The Connecticut Labor Department saw unemployment benefit claims jump 900 percent over four days, from a norm of 3,000 or so filings in a typical week ending Friday to nearly 30,000 on Tuesday. I asked yesterday what the economic indicators were to justify the president’s $1 trillion stimulus package. Well, there they are.

But knowing how serious the COVID-19 pandemic is doesn’t detract from my reluctance to trust the president to do the right for its own sake. He is a totalitarian in the sense that everything — truth or democracy, loyalty or disease — revolves around his enfeebled ego so that even obeying the law might put you on the other side of Donald Trump. He seems to care far more about juicing the economy, thus calming Wall Street and covering his ass, than providing the leadership a nation needs in a crisis.

As of cue this morning, Trump confirmed my suspicions. He said, and I quote:

95% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, 53% overall. Not bad considering I get nothing but Fake & Corrupt News, day and night. “Russia, Russia, Russia”, then “the Ukraine Scam (where’s the Whistleblower?)”, the “Impeachment Hoax”, and more, more, more…. Also, according to the Daily Caller, leading Sleepy Joe Biden in Florida, 48% to 42%.”

Don’t get me wrong. It does not feel good to distrust an American president at a time like this. It does not feel good suspecting that he’s more focused on “the numbers” — whether it’s the number of sick or the S&P 500 — than he is on real human beings who are really going to suffer thanks to a real pandemic his White House really did nothing to stop early on because he really did fear its impact on “the numbers.” It does not feel good, and yet here we are. Worse, the president today is basically saying I’m right.

Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps I need to stop trying to see a leader who does not exist at the moment. Maybe I need to see what’s not there. No crisis on God’s earth, even one as great as this one, is going to turn this president into a leader. He cannot rise to the occasion. There is no occasion he feels bound to recognize if it does not serve him. Whenever this crisis ends — and that may be 18 months from now, according to a new report — it will be in spite of, not because of, Donald John Trump.

The president’s Twitter id isn’t the only thing telling me I’m right to distrust him. The White House is putting all its political capital into a giant stimulus bill when it has not yet done nearly enough to stop, or slow down, the spread of the novel coronavirus.

For one thing, Trump’s foolish ban on travel from Europe forced Americans to return en masse, turning airports around the country into huge petri dishes perfect for spreading the virus. For another, cities and states do not have a sufficient tests, ventilators, hospital beds, medical staff and more. The closest he got to meeting that ballooning demand was a vague promise made during a presser about the stimulus plan.

About that plan. The Post tells us it (so far) calls for sending some Americans $1,000 depending on need and income (some will get $2,000 checks). That’s fine on its face, as is allocating $300 billion in cheap loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. A closer look, however, suggests Trump and the GOP are creating conditions in which special-interests — and even the president himself — will benefit from the legislation.

Some $50 billion would be set aside for the airline industry. (Boeing put its hand out for $60 billion.) That’s on top of tens of billions for “unspecified stabilization measures” to prop up other sectors, “which could include hotels,” according to the Washington Post. I don’t need to remind you Donald Trump is in the travel and hospitality business.

Now, I’m no economist. But I do know what bullshit smells like.

Here we have a global disease outbreak about to trigger an international recession, and here’s an American president proposing a law to paper over the damage he’s already done while seeming to profiteer from mass sickness and death. If I’m reading this right, the Democrats are not only trying to steer him in a patriotic direction. (They want “restrictions on firms that receive emergency assistance to assure that employees aren’t laid off while executives pocket large bonuses,” per the Post.) The Democrats are also trying to stop Trump from enacting a law allowing him to skim the public till.

This president is what he is. A leader? No. Thief? Yeah, that sounds right.

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: 18 March 2020

Word Count: 784

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Nine years of a devastating civil war have taken Syria decades backward. Regretfully, there is still no hope on the horizon. Rather, the region is bracing for one of the worst humanitarian crises yet.

Encouraged by recent military successes, Syrian government troops are supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese Hezbollah and Russian ground and air units, courtesy of a new friendship between Moscow and Damascus.

Together they have defeated — although not completely — opposition groups ranging from extremist Islamists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to groups composed of regular people, among them Syrian patriots struggling to bring a somewhat acceptable version of democracy to the war-torn country.

Encouraged by their successes in the fight with the opposition, some supported by the United States and Western Europe, the Syrian government launched another major offensive that human rights observers and refugee relief agencies said would create the largest refugee crisis of the war.

Approximately 1 million people are expected to become refugees because of the latest offensive. They will join 6 million or 7 million other people displaced by fighting in the past nine years.

While coping with such a large movement of population and the logistics that accompany such a migration, there is an immediate component to consider, which, alas, leaders involved in the execution of such atrocities rarely consider: the devastation and the destabilisation of the millions of lives they affect.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so right when he stated, “a single death is a tragedy, whereas a million deaths is a statistic.”

Among issues to consider are having to deal with the immediate crisis, the logistics of funnelling large numbers of civilians through a war zone. There are the problems associated with having to house and feed the refugees and having to provide medical assistance to the casualties of war. There is providing security for refugees from armed fighters looking for foes or deserters.

Another immediate problem goes well beyond the flow of Syrian refugees and concerns the security of Europe. Naturally out of the million refugees streaming north towards Turkey, several hundred thousands are likely to try to find their way to Western Europe.

Hoping to use the refugee crisis to his political advantage, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed thousands of refugees passage through Turkish territory to the border with Greece and thus the European Union.

Thousands of refugees surged into Turkey’s north-western border region and battles erupted between the refugees and Greek police, who used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. In villages near the border, townspeople took it upon themselves to prevent the refugees from settling in their towns.

The Greek Navy fired warning shots at refugees trying to reach Europe by sea aboard small rubber dinghies. In Athens, the Greek prime minister said the agreement the European Union had with Turkey concerning refugees seeking to cross Turkish territory was no longer valid.

The strain the refugees place on host countries is huge. The presence of such large numbers of foreigners vying to gain access to various European countries has divided the Europeans.

There are those who say the refugees need to be allowed entry on humanitarian grounds and those — particularly on the political right — who are strongly opposed to having more refugees enter their country. They often blame the immigrants for a suspected increase in street crime, although detailed studies have demonstrated that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than non-immigrants.

In some instances, there have been clashes between far-right groups and security forces.

Another consideration is the long-term damage that will affect Syria for the next three or four generations. The loss of the well-educated class and the artistic and cultural circles will leave a mark on the country.

After nine years of intense fighting, the Syrian people deserve a break from the harsh dictatorship they are subjected to. Shame falls first and foremost on the leader of that country who values his staying in power far more than the millions who have seen their homes destroyed, their friends and families killed and maimed, arrested and executed, all for the satisfaction of one man.

Shame and fault must also rest on the shoulders and conscience of the international community, particularly countries that have the clout and the power to intervene — the United States, Great Britain and France.

The Syrian people deserve better than this.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 March 2020

Word Count: 732

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The president wants the US Congress to enact a massive economic stimulus package worth upwards of $850 billion. Don’t get me wrong. The United States government should step in during economic crises. But that brings me to ask: Is now that time?

For one thing, Donald Trump said during a primetime address last week that the coronavirus outbreak was a public health crisis, “not a financial crisis.” He said: “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation.”

For another, government intervention would seem necessary after banks stop lending, firms start shuttering (or filing for bankruptcy), and workers begin losing jobs. The time for action would be after economic indicators tell us to. Yes, Wall Street is in a dark mood, but Wall Street isn’t the real economy. That global equity markets are in a frenzy is insufficient reason to deepen an already historic $22 trillion national debt.

Trump’s stimulus package is similar to the one enacted in the last weeks of George W. Bush’s presidency. By then, the housing and credit crisis was just starting. Even then, however, it was clear the Congress had to act and fast or, as Bush said then, “this sucker could go down.” It didn’t go down, no thanks to the House Republicans. Not one of them voted in support of the bill. The House Democrats were forced to rescue Bush.

This is important to note, because the same House Republicans would later blame Barack Obama for the bank bailout the House Democrats voted for at the request of a Republican president. They did this by blurring the difference between the Troubled Asset Relief Program (its official name) and the $787 billion economic stimulus package that the new president signed into law soon after taking office in 2009.

Instead of uniting to face an emergency together as a nation, the House Republicans, led by John Boehner (who became House speaker after 2010), told Obama he was on his own — whatever happened was his fault. They could have helped put out the fire. Instead, they defamed Obama and the firefighters. This was entirely in keeping with the Republicans’ No. 1 “policy goal” then: ensuring that he was a one-term president.

To that end, the congressional Republicans would not even debate Obama’s proposed American Jobs Act of 2011, which might have ended sooner the suffering wrought by the Great Recession. The Republicans were not going to help Obama win reelection. Sure, Republican voters would suffer, but that was a small price to pay. And anyway, they said they wanted to help, but couldn’t, alas. “We’re broke,” Boehner shrugged.

We weren’t broke. Economists said so. They also said a recession is the best time for governments to cut taxes across the board, but especially for workaday Americans, and borrow money to juice the economy. (This is called Keynesian economics.) After the economy recovers, and after a period of sustained growth, time to raise taxes, especially on the most affluent, to pay down debts incurred during a contraction.

The Republicans have done everything backward — for political reasons.

They allowed massive suffering in an attempt to bring down Obama. By the time Trump was elected, the economy was going gangbusters despite Republican efforts to sabotage it. By 2017, there was no need for tax cuts. Indeed, it was time for tax increases. No can do, said Trump and his party. They pushed for and got the cuts, thus enriching by orders of magnitude the obscenely rich, stealing local tax dollars from blue states in the process, and sending the national debt to the highest it’s ever been.

Now Trump wants his own stimulus — again for political reasons.

For one thing, there are no economic indicators telling us to act right now. For another, his proposal includes some $50 billion to bail out airlines suffering from lack of global demand during a pandemic. Moreover, a huge chunk of it is in the form of payroll tax cuts. That might be fine otherwise but if job loss is the bar for government intervention, payroll tax cuts won’t prevent it, and they’ll be meaningless after it.

Trump’s gambit seems to be pushing lots of cash into the economy, propping up demand and making Wall Street happy again. Don’t expect the Republicans to balk, though. If they weren’t concerned about debt when they enriched the obscenely rich, they aren’t going to be concerned this time. Debt, after all, is a Democratic problem.

It’s hard to see Trump doing anything in good faith. This new proposal is no exception. If he really wanted to prevent a recession — if he really wanted to aid and comfort workaday Americans rather than special interests close to the Republican Party and his business interests — he would take a look at what Chuck Schumer is doing.

The Senate minority leader is drafting his own $750 billion stimulus package to boost unemployment insurance, provide money for schools and public transportation, expand Medicaid funding, expand more investments in health care, provide loan assistance, and halt evictions and foreclosures, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

To be sure, that’s not enough. The Democrats in both chambers should be demanding what Joe Biden is demanding: The passage of permanent paid sick leave. But at least Schumer’s proposal pushes money downward, where it does the most economic good.

And unlike the Republicans of 2010s, these Democrats really would unite to face an emergency together as a nation — even if a president they impeached got the credit. This isn’t because they don’t play politics. This is because their politics is better.

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: 17 March 2020

Word Count: 934

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Every month, it seems, brings a new act in the Trump administration’s war on the media. In January, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo exploded at National Public Radio reporter Mary Louise Kelly when he didn’t like questions she asked — and then banned a colleague of hers from the plane on which he was leaving for a trip to Europe and Asia. In February, the Trump staff booted a Bloomberg News reporter out of an Iowa election campaign event.

The president has repeatedly called the press an “enemy of the people” — the very phrase that, in Russian (vrag naroda), was applied by Joseph Stalin’s prosecutors to the millions of people they sent to the gulag or to execution chambers. In that context, Trump’s term for BuzzFeed, a “failing pile of garbage,” sounds comparatively benign. Last year, Axios revealed that some of the president’s supporters were trying to raise a fund of more than $2 million to gather damaging information on journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outfits. In 2018, it took a court order to force the White House to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. And the list goes on.

Yet it remains deceptively easy to watch all the furor over the media with the feeling that it’s still intact and safely protected. After all, didn’t Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rail against the press in their presidencies? And don’t we have the First Amendment? In my copy of Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1,150-page Oxford History of the American People, the word “censorship” doesn’t even appear in the index; while, in an article on “The History of Publishing,” the Encyclopedia Britannica reassures us that, “in the United States, no formal censorship has ever been established.”

So, how bad could it get? The answer to that question, given the actual history of this country, is: much worse.

Censoring the news, big time Though few remember it today, exactly 100 years ago, this country’s media was laboring under the kind of official censorship that would undoubtedly thrill both Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. And yet the name of the man who zestfully banned magazines and newspapers of all sorts doesn’t even appear in either Morison’s history, that Britannica article, or just about anywhere else either.

The story begins in the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the First World War. Despite his reputation as a liberal internationalist, the president at that moment, Woodrow Wilson, cared little for civil liberties. After calling for war, he quickly pushed Congress to pass what became known as the Espionage Act, which, in amended form, is still in effect. Nearly a century later, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden would be charged under it and in these years he would hardly be alone.

Despite its name, the act was not really motivated by fears of wartime espionage. By 1917, there were few German spies left in the United States. Most of them had been caught two years earlier when their paymaster got off a New York City elevated train leaving behind a briefcase quickly seized by the American agent tailing him.

Rather, the new law allowed the government to define any opposition to the war as criminal. And since many of those who spoke out most strongly against entry into the conflict came from the ranks of the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World (famously known as the “Wobblies”), or the followers of the charismatic anarchist Emma Goldman, this in effect allowed the government to criminalize much of the Left. (My new book, Rebel Cinderella, follows the career of Rose Pastor Stokes, a famed radical orator who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.)

Censorship was central to that repressive era. As the Washington Evening Star reported in May 1917, “President Wilson today renewed his efforts to put an enforced newspaper censorship section into the espionage bill.” The Act was then being debated in Congress. “I have every confidence,” he wrote to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, “that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field.”

Subject to punishment under the Espionage Act of 1917, among others, would be anyone who “shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”

Who was it who would determine what was “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive”? When it came to anything in print, the Act gave that power to the postmaster general, former Texas Congressman Albert Sidney Burleson. “He has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” writes the historian G. J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.”

Burleson was the son and grandson of Confederate veterans. When he was born, his family still owned more than 20 slaves. The first Texan to serve in a cabinet, he remained a staunch segregationist. In the Railway Mail Service (where clerks sorted mail on board trains), for instance, he considered it “intolerable” that whites and blacks not only had to work together but use the same toilets and towels. He pushed to segregate Post Office lavatories and lunchrooms.

He saw to it that screens were erected so blacks and whites working in the same space would not have to see each other. “Nearly all Negro clerks of long-standing service have been dropped,” the anguished son of a black postal worker wrote to the New Republic, adding, “Every Negro clerk eliminated means a white clerk appointed.” Targeted for dismissal from Burleson’s Post Office, the writer claimed, was “any Negro clerk in the South who fails to say ‘Sir’ promptly to any white person.”

One scholar described Burleson as having “a round, almost chubby face, a hook nose, gray and rather cold eyes and short side whiskers. With his conservative black suit and eccentric round-brim hat, he closely resembled an English cleric.” From President Wilson and other cabinet members, he quickly acquired the nickname “The Cardinal.” He typically wore a high wing collar and, rain or shine, carried a black umbrella. Embarrassed that he suffered from gout, he refused to use a cane.

Like most previous occupants of his office, Burleson lent a political hand to the president by artfully dispensing patronage to members of Congress. One Kansas senator, for example, got five postmasterships to distribute in return for voting the way Wilson wanted on a tariff law.

When the striking new powers the Espionage Act gave him went into effect, Burleson quickly refocused his energies on the suppression of dissenting publications of any sort. Within a day of its passage, he instructed postmasters throughout the country to immediately send him newspapers or magazines that looked in any way suspicious.

And what exactly were postmasters to look for? Anything, Burleson told them, “calculated to… cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny… or otherwise to embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” What did “embarrass” mean? In a later statement, he would list a broad array of possibilities, from saying that “the government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufacturers or any other special interests” to “attacking improperly our allies.” Improperly?

He knew that vague threats could inspire the most fear and so, when a delegation of prominent lawyers, including the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, came to see him, he refused to spell out his prohibitions in any more detail. When members of Congress asked the same question, he declared that disclosing such information was “incompatible with the public interest.”

One of Burleson’s most prominent targets would be the New York City monthly The Masses. Named after the workers that radicals were then convinced would determine the revolutionary course of history, the magazine was never actually read by them. It did, however, become one of the liveliest publications this country has ever known and something of a precursor to the New Yorker. It published a mix of political commentary, fiction, poetry, and reportage, while pioneering the style of cartoons captioned by a single line of dialogue for which the New Yorker would later become so well known.

From Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the young future columnist Walter Lippmann, its writers were among the best of its day. Its star reporter was John Reed, future author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a classic eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. His zest for being at the center of the action, whether in jail with striking workers in New Jersey or on the road with revolutionaries in Mexico, made him one of the finest journalists in the English-speaking world.

A “slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope,” the critic Irving Howe later wrote, The Masses was “the rallying center… for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture.” But that was no protection. On July 17, 1917, just a month after the Espionage Act passed, the Post Office notified the magazine’s editor by letter that “the August issue of the Masses is unmailable.” The offending items, the editors were told, were four passages of text and four cartoons, one of which showed the Liberty Bell falling apart.

Soon after, Burleson revoked the publication’s second-class mailing permit. (And not to be delivered by the Post Office in 1917 meant not to be read.) A personal appeal from the editor to President Wilson proved unsuccessful. Half a dozen Masses staff members including Reed would be put on trial — twice — for violating the Espionage Act. Both trials resulted in hung juries, but whatever the frustration for prosecutors, the country’s best magazine had been closed for good. Many more would soon follow.

No more “high-browism” When editors tried to figure out the principles that lay behind the new regime of censorship, the results were vague and bizarre. William Lamar, the solicitor of the Post Office (the department’s chief legal officer), told the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing. I know exactly what I am after. I am after three things and only three things — pro-Germanism, pacifism, and high-browism.”

Within a week of the Espionage Act going into effect, the issues of at least a dozen socialist newspapers and magazines had been barred from the mail. Less than a year later, more than 400 different issues of American periodicals had been deemed “unmailable.” The Nation was targeted, for instance, for criticizing Wilson’s ally, the conservative labor leader Samuel Gompers; the Public, a progressive Chicago magazine, for urging that the government raise money by taxes instead of loans; and the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register for reminding its readers that Thomas Jefferson had backed independence for Ireland. (That land, of course, was then under the rule of wartime ally Great Britain.) Six hundred copies of a pamphlet distributed by the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Why Freedom Matters, were seized and banned for criticizing censorship itself. After two years under the Espionage Act, the second-class mailing privileges of 75 periodicals had been canceled entirely.

From such a ban, there was no appeal, though a newspaper or magazine could file a lawsuit (none of which succeeded during Burleson’s tenure). In Kafkaesque fashion, it often proved impossible even to learn why something had been banned. When the publisher of one forbidden pamphlet asked, the Post Office responded: “If the reasons are not obvious to you or anyone else having the welfare of this country at heart, it will be useless… to present them.” When he inquired again, regarding some banned books, the reply took 13 months to arrive and merely granted him permission to “submit a statement” to the postal authorities for future consideration.

In those years, thanks to millions of recent immigrants, the United States had an enormous foreign-language press written in dozens of tongues, from Serbo-Croatian to Greek, frustratingly incomprehensible to Burleson and his minions. In the fall of 1917, however, Congress solved the problem by requiring foreign-language periodicals to submit translations of any articles that had anything whatever to do with the war to the Post Office before publication.

Censorship had supposedly been imposed only because the country was at war. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the fighting and on the 27th of that month, Woodrow Wilson announced that censorship would be halted as well. But with the president distracted by the Paris peace conference and then his campaign to sell his plan for a League of Nations to the American public, Burleson simply ignored his order.

Until he left office in March 1921 — more than two years after the war ended — the postmaster general continued to refuse second-class mailing privileges to publications he disliked. When a U.S. District Court found in favor of several magazines that had challenged him, Burleson (with Wilson’s approval) appealed the verdict and the Supreme Court rendered a timidly mixed decision only after the administration was out of power. Paradoxically, it was conservative Republican President Warren Harding who finally brought political censorship of the American press to a halt.

A hundred years later Could it all happen again?

In some ways, we seem better off today. Despite Donald Trump’s ferocity toward the media, we haven’t — yet — seen the equivalent of Burleson barring publications from the mail. And partly because he has attacked them directly, the president’s blasts have gotten strong pushback from mainstream pillars like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, as well as from civil society organizations of all kinds.

A century ago, except for a few brave and lonely voices, there was no equivalent. In 1917, the American Bar Association was typical in issuing a statement saying, “We condemn all attempts… to hinder and embarrass the Government of the United States in carrying on the war… We deem them to be pro-German, and in effect giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” In the fall of that year, even the Times declared that “the country must protect itself against its enemies at home. The Government has made a good beginning.”

In other ways, however, things are more dangerous today. Social media is dominated by a few companies wary of offending the administration, and has already been cleverly manipulated by forces ranging from Cambridge Analytica to Russian military intelligence. Outright lies, false rumors, and more can be spread by millions of bots and people can’t even tell where they’re coming from.

This torrent of untruth flooding in through the back door may be far more powerful than what comes through the front door of the recognized news media. And even at that front door, in Fox News, Trump has a vast media empire to amplify his attacks on his enemies, a mouthpiece far more powerful than the largest newspaper chain of Woodrow Wilson’s day. With such tools, does a demagogue who loves strongmen the world over and who jokes about staying in power indefinitely even need censorship?

Adam Hochschild writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 10 books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. His latest book, just published, is Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, The Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes.

Copyright ©2020 Adam Hochschild — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 March 2020

Word Count: 2,551

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You’d think congressional Republicans would see the wisdom of stepping in to prevent a historically and monumentally weak leader of the Republican Party from making a horse’s ass of himself while turning a national health crisis into a full-on catastrophe.

But that would require Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House to believe they have a responsibility to people other than other Republicans. Or, to put it another way, that would require them to show decency and courage. They’d have to tell the emperor that he’s naked. And, to be frank, who’s got the time for that?

Put yet another way, the Republicans began severing their dedication to democracy on the day the republic elected its first African-American president. The Democrats, at that point, were no longer the loyal opposition. They were the enemy. Their being the enemy justified any GOP action, even stealing a black executive’s Supreme Court nominee, or worse, covering up for Donald Trump’s conspiracy to betray his country.

Some are asking why the Republicans are standing aside while the president botches the government’s response to the outbreak of a new coronavirus. But this is entirely in keeping with the GOP’s conduct over the last dozen years. They turned their back on the Constitution. They enfeebled it, then sabotaged it. When they acquitted Trump, they said treason was fine. If you’re OK with treason, you’re OK with a pandemic.

Public officials in the Northeast, Midwest and west coast are taking extraordinary measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. They are shutting down various public venues, including schools, restaurants and bars. But some Republican leaders around the country deny the empirical reality of the outbreak, as if recognizing it risks the president’s fury. Worse, they are encouraging people to act as if nothing is wrong.

Governors in Oklahoma, Florida and other red states have taken little or no action to stop the outbreak. Devin Nunes, the president’s No. 1 toady, said on Fox: “If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy. Let’s not hurt the working people in this country.”

This is profoundly irresponsible for a public official. Young healthy people can carry COVID-19 without showing symptoms. They can, therefore, distribute it far and wide. Such disinformation is of no concern to Nunes, though. His goal is singular and clear. It’s what happens when people in power view the world through a totalitarian lens in which nothing — neither treason nor pandemics — exists outside the realm of politics.

“Totalitarian” is the correct term. The president seems convinced the outbreak is the product of a conspiracy to humiliate him. That’s why he’s focused on numbers of sick people rather than on means of preventing more people from getting sick. That’s why he encourages people not to get tested. (If they do, the numbers go up!) That’s why he’s laser-focused on preventing foreign nationals from entering the country. (In his mind, it’s a “Chinese virus” that infected Europe. Less travel means fewer bad numbers!)

Totalitarians use the same blunt instrument for every crisis no matter how nuanced the crisis is. Inevitably, it gets much worse. Over the weekend, international travelers flooded airports beyond capacity, resulting in long screening lines and hours of waiting in close quarters. The travel ban was supposed to slow down the coronavirus, but the Trump administration failed to think ahead. Instead of retarding its spread, it accelerated it by turning airports into gigantic petri dishes hospitable to the disease.

Another number the president fetishizes is the Dow and other stock indices. He’s been pressuring the head of the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in the belief that equity markets will celebrate more cheap money. But less than a day after the central bank announced rate cuts close to zero, stocks tumbled minutes after the opening bell. All trading ceased after tens of billions in wealth (8 percent) went up in a puff of smoke.

A monumentally weak president, as I have said, is a dangerous president. Don’t expect Trump to think, “Well, rate cuts didn’t work; let’s try something else.” Instead, expect him to blame Jay Powell for not doing enough to protect him (by way of juicing markets). His aides have said he can’t fire the Fed chairman, but that’s never been tested. The president could fire Powell as he has fired other administration officials for disloyalty, and that would roil the markets even more than they already are.

Trump is a totalitarian in that he is the center of everything, which makes everything — truth or democracy, loyalty or disease, or anything — for or against him in one way or another. His political worldview is total and totalizing. Even if the Republicans were to step in to prevent a weak president from making things worse, what could they do?

They are as weak as he is.

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: 16 March 2020

Word Count: 823

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Aid activists said a possible outbreak of the new coronavirus in the embattled Syrian province of Idlib could become a deadly threat to millions of people in the region.

Approximately 3 million people live in Idlib, the last stronghold of rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad after nine years of war. The United Nations said nearly 1 million internally displaced people are seeking shelter along the closed border with Turkey in camps that lack basic facilities, such as toilets and showers.

“The minute the virus reaches the camps, there is no way to stop it,” Fadi al-Dairi, regional coordinator for Syria at the British NGO Hand in Hand for Aid and Development, said by telephone.

Idlib, in north-western Syria, has been subject to months of intense bombardment by the Syrian regime and its ally Russia. The Syrian offensive was halted March 6 by a ceasefire negotiated between Russia and Turkey. Ankara has deployed thousands of troops in the enclave, operating alongside its Syrian opposition allies.

Syrian officials said there is no coronavirus case in the country, even though all five of its neighbours — Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan — have detected the virus on their territory.

Recent fighting has damaged Idlib’s medical infrastructure, already devastated by the war, making any outbreak even more serious. Syria’s “fragile health systems may not have the capacity to detect and respond” to an epidemic, World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesman Hedinn Halldorsson told Agence France-Presse.

Unable to provide services from government-held territory in Syria, the WHO provides cross-border assistance to rebel-held Idlib via Turkey, Halldorsson said. Health personnel are being trained “and laboratories in both Idlib and Ankara are being prepared and stocked to safely test and diagnose the virus,” he added.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan scheduled talks via video link with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron to address the situation in Syria and the new refugee crisis between Turkey and the European Union, triggered by Erdogan’s decision in late February to open Turkey’s borders for migrants wishing to cross to neighbouring EU member Greece.

Dairi said there was little Europe could do to address the danger posed by coronavirus in Idlib but he suggested the European Union might be able to send more testing equipment to the province.

Hisham Dirani, co-founder and CEO of the Turkey-based aid group Binaa, said dire conditions in the camps created a fertile breeding ground for the virus.

“So far we have no cases” of coronavirus in the Idlib camps, Dirani said by telephone, “but it is an optimum environment for the virus — a hundred people are sharing one toilet.”

“If a case occurs,  how could aid organisations deal with that?” he asked. “There are only 50 ventilators in the whole of Idlib.”

Syrian authorities announced measures aimed at preventing the virus from reaching the war-torn country, including school closures and a ban on smoking shisha in cafes, state media reported.

Damascus ordered the closure of all public and private schools, universities and technical institutes until April 2, the official SANA news agency reported. The government reduced civil servant staffing 60%, slashed working hours and suspended the use of fingerprint scanners for public employees for a month, SANA said.

Two quarantine centres are to be established in each of the country’s provinces, the government said. There were no details about how the plan could be implemented in Idlib, a region effectively split into a government-held area in the south and rebel territory in the north.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 March 2020

Word Count: 581

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The World Health Organisation has declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and the group’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noting that the number of cases outside China increased 13-fold in two weeks, said he was “deeply concerned” by “alarming levels of inaction” over the virus.

Apart from China, Italy’s action was perhaps the most draconian, effectively placing 62 million residents under lockdown to slow the spread of the disease, which saw 200 people die in a 24-hour period.

In the United Kingdom, the first MP to catch the virus was Nadine Dorries, ironically a health minister in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government. There has been a debate about whether Johnson should be tested because Dorries and Johnson attended the same reception a few days earlier.

The virus could cross the House of Commons to infect Labour, Liberal Democrat or Scottish National Party MPs because it does not discriminate between House members on the basis of political affiliation party, gender or sexual orientation. Viruses do not discriminate between people and they certainly cross the floor of a parliament from government benches to opposition benches.

The virus outbreak, which started in China, crossed borders and landed in countries thousands of kilometres apart, extending the above analogy that it does not discriminate between its victims and it does not see a victim from one developed country as superior to another from a developing country. This is confirmed by the fact the two major centres of the outbreak outside China are Italy and Iran.

The same has been seen in the Palestinian territories and Israel. The coronavirus has infected both Israelis and Palestinians in almost equal measure. It did not see Jewish Israelis as more superior to Palestinian Arabs and therefore to be avoided.

Israel insisted on citizens arriving at Ben Gurion Airport be committed to two weeks of house quarantine. It barred travellers from several countries from entering and was considering expanding that to all countries, having seen the number of coronavirus cases rise to 97. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people.

The Palestinian Authority placed all of Bethlehem under quarantine after seven tourists at the same hotel tested positive for the coronavirus. It decided to close schools and universities for a month.

There have been at least 29 confirmed coronavirus cases in the Palestinian territories. One of the latest cases was in the northern town of Tulkarem. The patient is said to have contracted the virus in Israel.

Again, this demonstrates that the virus does not distinguish between Jewish Israeli or indeed a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a Palestinian worker from the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem.

Even in Israel’s self-declared capital Jerusalem, the coronavirus will not distinguish between East and West Jerusalem or between a Jewish, Christian or Muslim worshipper. Its victim is any human being who crosses its path.

While a rabbi a priest or an imam may pray for his flock’s protection from the virus, the coronavirus will be unperturbed by one more than it is by another. The coronavirus could strike a Muslim on Friday, a Jew on Saturday and a Christian on Sunday. It has no respect for holy days.

This should provide Palestinian and Israeli religious and political leaders with food for thought. At the end of the day, a Jew, Christian or Muslim bleeds, cries and laughs in the same way. They could give each other blood, body organs and bone marrow and actually do so. They like each other’s food and culture, even if they do so secretly.

A Jewish Israeli is likely to be treated by a doctor of Palestinian origin at Hadassah Hospital and when a Palestinian from Gaza needs specialist treatment he could be treated by an Israeli doctor in Haifa.

They may fear the other but often rely on each other for support and can see each other as equal. However, the ideology of Zionism does not see Jews and Palestinians as equal and rabbis often talk of non-Jews as “goyim”, a lesser human being.

This was reinforced by the passing of Israel’s Nation-State Law in 2018, which gave Jews the right of self-determination in Israel (whose borders are not declared) but not non-Jews. The non-Jews include Israel’s 20% Palestinian citizens and if taken together 6 million Palestinians in historic Palestine. It gave Jews across the world the right of return but not Palestinian refugees, expelled in 1948 and since then.

If peace is to come to the Holy Land, Palestinian Muslims and Christians and on the other side Israeli Jews must see each other as equal human beings who will inhabit the holy land for decades to come. It is time for freedom, justice and equality to become a reality and for the coronavirus to be defeated by all.

Kamel Hawwash is a British-based Palestinian university professor and writer.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2020

Word Count: 798

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The president of the United States went on television last night to reassure a worried nation that the government’s response to the outbreak of new disease is well in hand. “This is not a financial crisis,” Donald Trump said from the Oval Office. “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

Yeah, no.

As I was waiting for my Dunkin this morning, ABC News broke into its regular programming with a special report. Wall Street fell 7 percent (that’s billions going poof) within minutes of the opening bell. That triggered the circuit breakers, which halted trading for 15 minutes. That’s a precaution, the correspondent said, to prevent “a free fall.” The long bull market has ended. A recession appears to be in the offing.

I don’t know what to say except more of what I’ve been saying.

You can’t trust a fascist to do the work of a democratic republic. You can’t trust a leader who betrayed his country, then got his party to cover up his betrayal. You can’t trust an executive who’s willing to throw people away when they displease him by telling the truth, obeying the law and practicing patriotism. You can’t trust someone who has, if memory serves, lied or spoken falsely over 14,000 times since taking office. You can’t trust a president who takes no responsibility for his oath to defend and protect the US Constitution. You can’t trust a president who serves Republicans only.

Morally speaking, if you were OK with treason, you should be OK with a pandemic.

You can trust a fascist to bumble into disaster before making things much worse by focusing on all the wrong things. Last night, Trump claimed his administration saved lives by taking “early action on China.” He blamed Europe for not doing more sooner to contain “the foreign virus.” He said Europeans “seeded” hotspots in the US. He announced a ban on travel from Europe for 30 days. (Earlier in the day, he said the coronavirus outbreak meant we needed a border wall more than ever.) It was a xenophobic know-nothing campaign speech dressed to look like serious leadership.

But Trump couldn’t even do nativism right.

Turns out “suspending all travel” from Europe does not include the United Kingdom or Ireland, which got officials on the continent thinking Trump’s true aim was punishing the trading bloc, not protecting public health. Turns out the ban does not apply to goods and trade. Turns out the ban applies only to foreigners who’ve been to Europe in the past 14 days. Trump said insurance firms “have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments.” Turns out that’s for testing, not treatments. (He said today that “the testing has been going very smooth.” That’s what you call a lie.)

The president is trying hard to project calm publicly, but privately he’s panicking. The more he panics, the more his aides worry he’ll do something destructive. According to the Washington Post, Trump is threatening to fire Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

 

While Trump has long publicly clashed with Powell, Monday’s outburst was an “eruption” unlike many others due to the political and economic stress that has gripped the White House as the coronavirus spreads. … It caused some White House aides to worry that the president’s fury with Powell could lead to upheaval and economic woes if he continues to lash out at the Federal Reserve (italics all mine).

Given the president is untrustworthy, people are seeking out public officials who are. One person appears to be Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the president’s point man for disease response. He reminded a House panel during testimony Wednesday that COVID-19 is “10 times more deadly than the seasonal flu,” and “things will get worse than they are right now.”

 

We would recommend that there not be large crowds. If that means not having any people in the audience when the NBA plays, so be it. But as a public health official, anything that has large crowds is something that would [cause] a risk to spread.

Within hours, the NBA suspended its season. That came after the NCAA said college basketball fans would not be allowed to attend March Madness games. The South by Southwest Festival was cancelled. So was Coachella. Princess and Viking cruise lines are suspending operations. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other universities and colleges are telling students not to return from spring break. States are banning access to nursing homes. (New Haven Public Schools just cancelled an entire week of school!)

Yet the president’s campaign continues to plan MAGA rallies.

To be a fascist is to be a nihilist. Maybe Trump figures what the hell, why not? It’s now confirmed that he was in contact with a Brazilian infected with COVID-19. Reuters’ Gabriel Stargardter posted a photo of Fabio Wajngarten, who had “tested positive … according to Brazilian media.” The picture was “taken at Mar-a-Lago, five days ago.”

Many of us knew we couldn’t trust Trump. Wall Street, however, could tolerate fascism as long as profits were good. When profits aren’t good, Wall Street gets suspicious. Doubt creeps in. Once doubt creeps in, it doesn’t go away. It grows. It accelerates. And the more Trump says the markets will be fine, the more the markets will doubt him.

Alas, it takes Wall Street for America to see what we been knew.

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: 12 March 2020

Word Count: 914

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Joe Biden won Michigan on Tuesday night. Six states voted in all, but Michigan was the big one. That’s where Bernie Sanders took a stand. It’s where he defeated in 2016 the “Democratic establishment.” If he could hold it, and hold its white working class, Sanders could prove everyone wrong — again. His revolution was alive and really real.

It wasn’t real. Not really. Not now, and not then.

Turns out lots of Michiganders who voted four years ago for Sanders voted in 2020 for the former vice president. At the same time, people who voted for Hillary Clinton last time voted for Joe Biden this time. Put all these together and what do you see? Sanders didn’t win Michigan last time due to who he was. He won due to who he wasn’t.

Most presidential candidates want you to vote for them, not necessarily against their opponents. The independent senator from Vermont has been unique in this respect. Negative partisanship, as political scientists call it, was baked into his rhetoric and his platform from the beginning. Vote for me, he said, because I’m not Hillary Clinton, because I’m not the Democratic Party, and because I’m not the neoliberal 1 percent.

That gambit, as I have said, was aided by Russian Crypto-Czar Vladimir Putin. He, too, wanted American citizens to vote against a candidate most threatening to his influence on global affairs. The Kremlin, therefore, mounted a covert cyberwar by which Russian saboteurs successfully moved American public opinion in three states — including Michigan — against the former secretary of state. One consequence of the effort was electing Donald Trump. Another was paving the way for Bernie Sanders’ second run.

(If he decides to keep running, which is evidently the case, Sanders will continue to receive Russian aid and comfort for the balance of the primary season and the whole of the general election. Being a sore loser is one thing. Being a bottomless supply of scorn and resentment for an enemy bent on keeping Trump in power is quite another.)

If the “anti-establishment candidate” lost, does that mean the “pro-establishment candidate” won? Biden certainly represents the establishment in that he’s been a Democrat since forever. Some in the pundit corps are, moreover, framing his primary victories as the establishment’s revenge. But this view is so narrow as to distort the political factor most influential in choosing him: Donald Trump is the president.

If the “pro-establishment candidate” won, does that mean the party isn’t moving radically to the left. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is right in saying “the entire narrative of the Democratic Party going crazy left was wrong.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough is also right. He said: “This Democratic Party is far more moderate and pragmatic than most presidential candidates, political pundits, and Twitter influencers believed for years.”

But both are wrong, too. Exit polls show Democratic voters want things like universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing and the rest. They want, in other words, what Bernie Sanders was selling them. They just don’t want to buy it from Sanders. Why? Because those things, as of right now, are less important than defeating Trump.

At the same time, hell yes the party is more conservative than we thought. Michigan’s upper peninsula went entirely to Sanders last time. It went entirely to Biden this time. That suggests Sanders won in 2016 not only because he was not Hillary Clinton. He won because he’s not a woman, especially that woman. The white working class, which populates the upper peninsula, is open clearly to progressive policies of one sort or another, but less open to a woman seeking the presidential power to realize them.

Sanders is not a stand-in for leftism. Plenty of leftists gladly voted for Biden. They want to beat the president, too. At the same time, the people who were supposed to turn out for Sanders — the youth vote — didn’t. Therefore, take the concern-trolling about unity with a grain of salt. There’s plenty of party unity thanks to animosity toward Trump. Yes, Biden should court young voters, but he needn’t fear their retribution. If they didn’t show for Sanders, they’re not going to show for Trump.

If Democrat voters picked Biden because they want to beat Trump, does that mean they don’t care what Biden himself is offering? I’m sure there’s some truth to that. But his being a Democrat means he doesn’t have to explain what he stands for, as Sanders did. Biden is furthermore unlike any presumptive Democratic nominee I have ever seen.

He’s less candidate than vessel into which the party will pour its ambitions. I think legendary broadcaster Dan Rather was right when he said: “Joe Biden is being characterized as a ‘moderate,’ but if elected I think it might turn out that he ends up presiding over one of the most progressive administrations in American history. It’s where his party is going, and on many issues where the country is going as well.”

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 March 2020
Word Count: 827
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The president shook hands today with supporters in Orlando, according to the AP. This wouldn’t be newsworthy in normal times. We don’t live in normal times, though. We live in time in which a new coronavirus is spreading across the world, shutting down cities in China and Italy, panicking global markets and vaporizing wealth.

We live in a time, moreover, in which the president of the United States looks dimly on administration officials acting professionally, behaving morally, and obeying the law. Donald Trump has purged senior-level offices of people who knew what they were doing and replaced them with ignoble apes who know little except loyalty to Trump.

Even so, why would the president shake hands with people? The Washington Post and others have reported he was advised not to. (Skin-to-skin contact is how viruses and other critters jump from person to person.) I guess you could say he’s just ignoring their advice. But that presupposes that he understands what health experts are telling him about the new coronavirus. It presupposes that he believes he needs to understand. He doesn’t.

I know this sounds speculative. (OK, I concede; it is.) I don’t have sources at hand other than my own experience to draw on. But other people who are living in, or who have endured before finally escaping, authoritarian climates know what I am talking about. Estranged adult children, wronged women, and people of color living in a white supremacist society — these Americans see Trump in a clear light. They always have. And they wonder how it’s possible for everyone else not to see what they are seeing.

Here is what they see: the president doesn’t need to understand the new coronavirus, because understanding it isn’t going to influence him one way or another from doing whatever he wants to do (for instance, shaking hands with faithful supporters). He’s going to do whatever he wants to do, because there is no authority higher than, or independent from, his ego and self-interest. While other people concern themselves with, say, obeying the law, he does no such thing. He can’t break the law. He is the law.

The president doesn’t need to pay heed to advisers telling him for God’s sake don’t touch anyone! because paying heed to the advice of those who know what they are talking about would be an act of deference impossible for someone who does not recognize the legitimacy of things (viruses) and people (experts) who are not him. Even if this president got sick from the new coronavirus, he’d deny his diseased reality. Being sick is impossible for Donald Trump. Being sick would mean the president isn’t perfect.

Some expressed shock last week when the president said he’d rather not help sick people quarantined on a cruise ship. He said he’d rather not let them off the boat, because once they were allowed off, they’d be included in the official number of sick people. “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. … I’d rather have them stay on [the ship], personally.”

Some were shocked, because, you know, it was a terrible thing to say about people in need of help. But shock also presupposes that this president is violating some kind of unwritten rule of partisanship in which normal political conflict is set aside during times of crisis. This president, however, is no mere partisan. Neither are his Republican confederates. He is an authoritarian, a fascist, a white supremacist — many names meaning the same thing to people who are enduring it or who have escaped it.

In authoritarian countries, reality is less problematic than individuals talking about it as if reality itself had greater authority over people’s choices than the authoritarian regimes running those counties. In China, the ruling Communist Party suppressed knowledge of the coronavirus outbreak, because word getting out would make the party look bad. In the US, the president suppressed administration efforts to address and contain the new virus, because word getting out would make him look bad.

As I said, people who live in authoritarian climates, or who have escaped them, have always seen Trump in a clear light. The same can’t be said of the political class, the press corps and Wall Street. They kept seeing Trump as just another partisan. They kept thinking he’d stop being divisive when the moment called for unity. Or worse, they kept thinking they could control him — a least be immune to his misbehavior.

They were wrong. They are wrong.

That says more about them than it does Trump.

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 March 2020
Word Count: 767
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