believe me, he's not a happy camper.”
On this indecipherable note, his allotted time exhausted, Trump’s recitation ended. In its way, it had been a Joycean performance.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters?
It was now Clinton’s turn to show her stuff. If Trump had responded to Holt like a voluble golf caddy being asked to discuss the finer points of ice hockey, Hillary Clinton chose a different course: she changed the subject. She would moderate her own debate. Perhaps Trump thought Holt was in charge of the proceedings; Clinton knew better.
What followed was vintage Clinton: vapid sentiments, smoothly delivered in the knowing tone of a seasoned Washington operative. During her two minutes, she never came within a country mile of discussing the question Holt had asked or the thoughts she evidently actually has about nuclear issues.
“[L]et me start by saying, words matter,” she began. “Words matter when you run for president. And they really matter when you are president. And I want to reassure our allies in Japan and South Korea and elsewhere that we have mutual defense treaties and we will honor them.”
It was as if Clinton were already speaking from the Oval Office. Trump had addressed his remarks to Lester Holt. Clinton directed hers to the nation at large, to people the world over, indeed to history itself. Warming to her task, she was soon rolling out the sort of profundities that play well at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, or the Council on Foreign Relations, causing audiences to nod -- or nod off.
“It is essential that America's word be good,” Clinton continued. “And so I know that this campaign has caused some questioning and worries on the part of many leaders across the globe. I've talked with a number of them. But I want to -- on behalf of myself, and I think on behalf of a majority of the American people, say that, you know, our word is good.”
Then, after inserting a tepid, better-than-nothing endorsement of the Iran nuclear deal, she hammered Trump for not offering an alternative. “Would he have started a war? Would he have bombed Iran?” If you’re going to criticize, she pointed out, you need to offer something better. Trump never does, she charged. “It's like his plan to defeat ISIS. He says it's a secret plan, but the only secret is that he has no plan.”
With that, she reverted to platitudes. “So we need to be more precise in how we talk about these issues. People around the word follow our presidential campaigns so closely, trying to get hints about what we will do. Can they rely on us? Are we going to lead the world with strength and in accordance with our values? That's what I intend to do. I intend to be a leader of our country that people can count on, both here at home and around the world, to make decisions that will further peace and prosperity, but also stand up to bullies, whether they're abroad or at home.”
Like Trump, she offered no specifics. Which bullies? Where? How? In what order? Would she start with Russia’s Putin? North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un? Perhaps Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines? How about Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Or Bibi?
In contrast to Trump, however, Clinton did speak in complete sentences, which followed one another in an orderly fashion. She thereby came across as at least nominally qualified to govern the country, much like, say, Warren G. Harding nearly a century ago. And what worked for Harding in 1920 may well work for Clinton in 2016.
Of Harding’s speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges.” Mencken characterized Harding’s rhetoric as “so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” So, too, with Hillary Clinton. She is our Warren G. Harding. In her oratory, flapdoodle and balderdash live on.
The National Security Void
If I’ve taxed your patience by recounting this non-debate and non-discussion of nuclear first use, it’s to make a larger point. The absence of relevant information elicited by Lester Holt’s excellent question speaks directly to what has become a central flaw in this entire presidential campaign: the dearth of attention given to matters basic to U.S. national security policy.
In the nuclear arena, the issue of first use is only one of several on which anyone aspiring to become the next commander-in-chief should be able to offer an informed judgment. Others include questions such as these:
- What is the present-day justification for maintaining the U.S. nuclear “triad,” a strike force consisting of manned bombers and land-based ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles?
- Why is the Pentagon embarking upon a decades-long, trillion-dollar program to modernize that triad, fielding a new generation of bombers, missiles, and submarines along with an arsenal of new warheads? Is that program necessary?
- How do advances in non-nuclear weaponry -- for example, in the realm of cyberwarfare -- affect theories of nuclear deterrence devised by the likes of Kahn and Wohlstetter during the 1950s and 1960s? Does the logic of those theories still pertain?
Beyond the realm of nuclear strategy, there are any number of other security-related questions about which the American people deserve to hear directly from both Trump and Clinton, testing their knowledge of the subject matter and the quality of their judgments. Among such matters, one in particular screams out for attention. Consider it the question that Washington has declared off-limits: What lessons should be drawn from America’s costly and disappointing post-9/11 wars and how should those lessons apply to future policy?
With Election Day now merely a month away, there is no more reason to believe that such questions will receive serious consideration than to expect Trump to come clean on his personal finances or Clinton to release the transcripts of her handsomely compensated Goldman Sachs speeches.
When outcomes don’t accord with his wishes, Trump reflexively blames a “rigged” system. But a system that makes someone like Trump a finalist for the presidency isn’t rigged. It is manifestly absurd, a fact that has left most of the national media grasping wildly for explanations (albeit none that tag them with having facilitated the transformation of politics into theater).
I’ll take a backseat to no one in finding Trump unfit to serve as president. Yet beyond the outsized presence of one particular personality, the real travesty of our predicament lies elsewhere -- in the utter shallowness of our political discourse, no more vividly on display than in the realm of national security.
What do our presidential candidates talk about when they don’t want to talk about nuclear war? The one, in a vain effort to conceal his own ignorance, offers rambling nonsense. The other, accustomed to making her own rules, simply changes the subject.
The American people thereby remain in darkness. On that score, Trump, Clinton, and the parties they represent are not adversaries. They are collaborators.
Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, which has been longlisted for the National Book Award.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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