The American people have known that the war in Afghanistan was a lost cause for quite some time. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans’ views of the war started to go south right around the end of 2011, until eventually a majority started seeing the writing on the wall about two years later.
That’s why the Washington Post report this week on the so-called “Afghanistan Papers”, detailing how US officials “deliberately mislead the public” on the war’s progress, is almost sort of unremarkable. If the piece took away any shred of innocence left from this ghastly enterprise, it’s that perhaps some of us thought our leaders, while failing miserably at building a nation thousands of miles away, were at least acting in good faith.
At the same time, the Post report is rage inducing, not just because of the sheer stupidity of American leaders continuing to fight a war they knew they could not win, but also how their unwillingness to take responsibility for a failed policy caused so much death, destruction and heartbreak, particularly among those American families who have admirably dedicated their lives to serving their country, and the countless number of Afghan civilians trapped in a cycle of endless war they have nothing to do with.
Of course, the “Afghanistan Papers” immediately recalled memories of the Pentagon variety leaked to the New York Times nearly a half century ago because they too were government documents outlining how numerous American administrations had lied to the public about Vietnam – another long, costly and unnecessary war with no military solution.
Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian writes—The old made our climate mess. And the young will get us out of it. If we are to survive, we must follow the demands and examples of the next generation:
We are on the brink, and part of what that brink is, I believe, is the necessary end of that adolescence. As a species we must act with restraint in the face of consequences, must consider the other species with us now, those of our own not yet born, and those currently facing ultimate climate vulnerability around the world from floods, fire, sea level rise, crop failure, superstorms and more.
We must expand our imaginations and act on that bigger understanding of our place in the world and our impact on the future. That means making radical changes, like our homes and transit being powered by renewables, our government not plotting more extractivism. It means leaving fossil fuels in the ground, where they belong. We need to remind ourselves why these changes are necessary: that the earth is finite, that actions have consequences, that they go beyond the horizon of what we can see and hear, in time and space, that those who come after us have rights we can’t just annihilate. We must make sweeping changes by the end of the coming decade, and we must stick to them afterward by remembering why they matter.
What is striking in this moment is that such maturity is largely the property of the young. Many of the significant grownups in the room of climate chaos are 16 or 20 or 27, Greta and the thousands of youths like her who are less visible but no less committed, the teens from Nigeria to Alaska doing their utmost for the climate. But because they are truly young, they control no shares, have no votes, sit on no boards: they need us as we need them. They are the leadership in this moment, the people who are thinking about 2100, the people who are ready to change everything, the people who understand the gravity and scale of the catastrophe.
Charlie Savage writes in a news analysis at The New York Times—We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly. A high-profile inspector general report has served as fodder for arguments about President Trump. But its findings about surveillance are important beyond partisan politics:
At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.
“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”
Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to regulate domestic surveillance for national-security investigations — monitoring suspected spies and terrorists, as opposed to ordinary criminals. Investigators must persuade a judge on a special court that a target is probably an agent of a foreign power. In 2018, there were 1,833 targets of such orders, including 232 Americans. [...]
Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.
Malaika Jabali at The Guardian writes—Plantation weddings are wrong. Why is it so hard for white Americans to admit that?
Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that online platforms, including Pinterest and the Knot Worldwide, would restrict content that features or romanticizes weddings held on former slave plantations. These changes were the result of a campaign by the social justice organization Color of Change. In a letter, Color of Change wrote that “plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen. The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry.”
Color of Change posted the news on Facebook, where it was, of course, received with appropriate empathy and contemplation. The 600 comments included lots of gems such as “Proud of our civil war plantation wedding! Eat shit color of change [sic]!!” because one exclamation point wasn’t enough. There was the old-faithful “slavery was too long ago” argument, with one commenter adding, “So stupid. That was hundreds of years ago. Why not call them beautiful homes or restored homes. Are they canceling castle weddings too?” And the unheard-of sentiment: “There were slaves of every color.”
The basic themes were echoed by the wedding vendors quoted in news reports: that slavery was in the past, that it wasn’t that bad, that the splendor of plantations has outlived whatever negativity they might represent. While these pronouncements can be easily countered with reason, logic unfortunately doesn’t matter.
Slavery was indeed “in the past” – a shocker to readers, I’m sure. Yet this hasn’t prevented America from fervently preserving the history it does deem worthwhile, no matter how far back or inconsequential.
Nikki Haley at The Washington Post writes—Today’s climate wouldn’t allow us to remove the Confederate flag in South Carolina:
[...] Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist.[...]
Today’s outrage culture would instead have made the case that everyone who respects the Confederate flag is an evil racist. Not only is that untrue; but more to the point, if I had tried to make that argument, the flag would never have come down. As Hillary Clinton has learned, calling people “deplorable” is not the best way to win their support.
Respect can be powerful and persuasive. It helped bring our state together and bring the flag down. More people in our culture today should try it.
Good grief, what a manure pile disguised as another Republican paean to the civility they haven’t practiced for years. The former governor, who has lived in South Carolina all her life, supported keeping the flag flying until Dylann Roof did his murders. Then she changed her mind because that mass murderer supposedly “hijacked” the flag from all the good people who see it as honorable heritage instead of a banner of white supremacy and treason. Where were those prayers when that flag first went up in 1961 to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War and a nose-thumbing to the civil rights movement? A flag that stayed up for 54 years. At the time it was first placed on the Capitol grounds, the people who chose to raise it directed the outrage that Haley now laments at the "uppityness" of black people demanding they be treated like human beings and first-class citizens.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Our country is accepting the unacceptable:
When this presidency began, it was commonplace to write off fears that our political and journalistic systems would eventually “normalize” the president’s abuses. The worry was that however strong our system might have been in the past, we would come to accept behavior that had never been acceptable before.
This is exactly what has happened. When the House unveiled impeachment articles on Tuesday, a large share of the reporting and commentary was about the political risks facing Democrats for insisting on something that would once have been uncontroversial: It is a chilling threat to freedom and to democracy for the commander in chief to use his power to press a foreign government to investigate a political opponent.
Not long ago, the hopeful — and also the complacent — were certain that such a thing could never happen here. But it has happened here.
AD
And the Republican Party — including many of its leaders from whom we once expected better — has reacted not with horror but by closing ranks around their petulant, abusive leader, accepting from him behavior they would have rightly denounced from any other president.
Ed Kilgore at New York magazine writes—Is Pelosi Falling Between Two Stools in Her Impeachment Strategy?
As the House grows closer to passing articles of impeachment and the Senate makes plans for an impeachment trial, it’s important to internalize a couple of basic facts about the big picture: (1) Trump is not going to be removed from office by the Senate, and (2) whatever impact impeachment has on future presidents or on historical judgments of this Congress — both factors often cited by Democrats favoring impeachment — we won’t know it for a good while. So the only thing relevant to analyze is the effect that this process and its trajectory may have on the 2020 elections.
We just don’t know at this point how the voting public will adjudge the impeachment inquiry, the House impeachment, or the Senate acquittal. Public support for impeachment spiked a bit just before and just after the formal process was initiated, but it has stabilized amid evidence that it’s not very popular in the Rust Belt battleground states where Trump pulled his upset in 2016. Attitudes toward impeachment, not surprisingly, are beginning to pretty closely match attitudes toward Trump and his reelection bid. So the best early evidence is that the impact of impeachment may be on the margins of the election, where enthusiasm and turnout patterns are legitimately important and not just the subject of spin.
That should concern Democrats. The decision by Nancy Pelosi to quickly enact narrow articles of impeachment before the 2020 election year formally begins may well indicate that she views it as a distraction at best and as a potential problem for Democrats at worst.
Dan Spinelli at Mother Jones writes—Can You Make a Progressive Defense Bill? Democrats Tried, and Now Think They Failed:
Five months ago, progressives stacked the annual defense policy bill with dozens of provisions sure to make any hawkish Republican queasy. Win Without War, a liberal anti-war group, praised the “big progressive victories” in the bill and lawmakers roundly proclaimed it the “most progressive” defense bill in history. But the legislation set to reach President Trump’s desk this month is a far cry from the one progressives dreamed of getting when a Democratic majority took control of the House this year.
In July, the House passed a National Defense Authorization Act that included a host of provisions progressives had long pushed for. That bill would have blocked Trump from using the Pentagon’s money to build a border wall, ended American support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and required the White House to seek congressional approval before attacking Iran. But after negotiators from the House convened in conference with their counterparts from the Senate, not a single one of these proposals made it to the final bill, which was released on Monday and is set to be voted on this week. The only big item from the progressives’ agenda that Democrats did secure was a commitment to grant federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave, but that came in exchange for approval to create Trump’s Space Force, which would become the sixth branch of the Armed Services.
It didn’t take long for outside advocacy groups to register their disapproval. “The results of negotiations for the final text of the NDAA are disastrous,” read a statement released by 31 progressive national security, environmental, and civil rights groups. “The FY2020 NDAA conference report has been so severely stripped of vital House-passed provisions essential to keeping the current administration in check that it no longer represents a compromise, but a near complete capitulation.”
Most major progressive groups found something to dislike about the bill.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer writes—With GOP certain to acquit Trump, should he be impeached for the history books?
It’s hard to overstate what a dangerous place the United States finds itself in right now. There has, of course, been a civil war in our 243-plus year history as well as countless constitutional crises and difficult decisions about war and peace and basic human rights. Those battles have covered the powers of the presidency or the courts, or what is or isn’t a fundamental right within a democratic republic. This time feels different. We’re fighting over the one thing that’s even more basic than our ideals — what is truth, and does it matter? If the answer to that second question is “no,” then America is already way too deep into the black hole of authoritarianism. [...]
About a million trees have been felled to print articles about the evidence against Trump and what it all means for 2020 politics, but surprisingly little about how this national ordeal is making people feel. That depends, obviously, on your politics, but I think for the half of Americans who want a real investigation, it’s been a mixed bag. Seeing that there are still public servants in the State Department, the Pentagon, even within the White House with a sense not just of duty but right and wrong can be exhilarating. But listening to the Republicans with effective control of the final outcome spout baseless conspiracy theories without showing even the slightest curiosity about the truth has been infuriating, exhausting ... and thoroughly demoralizing.
Emily Lynn Saunders and Max Granger at The Baffler write—The Trials of Scott Warren. How the state has tried and failed to criminalize solidarity in the borderlands Genevieve Schroeder:
About forty miles to the north, in the town of Ajo, Arizona, another child struggled to understand why people were dying in the desert outside his living room window. Eight-year-old Gabriel Cooper had seen his older friend Scott Warren on the news. His parents had explained that Scott was in trouble for helping a pair of young men who had arrived in Ajo after walking for days through the remote desert south of town. Scott had given the two Central American men water, food, clean clothes, and a place to rest, and because of it, the government wanted to send him to prison for twenty years. Gabriel wanted to know why the people in power would try to punish Scott for helping others survive.
Scott Warren is just one of thousands of residents and humanitarian volunteers responding to the needs of migrants and refugees in the O’odham lands of the Sonoran desert. By targeting him and other borderland aid workers, the United States has demonstrated the lengths it will go to destroy the lives of migrants and forestall the radical possibilities prefigured in acts of care and solidarity. The Trump administration has sought to intimidate residents and establish a legal precedent that would criminalize humanitarian care—a precedent that would classify hospitality as harboring, search and rescue as smuggling, and aid as aiding and abetting.
So far, they have failed. Instead, the government’s efforts have only served to expose the government’s own crimes. In two separate felony trials, Warren and other humanitarian aid workers testified to the crisis of mass death and disappearance in the Sonoran Desert. The first time, earlier this year, a jury was unable to reach a verdict, the judge declared a mistrial, and the U.S. Attorney’s office elected to proceed with a retrial. Aid workers, border residents, and other witnesses to the decades-long human rights tragedy in the desert turned toward the new proceedings in November with rapt attention. Again, the state was unable to prove their case. This time, the jury’s decision was unanimous: “not guilty.”
Paris Marx at Jacobin writes—Uber Has Always Been a Criminal Organization:
Uber, that most ethical of ride-hailing companies, is in hot water once again. This time it isn’t for slashing drivers’ pay so low they can barely survive or having an institutionalized culture of sexism — I’m sure its PR department only wishes it could throw out the canned lines it has prepared for such situations. No, this time it’s thanks to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who chose to do his absolute best to dismiss the gravity of the execution and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, to avoid angering the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman — you might know him by his initials, “MbS” — who have invested billions in the company.
In an interview with Axios on HBO, Khosrowshahi called Khashoggi’s brutal, premeditated murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — which the Saudi state actually tried to cover up by sending out someone of a similar build wearing his clothes — a “mistake,” akin to an Uber autonomous test vehicle running down a pedestrian. In fact, he went further, saying that “people make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that they can never be forgiven.” In other words, let’s forgive the definitely-not-a-murderous-dictator “MbS,” who’s reported to have directly ordered Khashoggi’s assassination — otherwise Uber might not keep getting the Saudi money that funds their billion-dollar losses quarter after quarter.
Unsurprisingly, pretty much everyone other than maybe a few Saudi officials were shocked at how Khosrowshahi not only made the statement, but didn’t change his tone even after the Axios journalists pushed back.
Ed Burmila at The New Republic writes—The New Behemoths of Health Care Bureaucracy:
What are the 10 biggest companies in the United States? Put that question to a group of younger people, and they’re likely to rattle off tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Older people might mistakenly believe that manufacturing still leads the pack with postwar Goliaths such as Ford or General Electric. Oil companies (ExxonMobil, BP) and megabanks (Citi, Wells Fargo) seem obvious contenders.
Yet regardless of who’s doing the guessing, I suspect it would take a very long time before anyone mentioned UnitedHealth, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. Who, beyond each firm’s array of boardrooms and back offices, has even heard of them? Nevertheless, they are ranked as 6, 7, and 10, respectively, on this year’s Fortune 500 ranking of the biggest companies by total revenues. If you add CVS-Caremark (#8), four of the 10 largest actors in the economy are distinctly low-profile middlemen in the rapacious and wholly inadequate profit-driven system of health care in the U.S., which constitutes an astounding 18 percent of our gross domestic product.
It doesn’t take much digging to figure out where all that money is going. The top 25 entries in the Fortune list also include Walgreens and Cardinal Health. Mail-order pharmacy service Express Scripts also cracked the top 25 in 2018 but was purchased by Cigna and disappeared in this year’s rankings. That puts effectively seven of the top 25 companies in the nation’s economy in the health care industry—with the vast majority of their revenue derived from administrative activities rather than productive ones, such as manufacturing pharmaceuticals, supplying insurance, or directly providing service to patients. They represent a fast-burgeoning rentier segment of our health care bureaucracy that operates behind the scenes to increase profits, reduce company costs, and generally ensure the toxic combination of expensive and poor service that American health care consumers experience.
Hayley Farless at Common Dreams writes—Supreme Court’s Newest Move on Abortion Approves Torture for Pregnant People:
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Kentucky’s H.B. 2, deceptively titled the “The Kentucky Ultrasound Informed Consent Act,” as if it has anything to do with information or consent. Previously upheld by a panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, this cruel law mandates that Kentucky abortion providers at the commonwealth’s only abortion-providing clinic force their patients to submit to an ultrasound and have their pregnancy described to them in detail while also being played audible cardiac activity. [...]
Think about this scenario, one that will now be the normal abortion experience in Kentucky. An abortion patient is made to lie nearly naked on the examination table with their legs in stirrups and a probe inserted into their bodies, their care delayed further while an undesired or non-viable pregnancy is still growing inside of their body against their will. They don’t want to be pregnant anymore, and they certainly don’t want to have their pregnancy—whether it’s the result of a birth control failure, an assault, or an intentional conception that’s no longer viable—described to them in vivid detail. But it doesn’t matter. No matter the silent tears or the loud sobs, their physician must continue describing the pregnancy and showing them the ultrasound images, all while playing audio of any fetal cardiac activity. If the patient closes their eyes or covers their ears or asks for the narrative to stop, their physician must either keep going or refuse to provide care.
What part of that “procedure” protects the patient? What part of that “consultation” supplies additional medical information for the practitioner? None of it. It’s punishment, plain and simple. It is a government intrusion on healthcare that is strategically intended to emotionally torment both abortion patients and their providers.