22 May 20
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21 May 20
RSN: Norman Solomon | Class War - Not the Media Hokey Pokey - Is What It's All About
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Journalists aren't supposed to 'bury the lead.' But when death is the topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes unmentioned."
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Supporters cheer in the crowd during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Journalists aren't supposed to 'bury the lead.' But when death is the topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes unmentioned."
Class war — waged methodically from the top down — is so constant and pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make large companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going on all around us. In the process, it normalizes avoidable death as a cost of doing business.
Overall, news media are part of that normalization. While negative coverage of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the pandemic, media outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of the dying in our midst — at a time when most of the dying could have been prevented.
Deaths tend to become less “newsworthy” as the numbers mount and shock gives way to tacit media acceptance. A new lethal reality is built on dominant structures that keep serving the financial priorities of the powerful. Emphasis is often less about saving lives and more about saving the stock market. The storyline becomes more about “opening,” less about dying, even though opening is sure to cause more dying.
Patterns of economic injustice are so basic to U.S. society that they amount to deep cracks in its foundation. Under the weight of catastrophe, whether hurricane or recession or pandemic, the cracks split wider and wider as more human beings — disproportionately poor and people of color — fall into the abyss.
Corporate media narratives routinely bypass such core truths about cause and effect. Heartbreaking stories have scant context. Victims without victimizers.
Fueled by ultra-greed, Trump’s approach is a kind of scorched-earth nonstop campaign, an extreme version of the asymmetrical class warfare going on all the time.
“The world before COVID-19 was a deeply unequal place,” the progressive publisher OR Books noted in an email to supporters this week. “Now, in the pandemic, those inequalities are only more stark. Across America and around the globe are fabulous riches for a tiny few and deepening immiseration for everyone else.”
A swiftly infamous Instagram post by David Geffen (“net worth” $8.7 billion) in late March, showing his $590 million yacht at sunset as the pandemic took deadly hold in the United States (“isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus … I hope everybody is staying safe”), became a symbol transcending avowed politics. Geffen is no right-winger. He’s a liberal. In the 2018 election cycle he gave $1 million to Democratic Congressional super PACs. He went on to become a donor to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
But the most pernicious and ultimately destructive actions of the super-wealthy are not so overtly gauche. The poisons are laced with soothing PR, while the rich movers and shakers play by the rules that capitalism has constructed for the voracious acquisition of wealth at the expense of everyone else. In that sense, the worst class-war crimes are the ones that adhere to the rules and don’t get singled out for condemnation.
Consider the pathology of Jeff Bezos, reputedly the world’s richest person, who commented that he couldn’t think of much else to spend his money on besides programs for space travel, while back on planet Earth the extent of misery due to poverty is staggering. Said Bezos: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”
For the likes of Bezos and other elite winners of riches, in the words of songwriter Tracy Chapman, a future awaits: “I won’t die lonely / I’ll have it all prearranged / A grave that’s deep and wide enough / For me and all my mountains o’ things.”
A few months into 2020, capitalism is running amuck in tandem with the coronavirus, like some headless horseman galloping over dead bodies. Meanwhile, for U.S. news media, accustomed to covering faraway disasters, a reflex has set in close to home — turning the page on deaths, increasingly presenting them as numbers. An anesthetized pall of acceptance is descending on us.
“For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person who grieves,” psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has pointed out. “The person who mourns goes on living and for as long as he [or she] lives there is always the possibility of feeling grief.” In his book “The Examined Life,” Grosz wrote: “My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow.”
The corporate system is looking for its own forms of social “closure” in the midst of this pandemic’s colossal deadly upheaval. Already, we’re supposed to accept.
Maybe you don’t want to call it class war. But whatever you call it, the system always makes a killing.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is 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.
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Supporters cheer in the crowd during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
The 2020 Bernie Delegates Network Announces Launch as Progressive Force for Democratic National Convention
Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction.org, The 2020 Bernie Delegates Network for Political Action
Excerpt: "Three progressive national organizations today announced formation of the 2020 Bernie Delegates Network, which will serve as a communications and action hub for more than 1,000 Bernie Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention."
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Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction.org, The 2020 Bernie Delegates Network for Political Action
Excerpt: "Three progressive national organizations today announced formation of the 2020 Bernie Delegates Network, which will serve as a communications and action hub for more than 1,000 Bernie Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention."
Selected last week as a Sanders delegate from Arizona to the 2020 national convention, Patti Serrano said: “We look forward to continue holding the party’s top leaders accountable. We are committed to speaking truths on policies that affect and hurt our communities. By organizing and ensuring we hold ground on the everyday issues that directly impact the majority of people in our nation, like the fundamental human right to quality healthcare, I am hopeful that the Bernie Delegates Network will have a positive impact on this year’s convention.” Serrano, who was born and raised in South Tucson, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants.
In a joint statement, the sponsoring groups -- Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction.org -- said that the network will work to support and connect delegates at the DNC.
“The progressive base of the Democratic Party is determined to be heard,” the statement said. “At the grassroots, it’s clear where the political momentum is headed. Unless the Democratic ticket and the party’s top leaders are willing to fully recognize and respond to the broadly popular policy views of party activists, we’re in grave danger of low, 2016-level voter turnouts and the re-election of Donald Trump. It is unacceptable for top-ranking Democrats to maintain corporate business-as-usual.”
In the weeks before the party’s national convention in Philadelphia, the 2016 Bernie Delegates Network was organized and sponsored by RootsAction and PDA. Conducting one-delegate one-vote online elections, the network gauged and publicized the views of Sanders delegates on key issues and plans.
A July 2016 network survey of several hundred Sanders delegates on likely VP running mates found that just 3 percent said that Tim Kaine would be “acceptable” -- with 9 percent undecided and 88 percent saying Kaine was “unacceptable.” A week later, Hillary Clinton announced Kaine as her choice.
Today’s statement from the 2020 Bernie Delegates Network said: “We will be urging the current Democratic leadership to heed the concerns of progressives and avoid the kind of mistakes that led to defeat four years ago.”
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal speaks to members of the media as she arrives at a House Democratic Caucus meeting on Sept. 25, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
Swing-District Democrats Link With Progressives to Back Paycheck Bill Pelosi Rejected
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "After House speaker Nancy Pelosi excluded a plan to keep unemployment down by subsidizing firms to keep workers on payrolls from her relief package last week, dozens of progressives have banded together with 10 'front-line' Democrats from swing districts to introduce it as a standalone piece of legislation."
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "After House speaker Nancy Pelosi excluded a plan to keep unemployment down by subsidizing firms to keep workers on payrolls from her relief package last week, dozens of progressives have banded together with 10 'front-line' Democrats from swing districts to introduce it as a standalone piece of legislation."
EXCERPT:
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Germany relied on a program of wage subsidies to keep people in their jobs, which kept unemployment in the low single digits. The U.S., meanwhile, focused instead on providing relief in the form of unemployment payments and brief subsidies for health care coverage for the jobless. The U.S. unemployment rate, as expected, rose dramatically, while Germany’s didn’t, and the U.S. recovery took much longer. U.S. policymakers, or at least those in charge of writing the laws, learned little from the last crisis.
The CARES Act, the multitrillion-dollar relief package that was passed in late March, took the route of subsidizing unemployment by providing workers who had been recently laid off with an extra $600 in unemployment benefits for four months. The HEROES Act includes an extension of those benefits until January 2021. “Mass unemployment is a policy choice, and we must choose differently,” Jayapal said Tuesday, introducing the Paycheck Recovery Act.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., joined by a handful of Democrats, has sponsored a similar piece of legislation in the Senate. The politics of fighting on behalf of jobs is an obvious winner, and Hawley is hoping to exploit Democrats’ failure to do so in an election year. Some Republicans, Politico reported, “see an opportunity to get the upper hand on jobs and the economy after the Democratic House proposal omitted” Jayapal’s paycheck guarantee legislation. Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, facing a tough reelection fight in Colorado, publicly backed the paycheck measure at the end of last week. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Doug Jones, D-Ala.; and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have also supported versions of the legislation.
“We should put forward a proposal that is focused on jobs in contrast to what House Democrats are doing. They could have done something like this. They had an opportunity to put forward a jobs proposal and they didn’t,” Hawley said. “It is unbelievable that you would propose $3 trillion in federal spending and you wouldn’t have a focus on workers.”
As late as March 17, people eat at a restaurant along Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, Fla., several days after President Trump declared a national emergency. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
New Model Finds Shutting Down US Even One Week Earlier Could Have Cut Death Toll in Half
Elliot Hannon, Slate
Hannon writes: "As the U.S. begins to restart portions of what was daily life before the arrival of the coronavirus, a new model on the virus's spread estimates that if the country had responded more quickly - even by a single week - in shutting down and social distancing, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved."
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Elliot Hannon, Slate
Hannon writes: "As the U.S. begins to restart portions of what was daily life before the arrival of the coronavirus, a new model on the virus's spread estimates that if the country had responded more quickly - even by a single week - in shutting down and social distancing, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved."
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Believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
Two Weeks Ago, She Predicted Trump Would Use COVID to Arrest Obama. Now She's a GOP Senate Candidate
Will Sommer, The Daily Beast
Sommer writes: "A QAnon conspiracy theorist won the GOP Senate primary in Oregon on Tuesday, giving a massive electoral stage to the bizarre pro-Trump movement that the FBI considers a potential domestic terror threat."
Will Sommer, The Daily Beast
Sommer writes: "A QAnon conspiracy theorist won the GOP Senate primary in Oregon on Tuesday, giving a massive electoral stage to the bizarre pro-Trump movement that the FBI considers a potential domestic terror threat."
Jo Rae Perkins will be the Republican nominee for Senate in Oregon. And, boy, she’s not your usual candidate.
Jo Rae Perkins, an insurance agent and avowed QAnon believer, handily won the contest to take on Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) in the general election. Perkins, who has launched unsuccessful Senate and House bids in the past, beat her nearest Republican primary opponent by nearly 20 percentage points on Tuesday.
To celebrate, Perkins tweeted a video acknowledging the support she had received from QAnon believers. The victory speech included references to QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” QAnon followers who call themselves “Anons,” and “Q,” the anonymous person or group whose “clues” make up the basis of QAnon.
“I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team,” Perkins said, holding up a sign with a QAnon slogan on it. “Thank you Anons, thank you patriots.”
Perkins deleted the video on Wednesday afternoon, amid press coverage of her primary win. She didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Oregon Republican Party didn’t respond to a request for comment about the state party’s stance on Perkins or QAnon. But Perkins’ victory is the latest in the remarkable evolution of a state GOP apparatus that was not always so dominated by the far-right fringe. Indeed, Republicans held a Senate seat in Oregon as recently as 2009. And Merkley only narrowly won his first general election for the seat then held by Sen. Gordon Smith (R) in 2008, winning by only three percentage points. He’ll likely fare much better against Perkins.
Beyond the boundaries of Oregon, Perkins’ primary win also represents how far conspiracy theorists have ascended in national politics. QAnon supporters believe in an elaborate conspiracy theory that posits that Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against a “cabal” made up pedophile-cannibals in the global elite and Democratic Party. They are also convinced that Trump will soon imprison or execute top Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Despite its bizarre claims, QAnon has won prominent converts, including comedian Roseanne Barr, former baseball player Curt Schilling, and several Instagram influencers. Donald Trump has invited QAnon promoters to the White House, and frequently retweets them. His nominee for director of national intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), followed a number of QAnon accounts onTwitter.
QAnon believers have been charged with a host of violent crimes that appear to have been connected to their beliefs, including two murders, a terrorist incident involving an armored truck and guns near the Hoover Dam, and two child-abduction plots. In April, a QAnon believer allegedly claiming that she planned to kill former Vice President Joe Biden was arrested with illegal knives.
Perkins seemed at least self-aware that the views she held put her on the far fringe of the politically acceptable. She told Right Wing Watch in January that she was taking a risk running as an open QAnon believer.
“It’s either pure genius or pure insanity,” Perkins said. “It’s one of the two. The voters are going to have to be the ones that make that decision.”
But Perkins isn’t just a casual QAnon believer. She appears to be well-versed in the conspiracy theory, even appearing on a YouTube show to decode QAnon “clues.”
In a May 5 video with QAnon promoters “ShadyGrooove” and “InTheMatrixxx”—two prominent QAnon figures who have teamed up with an alleged cult leader to push their theories—Perkins said she was initially convinced that the coronavirus lockdown was actually cover for Trump to arrest top Democrats.
“President Trump was going to flip the switch and say ‘go and do those arrests that we’ve all been waiting for,’” Perkins said.
Perkins added that the coronavirus is a “fake virus” and described herself as “red-pilled”—QAnon code meaning she’s been “awakened” by the conspiracy theory.
When Obama failed to be arrested and tried at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, however, Perkins didn’t take it as a sign that QAnon is fake. Instead, she claimed on the YouTube show that the arrests had failed to happen because of some unspecified failing of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), adding that “the judges aren’t in place.”
Perkins also used the YouTube appearance for a chance to raise some campaign funds. She badly needs them—Perkins has raised roughly $24,000 as of April 29, compared to Merkley’s $4.3 million.
Still, QAnon believers have tried to shell out for her campaign. On the podcast, the host “InTheMatrixxx” urged his fans to back Perkins.
“She doesn’t have the deep-state pockets, folks,” he said.
Protesters rally inside the arrivals hall of Hong Kong International Airport on August 9, 2019. (photo: EPA)
China Plans New National Security Law for Hong Kong
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "China will propose a national security law for Hong Kong in response to last year's often violent pro-democracy protests that plunged the city into its deepest turmoil since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997, state news agency Xinhua has said."
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Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "China will propose a national security law for Hong Kong in response to last year's often violent pro-democracy protests that plunged the city into its deepest turmoil since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997, state news agency Xinhua has said."
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'The bear population has quadrupled,' said one worker at a Yosemite hotel. (photo: Jason J. Rodriguez/Getty)
We've Never Seen This': Wildlife Thrives in Closed US National Parks
Jeremy Miller, Guardian UK
Miller writes: "Earlier this month, for the first time in recent memory, pronghorn antelope ventured into the sun-scorched lowlands of Death Valley national park. Undeterred by temperatures that climbed to over 110F, the animals were observed by park staff browsing on a hillside not far from Furnace Creek visitor center."
Jeremy Miller, Guardian UK
Miller writes: "Earlier this month, for the first time in recent memory, pronghorn antelope ventured into the sun-scorched lowlands of Death Valley national park. Undeterred by temperatures that climbed to over 110F, the animals were observed by park staff browsing on a hillside not far from Furnace Creek visitor center."
Deer, bobcats and black bears are gathering around parts of Yosemite national park typically teeming with visitors
“This is something we haven’t seen in our lifetimes,” said Kati Schmidt, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association. “We’ve known they’re in some of the higher elevation areas of Death Valley but as far as we’re aware they’ve never been documented this low in the park, near park headquarters.”
The return of pronghorns to Death Valley is but one of many stories of wildlife thriving on public lands since the coronavirus closures went into effect a month and a half ago.
In Yosemite national park, closed since 20 March, wildlife have flocked in large numbers to a virtually abandoned Yosemite Valley.
More than 4 million visitors traveled to Yosemite last year, the vast majority by way of automobile. On busy late-spring days, as visitors gather to see the famed Yosemite, Vernal and Bridal Veil Falls, the 7.5-mile long valley can become an endless procession of cars.
But traffic jams seem a distant memory as the closure approaches its two-month mark. Deer, bobcats and black bears have congregated around buildings, along roadways and other parts of the park typically teeming with visitors. One coyote, photographed by park staff lounging in an empty parking lot under a rushing Yosemite Falls, seemed to best capture the momentary state of repose.
A handful of workers who have remained in Yosemite during the closures, who have been able to travel by foot and bike along the deserted roadways, describe an abundance of wildlife not seen in the last century. “The bear population has quadrupled,” Dane Peterson, a worker at the Ahwahnee Hotel, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not like they usually aren’t here … It’s that they usually hang back at the edges or move in the shadows.”
Similar behaviors have been documented in other national parks including Rocky Mountain, in Colorado, and Yellowstone, in Wyoming. “Without an abundance of visitors and vehicles, wildlife has been seen in areas they typically don’t frequent,” said the National Park Service spokesperson Cynthia Hernandez, “including near roadways, park buildings and parking lots, spending time doing what they usually do naturally: foraging for food”.
The human-free interregnum is rapidly coming to an end, however, as the park service ramps up its phased reopening.
While Yosemite, Death Valley and a number of other California national parks remain closed, on Monday, Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks – which collectively received nearly 8 million visitors in 2019 – reopened their gates for the first time since late March.
To protect visitors and staff, the park service has hired seasonal workers to disinfect high use areas and installed plastic barriers at tollbooths, visitor centers and permit desks.
But few if any protective measures have been put in place for wildlife. The consequences of the re-openings may be especially hard on young animals born in the calm of the closures, according to wildlife experts.
“Individuals who have lived in the national park area will likely readjust pretty quickly to the return of recreators after quarantine,” said Lindsay Rosa, a conservation scientist with Defenders of Wildlife. “But newcomers, particularly juveniles born this spring, may take a bit longer to learn since they haven’t yet had the opportunity to encounter many humans.”
Visitors to the re-opened parks should be particularly wary of amphibians, says Rosa, many of which are beginning their migration to breeding grounds. “[For them], roads remain a particularly fatal obstacle.”
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