Joe Biden is full of surprises. After the Electoral College met Monday to finalize the results of the election, the president-elect delivered a speech I never thought he’d deliver. He did not say you’re with us or against, but that’s what he righteously implied. And by implication, Biden gave a warning.

Treachery, sedition, treason — none of these will be tolerated. All of them, moreover, will come at a price for the Republican Party to pay, the least of which is being characterized as the republic’s mortal enemy.

I wasn’t alone in being surprised. So was Jonathan Bernstein, the politics writer for Bloomberg Opinion. I read the political scientist every morning because of his dispassionate, and therefore accurate, read on contemporary politics. But in today’s column, he’s wrong. Should Biden call out Donald Trump’s lawlessness? he asked:

 

His decision to address it on Monday night after the Electoral College reaffirmed his victory was probably a mistake. Even giving such a speech was a concession of sorts to Trump’s illegitimate challenges. … It may seem weird to say that the president-elect talking about the virtues of democracy could actually harm that cause, but that’s where we are. Scolding Trump, as Biden did on Monday, no doubt appeals to Democrats, and does have the virtue of accurately describing what’s happening. But the last thing Biden wants, and the last thing the nation needs, is a partisan divide over whether democracy is a good thing or not (italics mine).

Bernstein knows we already have a partisan divide over whether democracy is a good thing or not. That’s what this era of Donald Trump has been all about. He’s right to be concerned. We all should be. Conditions are becoming ideal for widespread political violence and, though unlikely, civil war. But he’s wrong in saying that ignoring the GOP’s attempted coup d’etat is better than facing it head on. He’s wrong in suggesting that Biden should avoid engaging in the debate over democracy.

It was failure to engage morally with a revived native-born fascism that gave rise to the last four years of hell.

There is risk to drawing a line and demanding that people pick a side. That risk should be obvious. Lots and lots of people will chose right-wing collectivism over republican democracy every single time. Indeed, many have already chosen collectivism though it has killed more Americans than all those who died fighting in World War II. But that has always been the case.

Native-born fascism will be with us long after Trump is out of the White House. All we can do is manage it. We manage it by engaging morally in debate over whether democracy is a good thing. But even this is missing something.

Democracy, after all, is secondary to equality. That’s what Abraham Lincoln thought. According to Yale philosopher Steven B. Smith, whose book Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes comes out next year, the 16th president

 

regarded the Union not as resting upon the direct expression of the popular will — a kind of American version of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ — but upon a belief in the principle of equal human rights.

A slave-holding republic — one that did not respect the rights and dignity of each individual — was a contradiction in terms. Lincoln expressed his view almost as a political catechism. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. (italics mine)

With inequality, you have a social order, but you don’t have a nation. Without a nation, without an idea binding a diverse people together as one, all that’s left are competing factions in an endless struggle for control. This is where we are amid the social and, therefore, economic inequality dominating our lives.

This is why Lincoln believed equal human rights were foundational to an enduring democracy. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he said. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

And this is why Biden’s speech was just shy of jaw-dropping. He characterized those standing against “the general will” as standing so far outside the mainstream “we’ve never seen it before — a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution.”

The next step is characterizing the forces of social inequality — especially white supremacy — as being outside the boundaries of our republican democracy. It’s defending anti-racism, which isn’t political correctness. It isn’t “cancel culture.” It’s good old-fashioned patriotism.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2020

Word Count: 782

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As autumn fades and winter looms, the dire predictions public-health experts made about Covid-19 have, unfortunately, proven all-too-accurate. On October 27th, 74,379 people were infected in the United States; less than a month and a half later, on December 9th, that number had soared to 218,677, while the 2020 total has just surpassed 15 million, a number no other country, not even India, which has a population three times that of the U.S., has surpassed.

And now, it seems, the third wave of the virus has arrived. As recently as late October, the embattled Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, warned that “we are in for a whole lot of hurt” and that infections could reach 100,000 a day. As it happens, he was wildly optimistic. A little more than a month later, there were more than twice that many. Is it possible, however, that the current surge is due in part to increased testing, as President Trump and others have regularly claimed? Here’s the problem. Even if that theory were true, it can’t account for the spiraling death toll, which is now more than 300,000 and could hit 450,000 by February, according to Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nor can it explain the daily Covid-19 hospitalizations, the first round of which peaked at 59,712 on July 23rd, dropped pretty steadily to a low of 28,606 on September 20th, and then started to soar, reaching 106,671 on December 9th.

Though big-picture statistics like these should help us grasp the staggering magnitude of our current public-health crisis, what they don’t reveal is the searing effects it’s had on the lives of millions of Americans, even those who have managed to evade the virus or haven’t seen friends or family fall ill or die from Covid-19. The pandemic has been especially hard for those on the front lines: doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers who experience battle fatigue and despair while besieged by suffering and deaths, visceral reminders of their own vulnerability.

In society at large, precautions — lockdowns, social distancing, limits on festive gatherings — necessary to keep Covid-19 at bay have increased loneliness and social isolation. Contrary to early expectations, reports of abuse and violence within families haven’t actually spiraled, but experts suggest that may be because the victims, confined to their homes alongside their tormentors, are finding it harder to seek help and fear reporting what’s happening to them. As for children, teachers are no longer seeing their pupils in person as regularly and so are less able to spot the typical warning signs of mistreatment.

Thankfully, the pandemic has yet to increase this country’s already alarming suicide rate, but the same can’t be said for levels of stress and depression, both of which have risen noticeably. School closures and the move to online learning have forced parents, particularly women, to scramble for childcare and to work less, even though many of them were barely getting by while working full-time, or stop working altogether, often a genuine disaster in poor families.

Not surprisingly, people who have been laid off or had their work hours reduced have fallen behind on their mortgage and rent payments. Although various federal and state moratoriums on such payments, as well as on evictions and foreclosures, were enacted, such protections will eventually end. And the moratoriums don’t negate renters’ or homeowners’ obligations to settle accounts with their bankers and landlords somewhere down the line (which for many Americans may, in the end, prove an impossibility).

Food and the pandemic Apart from the illness and death it causes, perhaps the most poignant consequence of Covid-19 has been the way it’s increased what’s called “food insecurity” across the United States. That ungainly term doesn’t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment, which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries, but rather to the disruption of people’s typical food-consumption patterns. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) distinguishes between what it calls low food security (“reduced quality, variability, or desirability of diet”) and the very low version of the same (“multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”).

Surveys by the USDA and the Census Bureau show that both variants have risen steeply during the pandemic. Just before the coronavirus struck, 35 million Americans, 11 million of them children, experienced food insecurity, the lowest figure in two decades. This year, those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively. In 2018, 4% of American adults reported that at least some members of their family did not have enough to eat; by July 2020, that figure had hit 11%, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Food Research and Action Center, and will only increase as the pandemic worsens.

Income supplements provided by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March in response to the economic problems created by Covid-19, increases in the government’s Supplementary Nutritional Program (SNAP), and the Pandemic Electronic Benefit (P-EBT), which helps parents whose children no longer get free or subsidized school lunches, have made a difference — but not enough to make up for lost or reduced income, lost homes, and other disasters of this moment. And sadly, any follow-up to the CARES Act, assuming Congress reaches some kind of agreement on its terms before the current legislation expires at the end of December, will almost certainly be far less generous than the original law. The SNAP increases already excluded the poorest seven million households that were then receiving the maximum amount, and the new increases now under discussion in Congress would add less than one dollar to a four-person family’s maximum daily benefit. P-EBT expired in most states at the end of September, in some as early as July.

That food insecurity has “skyrocketed,” as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities puts it, during the pandemic despite government assistance shouldn’t come as a surprise. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs, wage cuts, freezes, or reduced working hours. Others have looked for jobs in vain and finally given up (but aren’t included in official unemployment statistics). Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch, in whole or part, to online teaching. Worse yet, as pandemic-induced firings, layoffs, and wage cuts have reduced incomes, and so consumer purchasing power, food prices, especially for meat, fish, and eggs, have only risen. Such costs have increased for other reasons as well. The pandemic has disrupted supply networks, national and international. Leery consumers, anticipating shortages or seeking to reduce trips to grocery stores to avoid being infected by Covid-19, have also resorted to panic buying and the stockpiling of food and other necessities.

Who you are and where you live matters most Of course, not everyone has been hit with equal force by rising food prices. Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and, in any case, spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries. According to the USDA, adults with incomes in the top fifth of society spent 8% of their income on food last year; for the bottom fifth, it was 36%. The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth, so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started. In March, for example, 39% of those making less than $40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced, but only 13% of those who earned $100,000 or more, and that gap continued into the fall.

Not surprisingly, then, the bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession, the more likely they were to experience food insecurity, which is why aggregate statistics on the phenomenon and other societal problems attributable to the pandemic can be misleading. They tend to mask the reality that its effects have been felt primarily by the most vulnerable, while the others have been touched much more lightly, or not at all.

The variations are rooted in ethnicity and location as well as income level (and the three tend to be closely linked). A USDA report classified 19% of Black households and 16% of Hispanic households as food insecure in 2019, compared to 8% of their white counterparts. By this summer, food insecurity had increased significantly across the board, afflicting 36% of Black, 32% of Hispanic, and 18% of white households. While the pandemic has certainly made matters worse, African Americans had the highest rate among those three groups even before it started. This was especially true of counties — the U.S. has more than 3,000 of them — in which they were in the majority. In 2016, those particular counties accounted for a mere 3% of the national total, but 96% of them had “high food insecurity,” as the Department of Agriculture defines it, as well as a poverty rate more than twice the national average (12.7% that year).

Native Americans have had the worst of it, however, since many of their families lack access to running water and plumbing (58 per 1,000 households compared to three per 1,000 for whites). Nearly 75% of Native Americans must travel more than a mile to reach a supermarket, compared to 40% of the population as a whole, and the disruption of supply chains has only diminished their food security further relative to other ethnic communities. Even prior to the pandemic, counties in which they (or Native Alaskans) constituted a majority were among those with the highest levels of food insecurity. Not coincidentally, in 2016, the poverty rate in nearly 70% of Native American-majority counties averaged a whopping 37%.

In other words, while every group has suffered in this pandemic year, race matters — a lot — when it comes to the degree of suffering.

So does income. In coronavirus-stricken America, only 1% of adults with an annual income exceeding $100,000 surveyed by the Census Bureau this summer responded that, during the preceding week, their household “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.” Compare that to 16% of those making $25,000-$35,000 and 28% of those earning less than $25,000.

Finally, food insecurity during the pandemic has varied by location as well. Ten states (and the District of Columbia) had the highest rates, ranging from Mississippi (33.5%), which stood atop this group, to Alabama (27%), which had the lowest. In between, in descending order, were Washington, D.C., Nevada, Louisiana, New York, New Mexico, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Food banks and pantries: on the front lines The other day, a close friend described to me the daily scene at a food distribution center in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Well before trucks laden with food pulled up early in the morning, he said, the lines had already started forming, hundreds of people waiting patiently in a queue that encircled the block. And that’s just one of many neighborhoods in New York where this is all too typical these days. In Queens, for instance, one pantry regularly faces a demand so steep that lines can extend for eight blocks. Try to imagine what the waiting time must be. All told, 1.5 million people in the city, unable to buy the groceries they need, rely on food pantries, and New York is anything but unusual. Photographs abound of cars lined up by the hundreds, even thousands, at food pantries in major cities around the country.

Feeding America, a non-profit organization that supports 200 food storage centers and 60,000 pantries nationwide, reports that the country’s food banks have provided the equivalent of more than 4.2 billion meals since March, a 50% increase compared to a year ago and 40% of the people who come to such pantries are first-time visitors. A Consumer Reports survey of grocery shoppers found that nearly a fifth of them had turned to a food pantry since the pandemic began (half of whom hadn’t sought such help at all in 2019). In March, before the first wave of Covid-19 began to peak, 18 million Americans already used food pantries; by August, that number had climbed to 22 million, even though an additional 6.2 million people had received benefits from SNAP (the food-stamp program in common parlance) between March and May alone. By early July, 37.4 million people had signed up for SNAP compared to 35.7 million for all of last year.

Little wonder, then, that food banks, facing a tsunami of demand, have struggled to stay stocked amid rising prices, shortages, reduced donations from big chain supermarkets, and disrupted supply chains. It’s also become even harder for them to raise the money they need to operate. Not a few have buckled under the strain and many have been forced to shut down. Pantries have also had a hard time mustering volunteers, in part because seniors, particularly vulnerable to the virus, made up a significant segment of such helpers. Not surprisingly, then, food banks and pantries have battled to function or simply survive in these months, while also having to implement an array of cumbersome and costly safety measures to keep volunteers, staff, and clients infection-free.

Despite their heroic role, such food banks and pantries are the equivalent of the proverbial finger in the dike. For Covid-induced food insecurity and hunger to decline significantly, the third wave of infections will have to subside and Congress will have to offer more effective aid. The Trump administration’s recent proposal, blessed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to provide a one-shot $600 check to all adults (whether they’re unemployed or not) certainly isn’t. At the same time, vaccines will have to be produced in sufficient quantities and distributed rapidly. (We are far from ready on that front.) All this in a country where striking numbers of people look askance at vaccination — in a December survey only 63% of Americans said they would be willing to get vaccinated against Covid-19 — and are also drawn to conspiracy mongers whose appeal has grown, thanks in part to social media.

Once the virus is vanquished or at least brought under reasonable control, the economy can be reopened. Then, many of the nearly 11 million at-present unemployed people will perhaps have a shot at working again or having their employers end reduced hours and cut wages.

Here’s hoping that these various stars align by summer 2021. We can then revert to pre-pandemic normalcy, even though that state of affairs was marked by substantial poverty — 34 million people last year — and rising inequality.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2020

Word Count: 2,434

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Let me start by saying I do not expect the Editorial Board to influence the ways high-profile Democrats in the US Congress think and behave, but it feels pretty damn good when their thinking and behavior echoes what you’ve read in this humble newsletter.

I left you Friday by saying the Republicans had become an insurgency to overthrow the republic. In joining a lawsuit to the US Supreme Court seeking to invalidate millions of votes, the Republicans (from the US House, the US Senate and 18 states) had made a declaration on par with their oaths of office by which

they no longer agree with the superlative principle constituting the foundation of our republic. They have declared where they stand, and where they stand is against America. Yes, the Republicans are performing partisanship. But that performance has led them to the edge of treason.

I also said the Democrats in the Congress must name such misconduct. They won’t, though. Instead, I said, they

 act as if eventually they can negotiate with these ‘suicide bombers.’ They can’t. Indeed, they mustn’t. Compromise begets more of the same. They don’t want to force the Republicans to choose a side. This isn’t, the Democrats say, about ‘us versus them.’ The problem is the Republicans have already chosen.

 Not long after I posted Friday’s edition, Chris Murphy said this on the Senate floor:

The most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make President Trump president for a second term no matter the outcome of the election are engaged in a treachery against their nation. You cannot at the same time love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes, because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again. It is the only way … because he didn’t win (my italics).

I don’t think Murphy, my US senator, reads the Editorial Board. He has just an incredible knack for feeling out the rhetorical vanguard. To my knowledge, he’s the highest-ranking Democrat to use “treachery” or something close to “treason.”

Let’s hope other Democrats follow his example. Let’s hope they understand the importance of staking out the high, moral and patriotic ground. They, and we, are going to need it.

The Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit Friday, but the GOP continues to threaten the people’s sovereignty. Some are plotting yet another coup d’etat, according to the New York Times:

As the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress is plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

The plan is to reject the Electoral College votes, a move that would violate federal “safe harbor” laws. Again, the point should not be whether they will succeed. (They won’t.) The point should be that some Republicans are going to try. The point is that trying is sedition.

Naming the GOP’s insurgency is more important than punishing it. For now, anyway. Some House Democrats are asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to seat those Republicans who, when they joined the Supreme Court case, declared themselves the enemy of republican democracy. In the process, a dozen of them did, indeed, allege that their own elections were invalid. But nonsense isn’t a reason to deny majority rule.

The Republicans are lying. Real voters voted for them. The Democrats know that well enough. There’s no need for Pelosi and the Democrats to play along with the lie.

The Democrats don’t need “procedural maximalism,” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said, to respond to Republican disloyalty. What they need is patriotic maximalism — which is to say, they need to turn up the rhetoric.

That’s what I saw in Adam Schiff’s remarks Friday night. The House Intelligence Committee chair, and lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, said refusing to seat Republicans wasn’t the remedy for their betrayal of the non-negotiable values that America stands for. Instead, he said:

the remedy is to make the case to the American people that they are being betrayed. The Republicans said they stood for something. As it turns out, they don’t stand for anything. Helping the country see how close we are coming to losing our democracy and why it’s worth fighting for. I think we all thought democracy was self-effectuating, that we could count on the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice on its own. We have learned we have to fight for it every day (my italics).

To my ears, this seems like something new. In the past, the Democrats tried saying partisanship was the problem, not the solution. Partisanship is something to run from, not embrace. Schiff is turning that around. And he’s right, too.

Partisanship saved the United States from a second Trump term. Partisanship, therefore, will save us from a political party turned insurgency prepared to kill itself to win. The moral arc of the universe won’t bend on its own, as I intimate at the Editorial Board.

We seem to be witnessing, at long last, a Democratic Party prepared to take its own side in a fight.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2020

Word Count: 882

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Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”:

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent.

King concluded that American society was degrading human life by clinging to old thinking rather than turning to bold, visionary solutions — words that (sadly enough) ring even truer in our day than in his.

In late October as the coronavirus pandemic raged, the Economic Policy Institute released a study showing that it isn’t just morally right but an economic necessity to deal with poverty in this country and fast. “If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy,” as that study put it, “the health and well-being of the nation are at stake. What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity, and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”

Even as, almost two months later, we remain trapped in an unprecedented crisis of spreading illness, there is increasingly clear evidence that, were those in power to make other choices, we would no longer need to live burdened by the social ills of old. Oddly enough, because of the Covid-19 crisis, we’re being reminded (or at least should be reminded) that, in reality, solutions to many of the most pressing issues of our day are readily at hand if those issues were prioritized and the attention and resources of society directed toward them. In a moment overflowing with lessons, one of the least discussed is that scarcity is a lie, a political invention used to cover up vast reserves of capital and technology facilitating the enrichment of the few and justifying the pain and dispossession of so many others. Our present reality could perhaps best be described as mass abandonment amid abundance.

Indeed, the myth of scarcity, like other neoliberal fantasies, is regularly ignored when politically expedient and conjured up when the rich and powerful need help. The pandemic has been no exception. Over the last nine months, the wealth of American billionaires has actually increased by a third to nearly $4 trillion, even as tens of millions of Americans have filed for unemployment and more evictions loom than ever before in U.S. history. Now, politicians in Washington are haggling over a “compromise” relief bill that offers little in the way of actual relief, especially for those suffering the most.

At the same time, with the health of everyone, not just the poor and marginalized, at risk, the government has proven itself remarkably capable of mobilizing the necessary resources for decisive and historic action when it comes to producing a Covid-19 vaccine in record time. That the same could be done when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable and abolishing poverty should be obvious, if only the nation saw that, too, as a crisis worthy of attention.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way In 1918, with an influenza pandemic raging in the United States, cities closed down and doctors prescribed painkillers like aspirin as a national debate (remarkably similar to the present one) raged over the necessity of quarantine and masks. At that time, the country simply had to wait for those who were infected to die or develop immunity. Before it was over (in a far less populous land), at least 675,000 Americans perished, more than in every one of our wars since the Civil War combined.

A century later, when the Covid-19 pandemic exploded this March, the country ground to a similar terrifying halt, but under different conditions: for one thing, the shutdown was accompanied by the promise that the government would invest billions of dollars in a potentially successful vaccine produced far faster than any ever before. Nine months later, after the Trump administration had funneled those billions into research and had guaranteed the manufacture and purchase of viable vaccines (radically reducing the business risk to pharmaceutical companies in the process), it appears that we are indeed there. Last month, multiple companies released trial data for just such vaccines that seem to be nearly 95% effective; and Great Britain has, in fact, just rolled out the first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine with the U.S. not far behind. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency use.

A long list of grave questions remains when it comes to the oversight of, and accountability of, those private companies that now hold the health of the world in their hands. Already, the British government has granted Pfizer, which stands to earn billions by beating the competition to market, legal indemnity from any complications that may arise from its vaccine, and the Trump administration has made similar agreements. Much also remains uncertain when it comes to how American-produced vaccines will be fairly distributed, here and across the world, and whether they will be safe, effective, and free. (I recently signed onto a public letter to the incoming Biden administration calling for a “people’s vaccine.”)

Still, it does seem that the historic speed with which this novel virus could eventually be curbed by just such a vaccine (or set of them) is likely to prove astonishing. Historically, on average, successful vaccines have taken 10 to 14 years to develop. Until now, the fastest effective one ever produced was the mumps vaccine and that took four years. Nearly as remarkable is how so many people have received the news of the coming of those coronavirus vaccines as if it were the norm. If anything, in a time of constant, rapid technological revolution, there’s a noticeable impatience, stoked by Donald Trump and others, that it’s taken this long.

The Covid-19 vaccine experience does show one thing, however — what can be done when the resources of this country are marshalled to immediately address a crisis-level issue. Imagine if the same approach were taken when it came to systemic racism, climate change, or the poverty that has only deepened in the midst of the pandemic crisis. Indeed, if the political will were there, Americans could clearly tackle massive problems like hunger and homelessness no less effectively than developing a vaccine, instead of spending millions of dollars on cruel attempts to drive the homeless away by redesigning park benches and other urban architecture to repel those with nowhere to stay. After all, in cities like San Francisco, where homelessness is rampant, there are more vacant houses than there are homeless people.

Although the politics of austerity generally reign supreme on both sides of the aisle in Congress (especially when it comes to antipoverty programs like welfare), it’s also true that public spending is regularly and abundantly martialed to solve issues that affect certain parts of society — namely, the private sector and the military. From subsidies to major companies like big agriculture to critical R&D expenditures for Silicon Valley to public university research that benefits private industry, funding from the state is often the invisible backbone of American business operations and advances. Likewise, spending on the military makes up more than half of the federal discretionary budget, funding everything from the 800 American military bases that circle the planet to expensive and risky new technologies and war machines.

Lessons from the pandemic Back in March, the writer Arundhati Roy spoke of the pandemic as “a portal.” She was perhaps suggesting that the widespread suffering caused by Covid-19 could open a doorway into a future in which we humans might begin to treat ourselves and the planet with greater devotion. In another sense, however, the pandemic has also been a portal into our past, a way of showing us the conditions that have laid the groundwork not just for the devastation that now consumes us but for possibly far worse to come.

No one could have expected this exact crisis at this exact moment in exactly this way. Yet, before Covid-19, society was already teetering under the weight of poverty and inequality, and a sober look at history offers clues as to why the United States now has the highest Covid-19 case tally and death toll in the world. Too many have died because our country’s preexisting conditions of systemic injustice have gone untreated for so long and those in power never seem to learn the applicable lesson of this moment: pandemics spread along the fissures of society, both exposing them more and deepening them further.

Before Covid-19, there were already 140 million people in this country who were poor or a $400 emergency — one job loss, accident, illness, or storm — away from poverty. Across America that meant close to 80 million people were uninsured or underinsured, 60 million people had zero (zero!) wealth other than the value of a family car, more than a million people were defaulting on federal student loans annually, and more than 62 million workers were making less than $15 an hour, with more than two million in Florida alone making only $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage. And that’s just to begin down a nightmarish list.

For Pamela Sue Rush and about 1.5 million other people, it meant a lack of access to piped water and sewage systems. Before Pamela, who is Black, contracted Covid-19 and died in July, she lived in a mobile home in Lowndes County, Alabama, where human waste festered in her backyard because she didn’t have proper plumbing, and in a state that still hasn’t expanded Medicaid, and in a country that has no federal guarantee of either healthcare or clean water. Covid-19 may have been the immediate cause of her death, but the underlying one was racism and poverty.

During these pandemic months, a popular notion has been that the virus is a great equalizer because everyone is susceptible. Yet the human and economic toll has been anything but equal across society. It will take more time to find out just what the mortality rate among the poor has been, but it’s already clear that those of us with compromised immune systems, disproportionately poor and people of color, are at greater risk of hospitalization and death from the coronavirus, and early reports suggest that poorer counties have higher death rates. An unsurprising but alarming new study found that more than 400,000 Covid-19 cases are associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums, forcing people out of the safety of their homes; such numbers will only worsen this winter as evictions continue, if such moratoriums aren’t extended into the new year.

Beyond the toll of the virus itself, the economic fallout has been devastating for the poor. Between six and eight million people have fallen below the federal poverty line since March (although that measure is an old and broken standard). The true numbers are undoubtedly far higher. The last 38 weeks have seen unemployment claims greater than the worst week of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Some economists are now talking about a possible quick bounce back once the virus is controlled and yet the long-term damage is only beginning to reveal itself. After all, 10 years after the Great Recession, a time when little in the way of long-term relief was provided, the majority of workers had still not recovered from it. That this crisis is already significantly deeper and wider should give us pause as we consider what the next decade will look like if this country doesn’t alter its bleak course.

The fissures in our society were vast before Covid-19 hit and they’ve only broadened. A vaccine will address the most visible of them, but we as a nation will continue to stumble from crisis to crisis until we learn the most important lesson this moment can teach: that our yet-to-be-United States will only heal as a society when every person’s needs are met. In a pandemic, one person without food, water, healthcare, or housing puts everyone at risk. The same is, in fact, true in non-pandemic times, for a society riven by poverty and deprivation will always be unstable and vulnerable.

Martin Luther King once told a crowd in St. Louis that “we must learn to live as brothers or perish together as fools.” Today, the balance is tipping perilously toward the latter category, as Congress painfully debates a thoroughly anemic relief bill that promises little for most Americans and sets a dangerous precedent for the coming months. In a recent letter to Joe Manchin, the self-proclaimed “centrist” senator from West Virginia, Reverend William Barber II (my co-chair on the Poor People’s Campaign) wrote:

I am ashamed of this nation. I know you want to do the right thing, and Republicans are tying your hands, but please don’t call this a ‘centrist plan.’ It’s more cynical than centrist. It’s damn near criminal that millions are hurting, billionaires are getting richer, sick people are dying, poverty is expanding, and the Senate can’t do the right thing.

Indeed, the most important things to note in the coming stimulus bill are these: it protects corporations (that have not protected their workers) from any accountability or legal responsibility; it continues to bail out the rich, not the rest of us, with no provisions for stimulus checks and insufficient funding to states and municipalities; it lowers unemployment benefits to $300 per week (based on wages of $7.50 an hour) rather than $600 per week (based on $15 an hour); it is not only significantly less than the nation needs, but less than what was on offer months ago. The cynicism of this relief bill lies in the way it diminishes life for political gain and corporate profit and in the false contention that this is the most that’s available to us, the best the nation can do.

The ghosts of Christmas present Call it a cruel stroke of history that Congress should be deliberating on the welfare of millions only a few weeks before Christmas, especially since so many of the key players call themselves “Christians.” This holiday season and the winter beyond it promise to be a long, dark portal to who knows where, as temperatures drop, Covid-19 cases continue to rise, and poverty and homelessness are transformed into so many more death certificates. The timing of Congress’s new “relief” bill is particularly wicked if, as a Christian, you were to remember the details of Jesus’s birth in that manger in Bethlehem.

After all, he was born a homeless refugee to an unmarried teenage mother and had to flee to Egypt with his family as a baby because the ruling authorities already deemed that this poor Palestinian Jewish boy would grow up to be a threat to the established order of injustice. But the powers and principalities of his day were never the only ones who mattered. There were always those who recognized in his birth that, to right the wrongs of society, to protect the lives of countless innocent victims, another way was possible, if society started with the poor and marginalized, not with those already full to the brim.

It’s too bad that some of the congressional representatives who call themselves Christian are so unwilling to take a moment to consider the homeless revolutionary who was long ago sent to lead a moral movement from below. They should remember that the story of Christmas celebrates the birth of a poor, brown-skinned leader who, in the Gospel of Luke, is born to “scatter those who are proud, bring down rulers from their thrones, but lift up the humble. He fills the hungry with good things but sends the rich away empty.”

In a time when more children are on the brink of being born into poverty, homelessness, and state-sanctioned violence, rather than, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths” of the wealthy and corporations, Americans would do well to recognize that scarcity could vanish and that it’s time to address systemic inequality.

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 in New York City 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.

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2020

Word Count: 2,696

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What’s it going to take for the Democrats in the US Congress to see the danger? How often must the Republicans spurn, violate or profane the core values going into being an American for the Democrats to call them out? When will they stop taking it in the face and give it in kind?

This isn’t a matter of pride. This is a matter of cold-blooded partisanship. The Democrats keep looking at the Republicans as if any minute they’re going to snap out of it. They must start treating the GOP as an insurgency.

The closest any Democrat, not to say leading Democrat, has gotten to naming correctly the Republican Party’s near-wholesale defiance of the people’s sovereignty comes from Pennsylvania’s attorney general. In a brief sent to the US Supreme Court, Josh Shapiro said,

Texas’s effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. … (It) should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated (bold mine).

Shapiro is talking about a lawsuit filed this week by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleging that millions of votes in four swing states were cast illegally and unconstitutionally on account of mail-in provisions made during the covid pandemic. The suit asks the high court to invalidate all of those votes, thus handing Donald Trump reelection.

The suit won the support of attorneys general from 17 Republican-controlled states. Yesterday, it got the backing of 106 members of the Republican House conference, a majority. Shapiro, a Democrat, is joined by 20 states, including GOP-run Georgia, in asking the high court to dismiss the case with prejudice, because all of it — and I mean all of it — is predicated on a towering mountain of fantastic lies.

Naturally, the press corps’ is focused on the chances of the case being heard. They’re slim. All nine justices have rejected a similar earlier case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans. Paxton’s lawsuit is a last-ditch effort by the losing candidate and his allies to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is a coup d’etat destined to fail, though Trump appointed three of the court’s justices.

That’s why the Democrats aren’t worried. The Republicans are merely demonstrating loyalty, they think. This is just another round of performative partisanship. They trust the Republicans will get back to business after Inauguration Day. And that’s where they make their first mistake.

Remember that America is a covenant. It’s a moral agreement made collectively as a political community, a social contract based on shared values and shared purpose. There’s lots of room for disagreement, but one thing’s permanent. The people’s sovereignty is supreme. If you agree to that, you’re welcome to participate. Put quite another way, you can’t disagree — not if you want to be considered an American.

That the Republican coup is going to fail is beside the point. The point is that 18 state leaders and 106 US representatives have issued a declaration, one that should carry as much moral and political weight as their oaths of office. They no longer agree with the superlative principle constituting the foundation of our republic.

They have declared where they stand, and where they stand is against America. Yes, the Republicans are performing partisanship. But that performance has led them to the edge of treason.

Remember, too, that these Republican leaders come from states currently being savaged by the covid. They did not take seriously the spread of the new coronavirus, because taking it seriously would have enraged the GOP president. Cumulatively, more than 3,000 Americans died Wednesday. More than 3,000 died Thursday. More than 3,000 will die today.

According to USA Today, more Americans have now died from the covid than all who died fighting in World War II! Moreover, more than 3,000 people are expected to die each day for the next 60 to 90 days, even if a vaccine is available. And yet the Republicans continue to do little or nothing about it.

Two things are true at the same time. The Republicans stand against America. The Republicans are sacrificing themselves to stand against America.

Together, these facts should illustrate the reality we are facing, a reality that the Democrats won’t call by name. The Republican Party is now an insurgency, one that has many heavily armed domestic terrorists prepared to act at the slightest word from the president. If the party does not get what it wants, it stands ready to blow up itself and the rest of us.

The Democrats, meanwhile, act as if eventually they can negotiate with these “suicide bombers.” They can’t. Indeed, they mustn’t. Compromise begets more of the same. They don’t want to force the Republicans to choose a side. This isn’t, the Democrats say, about “us versus them.”

The problem is the Republicans have already chosen.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 December 2020

Word Count: 816

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Gird your loins for a piece inspired by Ted Cruz. Yeah, you’d think I’d know better. In my defense, however, this piece isn’t really about the most hated member of the United States Senate. It’s about truth and what it means to be a man in the age of the covid.

Our story began last week when Cruz posted to Twitter a picture of himself holding up the head and rack of a recently shot eight-point buck. “A beautiful day in South Texas,” he wrote. Replies were a mix of admiration and disdain. The photo captures almost perfectly a kind of conventional wisdom benefiting Cruz so long as it isn’t scrutinized all too seriously. Real men hunt. Republicans hunt. Ergo, real men are Republicans.

This conventional wisdom, understandably, attracts critics. They point out that Cruz is a product of the Ivy League two times over, that he’s an attorney, that he’s argued cases before the United States Supreme Court. If anything he is of the political elite, not against those whom he claims to oppose in the name of the common men who constitute the Republican Party. The conclusion drawn by skeptics is that Cruz’s image of rugged authenticity is hypocritical, because it’s entirely “performative.”

You could say that. You could also say the whole notion of authenticity is kind of phony. Once you start questioning its bases, you realize it’s relative. Moreover, you could say hunters pose often with the animals they shoot. Pictures are demonstrations of pride, but also boasting. In that sense, Cruz’s tweet is within established norms. Sure, he isn’t normal. He’s a senator. But he’s not doing anything out of the ordinary.

Cruz’s critics are right. He is, indeed, performing. But they’re right for the wrong reasons. They are paying attention to a member of the political elite pretending, in his picture, to be a regular Joe. In doing so, however, they’re overlooking something obvious. Two things, actually. One, Cruz is a member of the political elite. Two, the elites hunt. Historically, that was part of what being elite meant. You didn’t hunt for food. Commoners did that. You hunted for one reason: You enjoyed killing things.

Fact is, unless you are literally living off the land, no one needs to hunt. To be sure, poverty and hunger are still social and political problems, but no one seriously thinks the solution, or even a solution, is to go hunting. This is why hunting is unpopular. (I mean so unpopular as to be taboo in some quarters.) No one feeds themselves by way of hunting. Hunting, therefore, is a pastime. It’s a pastime predicated on killing things.

Killing things isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Given the present state of humankind’s relationship to nature, hunting can solve an intractable problem. Wolves used to hunt deer in Connecticut. Then we got rid of them. The deer are now so abundant, there isn’t enough food for them, or they commit nighttime vehicular suicide. Deer don’t have natural enemies anymore. Human beings are now a kind of artificial predator.

What’s bad is telling ourselves reasons for hunting that hide the real reasons for hunting. It’s not for food. It’s not because of “tradition.” It’s not anything noble. The only reason is to kill something. You get a rise out of pulling the trigger. My sense is that when hunting was popular — when there was less incentive to justify it — people understood this truth without being conscious of it. The power to kill is pleasurable.

It’s also a truth you keep to yourself. There’s something shameful about taking a picture of yourself with your latest kill while saying that the only reason you killed it was because killing it was fun. Sure, that might be the truth of things, but you didn’t just come out and say it! Better to have a convenient and acceptable explanation. I didn’t kill this deer, because I wanted to. I killed it, um, because it’s protein, yeah, that’s it!

Which brings me back, unfortunately, to Ted Cruz. He doesn’t care about shame. He doesn’t care about values, norms, any of the “good-sounding” reasons — protein, yeah, that’s it! — that justify killing things. Commoners explain themselves. Normal people feel shame. Members of the political elite do not, because they are the political elite.

Cruz is performing. But it isn’t regular Joe stuff. What he’s performing is a hard truth in this age of the covid. Three thousand Americans died yesterday from the disease. Three thousand more are going to die today. Yet Cruz and his party do nothing. They are, in fact, cheered on. What’s he telling us? It must be this. I can kill with impunity. I could kill you. I’d never pay a price. I’d be rewarded. That’s what it means to be a real man.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 December 2020

Word Count: 801

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As Donald Trump gave in to the demand that the transition process to the Biden years officially begin, the administration and its fossil-fuel allies doubled down on their efforts to implement destructive environmental policies that President Biden might try to reverse. Those initiatives have included a campaign to jump-start oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; the approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of the long-delayed Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota; and a push by utility companies to obtain funding and permits for the construction of 235 gas-fired power plants, each with a 30-year life expectancy.

In response, horrified progressives have sought to pressure the president-elect to appoint officials committed to blocking these and other similar projects. But the strategy of pressuring leading Democrats hasn’t worked particularly well for environmentalists in the past and doesn’t seem to be working now. Despite the movement’s full-court press for a real environmentalist presence in the administration, Biden designated Congressman Cedric Richmond as his “liaison” with that very movement. Richmond voted in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline and, among Democrats in the House, he was the fifth-largest recipient of fossil-fuel cash.

Fortunately, a more promising strategy for defeating new fossil-fuel projects has been quietly bearing fruit, even in the Trump era. Climate and Indigenous organizers have been attacking Big Energy companies and their investors, using economic pressure, boycotts, lawsuits, and disruptive direct-action tactics to impede drilling, interrupt the transportation of oil and gas, and choke off the flow of financing to, and insurance for, such projects. This multipronged strategy has been so surprisingly successful that the companies themselves — especially their sources of funding — have begun divesting from fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure. As our desperately overheated planet continues setting records, understanding the largely unnoticed success of recent resistance movements is crucial if we hope to prevent total ecological collapse.

Why the fossil-fuel industry is vulnerable, but the end of fossil fuels isn’t inevitable The fossil-fuel industry and its champions in Congress recently complained that financial institutions were “discriminating against America’s energy sector.” Specifically, banks were “folding to activist environmental groups’ pressure” by adopting “policies against investing in new oil and gas operations.” Trump’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) responded by trying to force Wall Street to fund drilling in the Arctic Refuge and undertake other new fossil-fuel initiatives.

Why have the banks suddenly become so unwilling to invest in a longtime favorite sector of theirs? One reason is that easy-to-access fossil fuels are getting scarcer. In this era of “extreme” energy, companies have found themselves investing striking amounts of Wall Street capital (and wreaking environmental devastation) to find, extract, and transport hydrocarbon deposits from deep oceans, the Arctic, oil sands, and shale. At a time when oil prices were reliably above $80 per barrel, such projects were enormously profitable. But the fracking boom of the Obama years burst that bubble, with oil prices dropping as low as $40 per barrel by 2015 and remaining well under $80 during the first three years of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, renewable energy sources (especially wind) were growing cheaper by the month and siphoning off investment capital, further reducing the demand for carbon-based power.

The global spread of Covid-19 tanked energy demand, turning the drop in oil prices into a nosedive. The pandemic itself, the economic lockdowns, the lack of travel that went with them, and a Saudi-Russian price war drove oil to a calamitous low of $19 per barrel in April 2020. The result was widespread bankruptcies among shale producers and weakening viability among major banks saddled with $300 billion in shaky hydrocarbon loans. To prevent further losses, those banks started to withhold funding for new projects, while oil companies wrote down the value of their reserves, implicitly acknowledging that many of them may never be extracted. A number of experts are now predicting that the “fracking revolution” has entered a period of terminal decline.

This potentially dire situation helps explain the latest Trump initiatives. In order to lock in the next generation of major fossil-fuel projects, the industry’s partisans must convince the major oil companies to borrow and invest the many billions of dollars needed to complete them. They must also convince or coerce increasingly reluctant banks to fund the projects and induce insurers to underwrite ventures that are enormously risky.

This is a daunting but not impossible undertaking. The history of capitalism is strewn with the carcasses of major industries that fell into terminal crisis and were overtaken by new competitors. When it came to manufacturing, water power was replaced by electric power, just as fossil-fueled transportation replaced horses. But history is also littered with industries that somehow survived the challenge of apparently superior substitutes. The nuclear power industry, for instance, has survived despite its monumental costs, poor performance, and the environmental catastrophes associated with it. The reason: the U.S. government invested vast resources in it, forced other institutions to do the same, and suppressed political and economic resistance to it.

The same thing could happen with fossil fuels. The major carbon corporations wield so much power and remain so deeply embedded in the U.S. economy that they can call on governments for subsidies to keep them afloat, no matter the economic (let alone environmental) irrationality of continued fossil-fuel production. Trump’s gambit in the Arctic Refuge, like his entire energy policy, has been anchored by attempts to increase such subsidies and so prolong the fossil-fuel era. The industry giants are also using the current crisis to acquire bankrupt competitors at low prices and consolidate production into a ruling oligopoly. The survivors could emerge even more powerful and so potentially even more capable of demanding handouts from the public.

Why fossil fuels might be defeated Ironically, the Trump administration’s latest initiatives on behalf of fossil fuels also reveal how the industry can be defeated. Because investors are increasingly reluctant to fund troubled extraction and infrastructure projects, the industry has enlisted the U.S. government to force them to do so. The Arctic Refuge, a pristine wilderness area in Alaska where the Trump administration’s OCC and the industry have, absurdly enough, invoked anti-discrimination law (alleging discrimination against both fossil-fuel producers and Indigenous Alaskans) to try to compel the banks to invest, is the most obvious case of this.

Their desperation reflects just how effective the resistance to fossil-fuel projects has been in recent years. All across the U.S. and Canada, climate and Indigenous organizers have successfully raised the level of risk attached to such investments. The industry is highly vulnerable to delays in both drilling and the construction of the transportation infrastructure necessary to deliver oil and gas. Delays raise production costs, while creating long-term uncertainty about the competitiveness of fossil fuels. Green resistance movements have created a credible threat of chronic delays to and interruptions of such projects, leading major lenders to begin shifting from reluctance-to-invest to outright refusal.

The OCC’s efforts to strong-arm lenders are based on its recent finding “that some of the nation’s largest banks had stopped doing business altogether with one or more major energy industry categories.” As Alaskan lawmakers put it grimly, the banks were increasingly “folding to activist environmental groups’ pressure.”

Why has that pressure worked? By obstructing drilling and the construction of infrastructure (especially pipelines and power plants), the green movement has added to the industry’s operating costs in increasingly bad times, while leaving investors fearing the risks now associated with those projects. In this way, it’s won victories, even in a moment when the Trump administration was aggressively promoting fossil fuels, when a far-right majority controlled the Supreme Court, and when most congressional Democrats were sitting on their hands.

The movement has applied four mutually reinforcing strategies that, together, have often succeeded in blocking or at least delaying such projects and, in doing so, have rendered them ever less viable.

First, resistance groups mounted disruptive protests at extraction sites and along the routes of proposed oil and natural gas pipelines. Actions against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access (DAPL) pipelines, led by Indigenous communities seeking to protect their lands from devastation, have been the most visible examples of this. In addition to forcing months of delays in construction, these on-site protests inspired a broader movement against fossil fuels and gave added impetus to demands for regulators, judges, and politicians to intervene.

Second, the movement targeted regulators in an effort to prevent or postpone the issuing of permits for the projects. Even during the Obama era, federal regulators had mostly acted as “rubber stamps” for new fossil fuel projects. But the Standing Rock Sioux campaign against DAPL successfully pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to announce a new environmental review of the pipeline, delaying it until Trump took office.

Third, the movement has filed lawsuits based on industry violations of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other laws. Such suits often challenged the validity of permits already issued, which slowed down industry operations and provided the movement with an alternative choke point when regulators and politicians proved unresponsive.

Finally, it targeted the “money pipeline,” pressuring banks, insurers, and other large institutions to divest from fossil fuels. Initially, this strategy was largely symbolic, but no longer. It’s now adding to the financial difficulties of Big Energy. Shell Oil Company, for instance, recently labeled the divestment movement a “material risk.” In the case of the Arctic Refuge, the movement’s pressure on Wall Street has made big loans harder to obtain and also led investment firms to put pressure on insurance companies to steer clear of projects there.

This four-pronged strategy has yielded many victories and now poses a credible threat to future fossil-fuel projects. In July 2020, for instance, the business media announced a cascade of ominous news affecting four important pipelines:

• A federal judge ruled that the DAPL permit was in violation of NEPA and ordered a time-consuming full environmental review. Though the pipeline had been successfully built in North Dakota despite much resistance, it is now at risk of being permanently closed anyway.

• An Indigenous landowners’ lawsuit arguing that a second North Dakota pipeline, Marathon Oil’s Tesoro High Plains line, illegally trespassed on their territory led the Bureau of Indian Affairs to order its closing after 67 years of operation.

• The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling by a Montana district court judge that had stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

• Dominion Energy and Duke Energy cancelled their Atlantic Coast pipeline project “after years of delays and ballooning costs.”

In response to that last cancellation, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette complained that “the obstructionist environmental lobby has successfully killed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.” His attitude reflected a growing exasperation among industry leaders who have recently decried the “rising tide of protests, litigation, and vandalism” against pipelines and warned that the movement is reaching a new “level of intensity” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”

Indeed, the resistance has increased pessimism among industry executives and their investors. According to Bloomberg News, typically a gauge of Wall Street sentiments, the core big energy companies are ever more often concluding that “the mega-projects of the past are no longer feasible in the face of unprecedented opposition to fossil fuels and the infrastructure that supports them.”

A tipping point? The July decisions on the two North Dakota pipelines were especially significant since they threatened already operating projects. As one former pipeline executive put it, this meant that even projects that successfully weathered a storm of protests and secured the necessary permits to operate remained vulnerable and might be shuttered long before repaying their immense debts. With that prospect, “I think it’s going to be incredibly difficult for anybody to invest in any kind of [fossil-fuel] infrastructure.” Echoing his view, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum warned that the DAPL ruling might be “a tipping point, which actually could really cripple production in North Dakota.”

Even if the industry ultimately wins some of its current battles, it might not be able to keep investors on board. The prospect that some future judicial decision could imperil their existing investments deprives them of “certainty from the government,” as one industry lobbying group warned in March. This threat is compounded by the prospect that, in the Biden years to come, other parts of the government may finally begin taking action to stop climate destruction, which could leave fossil-fuel assets “stranded.”

If the green movement can continue to disrupt the certainty that investing in oil fields and pipelines will return big profits, count on this: capitalists will begin to desert fossil fuels big time. Billionaire investment strategist Jeremy Grantham predicts a tipping point in the near future. He expects that investors will respond to the mounting threats to the fossil-fuel industry “very slowly” for a while and then “all at once.” The point of resistance, then, is to increase the delays, closures, and disruptions that make fossil fuels a risky investment, therefore ensuring that the “all at once” tipping point arrives before humanity crosses the threshold of irreversible catastrophe.

What does all this mean for the current movement to win a Green New Deal? Electing pro-GND candidates has helped place it on the legislative agenda, but the movement must avoid the trap of investing all its energy and resources in electoral campaigns and lobbying. The Democratic Party leadership, including President-elect Biden, has mocked the Green New Deal and committed itself instead to a dangerous “all of the above” energy policy that includes plenty of oil, gas, and nuclear power. Even if Democrats were to win a Senate majority from the two January run-off elections in Georgia, Green New Deal legislation would remain a hard lift at best.

The environmental movement can, however, still move this country closer to a Green New Deal through the very same strategy that brought it victories during the Obama and Trump eras. By obstructing fossil-fuel projects at every turn, it can deprive the industry of the Wall Street investments it needs and lead private investors to view renewables, ever cheaper to produce, as a safer option. The government itself will be forced to invest in renewables in order to meet society’s energy needs and provide jobs to replace those lost when fossil-fuel projects are blocked, as the climate movement has long demanded. Direct resistance to fossil fuels is the shortest and surest path to a renewable energy transition. When you make the building of more pipelines and gas-powered plants so much harder, you also make the Green New Deal and a livable planet so much more possible.

Richard Lachmann is professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Albany, and author of First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020).

Michael Schwartz is distinguished teaching professor of sociology (emeritus) at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Kevin Young is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Schwartz and Young are the co-authors, with Tarun Banerjee, of Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (Verso, 2020). This article originated at TomDispatch.

Copyright ©2020 Richard Lachmann, Michael Schwartz, Kevin Young — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 December 2020

Word Count: 2,426

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As you know, the Rev. Raphael Warnock is running to represent the state of Georgia in the US Senate against incumbent Republican Kelly Leoffler. Their runoff next month, as well as the one between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue, is the site of intense national focus. If the Democrats take both seats, they win control of the upper chamber. This more than anything explains the extreme online reaction Tuesday to a short tweet by Warnock. “I am a pro-choice pastor,” he wrote. To wit:

Charlie Kirk: “You cannot be pro-abortion and also be a Christian.” Erick Erickson: “So not really a follower of the actual Jesus, but the one you’ve conjured in your head. Got it.” Graham Allen: “If you are ‘pro-choice’ pastor, you are not only NOT pastor. You are a crappy Christian!” Ben Shapiro: “I am the square root of a negative number.”

It should be said this is Warnock’s opinion. People are entitled to theirs. A difference of opinion, however, isn’t why Erickson and his ghouls are reacting so strongly. They are trying to discredit his religion. They are trying to delegitimize his faith. And they are doing this because Warlock, as the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr., once preached, speaks with righteous authority. If you can take that away, you have taken away Warnock’s mightiest political asset.

A political defense is, therefore, appropriate. One of the best political defenses comes from the Rev. Dave Barnhart, an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church who heads something called the house churches of Saint Junia in Birmingham, Ala. Some time ago he wrote the following, which has been widely shared by liberal Christians.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.

He went on.

It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

But Rev. Warnock’s opinion deserves a religious defense — a liberal and conservative religious defense. The former comes from the African-American church, where most people actually oppose abortion. However, they do not, and will not, take a position by which they are seen to be telling Black women what to do with their bodies. Black history is a history of state claims on Black bodies. The Black church, I think, is manifesting the moral equality at the center of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Would you accept authority over your body in defiance of your own? Of course you wouldn’t.

For a conservative religious defense, allow me to draw on my own experience. I was once part of an obscure (white) evangelical Protestant sect called — deep breath — Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t recall anyone mentioning abortion, but I do recall vividly that the order of power was sacred. God over Man. Men over women. And parents over children.

I vividly recall the importance of parental authority, because it was literally beaten into me. Dissent was intolerable even in diapers. Equally intolerable? The rights of “the unborn” above the rights of parents. You can totally be a pro-choice pastor. You can be pro-choice and religiously conservative.

In everything, there was extreme skepticism of “this world,” which is Satan’s. That meant some of my family members refused to put up Christmas trees. It was too pagan for one thing. For another, it needlessly risked their mortal souls. Why tempt God’s wrath with the appearance of worshipping a false deity? (Bring that up the next time someone rails against the “war on Christmas.”) I think of this when it comes to “the unborn.” They’re mentioned only twice, in Psalms, both with reference to future generations. Nothing, however, about inchoate human beings. You could say, with legitimate Biblical authority, that the movement for life is a movement for idolatry. You could also say, with religiously conservative fury, that it’s time to get back to Biblical basics: prisoners and immigrants, widows and orphans, the sick and the poor.

My point isn’t to endorse a religiously conservative view. Indeed, I dislike it. My point is that Erickson and his ghouls aren’t as religiously conservative as they would like us to believe. They are, of course, politically conservative. Fascist, I would say, and there’s the rub. Deep in the heart of the world’s fascist politics is a crippling anxiety about the place of women in society, especially women’s bodies being out of the control of men.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 December 2020

Word Count: 909

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Liberal democracy is not a good thing for political parties of the right. While it can deliver for most people most of the time, liberal democracy can’t for the Republican Party or its counterparts around the globe. Elite members of such political parties have everything they need politically, because they are rich, very rich or very obscenely rich.

They don’t need democratic politics the way you and I need democratic politics, because god-like wealth, status and power have already brought them superlative levels of freedom. What they need, or what they tell themselves they need, is for liberal democracy to get out of the way so they can become even more very obscenely rich.

Democracy won’t get out of the way, so political parties of the right have devised ways of making their goals appear as if they’re everyone’s. They must because their real goals are gothic: minimal if any taxation on their money, especially dynastic money, and minimal if any regulation of the means of adding more to the pile.

Most people most of the time don’t care about that, because they have some measure of caring for their fellow human beings. Indeed, they sympathize with the poor and resent the rich. There’s only one thing the conservative rich can possibly do. They lie — and lie and lie.

While the conservative rich really do believe they are better than everyone else — they have “good genes,” after all — they can’t say that. That gets them in trouble. While they really do believe morality is a ploy by the weak (you and me) to defend themselves against the strong (them), they can’t say that. That gets them in trouble. So they spend as much time masking their true intentions as they do gobbling up as much as they can in the barbarous belief that human beings can’t behave better than wild animals.

When an anonymous billionaire was asked in July if it’s fair to get richer while the covid pandemic kills Americans and leaves devastation in its wake, he said: “I don’t know. Is war fair? Do people die in a war? Yes. You’ve got a virus that is affecting people. It’s pretty clear who it affects. (He meant people who are old and sick.) So nature is saying, ‘I’m going to pick on you.’ Is it fair? Is it right? No. But that’s life.”

This is social Darwinism, among a repertoire of lies the conservative rich have told us for decades. Their extraordinary wealth, and consequently their extraordinary power, aren’t just natural; they are preferable to the impure hand of government taxing and regulating what they say should not be taxed and regulated, because doing so threatens the economy, a system in which all of us have stake. This lie appeared noble, tied to our collective fate. It was, however, gothic. It was predicated on mass suffering.

It was also very useful during the 40 years that liberal democracy seemed intractable. The conservative rich had to pretend. They had to act as if they cared about equality. They had to make like they loved America. They had to — until Donald Trump came along.

Trump told “the truth.” Might equals right, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to scam you. He was popular with the white working class. The Russians attacked Hillary Clinton but it didn’t cost him. The best part? He could show utter contempt for his own supporters (Mexico’s gonna pay for the wall ha ha!) and they totally fell for it! With his rise came the luxury of not having to fake it anymore.

For the last four years, the Republicans haven’t bothered appeasing liberal democracy with all the many lies they honed to perfection over the years. National character? Didn’t matter. States rights? Didn’t matter. Norms and institutions? Didn’t matter. Civil society? Didn’t matter. “Big government”? Didn’t matter. Budgets and spending? Didn’t matter. Patriotism? Even that didn’t matter.

Everything the conservative rich told us they cared about was stripped away. Their true goals — tax cuts, business deregulation, control of judges — were revealed. The GOP showed its true face.

And it continues to.

The president isn’t winding down his term. He’s “broadening” a “pressure campaign” to subvert the election and the will of the people. Trump twice called last week the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That’s the third time he has intervened personally in an attempt to stay in office. Federal law requires the US Congress to recognize the election’s outcome, but so far all but 25 Republicans refuse to say Joe Biden won.

How far they are willing to go along with Trump depends on how much they see the need to appease liberal democracy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 December 2020

Word Count: 782

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If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country’s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end?

Recently, in a podcast chat about our very different but somehow twin journeys through those wars, he and I got to thinking about what might have happened if our paths had crossed so much earlier. Both of us, after all, have been writing for TomDispatch for years. As Bill once said to me, thinking about his post-military writing career, “You know, Danny, in my small way I was trying — and failing — to stop the wars you were heading into.”

Now that’s an interesting, if disturbing, thought. But Bill, what would you have said to Lieutenant Danny (that was me once upon a time!) and how might he have responded then?

Who could know now, of course? Still, here’s our retrospective attempt to sort that out in joint correspondence in which we track about 15 years’ worth of this country’s unending wars.

The Frankenstein and Star Trek years of American war

Bill: When you were graduating from West Point in 2005 and shining your lieutenant’s bars, Danny, I was putting my uniform away after 20 years in the Air Force and driving to Pennsylvania for a new career as a history professor. I thought I’d teach and maybe write a book or two. I never pictured myself as a dissenter, and I’d never spoken out publicly against the wars we were in. The one time I was interviewed about them, in 2005 when I was still the military dean of students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, I remember saying that I preferred our troops use words rather than rifle butts to communicate with the Afghans and Iraqis. Of course, we had so few troops who spoke Arabic or Pashto or Dari that we leaned on our rifles instead, which meant lots of dead and alienated people in both countries.

In the summer of 2007, I was increasingly disgusted by the way the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney was hiding behind the bemedaled chest of Iraq commander General David Petraeus. Our civilian commander-in-chief, George W., was avoiding responsibility for the disastrous Iraq War by sending Petraeus, then known as the “surge” general, before Congress to testify that some sort of victory was still possible, even as he hedged his talk of progress with words like “fragile” and “reversible.”

So I got off my butt and wrote an article that argued we needed to end the Iraq War and our folly of “spilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon.” I submitted it to newspapers like the New York Times with no success. Fortunately, a friend told me about TomDispatch, where Tom Engelhardt had been publishing critical articles by retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich. Luckily for me, Tom liked my piece and published it as “Saving the Military from Itself” in October of that same year.

That article put me on the path of dissent from America’s forever wars, even if I wasn’t so much antiwar as anti-dumb-war then. As I asked at the time, how do you win someone else’s civil war? Being a Star Trek fan, I referred to the Kobayashi Maru, a “no-win” scenario introduced in the second Star Trek movie. I saw our troops, young lieutenants like yourself in Iraq, being stuck in a no-win situation and I was already convinced that, no matter how much Petraeus talked about “metrics” and “progress,” it wasn’t going to happen, that “winning” really meant leaving, and we haven’t won yet since, god help us, we’re still there.

Of course, the so-called surge in Iraq back then did what it was actually meant to do. It provided an illusion of progress and stability even while proving just as fragile and reversible as the weaselly Petraeus said it would be. Worse yet, the myth of that Iraqi surge would lead disastrously to the Afghan version of the same under Barack Obama and — yet again — Petraeus who would prove to be a general for all presidents.

Lucky you! You were on the ground in both surges, weren’t you?

Danny: I sure was! Believe it or not, a colonel once told me I was lucky to have done “line duty” in both of them — platoon and company command, Iraq and Afghanistan, Baghdad and Kandahar. To be honest, Bill, I knew something was fishy even before you retired or I graduated from West Point and headed for those wars.

In fact, it’s funny that you should mention Bacevich. I was first introduced to his work in the winter of 2004 as a West Point senior by then-Lieutenant Colonel Ty Seidule. Back then, for a guy like me, Bacevich had what could only be called bracing antiwar views (a wink-nod to your Bracing Views blog, Bill) for a classroom of burgeoning neocons just about certain to head for Iraq. Frankly, most of us couldn’t wait to go.

And we wouldn’t have that long to wait either. The first of our classmates to die, Emily Perez, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in September 2006 within 18 months of graduation (and five more were to die in the years to come). I took a scout platoon to southeast Baghdad a month later and we didn’t leave — most of us, that is — for 15 months.

My partly Bacevich-bred sneaking suspicions about America’s no-longer distant wars were, of course, all confirmed. It turned out that policing an ethno-religious-sectarian conflict, mostly of our own country’s making, while dodging counter-counterinsurgent attacks aimed at expelling us occupiers from that country was as tough as stateside invasion opponents had predicted.

On lonely outpost mornings, I had a nasty daily habit of reading the names of our announced dead. Midway through my tour, one of those countless attacks killed 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich. When I saw that name, I realized instantly that he must be the son of the man whose book I had read two years earlier, the man who is now our colleague. The moment remains painfully crystal clear in my memory.

By the way, Bill, your Iraq War take was dead on. During my own tour there, I came to the same realization. Embarrassingly enough, though, it took me seven years to say the same things publicly in my first book, fittingly subtitled “The Myth of the Surge.” By then, of course, ISIS — the Frankenstein’s monster of America’s misadventure — was already streaming across Syria’s synthetic borders and conquering swaths of northern and western Iraq, which made an anti-Iraq War screed seem quaint indeed, at least in establishment circles.

But Bill, do go on.

Bill: It was also back in 2007 when something John McCain said on PBS really ticked me off. In essence, he warned that if the U.S. military lost in Iraq, it wouldn’t be the generals’ fault. No, it would be ours, those of us who had questioned the war and its conduct and so had broken faith with that very military. In response, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch with the sarcastic title, “If We Lose Iraq, You’re to Blame,” because I already found such “stab-in-the-back” lies pernicious beyond words. As Andy Bacevich noted recently when it came to such lies about an earlier American military disaster: we didn’t lose the Vietnam War in 1975 when Saigon fell, we lost it in 1965 when President Johnson committed American troops to winning a civil war that South Vietnam had already lost.

Something similar is true for the Iraq and Afghan wars today. We won’t lose those conflicts when we finally pull all U.S. troops out and the situation goes south (as it most likely will). No, we lost the Afghan War in 2002 when we decided to turn a strike against the Taliban and al-Qaeda into an occupation of that country; and we lost the Iraq War the moment we invaded in 2003 and found none of the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his top officials had sworn were there. Those were wars of choice, not of necessity, and we could only “win” them by finally choosing to end them. We lose them — and maybe our democracy as well — by choosing to keep on waging them in the false cause of “stability” or “counterterrorism,” or you-name-it.

Early in 2009, I had an epiphany of sorts while walking around a cemetery. With those constant deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries globally, the U.S. military, I thought, was becoming a foreign legion, almost like the quintessential French version of the same, increasingly separated from the people, and increasingly recruited from “foreign” elements, including recent immigrants to this country looking for a fast-track to citizenship.

Danny: Bill, one of my own soldiers fit the mold you just mentioned. Private First Class Gustavo Rios-Ordonez, a married father of two and a Colombian national. Partly seeking citizenship through service, he was the last trooper to join my command just before we shipped out and the first killed when, on June 20, 2011, he stepped on an improvised explosive device within sight of the Afghan outpost I then commanded. Typing this now, I stare at a framed dusty unit guidon, the pennant that once flew over that isolated sandbagged base of ours and was gifted to me by my soldiers.

Sorry, Bill, last interruption… scout’s honor!

Surges to nowhere

Bill: So I wrote an article that asked if our military was morphing into an imperial police force. As I put it then: “Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.” And I added, “Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, our troops are currently fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.”

A few people torched me for writing that. They thought I was saying that the troops themselves were somehow foreign, that I was attacking the rank-and-file, but my intent was to attack those who were misusing the military for their own purposes and agendas and all the other Americans who were acquiescing in the misuse of our troops. It’s a strange dynamic in this country, the way we’re cajoled into supporting our troops without ourselves having to serve or even pay attention to what they’re doing.

Indeed, under George W. Bush, we were even discouraged from commemorating the honored dead, denied seeing footage of returning flag-draped caskets. We were to celebrate our troops, while they (especially the dead and wounded) were kept out of sight — literally behind curtains, by Bush administration order — and so mostly out of mind.

I was against the Afghan surge, Danny, because I knew it would be both futile and unsustainable. In arguing that case, I reached back to the writings of two outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy. As President Obama deliberated on whether to surge or not, I suggested that he should confer with broadminded critics outside the government, tough-minded freethinkers cut from the cloth of Mailer and McCarthy.

Mailer, for example, had argued that the Vietnamese were “faceless” to Americans (just as the Iraqis and Afghans have been all these years), that we knew little about them as a people and cared even less. He saw American intervention in “heart of darkness” terms. McCarthy was even blunter, condemning as “wicked” the government’s technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare with its “absolute indifference to the cost in human lives.” Predictably, Obama listened to conventional wisdom and surged again, first under General Stanley McChrystal and then, of course, under Petraeus.

Danny: Well, Bill, paltry as it may now sound, I truly thank you for your post-service service to sensibility and decency — even if those efforts didn’t quite spare me the displeasure of a second stint in a second theater with Petraeus as my supreme commander for a second time.

By the way, I ran into King David (as he came to be known) last year in a long line for the urinals at Newark airport. Like you, I’ve been tearing the guy’s philosophy and policies up for years. Still, I decided decorum mattered, so I introduced myself and mentioned that we’d met once at a Baghdad base in 2007. But before I could even kid him about how his staff had insisted that we stock ample kiwi slices because he loved to devour them, Petraeus suddenly walked off without even making it to the stall! I found it confusing behavior until I glimpsed myself in the mirror and remembered that I was wearing an “Iraq Veterans Against the War” t-shirt.

Okay, here’s a more instructive anecdote: Have I ever mentioned to you that my Afghan outpost, “Pashmul South” as it was then known, featured prominently in the late journalist Michael Hasting’s classic book, The Operators (which inspired the Netflix original movie War Machine)? At one point, Hastings describes how Petraeus’s predecessor in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, visited an isolated base full of war-weary and war-exasperated infantrymen. In one of the resident platoons, all but seven of its 25 original members had “been killed, wounded, or lost their minds.” And yes, that was the “palace” I took over a couple of years later, an outpost the Taliban was then attacking almost daily.

By the time I took up the cause of “Enduring Freedom” (as the Afghan operation had been dubbed by the Pentagon), I had already resigned myself to being one of those foreign legionnaires you’ve talked about, if not an outright mercenary. During the Afghan surge, I fought for pay, healthcare, a future West Point faculty slot, and lack of a better alternative (or alternate identity). My principles then were simple enough: patrol as little as possible, kill as few locals as you can, and make sure that one day you’ll walk (as many of my scouts literally did) out of that valley called Arghandab.

I was in a dark headspace then. I didn’t believe a damn thing my own side said, held out not an ounce of hope for victory, and couldn’t even be bothered to hate my “enemy.” On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, staff officers at brigade headquarters sent a Reuters reporter deep into the boonies to profile the only commander around from the New York City area and I told him just what I thought, or close enough in any case. Suffice it to say that my colonels were less than pleased when Captain Sjursen was quoted as saying that “the war was anything but personal” and that he never “thought about 9/11 at all” or when he described the Taliban this way: “It’s farm-boys picking up guns. How do you hate that?”

Rereading that article now, I feel a certain sadness for that long-gone self of mine, so lost in fatalism, hopelessness, and near-nihilism. Then I catch myself and think: imagine how the Afghans felt, especially since they didn’t have a distant home to scurry off to sooner or later.

Anyway, I never forgot that it was Obama — from whom I’d sought Iraq War salvation — who ordered my troops on that even more absurd Afghan surge to nowhere (and I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him either). Still, if there was a silver lining in all that senselessness, perhaps it was that such a bipartisan betrayal widened both the breadth and depth of my future dissent.

The struggle itself

Bill: Speaking of surges, Danny, even the word is a military misnomer. It’s dishonest. Real generals advance and retreat. They reinforce. They win (or lose). They occupy the battlefield. Lines move on maps. Foes are beaten and surrender. None of this happens with a “surge.” Our generals just added more troops to exert temporary control over an area in what was nothing more than a fallacious face-saving gesture. A mask. A conceit. All those surges did was sustain a losing cause and reinforce failure. Consider them a fundamental mistake of military strategy, like throwing good money after bad or doubling down on a losing hand.

Why didn’t they listen to me? Why didn’t they stop the Iraq and Afghan surges and end those wars? And now that, with other retired military types, we’re both in the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) you organized, continuing to speak out against the twenty-first-century American way of making war, why do they still not listen to us? I fear that the answer’s simple enough: they have a trillion reasons not to. After all, roughly a trillion-plus dollars is spent each year on the Pentagon, on so-called homeland security, on nuclear weapons, on intelligence and surveillance, on buying weaponry and then more of the same after that. Why won’t they listen to us? We threaten their bottom line, their profits. And why should we get invites to CNN and MSNBC and other mainstream media sites when they already have Pentagon cheerleaders on their staffs and retired senior officers who spout the party line, as journalist David Barstow revealed in his Pulitzer-award-winning series? We aren’t really in EMN, Danny, we’re in the IMF, the impossible missions force.

I remember reading old newspapers from the 1930s that were quite blunt about how to end war: get the profit motive out of it. That was when the standing U.S. military was fairly small and Americans were skeptical of weapons makers, the “merchants of death” as they were so rightly called back then. Almost a century later, we’re the leading merchant of death, the country that arms the world. Domestically, we’re awash in weaponry, with a gun for every American and a mini-tank for every police force. I’ve attacked this creeping militarism, this degradation of our democracy, but with little success. So welcome to the IMF from the classic TV show Mission Impossible. Unless we smarten up and end these perpetual wars, this democracy will self-destruct in five seconds. The odds are long, but it’s a mission we just have to accept.

Danny: I couldn’t agree more, Bill. The militarism problem is cyclical and systemic with a backstory that’s sure to ping our shared historian’s radar. I hinted at this two months ago in remarks I made at legendary antiwar vet Smedley Butler’s graveside (the former major general I wrote about at TomDispatch in February). Highlighting his prophetic aspect, I noted that the two-time Medal of Honor-recipient had diagnosed core components of the military-industrial complex a quarter of a century before our new organization’s namesake, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, coined the term in his Cassandra-like 1961 farewell address. If that isn’t proof our forever-war problems are systemic rather than discrete, I don’t know what is.

That short speech of mine was occasioned by the 19th anniversary of our absurd Afghan War, the conflict you couldn’t singlehandedly stop in time to save me from a second surge excursion. Anyway, don’t beat yourself up about that, Bill. Like you said, the war-state beast is humongous and our buddy Bacevich has been beating this drum since you were still wearing Air Force blue. Under the circumstances and in these pandemic times, what could be more appropriate than a buck-up from that ever-cheery French novelist of plagues and philosopher Albert Camus: “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

And you won’t believe this, but I had to stop there a moment to field a tortured text from an ex-student of mine turned Army lieutenant who’s now straddling those spheres of doubt and dissent that you and I know all too well. You may recall that I penned a piece last year for our mutual friend Tom Engelhardt on “Watching My Students Turn Into Soldiers of Empire.” Damned if that wasn’t a hard pill to swallow. Come to think of it, that must be precisely the feeling of failure you’ve described in our recent correspondence.

Well, at least the military dissent gestation period seems to be shortening. I commissioned exactly 20 years after you. The last crop of cadets from the freshman history class I taught at West Point after I returned from those wars were just 15 years behind me and some of them are now in doubt deep.

The thing is, I fear you’re a better man than I am, my friend. I can see the script that’s coming down the dusty and well-trodden trail, but I’m not sure I could stomach writing a co-column with one of those kids — let alone attending one of their funerals.

I guess we old hands had better get to work. In the battle against endless war, our motto has to be: no retreat, no surrender.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Danny Sjursen also writes regularly for TomDispatch. He is a retired U.S. Army major, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, directs the Eisenhower Media Network and cohosts the “Fortress on a Hill” podcast. A former history instructor at West Point, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. His two books are Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright ©2020 William Astore and Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 December 2020

Word Count: 3,489

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