Something I have learned is the difference between presidential elections and politics. To be sure, our national discourse treats them as if they were synonymous. But once you pay close attention to the nature of elections — they tend to be more fantasy than reality — you understand more fully that meaningful shifts in the political landscape usually don’t line up with an electorate’s decision-making once every four years.

Our national discourse isn’t the only reason we usually think of presidential elections and politics as the same thing. Many of us, not just celebrants of Marxist electoral theory, possess a deep sense of “progress” — that American history itself, often aligned with the will of God, marches inexorably forward with or without human agency in the direction of greater freedom, justice, equality and prosperity for all Americans.

Most of us surely felt this way after the historic election of our first black president. Slavery and apartheid had been America’s great crime against humanity, but here was the same racist nation electing a biracial cosmopolitan as leader of the free world. Before 2008, “progress” might have felt abstract. Afterward, it felt so real that many, or most, white Americans came to believe that we entered an epoch of “post-racialism.”

That was wrong, obviously. Meaningful shifts in the political landscape usually don’t line up with presidential elections. America was no more “post-racial” after 2008 than it was “post-racial” after 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. Socially accepted sadism hadn’t disappeared. It was present the whole time. The sense of “progress” embedded in our culture, however, prevented many white Americans from seeing it.

Progress doesn’t line up with elections, but it does happen. Whether it’s good is a different question. Our history can be seen as a series of “political regimes” in which one party and its argument for the proper role of government in our daily lives prevails with a majority of voters for about four or five decades. The catalyst for regime change is usually a national crisis that can’t, or won’t, be resolved by the prevailing regime.

Herbert Hoover and the Republicans represented the political consensus in the run up to the market crash of 1929. The decade-long Great Depression ended it. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats were preeminent through World War II and most of the Vietnam War. The backlash against that conflict and against civil rights advances — in addition the 1970s oil shocks — ended that one. Our current consensus of low taxation and low regulation began with Jimmy Carter, but it’s usually attributed to Ronald Reagan, who has been for the last half century the patron saint of US conservatism.

It’s tempting to see the current crisis as the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush regime. The new coronavirus has killed more than 26,000 people in this country and will likely lead to thousands more deaths. Its economic impact threatens to push unemployment up to 20 percent (that’s firmly in Great Depression territory). Farmers are plowing under crops and dumping milk while people are going hungry. Experts are warning of the need for “social distancing” practices for at least two more years, which, when you think about it, means we could be living abnormally for such a long time that the very notion of normal will eventually become a distance memory.

There’s another sign of regime change. What was politically impossible is all of a sudden politically expedient. For instance: Criminal justice reformers have for years been advocating for releasing prisoners convicted of minor crimes, such as the sale of marijuana. GOP lawmakers always balked, saying releasing them before they repaid debts to society would give people free license to commit future crimes. Yet, in the thick of a pandemic, states are releasing non-violent felons in droves. Just like that.

A host of progressive policy ideas are quickly worth talking about in Washington. Permanent paid medical leave, employment guarantees, universal basic income, higher minimum wages, universal health care, comprehensive immigration reform, even climate change regulation — the list goes on and on. In the past, the GOP and the business class said we can’t do this. It would hurt the economy! But we may soon be getting to the point where we can say: if we don’t do this, that will hurt the economy!

The pandemic probably does signal the Reagan-Bush regime is winding down. Does that mean it will come to a hard stop in 2020? Don’t bet on it. Transitions between regimes can be so long it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins until years after the fact. My guess is the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush regime was evident in the 2007-2008 panic. The end of the end might be the close of Trump’s first term or his second. What’s certain is that progress doesn’t happen on its own.

If you want the regime to end now, you have to force it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 April 2020

Word Count: 821

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Turkey’s opposition cries foul, over and over again, to no avail these days. Despite its attempts in parliament, the ruling AKP and its ally, extreme-nationalist MHP stood firm in their defence of the release of some 90,000 inmates, mostly common criminals, while keeping about 50,000 political prisoners behind bars.

Sheer populism is behind the stance of the AKP and MHP. Both of these two parties’ motive is to appease their own voter base. Political prisoners are part of the opposition that Turkish rulers are resolved to crush and silence. They see the political prisoners as deserving to stay locked up.

Soon, after the bill passes, these detainees will also be also deprived from reading the opposition newspaper.

But there is more brewing beneath the cunning calculations. As the fog of the COVID-19 pandemic thickens in Turkey, authorities are manipulating the data. COVID-19 deaths are being listed as caused by other sicknesses, such as pneumonia, according to the independent Turkish Medical Association (TTB). The union’s internal network believes the daily death figures may be running higher than two-digit levels.

No surprise. In Turkey, the management of any crisis — or disaster — has always taken second seat to cover ups.  This is happening even more so now that the AKP is doing all it can to control the flow of information.

There is even more. In the midst of social mistrust and despair, it was revealed that the Erdogan regime had discreetly added a draft provision into an omnibus bill aimed at establishing massive restrictions on the flow of information and freedom of speech in social media.

According to Reuters, the government “will require foreign social media companies with high internet traffic to appoint a representative in the country to address concerns raised by authorities over content on their platforms. Companies that do not comply with the new measure could face the prospect of having their bandwidth halved within 30 days by court order, and then slashed by 95% if they hold out another 30 days.”

The move follows an intense crackdown on social media during the rise of the pandemic. The Interior Ministry has been keeping busy trying “to restore order” in the dynamic internet domain: In the past two weeks, nearly 4,000 social media accounts were  monitored, leading to police raids on the homes of more than 600 “suspects” and detention of 229 citizens for “provocative” posts.

Twitter figures show that Turkey is one of the top two countries in the world where related court orders were issued in the first half of last year.

The draft bill is to be discussed and voted in the coming days. Given the domination of AKP-MHP alliance in Parliament, it is expected that it will tighten the noose further on the free word, as if the current censorship regime was not enough.

The intent is to intensify the pressure on the social media giants — Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Skype, Zoom, Instagram and even WhatsApp. Companies will need to meet demands from authorities about content within three days, then compile and notify officials of all removed or blocked content within a three-month period, according to the draft law.

That’s not all, as the companies will also have to store data that include the identity of users within the country.

If they don’t abide by the rules, companies will be fined with up to 1 million lira ($148,000) for each violation, while those who do not register the removed or blocked content or do not store data in Turkey will be fined up to 5 million lira ($736,000), the reports say.

“It’s beyond comprehension,” said Ozgur Ozel, an MP of the main opposition party, the CHP. “In these outbreak times, no other government manipulates its people. It is sheer opportunism which tells us about its paranoia.”

The government’s intent is to force the social media giants to appoint representatives in Turkey. If they don’t, up to 95 % of their content will be blocked. It will mean a massive throttling of the traffic, putting the companies in a critical situation. If they do, they will be serving an Orwellian regime and censoring the free flow of views and data. What’s worse is that any appeals process is at best protracted in Turkey. The Supreme Court’s decisions in these cases take years.

Critics raise their voices, as does the political opposition. But they fall on deaf ears since 95% of Turkish media do not report their views. This and the global turmoil offer the Erdogan regime, it seems, another “divine gift” delivered on a golden plate to further cement a Central Asian style authoritarian rule of which “digital policing” is a vital component.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 April 2020

Word Count: 775

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Please do not give congressional Republicans credit for standing up for the United States Constitution. Actions speak louder than words. If they believed what they say about limited government, checks and balances, the separation of powers, and the rest, every one of them would have voted to impeach, convict and remove the president. All but two kissed Donald Trump’s gold ring. (All but one, in fact: Mitt Romney; Justin Amash, a representative from Michigan, is now a Republican-turned-Independent.)

Liz Cheney, a representative from Wyoming, corrected Trump by way of Twitter this morning. She said he was wrong to say, as he did yesterday, that he has total authority as the president. She then proceeded to quote the 10th Amendment, which says any powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the states “or to the people.” Some might ask if she’s finally seen the light. Answer: nah. Cheney had her chance to show loyalty to the Constitution. She had it. She failed. There’s no going back now.

This should be a familiar song-and-dance. When a Democrat resides in the White House, the Republicans become “constitutional warriors,” proclaiming themselves to be “constitutional conservatives” defending a “constitutional republic” from all manner of “government tyranny,” even if that means turning down free federal dollars to expand access to health care, all in the name of states rights and sovereignty.

But when a Republican resides in the White House, it’s all good. Deficits don’t matter, the whole idea of budgets doesn’t matter, “government interference” in the economy (read: banks and corporations) doesn’t matter, and even “government handouts” don’t matter. When Washington serves the rich and the powerful, that’s democracy! When Washington serves normal people and the common good, that’s totalitarianism!

If a Republican president accidentally reveals the charade — or, you know, if he willfully commits treason by extorting a foreign nation into sabotaging US elections — well, that’s not occasion for prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law and Constitution. That’s occasion for throwing all that away, then pretending to have done no such thing. The Republicans sing hosannas to limited government, checks and balances, the separation of powers while allowing a GOP president to run those principles down.

I suspect that the Republicans’ mode of betrayal — of their own conservative principles and of their fellow Americans — was never entirely clear until the start of the Trump administration. I suspect that many, though not most, Democrats and independents were still able to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt when they said they opposed, say, the expansion of the Affordable Care Act on grounds that it violated states rights and sovereignty. And even if they didn’t give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, what did it matter? Red states are red. Blue states are blue. Who cares?

I suspect that changed in 2017 when Trump and the Republicans raised taxes on rich blues states while cutting taxes for the very rich and very large corporations. Rich blue states had already been sending more in tax money to Washington than they were getting in return. Now Republicans were making it so rich blue states were subsidizing poor red states even more. (The mechanism was capping deductions for state and local taxes.) The new tax law not only revealed Republican betrayal of their own principles; it revealed the Republican “soft civil war” against a majority of the American people.

Most people in this country live and work on the coasts or in cities — areas where state and local taxes are higher than average to maintain a standard of living electorates in those areas demand from their respective governments. These are the same places feeling the brunt of the new coronavirus pandemic, places that no longer feel they can turn to the president for help in fighting a disease that has killed more than 23,500 people in a little over a month. Majorities of Americans now see that neither the president nor his party can be trusted, because when trusted, people end up dead.

And broke. After passing a $2 trillion stimulus package, $500 billion of which was set aside as a corporate slush fund, the Republicans insisted not one dollar can be used by cities and states to make up for economic activity lost in the pandemic. According to the Washington Post, every city surveyed, large and small, is going to run budget shortfalls caused directly by the cost of fighting the pandemic, leading to layoffs of school teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public servants. This is so injurious and humiliating to the 93 million people who live in cities that a government official refused to be named when confirming this facet of the law to the Post: “A senior Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the planning, confirmed Monday the dollars ‘cannot be used to cover general budget shortfalls.’”

It’s one thing to see thousands die due to a president’s gross criminal negligence. It’s another to have to pay for all those deaths and keep paying. That might be enough for states with a majority of Americans in them to start thinking about doing their own thing in their own ways; enough for states like California, Oregon and Washington to form their own pact in a concerted effort to return to life to normal; and enough for states in the Northeast, led by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, to follow suit.

A soft civil war remains soft as long as one side doesn’t recognize what’s going on.

That’s changing. And that’s the last thing the Republicans want.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 April 2020

Word Count: 928

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Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history:

Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.

As it happened, Napoleon Bonaparte died only 42 years before Henry Ford was born and I’m not sure he tried to cross anything except a significant part of Russia (unsuccessfully). My suspicion: Ford may have been thinking, in the associative fashion we’ve become used to in the age of Trump, of Julius Caesar’s famed crossing of the Rubicon almost 2,000 years earlier. But really, who knows or cares in a world in which “bunk” has become the definition of history — a world in which Donald Trump, in news conference after news conference, is the only person worth a tinker’s dam (or damn)?

In fact, call Ford a prophet (as well as a profiteer) because so many years after he died in 1947 — I was three then, but you already knew I was mighty old, right? — we find ourselves in a moment that couldn’t be bunkier. We now have a president who undoubtedly doesn’t know Nero — the infamous fiddling Roman emperor (although he was probably playing a cithara) — from Spiro — that’s Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president who lived god knows how long ago. In fact, Agnew was the crook who fell even before his president was shown the door. But why linger on ancient history? After all, even yesterday’s history is water through the gate, if not under the bridge, and in these glory days of Donald Trump, who cares? Not him, that’s for sure.

A president who deserves the Medal of Honor? All of this is my way of introducing a vivid piece of imagery that our president snatched out of the refuse pile of history and first used in late March. It was a figure of speech he’s repeated since that didn’t get the kind of media commentary — hardly a bit of it — it deserved. Nor did The Donald get the praise for it he deserved. Henry Ford would have been deeply proud of him for bunking, as well as debunking, history in such a fashion.

We’re talking about a president who couldn’t get a historical fact right if he tried, which he has absolutely no reason to do. After all, in early March, facing the coronavirus, he admitted that he had no idea anyone had ever died of the flu. Weeks later, he spoke at a news conference about mobilizing military personnel to deal with the modern equivalent of the flu pandemic of “1917.” (“We’ll be telling them where they’re going. They’re going into war, they’re going into a battle that they’ve never trained for. Nobody’s trained for, nobody’s seen this, I would say since 1917, which was the greatest of them all.”) He was, of course, referring to the catastrophic “Spanish flu” of 1918 in which his own grandfather died, but no matter. Truly, no matter. After all, that must have been 1,000 years ago in a past beyond the memory of anyone but a very stable genius. Under the circumstances, what difference could a year make?

Which brings me to the bunkable historical image I referred to above. At his March 24th coronavirus briefing, speaking of scary death counts to come (or perhaps, given what I’m about to mention, I should use that classic Vietnam-era phrase “body counts”), President Trump offered an upbeat glimpse into the future. His exact words were: “There’s tremendous hope as we look forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ah, yes, the light at the end of the tunnel. Such a bright, hopeful, and striking image that others among his supporters and administration figures promptly ran with it. Speaking of the then-latest grim coronavirus figures from New York state, for instance, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said: “If that trend does hold, it’s really good news about when this nightmare actually peaks, and then we start seeing light at the end of the tunnel.” Surgeon General Jerome Adams added, “What the president, in my mind, is doing is trying to help people understand that there is a light at the end of this tunnel.” And Admiral Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing coordinator, chimed in: “There are beginning to be indicators that we are getting ahead of this — that there’s light at the head of the tunnel.”

A week later when things had grown far worse than he predicted, the president added, “We’re going to have a very tough two weeks” before the country sees the “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Now, historically speaking, here’s the strange thing: you could barely find a hint — whether from Donald Trump, his advisers, or media sources of any kind — of where, historically speaking, that striking image had come from. In official Washington, perhaps the sole echo of its ominous past lay in the sardonic response of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “The light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, “may be a train coming at us.” Or, as a friend commented to me, maybe it was light from a refrigerated truck like the ones New York hospitals are now using to store the overflow of dead bodies from the pandemic.

History? Yes, there actually is a history here, even if it’s from a past so distant that no one, not even a president with a “very, very large brain,” seems to remember it. And yet few who lived through the Vietnam War would be likely to forget that phrase. It was first used, as far as we know, in 1967 when the war’s military commander, General William Westmoreland, returned to Washington to declare that the conflict the U.S. was fighting in a wildly destructive manner was successfully coming to an end, the proof being that “light” he spotted “at the end of the tunnel.” (He later denied using the phrase.) That memorably ill-chosen metaphor would become a grim punch line for the growing antiwar movement of the era.

So let’s say that there’s a certain grisly charm in hearing it from the president who skipped that war, thanks to fake bone spurs, and has talked about his own “Vietnam” as having been his skill in avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, in various home-front sleep-arounds. He once even claimed to radio personality Howard Stern that he should have gotten “the Congressional Medal of Honor” for doing so. (“It’s Vietnam. It is very dangerous. So I’m very, very careful,” he told Stern, speaking of those STDs.)

In any case, to have picked up that metaphorical definition of failure from the Vietnam era seems strangely appropriate for a president who first claimed the coronavirus was nothing, then a “new hoax” of the Democrats, then easy to handle, before declaring himself a “wartime president” (without the necessary tests, masks, or ventilators on hand). In some sense, President Trump has been exhibiting the sort of detachment from reality that American presidents and other officials did less openly in the Vietnam years.  And for this president, Covid-19 could indeed prove to be the disease version of a Vietnam War.

Given his success so far with that largely unchallenged light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, I thought it might be worth mentioning a few other choice phrases from the Vietnam era that the president could wield at future news conferences. Take, for instance, President Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union Address: “We have gone through a long, dark night of the American spirit, but now that night is ending.” Or the classic description by an anonymous U.S. major of the retaking of the town of Ben Tre in the wake of the Tet Offensive of 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Or, should the president want to stick with General Westmoreland, there’s always his 1967 National Press Club speech highlighting progress in the war: “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”

Give Donald Trump credit. He seems to be leading the richest, most powerful country on the planet in an ill-equipped, ill-organized, ill-planned battle (though not in any normal sense a war) against the pandemic from hell. Whether or not it ends in a Vietnam-style helicopter evacuation from that hell (or even from the White House) remains to be seen, but at least the imagery chosen so far has been unnervingly apt, though next to no one in our increasingly bunkable world even noticed.

Peace in the dark? Still, in a Trumpian spirit, let’s take the president and his team at their word for a moment. Let’s consider what glimmer of grim hope might be discovered in that light they claim to see flickering at the end of the coronaviral tunnel — at least when it comes to twenty-first-century American war.

Let’s start with the obvious: like the Black Death of the 14th century that ended feudalism, it’s at least reasonable to assume that, whenever it finally disappears (if it goes at all), Covid-19 will indeed have ended something on this planet of ours. Imagine an American future (more than 100,000 body bags worth of it) in which the global economy has been thoroughly cracked open and the Pentagon and the U.S. military, perhaps the most powerful institutions in twenty-first-century America, find themselves among the wounded and the crippled.

Let’s imagine, as with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that the coronavirus is likely to run riot through the closed ranks of that military, filling some of those very body bags. What, then, of the conflicts our twenty-first-century “warriors” have been fighting from Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia and beyond, those never-ending post-9/11 wars of terror (officially, of course, “on terror”)? Will our troops, trainers, advisers, and military contractors soon find themselves in what may be little short of pandemic wars?

Can you even imagine what that might involve? One thing crosses my mind, at least: that such wars will become too dangerous to fight and that, sooner or later, American troops might simply leave Covid-19 battle zones for home. Such possibilities aren’t in the headlines yet, although reports of the first tiny evacuations — of Green Beret units — from such pandemic battlegrounds are just beginning to pop up and the first U.S. trainers in Iraq seem to have been withdrawn (“temporarily”) due to the spread of the coronavirus in that country.

It’s true that these initial small steps seem like anything but the equivalent of the final dramatic evacuation from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese troops moved into town. Still, with the first tiny evacuations seemingly underway, my question is: Could the coronavirus turn out, in some strange fashion, to be a grim, death-dealing peacemaker for Americans? The United Nations of diseases? Is it possible that, on the hotter, more imperiled planet to come, the hundreds of American bases still scattered around the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion and all those troops, as well as the forever wars that go with them, could be part of our past, not our future?

Could a post-coronavirus planet be one on which the U.S. military and the national security state were no longer the sinkholes for endless trillions of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent so much more fruitfully elsewhere? Could there, in other words, be just the faintest glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel from hell or is that still darkness I see stretching into the distant future?

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: 14 April 2020

Word Count: 2,009

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It is sobering to think that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) held its first meeting on COVID-19 only on April 9, nearly a month after a pandemic was officially declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). That the world’s most powerful multilateral instrument has been ineffective so far, despite a global crisis of unprecedented magnitude, underlines the true state of affairs today: we live in a leaderless world.

Never mind the United Nations, this is the first global crisis in more than 50 years where no country is looking towards the US for leadership.

If there’s anything that’s needed in a global pandemic it is a vaccine and leadership. A vaccine is not expected for at least a year, but what about leadership?

Trump-led America is an empire in decline and it can do little to help itself or anyone else. In the end, it will matter little whether Donald Trump is a symptom or the cause of America’s loss of moral clarity, executive efficiency and the will to lead. What may be clear with the hindsight of history is that when the US elected Trump its 45th president, it was sealing its fate as a waning power with neither the ability nor the authority to lead the world.

America’s abdication of the leadership role it solidly assumed for nearly 80 years has been startlingly complete in the pandemic. Not only has the Trump administration stymied any chance of strong collective action from the Group of Seven industrialised countries, it did the same for the G20 and even for something so anodyne as a UN Security Council joint resolution on the pandemic. It’s all part of the Trump administration’s propaganda battle to force China to take responsibility for the viral outbreak.

That the US thinks it more important to wage this particular war with China, while the world fights a pandemic, is further evidence it is unfit and unwilling to even participate in, let alone lead, a joint global collaborative vision and programme to deal with massive economic and political upheaval. While a ceasefire has been called by the Saudi-led coalition fighting the five-year war in Yemen, and rebel groups from Columbia to Cameroon have laid down their arms in response to the gravity of the global situation, America’s president continues to pick petty fights at home and abroad.

The hubris of the Trump administration’s vision is apparent from its request to Congress in recent weeks — while the pandemic rages — for billions of dollars to develop a Pacific Deterrence Initiative that would signal a broader shift in security focus away from the Middle East and towards China and Russia.

Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state and one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence, recently wrote that “no country, not even the US, can in a purely national effort overcome the virus.” And he suggested the US undertake “a major effort in three domains.” He listed these efforts as follows: Shoring up global resilience to infectious disease, striving to heal the wounds to the world economy and safeguarding the principles of the liberal world order.

It sounds like an eminently sensible plan — if there were someone, anyone, to lead it. The UN would be a suitable candidate for the job, first by passing a declaration similar to the one six years ago during the Ebola outbreak, that the coronavirus pandemic represents a threat to peace and security. Such a designation carries the force of international law and would allow for collective effort as well as a nodal organisational point.

The UNSC’s paralysis over the coronavirus until now has clearly shaken many countries, so much so that the ambassadors of Ghana, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland sought a UN General Assembly resolution on a strong and unified response to the pandemic. The 193-member body subsequently called for “international cooperation” and “multilateralism” in this extraordinary moment in history. Then, Tunisia, which has a non-permanent seat on the UNSC, put forward a resolution expressing concern about the outbreak, supporting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s appeal for a global ceasefire to all armed conflicts and for the UN to declare the pandemic “a threat to humanity.”

It’s obvious that the gap in enlightened global leadership and shared resolve is uniting the world in a remarkable way. But it may not be enough to fill the void.

 

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 April 2020

Word Count: 726

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The president has been talking nonstop about the need to “reopen” the economy. Yes, we’re midway through a deadly pandemic. Yes, the new coronavirus has killed more than 22,000 Americans in a month. Yes, “reopening” the economy is unwise to anyone who is not Donald Trump. Getting reelected is his top priority, not your good health.

Sadly, the press corps has been repeating news of his pending decision to “reopen” the economy without scrutinizing the implicit claim at the heart of Trump’s decision: that the president has the constitutional authority and power to “reopen” an economy and thus to force state governors with differing and competing objectives to comply.

Before I go on, let’s be clear that the rhetoric of “reopening” makes little sense. The economy never closed. It can’t therefore be “reopened.” To be sure, the Trump administration issued guidelines for implementing “social distancing” for the purpose of slowing the spread of the new coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19. But these public-health guidelines from the CDC are not the same thing as “closing” the economy. Easing them, or lifting them, is not the same thing as “reopening” the economy. If Trump had ordered a lock-down across all 50 states, there’d be substance behind the rhetoric of “reopening.” But he hasn’t done even that, to the dismay of governors from both parties, because getting reelected is his top priority, not you.

If the president had ordered a lock-down across all 50 states, he would have damaged the economy (for the right reasons), but he would also have been responsible for the damage (again, for the right reasons). If there’s one constant in this random, arbitrary and chaotic presidency, it’s that Donald Trump is never responsible for anything.

Fortunately, for him, our system of government was designed to divide authority (and therefore responsibility) between and among Washington and the states. That gives Trump a context in which he can make-believe presidenting without actually being presidential, all the while blaming governors for outcomes largely of his own creation.

Unfortunately, for us, Trump has as much disrespect for our federalist tradition as he does willingness to exploit it by whatever means necessary to maintain power. One means is getting the press corps to uncritically repeat news of his pending decision to “reopen” a national economy comprising 50 states with 50 governors from both parties, most of whom privilege public health over Trump’s reelection. In other words, by declaring, implicitly at first and then explicitly, powers he does not in fact have.

This morning, the president said:

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect. … It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons.

With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly! (my emphasis)

Make no mistake. This is a staggering statement.

Trump is saying in the clearest terms possible that a president has more authority in a state than that state’s governor. He’s implying, though not saying, that a governor must comply with his “order” to “reopen” that state’s economy. Again, “reopening” is a canard. He can’t reopen what never closed. And even if “reopening” the economy were a goal, lifting “social distancing” guidelines isn’t going to achieve it. What’s at stake here, in addition to public health (forcing governors to “reopen” in the middle of a pandemic will get people killed), is the very thing making us the United States.

Making this doubly staggering is that Trump is a Republican, whose party for the last half century glorified the rights and sovereignty of the states in order to slow, or prevent, the federal government’s “interference” with their sociopolitical orders. States then were protecting apartheid. States now are protecting public health. Yet the GOP president, pursuing his own self-interest, seems ready to nullify their sovereignty.

Usurping the power of state governors (specifically, declaring to have the legitimate authority to usurp state governors) is a natural outcome, I think, of Trump’s acquittal. When the Senate found him not guilty of betraying our country, and of denying the constitutional authority of the Congress, it set the stage for conflict with governors. The president isn’t above the law. He is the law. There are no states. He is the state.

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: 13 April 2020

Word Count: 767

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The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which causes Covid-19, seemed to emerge from deepest history, from the Black Death of the 14th century and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. In just months, it has infected more than 1.5 million people and claimed more than 88,000 lives. The virus continues to spread almost everywhere. In no time at all, it’s shattered the global economy, sent it tumbling toward a deep recession (possibly even a depression), and left much of a planet locked indoors. Think of it as a gigantic stress test.

Doctors use stress tests to assess the physical fitness of patients. Governments use them to see whether banks have enough cash in reserve to honor their obligations to depositors and creditors in economic crises. The International Monetary Fund conducts stress tests on national financial systems.  Now, like several other countries, notably Italy and Spain, the United States faces a different, far tougher stress test imposed by Covid-19.  The early results are alarming.

Since the first infection in the U.S. came to light in the state of Washington on January 20th, the disease has spread across the country at a furious pace. Hospitals, especially in New York City, have been deluged and are already at the breaking point. And things will get worse — and not just in New York.  Yet the most basic necessities — protective masks, gowns, rubber gloves, and ventilators — are so scarce that they are being reused, further increasing the risk to healthcare workers, some of whom have already contracted Covid-19 from patients.  The experiences of China, Italy, and other countries suggest that the disease will take the lives of many of these brave people; indeed, some here have already paid the ultimate price.

And this pandemic will subject our political system, economy, and society to a set of stress tests into the distant future.

The “wartime president” By mid-January, the news from China made it obvious that the virus would spread across borders and soon reach the United States. The sheer volume of travel between the two countries should have made that reality all too obvious.  Nearly three million Chinese visitors came to this country in 2018 and 2.5 million Americans, counting only tourists, traveled to China. In fact, we now know that, in the weeks after Covid-19 was disclosed in Wuhan, China, more than 430,000 people flew here from that country, thousands of them from Wuhan itself — and this continued even after Donald Trump put his much-vaunted travel measures in place. (“I do think we were very early, but I also think that we were very smart, because we stopped China,” he nonetheless claimed.)

In addition, President Trump and his team remained unruffled, never mind that the country wasn’t remotely prepared for what was clearly coming. Despite secret intelligence reports as early as January warning that Chinese leaders were understating the coronavirus threat’s severity, the administration failed to develop any kind of emergency plan to prepare for the pandemic.

That proved to be a monumental blunder. China confirmed its first coronavirus fatality on January 11th.  An infection was first reported in Washington state barely a week later. More than a month after that, at a February 26th press conference, President Trump nonetheless dismissed the seriousness of the disease, noting that seasonal flu kills as many as 69,000 in the U.S. annually. He failed to mention that the virus may have a fatality rate up to 10 times higher than the flu and that a Covid-19 vaccine was nowhere in sight. Only 15 infections had been reported here, he claimed breezily, and “when you have fifteen people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Close to zero? By mid-March, infections had risen to 1,200 (which soon would prove a drop in the pandemic bucket as “America First” acquired a new meaning). Yet the president called that number inconsequential. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh did him one better: “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” He accused the media of exaggerating “in an effort to get Trump.”

True to form, the president was quick to personalize the pandemic. He preened about how scientific experts marveled at his grasp of the complex details of virology and the way supposedly awestruck doctors asked, “How do you know so much?” The president’s self-effacing answer: natural ability, possibly even a genetically-derived aptitude, thanks to “a great, super-genius uncle” who’d worked at MIT.

He declared himself a “wartime president,” despite the lack of any evident strategy to vanquish this particular foe. His response when governors of hard-hit states began pleading for urgent help from the federal government: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.”  The governors, he groused, were “complainers,” who should have stockpiled what they were now begging for. Thin-skinned as ever, he told Vice President Mike Pence that those like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, “the woman from Michigan,” who weren’t appreciative enough of his help didn’t even deserve to have their phone calls returned, at least by him. Inevitably, he had a Limbaugh-like conspiracy theory ready: fear-mongering Democrats were exploiting the Covid crisis to bash him. The virus, he said during a campaign rally — yes, he was still holding them in late February — was their “new hoax.” Fox News and the president’s base duly ran with this theme. 

Despite the warning of epidemiologists that the virus’s transmission rate would skyrocket unless Americans were scrupulous about “social distancing,” Trump tarried (and to this day can’t keep his distance from anyone at his news conferences). He failed to use the presidential bully pulpit to disseminate this advice quickly.

Nor, despite an evident shortage of medical supplies and equipment, did he act decisively. The 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) gives him the authority to order private companies to produce essential medical supplies and equipment, including ventilators, and then distribute them in ways that would prevent hard-hit states from outbidding each other.  He rejected widespread calls to use the Act. “We’re not,” he quipped, “a country based on nationalizing our business. Call a person over in Venezuela. How did the nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.” Of course, no one had called for a government takeover of American companies. Trump did eventually invoke the DPA reluctantly in late March but has used it sparingly and ineffectively. 

Continuing to downplay the Covid-19 threat, he declared during a March 31st  Fox News “virtual town hall” on the coronavirus that he would love to have the economy up and running two weeks later on Easter Sunday with “packed churches all over the country.”  That was, of course, a pipedream: by March 30th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had already reported more Covid-19 cases — 140,904 — here than in any other country and 2,405 deaths.  (And yet, in early April, Trump was still talking about the need to fill sports stadiums “sooner rather than later”; the cure, he said, cannot “be worse than the problem itself.”)

As of April 11th, the CDC’s tally had risen to 492,416 infections and 18,559 fatalities, while John Hopkins University’s tracking site reported 526,296 infections and 20,463 deaths (the highest numbers in the world in both categories).  Physicians and public health specialists have, however, warned that the toll could already be much higher given the shortage of test kits. President Trump seemed finally to be grasping the gravity of the pandemic, thanks in part to the patient tutelage of specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  But put this in your no-good-deed-goes-unpunished file: on social media, radio, and television, Fauci has been pilloried by Trump fans for supposedly undercutting the president or, as one acolyte tweeted, for trying to create a “Police State Like China in Order to Stop the coronavirus.” Fauci even started receiving death threats.

Unable to stay out of the limelight, Rudolph Giuliani, evidently seeking to displace Dr. Fauci as Trump’s top coronavirus expert, took to Twitter, practicing medicine without a license and touting the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a sure-fire cure for the disease. This despite doctors’ warnings that the drug’s efficacy was unproven and that it could have fatal results, as well as the American Medical Association’s counsel that a rush to use it could lead to hoarding and reduce its availability for treating people with ailments for which it’s actually been approved. The president has followed Dr. Giuliani’s advice on hydroxychloroquine, repeatedly hailing it “the biggest game-changer in the history of medicine.”

At a March 29th press conference, Trump finally ditched his goal of restarting the economy by Easter and asked non-essential workers to stay home until the end of April, venturing outdoors only when essential. The Covid-19 death toll could, he now conceded, end up ranging between 100,000 and 240,000, a number, he asserted, that would only prove “we all, together, have done a very good job” given that he’d heard estimates of “up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that” if the pandemic were not dealt with effectively here. Later, he allowed that even 240,000 deaths in the U.S. could be a low end figure. Then he again praised himself for taking decisive steps — assumedly by denying for weeks that the virus was a massive problem, predicting that it would perish in the summer heat, and assuring Americans that you could, in any case, cure it with anti-malarial drugs, which he “may take” himself. Compared to two million possible deaths, 240,000 was, he boasted, “a very low number.” Give him credit for the math, at least: 240,000 is indeed a far lower figure than two million.

Economic pain — acute, with more to come As the stock market plunged — it had lost more than a third of its value by the end of March — and it became undeniable that the fallout from the virus would cause the economy to crater, Congress passed a $2 trillion-plus Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) bill on March 27th, which the president signed within hours. The main provisions of that mammoth, nearly 900-page piece of legislation included:

* $1,200 to people with annual incomes below $75,000;

* $2,400 to those who file taxes jointly and earn less than $150,000;

* $500 per child for households with dependent children;

* 13 weeks of unemployment compensation beyond individual state government limits plus a weekly supplement of $600;

* a 50% payroll tax credit up to $10,000 for businesses that continued to pay non-working employees and whose revenues have shrunk by at least 50% compared to a year ago;

* loans to small businesses to help them cover the costs of employees’ salaries and health insurance;

* a $30.75 billion “Education Stabilization Fund,” providing various forms of economic assistance to hard-pressed students;

* six-month deferments on federal student loans and the suspension of penalties for overdue payments;

* $500 billion in loans and guarantees for corporations.

These were certainly much-needed moves and $2.2 trillion was hardly chump change. Still, the number of the unemployed may far exceed current expectations as the economy more or less shuts down. Some economists estimate that the gross domestic product could eventually shrink by a staggering 30%, with unemployment reaching at least 32%, or 47 million people, a figure that would surpass the 24.9% peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The CARES stimulus package, geared significantly to big banks and big corporations, may not suffice to meet the needs of an increasing number of jobless people. At least 6.6 million had filled unemployment claims by end of March alone. By early April, the number edged close to 17 million, and millions more will follow. And who knows how much of the $500 billion allotted to corporations will be devoted to protecting workers’ jobs and benefits when less than 10% of it has strings attached?

Furthermore, some of the measures in the CARES Act to help the jobless expire on July 30th and others at the end of the year, although it could take far longer to truly contain the virus.  The government could pony up more money, but the bill itself has no renewal clause, which means that we could be in for another grim legislative battle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already stated that he’ll oppose rapid follow-on legislation until the effects of the current bill are known, lest Democrats “try to achieve unrelated policy items they would not be able to pass.”

The intricately linked global economic system has broken down in just a couple of months, so time isn’t on the side of the unemployed. In addition, the maximum duration of unemployment benefits varies strikingly by state. In North Carolina, it’s only 12 weeks; in Massachusetts, 30. Likewise, the maximum weekly amount paid ranges from $823 in Massachusetts to $235 in Mississippi. Unemployment insurance certainly helps, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that it averages just over $300 a week nationally, covering only 46.6% percent of a worker’s former earnings. Yet if Covid-19 leaves many millions without jobs well beyond July 30th, or perhaps even the end of the year, they will have to pay for food, rents or mortgages, and utility bills, to mention just a few of the basics.

Households with incomes in the bottom 20% will face a particularly hard struggle, to say nothing of the 38 million people already living in poverty.  Monthly rent in 2018 averaged $1,450 and monthly food costs (not counting spending in restaurants) $363. The average savings of Americans — excluding investments, retirement accounts, and homes — totaled only $4,830 that year. Unsurprisingly, approximately 27% of them report that they may not be able to cover even a month’s worth of basic expenses; another 25% say that they could hang on for three months. Then what? Already, laid-off low-wage workers, who could barely meet their basic expenses when they had jobs, have become desperate, while those still employed who work in restaurants and hotels hit hard by social distancing have seen their hours cut back and their tips diminished.

No one knows just how bad things could get, how many people will succumb to Covid-19, or what heights the jobless rate will reach, but of this much we can be certain: the virus’s wave hasn’t crested yet and may not for weeks, or even months. And because the United States lacks the strong social safety nets of European countries, people with meager savings will be especially vulnerable. Apart from the trauma of suddenly losing jobs, people filing unemployment claims have already been wearied by chronically busy phones and crashing websites as unemployment offices face a tsunami of a sort never previously imagined.

The social fabric under stress The loss of a job doesn’t just create economic insecurity, it can also produce psychological stress and a diminished sense of self-worth. Covid-19 is likely to leave startling numbers of Americans feeling bereft.  Social isolation may provide welcome solitude for a while (at least for those who can half-afford it). Before long, though, it will likely disorient people, particularly the elderly and those who are alone and cut off from friends and family, not to speak of exercise, eating out, or even trips to the local library. Zoom and Skype won’t, in the long run, qualify as the real deal. Well before Covid-19 made its appearance, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) reported that a fifth of Americans already felt isolated and two out of five claimed to lack “meaningful” social networks.” Loneliness, the HRSA concluded, had become an “epidemic” — and that was before an actual epidemic hit. Medical professionals concurred at the time. Imagine what they’d say now.

Among other things, the coronavirus experience will undoubtedly increase the risk of suicide (especially given the rush to purchase weaponry), already at epidemic levels.  In 2017 alone, 47,000 Americans killed themselves. By then, suicide had already become the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more lives than homicides or motor vehicle accidents. The suicide rate has increased for the last 13 years straight.  Among youth, it has jumped 56% in the past decade alone, among blue-collar workers by 40% in less than two decades. Sixty thousand veterans have died by their own hand since 2008, a suicide rate 1.5 times higher than for other adults.

By ratcheting up stress, dejection, and isolation, Covid-19 could also increase domestic violence, the neglect and mistreatment of children, and drug and alcohol abuse, especially among recovering addicts.  Globally, the virus has also turbocharged demagogues, for whom the pandemic provides an opportunity to commit hate crimes and engage in scapegoating, racial tropes, and weird conspiracy theories, while using social media to whip up fear, suspicion, and animosity, and deepen social divisions. Admittedly, such problems can’t all be chalked up to the pandemic. Still, they could all get worse as this insidious virus continues to wreak havoc.

Now for the good part Crises highlight and exacerbate a society’s problems, but they also put some of its best attributes on display. Covid-19 hasn’t been an exception. Doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and first responders knowingly endanger their lives daily to care for those sickened by the virus. By April, 25,000 healthcare workers from other parts of the country had converged on New York State, the pandemic’s epicenter, to help. Volunteers have mobilized nationwide to sew masks for hospital workers, stepping in where the government has failed. People have found ways to help elderly neighbors. Strangers have been engaging in acts of kindness and generosity toward one another — an acknowledgement that we confront a shared problem that will consume much more than our livelihoods if we don’t stand together (social distancing aside). Civic groups, non-profit organizations, and companies are pitching in to help in a variety of ways. Governors — Andrew Cuomo of New York, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Larry Hogan of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California — have been working tirelessly to protect their states, showing that not all parts of the political system are as dysfunctional as Washington, D.C., today.

At some point, we’ll emerge into a different world. What it will be like no one can yet know. Covid-19 has certainly created much despair but reasons for gratitude and admiration as well — something to keep in mind as this terrible stress test continues without letup.

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

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 April 2020

Word Count: 3,069

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Yesterday, I told you not to worry (too much) about the so-called Berniebros. These are the loudest, most extreme supporters of the Vermont senator, many of whom have huge platforms. Unlike Sanders, they oppose Joe Biden, the next Democratic nominee. Some have said they’ll vote for Donald Trump.

I told you not to worry (too much), because they won’t have the influence they had in 2016. Voters behave differently when there’s an incumbent. Democratic voters are in no mood for soul-searching. They won’t have to wrestle with their ambivalence for Hillary Clinton. It’s doubtful, I think, that Berniebros can crack Democratic unity.

However, the question of whether they have any influence, or much of any influence, is separate from the question I want to ask in today’s edition. Who’s side are they on? I don’t mean whether they are on Biden’s side or the president’s. I don’t mean whether they are voting Democratic or Republican? I mean the most fundamental of loyalties.

Let’s put the question in a context. The attorney general of the United States appeared on Fox News last night. He said the investigation into the Russian attack on the 2016 election, headed by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was “without any basis.” The inquiry, which jailed many of the president’s former aides, and revealed the extent of the Kremlin’s secret cyberwar, was an effort “to sabotage the presidency” of Donald Trump. Barr added that it was “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

Barr has pretty much forfeited whatever remaining credibility he ever had. But even this could be interpreted as ordinary election-year pablum. Barr could be trying to rally the base or give fence-sitting Republicans, dismayed by the president’s complicity in foreign espionage, a reason to come home. It wasn’t Trump; it was agents of the “Deep State” scheming to ruin his tenure. You’re still a good American if you vote for Trump.

Then Barr said something else. He said China posed a “larger threat” to the United States than Russia. China, he said, is mounting a “full-court blitzkrieg” against us.

In fairness to Barr, China is a problem. But China did not wage cyberwarfare against us. China did not try to move American public opinion against the Democratic nominee. China did not conspire with Wikileaks and (apparently) former Republican members of the US Congress. Perhaps China will this year, but that does not detract from the fact that every US intelligence agency has told the Congress for four years that Russia has been and continues undermining the public’s faith in the republic.

If it’s laughable (and it is) that China is a “larger threat” than Russia, why would the attorney general of the United States, the man in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI, contravene the collective assessment of the entire intelligence community? For that matter, why would he suggest that Robert Mueller — a decorated combat veteran who rebuilt the FBI after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and a registered Republican — conspired with insurgents to harm Trump and injure the United States?

Perhaps there are many answers, but here’s one that rings true to me. Barr does not want us to pay attention to Russia, or understand fully the havoc it wrought last time around. That way, Vladimir Putin’s agents can repeat their past success. At the very least, the nation’s top law enforcement officer seems guilty of gross negligence, which, if it isn’t treason, is a disgusting and impeachable violation of the US Constitution.

The left has always struggled with Russia’s 2016 meddling, because it ran afoul of its narrative about Hillary Clinton. She and everything she represents — particularly the neoliberal international order — is why Trump won, not Russia. My guess is most leftists have come around, accepting the truth’s nuance and complexity, but nuance and complexity are bad for business when your business is attacking Democrats.

It’s important to sort out who I’m talking about. I’m not talking about socialists, real or imagined. I’m not talking about social democrats or people who are just sick and tired of politics as usual. I’m not talking about leftists deeply concerned, or genuinely skeptical, of American adventurism abroad. I’m talking about Berniebros, what I have called the Loud Leftists, people so anti-American they will burn everything down, because burning everything down, they believe, will hasten the coming revolution.

It’s important also to note that these fellow travelers have historical antecedents. The arch-conservatives of the 1970s, towering figures like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who defined, along with William Buckley, conservatism for two generations, were former leftists. Some of them, like Ronald Radosh and Whitaker Chambers, were so-called red-diaper babies and card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA.

Unlike the Berniebros, Podhoretz and others were fiercely loyal to America, so much so they were willing to overlook, or rationalize as necessary, atrocities committed by the US for the purpose of containing the “Communist contagion.” Unlike Podhoretz and the others, the Berniebros are fiercely disloyal to America, so much so they are willing to overlook, or rationalize as necessary, the republic’s slow dissolution at the hands of government leaders appearing in league with our former Cold War enemy.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 April 2020

Word Count: 863

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I’ll say this for Bernie Sanders. His was the only campaign to contact me. I live in New Haven. Connecticut’s primary is in June. The Democratic nomination is, by that time, all over but the shouting. It’s nice that Sanders didn’t take us Nutmeggers for granted.

That said, I couldn’t help noticing something about his campaign’s last text message to me. “This pandemic has underscored the essential need for Medicare for All, which Bernie has been fighting for his entire adult life,” it said. “Are you in for Bernie?”

This is plain-vanilla campaign rhetoric. Normally there wouldn’t be anything noteworthy here. But we don’t live in normal times. When I got this message Monday, my first thought: Most Democrats like his policy proposals. They just don’t like him.

It seems he finally figured that out. Sanders dropped out of the running Wednesday. He will endorse Joe Biden. He will probably campaign for him. Biden, in return, will most likely dovetail, or absorb entirely, many or most of Sanders’ ideas in a bid to bring around Sanders’ supporters. Biden will do what party nominees do — open the door to unity, offer a carrot or two, build as wide a coalition as possible, and then move on.

To be sure, some so-called Berniebros will never walk through the door. Some of them are already saying they’d rather vote for Donald Trump. Some of them even have a financial incentive to accelerate the president’s carnage in the false hope that doing so will hasten the coming revolution. This is ridiculous but to be expected. Some people’s wounds will never heal. Some people make a living pretending to be oh-so-wounded.

Will they do to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton? Maybe. But bear in mind the single biggest difference between 2016 and 2020. This time, there’s an incumbent. Last time, there wasn’t. In that difference, you’ll find Democrats behaving quite differently.

Democrats were eager to search for the soul of the Democratic Party four years ago. Very few if any Democratic voters desire soul-searching this time around. The stakes are too clear, because the stakes are so high. Democratic voters were willing to give Berniebros a hearing last time. Very few if any are willing to repeat the exercise.

Will they be loud? Indeed! The volume will be deafening thanks in part to Russian saboteurs and Republican operatives hoping to shatter Democratic unity. The president will accuse Biden of corruption (because his son worked for a Ukrainian gas company) and the Kremlin will magnify that allegation, and all the while Berniebros will second-guess the wisdom of nominating a former vice president with baggage.

Let ’em. Joe Biden isn’t Hillary Clinton, and that’s another fundamental difference. As hard as it is to say, the presumptive Democratic nominee will benefit from the sexism that kneecapped the former secretary of state. White working class bigots who voted for Sanders in the previous Democratic primary won’t hesitate to vote for Biden. They won’t have to choose between Trump, or a third-party spoiler, or that woman.

That most Democrats liked Sanders’ policies more than they liked him personally should tell us something. Character matters. Civic virtue matters. This isn’t to say Sanders isn’t virtuous. It is to say he didn’t foreground virtue as much as he did a revolutionary spirit. He didn’t think modeling virtuous behavior was needed. What was needed was knocking down impediments to freedom, equality and justice for all.

(And yelling. What was needed was lots of yelling.)

Again, most Democrats don’t disagree. But I suspect they want more than good ideas. Berniebros are quick to make fun of Democrats for choosing a nominee for “no reason” other than that he’s not Donald Trump. But Biden does stand for something, in addition to the many liberal policy proposals he brings to the table. He stands for — indeed, models — the kind of civic virtue most Americans expect from a president.

At the very least, Biden would be a perfectly fine, ordinary, though perhaps boring president who strives to treat Americans equally, so that when a viral pandemic strikes one part of the country especially hard, he won’t exploit the moment to reward friends and punish enemies, or personally profit at the expense of mass suffering and death.

But a President Biden would do more than the very least. Political scientist Josh Chafetz wrote this morning that “it’s entirely possible that a Biden presidency could lead to a more actual, lasting progressive policy movement than a Sanders presidency would have.” Even if a Sanders presidency would have had more progressive goals, he said, a Biden presidency would likely lead to more progressive and enduring results.

I think that’s right. Biden would be receptive to the party’s left flank while at the same time continuing to model anti-Trump civic virtues needed to win over legislators. He would, I hope, govern from the moral high ground — consensus-seeking, solutions-oriented, with an eye on the common good with protections for the least among us.

That’s not transformational. That’s not revolutionary. That’s not yelling.

But that’s not nothing either.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 April 2020

Word Count: 847

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Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label “ring knocker.” (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer “need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally to his point of view.”) Last August, the class of 2023 announced theirs: “Freedom Is Not Free.” Mine from the class of 2005 was “Keeping Freedom Alive.” Each class takes pride in its motto and, at least theoretically, aspires to live according to its sentiments, while championing the accomplishments of fellow graduates.

But some cohorts do stand out. Take the class of 1986 (“Courage Never Quits”). As it happens, both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are members of that very class, as are a surprisingly wide range of influential leaders in Congress, corporate America, the Pentagon, the defense industry, lobbying firms, Big Pharma, high-end financial services, and even security-consulting firms. Still, given their striking hawkishness on the subject of American war-making, Esper and Pompeo rise above the rest. Even in a pandemic, they are as good as their class motto. When it comes to this country’s wars, neither of them ever quits.

Once upon a time, retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute (Class of ’75), a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught both Esper and Pompeo in his West Point social sciences class. However, it was Pompeo, the class of ’86 valedictorian, whom Lute singled out for praise, remembering him as “a very strong student — fastidious, deliberate.” Of course, as the Afghanistan Papers, released by the Washington Post late last year, so starkly revealed, Lute told an interviewer that, like so many U.S. officials, he “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking in Afghanistan.” Though at one point he was President George W. Bush’s “Afghan war czar,” the general never expressed such doubts publicly and his record of dissent is hardly an impressive one. Still, on one point at least, Lute was on target: Esper and Pompeo are smart and that’s what worries me (as in the phrase “too smart for their own good”).

Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, had particularly hawkish views on Russia and China before he ever took over at the Pentagon and he wasn’t alone when it came to the urge to continue America’s wars. Pompeo, then a congressman, exhibited a striking pre-Trump-era foreign policy pugnacity, particularly vis-à-vis the Islamic world. It has since solidified into a veritable obsession with toppling the Iranian regime.

Their militarized obsessions have recently taken striking form in two ways: the secretary of defense instructed U.S. commanders to prepare plans to escalate combat against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, an order the mission’s senior leader there, Lieutenant General Robert “Pat” White, reportedly resisted; meanwhile, the secretary of state evidently is eager to convince President Trump to use the Covid-19 pandemic, now devastating Iran, to bomb that country and further strangle it with sanctions. Worse yet, Pompeo might be just cunning enough to convince his ill-informed, insecure boss (so open to clever flattery) that war is the answer.

The militarism of both men matters greatly, but they hardly pilot the ship of state alone, any more than Trump does (whatever he thinks). Would that it were the case. Sadly, even if voters threw them all out, the disease runs much deeper than them. Enter the rest of the illustrative class of ’86.

As it happens, Pompeo’s and Esper’s classmates permeate the deeper structure of imperial America. And let’s admit it, they are, by the numbers, an impressive crew. As another ’86 alumnus, Congressman Mark Green (R-TN), bragged on the House floor in 2019, “My class [has] produced 18 general officers… 22-plus presidents and CEOs of major corporations… two state legislators… [and] three judges,” as well as “at least four deans and chancellors of universities.” He closed his remarks by exclaiming, “Courage never quits, ’86!”

However, for all his gushing, Green’s list conceals much. It illuminates neither the mechanics nor the motives of his illustrious classmates; that is, what they’re actually doing and why. Many are key players in a corporate-military machine bent on, and reliant on, endless war for profit and professional advancement. A brief look at key ‘86ers offers insight into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex in 2020 — and it should take your breath away.

The West Point mafia The core group of ’86 grads cheekily refer to themselves as “the West Point mafia.” And for some, that’s an uplifting thought. Take Joe DePinto, CEO of 7-Eleven. He says that he’s “someone who sleeps better at night knowing that those guys are in the positions they’re in.” Of course, he’s an ’86 grad, too.

Back when I called the academy home, we branded such self-important cadets “toolbags.” More than a decade later, when I taught there, I found my students still using the term. Face facts, however: those “toolbags,” thick as thieves today, now run the show in Washington (and despite their busy schedules, they still find time to socialize as a group).

Given Donald Trump’s shady past — one doesn’t build an Atlantic City casino-and-hotel empire without “mobbing-it-up” — that mafia moniker is actually fitting. So perhaps it’s worth thinking of Mike Pompeo as the president’s latest consigliere. And since gangsters rarely countenance a challenge without striking back, Lieutenant General White should watch his back after his prudent attempt to stop the further escalation of America’s wars in Iraq and Iran in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Worse yet for him, he’s not a West Pointer (though he did, oddly enough, earn his Army commission on the very day that class of ’86 graduated). White’s once promising career is unlikely to be long for this world.

In addition to Esper and Pompeo, other Class of ’86 alums serve in key executive branch roles. They include the vice chief of staff of the Army General Joseph Martin, the director of the Army National Guard, the commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command, the deputy commanding general of Army Forces Command, and the deputy commanding general of Army Cyber Command. Civilian-side classmates in the Pentagon serve as: deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy, and environment; a civilian aide to the secretary of the Army; and the director of stabilization and peace operations policy for the secretary of defense. These Pentagon career civil servants aren’t, strictly speaking, part of the “mafia” itself, but two Pompeo loyalists are indeed charter members.

Pompeo brought Ulrich Brechbuhl and Brian Butalao, two of his closest cadet friends, in from the corporate world. The three of them had, at one point, served as CEO, CFO, and COO of Thayer Aerospace, named for the “father” of West Point, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, and started with Koch Industries seed money. Among other things, that corporation sold the Pentagon military aircraft components.

Brechbuhl and Butalao were given senior positions at the CIA when Pompeo was its director. Currently, Brechbuhl is the State Department’s counselor (and reportedly Pompeo’s de facto chief of staff), while Butalao serves as under secretary for management. According to his official bio, Butalao is responsible “for managing the State Department on a day-to-day basis and [serving as its] Chief Operating Officer.” Funny, that was his exact position under Pompeo at that aerospace company.

Still, this mafia trio can’t run the show by themselves. The national security structure’s tentacles are so much longer than that. They reach all the way to K Street and Capitol Hill.

From Congress to K Street: the enablers Before Trump tapped Pompeo to head the CIA and then the State Department, he represented Wichita, Kansas, home to Koch Industries, in the House of Representatives. In fact, Pompeo rode his ample funding from the political action committee of the billionaire Koch brothers straight to the Hill. So linked was he to those fraternal right-wing energy tycoons and so protective of their interests that he was dubbed “the congressman from Koch.” The relationship was mutually beneficial. Pompeo’s selection as secretary of state solidified the previously strained relationship of the brothers with President Trump.

The ’86 mafia’s current congressional heavyweight, however, is Mark Green. An early Trump supporter, he regularly tried to shield the president from impeachment as a minority member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The Tennessee congressman nearly became Trump’s secretary of the Army, but ultimately withdrew his nomination because of controversies that included sponsoring gender-discriminatory bills and commenting that “transgender is a disease.”

Legislators like Green, in turn, take their foreign-policy marching orders from the military’s corporate suppliers. Among those, Esper, of course, represents the gold standard when it comes to “revolving-door” defense lobbying. Just before ascending the Pentagon summit, pressed by Senator Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, he patently refused to “recuse himself from all matters related to” Raytheon, his former employer and the nation’s third-largest defense contractor. (And that was even before its recent merger with United Technologies Corporation, which once employed another Esper classmate as a senior vice president.) Incidentally, one of Raytheon’s “biggest franchises” is the Patriot missile defense system, the very weapon being rushed to Iraq as I write, ostensibly as a check on Pompeo’s favored villain, Iran.

Less well known is the handiwork of another ’86 grad, longtime lobbyist and CNN paid contributor David Urban, who first met the president in 2012 and still recalls how “we clicked immediately.” The consummate Washington insider, he backed Trump “when nobody else thought he stood a chance” and in 2016 was his senior campaign adviser in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania.

Esper and Urban have been close for more than 30 years. As cadets, they served in the same unit during the Persian Gulf War. It was Urban who introduced Esper to his wife. Both later graced the Hill’s list of Washington’s top lobbyists. Since 2002, Urban has been a partner and is now president of a consulting giant, the American Continental Group. Among its clients: Raytheon and 7-Eleven.

It’s hard to overstate Urban’s role. He seems to have landed Pompeo and Esper their jobs in the Trump administration and was a key go-between in marrying class of ’86 backbenchers and moneymen to that bridegroom of our moment, The Donald.

Greasing the machine: the moneymen Another ’86er also passed through that famed military-industrial revolving door. Retired Colonel Dan Sauter left his position as chief of staff of the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command for one at giant weapons maker Lockheed Martin as business developer for the very systems his old unit employed. Since May 2019, he’s directed Lockheed’s $1.5 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program in Saudi Arabia. Lockheed’s THAAD systems have streamed into that country to protect the Kingdom, even as Pompeo continually threatens Iran.

If such corporate figures are doing the selling, it’s the Pentagon, naturally, that’s doing the buying. Luckily, there are ’86 alumni in key positions on the purchasing end as well, including a retired brigadier general who now serves as the Pentagon’s principal adviser to the under secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

Finally, there are other key consultants linked to the military-industrial complex who are also graduates of the class of ’86. They include a senior vice president of Hillwood — a massive domestic and international real estate development company, chaired by Ross Perot, Jr. — formerly a consultant to the government of the United Arab Emirates. The Emiratis are U.S. allies in the fight against Pompeo’s Iranian nemesis and, in 2019, awarded Raytheon a $1.5 billion contract to supply key components for its air force missile launchers.

Another classmate is a managing partner for Patriot Strategies, which consults for corporations and the government but also separately lands hefty defense contracts itself. His previous “ventures” included “work in telecommunications in the Middle East… and technical security upgrades at U.S. embassies worldwide.”

Yet another grad, Rick Minicozzi, is the founder and CEO of Thayer Leader Development Group (TLDG), which prides itself on “building” corporate leaders. TLDG clients include: 7-Eleven, Cardinal Glass, EMCOR, and Mercedes-Benz. All either have or had ’86ers at the helm. The company’s CEO also owns the Thayer Hotel located right on West Point’s grounds, which hosts many of the company’s lectures and other events. Then there’s the retired colonel who, like me, taught on the West Point history faculty. He’s now the CEO of Battlefield Leadership, which helps corporate leaders “learn from the past” in order to “prepare for an ever-changing business landscape.”

A class-wide conflict of interest Don’t for a moment think these are all “bad” people. That’s not faintly my point. One prominent ’86 grad, for instance, is Lieutenant General Eric Wesley, the deputy of Army Futures Command. He was my brigade commander at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 2009 and I found him competent, exceptionally empathetic, and a decidedly decent man, which is probably true of plenty of ‘86ers.

So what exactly is my point here? I’m not for a second charging conspiracy or even criminal corruption. The lion’s share of what all these figures do is perfectly legal. In reality, the way the class of ’86 has permeated the power structure only reflects the nature of the carefully crafted, distinctly undemocratic systems through which the military-industrial complex and our political world operate by design. Most of what they do couldn’t, in fact, be more legal in a world of never-ending American wars and national security budgets that eternally go through the roof. After all, if any of these figures had acted in anything but a perfectly legal fashion, they might have run into a classmate of theirs who recently led the FBI’s corruption unit in New Jersey — before, that is, he retired and became CEO of a global security consulting firm. (Sound familiar?)

And that’s my point, really. We have a system in Washington that couldn’t be more lawful and yet, by any definition, the class of ’86 represents one giant conflict of interest (and they don’t stand alone). Alums from that year are now ensconced in every level of the national security state: from the White House to the Pentagon to Congress to K Street to corporate boardrooms. And they have both power and a deep stake, financial or otherwise, in maintaining or expanding the (forever) warfare state.

They benefit from America’s permanent military mobilization, its never-ending economic war-footing, and all that comes with it. Ironically, this will inevitably include the blood of future West Point graduates, doomed to serve in their hopeless crusades. Think of it all as a macabre inversion of their class motto in which it’s not their courage but that of younger graduates sent off to this country’s hopeless wars that they will never allow to “quit.”

Speaking of true courage, lately the only exemplar we’ve had of it in those wars is General “Pat” White. It seems that he, at least, refused to kiss the proverbial rings of those mafia men of ’86.

But of course, he’s not part of their “family,” is he?

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 April 2020

Word Count: 2,515

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