By Branko Marcetic

WASHINGTON: The vibes have not been this good for a long time. Only two weeks after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his campaign turned the 2024 election on its head, Vice President Kamala Harris has shocked the political establishment by choosing as her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the most progressive of the handful of names in contention. Walz has a record as governor that anyone on the Left has plenty to be pleased with, from putting in place free, universal school meals and paid family and medical leave to establishing a form of tuition-free public college and beefing up worker protections.

Harris’s decision to go with Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the other name that her list had been whittled down to, is another major sign, on top of Biden’s 2020 campaign and the first year of his presidency, of a major shift in the United States’s political center of gravity since 2016, and a reversal in what passes for conventional political wisdom among the Democratic establishment.

Ever since Bill Clinton won the presidency by going out of his way to antagonize the left wing of his own party, Democrats have been guided by a simplistic philosophy: you win elections by tacking to the center on anything and everything, and ideally, you’ll do it by making sure everyone saw you giving progressives a loud and painful slap in the face.

This is not what happened here. By almost every parameter of conventional Democratic thinking, Shapiro was the logical, “strong” pick for Harris: he’s a business-friendly centrist who wants to cut corporate taxes; he bucked unions on school vouchers, a favourite policy of the Right and neoliberal Democrats attempting to dismantle public schools; and he was vehemently pro-Israel, to the point of using state power to attack dissenters on US-Israel policy and comparing left-wing, antiwar protesters to the Ku Klux Klan. He was backed by big money, sometimes far-right pro-Israel and corporate donors, and choosing him was explicitly urged by centrist pundits as a way for Harris to publicly kick progressives in the shins.

Walz, meanwhile, is unabashedly progressive. He not only passed measures that were economically left, but proved supportive of issues like gun control, abortion rights, and transgender rights. He has, to the chagrin of centrist commentators, said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighbourliness,” expressed guarded sympathy for the message of pro-Palestinian protesters, and was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s only socialist. By the traditional Democratic playbook, all of this should have made him toxic.

And yet Walz’s left-leaning governance was reportedly his main selling point for Harris, who, despite being a career-long corporate-friendly centrist herself, seems to want to accomplish on the national level something similar to what Walz has done in Minnesota. At the very least, it was not viewed as a drawback that would undermine his demographic appeal as a white, male, rural-rooted, hunting-and-fishing Midwesterner.

In fact, Walz has in the end united an improbably diverse array of politicians associated with the Democratic Party, endorsed and reportedly backed behind the scenes by Sanders and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, respectively, while drawing eager plaudits from Squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, all the way to centrists Dean Phillips, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Manchin.

Meanwhile, though the Harris camp says Shapiro’s problem was in a lack of chemistry, it’s hard not to think back to the avalanche of commentary in the past few weeks that pointed out how what in previous eras might have been counted as strengths had become potential liabilities for the Pennsylvania governor: his calls to cut the corporate tax rate clashed with Harris’s plans to raise it; unions’ dislike of him threatened to undermine a key and energized part of the Democratic coalition; and his uniquely bad record on Israel-Palestine threatened to reopen a festering wound within the party that they had managed to at least partially bandage over by getting Biden to drop out, especially after reporters unearthed a shockingly racist opinion piece he had written on the subject in college, and which the now-fifty-one-year-old Shapiro didn’t even bother to address, let alone apologize for.

“I’m literally texting with a number of CEOs right now,” one MSNBC talking head told the decidedly pro-Shapiro Morning Joe panel this morning, not long after Harris had made a big push to win the favour of big business. “The business community . . . was hoping, maybe hoping against hope, that the governor of Pennsylvania would be the vice-presidential pick, and that was going to be a larger indicator or signal about how Vice President Harris would govern as president.”

Of course, we shouldn’t overstate things. There really are endless variables involved in a decision like this: Walz has a unique profile, in his strengths as a communicator, his specific demographic profile (namely, his rural, blue-collar, non-elite-educated background), and as a formerly centrist lawmaker who took on the progressive mantle late in the game, all of which blunts attacks on him as an of out-of-touch radical. And Shapiro had other liabilities beyond his centrism, including his role in a sensational case involving a possible murder that had been allegedly wrongly ruled a suicide, that the state supreme court only just decided to take up this year, and which he has been accused by the victim’s parents of “sitting on.”

Still, it’s hard to see any of this — Walz’s transformation into a progressive, his unapologetic defense of his record, and it being considered an asset over a centrist rival — happening in an earlier era of US politics. The fact that it comes after Joe Biden, one of the leading engineers of the Democratic Party’s rightward turn, briefly governed as a progressive populist is solid proof that the American political landscape has markedly changed.

At the start of this millennium, Biden himself pointed to Clinton’s winning campaigns to trash the idea “that class warfare and populism is the way we should conduct the next election.” It seems Democratic Party leaders no longer wholly agree. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

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By Branko Marcetic

One of the defining features of our era has been the loss of a domestic political appetite for more US wars. But a similar pushback to Washington’s use of sanctions has been slow to follow, despite the fact that US sanctions are demonstrably cruel, indiscriminate, ineffective, and often illegal.

The near-term prospects for a groundswell of US opposition to sanctions are basically nonexistent at this point. But we may be seeing the beginnings of one taking shape: last week saw twenty-one House Democrats send Joe Biden a letter calling on the president to end US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela and review Donald Trump–era sanctions policy more generally, in light of the “border crisis,” which has seen a surge in migrants at the southern border (though one that is lower than expected) since the expiration of the Donald Trump–era Title 42 order.

Calling the sanctions “a critical contributing factor in the current increase in migration,” the letter points to “their grave humanitarian toll on the peoples of those countries” and the “significant logistical challenges” it is creating for US authorities. But the letter also stresses that “there are also strong moral grounds” to lift the sanctions and that US policy should seek to not “exacerbate the suffering of the innocent people whose freedom we seek to advance.”

Organized by two representatives of border states, Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — a cochair of Biden’s 2024 campaign and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) very first congressional endorser, respectively — the letter was cosigned by a number of progressive elected officials, including Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Chuy García (D-IL), and six of the newly expanded “Squad” of progressive and socialist members of Congress.

The signatures of Squad members Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, and Ayanna Pressley were missing from the letter. Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern, who has repeatedly called on Biden to lift sanctions against Venezuela in the past, also didn’t sign the letter, and his Northampton office was met by protests from the Anti-Imperialism Action Committee, an anti-capitalist activist collective based in Western Massachusetts, and other activists as a result.

Some of the progressive signatories have taken this message to other platforms. At a May 11 House Agriculture Committee meeting, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) — one of the newly minted Squad members who won his seat in these past midterms — spoke about the failure of the decades-long US blockade on Cuba in fostering democracy and called for “revisiting our policies that push people out of their home countries,” emphasizing the economic costs to the US economy that result.

“I don’t think that it serves us to be starving people abroad,” he said. “I think it helps Americans for us to be feeding people all over the world.”

Khanna similarly took this message to a venue where viewers are unlikely to have heard criticism of Biden’s continuation of Trump–era sanctions policy: MSNBC, on the Morning Joe show.

“Look at what’s causing people to flee Venezuela and Cuba,” he urged. “The Republicans are saying, ‘let’s sanction them more.’ That’s causing more people to actually leave. Let’s look at rational sanction policy so we’re not causing the influx.”

Progressive criticism of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela — both of which are explicitly aimed at fomenting regime change in the countries — have been backed up by Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy advisor for former president Barack Obama.

“This is an obvious thing that is sitting right in front of the Biden administration, to just go back to the kind of openness that we had at the end of the Obama years [and] make life better for the Cuban people,” he said in a recent MSNBC appearance, warning that the political cost for Biden stemming from events at the border would be worse than for lifting Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions.

This course has also been endorsed by leftist Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said he had personally urged Biden to attack the root causes of migration to the US southern border, namely the “poverty and abandonment” endemic to those countries — and which US sanctions have unquestionably played a major role in causing. This comes a month after the US envoy of the Venezuelan opposition itself, which only a year ago was demanding that Biden not waver on Trump’s policy, implored the administration to end the sanctions, lest it turn Venezuela into “another Cuba.”

Despite this diverse chorus of voices pushing for sanctions to be lifted, it’s also running into a wall. That’s because, according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is worried about alienating Cuban-American Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who wrote a counterletter claiming, as all sanctions enthusiasts do, that the policy has nothing to do with the exodus of people from both countries.

Menendez is a hard-line supporter of Trump’s sanctions policy, and is currently under federal investigation eight years after already once being indicted on separate bribery charges. When he finds time away from potential criminal prosecution, Menendez is a full-time hawk who teams up with neocon Lindsey Graham to push legislation undermining peaceful coexistence with China and Iran. Since it relies on him to push through appointments blocked by the GOP and to pursue its wider geostrategic goals, the administration has tended to give Menendez enormous leeway in driving its own foreign policy decision-making, something that likely won’t change anytime soon.

Still, the fact that there’s any disquiet being heard at all in Washington toward the ruinous and largely pointless US overuse of sanctions — a weapon that the Biden administration has used with record frequency — is an important development. Political shifts in the halls of Congress don’t happen overnight and are usually the fruit of months and years of small, symbolic measures like this letter, adding up bit by bit to slowly shift what’s politically acceptable. This progressive challenge to a president — one who’s otherwise enjoying near-dictatorial levels of obeisance from fellow elected Democrats — is a first step, and one that couldn’t have happened without the election of progressive insurgents to Congress. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

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By Branko Marcetic

The security failure that led to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot in 2021 was always deeply weird. How was it that the vastest, most penetrating surveillance state in human history Unites States of America was taken by surprise? Why was law enforcement ― which responds to just about any gathering at the Capitol as if it were an invading army, and had spent the previous year brutally putting down unarmed protesters ― so undermanned and under-resourced on the day it maybe mattered most? As ,ore disclosures about the riot are coming  out, it is only getting weirder

A congressional hearing on October 13, for instance, revealed yet more evidence that law enforcement knew something dangerous might happen that day. Records obtained by the January 6 committee show that the Secret Service had been keeping tabs on the chatter of pro-Donald Trump websites, knew there were plans to bring arms to engage in political violence, was aware some pro-Trump protesters intended to storm the Capitol, and knew about death threats being made against then vice president Mike Pence, who played what the protesters saw as the key role of officially certifying the election result. In one December 26 email, a Secret Service field office shared a tip it had gotten from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the plans that day of the Proud Boys, a far-right group notorious for its use of political violence.

“They think that they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped,” the email read. “Their plan is to literally kill people. Please, please take this tip seriously and investigate further.”

The disclosures prompted Democratic representative Adam Schiff of California, a member of the January 6 committee, to charge that earlier testimony from White House and Secret Service witnesses that they’d gotten no intelligence about possible violence on the day was “not credible.”

These disclosures come on the heels of a series of scandalous headlines about the Secret Service’s conduct that day and since. The Secret Service ― whose security for Trump was led by veteran official Tony Ornato, a loyalist who, unusually, held the position of White House deputy chief of staff for operations at the same time ― reportedly tried to whisk Pence away to a military facility twelve miles away in the middle of the episode, which would have prevented him from being at the Capitol to certify the election. When the department of homeland security inspector general’s office later requested the Secret Service’s text messages from January 5 and 6, oversight officials found they’d been deleted shortly after the request.

Things don’t get much better for the agency when looking at the nearly nine hundred pages of documents Bloomberg News obtained earlier this month from the very Secret Service division whose job is to identify threats. Besides the scores of pages showing the agency’s detailed awareness of plans for a “large-scale demonstration” on the day made by pro-Trump groups, including extremist organizations like the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys, the documents at times seem to play down the violence of the latter.

A January 4, 2021 Secret Service report states that “the group has not been known to engage in civil disobedience and their demonstrations have ended without incidents or arrests.” Variations of this claim are repeated throughout, with even a post–Capitol riot, February 17, 2021 brief on the Proud Boys noting that many members’ social media posts about the election “contained vague threats of violence.”

But this was a dubious statement long before the events of January 6, given the group’s well-known history of violence, and given that their leader, Enrique Tarrio, was arrested and charged on January 3, 2021 for a December protest in DC that had turned violent and seen nearly forty people arrested. Adding to the strangeness, Tarrio was revealed soon after this to be, to borrow the word his lawyer used eight years ago, a “prolific” undercover asset for the FBI and local law enforcement.

On top of all this, there’s the January 13, 2021 email sent to Paul Abbate, a longtime counterterrorism agent at the FBI who would be named deputy director of the Bureau the following month. Released earlier this month as part of a tranche of Capitol riot–related FBI documents, the email features someone apparently involved in the Bureau telling Abbate about the level of sympathy within the FBI for the far right.

One FBI squad reportedly switched their televisions from Fox to Newsmax after the election, because they’d decided Fox was “playing to the left” and reporting “fake news.” Multiple black agents have allegedly declined to join special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams “because they do not trust that every member of their office’s SWAT team would protect them in an armed conflict.” A senior analyst who had recently retired “has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content.”

These issues aren’t unique to just one or two agencies. Roughly 13 percent of those hit with charges over the Capitol riot had a background in either the military or law enforcement, including thirty off-duty police officers from a dozen departments. Meanwhile, in September last year, a former top Capitol Police official blamed two senior officials, since promoted to lead the Capitol Police, for the intelligence and leadership failures that led to the riot, accused them of making false statements to Congress about their conduct around the event, and charged that congress people had “purposefully failed” to tell the story of these failures.

It’s still not clear what all of this points to, whether deliberate collusion, incompetence, unconscious bias, or some combination thereof. But none of it inspires confidence in a system of law enforcement that has long been overly friendly with and at times infiltrated by far-right extremists, and whose officers are known to sometimes openly share racist posts or even join extremist groups.

Until now, the January 6 investigations have tended to ignore this part of the story in favour of lionizing law enforcement’s conduct in the episode, and focusing instead on the behaviour of the many low-level protesters who had no ties to right-wing militias or seemingly no clue what to even do once they got into the Capitol. It’s part of a pattern in the Trump era that’s seen leading liberal voices venerate institutions like the FBI as a way to cast the former president as uniquely outside of the American mainstream, and which has resulted in an expansion of police powers since.

But if we’re going to talk about an attempted coup, then the role of law enforcement agencies ― whether through incompetence or malice ― in helping Trump to overturn an election is kind of crucial. That this seems more and more the focus of both congressional leaders and the press should be encouraging for anyone hoping to prevent a much worse repeat of history down the line. Better late than never. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

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By Branko Marcetic

If you’re going to undermine your own public rhetoric and supposed values by cozying up to a brutal autocrat, you might as well get something out of it. While maybe an obvious point to the rest of us, it’s apparently something US officials are just now belatedly realizing about the US-Saudi relationship.

That “unbreakable” relationship is now suffering maybe the severest strain yet, with the two longtime allies all but at each other’s throats. In a grim but fitting detail for the current political landscape, what finally triggered this wasn’t the ever-growing list of grisly Saudi crimes and abuses — a rap sheet that includes its spy agency’s documented complicity in the September 11 attack that killed thousands of American civilians — but the House of Saud’s seeming to side with Russia over its ally Washington on the steadily escalating war in Ukraine.

Last week, the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)+ cartel that exercises a quasi-monopoly on world oil agreed, at Saudi urging, to a major production cut of two million barrels per day, which has already sent US gas prices climbing after months of easing. Washington, which objected strenuously to the move to no avail, is already viewing the move as a “hostile act” by the crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, with many observers reading the cut as the Saudi leader’s attempt to create an “October surprise” for the Biden administration, pushing up inflation just in time for next month’s midterm elections. Joe Biden is now talking about “reevaluating” the United States’ relationship with the brutal autocracy in turn.

This US unhappiness goes well beyond the White House though. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is calling for an immediate “freeze on all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” including arms sales and security assistance “beyond what is absolutely necessary to defend US personnel and interests.”

Some Democrats in the House have introduced a bill to pull troops and weapons systems out of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a position supported by lawmakers including Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), all of whom framed the move as an appropriate punishment for the Saudi leadership, in their eyes, picking Russia over the West in the ongoing war.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) began beating the drum on this as early as last Wednesday, while Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the second-highest-ranking Senate Democrat, fumed that “the Saudi royal family has never been a trustworthy ally of our nation” and that US foreign policy needed to be reimagined “without this alliance with these royal backstabbers,” pointing, among other things, to “unanswered questions about 9/11.” Durbin is backing legislation to let Washington sue OPEC over price-fixing, which is right now being backed by both a Republican colleague and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.

It may seem somewhat absurd for this — the tacit Saudi support for a country waging an illegal war of aggression on a smaller neighbour — to be the final straw for US officials, given the much longer and even more brutal war that Saudi Arabia itself has waged against Yemen with US support and given the apparent Saudi role in an attack on American soil. But this isn’t really about Russia and its war on Ukraine.

The reality is US-Saudi relations have been going badly for some time, the downward slide picking up speed with the election of Joe Biden, who had vowed on the campaign trail to turn the country into a “pariah” over its 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and, to a lesser extent, the barbarity of its treatment of Yemen. In practice, Biden continued to treat the regime with kid gloves, signing a carefully phrased executive order that allowed him to keep fueling the Saudi war effort and declining to sanction the crown prince when his own intelligence agencies fingered him in Khashoggi’s killing.

Since then, Biden’s attempt to thread this needle has apparently not satisfied the erratic and violent crown prince, who seems to have relished the opportunity to thumb his nose at the president, particularly as the White House has tried to rally the world against Russia’s invasion (and domestic uproar over high prices). Saudi Arabia and the UAE both undermined Washington’s attempts to diplomatically isolate Russia, continued to reject US cries to alleviate war-induced inflation by cranking up oil production, and Bin Salman wouldn’t even take Biden’s phone calls to discuss the matter, even as he spoke with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

But maybe the biggest slight came in July, when Biden, desperate for a boost to oil production to shore up his flagging presidency, earned condemnation across the board for reversing himself and taking an official trip to Riyadh. Publicly weighing the sweetener of restarting “offensive” weapons sales before the trip, Biden was photographed giving the Saudi despot a widely derided fist bump before meeting with him privately, where he supposedly challenged him on the Khashoggi murder, all before restarting the flow of supposedly “defensive” weaponry to its warmaking coalition.

It was all for naught: the crown prince snubbed Biden by having a regional governor meet him at the airport, Saudi sources embarrassed Biden by denying his description of what took place at their meeting, and Bin Salman ultimately rebuffed the president’s pleas to boost oil production. And now he’s going even further, doing the exact opposite of what Biden requested, and less than a month out from a make-or-break election for his party.

It’s a risky but not totally irrational gamble for Bin Salman: boost Saudi revenue in the short-term while weakening the US president who opposed you, then wait the next two years out until the Saudi-friendly Donald Trump could be back in the president’s chair. In the meantime, you’ve given every future US leader a high-profile lesson in why never to challenge Saudi Arabia.

Whether it pans out as he hopes remains to be seen. But in the meantime, provided that Democrats’ rage over this latest snub endures and they follow through on threats to withhold US aid, this spat could prove the key to finally ending the frustratingly resilient US support for the Saudi war against Yemen, where a ceasefire just expired.

According to the United Nations, approximately 377,000 people were killed in the eight-year conflict by the end of 2021, 70 percent of them children under five, with millions facing critical levels of malnutrition. The majority of deaths have been the result of indirect, noncombat effects of the war, namely hunger and disease, though these effects are also being directly caused by Saudi actions, namely its blockade of the country and its indiscriminate, even deliberate, destruction of infrastructure like hospitals, food supplies, and water and sanitation systems. Ending the pivotal US support for the war would be major step toward ending this carnage, which survived earlier thanks to Trump’s vetoes.

The latest news is that Khanna and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have introduced legislation in both chambers of Congress to immediately end weapons transfers to the country, and they claim it’s “already garnering bipartisan support in both chambers” over Bin Salman’s latest slight. Let’s hope it passes. The Russian invasion has sparked much moral outrage in the United States, but little self-reflection on, or attempts to actually change, US policy that supports a variety of identical crimes. Maybe that’s about to change. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

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