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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it feel, America?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Released: 08 June 2020

Word Count: 2,357

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One of the habits of the Washington press corps is equalizing the parties so their differences are not apparent. The Republican Party is a vertical organization whose members are inherently deferential to party authority. The Democratic Party is more horizontal. Arrangements of power are negotiated among competing factions. For this reason, the Republicans always come off as forceful and more disciplined in their messaging. For this reason, the Democrats always comes off as indecisive and soft.

That the Democrats sound this way is frustrating to some liberals and progressives — and, these days, a few conservative former Republicans demanding a stronger reaction to an authoritarian president. What these critics don’t see is something journalistic balance prevents them from seeing. The Democrats are the bigger tent, much bigger in the age of Donald Trump. Their messaging may sound wishy-washy, but their power speaks for itself. The GOP, meanwhile, sounds powerful no matter how weak it is.

“Bothsiderism,” as journalistic balance is sometimes called, affects the electorate’s understanding of the role of religion in the parties, too. White evangelical Christians do not constitute the whole of the Republican Party. (Mormons and traditional white Catholics are also important.) But white evangelical Christians, especially in the age of Donald Trump, are so influential that the Republicans, when they talk about religion, talk about religion as if they were the party of twice-born Christianity. Indeed, there’s very little daylight in today’s GOP between ultra-orthodox Christian faith and politics.

A consequence of this seamless merger is the ability among Republicans to portray the Democrats as opposing religion as much as they oppose Republican politics. They can portray the Democrats, moreover, as being so anti-religious their efforts to combat racism and other forms of institutional prejudice are about cynical politics, not morality. Consider what Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News this week. The answer to systemic racism wasn’t policy, he said, but “loving God,” but that’s hard to do when “we’ve been working really hard, particularly on the left, to kick God out.”

More on that in a moment.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is as religiously diverse as it is racially and economically diverse. The party also boasts a bloc of evangelical Christians, but they are black and Latinx. Jews vote Democratic by huge margins. So do liberal (white) and nonwhite Catholics. The parties tend to split mainline Protestants — Episcopalian, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on — though I’d guess they lean Democratic these days. When the Democrats talk about religion, they talk about religion with all this diversity in mind, and as a consequence, they sound less forceful than Republicans.

The party is more liberal than the GOP, obviously, and being liberal means it makes room for a spectrum of religious views, including quite conservative ones. For this reason, the Democrats tend to focus — when they talk about religion publicly — less on religious identity and more on universal principles applicable to public affairs that all the world’s religions have in common. There’s less emphasis on loving God due to the variety of ways of imaging what God is. And anyway, what’s loving God got to do with exercising faith in public life? There is more emphasis, however, on loving each other.

The loving-each-other part, or the Golden Rule, is key to understanding the role of religion in each of the parties, and it’s key to understanding why bothsiderism distorts political reality and thus undermines citizen participation in American democracy. Fact is, the massive public protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd have featured dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of members of the clergy from an array of religions. They are marching for equality. They are marching for peace and the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. They are marching to exercise their religion, but you wouldn’t know it. They are largely invisible in press corps reporting.

There’s no shortage, however, indeed there’s a glut, of reporting on the president’s pandering to white evangelical Christians. That’s understandable given its importance to his reelection (and given how ironic it seems that people who hated Bill Clinton for his infidelity love a world-class philanderer like Donald Trump). But whitewashing religious experience from the Democratic Party inadvertently gives the impression that only Republicans care about religion in public life, especially religious freedom.

Bothsiderism ends up favors the Republicans politically by making them appear to be champions of religious freedom and by making the Democrats appear to be champions of secularism, as if religious freedom and secularism were oppositional. They are not. The Democrats do champion secularism, of course, but not to “kick God out” of the country, as Dan Patrick and other evangelicals would have it. It is to protect religion. It’s to make a space in public life for the exercise of all religions to compete in our national political discourse and the “marketplace of ideas.”

Patrick’s accusation is a perversion of the First Amendment’s establishment clause in that it privileges one sect of one religious tradition above all others. But you might not know that by reading the New York Times.

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: 05 June 2020

Word Count: 845

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In yesterday’s edition of the Editorial Board, I touched briefly on something I’d like to focus on fully today. Thanks to Donald Trump, I said, white Americans are starting to see the United States through the eyes of black Americans who experience every day police departments deploying an array of gestapo tactics. Black Americans, in other words, understand fascism intimately. White Americans are finally seeing that the point of Black Lives Matter wasn’t mere political correctness. It was a yearning for freedom.

That was my primary point. My secondary point, the one I want to focus on fully today, is that many white Americans are now aligning with black Americans to not only demand due process and equal justice for George Floyd — not only demand anti-racist policy to counteract institutional racism — but also demand an end to a 40-year-old “conservative” political regime built precariously on the backs of black Americans.

Perhaps the best way to understand the millions marching in the streets is by comparing them to uprisings overseas, such as the Arab Spring, in which massive protests signaled that the old regime had finally descended into decadence, decay and illegitimacy. The grassroots energy that fueled the establishment of the current regime, which was cemented with the elections of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was the mirror opposite of the grassroots energy fueling today’s protests. The “conservative” revolution was, among other things, a backlash against the political enfranchisement of black Americans. One could say that the current revolution, if that’s not overstating it, is a backlash against the backlash’s disenfranchisement.

We don’t usually talk about “regimes” when we talk about American politics. “Regime” is a word reserved typically for discussions of dictators and despots. “Regime change” is usually what the United States does to other countries. But our history can be understood, perhaps best understood, as one regime changing into another every 40 years or so, first during a period of flowering, then mainstream acceptance and then a period of decadence, decay and illegitimacy, usually amid some kind of crisis that essentially proves that the old regime’s argument doesn’t matter anymore. At the heart of each transition between established regimes was the question of whether white Americans took seriously the concerns and interests of black Americans. The Republicans broke faith with the republic after a black man became president. That’s probably when the old order began disintegrating. What’s next is anyone’s guess.

The protests are not the only sign of regime change. So is the old regime’s attempt to tighten its grip on political power. As it sinks deeper into illegitimacy, its champions increasingly turn to increasingly illegitimate means of maintaining the old order. The Republicans turned a blind eye to Russia’s sabotage of the 2016 election. The party then acquitted Donald Trump of treason. It is now silent as the president threatens to send military troops to crush public outrage. Those who are not silent, like Sen. Tom Cotton, wade even further into illegitimacy, calling, in the pages of the New York Times, for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”

Another sign is division among respected representatives of the old order. Every major newspaper in the country, all but two, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s a huge indicator given that newspaper publishers nearly always endorse GOP candidates. The Republican Party itself has been split a dozen ways. Moderates like Charlie Dent and Jeff Flake are long gone. So-called “never-Trumpers” have relearned that conservatism without democracy is fascism. George W. Bush these days sounds like a liberal. Most importantly, nonpartisan voices in national security — Mike Mullen and Jim Mattis, among other former intelligence officials from both parties — are growing louder in their denunciation of Trump and the Republican Party, signaling a repudiation of the old order and an openness to future possibilities with new allies.

The Reagan regime’s argument was that government was best when it governed least. That appealed to white supremacists hoping to maintain a custom of sadism going back to slavery. That appealed to liberals who fought against the Vietnam War. That appealed to anyone remembering state-sponsored crimes against humanity in places like Germany, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. Free markets, not the government, were trustworthy. Free individuals, not community or society, were most important. Demands for a government of, by and for the people were met with deep suspicion.

Make no mistake: nothing is certain. Progress doesn’t happen on its own. America’s future, quite literally, could be more democratic as well as more liberal, or it could be more authoritarian. But one thing, at least, seems certain. The current dust devil of disaster — pandemic, unemployment, and massive social unrest — is probably enough to persuade a majority of people to see that the old argument doesn’t matter anymore.

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: 04 June 2020

Word Count: 801

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharris — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 June 2020

Word Count: 2,591

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I teach a class at Wesleyan on how to understand the 2020 presidential election. (Well, not at Wesleyan; everything’s over Zoom for the time being.) Students are naturally curious. They want to know where I stand. So I tell them I have a point of view, but that my point of view isn’t set in stone. Indeed, I tell them, points of view are never set in stone. They change over time. They are contingent. It depends on what’s at stake.

Moreover, I tell them that some points of view are more accurate than others. Some points of view are more helpful to understanding politics as it really is. If we do not understand politics as it really is, we cannot perform well our duties as citizens. There are forces at work in our society, I hasten to add, that would very much like us to misunderstand our politics in order that we perform poorly our civic duties. Then I tell students the best way to understand politics is by seeing it through a black lens.

Once white people see American politics from the perspective of the African-American experience, they understand, or at least have an inkling, that what they thought was their country isn’t. It’s a political fiction created for reasons good and bad, but mostly bad, and that continuing to see politics through a white lens not only harms the republic but enables the always-subliminal variants of American fascism. (Disclaimer: I do try in subtle ways to express gratitude to my students of color who don’t need a white visiting professor of public policy explaining their lives to them, and to encourage them to share experience and wisdom vital to our learning together.)

As a teacher, my goal is reaching students individually. That’s how teaching usually works. Even here, in this edition of the Editorial Board, I do not expect to persuade more than one person at a time of the moral and epistemological rightness of viewing politics through a black lens. This week, however, I’m witnessing teaching on a mass scale. It seems the citizenry is teaching itself, and it’s extraordinary. Out of the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder by the hands of a white cop, many Americans, many white Americans, are seeing finally what black Americans have always seen, and that the spirit animating the black experience has always been a yearning for freedom.

To be sure, white Americans, especially white liberals, understood at least in principle that bad cops do bad things sometimes to black Americans. That, however, wasn’t enough to embrace fully Black Lives Matter. While a black man sat in the Oval Office, Black Lives Matter didn’t seem like a life-saving effort to broaden the republican virtues of the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment, but instead a fashionable gesture toward progressive pieties with little bearing on the republic.

Things are different now. Among other reasons, things are different due to the Trump administration’s decision to gas peaceful protesters to make way for the president’s photo op. Things are different now that the Republican Party — once celebrated for its rugged defense of individuals and states against “government tyranny” — is silent in the wake of Donald Trump’s militarized response to the exercise of civil liberties, in the wake of policemen literally criminalizing speech and assembly, and the freedom to petition the government “for a redress of grievances.” Things are different now due to a deeper awareness among white Americans, more so than during the Obama years, that racism isn’t about race per se. It’s about an abuse of power so sadistic that the founders of this country might have recognized it as being worthy of overthrow.

A president who views himself as the embodiment of the state, by which he is not only above the law but the law itself, is creating conditions in which white Americans are starting to see the connection between authoritarianism and systemic racism, that they overlap and intertwine, whether expressed individually or societally, and that by fighting one, white Americans can fight the other, using their privilege as a weapon. After Trump’s forces flash-bombed peaceful protesters Monday, crowds in Washington appeared to increase, perhaps even double, in size the following day. What started as a call for justice for George Floyd is evolving into demands for the end of a 40-year “conservative” regime balanced precariously on the backs of black Americans.

People who used to call themselves conservatives are discovering that in the age of Donald Trump their conservatism depends on the integrity of traditional American liberalism (civil right and civil duties, separation of powers, representative government, checks and balances, etc.) and that without that liberal foundation — when that foundation is undermined by politics — their conservatism turns into something else, something ugly, something akin to America’s enemies foreign and domestic.

No one would question George W. Bush’s conservatism. But in a statement yesterday, in response to Floyd’s murder and outrage over it, the former president said not a word that would be interpreted as conservative. Bush sounded liberal. Bush sounded almost black. Points of view are never set in stone. They evolve and they change. They depend on the stakes. For Bush, and many others, the stakes are liberty and justice for all.

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: 03 June 2020

Word Count: 875

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As I’m writing these words, the United States Senate is busy doing what it’s been doing for the most part since Donald Trump took office nearly four years: confirming federal judges. Despite everything going on — a pandemic killing tens of thousands, an economy nearing collapse, police officers rioting in the streets — despite a republic on the edge, the Senate Republicans have continued mass-producing judges in order to enshrine minority rule in this country and establish a 21st-century apartheid state.

This is important to point out after the president threatened last night to use the US military to crush public protest of George Floyd’s murder by a white cop. This is important to point out after Trump signaled to his followers — white citizens willing to use illegitimate violence as well as white cops willing to use legitimate violence — that all violence is worthy, and pardonable, when put in the service of his name. Pointing out the mass-production of jurists is important, because totalitarianism didn’t arrive last night, as some seem to think. Fascism and its variants have always been with us, but they have been growing in strength since at least 2000 when one branch of the government invaded another in order to advance a “constitutional revolution.”

The difference between pre- and post-Trump authoritarianism, however, is the difference between lawfulness and lawlessness. The Republicans were always careful about appearing lawful before 2016, but they have since abandoned all pretense in a bid to hasten their jurisprudential project, with Lindsey Graham even urging publicly that retiring judges hurry up before the electorate catches on to what’s happening. The Republicans know in their bones they can’t win playing by the rules, so they must rig the rules in their favor with assistance from friendly jurists. This is so important, the Senate Republicans were not only willing to overlook Trump’s treason; they helped him cover it up, and, in the process, made the president the embodiment of the state.

It hardly needs saying that when a president becomes the embodiment of the state, he is above the law, or more precisely, he is the law itself — which is, or should be, an abomination in the eyes of Americans privileging the rule of law above all other forms of rule. Ignoring a pandemic that has killed 107,000 people so far, and threatening to occupy US cities as if their inhabitants were enemy combatants, are precisely what you’d expect from a president helped into office by a Russian autocrat and acquitted of treason by a political party tightening its grip on power. Indeed, the Republicans are getting a twofer. For their friends, there’s anything. For their enemies, there’s the law.

Make no mistake: it is illegal and unconstitutional for any president to use military power domestically. But being illegal and unconstitutional does not and will not stop a president who has become the embodiment of the state. Do not presume military occupation of, say, Minneapolis cannot happen. It can happen as quickly as Trump’s order to teargas peaceful protesters in Washington, DC, to make way for a photo op. Even if the president does not take such action, however, there are other ways of achieving his objectives. If nothing else, the Floyd protests have revealed, for all Americans to see, that Trump is, ideologically, a Maoist in capitalist form. For him, political power does not grow from the will of the American people. It grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Understand what you are seeing when you see police rioting. It is a system of monopolized violence whose adherents, though not all of them, will not be held accountable for their actions, because they believe accountability is a violation of their natural right to exercise power without legal restraint. What you are seeing when you see police rioting is a real-time expression of what people inhabiting a nation within a nation believe about people outside that nation. They, the real Americans, are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. Morality, for everyone else, means submission. If you refuse to submit, you get what’s coming to you, even if that includes your murder.

The president understands the psychology of the confederate nation within a nation perhaps better than anyone, and he understands, too, the natural kinship between some white cops and white vigilantes, who together constitute a covert and lethal force for maintaining order in or outside the purview of the law. Even if the US military never occupies Minneapolis, the president still has a network of legitimate and illegitimate actors itching for a reason to shoot. Axios reported last night that Trump went full law-and-order.

No, it’s the opposite. Trump went full lawlessness and order.

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: 02 June 2020

Word Count: 782

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These days, teaching graduating college seniors has me, as the Brits would say in the London Underground, “minding the gap.” In my case, however, it’s not the gap between the platform and the train I’m thinking of, but a couple of others: those between U.S. citizens and our government, as well as between different generations of Americans. The Covid-19 crisis has made some of those gaps far more visible than usual, just as my students leave school with many of their personal expectations in tatters.

The chasms illuminated by the coronavirus are many: the gender pay gap; the wealth gap between African Americans and Latinos on one side and white Americans on the other, not to speak of the gap in their healthcare access and health outcomes; the gap in the amount of domestic work and childcare done by women and men; and that’s just to start down a longer list. Covid-19 has exacerbated all of these gaps in very concrete ways. To take just one example, the children of families with the fewest resources will be the ones most affected by missing almost half a school year or more.

The generous resiliency of my racially diverse students continues to surprise me. They know it’s a bitter world out there, but many of them seem determined, gaps or not, to change it.

Unbelievable Born in 1952, I was too young for the “missile gap,” which animated John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for president. On the Senate floor, as early as 1958, he began claiming that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union in the production and deployment of nuclear missiles. In reality, that gap was all in the other direction, but it did help get him elected and spurred a major escalation of U.S. nuclear development and testing.

Eventually, a series of agreements would reduce Cold War nuclear tensions, although it now looks as if the Trump administration is going to withdraw from the last of those pacts early next year. It’s already pouring staggering amounts of money into further nuclear arms development, while contemplating the first U.S. nuclear test since 1992. So prepare for a new “missile gap.”

The first national abyss I personally became aware of was the “credibility gap.” That phrase signified the distance between what the U.S. government claimed was happening in Vietnam and the country’s doomed war effort there. As that conflict lumbered on, the gap only grew. Reporters in South Vietnam were, for instance, regularly treated to what came to be known as “the Five O’Clock Follies.” These were, as Susan Glasser recently wrote in the New Yorker, “nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing.” The Follies featured daily “body counts” of the dead presented like so many football scores, except that winner was the team with the fewest “points.”

Somehow the visitors always won and yet, after apparently taking every game, we lost the war. In 1975, the United States finally turned out the lights on the war effort, having lost more than 58,000 soldiers, while killing millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians — another less noted gap. (In recent months, headlines like this one from Reuters became commonplace: “U.S. coronavirus deaths surpass Vietnam War toll” — quite true if you don’t count the dead from the countries where that war was fought.)

As others have pointed out, President Trump’s coronavirus press briefings were contemporary Five O’Clock Follies, complete with bogus victory statistics on how this country leads the world in Covid-19 testing. It’s worth remembering, however, that modern presidential dissembling hardly began with Donald Trump.

Sadly enough, the credibility gap is associated with Lyndon Johnson who, from 1963 to 1968, actually presided over the country’s greatest efforts to end poverty since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Great Depression-era New Deal. He also oversaw the first organized federal-level challenges to racial injustice since Reconstruction. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War, Johnson might be remembered today for another “war” entirely, his War on Poverty, which gave us Head Start, an academic and nutritional enrichment program for poor children, and Medicare, guaranteeing healthcare for people 65 and older. And it was Johnson who finagled — through a Congress that still contained a host of white supremacists — passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. None of those laws dismantled institutional racism, but each provided legal leverage for those seeking to ameliorate its worst effects.

A harvest of doubt Still, Johnson’s tragedy (and our own) was that, in those years, his Vietnam-inspired credibility gap created fertile ground in which to plant the greatest gap of all: a robust distrust of government in general, a belief that collective action at the national level represented a dangerous and intractable obstacle to the common good. Partially thanks to that very credibility gap, he would be succeeded by Richard Nixon, who would continue the Vietnam War in an increasingly mendacious fashion, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. Nixon’s CIA would also give secret moral and logistical support to General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, plunging that country into decades of torture, murder, and dictatorship.

Nixon’s own presidency collapsed under the weight of the duplicity and corruption that came to be known as “Watergate.” So redolent of scandal did the name of that Washington office complex (where Nixon’s minions burgled Democratic National Committee headquarters) become, that decades of scandals-to-come would regularly be labeled “gates” of various sorts. The latest is, of course, “Obamagate,” Donald Trump’s attempt to conjure up a scandal out of thin air about our last president. When the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker tried to winkle an actual definition of the supposed crime involved out of the president, he replied, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”

Ronald Reagan would go on to manipulate Johnson’s and Nixon’s inheritance of distrust over his eight years in office. In his January 1981 inaugural address, he proclaimed that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” He then set out to dismantle Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that underpinned white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We’re still living with the legacies of that credo.

The Reagan revolution, as it was called, actually continued in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Republican Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the House of Representatives, supposedly helped write what would be called the Contract with America. Originally conceived in the bowels of the conservative Heritage Foundation, that document contained language taken directly from Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union address. It enshrined his version of the credibility gap in 10 pieces of proposed legislation. Among them were mandatory sentencing laws that helped make the U.S. the world’s leader in mass incarceration. Keeping so many people in jail is a curious outcome for an initiative supposedly rooted in a commitment to getting government out of people’s lives.

Nor should we forget those lies about Saddam Hussein’s reputed weapons of mass destruction and his links to al-Qaeda. This doctored intelligence allowed President George W. Bush to launch his much-desired, and disastrous, invasion and occupation of Iraq — another credibility gap-based folly of the first order.

Now, after three and a half years of Donald Trump, many Americans and much of the world simply accept that the U.S. has a credibility chasm of a previously unimaginable sort. Somehow, it’s become so much the norm that, even as the Washington Post has tallied up 18,000 of Trump’s “false and misleading statements,” few Americans expect to have a president who actually tells the truth anymore. The credibility gap of the 1960s and 1970s, the distrust it engendered in the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the credibility follies of George W. Bush, all paved the way for a president who would lie multiple times a day while continuing to dismantle government policies that protect ordinary Americans and the environment that sustains their lives.

Indeed, on May 19th, President Trump issued an executive order to “combat the economic consequences of Covid-19” by insisting all agencies “address this economic emergency by rescinding, modifying, waiving, or providing exemptions from regulations and other requirements that may inhibit economic recovery…” Add this to the damage his administration has already done to regulations protecting our air, water, wetlands, and national monuments and you’re way beyond gaps.

OK, Boomer The credibility gap and the war that generated it gave rise to another kind of division: “the generation gap.” Largely (though not entirely) a white middle-class phenomenon, the phrase stood for a deepening cultural rift between the generation that had constructed the post-World War II United States and the one conscripted to fight its then-latest war. In the space of a few years, that gap, too, would quickly widen into a chasm. On one side would stand the parents who had faced down fascism in Europe and Asia, while filling the factories with Rosie the Riveters and enduring shortages and rationing at home; on the other stood their own children who, at least if they had white-collar or unionized parents, had been born into a life that promised unprecedented economic abundance.

Imagine the pain of those parents when their children, heading out onto the streets to protest Washington’s latest war, rejected that life of security and plenty for which they had sacrificed much and the values that went with it. Imagine the pain of those privileged but anxious children, growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, for whom a promised world of security, plenty, and freedom came to seem ever more like a cheat and a mirage. Imagine their sense of betrayal when a growing Civil Rights Movement revealed that plenty and freedom had always been grotesquely ill distributed in the Land of the Free. Imagine their shock when they realized that the price of plenty was another kind of unfreedom — felt in uniform in distant Southeast Asia where American soldiers were committing murderous acts to support a standard of living dependent on the extraction of cheap raw materials from impoverished developing nations.

Imagine how they felt when they discovered that their parents were prepared to send thousands of them to die in an immoral and pointless war. The Canadian poet Leonard Cohen captured this horror in his song of that moment, “The Story of Isaac and Abraham,” a mournful rendering of the biblical tale of a father willing to obey a god even if it meant slaughtering his own child. As Cohen’s Isaac said to the parents of the Vietnam War era:

“You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore…”

Fifty years ago this spring, such sacrifices seemed plentiful enough. The National Guard, called onto the campus of Kent State University in Ohio to suppress students protesting the invasion of Cambodia, shot and killed four of them. Just weeks later, local police killed two protesting African-American students and wounded 12 more at Jackson State University in Mississippi. No wonder that when we looked at the hands of our parents’ generation, they seemed to cradle what Cohen called “their hatchets blunt and bloody.” No wonder our unofficial slogan then was: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

Today, however, boomers like me stand on the other side of a new generation gap. We’re the ones younger people increasingly feel they shouldn’t trust. And who can blame them? If we ever consent to get off stage along with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the rest of them, we’ll be leaving behind a shattered planet, including the most profound economic inequality in a century, mass extinctions of every sort, and a climate crisis that threatens all of humanity, starting with the poorest of us.

Mending the gaps And then came the coronavirus. Although Covid-19 kills people of all ages, it’s been deadliest among the old — especially old people living in “congregate settings,” also known as nursing homes. (It seems, in fact, to rampage through just about anyplace — like prisons or meatpacking plants — where people are squashed together.) If I were in my twenties or thirties today, maybe I’d be tempted to accept a mass culling of boomers as the price of “reopening” — or (as the Trump campaign’s new slogan has it) a new “Transition to Greatness.” In fact, however, it only seems to be members of my own generation, like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who are echoing Republican talking points by calling on “lots of grandparents” to risk their lives to get the economy going again.

Americans are suffering under lockdown. Almost 40 million of us have filed for unemployment and a third of us show signs of clinical anxiety and/or depression. At the same time, boomers who are paying attention already know that the millennial generation — those born between 1981 and 1996 — will not experience the economic bonanza that made life so relatively comfortable for our era’s white working and middle classes. Those days are not coming back. The coronavirus is the third major recession that has savaged their jobs and earnings.

The coronavirus has changed my university, too. Halfway through the term, we moved online and the students I knew in person turned into little faces in boxes on my computer screen. Even through that strange medium, however, I could feel how frightening the world looks to graduating seniors today. It was bad enough a decade ago, when graduates were leaving school in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008. They knew that it might take decades to catch up economically with friends who’d finished just a couple of years earlier.

Now, this cohort is facing something far worse. But the funny thing is, frightened as they are, they seem to be determined that the world on the other side of this pandemic must be different than the one they stood to inherit a few short months ago. They don’t want things to get “back to normal.” Over and over this spring, they described the pandemic as an opportunity for a radical break with the way things were BC (Before Covid-19). That determination is pretty inspiring to this weary old boomer.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 June 2020

Word Count: 2,396

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Official Russian media reported that President Vladimir Putin issued “orders” to negotiate with Syria over handing additional installations and maritime areas over to the Russian army. It was an interesting way of putting things. It certainly depicted a new reality in Syria that many in the region, notably Iran and its proxies, refuse to take note of. As usual, they prefer to escape this reality!

This new reality is represented by the existence of agreements, or more accurately, specific understandings that make Russia the sole guardian over the Syria we once knew, or what was left of it. Russia has decided to expand its zone of direct control in Syria and it will get what it wants. Contrary to Iran’s dreams, Moscow will not leave any room for Iranian presence along the Syrian coast, just for the sake of confirming who the boss is in Syria and that it is up to Russia, not Iran, to determine Syria’s future role in the region.

It seems clear that there is some sort of Russian-American understanding regarding Syria. There is, in addition, an American blessing for a Russian-Turkish-Israeli understanding on the future of Syria. This understanding is based on the premises that the situation in Syria cannot continue as it is and that Iran has no place in Syria. If Iran’s goal is to support the minority regime that Bashar Assad symbolises, then all that can be said now is that this system exploded from within.

The evidence for this division is the recent rift between the two branches of the ruling clan, the Assads and the Makhloufs. In a surprise reversal of fortunes, the Assads decided to simply lay their hands on Rami Makhlouf’s fortune. It is rather difficult to estimate the actual size of this fortune, just as it is difficult to determine who among the two rivals will emerge victorious. For the moment, the Assads have the upper hand, but the Makhloufs still enjoy a rather distinctive status among the Alawites. Besides, with his fortune stashed away behind dozens of front companies in Europe, the Gulf, Russia and many of its satellite countries, Rami Makhlouf is not out of the fight yet.

In any case, Syria’s future now must be looked at from the angle of the Russian-Israeli-Turkish understanding that America has blessed. The American blessing is due to several reasons, including that the administration of US President Donald Trump is now more concerned than ever with the US’s domestic problems in an election year. It has enough on its plate right now with the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impact and, more recently, the fallout over the police killing of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest city.

As busy as it is, the American administration will never steer far away from the Syrian file, which it considers an integral part of the Iranian file. Evidence of this American interest is the enforcement of the Caesar Act. This is a very brutal act that imposes tough sanctions on the Syrian regime and anyone who deals with it. Russia will no doubt take this matter into consideration, given that the primary goal of the act is to bypass the United Nations Security Council and its resolutions, where Russia and China have been able to protect the Syrian regime for a long time through their veto powers.

The one party that made time work for it in the Syrian crisis is Israel. Turkey as well to some extent, but its role in Syria was characterised by passivity. Turkey has missed all of its opportunities since the Syrian revolution to intervene in a way that would allow it to play a positive role in protecting Syrian citizens. It is true that it opened its frontier to hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the regime and its oppression, but it is also true that, like Israel, it wagered on the crisis eroding with time and on arriving on the Syrian scene by 2021.

By mid-2021, Bashar Assad will find it difficult to secure another term for himself, even by cheating in the elections. What will do in the Syrian regime is the horrible and very real economic crisis. It is so bad that Lebanese Hezbollah is no longer concerned with saving the Syrian regime militarily but has moved on to saving it economically, even at Lebanon’s expense!

Pending mid-2021, Russia’s strategy is to collect as many playing cards as possible in the Syrian game in order to become the sole decision maker in the country. That’s when Bashar Assad will discover that he has become powerless and that a bankrupt Iran will not be able to save him again. That’s also when Putin will be starting to collect the dividends of his country’s huge investment in Syria, especially since September 2015 when it sent its planes to the Hmeimim base, supposedly to stop the opposition from invading and controlling the Syrian coast.

In a nutshell, there is a new game in Syria in light of the Turkish occupation of a border strip in the north of Syria and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights that it has been occupying since June 1967 … that is for 53 years now!

How far will the US-Russian understanding on Syria reach? This is the big question in light of the coming in force of the Caesar Act, which is bound to have terrible and far-reaching repercussions, not only inside Syria, but also on any entity that wants to deal with the Syrian regime, including Russia, China and European companies.

Putin’s “order” to the relevant authorities in his country to negotiate an expansion of the Russian presence in Syria, just a few days before the coming into force of the Caesar Act, is definitely no coincidence. It is also no coincidence that this order came in light of an understanding with Turkey and Israel with an American blessing, and at a time when all Iran can do is display useless acts of defiance like sending five oil tankers to Venezuela, a country with one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

The rules of the game in Syria have changed while the Syrian regime has missed all the opportunities it has been given to rehabilitate itself. This June 10, 2000, will mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of the founder of the current regime, Hafez Assad. Today, Syria is paying the price of his heir’s inability to establish Arab and international relations that truly serve Syria’s interests. Instead, he preferred Iran’s embrace. What we are witnessing today in Syria is the culmination of a series of miserable regime failures that made various powers, headed by Russia, think about how to have greater control of a part of Syria. And we know that the Israeli and Turkish occupations of parts of Syria are not going to disappear tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

Khairallah Khairallah is a Lebanese writer.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 June 2020

Word Count: 1,149

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A photograph taken Sunday features the finest from the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, outside Cincinnati, Ohio. They are running up a “Thin Blue Line” flag to replace a stolen American flag to honor a Cincinnati cop who had been shot.

Its defenders, who are incorrect, say the “Thin Blue Line” flag symbolizes police departments as the last line of defense between order and anarchy. Its critics, who are correct, say the flag represents tyranny, the use of lethal force for the most minor of offenses, and the moral and political worldview in which might makes right.

The flag’s manufacturer, Thin Blue Line USA, told USA Today it does not represent “racism, hatred, and bigotry.” Rather it represents unity and solidarity. “We want to get rid of that rivalry between law enforcement and citizens,” VP Pete Forhan said.

If that were the case, one might think Hamilton County deputies would run up that flag along with the flag of the United States. That wasn’t the case. Instead, one symbol of unity replaced another with the implications of that replacement flying for all to see.

Meanwhile, others were attempting, in quite a different way, to “get rid of the rivalry between law enforcement and citizens,” as cities nationally saw myriad protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. In New Haven, where I am writing these words, our chief of police held a press briefing Saturday outside police headquarters during which he and a few dozen cops, of all hues, “renewed our vow to the city of New Haven” by reciting their oath:

In unison, they said:

“I solemnly swear that I will faithfully and impartially perform the duties of a law enforcement officer to the best of my ability and according to law, and that I will at all times try to use the power entrusted to me as such officer for the best interest of the city, so help me God”

New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said:

 You will hear the voices of the men and women of the New Haven Police Department, but these are also the voices of law enforcement officers around the country that do their jobs every single day, honoring their oath and their commitment to their cities. So, today we speak for us, and we speak for them (my italics).

Chief Reyes was correct. In cities and localities around the country, according to the Washington Post, cops were not only joining peaceful protesters in denouncing a fellow police officer’s murder of an unarmed black man, some were even taking a knee in apparent homage to Colin Kaepernick, the former pro-football player who famously, or infamously, knelt during the national anthem to protest white police violence.

These cops were expressing unity and solidarity in a very different way from the sheriff’s deputies in Hamilton County, Ohio. The latter sought unity in terms of dominance and submission — you are a friend or you are an enemy. The former sought unity in democratic terms — we rise and fall as one nation under God. At least, the “Thin Blue Line” seems thinner after last weekend. At most, perhaps it’s cracking.

Perhaps it’s cracking because the rest of the country is coming around the seeing they were right. Kaepernick was right. Black Lives Matter was right. Every black person who ever said cops target them just for being black, they were right. That was hard for some white people to see while a black man was president. But with a tyrant like Donald Trump — who encourages violence against minorities; who inspired the white supremacists in Charlottesville; who sucks up to the world’s dictators; and, who is now inspiring right-wing domestic terrorists infiltrating protests to set buildings on fire and let black people take the blame — it’s clear now. They were right. They were right.

They were right, and this weekend’s protests, or rather the violent police reaction to them, deepened the point more. Videos show cops shooting rubber bullets at people’s heads (one bullet shattered the eyeball of a photojournalist); pepper spraying protesters from their cruisers on their way to the scene of a 18-wheeler plowing into a throng; arresting reporters; and, driving a police cruiser into a crowd. Various and sundry, and inexplicable, videos show cops in body armor beating people. Everything Black Lives Matter said was true seemed as clear as the “Thin Blue Line” flag flying proudly in Ohio.

Pointing out the apparent cracks in the “Thin Blue Line” is important, because some people — starting with the president of the United States — want to portray the violence of last weekend’s protests in binary terms — between order and disorder, civilization and anarchy, good guys and bad guys — instead of what it was: justice versus injustice, democracy versus fascism, freedom versus barbarism. Some people — starting with Donald Trump — may use those terms to achieve fascist ends.

I do no overstate one iota.

US Attorney General Bill Barr portrayed protesters as professional leftists bent on destroying the republic. This morning, he deployed “riot teams” to Washington, D.C., and Miami to “quell violent clashes between protesters and police,” according to USA Today. During a conference call with governors, the president said: “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time,” according to audio obtained by CBS News. “They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.”

He’s wrong, of course. The struggle for freedom never stops.

Even some in the “Thin Blue Line” understand that.

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: 01 June 2020

Word Count: 954

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Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I?

Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks all took part in elaborate online graduation ceremonies, offering commentary, advice, and encouragement in our now campus-less world, but I’m a hapless old guy with a flip phone from another age. And, of course, you’re not here on this glorious, sunny graduation day. There’s no verdant campus. No gowns. No caps to toss in the air. No gate to walk out of into a future that many of you mortgaged your lives to be part of. Nor is there a crowd of joyous parents and grandparents, some of whom may even have grown desperately sick and possibly died in these last months thanks to the Trump administration’s catastrophic response to a global pandemic.

Nor are there other more eminent speakers to give you hope or inspiration. Just me. Just here. Just now. All alone in this room — and you there, wherever you are, perhaps alone or with family, brooding about a world that may never be, about a future that, it seems increasingly likely, can’t be and won’t be.

Your future, as previously imagined, is — not to put too fine a gloss on it — no more. In a sense, it has already become my future and since, at almost 76, I really don’t have much of a future, that’s a terrible thing for an old man to have to say.

The pandemic shock Still, since I’m here and you’re there, let me address you in my own way by starting with the obvious: You deserved so much better than this. I’m ashamed, deeply so. Every adult in this country (except perhaps the front-line caregivers and workers who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic moment for the rest of us) should be similarly ashamed.

And that brings me to one obvious question: Why aren’t so many of us, especially those in that deeply loyal base of Donald Trump’s, more ashamed of the world they’re preparing to leave you, even as their own worlds crash and burn around them?

In the end, we could be talking about nothing less than the destruction of the planet as we humans have known it for thousands of years. To put matters bluntly, that base helped elect, and continues to support, a president who aims to be nothing less than a planet destroyer. That’s been an obvious goal of Donald Trump and his Republican allies and sycophants since his election. It’s what they were clearly dedicated to (however they explained it to themselves) even before the coronavirus arrived to offer such a helping hand.

But let me say this: at my age, I’m still shocked by what’s happened in these last months. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about the Black Death and the destruction it wreaked on Medieval Europe or China in the fourteenth century or even the devastation and death caused by the Spanish Flu barely a century ago. Still, never for a second did I actually imagine this happening to us in the here and now, with the dead and dying, the sick and desperate, jobs lost by the tens of millions, businesses destroyed. I never thought that such a pandemic would descend on us or that it would do so with such a president and crew in power in Washington.

I mean, what else do you need to know about our world at this moment than that a series of countries led by democratically inclined women (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Taiwan) have more or less suppressed the coronavirus (at least for now)? Meanwhile, in the viral sweepstakes presently engulfing parts of the Earth, the three leading lands when it comes to record numbers of cases are Donald Trump’s America, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In other words, it’s no happenstance that three autocratically inclined right-wing “populists” who give more of a damn about themselves than anything else imaginable are winning the race to hell.

There’s something about our world growing ever worse amid a Covid-19-induced instant Great Depression that makes you — that is, me — feel so small, so inconsequential, which is, of course, exactly what I am, what just about any of us is in this coronaviral moment. But why me or you and not him? That question’s been preying on my mind — and you know just who I mean.

In these last weeks, only Donald Trump’s most devoted followers, those at the heart of his base, could really do anything they wanted in public, because, following him as they did, they didn’t believe in shutting themselves in, social distancing, wearing masks, or anything else that the scientists tell us might help slow down this deadly virus or bring it under control. So they’ve felt free to mix and match and destroy (themselves above all).

Collapsing roofs The question is: how did we get here? How did we make it to such a leader and such followers in such a crisis? We’re talking about a man who, unlike President Herbert Hoover, may usher us into a true Great Depression and possibly not suffer a staggering defeat at the polls in November, as that president did in 1932. (Of course, to put things in perspective, Joe Biden isn’t exactly Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is he?)

If you’re wondering how all this could have happened in such a fashion, and why that base of the president’s remains so remarkably faithful amid the rubble of our world, I offered my own answer years ago. After all, there never was much of a question about Donald Trump himself. He was, without a doubt, a self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, self-absorbed monster of a man and — to give him full credit — he never made the slightest secret of who he was. Nonetheless, in the middle of election season 2016, when it became increasingly obvious to me that he had a real shot at beating Hillary Clinton and becoming president of the United States, I started wondering why that might be so.

That June, as the presidential race was heating to a boil, I offered my own pre-answer to all such future questions. In a piece at TomDispatch, I suggested that, in a country of already grotesque inequality,

 

“a significant part of the white working class, at least, feels as if, whether economically or psychologically, its back is up against the wall and there’s nowhere left to go. Under such circumstances, many of these voters have evidently decided that they’re ready to send a literal loose cannon into the White House; they’re willing, that is, to take a chance on the roof collapsing, even if it collapses on them.”

Yes, even if it collapses on them. I also pointed out that “The Donald represents, as a friend of mine likes to say, the suicide bomber in us all,” adding that a vote for him would be “an act of nihilism, a mood that fits well with imperial decline.”

Nihilism indeed. Donald Trump, the birther king, was then visibly the opposite of great, despite that MAGA slogan of his. He was, from the beginning, a degraded (or, if you prefer, de-greated) personification of imperial decline. And now that the roof has indeed collapsed on his base, among so many others, his personal responsibility for the severity with which it’s happened should be obvious enough. Still, don’t kid yourself: everything about this America of ours suggests that, for a significant minority of the population, it’s not. Not yet, perhaps not ever.

And here’s the weirdest thing for me: I answered that question in 2016, but all these years later, as I address you on graduation day 2020, I have yet to fully accept it. At some level, I still can’t believe it and I’ll bet you can’t either.

What it means to “transition to Greatness” in 2020 America One thing is now clear enough to me. If Covid-19 hadn’t helped that roof collapse, something else would have because, even before the pandemic broke out, even before he was in office, Donald Trump and his crew-to-be were already intent on the destruction of the world as we’ve known it. Don’t think, by the way, that I’m speaking figuratively. Imagine the three obvious ways our world could be desperately degraded — climate change, nuclear Armageddon, or massive environmental destruction — and in the years before Covid-19 arrived on our shores, Trump and crew were hard at work on all three.

This was, after all, the man who called climate change a “Chinese hoax” long before he ever got near the White House. And erratic as he may look, he’s been remarkably steadfast in a deeper way ever since. Note, for instance, that even then he was already blaming every problem in the world on two things: China and Barack Obama, as he is now. (“Wuhan virus!” “Obamagate!”) And long before the pandemic hit, he and his crew were deeply engaged in ensuring that this planet would become the hothouse from hell. Whether by leaving the Paris climate accord or opening the way for methane gas releases, expanding offshore drilling or encouraging Arctic drilling while freeing coal plants to release more mercury into the atmosphere, he and his associates have engaged in a grim version of “make it so,” the famed line of Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s USS Enterprise. In these years, largely in the service of Big Energy, he and his crew have transformed themselves into so many pyromaniacs.

In a similar fashion, Trump and his team have turned their attention to ensuring that this planet would once again be swept up in a nuclear arms race. In these years, from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to the Open Skies Treaty, his administration has systematically withdrawn from Cold War-era nuclear pacts. At the same time, they’ve been pouring money into what’s euphemistically called the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in amounts only matched by the other eight nuclear powers combined. They are now reportedly even considering restarting underground nuclear testing (abandoned 28 years ago) and possibly pulling out of the final significant Cold War nuclear agreement, the New START Treaty, early next year.

Similarly, as with climate change, his administration, especially the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked with striking intensity to roll back environment rules and regulations of every sort — the New York Times recently toted up 100 of them — again largely in the service of the desires of Big Energy. In other words, they’ve focused on ensuring that this country has significantly dirtier, more polluted air, water, and wetlands, while far more toxic chemicals are floating in our all-American world. Meanwhile, he and his people have been similarly hard at work endangering the Endangered Species Act.

And this was all before the president ignored his own scientists and advisers on the coming pandemic, ensuring that tens of thousands of extra Americans (or, in his terms perhaps, extraneous Americans) would die by shutting down the country significantly too late and remarkably ineptly. He then guaranteed that yet more would die by reopening it too soon — and by swearing, while he was at it, that no matter what hit this country next, he would never “close it down” again. All of this he recently termed a “transition to Greatness.”

And imagine what will happen when any of these areas of destruction begin to reinforce one another. Consider, for instance, that in a climate-changing world, the intensity of storms is now on the rise and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center expects an “above normal” Atlantic hurricane season this fall. So check out the cyclone of record intensity that only recently hit India in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving desperate people anything but socially distanced in shelters, and then think about the coming fall here on the East Coast of the U.S. or, for that matter, what will happen when you combine the coronavirus with intensifying wildfires in the West.

A conundrum planet So that roof I was thinking about in 2016 has indeed come down to varying degrees on just about every American and yet Donald Trump may not be the new Herbert Hoover.

Or put another way, on this, your graduation day, I’m sending you out into his world and that of the Mitch McConnellized party that hitched its wagon to his horse. (Imagine that, once upon a time, the Republicans were considered the party of the environment!) On such a planet, there is just one thing that matters to those in power — and no, I’m sorry to say that it’s not you. It’s his reelection, which means so much more than life, liberty, or the pursuit of anyone’s happiness other than his own. If his numbers weaken the slightest bit among aging evangelicals, for instance, then it’s time to open the churches NOW!! If, however, your numbers weaken, as indeed they have, tough luck.

If he wants a full-scale in-person convention (and so the televised extravaganza that will go with it) for that reelection bid, then make it so and to hell with the delegates themselves or their hosts in Charlotte, North Carolina (or wherever it ends up). And good luck to the Democrats keeping Joe Biden in a basement somewhere and potentially holding a virtual convention!

Donald Trump’s base elected a planet destroyer and he’s never let them (or himself) down. In that sense, he’s been fulfilling his duties big time. So, on your graduation day, welcome to a world in which the ceiling’s on the floor. I know I’m supposed to offer you words of wisdom and encouragement today, but how can I? Not when we’ve now reached the true moment of Trumpian nihilism. Why not golf while scores of Americans die even if you did criticize the previous president for his golfing habits? (“Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?”)

This is the moment when I would normally say: class of 2020, gather yourselves together and, arm in arm, take this path through that gate and off this beautiful campus where you’ve just spent four years of your life. It’s time for you to enter our world and make it a better place.

Today, however, there is no path; there is no gate; and you can’t join hands (not unless you’re fervent supporters of Donald Trump). You’re graduating not into a world but into a conundrum. I know you’ll do your damnedest. After all, what can any of us do but that? Still, my heart goes out to you, though little good that’s likely to do.

I’m sorry. I truly am. You didn’t deserve this.

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

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 June 2020

Word Count: 2,466

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