This article is adapted from the new edition of Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War,” just published as a free e-book.
The final big legislative achievement of 2021 was a bill authorizing $768 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year. President Biden signed it two days after the Christmas holiday glorifying the Prince of Peace.
Dollar figures can look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had asked for “only” $12 billion more than President Trump’s bloated military budget of the previous year -- but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending -- while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations at many local, state, and national government agencies. It’s a nonstop trend of reinforcing the warfare state in sync with warped neoliberal priorities. While outsized profits keep benefiting the upper class and enriching the already obscenely rich, the cascading effects of extreme income inequality are drowning the hopes of the many.
Corporate power constrains just about everything, whether healthcare or education or housing or jobs or measures for responding to the climate emergency. What prevails is the political structure of the economy.
Class war in the United States has established what amounts to oligarchy. A zero-sum economic system, aka corporate capitalism, is constantly exercising its power to reward and deprive. The dominant forces of class warfare -- disproportionately afflicting people of color while also steadily harming many millions of whites -- continue to undermine basic human rights including equal justice and economic security. In the real world, financial power is political power. A system that runs on money is adept at running over people without it.
The words “I can’t breathe,” repeated nearly a dozen times by Eric Garner in a deadly police chokehold, resonated for countless people whose names we’ll never know. The intersections of racial injustice and predatory capitalism are especially virulent zones, where many lives gradually or suddenly lose what is essential for life. Discussions of terms like “racism” and “poverty” too easily become facile, abstracted from human consequences, while unknown lives suffocate at the hands of routine injustice, systematic cruelties, the way things predictably are.
An all-out war on democracy is now underway in the United States. More than ever, the Republican Party is the electoral arm of unabashed white supremacy as well as such toxicities as xenophobia, nativism, anti-gay bigotry, patriarchy, and misogyny. The party’s rigid climate denial is nothing short of deranged. Its approach to the Covid pandemic has amounted to an embrace of death in the name of rancid individualism. With its Supreme Court justices in place, the “Grand Old Party” has methodically slashed voting rights and abortion rights. Overall, on domestic matters, the partisan matchup is between neoliberalism and neofascism. While the abhorrent roles of the Democratic leadership are extensive, to put it mildly, the two parties now represent hugely different constituencies and agendas at home. Not so on matters of war and peace.
Both parties continue to champion what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” When King described the profligate spending for a distant war as “some demonic, destructive suction tube,” he was condemning dynamics that endure with a vengeance. Today, the madness and the denial are no less entrenched. A militaristic core serves as a sacred touchstone for faith in America as the world’s one and only indispensable nation. Gargantuan Pentagon budgets are taken for granted, as is the assumed prerogative to bomb other countries at will.
Every budget has continued to include massive outlays for nuclear weapons, including gigantic expenditures for so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal. A fact that this book cited when it was first published -- that the United States had ten thousand nuclear warheads and Russia had a comparable number -- is no longer true; most estimates say those stockpiles are now about half as large. But the current situation is actually much more dangerous. In 2007, the Doomsday Clock maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pegged the world’s proximity to annihilation at five minutes to apocalyptic Midnight. As 2022 began, the symbolic hands were at one hundred seconds to Midnight. Such is the momentum of the nuclear arms race, fueled by profit-driven military contractors. Lofty rhetoric about seeking peace is never a real brake on the nationalistic thrust of militarism.
With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the third decade of this century is shaping up to unfold new wrinkles in American hegemonic conceits. Along the way, Joe Biden has echoed a central precept of doublethink in George Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984: “War is Peace.” Speaking at the United Nations as the autumn of 2021 began, Biden proclaimed: “I stand here today, for the first time in twenty years, with the United States not at war. We’ve turned the page.” But the turned page was bound into a volume of killing with no foreseeable end. The United States remained at war, bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere, with much information withheld from the public. And increases in U.S. belligerence toward both Russia and China escalated the risks of a military confrontation that could lead to nuclear war.
A rosy view of the USA’s future is only possible when ignoring history in real time. After four years of the poisonous Trump presidency, the Biden strain of corporate liberalism offers a mix of antidotes and ongoing toxins. The Republican Party, now neofascist, is in a strong position to gain control of the U.S. government by mid-decade. Preventing such a cataclysm seems beyond the grasp of the same Democratic Party elites that paved the way for Donald Trump to become president in the first place. Realism about the current situation -- clarity about how we got here and where we are now -- is necessary to mitigate impending disasters and help create a better future. Vital truths must be told. And acted upon.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This article is adapted from the new edition of Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War,” just published as a free e-book.
The final big legislative achievement of 2021 was a bill authorizing $768 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year. President Biden signed it two days after the Christmas holiday glorifying the Prince of Peace.
Dollar figures can look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had asked for “only” $12 billion more than President Trump’s bloated military budget of the previous year -- but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending -- while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations at many local, state, and national government agencies. It’s a nonstop trend of reinforcing the warfare state in sync with warped neoliberal priorities. While outsized profits keep benefiting the upper class and enriching the already obscenely rich, the cascading effects of extreme income inequality are drowning the hopes of the many.
Corporate power constrains just about everything, whether healthcare or education or housing or jobs or measures for responding to the climate emergency. What prevails is the political structure of the economy.
Class war in the United States has established what amounts to oligarchy. A zero-sum economic system, aka corporate capitalism, is constantly exercising its power to reward and deprive. The dominant forces of class warfare -- disproportionately afflicting people of color while also steadily harming many millions of whites -- continue to undermine basic human rights including equal justice and economic security. In the real world, financial power is political power. A system that runs on money is adept at running over people without it.
The words “I can’t breathe,” repeated nearly a dozen times by Eric Garner in a deadly police chokehold, resonated for countless people whose names we’ll never know. The intersections of racial injustice and predatory capitalism are especially virulent zones, where many lives gradually or suddenly lose what is essential for life. Discussions of terms like “racism” and “poverty” too easily become facile, abstracted from human consequences, while unknown lives suffocate at the hands of routine injustice, systematic cruelties, the way things predictably are.
An all-out war on democracy is now underway in the United States. More than ever, the Republican Party is the electoral arm of unabashed white supremacy as well as such toxicities as xenophobia, nativism, anti-gay bigotry, patriarchy, and misogyny. The party’s rigid climate denial is nothing short of deranged. Its approach to the Covid pandemic has amounted to an embrace of death in the name of rancid individualism. With its Supreme Court justices in place, the “Grand Old Party” has methodically slashed voting rights and abortion rights. Overall, on domestic matters, the partisan matchup is between neoliberalism and neofascism. While the abhorrent roles of the Democratic leadership are extensive, to put it mildly, the two parties now represent hugely different constituencies and agendas at home. Not so on matters of war and peace.
Both parties continue to champion what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” When King described the profligate spending for a distant war as “some demonic, destructive suction tube,” he was condemning dynamics that endure with a vengeance. Today, the madness and the denial are no less entrenched. A militaristic core serves as a sacred touchstone for faith in America as the world’s one and only indispensable nation. Gargantuan Pentagon budgets are taken for granted, as is the assumed prerogative to bomb other countries at will.
Every budget has continued to include massive outlays for nuclear weapons, including gigantic expenditures for so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal. A fact that this book cited when it was first published -- that the United States had ten thousand nuclear warheads and Russia had a comparable number -- is no longer true; most estimates say those stockpiles are now about half as large. But the current situation is actually much more dangerous. In 2007, the Doomsday Clock maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pegged the world’s proximity to annihilation at five minutes to apocalyptic Midnight. As 2022 began, the symbolic hands were at one hundred seconds to Midnight. Such is the momentum of the nuclear arms race, fueled by profit-driven military contractors. Lofty rhetoric about seeking peace is never a real brake on the nationalistic thrust of militarism.
With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the third decade of this century is shaping up to unfold new wrinkles in American hegemonic conceits. Along the way, Joe Biden has echoed a central precept of doublethink in George Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984: “War is Peace.” Speaking at the United Nations as the autumn of 2021 began, Biden proclaimed: “I stand here today, for the first time in twenty years, with the United States not at war. We’ve turned the page.” But the turned page was bound into a volume of killing with no foreseeable end. The United States remained at war, bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere, with much information withheld from the public. And increases in U.S. belligerence toward both Russia and China escalated the risks of a military confrontation that could lead to nuclear war.
A rosy view of the USA’s future is only possible when ignoring history in real time. After four years of the poisonous Trump presidency, the Biden strain of corporate liberalism offers a mix of antidotes and ongoing toxins. The Republican Party, now neofascist, is in a strong position to gain control of the U.S. government by mid-decade. Preventing such a cataclysm seems beyond the grasp of the same Democratic Party elites that paved the way for Donald Trump to become president in the first place. Realism about the current situation -- clarity about how we got here and where we are now -- is necessary to mitigate impending disasters and help create a better future. Vital truths must be told. And acted upon.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Top U.S. officials want us to believe that the Pentagon carefully spares civilian lives while making war overseas. The notion is pleasant. And with high-tech killing far from home, the physical and psychological distances have made it even easier to believe recent claims that American warfare has become “humane.”
Such pretenses should be grimly laughable to anyone who has read high-quality journalism from eyewitness reporters like Anand Gopal and Nick Turse. For instance, Gopal’s article for The New Yorker in September, “The Other Afghan Women,” is an in-depth, devastating piece that exposes the slaughter and terror systematically inflicted on rural residents of Afghanistan by the U.S. Air Force.
Turse, an incisive author and managing editor at TomDispatch, wrote this fall: “Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen -- that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.”
Those deaths have been completely predictable results of U.S. government policies. And in fact, evidence of widespread civilian casualties emerged soon after the “war on terror” started two decades ago. Leaks with extensive documentation began to surface more than 10 years ago, thanks to stark revelations from courageous whistleblowers and the independent media outlet WikiLeaks.
The retribution for their truth-telling has been fierce and unrelenting. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is in a British prison, facing imminent extradition to the United States, where the chances of a fair trial are essentially zero. Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning spent seven years in a military prison. Former U.S. Air Force analyst Daniel Hale, who revealed murderous effects of U.S. drone warfare, is currently serving a 45-month prison sentence. They had the clarity of mind and heart to share vital information with the public, disclosing not just “mistakes” but patterns of war crimes.
Such realities should be kept in mind when considering how the New York Times framed its blockbuster scoop last weekend, drawing on more than 1,300 confidential documents. Under the big headline “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes,” the Times assessed U.S. bombing in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan -- and reported that “since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.”
What should not get lost in all the bold-type words like “failure,” “flawed intelligence” and “imprecise targeting” is that virtually none of it was unforeseeable. The killings have resulted from policies that gave very low priority to prevention of civilian deaths.
The gist of those policies continues. And so does the funding that fuels the nation’s nonstop militarism, most recently in the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act that spun through Congress this month and landed on President Biden’s desk.
Dollar figures are apt to look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had “only” asked for $12 billion more than President Trump’s last NDAA, but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Actually, factoring in other outlays for so-called “defense,” annual U.S. military spending is in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Efforts at restraint have hit a wall. This fall, in a vote on a bill to cut 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, support came from only one-fifth of the House, and not one Republican.
In the opposite direction, House support for jacking up the military budget was overwhelming, with a vote of 363-70. Last week, when it was the Senate’s turn to act on the measure, the vote was 88-11.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending -- while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations for local, state and national government agencies. It’s a destructive trend of warped priorities that serves the long-term agendas of neoliberalism, aptly defined as policies that “enhance the workings of free market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership.”
While the two parties on Capitol Hill have major differences on domestic issues, relations are lethally placid beyond the water’s edge. When the NDAA cleared the Senate last week, the leaders of the Armed Services Committee were both quick to rejoice. “I am pleased that the Senate has voted in an overwhelming, bipartisan fashion to pass this year’s defense bill,” said the committee’s chair, Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island. The ranking Republican on the panel, Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, chimed in: “This bill sends a clear message to our allies -- that the United States remains a reliable, credible partner -- and to our adversaries -- that the U.S. military is prepared and fully able to defend our interests around the world.”
It’s a long way from their glassed-in office suites to the places where the bombs fall.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Former president Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday in his latest attempt to halt her civil investigation into his business.
In the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Upstate New York on behalf of Trump and his real estate company, the former president alleges that James’s inquiry into his business practices has violated his constitutional rights.
“Her mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent,” Trump claims in the suit.
News of the lawsuit was first reported by the New York Times.
James’s civil investigation is looking into whether Trump’s company committed financial fraud in the valuations of properties to different entities, according to people familiar with the matter.
In the Monday lawsuit, Trump refers to the investigation as a “witch hunt,” a term he frequently used during his time in the White House to describe the investigation into his 2016 election campaign, and accuses James of abusing her powers “to target her political adversaries and advance her career.”
“Since taking office, she has tirelessly bombarded [Trump], his family and his business, Trump Organization LLC, with unwarranted subpoenas in a bitter crusade to ‘take on’ the President,” the suit claims.
In a statement, James said neither Trump nor his company “get to dictate if and where they will answer for their actions.” James noted that Trump has “continually” tried to slow down her investigation and said the new lawsuit is a “collateral attack” against her work.
“Our investigation will continue undeterred because no one is above the law, not even someone with the name Trump,” James said.
Trump, in a statement, claimed his lawsuit is “not about delay” but “about our Constitution.”
“Despite many years of investigation that nobody else could have survived even if they did things just slightly wrong, [James’s] is just a continuation of the political Witch Hunt that has gone on against me by the Radical Left Democrats for years,” he said.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump and his company, doubled down on his criticism of James and claimed that she is targeting Trump “with a callous disregard for the ethical and moral obligations she swore to abide by when she became Attorney General.”
“By filing this lawsuit, we intend to not only hold her accountable for her blatant constitutional violations, but to stop her bitter crusade to punish her political opponent in its tracks,” Habba said.
The lawsuit comes less than two weeks after James signaled that she is seeking a deposition from Trump early next year as part of her investigation. She requested to take his testimony on Jan. 7 at her New York office. An attorney for Trump said then that the former president would fight the request in court.
Executives at Trump’s company earlier made an issue out of James’s criticism of Trump while campaigning for the attorney general post and claimed that she has threatened a lawsuit to score political points.
James’s investigation, which began in March 2019, is separate from a criminal investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. Vance’s investigation, which earlier this month entered a crucial phase, is looking into whether Trump defrauded lenders by giving widely different valuations for the same property at the same time. James’s office is assisting with this criminal investigation.
Because James’s is a civil investigation, she can file a lawsuit against Trump over her findings but can’t file criminal charges against him. However, Manhattan prosecutors — led by Vance — have convened a new grand jury to consider potential criminal charges related to the company’s financial practices, according to the people familiar with the investigations. Vance, who is set to retire at the end of the month, has not signaled whether he will bring criminal charges against Trump.
Earlier this month, James announced that she was ending her bid for governor and would run for reelection instead, saying she wanted to continue her work as attorney general and “finish the job” on several “important investigations and cases.”
There’s a reason they wanted the social spending bill tied to infrastructure.
For members of “the Squad,” a group of staunch progressives in the House, Sen. Joe Manchin’s statement opposing the Build Back Better Act didn’t come as a surprise. They’d long warned it was just a matter of time before Manchin derailed the bill if a vote on infrastructure legislation, which he supported, was held first.
It turns out they were right.
Manchin has previously voiced a variety of concerns about the massive climate and social spending bill, and has repeatedly demanded it be trimmed down. In an attempt to pressure the moderate senator to support the measure, progressives lobbied Democratic leaders to keep it linked to a vote on a massive infrastructure package known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, as that latter bill was seen as a priority for Manchin.
The bills were coupled for weeks but were eventually separated due to pressure from House moderates and an assurance from President Joe Biden that he’d secure a yes vote from Manchin on the Build Back Better Act. Most House progressives voted in favor of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework; in the end, the six House members in “the Squad” were the only ones within the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against it. At the time, they reiterated fears that passing the infrastructure bill first would give up any leverage they had to pressure moderate lawmakers like Manchin to consider the Build Back Better Act.
“We have been saying this for weeks that this would happen,” Squad member Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) said in an MSNBC interview on Sunday. “Having [the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better] coupled together was the only leverage we had. And what did the caucus do? We tossed it.”
Bush’s stance was echoed by other Squad members, like Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and it’s now clear these progressives were correct to be worried. Although it’s uncertain how open Manchin might be to a different version of the Build Back Better Act, his position has effectively doomed the current version.
Democrats are attempting to pass Build Back Better via a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority. They need all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus on board to approve it — a fragile unity that’s impossible to achieve without Manchin’s vote. That fact has given Manchin, the bill’s largest detractor in the Senate, a lot of say over its fate. Over the past few months, he’s shown he’s more than willing to make full use of that influence. He did so again Sunday, shaking what little faith many progressives had left in him.
“Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naive,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted on Sunday.
When a handful of us in the House warned this would happen if Dem leaders gave Manchin everything he wanted 1st by moving BIF before BBB instead of passing together, many ridiculed our position.
Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naïve. https://t.co/TtKW6VOOCF
Progressives have long feared that moderates would abandon Build Back Better without the infrastructure bill
For months, the Congressional Progressive Caucus emphasized that it wouldn’t move along the bipartisan infrastructure bill without a concurrent vote on the Build Back Better Act. Members worried that moderates including Manchin would potentially abandon the social spending legislation once infrastructure passed. They were able to issue this ultimatum because the House also has a thin Democratic majority and the Congressional Progressive Caucus has the numbers to keep any bill without Republican support from passing.
At the start of November, however, as pressure to pass the infrastructure bill grew from both the White House and impatient moderates, most members in the progressive caucus agreed to a compromise. Armed with a written agreement from House moderates agreeing to consider the Build Back Better Act once the Congressional Budget Office released a cost estimate, as well as Biden’s promise that he would get Manchin’s support, progressives allowed the infrastructure vote to move forward.
“The president’s word is on the line here, and I do still believe that he is going to do what he told me and what he told our caucus and what he told the country he would do,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chair of the Progressive Caucus, said in an MSNBC interview last week. Manchin “made a commitment to the president, the president made a commitment to us, and I believe we’re going to get it done.”
The White House said Manchin was still participating in negotiations as recently as Tuesday, and that Manchin had brought the president a more limited version of the bill he could support. (As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has explained, Manchin’s statements do not explicitly indicate whether he’s closed the door to negotiating on a different version of the Build Back Better plan.)
“If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote in a statement Sunday.
Jayapal, in the MSNBC interview last week, said she did not regret the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s decision to vote for the infrastructure bill when it did.
“I don’t regret it because I think our leverage was at the maximum point,” Jayapal said. “Had we not done that, I think we would have lost even more on Build Back Better.”
Me: "Do you feel Joe Biden let you down? And do you feel you got played by Joe Manchin?"@RepJayapal: "No and no."
I pushed @RepJayapal on whether she and the progressives gave up leverage too soon by voting for BIF before BBB.
It’s impossible to say exactly what would have happened had progressives not chosen to put their trust in the president’s ability to seal a deal.
On one hand, questions have been raised about how much leverage progressives actually had throughout this process. Although Manchin helped negotiate the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, it was never clear whether he wanted it to pass so badly that he’d be willing to overlook his concerns about the size of the Build Back Better Act and many of its programs. It’s possible he would have been willing to vote down the social spending legislation even if that meant jeopardizing infrastructure legislation, too.
On the other hand, it did appear that the infrastructure legislation was a proposal that Manchin was invested in. He has long emphasized his support of bipartisanship and commitment to a measure addressing much-needed funding for roads and bridges that could garner both Democratic and Republican support. For that reason, the Squad is among those who now believe Democrats made a major miscalculation — one that not only potentially squandered a chance to pass Build Back Better quickly, but that has also put Democrats in a position in which further negotiation will be exponentially more difficult.
Manchin’s statement has damaged trust
Democrats are where they are now because of trust.
Progressives made a number of concessions on the Build Back Better Act, agreeing to a $3.5 trillion framework after initially proposing a $6 trillion option. Then they agreed to winnow it down further to $1.75 trillion, cutting some of their key priorities, including Medicare expansion of dental and vision coverage.
Throughout this process, willingness to move forward has relied on a sense that Manchin was participating in talks in good faith. And there was a sense that Biden, who has often touted the power of his personal relationship with Manchin, could find a way to get the senator to vote yes. For the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Manchin’s new statement seems to have shattered that trust.
“Today, Senator Manchin has betrayed his commitment not only to the President and Democrats in Congress but most importantly, to the American people,” caucus chair Jayapal said in a Sunday statement. “He routinely touts that he is a man of his word, but he can no longer say that.”
Now it will be more difficult to move forward. Progressives may feel less willing to compromise on provisions that remain outstanding in the bill, like drug pricing and Medicaid expansion, feeling that further compromise won’t net them anything from Manchin.
Manchin has also created confusion about what he wants, making it difficult for Democratic leaders to know where they should restart negotiations. It’s unclear if he simply doesn’t like the current shape of the Build Back Better Act and would be willing to vote for the proposal he brought to Biden recently, or if he’s now a no on any more spending.
The senator has placed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a tough position as well. Schumer is under increasing pressure from his caucus to simply bring a vote on the Build Back Better Act to the floor of the Senate, in hopes of forcing Manchin to vote yes.
The weeks to come will reveal if Manchin is willing to consider a version of the legislation that takes his concerns into consideration, or if he’s willing to walk away from it altogether. In both respects, however, his statement has made it tougher for progressives to trust that he will engage with this legislation seriously moving forward.
Death penalty states have had trouble obtaining the drugs that were long part of the standard lethal injection protocol. Now they have turned to new, often untested drugs and drug protocols. (photo: imago images/blickwinkel/Reuters)
Now more than ever there are two distinct worlds of capital punishment in the United States. It has long been the case that the death penalty has flourished in some regions of the country and in some states more than in others. And the release of the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) annual report for 2021 makes clear that the distance between those two divergent paths rapidly increased last year.
“The death penalty in 2021 was defined by two competing forces: the continuing long-term erosion of capital punishment across most of the country, and extreme conduct by a dwindling number of outlier jurisdictions to continue to pursue death sentences and executions,” The DPIC report noted. Capital punishment increasingly is used in just a few idiosyncratic locales and offers another fault line in this country’s fragmented political, legal, and cultural life. As in many other areas of American life, supporters and opponents of the death penalty regard each other as enemies, not just as opponents. They see the world in fundamentally different ways and think of the political struggle over the death penalty as a struggle over fundamental values and different ways of life.
As Emory University historian Daniel LaChance explains, “These days, support for capital punishment is concentrated among whites, Protestants, and Republicans—key demographic constituencies of the conservative side of the late twentieth century culture wars…. Support for the death penalty is not only a tool for controlling crime, but also an expression of allegiance to values—personal responsibility, the sacredness of innocent life, and the firmness of a nation’s convictions—that they feel have degraded in the United States since the 1960s.” Progressives, in contrast, see America’s continuing use of capital punishment as unjust, barbaric, and a sign of moral backwardness.
As a result, we can expect death penalty politics to grow more, not less, bitter and more intense, as the two worlds of capital punishment come to terms with new realities. What are these new realities?
In one of the worlds of capital punishment, abolitionists have made great progress and the death penalty is in retreat.
This year, Virginia became the eleventh state to have abolished capital punishment since 2007 and the 23rd state overall not to have the death penalty. It became the first southern state to abolish that punishment in recent memory. In Oregon, to cite another example of progress against the death penalty noted by the DPIC, the supreme court effectively ended that state’s use of capital punishment last October.
At the federal level, the Biden Justice Department announced a moratorium on federal executions.
During 2021, the United States imposed the fewest death sentences and carried out the lowest number of executions in decades. Eighteen people were sentenced to death, “tying 2020’s number for the fewest in the modern era of the death penalty, dating back to the Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia that struck down all existing U.S. death-penalty statutes in 1972. The eleven executions carried out during the year were the fewest since 1988.” But in the other world of capital punishment, things look quite different.
Donald Trump’s gruesome execution spree exemplified the desire to take the lives of those convicted of horrible crimes that still exists on the other side of the death penalty divide. Trump himself captured the flavor of the cultural chasm when he said during his 2016 campaign, “Death penalty all the way. I’ve always supported the death penalty. I don’t even understand people that don’t.”
While many political conservatives now oppose capital punishment, then Attorney General William Barr observed after the first of the federal executions last year that Americans “have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes, and justice was done today.”
Looking at only the states which carried executions last year, the names are quite familiar to any student of the death penalty, with Texas and Oklahoma leading the way, followed by Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri.
“All but one prisoner executed this year had serious impairments, including brain injury or damage, mental illness and intellectual disabilities, or had histories of gruesome childhood neglect and abuse,”according to a report in The Guardian,
That report quotes Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s deputy director, as saying that the states which continue to use the death penalty do not use it for “the worst of the worst, but the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.”
In this other world of capital punishment desperate measures have been required to keep the machinery of death running.
States have ratcheted up the regime of secrecy surrounding the death penalty. They refuse to disclose the precise drugs used when they put someone to death by lethal injection or to identify the suppliers of those drugs. Such refusal makes it very hard for journalists to inform the public about the killings that are carried out in its name or for condemned inmates to vindicate their rights under the Eighth Amendment.
Because death penalty states have had trouble obtaining the drugs that were long part of the standard lethal injection protocol, they have turned to new, often untested drugs and drug protocols. Or they have revived previously discredited methods of execution, as South Carolina did in May of this year when it brought back the electric chair and the firing squad to its inventory of execution methods.
In the world where the death penalty still lives, states have compiled a troubling record of problems and mishaps in their execution chambers, like the horror that unfolded last October when Oklahoma severely botched the execution of John Marion Grant.
As the DPIC’s Robert Dunham notes, “The handful of states that continue to push for capital punishment are outliers that often disregard due process, botch executions, and dwell in the shadows of long histories of racism and a biased criminal legal system.” And, as a strange case from Alabama reveals, death penalty states go deep into their bag of tricks to keep governmental officials in line. In that case, Jefferson County Judge Tracie Todd was suspended without pay for 90 days for, among other things, deciding that state’s death penalty system, which still allows judges to override jury decisions and impose death sentences was unconstitutional.
Such punishments are almost unheard of except when judges are guilty of the most serious derelictions of duty. But in Alabama it seems that a judge who points out the irrationality, cruelty, and injustice that is pervasive in its death penalty system has committed just such a dereliction.
This year ends with the two worlds of capital punishment intact, but with the sense that the United States is on the way toward abolition. Yet the road forward will not be easy nor is the result assured.
What the political philosopher Michael Walzer once said about all journeys toward justice seems apt as a way to think about capital punishment as this year comes to a close. This journey will be, as he says, “very slow, a matter of two steps forward, one step back.”
But that is still progress. We should not miss the fact that in 2021 there was more forward movement than setbacks on the way to ending America’s death penalty.
A migrant carries a child during a protest in favour of migration in Mexico City on Thursday. As the number of migrants at its southern border rises, the US has expanded its guest worker programme for low-skilled labourers. (photo: Toya Sarno Jordan/Reuters)
The number of H-2B visas will increase by 20,000, including 6,500 for Central America and Haiti, as migration spikes.
The United States is expanding its guest worker programme with an additional 20,000 visas available for seasonal, non-agricultural guest workers, as the number of migrants hoping to enter the country spikes at its southern border.
The extra H-2B visas would be in addition to the annual allotment of 66,000 visas for the fiscal year, a US official told the Reuters news agency on Monday. A formal announcement on the increased number, including 6,500 visas for workers from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti through March 31, is expected later in the day.
The expansion of the H-2B visa programme, used to employ landscapers, housekeepers, hotel employees and construction and carnival workers, among others, comes as the US labour market continues to face shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The White House has touted efforts to create legal pathways for migrants to come to the US as record numbers of migrants have been arrested at the southern border under the administration of President Joe Biden.
Even if all 6,500 visas are used, this represents just a fraction of the migrants trying to reach the US. US Border Patrol arrested more than 700,000 migrants from those four countries in the fiscal year 2021.
The additional 20,000 visas are a slight drop from the 22,000 made available for the second half of the fiscal year.
The Biden administration earlier this month struck an agreement with the Mexican government to reinstate a controversial Trump-era policy that forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their US court hearings.
The US Department of Homeland Security said the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), dubbed “Remain in Mexico”, restarted on December 6. Once it is again fully operational, the programme will see people returned to Mexico via seven border crossings in the US states of California, Arizona and Texas.
Some 70,000 people, including children, were sent back to Mexico under MPP, which Biden had initially sought to end as part of his pledge to reverse some of his predecessor Donald Trump’s most hardline, anti-immigration policies.
Following criticism from rights groups, the Biden administration set aside 6,000 H-2B visas for the three Central American countries during the second half of the fiscal year 2021, which ended on September 30, but fell short of filling all of those slots.
The addition of Haiti follows Biden’s decision to deport some Haitians after thousands arrived in southern Texas in September. The country has faced political instability and violence following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July as well as natural disasters.
The news comes following a deadly truck crash earlier this month in southern Mexico, which killed 54 migrants and injured 54 others.
Presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, of the 'I approve Dignity' coalition, takes selfies with supporters outside a polling station during the presidential run-off election in Punta Arenas, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021. (photo: Andres Poblete/AP)
A leftist millennial who rose to prominence during anti-government protests was elected Chile’s next president Sunday after a bruising campaign against a free-market firebrand likened to Donald Trump.
In a model of democratic civility that broke from the polarizing rhetoric of the campaign, Kast immediately conceded defeat, tweeting a photo of himself on the phone congratulating his opponent on his “grand triumph.” He then later traveled personally to Boric’s campaign headquarters to meet with his rival.
Meanwhile, outgoing President Sebastian Pinera — a conservative billionaire — held a video conference with Boric to offer his government’s full support during the three month transition.
Amid a crush of supporters, Boric vaulted atop a metal barricade to reach the stage where he initiated in the indigenous Mapuche language a rousing victory speech to thousands of mostly young supporters.
The bearded, bespectacled president-elect highlighted the progressive positions that launched his improbable campaign, including a promise to fight climate change by blocking a proposed mining project in what is the world’s largest copper producing nation.
He also promised to end Chile’s private pension system — the hallmark of the neoliberal economic model imposed by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
“We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business,” Boric said. “We know there continues to be justice for the rich, and justice for the poor, and we no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality.”
He also gave an extended shout out to Chilean women, a key voting bloc who feared that a Kast victory would roll back years of steady gains, promising they will be “protagonists” in a government that will seek to “leave behind once and for all the patriarchal inheritance of our society.”
In Santiago’s subway, where a fare hike in 2019 triggered a wave of nationwide protests that exposed the shortcomings of Chile’s free market model, young supporters of Boric, some of them waving flags emblazoned with the candidate’s name, jumped and shouted in unison as they headed downtown to join thousands who gathered for the president-elect’s victory speech.
“This is a historic day,” said Boris Soto, a teacher. “We’ve defeated not only fascism, and the right wing, but also fear.”
At 35, Boric will become Chile’s youngest modern president when he takes office in March and only the second millennial to lead in Latin America, after El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Only one other head of state, Giacomo Simoncini of the city-state San Marino in Europe, is younger.
His government is likely to be closely watched throughout Latin America, where Chile has long been a harbinger of regional trends.
It was the first country in Latin America to break with the U.S. dominance during the Cold War and pursue socialism with the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. It then reversed course a few years later when Pinochet’s coup ushered in a period of right-wing military rule that quickly launched a free market experiment throughout the region.
Boric’s ambitious goal is to introduce a European-style social democracy that would expand economic and political rights to attack nagging inequality without veering toward the authoritarianism embraced by so much of the left in Latin America, from Cuba to Venezuela.
It’s a task made more challenging by deepening ideological divisions unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic, which sped up the reversal of a decade of economic gains.
Kast, who has a history of defending Chile’s past military dictatorship, finished ahead of Boric by two points in the first round of voting last month but failed to secure a majority of votes. That set up a head-to-head runoff against Boric.
Boric was able to reverse the difference by a larger margin than pre-election opinion polls forecast by expanding beyond his base in the capital, Santiago, and attracting voters in rural areas who don’t side with political extremes. For example, in the northern region of Antofagasta, where he finished third in the first round of voting, he trounced Kast by almost 20 points.
An additional 1.2 million Chileans cast ballots Sunday compared to the first round, raising turnout to nearly 56%, the highest since voting stopped being mandatory in 2012.
“It’s impossible not to be impressed by the historic turnout, the willingness of Kast to concede and congratulate his opponent even before final results were in, and the generous words of President Pinera,” said Cynthia Arnson, head of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “Chilean democracy won today, for sure.”
Kast, 55, a devout Roman Catholic and father of nine, emerged from the far right fringe after having won less than 8% of the vote in 2017. An admirer of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, he rose steadily in the polls this time with a divisive discourse emphasizing conservative family values and playing on Chileans’ fears that a surge in migration — from Haiti and Venezuela — is driving crime.
As a lawmaker he has a record of attacking Chile’s LGBTQ community and advocating more restrictive abortion laws. He also accused Pinera, a fellow conservative, of betraying the economic Pinochet. Kast’s brother, Miguel, was one of the dictator’s top advisers.
In recent days, both candidates had tried to veer toward the center.
“I’m not an extremist. ... I don’t feel far right,” Kast proclaimed in the final stretch even as he was dogged by revelations that his German-born father had been a card-carrying member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
Boric’s victory likely to be tempered by a divided congress.
In addition, the political rules could soon change because a newly elected convention is rewriting the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. The convention — the nation’s most powerful elected institution — could in theory call for new presidential elections when it concludes its work next year and if the new charter is ratified in a plebiscite.
The holiday season is upon us and with it, a deluge of new tech, trinkets, and advertisements convincing us to indulge. But of course this torrent of consumption is nothing new, especially in the free-market capitalist consumerist nation of the United States. Every year, the holiday shopping season, spanning across November and December, sees massive monthly profits for corporations, employees crushed by inhuman workloads, and environmental destruction. And every year, the connections from consumerism to capitalism to the climate crisis are once again laid bare. Today we dive into the holidays and the manufactured desire for more to understand how capitalism is driving the climate crisis. But it’s not enough to just critique, we will also try to understand what will dismantle our current system and develop an ecologically sound and ethical world in its stead.
Underneath the bright glitz of Christmas lights and shrouded under the cover of wrapped presents, lies the stark reality of the holidays in the imperial core. Starting with the celebration of colonial genocide in Thanksgiving, followed immediately by the capitalist schemes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday that bleed into a month of Christmas celebrations foregrounding extensive gift-giving ceremonies, holidays have been co-opted by corporations and the relentless drive for profit and growth. Gift giving has been present in the ethos of winter holidays for hundreds of years, a tradition which some scholars point towards 19th century New York City aristocrats for starting as a way of shifting December holidays from a season when “poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets'' to one of cozy celebration in the home encouraging gift giving to children. But the amount of gifts were generally small in the 1800s, and it wasn’t until the rise of advertising around the turn of the 20th century, that retailers, especially toy retailers, saw the potential of the holidays for profit and capital accumulation. By the 2000s, US retail sales during the holiday season reached $416.4 billion and have only gotten bigger. Of the many factors driving the US shopper to spend an average of $1000 on presents every year, advertising is definitely making a mark. Advertisements make us feel good about something we know, deep down, is either unethical, useless, harmful, or all three. They are the rose tinted glasses that make the things in our home seem necessary when they are actually not. So, for a moment, let’s pull off those rose tinted glasses and understand the impact of the capitalist model on ourselves, our planet, and our holidays.
