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28 September 20
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RSN: Marc Ash | Minority Rule Is Un-American and Unacceptable
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "Minority rule is by its very nature authoritarian. If power is not truly derived from the people - a majority of the people - then that power is exercised in defiance of the people."
Four times in American history a candidate has won the presidency without a popular majority. In each instance it was a Republican, never a Democrat. In the first 20 years of this young 21st century, twelve of those years have seen the nation led by a president who could not win a majority from the American voters.
The result has been a degree of social division and unrest not seen in the country since the post Civil War era, which was the moment in history when the other two Republican minority presidents captured the White House.
Minority rule is fundamentally antithetic to American core values. The Declaration of Independence was at its foundation a pronouncement of self-determination. The idea that there should be “no taxation without representation” was a defining ideology of the Revolution.
Our perception or interpretation of the intent of the Framers seems to be a never-ending work in progress. Did they really intend that presidents serve without having won the popular election? After their bout with King George III, that would seem unimaginable. Nonetheless, we have found ourselves governed by not one but two presidents without majority support. What could go wrong?
Once the door to minority rule is opened, those who enjoy its power may not want to relinquish it. See current events for more on this. In addition, if the majority is ruled by the minority, this leads to social unrest – as evidenced by developments in Portland, Kenosha, Louisville, and hundreds of other emerging hotspots around the country. Minority rule imposes a lack of social order and naturally fosters social unrest.
There were concerns in 2015 as Donald Trump’s campaign for president began to get rolling that the tone of his rhetoric could, or perhaps was even intended to, lead to civil war. We are not there yet, but we can see that place from here.
Amy Coney Barrett and the frantic rush job to install her as the 2020 presidential election process is in full swing is another deliberate step toward constitutional nullification, minority rule, and social chaos.
The time has come for the minority to feel the full weight of the majority. Simply standing aside as the Constitution is trampled makes those who take no action complicit with those who transgress.
Should a state like Wyoming, with a population of roughly 600,000, stand in full parity in the selection of a Supreme Court Justice as a state like California, whose population stands at 40 million and has the fifth largest economy in the world? Or is the better question how long will California, New York, Illinois, and other states whose major population centers are fundamentally impacted by the imposition of the will of small rural states stand for the intrusion.
When do the major population and economic centers of the US begin to act like it? When do the citizens of those areas begin to demand it? Small, rural minority states can only control large, populous, economically powerful states if the larger states are docile and compliant.
The strength and power of the larger states can be exercised effectively without undue strife, but the process must begin in earnest and with immediacy.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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.
The aftermath of a Trump rally in 2016. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
NYT: Trump's Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public."
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
onald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appears at a vaccine development event in the White House Rose Garden in May. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
CDC's Credibility Is Eroded by Internal Blunders and External Attacks as Coronavirus Vaccine Campaigns Loom
Lena H. Sun and Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "For decades, the agency stood at the forefront of fighting disease outbreaks. This time, it's dealing with a crisis of its own."
he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was created to stop deadly pathogens. It battled malaria and polio. It helped eradicate smallpox. It sent intrepid disease doctors to Africa to fight Ebola. Over the course of seven decades, it became the world’s most admired public health agency.
The CDC had been preparing for decades for this moment — the arrival of a virus rampaging across the planet, inflicting widespread death and suffering.
But 2020 has been a disaster for the CDC.
The agency’s response to the worst public health crisis in a century — the coronavirus pandemic — has been marked by technical blunders and botched messaging. The agency has endured false accusations and interference by Trump administration political appointees. Worst of all, the CDC has experienced a loss of institutional credibility at a time when the nation desperately needs to know whom to trust.
This harsh assessment does not come from political or ideological enemies of the CDC. It comes from the agency’s friends and supporters — and even from some of the professionals within the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.
“Since late February, the CDC has lost massive amounts of credibility,” said Jody Lanard, a physician who worked for nearly two decades as a pandemic communications adviser consulting with the World Health Organization.
With a budget just under $8 billion, the nation’s chief public health agency is responsible for everything from investigating disease outbreaks to figuring out how best to prevent the leading causes of death in the United States, such as heart disease and cancer.
“It’s been a terrible year for the CDC,” said Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “There’s no question that their credibility and effectiveness have been damaged by a combination of external threats, leadership that has been perceived to be ineffective and mistakes they have made internally.”
Career staff members remain proud of the expertise, talent and professionalism that the agency can bring to bear in a crisis. But they see the agency’s situation clearly. One veteran researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said Friday that morale is at an all-time low.
CDC Director Robert Redfield, appointed by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in 2018, is a well-known AIDS researcher who had never led an organization so large and complex. While his credentials are solid, he does not cut an effective, confidence-inspiring figure on television. He often speaks in a monotone, his eyes frequently closed.
President Trump directly contradicted the CDC chief this month after Redfield testified to Congress that a coronavirus vaccine would not be widely distributed until the middle of next year, similar to what other top officials have said. Trump said Redfield was “confused.”
The CDC declined to make Redfield available for an interview for this article.
Inside the CDC, staffers acknowledge Redfield’s limitations as a leader but are fearful that, if he is ousted or quits, the White House will install someone of a more distinctly political or ideological bent — such as Scott Atlas, a Stanford University neuroradiologist and Trump pandemic adviser. Atlas, who has said pandemic fears are overblown, has become a Trump favorite and has publicly criticized Redfield in recent days. Atlas has no experience in public health but attends all meetings of the White House coronavirus task force.
Moving to replace Redfield with someone such as Atlas would further erode morale and probably lead to resignations, staffers say.
Asked Friday whether Trump still had confidence in Redfield, the White House sidestepped the question.
“President Trump has always followed the science and done what was in the best interest of the American people,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. “His early actions and therapeutic breakthroughs have saved American lives.”
A senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions noted that coronavirus task force members often have differing viewpoints: “President Trump takes these views into consultation and follows the science.”
“The American people are fortunate to have Dr. Redfield leading the CDC,” HHS spokeswoman Katherine McKeogh said. CDC guidelines receive “appropriate attention, consultation and input” from task force experts, she said. “Throughout the COVID-19 response, science and data have driven the decisions at HHS.”
The timing of the CDC’s troubles could not be worse. The country is poised to embark on a vaccination campaign against the novel coronavirus, and although many federal, state and local agencies will play a role, the CDC has to lead the effort and persuade people to get their shots.
As federal regulators get closer to approving coronavirus vaccines, there will be enormous attention devoted to making sure they are safe and effective. That issue resides with a different agency, the Food and Drug Administration. The CDC, following recommendations from a federal advisory panel, will decide which people should receive the initial doses. The CDC is also leading the massive and complicated effort to coordinate distribution of doses to states and monitor safety in tens of millions of people.
There is no precedent for a vaccine rollout of this scale, said Michael Fraser, chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. That’s why the CDC’s troubles are so inopportune.
“It’s just unnerving,” he said. “It comes at the worst time possible.”
Never has faith in a health agency mattered more, said Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
“Nobody is trusting the CDC when we need to be trusting the CDC,” del Rio said. “When you lose trust, you are essentially crippled.”
Inside the CDC, officials say honest mistakes are now widely perceived as signs of something nefarious. The prime example: the aerosol fiasco.
On Sept. 18, with no fanfare, the CDC updated a page on its website that described how the coronavirus is spread. The new wording included a reference to aerosols — tiny particles that can float through the air, potentially a significant distance. Growing evidence exists that these aerosols play a role in the pandemic. To what extent is unknown and difficult to measure. The consensus is that larger respiratory droplets, such as those emitted by a cough or sneeze, are the main drivers of viral spread, not aerosols. The new guidance added aerosols as one of the potential mechanisms of transmission.
Amid a flurry of headlines suggesting that this was a major change, the CDC backtracked. On Sept. 21, the agency removed the new language, saying it was a rough draft that still needed to be reviewed.
“Unfortunately, an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, told The Washington Post in a rare on-the-record interview. He said the agency feared the guidance, as written and initially posted, could be misinterpreted as suggesting that aerosols are the main cause of infections.
But many people outside the Trump administration, aware that the agency has endured political interference, have become skeptical about public statements from the CDC. One veteran CDC scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, expressed frustration about the skepticism. He said there was no political pressure to pull the revised guidance.
“No White House interference,” the scientist said. “We shot our own foot.”
The CDC isn’t done with the aerosol guidance. Career staffers are still working on the wording, the scientist said. When it is finished, he said, the language will probably be similar to what was first posted. He acknowledged that the reversals are confusing.
“When everyone is paranoid and angry, it looks like intrigue with lots of smoke and mirrors,” he said.
‘The worst is the silence’
The stumbles started early in the pandemic, with the botched rollout of test kits suspected of being contaminated at a CDC lab in late January. That led to critical delays in states’ ability to know where the virus was circulating.
But the agency’s most chronic problem has been the inability to speak directly and persuasively to the American public. To a large extent, that’s because it has been muzzled — and sometimes directly criticized — by political operatives in the Trump administration.
Michael Caputo, a political appointee and the top spokesman at HHS, this month falsely declared that CDC scientists were political partisans dedicated to opposing the president. He later apologized and is on medical leave.
That accusation came after Caputo and one of his advisers had tried to get the CDC to alter or delay its regular scientific missives, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, if they deviated from the president’s upbeat coronavirus message. Redfield told Congress this month that the “scientific integrity” of his agency’s reports “has not been compromised and it will not be compromised under my watch.”
In August, the CDC, under political pressure from White House and HHS officials, posted guidelines saying that asymptomatic people “do not necessarily need a test” — even if they had come in close contact with someone infected by the virus. Following an outcry from scientists inside and outside the agency, the CDC reversed itself. But the damage was done: Its scientific integrity had been undermined again.
Trump sidelines CDC in growing rift over coronavirus response
The public has not heard consistently from CDC scientists who possess the expertise to help people understand the virus; the disease it causes, covid-19; and how to respond effectively. Requests for interviews with CDC experts must be approved by HHS and the White House. A senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions said the White House has encouraged Redfield and others to speak to regional media outlets, which tend to focus more on local issues. The CDC has not held a briefing in three months.
“The worst is the silence,” said the CDC scientist. “You can’t explain what’s going on, correct mistakes, clarify things quickly before they spin up and out of control.”
Briefings must be approved by officials at HHS. By comparison, when the H1N1 swine flu pandemic hit the United States in spring 2009, the CDC held briefings almost every day for six consecutive weeks.
A top CDC infectious-diseases official, Nancy Messonnier, generated headlines in late February when she said at a news conference that the United States would inevitably see community spread of the coronavirus — that it was not by any means contained. She was rarely heard from again.
Lanard said the CDC’s biggest failure this year has been the lack of one or two “strong, warm” experts to serve as agency representatives.
“We needed someone who would have showed their own humanity, treated the public like grown-ups, shared the public’s anxiety, and validated the public’s skepticism and doubts,” she said.
Expressing a widely held sentiment among experts inside and outside the agency, Lanard said that person should be Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director. Schuchat, who has more than 30 years of experience, helped lead the agency’s response to the 2001 anthrax attacks, the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and last year’s vaping-related lung injuries.
“Dr. Redfield does not inspire,” Lanard said. “He also comes across more as an extension of the executive branch, even though I know he cares passionately about giving the best advice.”
Redfield’s latest rocky moment came Wednesday in a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked Redfield whether the director believed that aerosols play a role in transmission, as the revised guidance stated before the CDC reverted to earlier language.
“There’s definitely evidence of that, sir,” Redfield answered.
“There’s no inaccuracy in the statement,” Kaine said.
“There’s definitely evidence of that,” Redfield said.
Kaine expressed bafflement that an apparently accurate statement had been taken down, saying this “contributes to the massive confusion that is so, so troubling to scientists and so troubling to people. And then that leads to, well, gosh, is the vaccine going to be safe?”
Redfield reiterated that the process was flawed: “I just want to stress for the American public and for everyone here that that document that went up was a draft, had not been technically reviewed by CDC.”
The awkwardness of the moment did not go unnoticed elsewhere in the administration.
“That exchange was devastating,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.
Redfield has been widely criticized by experts inside and outside the agency for failing to defend CDC career scientists against political interference and criticism. But in testimony Wednesday, Redfield, without naming Caputo, said he found “offensive” comments from people at HHS about “a deep state down at CDC.” He said CDC staff members are hard-working and dedicated as they confront “the greatest public health crisis of our time,” and said the criticism can “suck energy out of people working 24/7.”
After Redfield told Congress in no uncertain terms this month that a vaccine will take months to deliver and that people should wear masks — drawing a public rebuke from Trump — he received an email from Robert C. Gallo, a close colleague who in 1996 co-founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Gallo told Redfield that people were praising him for “taking off the gloves and being so strong.” Gallo said Redfield called him that night to thank him for the support.
A person close to Redfield said the former Army physician has struggled with his ethics because of a belief in the importance of the chain of command. In the Army, he would lay down his life for his commander in chief.
“I said, ‘Bob, you can’t go wrong with following your conscience,’ ” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.
Redfield has told colleagues he plans to leave at the end of his term, regardless of who wins in November.
A matter of trust
In recent days, Trump and his allies have attacked the agency and its director in extraordinarily public ways, creating confusion about what scientists know about the virus and the timetable for when most Americans will have access to a vaccine.
On Wednesday, Atlas stood at the White House press room podium and contradicted Redfield’s sworn testimony that about 90 percent of Americans remain vulnerable to the coronavirus. Pressed by reporters about whom Americans should believe — the CDC director or him — Atlas replied: “You’re supposed to believe the science and I’m telling you the science.”
Atlas’s public attack on Redfield was “absolutely unconscionable,” the administration official said.
The conflicting messages from Washington and Atlanta break every rule in the CDC’s 450-page manual about communicating in a crisis.
People start to ask, “‘Can we trust the experts, can we trust what they tell us, should we follow their recommendations about what to do?’” said Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.
White House officials have pressured the CDC to change guidance over the last several months to align the guidelines more closely with the administration’s message that the pandemic is under control, federal health officials have said. Those actions include revised CDC guidance on mask-wearing and the reopening of religious institutions and schools.
“Every big public health response has two components: the public health emergency and the political emergency. It’s something epidemiologists begrudgingly accept,” said a CDC epidemiologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
“We hate the political component, and do everything we can to focus on the science and the people,” the disease tracker said. “I never would have expected the level of political interference we’re seeing now. It’s so sad.”
Democratic lawmakers are calling for the HHS inspector general to investigate allegations that the White House and its appointees interfered for political purposes with the work of the CDC and its scientists.
Within the agency, some believe problems could be reversed with a different director. Some public health experts say the CDC can regain credibility only with a wholesale change at the top. The CDC director is appointed by the HHS secretary, but unlike the heads of the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, the position does not require Senate confirmation.
Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, is calling for the CDC director to be replaced by a board, along the lines of the Federal Reserve system, to strengthen the agency’s institutional independence.
“You have to do something visible to allow the trust to be reestablished,” she said. Otherwise, future presidential administrations may be tempted to continue such interference, she said.
Reiss is the author of a forthcoming article in ConLawNOW, an online legal journal. The paper, “Institutionalizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Independence,” describes a seven-member governing board with staggered terms longer than the sitting president.
The CDC’s predecessor, the Communicable Disease Center, was founded in 1946 in Atlanta to suppress the spread of malaria in the South. The early challenges of the agency, which was armed with a budget of $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers and shovels to wage war on mosquitoes.
Nearly all of the CDC’s U.S. staff, including its director, are based in Atlanta. While career staff have long prided themselves on being physically independent from Washington, CDC’s distance has hindered its ability to build political support that is so crucial in times of crisis, experts say.
And unlike other health agencies, much of its work is designed to prevent bad things from happening — a mission that can prove challenging to highlight.
“Even in normal times, NIH can promise research breakthroughs, FDA can bring products to market to cure disease, but CDC is a public health agency and when public health is working, it’s invisible,” Yale’s Schwartz said. “We don’t see the individual victims; we don’t know whose lives are being saved.”
CNN reporter Omar Jimenez arrested live on TV at Minneapolis protest. (photo: AFP/Getty Ima
'Unlike Anything We've Seen in Modern History': Attacks Against Journalists Soar During Black Lives Matter Protests
Alex Woodward, The Independent
Woodward writes: "At least 50 journalists in the US have been arrested during Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the US, while dozens of others have also been injured by rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas."
t least 50 journalists in the US have been arrested during Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the US, while dozens of others have also been injured by rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas.The US Press Freedom Tracker has collected nearly 500 incidents from 382 reports, from the unrest in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd‘s killing by police in late May, to demonstrations in more than 70 cities across 35 states since.
At least 46 journalists were arrested between the end of May and the beginning of June, according to data collected by the organisation. Dozens of others reported injuries from law enforcement, firing “less lethal” projectiles, tear gas canisters and other weapons into crowds or directly at reporters during demonstrations, even when they had identified themselves and shown credentials, the organisation reports.
Two reporters have suffered permanent eye injuries.
The latest reports mark a significant spike since the end of May, when nationwide protests started, at which point the organisation had recorded only five arrests and 26 attacks for the entire year by that point.
But by the end of the month, the number of attacks had increased nearly five times, after more than a month of nightly protests, vigils and other demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice.
“The importance of documenting these – and doing it as quickly as we can – is not lost: the conversations and reckoning that lie ahead of us as a country are taking shape right now,” Press Freedom Tracker managing editor Kristin McCudden said in a statement.
“No matter where we’re talking about it, the message is the same: what’s happened in 70 cities in more than 30 states across the nation in one month is unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history and surpasses the Tracker’s entire three-year history of documentation.”
Minneapolis has had 71 reported incidents against reporters, followed by Washington DC with 33, New York with 27, and Los Angeles with 20, the Press Freedom Tracker reports.
By the Fourth of July weekend, demonstrations had been going for more than 40 days, from memorials and rallies for victims of police violence to groups of people attempting to dislodge monuments to Confederates and slaveholders, including prominent US figures and former presidents.
Reporters used social media to capture several of these incidents, while news networks were devoting significant live coverage to protests in the first weeks of demonstrations and finding themselves targets.
CNN correspondent Omar Jiminez spent an hour in custody after he was arrested live on television while covering the aftermath of protests in Minneapolis in May.
“Put us back where you want us, we are getting out of your way, just let us know,” he told police in riot gear as the camera captured his arrest.
That same day, a local television reporter in Louisville, Kentucky covering unrest after the police killing of Breonna Taylor captured an officer appear to take aim and fire a pepper ball directly into her camera.
Photojournalist Linda Tirado, who recently testified to a congressional committee about police violence at protests, had pulled her camera away from her face for a brief moment while shooting images in Minneapolis when she was hit by what she believes was a rubber bullet.
The impact permanently blinded her left eye.
On 1 July Andrew Buncombe, chief US correspondent with The Independent, was arrested in Seattle while covering the police clearance of the so-called CHOP protest zone. He was charged with failure to disperse despite repeatedly identifying himself as a journalist and held for at least eight hours before being released.
As journalists continue to report police violence against them in the field, which press advocates argue underlines the diminishing trust among law enforcement for the news media, Donald Trump‘s message to his supporters remains the same.
The president has broadly derided journalists as “fake news” at his own press conferences while encouraging supporters at his rallies to mock the ”enemy of the people” in the room. Amid his 2020 re-election campaign fury on Independence Day, he attacked reporters as part of a “far-left fascism” staging a mutiny against him.
His attacks against the press have been derided as a creeping threat of authoritarianism, as arrests of journalists under his administration have begun outpacing those under authoritarian regimes.
In its 2019 survey, the Committee to Protect Journalists discovered that at least 248 journalists worldwide were jailed in retaliation for their work that year. Its annual survey found 255 reporters were jailed in 2018.
The highest number of journalists imprisoned in any year since the organisation began its annual survey was 273 in 2016.
Last year, at least 48 journalists were jailed in China, followed by 26 in Saudi Arabia and 26 in Egypt, the organisation reported.
The US currently ranks 45th among 180 counties on the 2020 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
The scale of attacks on journalists in the US has alarmed international human rights groups, which called on city and state officials and law enforcement to immediately halt the arrests of reporters and to appoint independent commissions to investigate assaults.
Vice President Mike Pence. (photo: Getty Images)
Liz Theoharis | The Rise of Christian Nationalism in America, or How to Legislate Evil and Punish the Poor
Liz Theoharis, TomDispatch
Theoharis writes: "On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand."
It certainly tells you something about our political moment. Of the two women who were reported to be Donald Trump’s leading candidates to jam instantly into the Supreme Court seat of the barely dead Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the first, 48-year-old Appeals Court judge Amy Coney Barrett, is an extreme anti-abortion jurist. She also belongs to the People of Praise, a Catholic cult church that reportedly may have partially inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. How much more “supreme” could you get? The second, Cuban-American Appeals Court judge Barbara Lagoa, just concurred in a Florida court ruling that took the vote away from perhaps 100,000 or more former felons until they pay their often unknown court debts, “a Jim Crow–style gambit to keep returning citizens locked out of the voting booth forever” and perhaps lose Florida for Joe Biden. So Catholic charismatics versus the Latino vote (though Lagoa is reputedly also distinctly anti-abortion)? Tough decision. In the end, Trump chose Barrett.White evangelical Christians are almost literally part of what might now be considered Trump, Inc. (One of them is, of course, vice president and another the secretary of state.) In a July Pew poll, a staggering 82% of evangelicals, up from 2016, said they would vote for The Donald in the coming election. Though the president has indeed promoted himself as, in essence, a Christian nationalist (and an educational one, too), he is, of course, nothing of the sort. It couldn’t be clearer that, in reality, he’s a Trump nationalist, a Trump firster, a Trump evangelical, and nothing more.
With this instant Supreme Court nomination of his, we’re now all plunged into a world of Republican hypocrisy of a sort that once might have been unimaginable. After all, the same Mitch McConnell trying to rush the new nominee through at warp speed on the eve of election 2020 protested Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of the exceedingly moderate Merrick Garland in 2016, almost nine months before a presidential election, this way: "The American people are about to weigh in on who is going to be the president. And that's the person, whoever that may be, who ought to be making this appointment."
Now, just over five weeks before the next election, he and his Republican colleagues are hustling to do the very thing he rejected on supposed principle the last time around. Unlike TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign Reverend Liz Theoharis, I am, to say the least, no expert on the Bible. Still, I’d put my bottom dollar on the likelihood that it has something to say about the sort of mind-boggling hypocrisy that’s now playing out in Washington. It’s an ever uglier world out there and, as Theoharis makes clear today, some credit for that ugliness must be given to the rise not just of a presidentially backed version of white supremacy, but to the growth of a Christian nationalist movement in America. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Rise of Christian Nationalism in America
Or How to Legislate Evil and Punish the Poor
n August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, “Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire.” In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross.”
There’s nothing new, of course, about an American politician melding religion and politics on the campaign trail. Still, Pence’s decision to replace Jesus with the Stars and Stripes raised eyebrows across a range of religious and political persuasions. Indeed, the melding of Old Glory and Christ provided the latest evidence of the rising influence of Christian nationalism in the age of Trump.
It’s no longer hard to find evidence of just how deeply Christian nationalism influences our politics and policymaking. During the pandemic, the Bible has repeatedly been used (and distorted) to justify Covid-19 denialism and government inaction, not to speak of outright repression. In late March, as cities were locking down and public health officials were recommending strict quarantine measures, one of Donald Trump’s first acts was to gather his followers at the White House for what was billed as a “National Day of Prayer” to give Americans the strength to press on through death and difficulty.
Later in the spring, protests against pandemic shutdowns, funded with dark money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, demanded that states reopen for business and social distancing guidelines be loosened. (Forget about masking of any sort.) At them, printed protest signs said things like: “Even Pharaoh Freed Slaves in a Plague” and “Texas will not take the Mark of the Beast.” And even as faith communities struggled admirably to adjust to zoom worship services, as well as remote pastoral care and memorials, President Trump continued to fan the flames of religious division, declaring in-person worship “essential,” no matter that legal experts questioned his authority to do so.
And speaking of his version of Christian nationalism, no one should forget the June spectacle in Lafayette Square near the White House, when Trump had racial-justice protestors tear-gassed so he could stroll to nearby St. John’s Church and pose proudly on its steps displaying a borrowed bible. Though he flashed it to the photographers, who can doubt how little time he’s spent within its pages. (Selling those same pages is another matter entirely. After all, a Bible he signed in the wake of that Lafayette Square event is now on sale for nearly $40,000.)
The Battle for the Bible in American History
To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation’s highest political officials, they’ve had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society.
Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with a simple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society’s problems even as the rich get richer in what’s still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
The dangers posed by today’s Christian nationalists are all too real, but the battle for the Bible itself is not new in America. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They also ripped the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached a "prosperity gospel" that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism.
Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubberstamp Jim Crow practices, while in the late 1970s the Moral Majority helped to mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists into national politics. In my own youth, I remember politicians quoting Thessalonians in the lead up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as proof that God believes in work-requirements for public assistance programs.
Students of religion and history know that, although such theological battles have often tipped disastrously toward the forces of violence, deprivation, and hate, Christian religious thinking has also been a key ingredient in positive social change in this country. Escaped slave Harriet “Moses” Tubman understood the Underground Railroad as a Christian project of liberation, while escaped slave Frederick Douglass fought for abolition through churches across the north in the pre-Civil War years. A century later, near the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained how, to achieve his universal dream of justice, a beloved community of God would be built through a “freedom church of the poor.”
After all, in every chapter of American history, abolitionists, workers, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the oppressed have struggled for a better nation not just in streets and workplaces, but in the pulpit, too. In the wreckage of the present Trumpian moment, with a fascistic, white nationalism increasingly ascendant, people of conscience would do well to follow suit.
The “Psychological Bird” of Bad Religion
In my book Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, I focus on a reality that has long preoccupied me: how, in this country, the Bible has so often been manipulated to obscure its potentially emancipatory power; in particular, the way in which what theologian Jim Wallis has called the most famous biblical passage on the poor (from the Gospel of Matthew) -- “the poor will be always with us” -- has been misused.
Since I was a young girl, scarcely a week has passed in which I haven’t heard someone quoting Matthew as an explanation for why poverty is eternal and its mitigation reserved at best for charity or philanthropy (but certainly not for government). The logic of such thinking runs through so many of our religious institutions including what’s now known as “evangelical Christianity,” but also our legislatures, courts, military, schools, and more. It hasn’t just shaped the minds of young Christians but has helped to spiritualize (and cement in place) poverty, while implicitly or even explicitly justifying ever greater inequality in this society.
Today, the idea that poverty is the result of bad behavior, laziness, or sin rather than decisions made by those with power is distinctly ascendant in Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s Washington. Biblical passages like that one in Matthew have become another ideological tool brandished by reactionaries and the wealthy to deflect attention from this country’s systemic failures.
Consider, for example, the historic development of what’s often known as the “Bible Belt” (or alternatively the “Poverty Belt”). It sweeps across the South, from North Carolina to Mississippi, Tennessee to Alabama, home to poor people of every race. It represents the deepest, most contiguous area of poverty in the United States made possible in part by heretical theology, biblical misinterpretation, and Christian nationalism.
The convergence of poverty and religion in the Bible Belt has a long history, stretching back to the earliest settler-colonists in the slave era. It echoed through the system of Jim Crow that had the region in its grip until the Civil Rights years and the modern political concept of “the solid South” (once Democratic, now Republican). Within its bounds lies a brutal legacy of divide and conquer that, to this day, politicizes the Bible by claiming that poverty results from sins against God and teaches poor white people in particular that, although they may themselves have little or nothing, they are at least "better" than people of color.
At the end of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, Martin Luther King explained the age-old politics of division in the region this way:
“If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow... And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man... And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”
That “psychological bird” was seasoned and cooked in a volatile mix of racist pseudo-science, economic orthodoxy, and bad religion. In fact, it retained its enormous power in large part by using the Bible and a version of Christianity to validate plunder and human suffering on a staggering scale. De jure Jim Crow may no longer exist, but its history haunts America to this day, and the Bible continues to be weaponized to validate anti-poor, white racist political power.
As jobs and opportunity continue to vanish in twenty-first-century America and churches stand among the last truly functional institutions in many communities, the Bible, however interpreted, still influences daily life for millions. How it’s understood and preached affects the political and moral direction of the country. Consider that those Bible Belt states -- where Christian nationalism (which regularly displays its own upside-down version of the Bible) now reigns supreme -- account for more than 193 electoral college votes and so will play a key role in determining the fate of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in November.
I had my own experience with that version of biblical and theological interpretation and its growing role in our national politics in June 2019 during a hearing of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. Its subject was poverty in America and the economic realities of struggling families. A racially and geographically diverse group of leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign (of which I’m the co-chair) were invited to testify on those realities. Alongside us that day were two Black pastors invited by Republican congressmen to stand as examples of how faith and hard work is the only recipe for a good and stable life for the impoverished.
We had come to present what we’ve called the Poor People’s Moral Budget, a study showing that the United States does have the money to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, and more, just not the political will to do so. In response, members of the committee turned to the same tired stereotypes about why so many of us in such a wealthy country are poor. Some cited the supposed failure of the 1960s War on Poverty as evidence that programs of social uplift just don’t work, while ignoring the dramatic way politicians had undercut those initiatives in the years that followed. Like those pastors, others replied with tales of their own success rising out of economic hardship via bootstrap individualism and they plugged Christian charity as the way to alleviate poverty. I listened to them all as they essentially promoted a heretical theology that claimed people suffer from poverty largely because they’re estranged from God and lack a deep enough faith in Jesus.
That day, the walls of that House committee room rang with empty words twisting what the Bible actually says about the poor. One Republican representative typically remarked that, although he was familiar with the Bible, he had never found anyplace in it “where Jesus tells Caesar to care for the poor.” Another all-too-typically suggested that Christian charity, not government-sponsored programs, is the key to alleviating poverty.
Someone less familiar with the arguments of such politicians might have been surprised to hear so many of them seeking theological cover. As a biblical scholar and a student of the history of social movements, I know well how religious texts actually instruct us to care for the poor and dispossessed. As a long-time organizer, I’ve learned that those in power now regularly, even desperately, seek to abuse and distort the liberating potential of our religious traditions.
Indeed, in response to that representative, Reverand William Barber, my Poor People’s Campaign co-chair, and I pointed out how interesting it was that he identified himself with Caesar (not necessarily the most flattering comparison imaginable, especially as biblical Christianity polemicizes against Caesar and the Roman empire). Then I detailed for him many of the passages and commandments in the Bible that urge us to organize society around the needs of the poor, forgive debts, pay workers a living wage, rather than favoring either the rich or “Caesar.” That, of course, is indeed the formula of the Trump era (where, in the last six pandemic months, the 643 wealthiest Americans raked in an extra $845 billion, raising their combined wealth by 29%). I also pointed out that the most effective poverty-reduction programs like Head Start are federally funded, neither philanthropic nor a matter of Christian charity.
Good News from the Poor
In the Poor People’s Campaign, we often start our organizing meetings by showing a series of color-coded maps of the country. The first has the states that have passed voter suppression laws since 2013; the next, those with the highest poverty rates; then, those that have not expanded Medicaid but have passed anti-LGBTQ laws. And so it goes. Our final map displays the states densest with self-identified evangelical Protestants.
I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that those maps overlap almost perfectly, chiefly in the Bible Belt, but also in the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic states, and even in parts of the Northeast and West. The point is to show how inextricably connected the battle for voting rights, healthcare, and other critical resources is to the battle for the Bible. The stakes are measured in the health of the entire nation, because the same politicians who manipulate the Bible and the right to vote to win elections then pass immoral budgets and policies.
When Vice President Pence altered that line from the Book of Hebrews, he was charging headfirst onto that very blood-soaked battlefield with a desecrated Bible in hand. The question is: why should he and other Christian nationalists have the power to define Christianity? If they are so intent on “fixing their eyes on Old Glory,” shouldn’t they also fix their eyes on what Jesus actually said?
The Greek word evangelia, out of which “evangelical” comes, means bringing good news to those made poor by systems of exploitation. The Bible’s good news, also defined as gospel, talks again and again about captives being freed, slaves released, and all who are oppressed being taken care of. It’s said that were you to cut out every one of its pages that mentions poverty, the Bible would fall apart. And when you actually read the words on those pages, you see that the gospel doesn’t talk about the inevitability of poverty or the need for charity, but the responsibilities of the ruling authorities to all people and the possibility of abundance for all.
At a time when 43.5% of Americans are poor or one fire, storm, health-care crisis, pandemic, eviction, or job loss from poverty, it couldn’t be more important for Americans to begin to reckon with this reality and our moral obligation to end it. Instead, politicians pass voter suppression laws, kick kids off food programs, and allow the poisoning of our water, air, and land, while Christian nationalist religious leaders bless such policies and cherry-pick biblical verses to justify them as all-American. Consider such a reality not simply a matter of a religious but a political, economic, and moral crisis that, in the midst of a pandemic, is pushing this country ever closer to the brink of spiritual death.
If America is still worth saving, this is no longer a battle anyone should sit out.
Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty)
Turkey 'Indicts Six More Saudis' Over Jamal Khashoggi Murder
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Turkish prosecutors have filed a second indictment against six Saudi suspects over the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, according to Turkey's state news agency."
Istanbul prosecutors seek life imprisonment for two suspects and up to five years in jail for four others, report says.
Anadolu news agency said on Monday that two of the suspects were facing charges carrying aggravated life jail sentences. The charges against the other four carry sentences of up to five years in jail.
According to the indictment, the two were consulate staff members and were part of the team that left Turkey after carrying out the murder of the Saudi journalist, Anadolu reported. The other four suspects are reportedly accused of tampering with evidence by going to the crime scene immediately after the murder. They are also not in Turkey.
Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor and critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), was last seen at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, where he had gone to obtain documents for his impending wedding to Turkish fiancee Hatice Cengiz.
The 59-year-old’s body was reportedly dismembered and removed from the building and his remains have not been found.
In a separate case launched in July, an Istanbul court began to try in absentia 20 other Saudis over the murder, including two former aides to MBS.
Turkish prosecutors claim Saudi deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri and the royal court’s media adviser Saud al-Qahtani led the operation and gave orders to the Saudi hit team.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the order to murder Khashoggi came from “the highest levels” of the Saudi government but has never directly blamed MBS. The crown prince has denied ordering the killing but said he ultimately bears “full responsibility” as the kingdom’s de facto leader.
In September, a Saudi court overturned death sentences handed down to five defendants after a closed-door trial in Saudi Arabia last year, sentencing them to 20 years in prison instead.
“The Saudi prosecutor performed one more act today in this parody of justice,” Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said at the time. “But these verdicts carry no legal or moral legitimacy.”
Gavin Newsom. (photo: grandriver/Grist/Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Why Hasn't California Banned Fracking Yet?
Joseph Winters, Grist
Winters writes: "Alongside California Governor Gavin Newsom's headline-making announcement last week that he would ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, he also said he supported a ban on new fracking permits by 2024."
longside California Governor Gavin Newsom’s headline-making announcement last week that he would ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, he also said he supported a ban on new fracking permits by 2024.
The announcement came in the middle of one of California’s most devastating fire seasons on record — thousands of blazes have consumed more than 3.6 million acres of land and claimed at least 26 lives. Earlier this month, Newsom declared them a “climate damn emergency,” pointing to the climate crisis’ tendency to make extreme events like wildfires more likely and more dangerous. In response, he has promised Californians his cabinet would “step up our game” and “fast track our efforts” on climate.
His executive order on gas-powered car sales was an attempt to make good on that promise, and it drew praise from environmental advocates. The fracking statement, however, prompted criticism. Many green groups said that 2024 is too late and that the governor should use his executive powers to implement the ban himself. Newsom claims not to have that power — on Wednesday, he instead urged lawmakers to consider banning fracking during their next legislative session, in 2021.
“He punted on fracking,” Colin O’Brien, a deputy managing attorney for the nonprofit Earthjustice, told Grist. O’Brien contrasted Newsom’s inaction with more aggressive measures that have been taken in other states. “The state of New York banned fracking by executive order five years ago, and to my knowledge there’s nothing unique about California law that would prevent [Newsom] from doing the same today.” In the past five years, Washington state and Maryland have also implemented fracking bans via legislation, and New York’s state legislature also codified its fracking ban into law earlier this year.
Activists said Newsom’s statement is a distraction from his track record on regulating the state’s oil and gas industry. When Newsom ran for office in 2018, he promised an aggressive environmental agenda, including opposition to fracking “and other unsafe oil operations.”
“I’ll fight efforts by the oil and gas industry to escape the reach of state and federal regulators,” he wrote in a December 2017 Medium post.
But in the first half of 2020, the Newsom administration issued 190 percent more oil and gas drilling permits than it had during the governor’s first six months in office. And from April to July of this year — as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking off — the state’s Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) approved nearly 50 new permits for fracking projects.
Those permits started being issued immediately after the end of a nine-month moratorium on new fracking permits, which Newsom had implemented in July 2019 to allow time for the projects to be reviewed by a panel of independent scientists. Not all the permits have resulted in oil and gas exploration, and they expire after one year, but they have still raised concerns from environmental groups.
One of groups has called the spate of permit approvals illegal, citing insufficient environmental review and the serious threats that oil and gas exploration pose to California’s public health. On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute threatened to sue the state unless the governor takes action to stop the permits. Alongside the danger of spills and explosions, the health hazards of fracking include air pollution from methane and ozone, water contamination from heavy metals, and the longer-term effects of climate change, with these impacts often hitting low-income and nonwhite communities the hardest.
“You can’t claim climate leadership while handing out permits to oil companies to drill and frack,” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the group, in a statement. According to one analysis, California is on pace to approve more than 3,100 new permits in 2020, a greater number than any year since 2015. A spokesperson for CalGEM told the L.A. Times that by issuing the permits, it is merely following the law, and that California standards for health and safety “exceed those of any other state in the country.”
Newsom has also drawn flak from environmental advocates for not using his executive powers to implement statewide guidelines for the use of “setbacks,” buffer zones that protect communities from nearby oil and gas wells. A state scientific panel recommended setback standards all the way back in 2015, and several other states have already implemented their own requirements.
“This is an immediate step he could take to provide relief to frontline community members,” said O’Brien. “California is really lagging behind.”
In response to criticism last week, Newsom defended his decision not to go further on a fracking ban. The 2024 phaseout deadline is a “bold and big step,” he told the Associated Press, adding that fracking in California only accounts for 2 percent of the state’s petroleum production. Although a ban would hold symbolic power, he said, “We simply don’t have that authority. That’s why we need the legislature to approve it.”
Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips empathized with Newsom. Although his comments on fracking alone are insufficient, she told the Associated Press, “What he’s committed to is more than what any previous governor has committed to. This governor is now saying he’s going to work with the Legislature to get the power to ban fracking. That’s a good thing.”
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