Let’s assume that Donald Trump loses the election in November.

Yes, that’s a mighty big assumption, despite all the polls currently favoring the Democrats. If the economy begins to recover and the first wave of Covid-19 subsides (without a second wave striking), Donald Trump’s reelection prospects could improve greatly. The Republican Party has a huge war chest ready to fund ads galore, massive targeted outreach, and widespread voter suppression. And if all that isn’t enough, the president could borrow a tactic from the dictators he so admires and cancel the election outright out of concern over the coronavirus or some fabricated emergency.

Playing up fears of Trump’s reelection is a useful get-out-the-vote strategy, but for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the election happens and the president loses unambiguously. A majority of Americans will sigh with relief. Still, don’t count on Trump — and more important, Trumpism — evaporating like a nightmare at daybreak.

To begin with, there’s the president’s legendary base of support, the one-third of Americans who’d continue to back him even if he were to shoot someone on New York City’s Fifth Avenue (or, through criminal negligence, effectively murder more than 100,000 people by ignoring a pandemic for 70 days). Such Trumpists aren’t going to suddenly emigrate en masse to New Zealand, as some liberals threatened to do after the last presidential election.

For the time being, the president still has an entire party apparatus behind him, having transformed the Republicans into little more than a personality cult, banishing dissenters like former Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker to the political hinterlands, and silencing the handful of so-called moderates that remain.

Trump enjoys institutional support as well, having replaced so many putative deep-staters with civil servants prepared to unquestioningly do his bidding. He’s personally fired his perceived government enemies, chief among them six inspectors general. Minions like former body man John McEntee, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, and presidential aide Stephen Miller have all purged experts, replacing them in the government bureaucracy with loyalists. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell has done the heavy lifting in the Senate, filling the judicial system with Trump flunkies: two Supreme Court judges, more than 50 Court of Appeals judges, and 140 District Court judges so far.

Ever the money man, the president has secured a reliable cash flow, bringing the uber-wealthy class of conservative donors onto his team, a total of 80 billionaires, including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Texas banker Andy Beal, World Wrestling Entertainment cofounder Linda McMahon, Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Thanks to his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump has also funneled taxpayer money into his own business: millions spent on rooms at the Trump Organization’s hotels and golf clubs. Even before factoring in his money — Trump personally spent $66 million of his own dollars on the 2016 election — his campaign fund already has more than one-third of a billion dollars.

And then there’s the bulk of conservative civil society — ranging from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and evangelicals like Franklin Graham to the anti-abortion lobby and the International Union of Police Associations — that now operates in his corner. Despite the entertainment world’s general loathing of the president, he’s even lined up a celebrity or two like rapper Kanye West and actress Roseanne Barr along with a handful of D-listers like actor Jon Voight and Barack Obama’s half-brother Malik. On the fringes roam the true “bad hombres”: white supremacists, live-free-or-die militiamen, and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Taken together, these component parts of Trumpism form that most dangerous of creatures, a political chimera with the head of an establishment machine and the body of a radical social movement. This creature has its hands on the levers of power, its boots on the ground, and its eyes on the prize of four more years.

Are all these people and institutions true believers in Donald Trump? Probably not. Sporting more of a performative style than a coherent ideology, he is, to misquote Lenin, a “useful idiot.” When he’s no longer useful — that is, no longer in power — he’ll only be an idiot and the opportunists will move on.

While Trump may be expendable, Trumpism — which lies at the intersections of racial and sexual anxiety, hatred of government and the expert class, and opposition to cosmopolitan internationalism — is not so easily rooted out. Drawing heavily on American traditions of Know-Nothing-ism, America-First-ism, and Goldwater Republicanism, Trump’s essential worldview will survive the 2020 election.

If their candidate loses in November, Trumpists will dig in their heels just as their predecessors did after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Only a month after his inauguration, the Tea Party was already up and running. But the Tea Party will prove child’s play compared to the resistance the Trumpists are likely to mount if their candidate tanks on Election Day 2020. And such resistance could succeed in finishing what Trump started — disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment — unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.

Other societies have gone through such processes, but those efforts — Reconstruction after the American Civil War, denazification in Germany after World War II, and de-Baathification after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 — have all been flawed in various ways. Reconsidering them, however, might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history as we try to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.

Regime change The United States hasn’t recently been invaded, lost a major war in its homeland, or had its government fall to a popular uprising.

That’s usually what it takes to dislodge a deeply entrenched ruling ideology. The South lost the Civil War, the Nazis World War II, and Saddam Hussein the second Gulf War. Those defeats provided the winners with unprecedented opportunities to remake the old order, but don’t seem to apply to America in 2020. The electoral defeat of a president and party, if that’s even what happens in November, doesn’t constitute regime change. It’s just the kind of peaceful transition of power that’s the cornerstone of democratic stability.

But let’s face it: 2020 isn’t shaping up to be a normal election year. Conservative pundits, like military historian Victor Davis Hanson, believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats have brought the country to the brink of a literal civil war. During last year’s impeachment hearings, Trump himself tweeted approvingly a comment made by Robert Jeffress, an evangelical ally, that impeachment “will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Meanwhile, typically enough, Obama’s first secretary of labor, Robert Reich, suspects that President Trump’s flagrant disregard of the Constitution will precipitate major social unrest, even as comedian Bill Maher urges Democrats to reach out to Trump supporters as part of a bid to defeat the president — or risk civil war.

Many Americans seem to agree. In a 2018 Rasmussen poll, one-third of respondents thought it likely that another civil war would break out within five years. According to a 2019 civility poll from the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, the consensus was that the country is already two-thirds of the way toward a civil war.

Nor is there much confidence that the 2020 presidential election will go smoothly. Take your pick from a menu of potential disruptions: allegations of voter fraud and Republican voter suppression, a resurgence of the coronavirus, voting machine software glitches, Russian hackers, confusion over mail-in ballots, or an authoritarian president who repeatedly jokes about serving more than two terms. A recent Georgia primary offered a warning of what might come, with fiascos aplenty, particularly for voters of color. There weren’t enough polling places, people waited in line for endless hours, absentee ballots never arrived at homes. Multiply Georgia by 50 and you’d have a full-blown crisis of political legitimacy.

Even if this country manages to pull off the 2020 presidential election, a post-election insurrection is not out of the question. During the lame-duck period, a defeated Trump might call on his supporters — gun owners, militia members, active-service military — to serve as a Praetorian guard to keep him in office. Mark Villalta, an attendee at Trumpstock in Arizona last October, was typical of some Trump supporters in confessing that he’s hoarding weapons just in case Trump loses. “Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” he told The New York Times. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

It’s essential to ensure that the November 3rd election is free and fair, but if Trump loses, then the bigger problems are likely to begin.

Confederacy of dunces In the 1860 election, America confronted a polarized electorate, a stupendously mediocre president in James Buchanan, and a clear geographic divide between north and south, urban and rural. Not even the election of Abraham Lincoln could save the union. The attack on Fort Sumter, the opening salvo of the Civil War, took place roughly a month after his inauguration.

Donald Trump seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from the “War Between the States,” resisting as he’s done recently the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues and the redesignation of U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. In the last Oscar season, he even wished that Gone with the Wind had won rather than some South Korean film he’d never heard of. Such favoritism for the disgraced and vanquished should be as politically disqualifying as a Heil Hitler salute.

The reason that Trump can get away with his Confederate nostalgia comes, at least in part, from the failure of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to extirpate racism and its associated economic inequality from American society. In fact, as historian Allen Guelzo points out, “Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction.”

The Democrats of the time, in other words, became a party of resistance — to Reconstruction, civil rights, and the radical Republicans of that moment. So the Confederacy continued to live on not only in the hearts and minds of defeated Southern whites but also in the racist policies that elected officials in both parts of the country would resurrect.

Here, then, is a lesson of the Civil War’s aftermath for this moment. Today’s Republicans, the equivalent of the northern Democrats of the post-Civil War era and a true confederacy of dunces, cannot be allowed to persist in their current incarnation as a vehicle for Trumpism. A thorough thumping at the polls in November is a necessary but insufficient response to what they’ve become.

Gaining a congressional majority, in other words, is not enough. The Democrats and chastened Republicans would have to work to make that party a far less extreme force in American politics, abandoning Trump and reclaiming Lincoln.

“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Barack Obama insisted as he entered office in 2009, sidestepping efforts to investigate the wrongdoing of the George W. Bush administration. He was convinced that such forward thinking would unite the country. He was wrong.

To avoid a Reconstruction-like fiasco, the next administration would have to drain the swamp Trump created, bring criminal charges against the former president and his key followers, and launch a serious campaign to change the hearts and minds of Americans who have been drawn to this president’s agenda.

Detoxifying government When Saddam Hussein fell and American troops took Baghdad, the United States established an occupation authority that attempted to expunge all traces of the former Iraqi autocrat’s Baath Party from that society. At the time, the State Department considered three basic positions on what came to be known as de-Baathification: focus just on Saddam’s inner circle of about 50 top-ranking officials, expand that circle to include a larger number of top politicians, or eradicate Baathism altogether because “democratization is simply not possible unless and until the entire apparatus of control and authority is uprooted.”

Thanks to Paul Bremer, the head of that Coalition Provisional Authority, the third option became its very first directive, which led to the ejection of between 35,000 and 50,000 Iraqi civil servants onto the streets of their country. “In effect, the United States dismantled the Iraqi state, leaving a deep security vacuum, administrative chaos, and soaring unemployment,” wrote pundit Fareed Zakaria in 2007. “We summarily deposed not just Saddam Hussein but a centuries-old ruling elite and then were stunned that they reacted poorly.”

That thoroughgoing purge, along with the literal dismantling of the Iraqi army, generated a deep distrust of the American occupation and provided an instant pool of recruits for any militant resistance, fueling an all-out war.

The good news is that since Trumpism has only been a governing ideology for three years, it hasn’t (yet) penetrated the civil service or the military to the degree that Baathism dominated the Iraqi government and armed forces. Since Trump appointees don’t form a particularly deep state, however much Trump would have liked to create one of his own, no Iraq-style resistance is on the horizon.

The judiciary is another matter. The roughly 200 judges that Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have already managed to appoint for life will do their best to block all attempts to deconstruct Trumpism. If it can be shown that any of these judges engaged in serious ethical or criminal misconduct, then impeachment would be an option. However, you can’t impeach judges just because you don’t like their rulings (though some Republican legislators did try to do just that in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago).

Instead of attempting to remove individual judges, it would be more strategic to go after their ideological backer, the Federalist Society, an uber-conservative legal organization that has functioned as a judicial matchmaker for Trump, providing him with a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. All but eight of his federal appellate court picks have been members of the society.

You can’t outlaw a legal society, however lunatic its interpretation of the Constitution may be. However, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who’s on the Judiciary Committee, proposes to make it illegal for judges to be members of the Federalist Society. An added benefit: such a move would also go after the big money behind the attempted right-wing takeover of the court system because, as Whitehouse points out, “the Federalist Society is at the center of a network of dark-money-funded conservative organizations whose purpose is to influence court composition and outcomes.”

Detoxifying the court system is crucial not only for reversing Trump’s regressive policies but for clearing the way to prosecute him for his wrongdoing.

Hauling them into court At Nuremberg after World War II, the Allied victors put nearly 200 Nazis on trial for various crimes: 161 were convicted and 37 sentenced to death. The precedents established there and at other war crimes trials have guided contemporary tribunals culminating in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

It would be satisfying if the U.S. government could give Donald Trump and some of his top aides to the ICC for their violations of international law at the U.S.-Mexico border, the assassination of the head of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and similar actions. But that’s unimaginable even for a government led by President Joe Biden in which the Democrats had a veto-proof majority in the Senate. So it will be up to the American courts to charge and convict Trump, which has so far failed to happen, despite some cases related to his tax returns and allegations of sexual assault still inching forward.

The Nuremberg process developed new standards to prosecute the Nazis. Since the barriers have grown high indeed, the Trumpian opposition would have to get more creative to make sure that Trump goes to jail.

As soon as he is no longer president, federal prosecutors should label Donald Trump and his top associates an ongoing criminal organization and begin the process of bringing them to justice under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. For years, after all, the president has been acting like a mafia godfather, demanding loyalty, bullying competitors, and scorning “rats.” Last year, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee laid out in graphic detail ways in which the president and his gang were guilty of racketeering: bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice, and the like.

The House of Representatives impeached the president, but with the help of his Republican enablers, he managed to avoid removal from office. Getting read the RICO Act, on the other hand, could leave him facing years in prison and the Trump Organization would be liable for treble damages as compensation for victims. As Forbes contributor Steve Denning concluded during the impeachment proceedings:

While impeachment would obviously be a severe personal sanction for Donald Trump, convicting the Trump Organization as a RICO enterprise could be far worse. If Trump is ‘only’ impeached, he could always go back to his family business, sadder but perhaps wiser. But if the Trump Organization were to be convicted as a criminal enterprise under the RICO Act, there might be no business for Trump to go back to.

U.S. diplomat Herbert Pell, instrumental in bringing war-crimes charges against the Nazis during World War II, saw “how Confederate veterans in the South had created for themselves a misty-eyed mythology about the U.S. Civil War and was determined that the Nazis would not do the same.” As Dan Plesch explained in his study of international war crimes tribunals, “Pell’s motivation was to prevent postwar nostalgia for the Nazis breeding more war.”

Putting Trump on trial would not only remove him from the political equation but could effectively delegitimize Trumpism and prevent a second round of it from occurring.

The popularity of Trumpism Nazism didn’t die with Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the collapse of his regime, or those convictions at Nuremberg. More than 10% of the German population had belonged to the Nazi Party. Early efforts at denazification sputtered out largely because the United States and its allies needed a stable, prosperous Germany at the heart of Cold War Europe — and Germany quietly allowed former Nazis to remain in every echelon of society. Seven years after the war, for instance, 60% of the civil servants in Bavaria were former Nazis.

Nazi ideology was even more difficult to root out. According to a public opinion survey conducted in West Germany in 1947, 55% percent of those living under the U.S. occupation believed that “National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.” Worse yet, the majority of those in this category were under 30, not just the old guard.

As bizarre as Donald Trump might be, Trumpism itself is not a new American phenomenon. The difference is that the far right never before had such access to power, not during the George W. Bush era, not even during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It always remained on the margins, kept alive by the likes of the John Birch Society, the occasional extreme member of Congress, and weirdo talk show hosts like Alex Jones of InfoWars.

The danger of Trump lies in his remarkable capacity to mainstream views that previously had been beyond the pale (at least in official Washington). A significant number of Americans feel liberated, thanks to his imprimatur, to give voice to the worst angels of their nature. Transforming such deep-seated belief systems represents quite a different challenge than changing the guard in the Oval Office and beyond. After all, democratic societies don’t send people off to reeducation camps. Certain communities, like universities, can legislate against hate speech, but it’s people’s hearts and minds, not just their tongues, that must be reached.

To do so, it’s imperative to separate the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters from the illegitimate ones. Yes, “bad hombres” are attracted to Trump’s racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, but many of the disenfranchised who voted for him were motivated by a disgust at political elites and the raging economic inequality they produced in this land. After the triple whammy of the coronavirus pandemic (and its disproportionate impact on the working poor), the economic semi-collapse that followed its spread (and the disproportionate benefits Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other billionaires drew from it), and an epidemic of police violence (visited on people of color), more and more Americans are coming to feel that the status quo is simply unacceptable. They’re disgusted by Republican duplicity but also by the Democrats’ version of business as usual.

Because Trumpism is a cancer on the body politic, the treatment will require radical interventions, including the transformation of the Republican Party, a purge of Trumpists from government, and the indictment of the president and his top cronies as a criminal enterprise. To avoid a second Civil War, however, a second American Revolution would need to address the root causes of Trumpism, especially political corruption, deep-seated racism, and extreme economic inequality.

Otherwise, even if The Donald loses this election, the political creature he represents will rise from the ashes and eventually return to power (President Tom Cotton? President Ivanka?!). America can’t survive another civil war, but neither can it afford another failed Reconstruction, a half-hearted de-Trumpification of America, and a return to the previous status quo.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). John is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.

Copyright ©2020 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 June 2020

Word Count: 3,559

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In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally — or is it once again? — confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening.

Yet to state the obvious, we’ve been here before. Mass protests in response to racial inequality and discrimination, including police brutality, have been anything but unknown in the United States. Much the same can be said of riots targeting black Americans, fomented and exploited by white racists, often actively or passively abetted by local law enforcement officials. If Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was correct in calling violence “as American as cherry pie,” then race-related urban unrest is the apple-filled equivalent.

The optimists among us believe that “this time is different.” I hope events will prove them right. Yet recalling expectations that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 signaled the dawn of a “post-racial America,” I see no reason to expect it to be so. A yawning gap, I fear, separates hope from reality.

Let me suggest, however, that the nation’s current preoccupation with race, as honorable and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.

MLK defines the problem In April 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King delivered a sermon that offered a profound diagnosis of the illnesses afflicting the nation. His analysis remains as timely today as it was then, perhaps more so.

Americans remember King primarily as a great civil rights leader and indeed he was that. In his Riverside Church address, however, he turned to matters that went far beyond race. In an immediate sense, his focus was the ongoing Vietnam War, which he denounced as “madness” that “must cease.” Yet King also used the occasion to summon the nation to “undergo a radical revolution of values” that would transform the United States “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Only through such a revolution, he declared, would we be able to overcome “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

The challenge confronting Americans was to dismantle what King referred to as the “edifice” that produced and sustained each of those giant triplets. Today’s protesters, crusading journalists, and engaged intellectuals make no bones about their determination to eliminate the first of those giant triplets. Yet they generally treat the other two as, at best, mere afterthoughts, while the edifice itself, resting on a perverse understanding of freedom, goes almost entirely ignored.

I’m not suggesting that members of the grand coalition of Americans today fervently campaigning against racism favor extreme materialism. Many of them merely accept its reality and move on. Nor am I suggesting that they consciously endorse militarism, although in confusing “support” for the troops with genuine patriotism some of them do so implicitly. What I am suggesting is that those calling for fundamental change will go badly astray if they ignore Dr. King’s insistence that each of the giant triplets is intimately tied to the other two.

Defund the Pentagon? The protests triggered by the recent murders of George Floyd and other black Americans have produced widespread demands to “defund the police.” Those demands don’t come out of nowhere. While “reform” programs undertaken in innumerable American cities over the course of many years have demonstrably enhanced police firepower, they have done little, if anything, to repair relations between police departments and communities of color.

As an aging middle-class white male, I don’t fear cops. I respect the fact that theirs is a tough job, which I would not want. Yet I realize that my attitude is one more expression of white privilege, which black men, regardless of their age and economic status, can ill afford to indulge. So I fully accept the need for radical changes in policing — that’s what “defund” appears to imply — if American cities are ever to have law enforcement agencies that are effective, humane, and themselves law-abiding.

What I can’t fathom is why a similar logic doesn’t apply to the armed forces that we employ to police huge chunks of the world beyond our borders. If Americans have reason to question the nation’s increasingly militarized approach to law enforcement, then shouldn’t they have equal reason to question this country’s thoroughly militarized approach to statecraft? 

Consider this: on an annual basis, police officers in the United States kill approximately 1,000 Americans, with blacks two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victimized. Those are appalling figures, indicative of basic policy gone fundamentally awry. So the outpouring of protest over the police and demands for change are understandable and justified.

Still, the question must be asked: Why have the nation’s post-9/11 wars not prompted similar expressions of outrage?  The unjustified killing of black Americans rightly finds thousands upon thousands of protesters flooding the streets of major cities. Yet the loss of thousands of American soldiers and the physical and psychological wounds sustained by tens of thousands more in foolhardy wars elicits, at best, shrugs. Throw in the hundreds of thousands of non-American lives taken in those military campaigns and the trillions of taxpayer dollars they have consumed and you have a catastrophe that easily exceeds in scale the myriad race-related protests and riots that have roiled American cities in the recent past.

With their eyes fixed on elections that are now just months away, politicians of all stripes spare no effort to show that they “get it” on the issue of race and policing. Race may well play a large role in determining who wins the White House this November and which party controls Congress. It should. Yet while the election’s final outcome may be uncertain, this much is not: neither the American propensity for war, nor the bloated size of the Pentagon budget, nor the dubious habit of maintaining a sprawling network of military bases across much of the planet will receive serious scrutiny during the political season now underway. Militarism will escape unscathed.

At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then, except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to “defund” the Pentagon?

King considered the Vietnam War an abomination. At that time, more than a few Americans agreed with him and vigorously demonstrated against the conflict’s continuation. That today’s demonstrators have seemingly chosen to file away our post-9/11 military misadventures under the heading of regrettable but forgettable is itself an abomination. While their sensitivity to racism is admirable, their indifference to war is nothing short of disheartening.

In 1967, Dr. King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” During the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness.

America’s national signature Given their size and duration, the protests occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have been remarkably peaceful. That said, some of them did, early on, include rioters who resorted to looting. Smashing windows and ransacking stores, they walked off not with milk and bread for the hungry, but with shopping bags filled with high-end swag — designer shoes and sneakers, purses, clothing, and jewelry lifted from stores like Prada and Alexander McQueen. Also stolen were smart phones, handguns, even automobiles. In-store surveillance systems recorded scenes reminiscent of Black Friday doorbuster sales, though without anyone bothering to pass through a checkout counter. Some looters quickly attempted to monetize their hauls by offering to sell purloined items online.

Certain right-wing commentators wasted no time in using the looting to tar the protest movement as little more than an expression of nihilism. Tucker Carlson of Fox News was particularly emphatic on this point. Americans taking to the streets in response to George Floyd’s murder, he said, “reject society itself.”

“Reason and process and precedent mean nothing to them. They use violence to get what they want immediately. People like this don’t bother to work. They don’t volunteer or pay taxes to help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing… On television, hour by hour, we watch these people — criminal mobs — destroy what the rest of us have built…”

To explain such selfish and destructive misconduct, Carlson had an answer readily at hand:

“The ideologues will tell you that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it’s far darker. What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it.

This is vile, hateful stuff, and entirely wrong — except perhaps on one point. In attributing the looting to a deeper cause, Carlson was onto something, even if his effort to pinpoint that cause was wildly off the mark.

I won’t try to unravel the specific motives of those who saw an opportunity in the protests against racism to help themselves to goods that were not theirs. How much was righteous anger turned to rage and how much cynical opportunism is beyond my ability to know.

This much, however, can be said for certain: the grab-all-you-can-get impulse so vividly on display was as all-American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. Those looters, after all, merely wanted more stuff. What could be more American than that? In this country, after all, stuff carries with it the possibility of personal fulfillment, of achieving some version of happiness or status.

The looters that Tucker Carlson targeted with his ire were doing anything but “rejecting society itself.” They were merely helping themselves to what this society today has on offer for those with sufficient cash and credit cards in their wallets. In a sense, they were treating themselves to a tiny sip of what passes these days for the American Dream.

With the exception of cloistered nuns, hippies, and other vanishing breeds, virtually all Americans have been conditioned to buy into the proposition that stuff correlates with the good life. Unconvinced? Check out the videos from last year’s Black Friday and then consider the intense, if unsurprising, interest of economists and journalists in tracking the latest consumer spending trends. At least until Covid-19 came along, consumer spending served as the authoritative measure of the nation’s overall health.

The primary civic obligation of U.S. citizens today is not to vote or pay taxes. And it’s certainly not to defend the country, a task offloaded onto those who can be enticed to enlist (with minorities vastly overrepresented) in the so-called All-Volunteer Military. No, the primary obligation of citizenship is to spend.

Ours is not a nation of mystics, philosophers, poets, artisans, or Thomas Jefferson’s yeomen farmers. We are now a nation of citizen-consumers, held in thrall to the extreme materialism that Dr. King decried. This, not a commitment to liberty or democracy, has become our true national signature and our chief contribution to late modernity.

Tearing down the edifice At Riverside Church, King reminded his listeners that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he had helped to found a decade earlier, had chosen this as its motto: “To save the soul of America.” The soul of a nation corrupted by racism, militarism, and extreme materialism represented King’s ultimate concern. Vietnam, he said, was “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

In a tone-deaf editorial criticizing his Riverside Church sermon, the New York Times chastised King for “fusing two public problems” — racism and the Vietnam War — “that are distinct and separate.” Yet part of King’s genius lay in his ability to recognize the interconnectedness of matters that Times editors, as oblivious to deeper maladies then as they are today, wish to keep separate. King sought to tear down the edifice that sustained all three of those giant triplets. Indeed, it is all but certain that, were he alive now, he would call similar attention to a fourth related factor: climate change denial. The refusal to treat seriously the threat posed by climate change underwrites the persistence of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

During the course of his sermon, King quoted this sentence from the statement of a group that called itself the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Regarding race, it appears that the great majority of Americans have now rejected such silence. This is good. It remains an open question, however, when their silent acceptance of militarism, materialism, and the abuse of Planet Earth will end.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 June 2020

Word Count: 2,179

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Recently, in this Black Lives Matter protest moment, my five-year-old son looked at me and asked, “Mommy, where did all the brown people go? Did the police here shoot them?”

We’d just moved to the outskirts of a more affluent rural town from a city where my son and three-and-a-half-year-old daughter mixed daily with black, Latino, and Asian American kids and were among a minority of whites at their preschool. Now, it was whites to the horizon: the white UPS guy, the white neighbors nearly a mile away on either side of us, the white motorcycle gangs zooming down the road in front of our house, sometimes sporting confederate flags on their seatbacks.

As I fumbled to explain racism, the general mistreatment of people of color, income inequality, and redlining in the simplest terms I could imagine, my son tried to clarify things: “So white people steal? Is that what they use the guns for?”

In his young life he’s already absorbed way too much talk of guns, bombs, weapons, and war thanks to the news he catches in passing, as well as discussions of my husband’s work on nuclear and ballistic-missile submarines and now as a Pentagon official, not to speak of my own work as a therapist in military communities, a human rights activist, and the co-founder of the Costs of War Project. I think, by now, he assumes that things in this country happen mainly thanks to the brute force of white guys with guns.

At his young age, he already struggles regularly with thoughts about how it feels to be treated badly because of the way you look. Late the other night, when he should have been asleep, he called me in and asked, “Mommy, what does it feel like when someone kneels on your neck?” And when, while riding in our car with the radio news on, he heard about the pepper spraying of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House, he asked, “Was that coronavirus they were spraying? Does that make you not breathe, too? Is the world bad?”

Later, he wondered aloud: “Does daddy have a gun? Is he scared?”

I guess it’s logical enough for the child of a man who has served on three subs and an aircraft carrier during his 17-year naval career to assume that the people with power and the mandate to kill are white men. Certainly, whenever we’ve attended a Navy gathering, we invariably face a sea of white officers and their white, J.Crew-clad wives.

And — not to cast aspersions — the four of us look as if we belong on the cover of a Muesli box with our pale skin, fair hair, and long, well-nourished limbs. The rare people of color we’ve come to know among the officer class in the Navy have had their own stories to tell about the commonplace nature of the racial slurs like “raghead” they’ve heard in the service and of being threatened with racially motivated violence by peers and higher-ups alike, sometimes under the guise of “training” exercises.

To report such threatened or actual violence is usually futile in the submarine force, as to do so you have to identify your rank and so open yourself up to further retribution. In other words, my son is already experiencing a system in which 43% of the men and women on active duty are people of color and yet, in practice, one that has regularly culled its officer class down to white men, as Helene Cooper’s recent striking investigative piece in the New York Times made all too clear.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that my son and other children like him tend to assume that the bad things that happen in this country do so through violence, armed and otherwise. Like more or less everyone in the U.S. now, he knows that George Floyd died on a street corner in Minneapolis because a police officer knelt on his neck. In my son’s short life, he’s also experienced a military world in which old missiles are painted bright colors and repurposed as street lamps and benches at military bases, not to speak of seeing whiskey bottles in our own dining room shaped like ballistic missile submarines.

At three, I remember him standing beside me as I anxiously watched the nightly news during one of his father’s sea deployments to an unknown location, as Donald Trump threatened to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on the Korean peninsula. I’ve found him looking over my shoulder as I sifted through photographs of burnt and bloody Iraqi and Afghan children in my work for the Costs of War Project. Relatives have snuck G.I. Joe figurines into some of the toy trucks they’ve given him as gifts — in their quest to one day make him “like his daddy.” And let’s not forget the active-shooter drills that were a regular part of preschool until Covid-19 struck, making the threat of weaponry an aspect of any child’s life away from home (and dodging them a kind of game).

Even at his young age, my son has been interested indeed in finding out what violence feels like to those who experience it and to its perpetrators as well. He zoned out during Sesame Street’s town-hall style program that attempted to explain American racism by having Big Bird teased for his size and color (a show that, by the way, didn’t explain slavery). Yet he was riveted when Nickelodeon stopped its programming for eight minutes and 46 seconds.

Most white parents assume that their children need to be sheltered from truths central to how our country is run and how it feels to so many. In the world of military families I’ve lived in for so long, however, as (to a far greater degree) in civilian communities of color, reckoning every day with what violations of your body will feel like is part of life itself.

One veteran’s story The threat of armed violence shapes the major life decisions of so many people of color today. I recently interviewed retired Marine enlistee Affraz Mohammed. He has written eloquently of his path as a Trinidadian-Muslim immigrant of Indian descent, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1980s and 1990s, into the U.S. Marines. There, before 9/11, he became well enough respected to be assigned as an escort to high-ranking diplomats at President George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, but the road to that moment (and thereafter) would be hell indeed.

Affraz Mohammed decided to join the military on the assumption that he would die young anyway if he stayed where he lived. “In the community I grew up in,” as he put it, “there wasn’t much opportunity. We had a crack epidemic. If I died in my neighborhood, the government wasn’t going to pay for my funeral.”

After all, his neighbor, the cousin of his best friend, shot his two cousins in an act of violence Mohammed still doesn’t understand. “There were guns lying on the ground there because drug dealers stashed them in abandoned buildings. It was like stepping on candy, because that was your self-protection.” To him, joining the military seemed to offer more hope of a future than staying in his neighborhood. At least in the Marines there would be “rules of engagement” when it came to using a rifle.

His journey through boot camp, however, would prove anything but easy. Drill instructors placed sandbags around his bunk (“to make me feel more at home”), called him a “towel head,” and punched him. “My meanest boot camp drill sergeant told me that one day I would understand why I was treated this way.”

After 9/11, he would indeed find out. He would be arrested in a sting operation for purchasing a then-illegal automatic rifle from another Marine. He had only wanted a pistol, but the seller arrived with what he claimed was a legal semi-automatic rifle, and offered him a good price for it. As soon as the deal was completed, he was, as he wrote in a piece for the New York Times, “swarmed and arrested by government agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Held in a prison in Alexandria, Virginia, he was not informed of the charges against him (which would fall apart at his future trial, the jury concluding that he was lied to and entrapped). He was, he says, raped there before being sent back to pretrial detention at Marine Corps Base Quantico. During that time, fellow Marines watching over him treated him as a “terrorist,” threatened his life, forced him to do menial tasks like picking up pubic hairs in the public bathroom using tweezers, and continued to sling racial slurs at him. “They called me Taliban Marine, Sand Nigger, Taliban Faggot, and more.”

Despite such treatment, Mohammed told me, “the military was hard, but growing up in the United States was harder. Even fellow Muslims at my local mosque treated me like an outsider because I was not Arab. Now, the FBI officials watching me want to know all about my connections with local mosques where I was never really accepted anyway.” Calls and in-person check-ins from the FBI have continued both for him and the Veterans Administration therapist treating him for the post-traumatic stress disorder he got from his time in the military.

“I learned to keep going even though it’s tough.” Other service members of color regularly suffer, even if not as severely as Mohammed did. Research by the Costs of War Project has, for instance, documented the way people of Arab and South Asian descent were profiled en masse and mistreated after the 9/11 attacks.

Of one thing there can be no question: the U.S. military like the rest of American society is infused with racism and yet service members of color like Mohammed often enough join anyway to steel themselves against the more unpredictable racist horrors of American life. In one military community where my family and I once lived, for example, I met a Mexican-American veteran who had served in a wartime Air Force unit in Vietnam. I still remember him telling me that he felt more affinity for the people he was shooting at than for members of his own command, most of whom were white. He spoke in anguished terms of then-candidate Trump’s warning that there would be “taco trucks on every corner” if this country didn’t severely restrict immigration. His parents, he told me, owned a Mexican restaurant and that was how the family survived. Through his military service, he added, “I learned I mattered even if it wasn’t recognized outside. I learned to keep going even though it’s tough.”

By all accounts, it is tough. And the boot camp of life for people of color begins early in this country. Once, when I mentioned to a black friend that my kids didn’t seem to notice differences in race at their preschool, she responded, “Well, I bet that the black kids notice differences.”

Not long after, while dropping my kids off one day, I noticed an African-American staff member yelling at two black girls struggling over a doll. “Sit down, right now!” she insisted. Her tone was harsher than commands I’ve seen given in the military. Unnoticed, I’ve watched the same woman discipline my white child in a similar dispute by commenting on how great the toy was that he and the other child were fighting over before counseling them both on how to take turns. In that way, I feel I saw a tiny example in the lives of those preschool children of the boot camp of black life in America.

In an NPR interview, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker described an all-American “tradition” of elderly black men teaching their kids “how to protect their black bodies from racism manifested in the most evil of ways, which is murder.”

The end goal of such a boot camp: keeping such kids safe from white peers, coaches, the police, future bosses, or anyone likely to find them “out of place” and capable of hurting them in response.

Home front or war zone As a military spouse and therapist, it’s clear to me that, these days, whether people of color or not, active-duty servicemen and women, as well as veterans, generally face a host of difficulties in this country. They range from problems accessing much needed responsive healthcare services to social isolation from a civilian population that understands little about their experiences, to chronic illnesses and injuries they suffer, to repeated deployments in America’s forever wars.

Now, add to all that the current showdown between highly militarized police and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the president’s deployment of the National Guard and his threats to deploy federal troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C. (and elsewhere). As one Washington therapist who works with military service members and their families told me, many veterans find that memories of combat are triggered by the sight of police in military-style equipment facing down crowds of civilians and, in response, they socially isolate themselves more.

For some veterans, when the home front starts to look like a war zone and fears rise that the Trump administration will use force against peaceful citizens, it feels like a new red line has been crossed. As Affraz Mohammed told me, “When the veterans of these wars come home, they won’t understand what’s going on. They are not used to a hostile environment at home. They want to come home. They turn the light switch off when they go home. What’s going to happen when they’ve got to turn it on again?”

As illustrated by an NPR interview with that rarest of figures, black retired Major General Dana Pittard, Mohammed is not the only person of color who worries that the very civil liberties he’s fought to protect are at risk in the United States as our endless wars in distant lands continue to come home. (“I was very concerned with even the threat of using active duty military to quell the protests.”) After all, those heavily white police forces, now facing off against Black Lives Matter demonstrators in cities and towns across the country, are equipped at this point with about $1.8 billion dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied military gear, including mine-resistant vehicles and grenade launchers. (Since that Pentagon program began in 1997, $7.4 billion worth of such stuff has been handed out.) A 2017 study found that cities where the police had received such military gear had more civilian deaths than those that hadn’t.

In the present context, my own family members, unlike General Pittard and some of the parents of my child clients, aren’t afraid for our lives or those of our children, not here in the U.S.A. That’s what racism means at the deepest level in a still white-dominated military in a still white-dominated country. Yet, as the United States comes ever more to resemble a war zone in a pandemic moment, in a country run by a president with autocratic inclinations, amid a surge of protest over racism, the home front could indeed become a war front. Then, among military families at least, the experiences of so many people of color and their children could come to seem more familiar. If those in uniform continue to be the aggressors against black, brown, and white protesters, including children, where will any of us find a safe haven?

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 June 2020

Word Count: 2,582

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Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which America’s streets were essentially empty, they’ve suddenly filled, day after day, with youthful protesters, bringing back a version of a moment I remember from my youth and that’s a hopeful (if also, given Covid-19, a scary) thing, even if I’m an old man in isolation in this never-ending pandemic moment of ours.

In such isolation, no wonder I have the urge to rant. Our present American world, after all, was both deeply unimaginable — before 2016, no one could have conjured up President Donald Trump as anything but a joke — and yet in some sense, all too imaginable. Think of it this way: the president who launched his candidacy by descending a Trump Tower escalator to denounce Mexican “rapists” and hype the “great, great wall” he would build, the man who, in his election campaign, promised to put a “big, fat, beautiful wall” across our southern border to keep out immigrants (“invaders!”) — my grandpa, by the way, was just such an invader — has, after nearly three and a half years, succeeded only in getting a grotesquely small wall built around the White House; in other words, he’s turned the “people’s house” into a micro-Green Zone in a Washington that, as it filled with National Guard troops and unidentified but militarized police types, was transformed into a Trumpian version of occupied Baghdad. Then he locked himself inside (except for that one block walk to a church through streets forcibly emptied of protesters). All in all, a single redolent phrase from our recent past comes to mind: mission accomplished!

From the second the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to the spread of Covid-19, developments on this planet have been remarkably inconceivable and yet strangely predictable. Can you even remember that distant moment, almost three decades ago, when a stunned Washington political establishment (since its members had never imagined a world without the other Cold War superpower) suddenly found themselves alone on Planet Earth, freed to do their damnedest in a world lacking enemies of any sort? The globe seemed to be there for the taking, lock, stock, and barrel.

Their promised post-Cold War “peace dividend,” however, would involve arming the U.S. military to the teeth, expanding the country’s “intelligence” agencies until there were (count ’em!) 17 of them, bolstering an already vast national security state, and dispatching this country’s generals to fight “forever wars” that would unsettle the planet, while conquering nothing at all. The folly of this in such a moment on such a planet should have been obvious. And in fact, it was. In early 2003, facing only one small terrorist group and a completely concocted three-nation “axis of evil,” President George W. Bush decided to order the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Sensing what was coming, millions of people poured into the streets of cities worldwide to tell him the obvious: don’t do it! (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” a typical protest sign of that moment read.) Of those millions, however, not one dreamed that, 13 years later, as a result of Bush’s decision to ignore them, this country, or at least its Electoral College, would put in the White House a president who would essentially launch the invasion of America.

What else do you need to know about our mad moment than that the president of the land that had, for so long, fought a “war on terror” would call the all-American protesters once again turning out in the streets of hundreds of cities and towns in vast numbers “terrorists”? He would then label a 75-year-old white man shoved over by two cops in Buffalo, New York, and left bleeding on the ground as they walked away an “ANTIFA provocateur.” (He’s still in the hospital.) In this fashion, with the police armed to the teeth with weaponry and equipment off the battlefields of America’s forever wars and George Floyd literally breathless thanks to one of those policemen, the war on terror would come home big time.

Think of it this way: we Americans, the greatest power in history, the ultimate unchallenged victors on this planet as the last century ended, are now living in a disease-ridden parody version of occupied Iraq and my own generation is officially responsible.

A flattened planet Outside that Green Zone in Washington, an age, a system, even a planet as we’ve known it may all be ending and that shouldn’t be taken in without emotion. So many things aren’t obvious when they should be. Still, to give myself a tad of credit, in the years after the invasion of Iraq, I did at least sense that this single superpower world of ours was some kind of sham. In October 2012, for instance, I suggested that

 

one thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet. Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces… Given the lack of enemies — a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers — why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.

I added, however, that “the end of the Cold War, which put an end… to several centuries of imperial or great power competition… left the sole ‘victor,’ it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation.”

Now, those exits are truly in sight and the self-congratulation that once filled Washington has been ceded to the walled-in occupant of the Oval Office in a country visibly in dismay and disarray. With a regime that not only has autocratic tendencies but also a remarkable urge to take the planet down environmentally (and possibly via nuclear arms as well), it’s easier to see just how disastrous the post-1991 “sole superpower’s” decisions really were.

Hopeful as the grit and determination of those Black Lives Matter protesters may be in the face of police violence and repression, not to speak of the nastiest virus in memory, we’re also at what looks increasingly like one of those moments when worlds do end and it didn’t have to be this way.

After all, in a cocoon of seemingly ultimate triumphalism, those who were running the post-1991 American global system did anything — to steal a word from journalist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World Is Flat — but flatten the world they inherited (as in creating a more level playing field of any sort). In fact, the American powers-that-be promptly put their energy into creating the least level playing field imaginable. In it, a single country, the United States, would invest more money in its military than the next 10 powers combined and, by 2017, three Americans would have more wealth than the bottom half of this society. Meanwhile, the wealth of 162 global billionaires would equal that of half of humanity. It was a world in which, once the coronavirus pandemic struck causing almost unspeakable economic disaster, those billionaires would once again make a rather literal killing — another half-trillion dollars-plus.

So Friedman was right, but only if by “flat” he meant the four flat tires on the American Humvee.

Here, in fact, was the strange reality of that moment of ultimate triumph in 1991: the American political ruling class, the people who had seemingly won it all, would prove remarkably brain-dead in a way few grasped then or we wouldn’t be in Donald Trump’s America today. Back then, the one thing they couldn’t imagine in a world without the Soviet Union was an all-American world of flatness, peace, and democracy.

The only thing they could imagine was another version of the militarized style of dominance that had long characterized the American Century, to use the famous phrase Life and Time publisher Henry Luce first put into the language in 1941. Those managing the imperial system that had dotted the planet with military garrisons in a historically unprecedented fashion, while creating a global economy centered on the accumulation of staggering wealth and power, had no idea that the United States would prove to be the second superpower victim of the end of the Cold War.

Saying goodbye to the American Century Now, let me truly launch that rant of mine — and note that there will be no more section breaks or breathing room. After all, that’s the nature of a rant in an era in which the man in the Oval Office is quite capable of running the country (into the ground) while tweeting or retweeting 200 times in a single day. Hey, what the hell else is there to do as the president of these disunited states, except tweet, watch Fox News, and disunite them further?

So take my word for it, more or less 75 years after it began, the American Century is over. So long! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Zaijian!

Having been born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler (and not much else in history), I’ve lived through just about all of that “century” and I’m still here. And yet think of this as an autopsy because the body (of my hopes and those of my generation) now lies in the morgue and a skilled medical examiner should be able to discover just what it died of.

Who knew what I really hoped for back then? I mean, you’re talking to a guy who can still remember reading quite a range of books, but not what was in many of them. So who knows, half a century or so ago, what exactly was in me? After all, I was then the equivalent of a book that I carried around endlessly but never stopped to fully read.

We’re talking about the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years when, for the first time in my life, however briefly, I suddenly felt strangely at home (and also movingly out of place) in this American world of ours. In the late 1960s, the radical politics of that moment blew me out of graduate school where, of all things, I was studying to be a China scholar at Harvard University. Yes, the Ming and Ching dynasties (rather than the Trump dynasty) then had my attention… until, of course, they didn’t. Those were the years when I suddenly became deeply aware that the American world I’d been brought up to admire (even if, in my childhood, my parents seemed to be having an awfully tough time in it) was deeply awry. And it tells you something about this white boy that it wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement that truly brought that home to me (though it should have been, of course) but an all-American conflict and slaughter taking place thousands of miles away.

Called the Vietnam War, it was a brutal American folly in the divided Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in which millions would die and it would unsettle my mind, my life, my being. Somehow, in those years, as I’ve also written elsewhere, it came to seem as if Vietnamese were being killed right outside my window in peaceful Cambridge, Massachusetts. While I would never end up in the U.S. military — my draft files were destroyed at the time by an activist group that called itself Women Against Daddy Warbucks — I would be mobilized into an anti-military, antiwar movement filled in a fashion unimaginable today with dissenting soldiers, many of whom had fought in Vietnam.

I was swept up by the idea of a better world that I began to imagine might actually come to pass. How naïve I was!

Had you told me at that moment that everything we then dreamt of beyond the ending of that terrible set of American wars would essentially go down in flames; that the U.S. would, in the ensuing nearly half-century, fight two endless conflicts in another Asian land, Afghanistan — one in a kind of open secrecy, the second (now nearly two decades old) in plain sight even as it turns into a pandemic war; that, in this century, my country would invade not only Afghanistan but Iraq and fight a war on “terror” across much of what once would have been known as the Third World; and that all of this would happen without — except for one brief moment — anyone out in the streets protesting or paying much attention at all (except to eternally “thank” the non-conscripted soldiers fighting in those wars), I would have thought you were nuts.

If you had told me that the president of the United States, a man of my generation, would be a narcissistic, autocratic-leaning, utterly self-obsessed version of whatever anyone who mattered to him wanted him to be, a man ready, even eager, to call troops from those distant wars onto American streets to put down a sudden surge of protest amid a viral pandemic and an economic collapse similar to the Great Depression, only to find himself opposed by the very generals, each whiter than the next, who fought the disastrous forever wars that paved his way to power (and that they would be greeted as saviors in the liberal media), I would have thought you mad as a hatter.

And here’s the saddest thing of all from my perspective: if those young people now in the streets can’t perform genuine miracles — and not just when it comes to racism — if they can’t sooner or later turn their mobilized attention to the planet-destroying side of the American ruling class, then forget about it. This world will be heading into a heat hell.

That my generation, whether in the form of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, would be responsible for turning imperial America into an autocratic-leaning, collapsing semi-democracy, and a first-class world annihilator, I would have found hard to imagine. If you had told me that, half a century into the future, the world’s fate would rest on a presidential election between a genuine madman and something close to a dead man (that, for all we know, may not prove to be an election at all), I would have dismissed you out of hand.

And yet that, it seems, is the pandemic legacy of my generation for which we should all be ashamed, even as we watch the young, driven by the insanity and inanity of it all, turning out in our diseased streets to protest a country coming apart at the seams.

Think of Donald Trump as the American imperial establishment’s ultimate gift to humanity. Yes, they were as shocked and horrified as so many of the rest of us when he won the 2016 election, but they created the perfect America for him to do so. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t both built a world that was desperately unflat and been so destructive in the process of unflattening it. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t launched almost 20 years of disastrous, never-ending wars across parts of Asia, the Greater Middle East, and much of Africa under the heading of the war on terror, conflicts that did indeed bring terror to vast populations and spawn a sea of uprooted refugees who helped spark a new right-wing “populism” across Europe and here. (Remember Donald Trump’s Muslim ban!)

It should have been obvious that, in some fashion, those wars and their failed generals would all come home.

Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if the Republicans, once the party of the environment, hadn’t become the party of billionaires and oil magnates. Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if George W. Bush hadn’t insisted on invading Iraq. Donald Trump couldn’t have happened if Barack Obama, a president who understood climate change as well as anyone imaginable, hadn’t been willing to look the other way while the fracking revolution took place and this country briefly became Saudi America. The oceans are now heating in an unprecedented fashion, storms intensifying, sea levels rising, floods increasing in intensity, the Arctic burning in an unprecedented fashion, wildfires growing wilder, and a genuine pyromaniac is in the White House.

The American century is ending decisively with a first-class declinist inside Washington’s Green Zone. My small suggestion: don’t hold your breath for the Chinese century either. I doubt it’s coming.

Whatever happens tomorrow or next week, or next month, or next year, despite the rare gleam of hope those young protesters offer, we are deep in the age of disappointment on (as Donald Trump has only accentuated) an increasingly disposable planet.

So here’s something I wonder about: thirty or forty years from now, when I’m long gone, will there be a modern Edward Gibbon around to write a multi-volume classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire? And will she emerge from that movement of young people now in the streets denouncing racism? And will that movement be transformed somehow into a planetary one of people of every age determined to trump the Trumps of our world and save a planet worth saving by forever burying all those fossil fuels and the criminal companies that produce them, or will the dreams of my generation have turned into the nightmare of all times? Will this not just be the end of that foreshortened American century, but — in the deepest sense of the word — the age of disappointment?

And now, for that rant of mine…

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 June 2020

Word Count: 2,952

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In 1964, an 18-year-old New York Military Academy first baseman named Don Trump slammed a game-winning home run against Cornwall High School that perked the interest of scouts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox. No question about it — the big kid was a professional prospect!

That same year, a 25-year-old New York Yankees pitcher named Jim Bouton, an All-Star the previous season, won two World Series games against the St. Louis Cardinals. Hall of Fame, here we come!

Neither of those hotshots fulfilled their baseball promise. Unpacking why not might just help us survive another day without baseball at a time when — thanks to that now grownup first-baseman — we really need the diversion. And it may remind us of what we’re missing.

As you may already have guessed, Don Trump was never really a pro prospect. That home run, in fact, would prove just a foretaste of his talent for hyping himself. It never happened. He made it up. In fact, his team didn’t even play Cornwall that year. Trump, who actually was his school’s team captain, has long claimed that he was the best athlete there, a boast rarely challenged because coaches and classmates tended to praise him once it became in their best interests to do so.

And what about that Yankee phenom, nicknamed “Bulldog” by his teammates (including legendary superstar Mickey Mantle) for his ferocious tenacity on the mound? Only six years after his World Series heroics, sportswriters would be furiously writing him off as a “journeyman” ballplayer, a “social leper” who had betrayed the game to produce a “tell-all” book written for him by a lefty journalist.

This year, Jim Bouton, who died in 2019 at age 80, will get more of the acclaim owed him as a revolutionary sports figure thanks to the publication of an excellent new biography and a forthcoming 50th anniversary Kindle edition of his memoir, Ball Four, arguably the best sports book of all time. In 1999, Ball Four was, in fact, selected by the New York Public Library as one of the “Books of the Century.”

Baseball anthropology Parts of Ball Four may now seem quaint. (Who would be shocked today to discover that ballplayers of that era actually cursed, popped amphetamines, or tried to peek at women through hotel windows?) In 1970, however, that book turned the national pastime on its head. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to have it banned or at least force Bouton to declare it “fiction.” Players who didn’t bother to read it nonetheless felt violated by it or were convinced that they should feel that way. Traditional sportswriters, whose status depended on the idea that they were the only conduit fans had to the true life of the locker-room, were infuriated. They had been exposed as faux insiders.

As former Wall Street Journal reporter (and sportswriter) Stefan Fatsis said, in retrospect, “I think you can argue that Ball Four completely reshaped journalism.”

No one who’s written about Bouton’s book, however, has caught its deeper spirit better than his widow, the psychologist Paula Kurman, in an introduction to that 50th anniversary edition. “Ball Four,” she wrote, “was an extraordinary study of a strange, isolated tribe — from inside the tribe — which any anthropologist would be proud to have authored. It was a universal fable, in which our hero sets out to seek his fortune, or the Holy Grail, and must do battle with those who try to stop him. It was a man from a macho world — openly talking about his feelings and insecurities. It was a kid calling out that the Emperor had no clothes on.”

For starters, it reshaped the perceptions that many sports fans then had of their heroes. It humanized them. Not surprisingly, the book spent months on the bestseller list, less for its mildly bawdy anecdotes than for the way it reinforced the passion of baseball fans for their game. Rigorously edited (but not written) by Leonard Shecter, a progressive, uncompromising veteran of the pre-Murdoch-era New York Post, Ball Four was a strange and unexpected valentine to what was still the national pastime then. (Today, it’s undoubtedly football, a tribute to American brutality.)

Bouton’s book proved to be the sweet revelation of a True Believer’s longing to get a tighter hold on a game that had entranced him as a young man, a hold as tight as the game had on him. Even now, it feels like a warm hug and helps explain why baseball is still America’s best game, a contest without a time limit or strategic violence, a sport that adds up to a true guild of disparate talents only capable of succeeding by working collectively (no matter the mix of workingmen, thugs, and poets on the field). Think of it as a sort of dream version of America.

As it happened, however, it was a glimpse into Mickey Mantle’s alcoholism that especially upset the establishment. As Bouton told Neal Conan of NPR’s Talk of the Nation in 2012, Mantle showed up so hung over one day that the Yankee manager excused him from the game, telling him to sleep it off in the trainer’s room.

“Anyway, the game goes extra innings,” recalled Bouton. “We need a pinch-hitter in the 10th. Somebody went to wake up the Mick. He comes out, put a bat in his hands. He walks up to home plate, takes one practice swing and hits the first pitch into the left field bleachers, a tremendous blast.

“Guys are going nuts. He comes over, crosses home plate. Actually, he missed home plate. We have to send him back for that. He comes over to the dugout, and he looks up in the stands, and he says, those people don’t know how tough that really was. Then after the game, the sportswriter said, ‘Mick, how did you do that?’… And he said, ‘Well, it was very simple. I hit the middle ball.'”

For Bouton, that anecdote was his almost fanboy way of showcasing the greatness of Mantle. But for the sports establishment, media and otherwise, it represented a loss of control, a peek into the deeper reality of the game and of the human beings that made it what it was. They were particularly upset at how Bouton exposed their greed, at how many now knew how little the owners paid all but a few of their players compared to their profits. The largest salary Bouton ever earned from the Yankees was $30,000 in 1965, the year after his World Series wins, and he had to refuse to sign his contract and hold out to get it. All of this would, of course, seem far less shocking in the world of 2020 with the billionaire first-baseman who specialized in bankruptcies in the White House and a country that, in the midst of a pandemic and the equivalent of the second Great Depression, managed to make its collective crew of billionaires $565 billion richer.

Most important, Bouton’s book laid bare the unfairness of baseball’s reserve clause, which bound players to their owners in something like perpetuity. As Kevin Baxter pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, “Ball Four, fortuitously for the players union, came out the same year that St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause by refusing to accept a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a legal battle that eventually led to free agency. Bouton played a part in that, too, when he was called to read passages from his book in front of arbitrator Peter Seitz, who eventually ruled in the player’s favor.”

He would also prove to be a rare sports activist outside the game. He marched for civil rights at a time when most athletes kept their political heads down. He participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations against South Africa’s white regime when most ballplayers didn’t know what the word meant. He was even a George McGovern delegate from New Jersey, his home state, at the 1972 Democratic convention.

The knuckleballer As a player, Bouton was an unusually friendly and accessible locker-room interviewee, even for sportswriters whose hostility to him was guaranteed to find its way into print. The most affronted and belligerent of these was the controversial, right-wing New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, who claimed that Bouton had violated the sanctity of the locker room (a transgression for which he gave only himself a pass). He was the one who described Bouton as a “social leper.” When the pitcher greeted him amiably afterward, Young blurted out, “I’m glad you didn’t take it personally” (though it couldn’t have been more personally meant). That became the title of Bouton’s sequel to Ball Four.

Overused by the Yankees, he would injure his arm in his fourth season and never regain the dominance of his early Bulldog days. In a major league career that lasted 10 seasons, he would play for three more teams, trying to develop and perfect a knuckleball, a difficult pitch to deliver, without notable success. He would then go on to a successful career as a TV sportscaster and then an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. He would jokingly describe himself as a “medium celebrity,” at about the time in the 1980s when Donald Trump first made it onto the B list of anyone who was anybody in New York City. It was a wonder they never met. His wife would later tell me that he “loathed Trump from the get-go,” but by the time he was angry enough to go on the attack, his verbal and literary skills had been dimmed by cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease.

As for me, while working at the New York Times and elsewhere, I interviewed and covered Trump for more than 35 years and Bouton for almost 60 — we eventually became friends — and I can’t tell you how creepy it seems to me to put both of them in the same sentence, no less compare them. Yet they did have something in common. They were both creatures, if not creations, of the media, highly accessible and always eminently quotable. They were both suffered by journalists who didn’t like them because they were guaranteed to draw attention and provide instant colorful copy (as the president still does daily). And both were misinterpreted early.

Trump’s ponderous, dour personal style made him seem serious, almost thoughtful, when being interviewed. While it was clear enough that he had no ideology beyond making money and making his own will prevail, he was regularly characterized as a cunning man and so it was easy enough to assume that he had a master plan of some sort. In those years (as now), he schemed endlessly to attract attention, going so far then as to pretend to be a publicist, peddling his employer, one Donald Trump, while on the phone with reporters.

Bouton, on the other hand, rarely fished for publicity. He did, however, have a bubbly personality and a willingness to talk to anyone about anything, a manner that obscured the very thing he had and Donald Trump lacked: a methodical, rational mind with a highly developed sense of justice. Looking back, Paula Kurman thinks that a media tendency to characterize him as a classic tilter at windmills was a way of diminishing the passionate pragmatism of his activism. His last major quest was an attempt to save an old ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which he saw as a way to preserve history, be a gift to a city — he lived near neighboring Great Barrington — and make money. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the American world of inequality and greed we now inhabit, he struck out.

As he revealed in Ball Four, Bouton was an acute social observer (even if he also had a certain sense of elitism), mocking the dress of various ballplayers, their sloppy chewing-tobacco habits, even the way some feigned brave limps. That he could be seen as a flake was the clearest proof of how conservative, insular, and blinkered most ballplayers and reporters who covered them were, and how hidebound baseball still is.

Dueling balls Otherwise occupied, Trump has been quiet on baseball since he called for the opening of the new season in mid-April at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of his drive to restart the economy at any human cost. Even though he once played the sport, it may be too intricate, humane, slow moving, and collective for a man with as little patience as he has. It’s unlikely he’s up to speed either on the current strained negotiations between the sport’s Trumpian owners and the players for some kind of a truncated version of a 2020 season.

Whether baseball has a season or not this year, chalk up a victory for The Donald in this time of death, destruction, and protest, one that would have amused the former Yankees pitcher. The last time I checked, a signed Jim Bouton baseball cost $64.99, while one with Trump’s signature was going for $5,565.79 — only slightly less than the price for a document signed by the captain of the Titanic.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 2,181

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They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hoboken’s motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and that — first, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low rises.

Hands up! Don’t shoot!

No justice! No peace!

Say his name! George Floyd!

As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering U.S. protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahl’s real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, New York.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of our website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic — however devastating and deadly it might prove to be — I uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the world’s axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very opposite — how little foresight I actually had. It’s desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

A latter day lynching Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous nineteenth-century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black man’s face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyd’s life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Georgia. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place we’re in today?

If President Trump hadn’t cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and “liberate” their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadn’t suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

“We’re here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American city — much less similar sentiments voiced across the nation — would have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyd’s death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and America’s rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyd’s dying plea: “I can’t breathe.” In Antwerp, Leopold’s statue was set on fire and later removed.

It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopold’s Ghost, who, in the late nineteenth century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africa’s Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de siècle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congo’s population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the country’s statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

A cultural renaissance or a societal black death? Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns and — fittingly enough, given Hoboken’s startling bars-to-area ratio — half a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of twenty-first-century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like “Racism is a pandemic, too” and “Covid is not the only killer” that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didn’t cause anyone to bat an eye like “ACAB” (an acronym for “All Cops are Bastards”) or “Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop”

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading “Defund the Police” or “Abolish the Police.” Suddenly — to most of us, at least — such proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, there’s no way of knowing whether you’re on the cusp of a cultural Renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but the Earth’s orbit and axis do change and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch (where this article originated) and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright ©2020 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2020

Word Count: 1,815

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America’s pundits and politicians have largely concluded that a new Cold War with China — a period of intense hostility and competition falling just short of armed combat — has started. “Rift Threatens U.S. Cold War Against China,” as a New York Times headline put it on May 15th, citing recent clashes over trade, technology, and responsibility for the spread of Covid-19. Beijing’s decision to subject Hong Kong to tough new security laws has only further heightened such tensions. President Trump promptly threatened to eliminate that city-state’s special economic relationship with this country, while imposing new sanctions on Chinese leaders. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together to devise tough anti-Chinese sanctions of their own.

For anyone who can remember the original Cold War, the latest developments may seem eerily familiar. They bring to mind what occurred soon after America’s World War II collaboration with the Soviets collapsed in acrimony as the Russians became ever more heavy-handed in their treatment of Eastern Europe. In those days, distrust only grew, while Washington decided to launch a global drive to contain and defeat the USSR. We seem to be approaching such a situation today. Though China and the U.S. continue to maintain trade, scientific, and educational ties, the leaders of both countries are threatening to sever those links and undertake a wide range of hostile moves.

Admittedly, some of the steps being discussed in Washington to punish China for its perceived bad behavior will have little immediate impact on the lives of Americans. A lot of the threats, in fact, may turn out to be little more than good old-fashioned chest thumping. Consider, for instance, the proposal floated by the top-ranking majority and minority members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe and Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, to fund a multibillion dollar “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” intended to bolster American forces in Asia. That effort, they avowed, will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that the American people are committed to defending U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

Well, that was easy! All we, the taxpaying citizens of the United States, need to do in this opening salvo of a new Cold War is salute Congress as it funnels yet more billions of dollars to the usual defense contractors and thereby “send a signal” to Beijing that we will “defend U.S. interests” somewhere far across the globe. (Now there’s a moment to wave your American flag!)

But don’t count on such a moment lasting long, not if a new Cold War starts in earnest. A quick look back at the original one should remind us that we’ll all pay a price of some sort for intensifying hostility towards China (even if a hot war isn’t the result). Perhaps, then, it’s none too soon to consider how such a world would impact you and me.

A feeble economic recovery For most Americans, the first consequence of an intensifying Cold War could be a weaker than expected recovery from the Covid-19 economic meltdown. Anything that stands in the way of a swift rebound — and a new Cold War with China falls into that very category — would be bad news.

Unlike in the original Cold War, when Washington and Moscow maintained few economic ties, the U.S. and Chinese economies remain intertwined, contributing to the net wealth of both countries and benefiting this country’s export-oriented industries like agriculture and civilian aircraft production. Admittedly, such ties have also harmed blue-collar workers who have watched their jobs migrate across the Pacific and tech companies that have seen their intellectual property purloined by Chinese upstarts. Donald Trump stoked resentments over just such issues to get himself elected in 2016. Since then, he’s sought to disentangle the two economies, claiming we would be better off on our own. (America first!) As part of this drive, he’s already imposed stiff tariffs on Chinese imports and blocked Chinese firms from gaining access to American technology.

Feel free to argue about whether China has abused international trade rules, as Trump and his allies have charged, and whether imposing tariffs (paid for by American importers and consumers, not Chinese suppliers) is the best way to address that country’s economic rise. The key thing to note, however, is that economic growth in both places had slowed in the wake of Trump’s trade war even before Covid-19 hit. As 2019 drew to a close, in fact, the prospect of yet higher tariffs and intensified economic warfare was already dragging down the whole global economy.

And while some experts believe that a relaxation of tariffs and other steps to improve U.S.-China trade would stimulate the economy in tough times, Trump and his China hawks, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, appear to view this moment as the perfect opportunity to double down on anti-Chinese measures. The president has already hinted that he’s prepared to order yet more tariffs on Chinese products and take other steps to hasten the “decoupling” of the two economies. “There are many things we could do,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in mid-May. “We could cut off the whole relationship.”

Cut off the whole relationship? Some policymakers claim that such a decoupling would stimulate growth at home as American firms shifted manufacturing back to the United States and its close allies. This argument, however, ignores two key factors when it comes to Americans desperate for work now: first, many of the tasks currently performed by Chinese workers will be shifted to plants in Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, and other low-cost manufacturing hubs; and second, any relocation of entire production lines to this country will take years to accomplish and, in the end, undoubtedly wind up employing more robots than workers. Bottom line: economically, an intensifying Cold War is guaranteed to scuttle any chances of a rapid recovery from the Coronavirus Depression, dampening employment prospects for millions of Americans.

Military spending, not recovery stimulus And here’s another thing a new Cold War guarantees: a significant increase in military spending at a time of ballooning national debt and a desperate need for investment in domestic economic recovery.

By the end of June, unless Congress votes additional assistance, much of the $2.2 trillion in emergency pandemic relief voted by Congress will have been used up, leaving millions of jobless Americans and many small business owners in dire straits. Democrats in the House of Representatives did unveil a plan for an additional $3 trillion in emergency funding, including aid for struggling states and cities and another round of direct payments to citizens. White House officials and many Republicans insist, however, that any further giveaways to ordinary Americans will raise the federal debt to unsustainable levels (a problem that never worries them when it comes to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy). So passing anything like that stimulus package appears ever less conceivable and July may leave millions of Americans unable to pay rent as well as other essential expenses.

When it comes to increased military spending, however, Republicans have no such qualms. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has introduced a $43 billion Forging Operational Resistance to Chinese Expansion (FORCE) Act. (Nifty title, huh?) Its goal, he claims, would be to “help thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s main geopolitical aim [of] pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific [and] achieving cross-strait unification with Taiwan via military force.” It includes, among other things, $3.9 billion for another Virginia-class submarine (that’s in addition to the $4.7 billion requested for such a sub in the Pentagon’s proposed 2021 budget) and $3 billion for more of one of the most expensive weapons systems in history, the F-35 jet fighter (and that’s in addition to the $4.6 billion requested for 48 of them in that same budget).

With the Democrats desperate to demonstrate their own anti-Chinese credentials, passage of the FORCE Act, or the somewhat more modest Pacific Deterrence Initiative introduced by Senators Reed and Inhofe, appears to be a sure thing. In fact, the need for yet more military funds may prove to be the Republican rationale for rejecting calls for additional pandemic relief.

But won’t higher military spending act as an economic stimulus, just as it did during World War II when it helped lift the United States out of the Great Depression?

Indeed, passage of the FORCE Act or a variant of it will pump additional money into the economy. But today’s military-industrial complex bears little relation to the one of 80 years ago when millions of workers were mobilized to churn out thousands of tanks and planes monthly in an all-out drive to defeat Nazi Germany. Nowadays, military hardware has become so complex that most of any dollar spent on a new plane, tank, or ship goes into specialized materials and computer systems, not armies of laborers. So the billions of dollars for one new submarine and additional F-35s are likely to generate only a few thousand extra jobs, while spending the same amounts on health care or elementary school education would generate many times that number.

Conscription And then there’s the issue that should be on the minds of every young man and woman in America (along with their parents, grandparents, and loved ones): the draft.

In contrast to the original Cold War, young men in this country are no longer obliged to serve in the U.S. military, though they (and their female counterparts) may choose to do so, whether for patriotic reasons, economic need, or both. Even though the United States has been continuously involved in “forever wars” since the 9/11 attacks, the armed services have been able to use a variety of economic and educational incentives to keep the ranks filled (and avoid the public outcry over those wars that would surely have accompanied a draft). This was possible in part because the numbers of soldiers engaged in combat at any given moment was not huge in comparison to, say, the Korean or Vietnam War eras and because vast numbers of troops were no longer on tap to “contain” the Soviet Union in Europe.

A full-scale Cold War with China could, however, prove another matter entirely, even if Pentagon manpower requirements were somewhat diminished by U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. Large force deployments will undoubtedly be needed to engage in a modern version of the “containment” of China, not to speak of deterring the further adventurism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Can this be done with an all-volunteer military? Not if tensions rise with Beijing.

Count on it: at some point, the question of conscription is bound to come up. So far, the Department of Defense has not opted for reinstating the draft — a move that would require congressional approval and undoubtedly ignite intense political debate of the sort top officials would prefer to avoid right now. Still, the leadership’s overarching guidance, the National Defense Strategy of 2018, made it quite clear that the United States must expect to face years of intense rivalry with its “great power competitors” and that such an epic struggle could well require the full mobilization of America’s war-making capabilities. “Long-term strategic competition [with China and Russia],” it claimed, “requires the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power.” Conscription was not specifically mentioned, but given the new focus on a rising China and a reckless Russia, it will be on the table sooner or later.

Repression and discrimination Another feature of the original Cold War that you should expect in a new one is an environment of repression, intolerance, and discrimination. In this case, it would be against Chinese-Americans, Chinese students and researchers currently in this country, and non-Chinese viewed as in any way beholden to that power. Sadly enough, signs of this have already emerged. Officials from the FBI and the National Security Council have, for instance, been dispatched to leading Ivy League universities to warn administrators against admitting or retaining Chinese students who may be collecting scientific and technical information to share with government-sponsored institutions at home. Concurrently, some 30 Chinese professors with ties to such institutions have had their visas denied, despite a history of collaboration with American academics. In a more dramatic move, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was arrested in January for failing to report income he had received from a Chinese university.

Many American academics have criticized such actions as an assault on academic freedom. Increasingly, however, U.S. officials insist that they represent a necessary component of the new Cold War. And while those officials also insist that our adversary in this struggle is the Chinese government or people associated with it (however tangentially), many Chinese-Americans are increasingly experiencing suspicion and hostility just for being Chinese. “Chinese-Americans feel targeted, and that’s really hurtful,” said Charlie Woo, a prominent Chinese-American businessman.

The experience of the first Cold War suggests that this sort of intolerance and repression will only increase with potentially chilling effects on intellectual freedom and the already deeply unsettled racial situation in this country.

Hot war And never forget that cold wars always risk becoming hot ones. Looking back, it’s easy enough to remember those years of the U.S.-USSR standoff as a relatively war-free era, since the two superpowers were fearful that a direct conflict of any sort between them might spark an all-out thermonuclear conflagration, leaving a planet in ruins. In reality, though, both sides engaged in a grim assortment of bloody “proxy wars” — regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, among other places, involving troops from one superpower and local allies armed by the other. In addition, the U.S. and the Soviet Union nearly found themselves in direct conflict on several occasions. The most notable, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Moscow installed nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba and the U.S. nearly went to war — which would probably have turned into a nuclear conflict — to remove them. Only a last-ditch negotiating effort by President John F. Kennedy and his Russian counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, averted such an outcome.

It’s easy enough to imagine that both contemporary versions of such proxy conflicts and of the Cuban Missile Crisis could emerge from a growing confrontation with China. An incident on the Korean Peninsula, no matter how it was sparked, could quickly turn into just such a proxy war. The greatest danger, however, would be U.S. and Chinese forces facing off directly, perhaps due to a naval clash in the East or South China Sea.

At present, American and Chinese warships encounter each other on a regular basis in those waters, often coming within shooting (or even ramming) range. The U.S. Navy insists that it’s conducting permissible “freedom of navigation operations” (FRONOPS) in international waters. The Chinese — claiming ownership of, and often building up, the many small atolls and islets that dot those seas — accuse the American ships of infringing on their national maritime territory. On occasion, Chinese gunboats have sailed dangerously close to them, forcing them to shift course to avoid a collision. As such incidents multiply and tensions increase, the risk of a serious faceoff involving loss of life on one or both sides is bound to grow, possibly providing the spark for a full-scale military confrontation. And there can be no question of one thing: an intensifying Cold War with China will only increase the odds of such a thing happening.

No one can say at what point you or any of us will begin to feel the direct effects of this new Cold War, only that, as tensions and hostile acts heighten, the consequences will prove harsh indeed. So cheer now, if you approve of measures already taken to isolate and punish Beijing, but think carefully before you embrace a full-blown Cold War with China and all that it will entail.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 June 2020

Word Count: 2,638

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It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.

The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened in 2017 was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch. On the morning of June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain announced that they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air, and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.

The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic — by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out. Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come (one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which turned aspects of American policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar into political footballs, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris ran there. That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began. Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the U.S. capital that would have made Rocky envious.

The Saudis come out swinging The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard. In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reported spending a little more than $10 million on FARA registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudi’s had soared to $27.3 million.

In the months following Donald Trump’s November triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizeable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests. For example, they brought on the CGCN Group whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration. To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar. One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives just two days after the conference ended.

Qatar, mind you, had been a U.S. ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.

The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill. For example, Qorvis Communications, a long-time public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar’s History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding Al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president himself was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted, “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.

However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.

Qatar strikes back Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally. They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Just two days after the blockade began, for instance, they inked a deal with the law firm of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.

They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of the Wall Street Journal reported. Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.

In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media. Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism. Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the U.N. General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign “to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump” to gain support on that most global of stages.

Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.

Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted, “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.” Finally, at that U.N. meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir al-Thani of Qatar and said, “We’ve been friends a long time… I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.

The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.

In November 2017, Barry Bennett from Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.

Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country. All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill’s passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where we work. Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.

The Saudi bloc’s battle for the war in Yemen Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a joint resolution to withdraw U.S. support for that war. According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.

That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’s bill.

Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”

When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war. In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network’s closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)

From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain. In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.” According to FARA filings, all but one of those representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10th, President Trump again described al-Thani as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked the president for “supporting us during this blockade.”

If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The CIA later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen. Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).

Given the president’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for this country’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook. In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work coopting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.

And the winners are… Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. They have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic, and military relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the U.S. as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever U.S. military support for the Kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).

In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it’s been America. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of this country played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots. Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.

None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that U.S. foreign policy should be driven by national — not special — interests.

Morgan Palumbo is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. Jessica Draper is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative and Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. This article originated at TomDispatch.

Copyright ©2020 Morgan Palumbo and Jessica Draper — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 June 2020

Word Count: 2,768

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From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn’t obey quickly enough, the order — one heard so many times in the streets of Iraqi cities and in the villages of Afghanistan — was issued: “Light ’em up.” And so “disobedient” Americans found themselves on the receiving end of non-lethal rounds for the “crime” of watching the police from those porches.

It’s taken years from Ferguson to this moment, but America’s cops have now officially joined the military as “professional” warriors. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25th, those warrior-cops have taken to the streets across the country wearing combat gear and with attitudes to match. They see protesters, as well as the reporters covering them, as the enemy and themselves as the “thin blue line” of law and order.

The police take to bashing heads and thrashing bodies, using weaponry so generously funded by the American taxpayer: rubber bullets, pepper spray (as Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio experienced at a protest), tear gas (as Episcopal clergy experienced at a demonstration in Washington, D.C.), paint canisters, and similar “non-lethal” munitions, together with flash-bang grenades, standard-issue batons, and Tasers, even as they drive military-surplus equipment like Humvees and MRAPs. (Note that such munitions blinded an eye of one photo-journalist.) A Predator drone even hovered over at least one protest.

Who needs a military parade, President Trump? Americans are witnessing militarized “parades” across the U.S.A. Their theme: violent force. The result: plenty of wounded and otherwise damaged Americans left in their wake. The detritus of America’s foreign wars has finally well and truly found its place on Main Street, U.S.A.

Cops are to blame for much of this mayhem. Video clips show them wildly out of control, inciting violence and inflicting it, instead of defusing and preventing it. Far too often, “to serve and protect” has become “to shoot and smack down.” It suggests the character of Eric Cartman from the cartoon South Park, a boy inflamed by a badge and a chance to inflict physical violence without accountability. “Respect my authoritah!” cries Cartman as he beats an innocent man for no reason.

So, let’s point cameras — and fingers — at these bully-boy cops, let’s document their crimes, but let’s also state a fact with courage: it’s not just their fault.

Who else is to blame? Well, so many of us. How stupid have we been to celebrate cops as heroes, just as we’ve been foolishly doing for so long with the U.S. military? Few people are heroes and fewer still deserve “hero” status while wearing uniforms and shooting bullets, rubber or otherwise, at citizens.

Answer me this: Who granted cops a specially-modified U.S. flag to celebrate “blue lives matter,” and when exactly did that happen, and why the hell do so many people fly these as substitute U.S. flags? Has everyone forgotten American history and the use of police (as well as National Guard units) to suppress organized labor, keep blacks and other minorities in their place, intimidate ordinary citizens protesting for a cleaner environment, or whack hippies and anti-war liberals during the Vietnam War protests?

Or think of what’s happening this way: America’s violent overseas wars, thriving for almost two decades despite their emptiness, their lack of meaning, have finally and truly come home. An impoverished empire, in which violence and disease are endemic, is collapsing before our eyes. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” America’s self-styled wartime president promised, channeling a racist Miami police chief from 1967. It was a declaration meant to turn any American who happened to be near a protest into a potential victim.

As such demonstrations proliferate, Americans now face a grim prospect: the chance to be wounded or killed, then dismissed as “collateral damage.” In these years, that tried-and-false military euphemism has been applied so thoughtlessly to innumerable innocents who have suffered grievously from our unending foreign wars and now it’s coming home.

How does it feel, America?

The end of citizen-soldiers, the end of citizen-cops I joined the military in 1981, signing up in college for the Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC. I went on active duty in 1985 and served for 20 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. I come from a family of firefighters and cops. My dad and older brother were firefighters, together with my brother-in-law and nephew. My niece and her husband are cops and my sister worked for her local police department for years. My oldest friend, a great guy I’ve known for half a century, recently retired as a deputy sheriff. I know these people because they’re my people.

Many cops — I’d say most — are decent people. But dress almost any cop in combat gear, cover him or her in armor like a stormtrooper out of Star Wars, then set all of them loose on the streets with a mandate to restore “LAW & ORDER,” as our president tweeted, and you’re going to get stormtrooper-like behavior.

Sure, I’d wager that more than a few cops enjoy it, or at least it seems that way in the videos captured by so many. But let’s remind ourselves that the cops, like the rest of America’s systems of authority, are a product of a sociopolitical structure that’s inherently violent, openly racist, deeply flawed, and thoroughly corrupted by money, power, greed, and privilege. In such a system, why should we expect them to be paragons of virtue and restraint? We don’t recruit them that way. We don’t train them that way. Indeed, we salute them as “warriors” when they respond to risky situations in aggressive ways.

Here’s my point: When I put on a military uniform in 1985, I underwent a subtle but meaningful change from a citizen to a citizen-airman. (Note how “citizen” still came first then.) Soon after, however, the U.S. military began telling me I was something more than that: I was a warrior. And that was a distinct and new identity for me, evidently a tougher, more worthy one than simply being a citizen-airman. That new “warrior” image and the mystique that grew up around it was integral to, and illustrative of, the beginning of a wider militarization of American culture and society, which exploded after the 9/11 attacks amid the “big-boy pants” braggadocio of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as they set out to remake the world as an American possession.

Why all the “warrior” BS? Why “Generation Kill” (one of those memorable phrases of the post-9/11 era)? Was it to give us a bit more spine or something to rally around after the calamity of those attacks on iconic American targets, or perhaps something to take pride in after so many disastrous wars over the last 75 years? It took me a while to answer such questions. Indeed, it took me a while to grasp that such questions were almost beside the point. Because all this warrior talk, whether applied to the military or the cops, is truly meant to separate us from the American people, to link us instead to wider systems of impersonal authority, such as the military-industrial-congressional complex.

By “elevating” us as warriors, the elites conspired to reduce us as citizens, detaching us from a citizen’s code of civics and moral behavior. By accepting the conceit of such an identity, we warriors and former warriors became, in a sense, foreign to democracy and ever more divorced from the citizenry. We came to form foreign legions, readily exploitable in America’s endless imperial-corporate wars, whether overseas or now here.

(Notice, by the way, how, in the preceding paragraphs, I use “we” and “us,” continuing to identify with the military, though I’ve been retired for 15 years. On rereading it, I thought about revising that passage, until I realized that was precisely the point: a career military officer is, in some way, always in the military. The ethos is that strong. The same is true of cops.)

In 2009, I first asked if the U.S. military had become an imperial police force. In 2020, we need to ask if our police are now just another branch of that military, with our “homeland” serving as the empire to be conquered and exploited. That said, let’s turn to America’s cops. They’re now likely to identify as warriors, too, and indeed many of them have served in America’s violent and endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. These days, they’re ever more likely to identify as well with authority, as defined and exercised by the elites for whom they serve as hired guns.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the warrior-mercenary mindset of the police has been fully exposed. For what was Floyd’s great “crime”? At worst, if true, an attempt at petty theft through forgery. He’d lost his job due to the Covid-19 crisis and, like most of us, was lucky if he saw a one-time check for $1,200, even as the rich and powerful enjoyed trillions of dollars in relief.

Rarely are the police sent to prosecute scofflaws in high places. I haven’t seen any bankers being choked to death on the street under an officer’s knee.  Nor have I seen any corporate “citizens” being choked to death by cops. It’s so much easier to hassle and arrest the little people for whom, if they’re black or otherwise vulnerable, arrest may even end in death.

By standing apart from us, militarized, a thin blue line, the police no longer stand with us.

A friend of mine, an Air Force retired colonel, nailed it in a recent email to me: “I used to — maybe not enjoy but — not mind talking to the police. It was the whole ‘community partners’ thing. Growing up and through college, you just waved at cops on patrol (they’d wave back!). Over the last five years, all I get is cops staring back in what I imagine they think is an intimidating grimace. They say nothing when you say hello. They are all in full ‘battle rattle’ even when directing traffic.”

When military “battle rattle” becomes the standard gear for street cops, should we be that surprised to hear the death rattle of black men like George Floyd?

Speaking truth to power isn’t nearly enough Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “speaking truth to power.” It’s meant as a form of praise. But a rejoinder I once read captures its inherent limitations: power already knows the truth — and I’d add that the powerful are all too happy with their monopoly on their version of the truth, thank you very much.

It’s not enough to say that the police are too violent, or racist, or detached from society. Powerful people already know this perfectly well. Indeed, they’re counting on it. They’re counting on cops being violent to protect elite interests; nor is racism the worst thing in the world, they believe, as long as it’s not hurting their financial bottom lines. If it divides people, making them all the more exploitable, so much the better. And who cares if cops are detached from the interests of the working and lower middle classes from which they’ve come? Again, all the better, since that means they can be sicced on protesters and, if things get out of hand, those very protesters can then be blamed. If push comes to shove, a few cops might have to be fired, or prosecuted, or otherwise sacrificed, but that hardly matters as long as the powerful get off scot-free.

President Trump knows this. He talks about “dominating” the protesters. He insists that they must be arrested and jailed for long periods of time. After all, they are the “other,” the enemy. He’s willing to have them tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets just so he can pose in front of a church holding a Bible. Amazingly, the one amendment he mentioned defending in his “law and order” speech just before he walked to that church was the Second Amendment.

And this highlights Trump’s skill as a wall-builder. No, I don’t mean that “big, fat, beautiful wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico. He’s proven himself a master at building walls to divide people within America — to separate Republicans from Democrats, blacks and other peoples of color from whites, Christians from non-Christians, fervid gun owners from gun-control advocates, and cops from the little people. Divide and conquer, the oldest trick in the authoritarian handbook, and Donald Trump is good at it.

But he’s also a dangerous fool in a moment when we need bridges, not walls to unite these divided states of ours. And that starts with the cops. We need to change the way many of them think. No more “thin blue line” BS. No more cops as warriors. No more special flags for how much their lives matter. We need but a single flag for how much all our lives matter, black or white, rich or poor, the powerless as well as the powerful.

How about that old-fashioned American flag I served under as a military officer for 20 years? How about the stars and stripes that draped my father’s casket after his more than 30 years of fighting fires, whether in the forests of Oregon or the urban tenements of Massachusetts? It was good enough for him and me (and untold millions of others). It should still be good enough for everyone.

But let me be clear: my dad knew how to put out fires, but once a house was “fully involved,” he used to tell me, there’s little you can do but stand back and watch it burn while keeping the fire from spreading.

America’s forever wars in distant lands have now come home big time. Our house is lit up and on fire. Alarms are being sounded over and over again. If we fail to come together to fight the fire until our house is fully involved, we will find ourselves — and what’s left of our democracy — burning with it.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, William Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated. He is proud to count many “first responders” in his immediate family. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2020 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 June 2020

Word Count: 2,357

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In the summer of 1995, when I was 18, I started visiting Tent City, a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in northeast Philadelphia. About 40 families had taken up residence in tents, shacks, and other makeshift structures. Among them were people of various races, ages, and sexual orientations, all homeless and fighting for the right to live.

Tent City was set up by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), a grassroots organization of poor and homeless people and a chapter of the National Welfare Rights Union. As in so many other areas of the country, homelessness in Philadelphia, a city battered by decades of deindustrialization, job loss, and affordable housing cuts, had become endemic. Although they were still living in what had once been the center of the northeast industrial corridor, many in Philly, especially the residents of Kensington, had been reduced to two main sources of income: welfare and drugs. A teenager might have stood better odds of going to jail or being shot than graduating from Kensington High. More than 40% of the population in the area had to break the law simply to survive. Police brutality was rampant.

Federal and municipal welfare systems were being stripped of funds being funneled into the private sector. City officials assured those of us who protested that there was simply too much need and not enough resources. Even the local paper accused us of engaging in “homeless hype” — being too disruptive in our public demonstrations and acts of mutual solidarity — when the people of Kensington really needed peace and quiet, law and order. At that time, however, there were an estimated 27,000 homeless people in the city and 39,000 abandoned houses.

In that small Tent City lot, poor people were exposing the city’s claim of scarcity as a myth. Families who moved there with close to nothing were quick to discover American abundance. Residents shared their food stamps, while individuals, community groups, and religious congregations all made donations. Soon, the abundance was such that hundreds of hungry families started turning out every week to be fed with the surplus food.

Tent City became more than another encampment on the margins of American life. It was a center of political life for Philadelphia’s poor, as well as a strategic organizing base for sustenance and protest. In the winter, as rats the size of cats arrived, the encampment moved to an abandoned Catholic church, a project the KWRU labeled “the new Underground Railroad.” Just as enslaved people once had to break the law to bust out of the system of slavery, poor and homeless people needed a growing civil disobedience movement to survive.

I think about Tent City often in these pandemic days of spiraling poverty and inequality, as protesters in cities across the country question the legitimacy of a system that devalues life, especially black lives, native lives, immigrant lives, and the lives of the poor. Unemployment is now at 41 million and so at Great Depression levels; the shantytowns that spread across the country in the worst years of the 1930s should remind us that mass homelessness exists just on the other side of mass unemployment.

Last week, for instance, Covid-19 moratoriums on eviction began to expire and, in my childhood hometown, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, upward of 40,000 eviction notices are poised to be sent out. Meanwhile, the government has blundered through a string of “relief” packages that have injected trillions of dollars into Wall Street while excluding millions of people from even the most basic stop-gap protections. In the midst of federal incompetence and outright abandonment, staggering numbers of Americans, children included, are desperate for support and real relief.

This society has long suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: we look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit. The wreckage of this pandemic moment is a bitter reminder of this affliction, as well as a signpost suggesting how we must emerge from this crisis a just and more equitable nation. With a possible depression ahead and more social unrest on the rise, isn’t it time to stop vindicating the wealthiest people in this country and look instead to leadership from those who were living in a depression before Covid-19 even hit and already organizing and protesting?

The poor organizing the poor Here’s a story from a long-ago moment that’s still relevant. Two months before his assassination in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., travelled to Chicago, to enlist the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) — the predecessor to the National Union of my day — into the Poor People’s Campaign. As he walked into a conference room at a downtown Chicago YMCA, Dr. King encountered more than 30 welfare rights leaders seated strategically on the other side of an exceedingly large table. One of his advisers later noted that the women’s reception of the southern civil rights leader was a “grand piece of psychological warfare.”

Representing more than 30,000 welfare-receiving, dues-paying members, they had not come to passively listen to the famed leader. They wanted to know his position on the recent passage of anti-welfare legislation and quickly made that clear, pelting him with questions. Dr. King felt out of his element. Eventually, Johnnie Tillmon, the national chairwoman of the NWRO, stepped in. “You know, Dr. King,” she said, “if you don’t know about these questions, you should just say you don’t know and then we could go on with this meeting.”

To this, Dr. King replied, “We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.”

That day, Dr. King would learn much about the long struggle those women had waged for dignity in the workplace and the home. They taught him that programs of social uplift should be a permanent right and that the welfare system of the mid-twentieth century, much like our own, was structured as a public charity that callously differentiated between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. They introduced him to policy proposals that were generations ahead of their time, including a demand for a Guaranteed Adequate Annual Income, or what many now call a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Four months into the Covid-19 crisis, with this country already afloat on a sea of inequality that would have been unimaginable even to those women in 1968, a sea change in public opinion may be underway when it comes to what’s necessary and possible. Ideas that only a few years ago would have been considered unimaginable like universal healthcare, guaranteed affordable housing, and debt relief are now breaking into the mainstream. Don’t think, however, that such policy positions, like the idea of a UBI, have materialized on Capitol Hill and in beltway think tanks out of thin air. They are, at least in part, the result of long-term agitating, educating, and organizing led by the poor themselves.

Those of us in the welfare rights movement always saw our work as the kindling for a wildfire of organizing by the poor and dispossessed. Our projects of survival, like Tent City, were not just about housing and feeding people. They were also about securing the lives of those committed to building the kind of movement necessary to transform society. Projects organized around immediate needs also became bases of operation for policy analysis and future plans.

Such projects, however, were beachheads meant to rally the larger society, as the ranks of the poor grew around us, to create lasting change for them. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that this novel pandemic has already galvanized bold collective action on the part of the poor and the precarious. For every sparsely attended reopen protest at a state capital by armed members of Donald Trump’s base, hundreds of new mutual-aid networks, ad-hoc tenant associations, and wildcat strike funds have been organized for those at the base of this society. Meanwhile, thousands of protestors have taken over streets in cities all across the country resisting racism and inequality.

Entire communities that are out of work and losing income are taking life-saving action that is also at times, and by necessity, in contradiction to the law. Despite recent media images of vandalism, today’s protest movement features countless acts that add up to projects for survival.

In April and May, millions did not pay rent, echoing that most basic of economic principles: those who can’t pay won’t pay. Indeed, such rent strikes and other protests speak to an essential demand for temporary relief in the midst of a crisis of unparalleled proportions, but they also signal potential new directions for millions of people who, if offered a political home that articulates their desperate needs and demands, might, against great odds, begin to find common cause.

The rich organizing the rich If this crisis is opening up new possibilities for organizing among the poor, however, the same is true for the rich. Since mid-March, the fortunes of the 600-plus billionaires in the United States have jumped by $434 billion, or 15%. In the CARES Act that Congress passed, legislators slipped in a tax break of $135 billion for 43,000 of the country’s wealthiest business owners. (And, of course, you need to add this to the unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the poor to the very rich that happened via the $1.5 trillion Trump tax cut of 2017.)

This pandemic has already been very profitable for a very few. It should be seen as one benefit from a long-term organizing campaign of the rich that has included crushing the labor movement, consolidating industry, financializing the economy, and what one historian has dubbed a decades-long “tax strike.” By now, of course, the story of widening inequality in this country has become a familiar one, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. In 1983, median household wealth in the United States was $84,000. Thirty-seven years of growing inequality later, it sits at $82,000. Meanwhile, as a point of comparison, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 was $92 billion in 1982. Now, it’s $2.89 trillion.

Behind this staggering and rapid accumulation of wealth rests a deep and abiding belief in recent decades that the rich are the engine of the American economy and so the deepest source of societal wellbeing. In this Covid-19 crisis, evidence abounds that such a faith, which emerged fullblown during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, remains, for now, bipartisan and largely unshaken. The CARES Act caught its spirit exactly, managing to direct most of its money to Wall Street and hundreds of millions more to the police, while leaving millions of workers lacking paid sick leave and the uninsured, the homeless, undocumented immigrants, and many more in the lurch.

While the HEROES Act, recently passed by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, offers improvements on this, many of which are guaranteed not to make it through the Senate, there are once again striking windfalls for the rich embedded in the bill. Within its 2,000 pages is funding for lobbyists, mortgage servicers, and private insurance companies. It does nothing to prohibit the corporate mergers that have produced bigger and more powerful monopolies in other moments of crisis in the recent past. It extends COBRA, a federal program that enables workers to temporarily keep health coverage on their own dime after their employment ends, and again directs vast sums of money to the private insurance industry, instead of expanding Medicaid and guaranteeing healthcare during the most devastating public health crisis in a century.

Meanwhile, at the state and local level, politicians on both sides of the aisle have refused to touch the wealth of the rich, even as they have decried their budget shortfalls, while managing this crisis largely via the playbook of austerity and readying themselves for social unrest. New York State, for instance, passed a budget that will cut $300 million from public hospitals but increase funding for the police. Likewise, the Washington State legislature has been lauded for the bipartisanship it demonstrated recently in putting through deep budget cuts. In no case have legislators chosen to tax their wealthiest residents, nor let up on policing and other forms of control. And Washington is home to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, at present the two richest people on the face of the Earth.

Of course, the workers who are actually keeping the nation afloat will suffer the most from such cuts. They may now be called “essential,” but they continue, as ever, to be treated as expendable appendages of the economy.

How to revive American society I recently wrote a piece with the subtitle “How to Destroy American Society from the Top Down.” The answer remains painfully simple: this country courts destruction as long as the rich are allowed to organize society around their lives and needs.

From my first moments working at Tent City through my 25 years of grassroots organizing, I’ve come to see that inverting that subtitle in a positive fashion is crucial to our survival as a nation. Any true revival of American society depends on collective action by those most impacted by injustice and by the willingness of the rest of society to follow their lead. From the abolitionism of the pre-Civil War era to the labor movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond, people on the receiving end of injustice have done best when they didn’t wait to be saved but, born out of necessity, took heroic action themselves.

When the Kensington Welfare Rights Union declared that we were building a “new Underground Railroad” in Philadelphia in the 1990s, we were doing more than just invoking a powerful chapter in the history of the abolition of slavery. We were implicitly challenging the dominant notion of who the agents of change in our society should be. We recognized, even then, that in the lessons Americans were taught about that history, enslaved people were often conspicuously missing in action from the story of abolition. We saw in that Underground Railroad a way for slaves to escape the grips of the system that was oppressing them, something far larger than just a physical pathway to freedom. We imagined it as a significant political project of the past exactly because it was one way the poor and enslaved of another era struck the first blows against a brutal and inhumane system.

Today, there is a freedom railroad rumbling underground, all around us. It has stops in the Amazon warehouses and the fast-food restaurants where low-wage workers are organizing for better wages and conditions; in immigrant communities that are protecting themselves against ICE raids in the midst of stay-at-home orders; in cities where people are winning moratoriums on water and utility shut-offs; in housing developments and hospitals where thousands are insisting that housing and healthcare are human rights.

You can hear it in the recent slogan — “stay in place, stay alive, organize, and don’t believe the lies” — of the Poor People’s Campaign that I co-chair, which has called for noncooperation with decisions to recklessly reopen states for business, putting the poor and sick most directly in harm’s way. You can see it in the tens of thousands of people protesting across the country, refusing to be subdued by years of racism and police violence, people who are demanding full justice and the right for all of us, but especially repressed black lives, to survive and thrive.

In a moment from hell, there is only one meaningful way to revive American society: from the bottom up.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. She teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharris — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 June 2020

Word Count: 2,591

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