18 July 22
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He has weaponised food, energy and refugees, spreading economic and political pain across the continent. Sanctions don’t work, a land for peace deal would be a disaster. Only the military route remains
The idea the Ukraine conflict could be confined to Ukraine – Nato’s politically convenient grand delusion – and that western sanctions and arms supplies would stop the Russians was always a nonsense. Now, enraged by Kyiv’s stubborn resistance and hell-bent on punishing his punishers, Putin’s aim is the immiseration of Europe.
By weaponising energy, food, refugees and information, Russia’s leader spreads the economic and political pain, creating wartime conditions for all. A long, cold, calamity-filled European winter of power shortages and turmoil looms. And like a coin-fed gas meter, the price of western leaders’ timidity and shortsightedness ticks upwards by the hour.
Russia’s destabilisation operations, social media manipulation, cyber-attacks, diplomatic double-talk, nuclear blackmail, plus its unrelenting slaughter of civilians in Ukraine, will only intensify Europe’s state of siege in the months ahead. The west’s fanciful belief it could avoid continent-wide escalation is evaporating fast.
Though not entirely due to Putin’s war, Europe now faces fundamental challenges as big or bigger than the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, or the pandemic. Yet many EU and UK politicians skulk in denial. If, as predicted, the gas stops flowing and the lights dim, it will not just be a matter of closed factories, lost jobs, and depressed markets.
Freezing pensioners, hungry children, empty supermarket shelves, unaffordable cost of living increases, devalued wages, strikes and street protests point to Sri Lanka-style meltdowns. An exaggeration? Not really. Blowback, fanned by the Putin-admiring far right, is already gathering strength in Greece and Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
In prospect, too, is a shattering of EU solidarity as national governments compete for scarce resources. Brussels is due to publish a “winter preparedness plan” this week. But its provisions are unclear and unenforceable. The broader context is lack of an agreed, implemented EU-wide energy policy.
Despite bilateral cooperation pledges, a total Russian cut-off could pit country against country, further inflate prices, and split the anti-Moscow coalition. In such a scenario Putin would demand sanctions relief in return for resumed supplies, just as he has over blockaded Black Sea grain.
Import-dependent Germany is already taking unilateral steps, seeking alternative oil and gas suppliers. A national emergency moved closer after Moscow turned off the Nord Stream I pipeline last Monday. Many in Berlin fear (and some environmentalists hope) the shutdown – and any subsequent rationing – may become permanent.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice-chancellor, fretted publicly about a “political nightmare”. Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, sounded similarly panicky last week. He predicted an imminent gas cut-off. Waxing Napoleonic, he urged European countries to form up in “order of battle”. But as in 1812, Russia has “General Winter”.
As if the mounting misery of millions were not daunting enough, then consider, too, the war’s knock-on impact on efforts to combat the climate and biodiversity crises. In the UK and elsewhere, net zero targets appear at increasing risk of being abandoned.
Because Europe faces “very, very strong conflict and strife” this winter over energy prices, it should make a short-term return to fossil fuels, Frans Timmermans, the European commission’s vice-president, suggested. Once again, Germany is showing a lead, increasing electricity production from coal-fired power stations. Once again, the west looks to tyrannical Gulf oil sheikhs for salvation.
A European winter of chaos may also strain US ties. By comparison, America’s post-pandemic recovery is more advanced, its economy more resilient, its energy costs much lower. Yet it is US president Joe Biden’s too-cautious leadership of Nato that has led Europe into this geopolitical cul-de-sac, even as a weakening euro slides below one dollar.
For Europeans, as they are re-learning to their cost, all wars are local. For Americans, as ever, all wars are foreign.
The sanctions, economic aid, and other non-military measures preferred by Biden were never going to be enough to bring Putin to heel. Some observers suspect a stalemate that slowly bleeds Russia suits US purposes, whatever the collateral damage. Yet right now, it’s Putin who is bleeding Europe. Sanctions are backfiring or poorly enforced. His energy coffers bulge. And Ukrainians aside, the pain is disproportionately felt by less wealthy European and developing countries. As instability grows, US-Europe divergence will feed pressure to change course.
The obvious escape route is a land-for-peace deal with Putin, agreed over Ukraine’s dead bodies. This kind of shoddy sellout has influential advocates. If (and it’s a big “if”), Russia returned to business as normal, it would alleviate Europe’s suffering – though probably not Ukraine’s.
Yet such a deal would also be a precedent-setting disaster for future peace and security across the continent and globally, too. Just think Taiwan. Or Estonia. It would destroy the sovereign integrity of democratic Ukraine.
Fortunately, there is an alternative: using Nato’s overwhelming power to decisively turn the military tide.
As previously argued here, direct, targeted, forceful western action to repulse Russia’s repulsive horde is not a vote for a third world war. It’s the only feasible way to bring this escalating horror to a swift conclusion while ensuring Putin, and those who might emulate him, do not profit from lawless butchery.
Intent on inflicting maximum disruption, Putin openly menaces the heartlands of European democracy. The writing is on the wall and may no longer be ignored. Enough of the half-measures and the dithering! Nato should act now to force Putin’s marauding troops back inside Russia’s recognised borders.
It’s not only Ukraine that requires saving. It’s Europe, too.
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Josh Reynolds/AP)
“Manchin [is] intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want,” the Vermont senator said
Manchin this week announced his refusal to support two major provisions in President Biden’s economic package: tax increases on the rich and spending on initiatives to stave off climate change. It likely marked the nail in the coffin for Biden’s and Democrats’ vision of a transformative economic package — a vision that the party has continually revised and pared back in a failed bid to win Manchin’s support.
Sanders was so mad, he opted not wait for journalist Martha Raddatz to finish her question, balking at the framing.
“Sen. Joe Manchin, of course, abruptly pulled the plug this week on the Democrats’ plans to pass,” Raddatz began.
“No, Martha. Let me respectfully disagree. He didn’t abruptly do anything,” Sanders interjected during a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week. “He has sabotaged the president’s agenda. … Six months ago, I made it clear that you have people like Manchin — [and] Sinema, to a lesser degree — who are intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want. Nothing new about this.”
Sanders added, “The problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious; he was not. This is a guy who’s a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires.”
“You say he wasn’t serious,” Raddatz said in response. “Manchin says his main goal is to do what’s good for West Virginia, and he’s worried about inflation.”
“Really? Really?” the Vermont senator replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Is that right?”
Responding to a Manchin quote about inflation and how it affects his West Virginia constituents, Sanders argued that it’s “the same nonsense Manchin has been talking about for a year” and pointed out that Manchin’s state is one of the poorest in the nation. “You ask the people of West Virginia whether they want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and eyeglasses. You ask the people of West Virginia whether we should demand that the wealthiest people and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. Ask the people of West Virginia whether or not all people should have health care as a human right like in every other country on Earth. That’s what they will say.”
He concluded, “In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”
This is far from the first time Manchin has torpedoed Biden’s legislative hopes. He opposed an earlier version of Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which included proposals to lower health care costs and expand access, fix immigration, assist families with child care costs, and attempt to address climate change. Manchin’s reluctance to act on climate — despite his recent public claims to the contrary — is fueled by his deeply vested interest in oil and coal. Manchin has fought for years to keep open his state’s dirtiest coal plant while reaping the profits at great expense to his constituents, Jeff Goodell reported for Rolling Stone. “Joe Manchin will absolutely throw humanity under the coal train without blinking an eye,” Maria Gunnoe, director of the Mother Jones Community Foundation and a longtime West Virginia activist, told Goodell. “My friends and I have a joke about his kind: They’d mine their momma’s grave for a buck.”
Steve Bannon goes on trial starting Monday in a Washington, DC, federal court. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Bannon was indicted in November on two counts of contempt of Congress after he failed to appear for a deposition before the committee or provide requested documents in response to a subpoena. He has pleaded not guilty.
If convicted, Bannon faces a minimum sentence of 30 days and a maximum of one year in prison for each count.
The trial is going ahead despite Bannon's two last-minute attempts to delay it, both of which were rejected by Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee.
It will take place in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., just down the street from the Capitol building, which was stormed by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the shadow of a series of public hearings laying out what the committee has learned so far. The last of those hearings, focused on what Trump did during the attack, is scheduled for Thursday.
The committee subpoenaed Bannon in September 2021 for testimony and documents. It believes Bannon, 68, can share useful information about the planning for Jan. 6, 2021, including what top Trump allies discussed at a meeting he attended at the Willard InterContinental hotel in downtown Washington the evening before.
But Bannon refused to cooperate with the committee. He did not appear on Oct. 14 for testimony or hand over documents by Oct. 18 in response to the panel's subpoena, arguing that he was covered by an assertion of executive privilege by Trump, even though he was not in the administration at the time of the meeting.
The House voted to hold him in contempt and referred him to the Justice Department for prosecution. Bannon was the first of four Trump advisers to be held in contempt by the House and referred for prosecution, although only one other of the four, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, has been indicted.
The department declined to prosecute the other two, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House aide Dan Scavino. Experts say pursuing a case against them would have been more difficult because of how closely they worked with Trump and because they both cooperated, to a degree, with the Jan. 6 committee.
Bannon's attorneys argued last week that the trial should be postponed because the Jan. 6 committee's public hearings and the media attention around them could taint the jury pool. Nichols, the District Court judge, said that this concern can be addressed in jury selection.
Bannon also offered, a little over a week before the trial was set to open, to testify before the committee. He did not, however, offer to provide the requested documents.
Prosecutors opposed the motion, saying it was irrelevant and had no bearing on his refusal to comply with the subpoena at the time. They also sought to exclude a letter from Trump that claimed he was waiving executive privilege and a second letter from Bannon's attorney to the committee that contained Bannon's offer to testify.
Nichols left the door open to those letters potentially being used as evidence at trial to argue that Bannon didn't think the subpoena's deadlines were hard and fast.
But Nichols did rule out several other defenses Bannon could have put forward at trial, including arguing that he thought he was covered by executive privilege or that the Jan. 6 committee violated House rules because its members are largely Democrats.
The trial opens Monday with jury selection and is expected to last around a week.
'Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled Roe, many clinicians around the country will be risking their careers and freedom if they provide abortion care.' (image: NYT)
Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled Roe, many clinicians around the country will be risking their careers and freedom if they provide abortion care. Seventeen states have enacted near-total bans on abortion, or they’re trying to. Many of these bans allow almost no exceptions, including for rape or a woman’s health. Now providers who illegally terminate a pregnancy face punishments that range from a suspension on practicing medicine to a $100,000 fine to a life sentence in prison.
Michigan’s chief medical executive, Natasha Bagdasarian, has written that these laws force doctors to choose between breaking the law and “breaking the oath we have taken on behalf of our patients.” A Missouri obstetrician-gynecologist, David Eisenberg, said on “The Daily” podcast before Roe fell that his professional commitment to make abortion care available to patients in need is “a part of my moral and religious worldview.” He added, “I am a conscientious provider.”
Though Dr. Eisenberg did not say he would break any laws, some doctors who identify as conscientious providers in post-Roe America may seek to provide abortions in violation of state laws, just as many did before Roe. A federal statute ought to protect clinician conscience in principled ways — not only for those who deny care, but also for those who deliver it.
And if lawmakers won’t protect conscientious providers, then judges should. Courts can recognize a legal defense of medical disobedience that would significantly reduce the punitive sanctions that some states impose for supplying clinically reasonable services in the name of conscience. This partial defense should also waive possible collateral consequences of a felony conviction, such as license revocation and disenfranchisement. That mitigation would go a long way to repair the one-sided exemptions already entrenched across the United States.
The American legal regime that governs medical conscience is broken. While conscientious providers find virtually no refuge in the conscience clauses that are codified in almost every state, refusers are protected almost categorically. And just about all of these conscience laws are reserved for denials of care. Conscientious refusers are often shielded from being fired, disciplined, held liable or found guilty for violating standards of care and endangering patients, even in serious ways. Conscientious refusers usually don’t have to tell patients about their options, or help them to access care elsewhere. But few protections exist for doctors who have equally conscientious reasons to provide abortions.
To be sure, there are crucial differences among the various services that conscientious providers might seek to supply. Some are safer or more effective than others. Some require costly facilities and staff, while others involve nothing more than a prescription pad. Some fall squarely within the medical norm, while others push its boundaries, or cross them.
These particulars matter. But the moral commitment to treat patients can be just as sincere and noble as the values that move other doctors to turn patients away. Even more important: Conscientious providers honor patients’ wishes, while conscientious refusers override them.
Yet all too often, only the consciences of refusers count in the eyes of the law. This asymmetry drives desperate patients underground and selectively burdens conscientious providers. It’s true that accommodating conscientious providers would undermine the government’s considered judgment that people shouldn’t have access to the health care the government has prohibited. But on particularly fraught questions — about life and death, impairment and identity — freedom of conscience in medicine can sometimes be important enough to shore up deserving appeals. This can be true even at the expense of other state interests, so long as accommodations are constrained by whatever harms they inflict on other people.
One reason to protect conscience in medicine is to preserve the moral integrity of clinicians who claim it. This applies to conscientious providers, too. Forcing doctors and nurses to stand by and do nothing to help patients in need flies in the face of clinicians’ fundamental charge to heal, promote health and relieve suffering. Also, openness to conscientious dissent, within limits, lets a pluralistic society adapt to moral change from the inside.
Congress or the courts should recognize a partial defense of medical disobedience. This defense shouldn’t be available to every clinician who invokes conscience to provide prohibited care. In the related context of religion, the Supreme Court has adopted a know-it-when-I-see-it test for whether someone’s putative beliefs qualify as genuine and morally weighty. That test would exclude “an asserted claim so bizarre,” odious or self-interested “as not to be entitled to protection.”
And doctors would have to show more than that they acted out of deeply held convictions. The care that they conscientiously provide must also be medically indicated and come with the informed consent of a patient or an appropriate surrogate. So a mercy killing of someone who had been pressured to exercise the option wouldn’t qualify. Nor would any intervention whose benefits haven’t been proven worth the risks through peer-reviewed studies or clinical practice. The requirement that care be clinically reasonable would rule out conscience claims to undertake the discredited conversion therapy that at least 20 states prohibit to try to turn gay kids straight. Other cases are closer calls. Bans on puberty blockers are passed or pending in some states to affirm a minor’s gender identity, though the evidence is still out about long-term risks to fertility and bone density.
America’s culture wars leave many people convinced that conscience has come to represent little more than a card that defeated camps play when they have nothing else to lose. But it can be more than that. States vigorously safeguard the consciences of refusers. Congress and the courts ought to protect the consciences of providers, too. It has been over a century since judges flexed their common-law authority to introduce any major category of mitigation. Dobbs gives reason to recover that muscle memory and recognize a limited defense of medical disobedience.
A memorial is pictured near a train car symbolizing the Drancy camp, at the Shoah memorial Tuesday, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris. The Paris mayor and head of the French Holocaust Memorial will mark the 80th anniversary of the round-up of the Vel d'Hiv, the biggest Nazi roundup of Jews in France, visiting the site used as an internment camp during World War II for tens of thousands of people who were then sent on to Auschwitz and other death camps. (photo: Thomas Padilla/AP)
18 july 22
Family by family, house by house, French police rounded up 13,000 people on two terrifying days in July 1942, wresting children from their mothers' arms and dispatching everyone to Nazi death camps. France honored those victims this weekend, as it tries to keep their memory alive.
For the dwindling number of survivors of France's wartime crimes, a series of commemoration ceremonies Sunday were especially important. At a time of rising antisemitism and far-right discourse sugarcoating France’s role in the Holocaust, they worry that history's lessons are being forgotten.
A week of ceremonies marking 80 years since the Vel d’Hiv police roundup on July 16-17, 1942 culminated Sunday with an event led by Macron, who pledged that wouldn't happen ever again.
“We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference," Macron said. "And we will fight, I promise you, at every dawn, because France's story is written by a combat of resistance and justice that will never be extinguished."
He denounced former French leaders for their roles in the Holocaust and the Vel d'Hiv raids, among the most shameful acts undertaken by France during World War II.
Over those two days, police herded 13,152 people — including 4,115 children — into the Winter Velodrome of Paris, known as the Vel d’Hiv, before they were sent on to Nazi camps. It was the biggest such roundup in Western Europe. The children were separated from their families; very few survived.
In public testimonies over the past week, survivor Rachel Jedinak described a middle-of-the-night knock on the door, and being marched through the streets of Paris and herded into the velodrome in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
She recalled her desperate mother shouting at police. Some French neighbors informed on Jews, others wept as they watched them being corralled like livestock.
Chantal Blaszka’s aunts and uncle were among the children rounded up: 6-year-old Simon, 9-year-old Berthe, 15-year-old Suzanne. Their names are now engraved on a monument at a garden where the velodrome once stood, along with some 4,000 other children targeted in the raids. Photos of the children hang from tree trunks, the result of years of painstaking research to identify and honor the long-anonymous victims.
Of the children deported from the Vel d'Hiv 80 years ago, only six survived.
“Can you imagine?” Blaszka asked, pointing at the names and shaking her head. “Can you imagine?”
Serge Klarsfeld, a renowned Nazi hunter whose father was deported to Auschwitz, spoke Saturday in the garden, calling it an “earth-shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families." Klarsfeld, 86, stressed the urgency of passing on memories as more of the war's witnesses pass on.
On Sunday, Macron visited a site in Pithiviers south of Paris where police sent families after the Vel d’Hiv roundup, before sending them onto the Nazi camps. A new memorial site honoring the deportees was inaugurated, including a plaque that reads: “Let us never forget.”
The president urged vigilance: “We are not finished with antisemitism, and we must lucidly face that fact.”
“It is showing itself on the walls of our cities” when they are vandalized with swastikas, he continued. “It is infiltrating social networks ... it inserts itself into debates on some TV shows. It shows itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism.”
Another ceremony was held at the Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy, home to a transit center that was central to French Jews' deadly journey to Nazi camps. Most of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborationist Vichy government passed through the Drancy camp.
The Drancy Shoah memorial actively documents the Holocaust, especially for younger generations. This work is especially important at a time when Jewish communities are increasingly worried about rising antisemitism in Europe. France’s Interior Ministry has reported a rise in antisemitic acts in France over recent years, and said that while racist and anti-religious acts overall are increasing, Jews are disproportionately targeted.
Anxiety has worsened for some since the far-right National Rally party made a surprising electoral breakthrough last month, winning a record 89 seats in France’s National Assembly. Party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted of racism and downplaying the Holocaust. His daughter Marine, who now leads the party, has distanced herself from her father’s positions, but the party’s past still raises concerns for many Jews.
During the campaign for this year’s French presidential election, far-right candidate and pundit Eric Zemmour propagated the false claim that Adolf Hitler’s Vichy collaborators safeguarded France’s Jews.
It took France’s leadership 50 years after World War II to officially acknowledge the state’s involvement in the Holocaust, when then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the French authorities’ role in the Vel d’Hiv raids.
“The policy, from 1942 onward, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews of France,” said Jacques Fredj, director of the Paris Shoah Memorial. “Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis ... but the management was French."
Macro spelled it out clearly Sunday: “Let us repeat here with force, whether self-styled revisionist commentators like it or not.”
None of France’s Vichy wartime leaders, he said, “wanted to save Jews.”
Kurt Waldheim concealed his past cooperation with the NAZIS and was Secretary General of the UN.
A painful account was written, BETRAYAL.
Although I have a first edition, the records of the atrocities are so painful, only a few pages were read.
The NAZIS kept records of those they exterminated.
Witnessing the current rise of HATE and Bigotry in the US should alarm us all.
This is how it starts.
In the US, much has to do with income inequality and poor education.
Kurt Waldheim, 88; former U.N. chief who hid his Nazi past
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jun-15-fg-waldheim15-story.html
Kurt Waldheim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim
Waldheim launched a discreet but effective campaign to become the secretary-general. Despite initial vetoes from China and the United Kingdom, in the third round, Waldheim was selected to become the new secretary-general. In 1976, China initially blocked Waldheim's re-election, but it relented on the second ballot. In 1981, Waldheim's re-election for a third term was blocked by China, which vetoed his selection through 15 rounds; although the official reasons by the Chinese government for the veto of Waldheim remain unclear, some estimates from the time believe it to be in part due to China's belief that a Third World country should give a nomination, particularly from the Americas;[19] however, there also remained the question of his possible involvement in Nazi war crimes.[20] From 1986 to 1992, Waldheim served as President of Austria, making him the first former secretary-general to rise to the position of head of state. In 1985, it was revealed that a post-World War II UN War Crimes Commission had labeled Waldheim as a suspected war criminal—based on his involvement with the army of Nazi Germany. The files had been stored in the UN archive.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations
President Donald Trump's hastily announced Rose Garden address took on an ominous tone. (photo: Luca Bruno/AP)
I doubt you’ll be shocked to discover that, in the years of the (first?) Trump era and the now distinctly crippled Biden one, the trust of Americans in our basic institutions and our government has taken a nosedive. According to Gallup’s latest polling, confidence in the presidency has dropped by 15 percentage points and the Supreme Court by 11. When it comes to Congress, Americans with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in that body have bottomed out at a barely perceptible 7%. It’s hard to get much lower than that (although these days our politicians are putting significant effort into outdoing themselves). We’re already talking about new lows for all three branches of government and, when it comes to that, it hardly matters whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent.
As this century began, only 5% of Americans claimed that our most important problem was government. In the Trump years, however, that figure rose to 32% and it’s stayed high ever since. Similarly, according to the Pew Research Center, “public trust” in government has fallen to “near historic lows.” And when you think about it, no wonder!
As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out, it seems as if top government officials never pay for the disasters they bring on the world (the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance) or on Americans. The institutionalists of the American system, not to speak of the Trumpist outsiders who became insiders, have had a remarkably free ride during four presidencies, no matter what they did — and now, it seems, an ever more reactionary Supreme Court has joined the fray in an increasingly autocratic fashion. Greenberg asks one crucial question: Is there any hope that the January 6th hearings might help restore some confidence that those who do us dirty in the name of America could actually pay a price for that — a price in court no less?
Honestly, I wouldn’t hold my breath, but we can always hope, can’t we? Isn’t it time that our top officials, including presidents, were held responsible for their criminal acts in our name, whether they were illegal invasions of other countries or sedition here at home? Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Can the System Be Saved?
Institutionalism vs. Democracy
Now, those hearings are offering the country (and the Justice Department) what could be a last chance to begin restoring the kind of governance that once underlay a functioning democracy. There is, however, a deeply worrisome trend lurking just under this moment’s attempt to garner accountability — namely, the way loyalty to institutional Washington (even outside the law) perpetuates a flight from accountability that’s become a crucial part of American political life.
So far, the January 6th hearings have inspired a cascade of takeaways. With each televised session, new evidence about the acts of Donald Trump and crew have come to light, among them that the former president was all too tight with the far right and that he knew the crowd approaching the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was armed and dangerous. So, too, those watching have learned about witness tampering and also the lengths White House lawyers and others went to in trying to restrain the former president’s engagement with the January 6th rioters. Overall, many Americans (though not so many Republicans) have learned that January 6th was part of a far larger Trumpian effort to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election, no matter the facts or the law.
Beyond chronicling what happened and assigning blame, something else in those hearings is worth noting: namely, they are exposing the ever-growing contradiction between Washington institutionalists, whose first loyalty is to the agencies and departments they served or are serving, and the supposed purpose or mission of those very institutions. And all of this will take the U.S. even further from the democracy it still claims to be, if those who have served in them and in the White House can’t be held accountable for their abuses of power and violations of law.
Over the Cliff of False Institutionalism
For a long time now, the mechanisms of our democratic system of government meant to ensure accountability have been at the edge of collapse, if not obliteration. Who could forget how — something I’ve written about over the years at TomDispatch — the government officials who, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, led us into the Global War on Terror found myriad ways to evade or defang the checks and balances of the courts and Congress? In the process, they managed to escape all accountability for their crimes. To offer a striking example: the top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush lied about Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, which was their main excuse for their assault on his country in 2003.
According to the invaluable Costs of War Project, a year and a half after invading Afghanistan in 2001, the top officials of the Bush administration took this country into a war in Iraq that would cost the lives of more than 4,500 American service members and nearly as many U.S. military contractors. Almost 200 journalists and aid workers would also die in that conflict, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
The Costs of War Project estimates that the overall war on terror those officials launched will, in the end, have a price tag of nearly eight trillion dollars. Add to that the impossible-to-calculate costs of their acts to the rule of law, since they dismantled individual liberties and made a mockery of human rights. After all, the top officials of that administration oversaw the secret rewriting of the law to make torture at CIA “black sites” legal, while imprisoning individuals, including Americans, without access to lawyers, due process, or the courts at a prison they built in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a system distinctly offshore of what until then had been known as American justice.
When Barack Obama took over the White House in 2009, his administration failed either to mount a course correction or punish any of the torturers or jailers and those who gave them the green light to do so. As the president put it then, he chose to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He refused even to hold an investigation into the misdeeds of Bush administration policymakers and lawyers who had rendered us a nation of torture, while secretly implementing warrantless surveillance policies on a mass scale, keeping Guantánamo open, and failing to bring the disastrous American presences in Afghanistan and Iraq to an end.
Ironically, in explaining his reasons for not shining a light into those CIA black sites or so much else that preceded him, Obama pointed to the importance of honoring institutionalism. It was crucial, he argued, for the Agency to be able to continue to function in ways that an investigation might impede. “And part of my job,” the president explained, “is to make sure that, for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”
Consider that an early sign of a toxic default to the version of institutionalism that threatens us today.
In the Trump years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the 2016 presidential elections stopped short of indicting the former president. Mueller’s task was to investigate potential Russian interference with that election and possible coordination with Trump in that endeavor. Mueller ultimately backed away from indicting the president for obstruction of justice, despite the evidence he had, citing an obscure 1973 Department of Justice memo from the Watergate era (reaffirmed in 2000). The memo argued that such an act would distract the president from the pressing affairs of his office. “The spectacle of an indicted president still trying to serve as Chief Executive boggles the imagination,” the memo said, and Mueller’s mind was evidently still boggled when it came to Donald Trump and the coming 2020 election.
And then there was the failure to investigate the institutional problems that accompanied the country’s initial handling of the Covid pandemic. There has never been the slightest accountability for the denialism that greeted its initial stages, nor any attempt to document what went wrong then. In June 2021, Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) called for the creation of “an independent 9/11-style commission” to understand how the public had been left so unprotected by the Trump administration in those early pandemic months and to discuss what lessons should be drawn from it for a future pandemic. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sponsored such an approach in the Senate, but nothing ever happened.
Such a narrative of accountability and blame might have exposed “the vulnerabilities of our public health system and issue[d] guidance for how we as a nation can better protect the American people.” But no such luck. The institutionalists prevailed and the bills are still lying dormant in Congress.
In these years, a continual distaste for self-examination and institutional reform has eviscerated notions of accountability, while leaving the nation unprepared and unprotected not only from future pandemics, but from abuses of power aimed directly at our democracy. So far, Donald Trump, in particular, has paid no price for his attacks on democracy, as the January 6th committee has made all too clear.
Institutionalists vs. Accountability
The January 6th hearings have only underscored the reticence of Attorney General Merrick Garland when it came to mounting a case against Donald Trump or any of his top officials. As former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal has written, “[W]e’ve seen no signs of such an investigation. Ordinarily, 17 months after a crime, one would expect to see some signs of an inquiry.” And yet Department of Justice (DOJ) veterans continue to attest to their faith that the institution and Attorney General Garland will rise to the occasion.
Harvard law professor and former DOJ official Jack Goldsmith recently asked readers to sympathize with the difficult decisions the attorney general has to deal with. Garland “arguably faces a conflict of interest,” Goldsmith wrote. He then added that Garland would not only have to be convinced that he had enough evidence to get a conviction in federal court, but would have to ask himself “whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump.” Goldsmith does recognize that a failure to indict could send a message that the president, even Donald Trump, “is literally above the law.” Yet he still ends his piece with a plea for trust in the AG’s decision-making.
And Goldsmith is anything but alone in putting his faith in the institution above the dire necessity of holding top officials accountable. Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, a 10-year DOJ veteran, has, in the end, weighed in similarly. “I’m an institutionalist,” he told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, signaling his credentials as a trusting servant of that department. “My initial thought was not to indict the former president out of concern [for] how divisive it would be. But given what we have learned, I think that he probably has to be held accountable.” A mere two weeks later he, too, had backtracked, saying “we should have faith” in Garland and the prospect of future indictments of Trump and top members of his administration.
In reality, this embrace of institutionalism, far from being a badge of honor, has become a millstone around the neck of the Department of Justice and the nation as a whole. Throughout the tenure of William Barr as Trump’s attorney general, veterans of that department and career officials there assuaged the fears of those worried that he would contribute to its further politicization. As department veteran Harry Litman reassured Americans on NPR, “That would never be Bill Barr. He’s a[n] institutionalist. He understands the important values of the Department of Justice. He has integrity. He has stature. He’s nobody’s toady.”
As it turned out, until the very end of Trump’s presidency, Barr proved to be an institutionalist bent on twisting the definition to fit his needs. His numerous stints in the White House, going back to the early 1990s, turned his form of institutionalism into an embrace of loyalty to the president over any form of accountability. Before the report of Special Counsel Mueller was even released, Barr provided his own spin, contrary to its findings. As he told NPR:
“After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report… the deputy attorney general and I concluded that the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”
This, despite the fact that, as Mueller testified, he had concluded otherwise.
Such shout-outs to institutionalism have become an essential part of the post-Trump political scene as well, extending to the very nature of America’s governing principles. For example, institutionalists who oppose expansion of the Supreme Court argue that such a move would constitute “serious violations of norms” and ultimately “undermin[e] the democratic system” and “diminish [the court’s] independence and legitimacy,” or so a report on potential Supreme Court reform, commissioned by Biden in 2021, concluded. And even after the disastrous Supreme Court decisions repealing abortion rights and expanding gun rights, President Biden, the consummate self-declared institutionalist, indicated that expanding the court “is not something that he wants to do,” as if the traditions of our institutions are more important than fairness, the representation of the majority, or even justice itself.
Biden has similarly shown an impassioned reluctance to challenge Congress, refusing, for instance, to lead the way when it comes to ending the filibuster in the Senate. Earlier this year he did finally (and unsucessfully) support a carve-out from the filibuster in order to try to get a voting rights bill passed and more recently in support of passing abortion-rights legislation. But his belated and tepid words were at best mere gestures and utterly without effect.
Could the January 6th Hearings Be a Game-Changer?
The House select committee investigating January 6th has been making its case directly to a remarkably substantial audience (mainly of Democrats and independents) — 20 million viewers for its opening evening session and 13 million for the daytime testimony of former White House aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, who attracted the largest daytime audience yet for the hearings, far exceeding even the most watched cable news shows at that hour. And keep in mind that those viewers are, of course, potential voters this November.
In addition to the public, the Department of Justice has been a target audience for those hearings. As Congresswoman and Vice Chairperson of the committee Liz Cheney has said, “The Justice Department doesn’t have to wait for the committee to make a criminal referral. There could be more than one criminal referral.”
There’s another target audience, too: American history and the possibility that the integrity of our institutions can someday be restored. The hearings themselves project the hope that, despite the disastrous failures of American democracy and institutional Washington in this century, there are still guardrails capable of protecting us and fortifying the mechanisms of accountability.
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the select committee, has summed up the matter this way:
“[F]or four years, the Justice Department took the position that you can’t indict a sitting president. If the Department were now to take the position that you can’t investigate or indict a former president, then, a president becomes above the law. That’s a very dangerous idea that the founders would have never subscribed to.”
Given Washington’s reliance in these years on loyalty to institutions rather than to democracy, it’s little wonder that polls of Americans show a waning trust in those very institutions. A recent Gallup poll typically “marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress” which ranked at a truly dismal 7%.
The question is: Can a revival of accountability as a cherished element of governance help to rebuild those institutions and trust in them or are we headed for a far grimmer America in the near future?
The January 6th hearings offer a certain hope that accountability might put institutionalism in its place. Restoring it (and so the faith of the American people in our democracy) should be the sine qua non for a post-Trumpist future. Whatever virtues our institutions may have, their true value can only persist if they are accountable to the principles of democracy they were created to uphold.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), 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.
Pennsylvania. (photo: Robert Knopes/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
Homes are rejected for efficiency upgrades because they need repairs. Many owners can't afford them.
Called the Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP, it’s one of the best tools the Biden administration has at its disposal to lower carbon emissions while investing in underserved communities. WAP has historically been funded at a few hundred million dollars per year, serving only about 0.2 percent of low-income households annually, by one estimate. So a new average of $700 million per year is a big deal.
But funding isn’t the only factor preventing WAP from reaching more people. The program has a fundamental flaw. Many homeowners who are eligible for WAP upgrades based on their income are ultimately turned away by program administrators, or “deferred,” told that their homes require repairs before any energy efficiency improvements can be made — repairs they often can’t afford.
“Deferrals are a significant problem for equity, because the households that could stand to benefit the most are not able to access a significant source of federal funding,” said Gabriel Chan, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota. Plus, the conditions that cause deferrals — plumbing problems, asbestos, and leaking roofs, to name a few — “layer health burdens on top of energy burdens,” he said.
A new program in Pennsylvania aims to address the issue. Earlier this month, the legislature voted to create a $125 million Whole Home Repairs Program as part of the state budget. In addition to paying directly for new roofs, septic systems, and other structural repairs, the money will go toward building up the state’s administrative capacity to help people apply to the program and developing the skilled workforce available to do the repair and weatherization work. It was a rare win for progressive Pennsylvania Democrats, who secured bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled legislature.
“The issue cuts across geographies and partisan lines,” said Nikil Saval, the first-term state senator from Philadelphia who spearheaded the policy. “Virtually all of the legislators I talked to, Democratic or Republican, recognize the issue in their districts.”
The issue isn’t just lack of access to energy efficiency funding. It’s an aging housing stock, with homes falling into disrepair, which can lead to abandonment, which can contribute to the collapse of communities.
Health and safety issues have also been exacerbated by the increase in extreme weather due to climate change. Saval’s program garnered support from community organizers like Angelo Ortega, an Allentown, Pennsylvania, resident whose house suffered damages when the remnants of Hurricane Ida blew through last year. He had just moved into his mother’s house to take care of her after an injury and was supposed to stay in the finished basement, but it flooded during the storm. Almost a year later, he and his mother, who suffers from asthma, are still trying to manage problems with mildew and can’t afford the work required to prevent future flooding. Friends of his in the community are in need of major roof repairs.
Ortega is a member of Make the Road Pennsylvania, a grassroots organization that advocates for working-class Latino communities. He said once Make the Road started spreading the word about Saval’s Whole Home Repairs proposal, a lot more people began showing up at their biweekly meetings, and Ortega learned how widespread the need for the program was.
“We didn’t know that there were so many persons with problems with their roofs, water decay, and persons with similar situations like myself with the basement flooding,” he told Grist. “It was an all-out expense for some of them.”
According to the most recent U.S. Census American Housing Survey, some 280,000 homes in Pennsylvania lack adequate plumbing, heating, or electricity, or have physical deficiencies like leaky roofs or pipes. But it’s unclear how many homeowners get deferred from the weatherization program — neither the Department of Energy nor the state collects data on how many people apply to the program or how many are turned away. The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the state agency that distributes WAP funding, recently surveyed the local agencies that actually implement the program to get a sense of how many homes were being deferred and came up with an estimate of 36 percent.
Better data could be on the way. The U.S. Department of Energy recently told NPR that it aims to begin tracking deferrals in spring 2023. However, the agency’s instructions to states, tribes, and territories for 2022 says that tracking deferrals is optional.
Saval’s Whole Home Repairs Program isn’t the first aimed at addressing the issue. Vermont has a “zero deferral” policy, scraping together funds from different sources to pay for repairs. Since 2016, Delaware has run a “Pre-Weatherization” program that’s funded by proceeds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a partnership between several Eastern states that forces power plant operators to buy permits to pollute.
Steve Luxton, the CEO of the Energy Coordinating Agency, a nonprofit that’s responsible for administering WAP in Delaware and Philadelphia, said the former’s Pre-Weatherization program is “as good as it could possibly get, to be honest with you.” Luxton estimates that in both places, close to 50 percent of eligible applicants are deferred due to structural issues. “In this case, rather than saying, ‘Well, I got bad news for you,’ we just let them know that you’ve got this issue. They don’t have to fill out documents or anything, we can take most of the information we already have and pretty much do what we have to do.”
Connecticut is launching a roughly $8 million Weatherization Barrier Remediation Program to pay for repairs this year. And last week, the Department of Energy announced several million in grants that will go to city and state agencies around the country for pre-weatherization work.
The challenge for Pennsylvania, and for many of these other programs, is finding a stable source of funding. Both Pennsylvania and Connecticut’s programs are backed by grants from the American Rescue Plan Act, the COVID-19 stimulus package Congress passed last year.
“We will need to find a recurring source of funding, because this is one-time dollars,” said Saval.
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