Trump administration claims progress over China farm purchases

White House says China bought US$23bn in farm products, but some believe the figures are ‘overly optimistic’

Total includes sales that have yet to be shipped and may not meet end-of-year deadline

Bloomberg Published: 5:54pm, 25 Oct, 2020

The Trump administration says new agricultural trade data shows that Beijing is on track to fulfil its commitments in the US-China trade deal by the end of the year, including “all-time high” purchases of American beef, pork, corn and soybeans. Other analysts, however, say the administration’s claims are misleading.

“Using the best methodology, we have calculated that China has purchased approximately 71 per cent of its target for 2020,” an administration report published last week said, promoting the new numbers as a victory for US farmers in the face of China’s “problematic” trade practices.

With days left before the election, President Donald Trump and his advisers are keeping a close eye on sentiment among farmers, a constituency that helped him win the White House four years ago. In Iowa, however, a major corn- and soybean-producing state that Trump won by more than nine percentage points in 2016, he is behind Democratic challenger Joe Biden in many polls.

A separate report set to be published this week by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) says that, at a closer look, the administration’s latest numbers are inaccurate.

Unpacking the ‘phase one’ deal for the US-China trade war

Instead of all-time highs, PIIE’s analysis shows that China’s agriculture purchases from the US this year are expected to be largely even with 2017, when Trump took office.

“We're now nine months through 2020, and US exports to China are slightly over 50 per cent of the way toward the year-to-date targets”, below the 71 per cent number claimed by the administration, said Chad Bown, the author of the report and a former White House senior economist who closely tracks US-China trade data.

“That's still well short of the pace needed to fulfil the purchase commitment targets,” he said.

The difference between his math and the Trump administration’s reckoning, said Bown, is that the administration added in purchasing predictions and projections that have no guarantees.

David Laborde Debucquet, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, agreed, questioning the superlative used in the Trump administration’s report.

“The methodology is ‘the best’ to get the results desired, not to actually check if the agreement has been implemented as written in black and white,” said Laborde Debucquet.


Bown said his own math simply followed the formula laid out in the text of the trade deal.

“They're still pretty far behind on meeting the agricultural targets,” he said, adding that some agricultural goods, like lobsters – a key export from the swing state of Maine – have plummeted.

Bown added that if China’s trade behaviour has changed in recent months, it has little to do with pressure from Trump and far more to do with other factors, like an African swine fever outbreak that has decimated China’s domestic pork supply.

US pork exporters are doing “very, very well” this year as a result, Bown said.

He also said that agricultural trade was only a small part of the story, adding that US sales of manufacturing goods and energy to China were doing even worse.

The two reports come amid plummeting US-China relations, with Trump and both parties in Congress eager to put pressure on China over a range of issues, including trade.

US-China relations: Joe Biden would approach China with more ‘regularity and normality’

Trade policy in particular has been a top priority for Trump since he took office, and his administration is eager to show that it has delivered on its promise to fight back against China’s alleged unfair trade practices.

And as the coronavirus pandemic has hurt the American economy, Trump has turned to blaming China, where the outbreak first emerged, for the damage. He has vowed to make China “pay” for it, though he has not said how.
But the latest trade numbers also come with just eight days remaining before the election. Millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and the US economy is considered a top priority for many voters.

Trump earned strong support from farmers in 2016, but after his trade war, waves of tariffs, and the coronavirus pandemic, it remains to be seen how many of them will vote for his re-election.

The administration’s trade report said that “these structural changes will benefit American farmers for decades to come”.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Trade deal figures do not add up, analysts say

Jacob Fromer has reported from Beijing and Washington. He has a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Skinwalker Ranch: possibly the spookiest place on Earth 

(Collection of the University of Maryland Art Gallery / Christopher M. Bartel)

With Halloween just around the corner, the spookiest place in the country might be right here in Utah. Recently, two scientific studies suggest that place is Skinwalker Ranch in rural northeastern Utah.

For as long as humans have lived in the Uintah Basin, they’ve been seeing strange things in the sky. In the 1970’s, Utah State professor Frank Salisbury wrote a well documented book about hundreds of UFO sightings in the basin.

But the strangeness goes way beyond mystery aircraft. For 15 generations, indigenous tribes, including the Utes, have referred to this sandstone ridge as being “in the path of the skinwalker.” They consider the skinwalker a malevolent spirit and a shapeshifter.

The ridge overlooks a picturesque property now known around the world by its nickname – Skinwalker Ranch. It easily ranks as the most intensely studied paranormal hotspot in history.

Retired U.S. Army Col. John Alexander. (KLAS-TV)

Dr. John Alexander retired from Army intelligence as a colonel and was part of the first scientific study of the ranch under the umbrella of NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science. NIDS was a think tank created and funded by Las Vegas aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow.

After reading a Deseret newspaper story about UFO activity at the ranch, Bigelow flew to Utah, bought the property, and assigned a team of professionals to study the ranch and the basin.

The rancher and his neighbors told the NIDS team about a litany of bizarre activity from shadow people appearing in and around the ranch house, poltergeist-type events where physical objects moved on their own, strange animals including huge wolves and sasquatch, and holes in the sky.

The scientists witnessed much of this for themselves, including animals carved up with surgical precision and ghostly images that appeared on camera. In all, they documented hundreds of paranormal events.

“Something else is in control,” John Alexander told Mystery Wire. “And if it wants you to find out, it may allow that, but if it doesn’t, this thing keeps morphing and changing into, you know, new shapes and forms. We had cameras there and things that happened just off camera, sometimes in front of the camera but you wouldn’t see them.”

The NIDS investigation was conducted in secrecy for years, but was stymied by the trickster intelligence.

A 2005 book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, revealed details about the ranch to the world and came to the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). With the support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the DIA launched its own study of weird activity at the ranch and the larger issue of UFOs.

In all $22 mil was allocated to the research, reams of documents and reports were generated, but have never been made public.

In december 2017 the New York Times revealed the Pentagon’s secret study of UFOs.  But that article made no mention of the far more mysterious encounters at the ranch.

Lue Elizondo was the intelligence officer in charge of the Pentagon’s program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – better known as AATIP. This Pentagon group studied the now famous UFO videos called Tic Tac, Go Fast, and Gimbal along with other military encounters. Elizondo coordinated with the DIA and the team studying the ranch.

Watch the Tic Tac, Gimble, and Go Fast UFO/UAP videos 

While the strange happenings at the ranch could be considered just a spooky Halloween tale, it also involves national security.

“Let’s take the nature of Skinwalker Ranch out of the equation and just look at it from an intelligence problem,” Elizondo told Mystery Wire. “You have to ask yourself, ‘is this something that is occurring naturally? Is it something that is being deliberately done? Is it something that another nation could be behind trying to influence us?’”

The public got an inside look at the first two scientific studies of the ranch in a 2018 documentary film, Hunt for the Skinwalker. This film helped inspire a television program about the new owner of the ranch, Utah businessman Brandon Fugal, who has financed his own scientific study.

Fugal’s team has documented the inexplicable activity that is once again spiking in the Uintah Basin.

---

Prisoner for free speech

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE

10 september 2020

Julian Assange has been detained by the British authorities since being forced out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was under the permanent surveillance of the CIA. His extradition hearing, which was delayed by the pandemic, began on Monday.

If he is extradited to the US, Assange risks being sentenced to a hundred years in prison under the Espionage Act. It is the first time in history that this law, which doesn’t distinguish between spying and whistleblowing, has been applied to a journalist – though the US assistant attorney for national security says ‘Julian Assange is no journalist’. Edward Snowden, also charged under the Espionage Act (in a case Dan Schiller wrote about in 2013), disagrees, commenting that ‘this is no longer about Julian Assange. This case will decide the future of media.’

Once upon a time, the mainstream media considered Assange a champion of freedom of speech: the WikiLeaks founder published his revelations under the auspices of major newspapers. But since the 2016 leak of the internal emails of the US Democratic Party, journalists have abandoned the whistleblower.

Prisoner for free speech

by Serge Halimi

CNN correspondent Jim Acosta returned to the White House on 17 November, a few days after a US judge had forced President Donald Trump to reverse the revocation of his press pass. Smiling before 50 or more photographers and cameramen, Acosta said triumphantly: ‘This was a test and I think we passed the test. Journalists need to know that in this country their First Amendment rights of freedom of the press are sacred, they’re protected in our constitution. Throughout all of this I was confident and I thought that … our rights would be protected as we continue to cover our government and hold our leaders accountable.’ Fade-out, happy ending.

Julian Assange probably did not watch the moving conclusion of this story live on CNN. He sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London six years ago, and his life there has become that of a prisoner: he cannot go outside for fear of being arrested by the British police, then probably extradited to the US; his access to communications is limited and he has been harassed repeatedly since Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, decided to please the US and make conditions less comfortable for his ‘guest’ (see Ecuador veers to neoliberalism, in this issue).

The reason for his detention, and the threat of several decades in prison in the US (in 2010 Trump wanted him executed), is his WikiLeaks website which has been behind the major revelations that have inconvenienced the world’s powerful over the last decade: photographic evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, US industrial espionage, secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. The dictatorship of former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was shaken by the leaking of a US State Department cable that referred to this kleptocracy, a US ally, as a ‘sclerotic regime’ and ‘quasi-mafia’. WikiLeaks also revealed that two senior figures in France’s Socialist Party, François Hollande and Pierre Moscovici, had visited the US embassy in Paris in June 2006 to say that they regretted the vigour of President Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the US invasion of Iraq.

What the ‘left’ cannot forgive Assange for is WikiLeaks’ publication of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. They believe this favoured Russian designs and Trump’s election, and forget that, in this matter, WikiLeaks only unveiled her efforts to sabotage Bernie Sanders’s campaign during the Democratic primaries. In 2016 media around the world, especially in the United States, eagerly relayed the information, as they had done with previous leaks, without editors being called foreign spies or threatened with imprisonment.

The US authorities’ relentless pursuit of Assange is encouraged by the cowardice of many journalists who have abandoned him to his fate or even delight in his misfortune. MSNBC star anchor Christopher Matthews, formerly a Democratic Party bigwig, even suggested that the US secret service should ‘pull one of those Israeli numbers and just grab him.’

Serge Halimi is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique

 Download a ‘Taking Sides’ ebook

Public debt: embracing the new reality

 

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From Athens to Madrid, everyone once knew the function of public debt. It was a bogeyman, our terror of which seemed to justify successive waves of austerity measures and to convince citizens they needed to tighten their belts in order to avoid the next catastrophe hovering on the horizon.

Things have changed. Before Covid-19, politicians would never have argued for the massive increases in public debt we are seeing today. The pandemic has also revealed the cost of the austerity policies applied since the 1980s. It would be difficult — for the time being – for politicians to further cut hospital services, the education system or social security for the most precarious. And, since governments remain averse to extracting money from the richest, reviving a dying economy requires them to legitimise the rise in public debt.

The rhetoric of belt-tightening will come back to haunt us, as it did in 2009-2011 as a result of the enormous deficits caused by rescuing the banks that collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis. Until then, neoliberalism has conceded a significant defeat by demonstrating the ease with which the economy can adapt to political imperatives: now, everything that used to be considered impossible seems trivial. We will have to remember this.

In this ebook :

• ‘Markets now rule the world’, by Wolfgang Streeck
• ‘Debt-ridden Europe is repeating our mistakes’, by Rafael Correa
• ‘Africa borrows on the open market’, by Sanou Mbaye
• ‘Greece: pay now, live later’, by Renaud Lambert
• ‘The defeat of Europe’, by Yanis Varoufakis

Taking Sides is a series of ebooks published by Le Monde diplomatique. In each ebook, we are releasing the most significant articles from our English-language archive since 1996, on a topic that merits your attention.

America, the panic room

‘Nobody is sure of anything anymore’

Both political parties in the US believe the other side is plotting a takeover of the nation that will end American democracy. The panic, fear, ranting and scolding has reached unbearable levels.

by Thomas Frank 

Joe Biden and his wife Jill, 20 August 2020
Olivier Douliery · AFP · Getty

In this, the worst year of everyone’s life, I had a very pleasant summer. For reasons of family necessity, I returned for the month of July to the house in suburban Kansas City in which I grew up — a slightly dilapidated shingle home that is situated in a neighbourhood of vast green lawns and imposing fake-baronial mansions. There I spent the month reading novels about World War II, making minor repairs to the sagging homestead, watching old movies, drinking Missouri wine — and quite often I was able to forget that there was a deadly pandemic and a full economic collapse in the world around me. In the mornings the sun would be shining, the flowers intensely fragrant, the car traffic thin to non-existent. I would climb on my bicycle and ride the silent byways of what is probably the most beautiful city in America, and when I had completed my exercise I would turn on Twitter and grab the newspaper out of the driveway and...

Bang. There it would be, just like the day before: panic, confusion, accusation, denunciation. Videos of people yelling at each other in public, of people brandishing firearms, of people driving cars through crowds of protesters, of people hysterically reciting passages from the nation’s founding documents as they tried to cling to sanity.

New symptoms of degeneration every day, and above them all, the growing feeling that no one really knows what the hell is going on.

Two items from the Kansas City Star for 14 July 2020:

• At a barbecue restaurant near my family’s house, a man reportedly walked in wearing a bright red Trump hat but no antiviral face mask. When the kid at the cash register (the kid is paid $8.50 per hour, the paper notes) asked the man to cover his nose and mouth as per local rules, the man flipped up his shirt like Clint Eastwood in an Italian western to let the kid see that he was carrying a pistol.

• That day’s main front-page news item announced that the state of Kansas was experiencing ‘uncontrolled spread’ of coronavirus, a conclusion the Star reached not by sifting reports coming in from different parts of that state, but instead by looking at a national epidemic map on the Internet; it seems the distant authority figures who control this particular map had moved Kansas from the red category (bad) to the dark red category (worse). And that, plus some local details, was the story; that was the shocking headline for the two million people of greater Kansas City: something had changed on an official-looking website somewhere.
No one really knows anything

I am not saying that making a news story out of a map on the Internet is lazy journalism; on the contrary, it’s typical in America these days. Regional newspapers can’t sift through reports from all across the state where they’re situated, because generally speaking they no longer have enough reporters to do a job like that. Like many comparable newsgathering operations in America, the Kansas City Star has been sold from owner to owner for years, haemorrhaging talent all the while. It sold its landmark office building a few years ago. Its corporate owner went into bankruptcy in February. In July it was purchased by a hedge fund based in New Jersey.
New symptoms of degeneration every day, and above them all, the growing feeling that no one really knows what the hell is going on

That is where we are in America, year 2020: no one really knows anything for sure anymore, and the death of newspapers is only the beginning of the problem. Thanks to the unprecedented quarantine lockdowns across the country, personal interaction with other humans is problematic; public buildings are closed or highly restricted; murder rates are spiking; people are afraid to fly; schools are online only; people are acting out scenes from nightmare cowboy movies; Fox News is dazzling your elderly father with images of violent disorder; and the only reason his old-fashioned phone rings anymore is so a computerised voice can threaten him with imprisonment unless he wires thousands of dollars at once to the computer’s bank account.

Meanwhile, hurricanes are lining up to pummel Louisiana and there are so many wildfires in California the sky is orange. Everyone is depressed. Things are falling apart and there is no one to put them back together. When I was younger, this country’s leaders seemed to specialise in reassuring people during dark times, but the current occupant of the White House has no interest in that, only in wriggling out of the blame. Self-absorbed, incapable of truthful utterance, Donald Trump has reacted to his people’s agony like a man watching a National Geographic TV show about the sad travails of some distant species.

The best summary I have seen of our epistemological predicament in Covidtime came from the mayor of Kansas City when the Star asked him to comment on a detachment of federal agents who had reportedly been sent to the city but whom no one had seen or heard from. Said he, ‘with frustration’, ‘You can’t verify it because nothing can be verified.’
Fears of the end of something big

When nothing can be verified, the imagination takes over. And it doesn’t require much imagination in Covidtime to launch our fears into the stratosphere. Americans are facing the end of the world, we imagine, or the end of our way of life, or the end of something big and important, something we can’t quite put our finger upon but that we’re really upset about.

There are at least a dozen of these fear complexes running as I write this. Fear of what a thoroughly Republicanised Supreme Court will do. Fear of cops beating and killing without accountability. Fear of riots in the streets. Fear that people will lose their jobs for showing insufficient liberalism. Fear of people who refuse to wear masks. Fear of masks themselves as a kind of muzzle, a negation of your personhood mandated by some faraway power that you have never heard of.
Trump has shown no interest in putting in the work. No interest in finding common ground ... in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show to get the attention he cravesBarack Obama

This being an election year, the Number One fear is political: that American democracy itself is sick or is about to collapse into dictatorship. By now this is a familiar tune, of course: liberals have been trying to scare one another with it ever since Donald Trump was elected (1). For years, celebrated journalists and social media superstars have denounced Trump as a Russian agent and described his every screwup as part of a diabolical plot against democracy. Comparisons of his tenure to Watergate have been commonplace since he was sworn in. A former Wall Street executive became famous in 2017 for enumerating the many tiny ways the idiot president was supposedly dragging us to authoritarianism; the next year, two Harvard professors got on the bestseller list with a scholarly book called How Democracies Die. This president, went the terrifying media story in those days, doesn’t respect norms or traditions, he doesn’t respect the media, he doesn’t respect the foreign policy establishment, and he lives to do what Vladimir Putin tells him to do.

Liberals don’t talk about ‘Russiagate’ much anymore, but they don’t really need to. The cultural rule of Covidtime — that everything must be cranked in the direction of maximum panic and urgency — has churned those old fears into a hurricane of anxiety which seems to gain strength the closer we get to election day. ‘I Fear that We are Witnessing the End of American Democracy’, runs a recent headline in the New York Times. An essay that is now being passed around by my liberal friends bears the headline ‘We Don’t Know how to Warn you any Harder. America is Dying’ (2). The current cover story in The Atlantic magazine compares the upcoming election to 9/11: all the political experts can see that a disaster is coming — that Trump will try to discredit the results — but no one knows what to do about it. Similar warnings of impending political doom — including one written by retired Army officers — arrive over social media literally every day.

What makes this moment fascinating as well as horrifying is that Trump supporters claim to tremble at this same fear. A coup d’état is indeed coming, they say, only it is liberals within the administrative and media elite who are planning it. Ironically, the right derives its fear of this coming leftwing takeover... from liberal whining about a rightwing takeover! The Russiagate investigation, they argue, was in fact a coup attempt driven by ‘anti-Trump conspirators across the US government and in the press’, in the words of a popular 2019 book. And all these present-day liberal fears of a Trumpist assault on democracy, they argue, are merely evidence of the liberals’ own plans to assault a democracy that just happens to love Trump — a false pretext that is being built up so that action can be taken later on. The liberals, this argument goes, are dropping hints of their conspiracy now ‘so that when it happens you won’t think it was a conspiracy’ (3), a super-ingenious double-axel bit of reasoning performed for readers by Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official who gained fame in 2016 for comparing that year’s election to a rebellion of passengers on a hijacked airliner (4).

Demonstrators confronting police in Rochester, New York, 6 September 2020
Michael M Santiago · Getty
Pageants of panic

The Covid epidemic forced both Democrats and Republicans to cancel their in-person conventions, ordinarily the high point of the political year, and to substitute in their place two barely watchable TV spectaculars — basically, four nights of poorly produced solo performances by each party’s celebrities. In some ways the two spectacles were quite different from one another — the Republicans shouted and snarled, the Democrats put more emphasis on ethnic diversity and the moral virtue of their leaders. But in the broadest of senses these Covidtime convos were very similar. Both were pageants of panic that encouraged viewers to believe the absolute worst about their opponents and also to hope that cool sane normalcy might return, if only the right candidate prevailed in November.

For the Democrats, the panic part came easy. They merely had to reiterate what the mainstream news media have been saying for four years: that Donald Trump is a menace to our tradition of government; that he has a soft spot for bigots; that he has bungled the nation’s response to the pandemic; that he is obviously incompetent; that he has cast doubt on the electoral process in all sorts of ways. This was especially easy for the Democrats to do because each of these charges is more or less accurate.

Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois, called Trump a ‘coward in chief’ who has failed US soldiers with his insufficient hawkishness towards Russia. Pop singer Billie Eilish announced that ‘Donald Trump is destroying our country and everything we care about.’ Andrew Cuomo, governor of the state of New York, reprising his well-known role as the embodiment of administrative competence (5), implied that Trumpism itself was a kind of virus.

Former president Barack Obama was professorial and sober as he summarised the dangers of Trumpism. He allowed that he had expected the TV billionaire to rise to the job of chief magistrate once Obama had handed it off to him. ‘But he never did,’ Obama intoned. Trump ‘has shown no interest in putting in the work. No interest in finding common ground ... no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.’ Obama proceeded to blame the entire coronavirus death toll on Trump, as well as the destruction of our ‘proud reputation around the world’, whatever that might be. Addressing the Republicans’ professed concerns about election integrity, Obama topped the right’s double axel with a triple: ‘That’s how a democracy withers,’ Obama intoned. ‘Until it’s no democracy at all.’

What a friend we have in Joe Biden: this was the convention’s other outstanding theme. Obama called his former vice-president ‘a brother’. Bernie Sanders applied the words, ‘empathetic ... honest ... decent’. There was little discussion of Biden’s long career in Washington, in part because Biden’s actual record on trade and crime would send voters reeling in disgust, but also because in Covidtime all conflicts must come down to good versus evil. Or, as Biden put it himself, the striving of light to ‘overcome this season of darkness in America’.

‘All elections are important,’ Biden told viewers, in his lovably clumsy way. ‘But we know in our bones this one is more consequential.’ It ‘will determine what America is going to look like for a long, long time. Character is on the ballot, compassion is on the ballot, decency, science, democracy, they’re all on the ballot.’ The former vice-president did descend briefly into the realm of fact: America during the pandemic had shown ‘by far the worst performance of any nation on earth’. But overall he tried to keep things on a spiritual plane, a place where abstract concepts fought momentous battles: ‘May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light join in the battle for the soul of the nation.’
Where did the inequality talk go?

In decades gone by, Democratic conventions always had a very predictable grand theme: this was the party of the middle class, the ones who looked out for your economic interests and made sure the powerful played by the rules. As the years passed, the message conformed less and less to reality, but this was the party’s historic brand image, and they were careful to remind you of it.

Not this time. Yes, there were references here and there to people suffering in the downturn caused by Trump’s pandemic. But by and large, the middle class theme was not emphasised this time around. For someone who has spent their life writing about business and labour and deregulation and inequality — about class — it was a little bit disorienting. What happened to all that stuff I used to care about? Where were the Dems who used to talk so compellingly about inequality? Where had that idea gone in Covidtime?

One place it went was the Republican convention, held the next week. Indeed, the Democrats’ old theme came up in the very first speech on the very first night. Right after the Pledge of Allegiance, the stage was taken by young Charlie Kirk, founder of a college group that denounces leftwing professors, who urged us to enlist in the class war. ‘For decades, ruling-class leaders in both parties sold out our future,’ he told viewers. ‘To China. To faceless corporations. And to self-serving lobbyists.’ (Yes, a Republican denounced corporations and lobbyists.) ‘They did it to preserve their own power. And enrich themselves. All while rigging the system to hold down the good, decent, middle-class patriots striving to build a family and pursue a decent life.’

The following speaker then assailed teachers’ unions.

Panic is the sexy, sobbing frenzy-theme that everyone wants to claim for their own this year, and while Democrats had warned of systemic racism and the danger Trump posed to democratic institutions, they were hopelessly outgunned in the panic challenge. Republicans are masters of the world-turned-upside-down nightmare And they played upon the ambient anxiety of 2020 like Vladimir Horowitz upon a Steinway concert grand. Put these liberals back in charge, they proceeded to warn, and you would get not just a threat to democracy, but the end of civilisation itself. You would get riots, like the handful of violent protests that broke out over the summer. Property would be destroyed. Statues would be torn down. The suburbs would be legislated into nonexistence (a classic racist trope). And none of it would be reported fairly because the news media as well as experts of every category have been utterly hypnotised by the ululating cry of senseless, anarchic liberalism.

• Thus Jim Jordan (a US Representative from Ohio): ‘Look at what’s happening in American cities’; ‘crime, violence, and mob rule’; ‘Democrats won’t let you go to work, but they’ll let you riot.’

• Thus Mark and Patty McCloskey (a wealthy couple from St Louis, Missouri, who became famous for pointing guns at protesters): ‘They want to abolish the suburbs altogether’; ‘your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America’; ‘the mob, spurred on by their allies in the media, will try to destroy you.’

• Thus Kimberly Guilfoyle (TV personality and Trump family intimate, who roared as though she were speaking in a crowded stadium rather than an empty room somewhere in DC): ‘this election is a battle for the soul of America’; ‘they want to destroy this country, and everything we have fought for and hold dear’; ‘America! It’s all on the line!’

• And thus Donald Trump Jr: ‘In the past, both parties believed in the goodness of America ... This time, the other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded. Freedom of thought. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. The rule of law.’

And that was just Day One of the Republican convention, reader. Other evenings were dedicated to constructing an alternate vision of reality in which Trump was innocent of every charge. He had done as well as anyone could with Covid, the Republicans said. They blamed the pandemic on China, insisted that economic recovery was just around the corner, and asserted that Trump was not a racist, a task that was undertaken by a succession of black professional athletes. Needless to say, these interventions were not nearly as successful as the party’s prolonged paean to panic.

Ivanka Trump at the White House, 27 August 2020
Alex Wong · Getty
‘The people’s president’

To really understand this year’s election, though, you must first understand the way the mainstream news media in this country have been dumping on Donald Trump for four years now. The Washington Post routinely publishes three or four op-eds per day trashing the man in the harshest possible terms; news stories in respectable outlets constantly label his statements as falsehoods and outright lies. The object, obviously, has been to wreck Trump’s popularity with the public, but it has also had the ironic effect of setting the bar for Trump himself pretty low. Here is a man Americans have heard described, day in and day out, as a human worm, as a man without virtues, as the lowest grade of despicable, maybe even a traitor. What if the Republicans presented evidence that he was actually a good guy, a man who cared?

The zillion-volt jolt of cognitive dissonance this would deliver to the cerebellum of the nation must have seemed like payoff enough to make such an effort worthwhile. And this is what explains the Republican convention’s one moment of unambiguous triumph: the grand finale, when the long succession of boring words uttered by unmoving speakers from an empty room gave way suddenly to a video of Ivanka Trump, the president’s stylish daughter, striding out of the White House between ranks of American flags, applauded by an actual, live, unmasked audience — a shocking gesture of Covid defiance.

As a slight breeze ruffled her perfect heiress hair, Ivanka stepped before a microphone set up on the south lawn of the White House and ushered us into an alternate reality where Donald Trump — ‘the people’s president’, the ‘champion of the American workers’, the ‘voice for the forgotten men and women of this country’ — was the good guy and everyone else in media and politics were the assholes, the liars, the deplorables. The president, she told us, is beloved by his grandchildren. He is beloved by ‘stoic machinists and steelworkers’ who tear up when they meet him. He has ‘a deep compassion for those who have been treated unfairly’, especially the imprisoned. He will, she told us, do anything for the dairy farmers of Wisconsin. And just imagine how bad it made him feel when he had to sacrifice ‘the strongest, most inclusive economy in a lifetime . . . and close it down to save American lives’.

Donald Trump himself then made his way out to the podium and, after accepting his party’s nomination and assuring viewers he felt normal human emotions, inverted Joe Biden’s Manichean imagery: ‘America is not a land cloaked in darkness; America is the torch that enlightens the entire world.’ Biden himself, Trump went on, was precisely what Trump himself is often accused of being: a fraud who has deceived the working class. He ‘took the donations of blue-collar workers, gave them hugs and even kisses’ — this a reference to Biden’s well-known habit of displaying unwanted affection for the women in his audience — ‘and told them he felt their pain, and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship our jobs to China and many other distant lands,’ the president charged. Everything you thought you knew was wrong.

And the ‘political class’ of the country? They are scoundrels, every last one of them. ‘Washington insiders,’ Trump pretended to recount, ‘pleaded with me to let China continue stealing our jobs, ripping us off and robbing our country blind, but I kept my word to the American people.’ Oh, these villains were demonic, vituperative, treasonous, in love with power — and they would enact a programme of pure madness if you gave them a chance: they would ‘eliminate’ the country’s borders (‘in the middle of a global pandemic’), give illegal immigrants ‘free taxpayer-funded lawyers’ while defunding police departments, encouraging riots, and releasing ‘400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighbourhoods’. Let the old ruling class have its way again and it would soon be the end of the world as they set happily about consigning proud Americans to eternal lumpen-hood while bathing themselves in moral splendour. These liberals, the president charged, ‘want to eliminate school choice while they enroll their children into the finest private schools in the land. They want to open the borders while living in walled off compounds and communities and the best neighbourhoods in the world. They want to defund the police while they have armed guards for themselves. This November, we must turn the page forever on this failed political class.’
Tiny truth behind the bullshit

There is a reason I don’t brush off these preposterous lines of Trump’s as empty falsehoods, fact-check failures to be clucked at and dismissed, and that is because beneath his billows of bullshit there is a tiny kernel of truth.

Everyone knows that a certain kind of left politics is fashionable among society’s upper crust; the radicalisation of America’s prestige media and its fanciest colleges and its elite cultural institutions in the last few years has made this obvious. A leading example of the last few weeks: NPR, a highbrow radio network much beloved of white-collar America, recently lent its gigantic megaphone to the author of a book called In Defense of Looting. Another example I saw with my own eyes a short while ago: a super-expensive, high-fashion T-shirt with these words printed on it: ‘We should all be feminists.’

‘They are coming after me because I am fighting for you,’ Trump said in his speech accepting the nomination. ‘That is what is happening.’

Uh, no. Trump is not fighting for us. But ‘they’ are indeed coming after him: that part is true. And if ‘they’ hate Donald Trump, well, for a lot of people that’s good enough. He is the enemy of their enemy. And we welcome their hatred.

For much of America, I suspect, this is Conflict Number One of these horrible years. Not Russiagate. Not the president’s smashing of norms or his inappropriate use of the military. Not even his incredible bungling of the Covid pandemic, in which his incompetence can be measured in the tens of thousands of corpses.

No, it’s this peculiar class conflict: Trump versus the more enlightened reaches of upper America. We have watched them come together against him with a kind of upper-class solidarity that most of us have never seen before. Their hate for him does not make Trump a good president — he is objectively an awful one — but it does help to rally people around him who would ordinarily have nothing to do with a vain fool of his ilk.

The scorn of upper America is just about all Trump has left. His proud, roaring economy is now a piece of smoking metal wrapped around a tree; the brave, industrious citizens he used to hail are now watching TV in the basement while they wait out a deadly disease that other industrialised countries have brought under control. Fear of judgmental liberals is literally all this man has going for him as he heads toward election day.

Why do Americans despise liberals? The answer is in our face, all the time. Liberal leaders may have given up talking about the middle class, but they have become absolutely adamant about their own goodness; about their contempt for their less refined inferiors. The liberalism of scolding is the result, and it is everywhere in Covidtime, playing constantly on a social media outlet near you. As I write this there is a video making the rounds in which a throng of protesters for Black Lives Matter (a cause I happen to believe in) corner a woman eating at a sidewalk café; they shriek at her, demanding she raise her fist in conformity with them. Watching it, one starts to understand what living in the McCarthy era must have felt like (6).

Similar but larger episodes — society-wide paroxysms of accusation and denunciation — seem to sweep over social media every single day. Three acquaintances of mine — all of them well to the left of liberal — have seen their reputations attacked in episodes of this kind, and in each of them the judicial process by which they were declared guilty was outrageously unfair, more like a political show trial than a judicious weighing of arguments. I would hazard a guess that millions of other Americans know of similar stories.

Granted, this doesn’t have much to do with Joe Biden, who has spent the last month reaching out to moderate Republican voters in the suburbs. To Biden’s credit, he seems to be a decent individual, a relic from a culture that found a way to tolerate or forgive the moral failings of ordinary citizens. Ordinarily such a man would easily defeat the bungling incompetent who currently sits in the White House. But the broader political picture makes things slightly more dubious.

That liberalism has become a politics of upper-class bullying and of character assassination is an impression that daily becomes more and more difficult to avoid. To say that people regard this form of politics with hate and fear would be a vast understatement. Panic, confusion, accusation, shrieking denunciation: that is the world into which we are descending, and plenty of Americans don’t blame Trump for it. They blame liberals. They blame the rich. Reader, they blame you.


Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2016.
Original text in English

(1) Elizabeth Drew, ‘Is this Watergate?’, 6 February 2017.

(2) Umair Haque, ‘We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying’, Eudaimonia, 30 August 2020.

(3) Michael Anton, ‘The coming coup?’, 9 April 2020.

(4) These fears are much older than the present administration. Many liberals argued that George W Bush ‘stole’ the 2004 election and warned in 2008 that he was preparing to do it again. Conservatives, for their part, have fretted for decades about a takeover in which leftists press down a Stalinist system on freedom-loving Americans. In 2009 and 2010, you will recall, Glenn Beck became a TV superstar warning that President Barack Obama embodied this very threat.

(5) Cuomo is widely admired among liberals for having appeared on TV looking proficient and knowledgeable in the early days of the epidemic. His actual record, however, is closer to that of a Trumpian bungler. In March 2020 Cuomo ordered the elder care facilities of New York State to admit coronavirus patients without testing them to see if they were still contagious. Since much of the American death toll from the disease has been among nursing home residents, the wisdom of Cuomo’s order is, to say the least, much questioned.

(6) See Lauren Victor, ‘I was the woman surrounded by BLM protesters at a D.C. restaurant. Here’s why I didn’t raise my fist’, 3 September 2020.

The labour we really need

Those we once called ‘unskilled’ are key workers

Suddenly what used to be classed as unskilled labour has proved in our global emergency to be crucial to modern life; truck drivers, shelf stackers, Amazon warehouse workers are now respected as key workers.

by Lizzie O’Shea

The labour we really need↑


Essential jobs: as Covid-19 spreads, warehouse workers demand better conditions and protective measures
Andrew Harrer · Bloomberg · Getty

Working life for a lot of Americans starts at McDonald’s. Former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan claimed flipping burgers was central to his understanding of the American Dream. ‘One of the things that’s really fun about working at McDonald’s is to get really fast at all of this stuff,’ recounted Amazon head Jeff Bezos, who spent time in his younger days at the fastfood giant. ‘[I would] see how many eggs you can crack in a period of time and still not get any shell in them.’ It proved a fitting start for the career of the future billionaire, as the embrace of wage-slave-misery-as-optimised-skill-building has since become a signature of his business strategy.

More than 750,000 people work for Amazon, most picking and packing orders in fulfilment centres for dispatch to customers. McDonald’s used to be the iconic workplace of last resort, but Amazon fulfilment centres now compete for the title. One Amazon worker described his designated centre as an ‘existential shithole’, says writer Emily Guendelsberger.

Retail sales workers, cashiers, fastfood and service workers are some of the most common US occupations. Jobs are low-paid, usually repetitive, considered dead-end, and all classified as ‘unskilled’. Yet the work required of people in such roles is often anything but unskilled.

Jobs classified as unskilled usually require minimal training and do not require a high school or college degree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in 2018 the percentage of workers in the US in jobs with no minimum education requirement was 31%; another 40% were only required to have a high school diploma. That leaves many Americans working in jobs classified as unskilled or low-skilled.

Clearing a table in one trip

Yet waiting on tables, talking on the phone, sorting goods, preparing food and serving customers all require dexterity, strength, memory and stamina, as well as hefty reserves of emotional labour in the customer-facing positions. As Brittany Bronson explained in the New York Times, ‘a skilled server assistant can clear a table in one trip versus two, simply with more careful placement of dishes along his forearm or between his knuckles.’ As an adjunct instructor and restaurant server, her position as a member of both the professional and working classes gives her a unique point of view: ‘The terms unskilled and low-skilled labor contradict the care and precision with which my co-workers, who have a variety of educational backgrounds and language fluencies, execute their tasks.’

My truck driver friend points out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like himBarbara Ehrenreich

Performing unskilled jobs may demand skills, but it is a different story when it comes to the management of these workers. The rhetoric we often hear about robots eating our jobs usually relates to the low-paid end of the labour market; less common are discussions about the automation of management. This can include things like just-in-time employee scheduling, which is increasingly optimised through technology, and disproportionately affects unskilled work. A BLS report for the period 2017-18 found that, among workers over 25, 31% of those in unskilled jobs knew their schedule less than one week in advance, compared with only 14% of workers with a BA or higher. Such precarity requires people working in unskilled jobs to be organised and resourceful, and manage their personal lives around paid work.




The supervision of unskilled jobs generally combines arbitrary rules with strict consequences, which again requires that workers themselves be skilful to survive. In call centres, workers are more and more subject to black box voice-recognition algorithmic analysis that monitors tone and tracks performance. Appearing energetic or empathetic, especially when managing a challenging customer, requires multiple proficiencies.

Union official Josh Cullinan points out that the modern fastfood worker uses skills that are foreign to most workers from generations past. A fastfood worker in the average drive-through window will be doing multiple tasks simultaneously. She will take orders from customers via an earpiece, enter them into a programme that conveys the orders to the kitchen, collect and hand bags of food to customers and take payment on electronic systems, all within strict deadlines. On top of this, she is expected to be polite, despite working long shifts that can be physically and emotionally exhausting.

Retail workers are also often required to work with an earpiece, to monitor workflow. ‘These young people are using systems in a way that their grandparents could not understand,’ says Cullinan. Workers have to develop skills in managing the emotional and physical toll of such work, which he says ‘takes knowledge and street smarts’. But this work also calls on new kinds of skills, including acting as an interface between ‘various technical systems that 20 or 30 years ago no workplace was using’.

Yet discussing the skills required to do unskilled jobs belies an undeniable reality: much of this work has been deliberately de-skilled in the traditional industrial sense. By breaking up tasks and requiring workers to repeat them endlessly, unskilled jobs strip away the bargaining power that attends skilled work, and makes such work an emotional slog.

This is one of the themes Guendelsberger returns to in her recent book On the Clock. She worked in a number of low-wage jobs — at Amazon, a call centre, McDonald’s — all classified as unskilled. Her time as an Amazon picker in a fulfilment centre is an example of an unskilled job and de-skilled work. Every task for pickers is allocated by an electronic scan gun that provides precise instructions and a specific amount of time for completion, with a countdown in seconds. The work was not difficult but it was stressful and painful, to the point that Guendelsberger was rationing painkillers. The boredom of the work presented a greater challenge than the physical toll of the vast distances she walked on a daily basis. ‘It’s hard to communicate how big a deal the boredom is: it’s much easier to write about pain,’ she writes. ‘The long days of lonely monotony brought me close to walking out more than once.’




These jobs are deliberately dehumanising: ‘All Amazon’s metrics and ticking clocks and automatic penalties are meant to constrain the inefficiencies of human workers, so they act more like robots.’ The tendency of the digital revolution, like the industrial revolution, is to treat people as nothing more than productive inputs, devoid of humanity.
It's hard to communicate how big a deal the boredom is: it's much easier to write about pain.

 The long days of lonely monotony brought me close to walking out more than once

Emily Guendelsberger

While repetitive, monotonous work is not uncommon, it does not necessarily correlate with low pay or drudgery. Elite sportspeople often spend their lives practicing a very specific set of skills repeatedly, but such efforts attract a level of recognition and social status that outweigh the downsides. The agonising snare drum part in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (which demands playing the exact same two-bar phrase on repeat for 15 minutes) is excruciatingly stressful by any metric, yet the glory heaped upon such performers often makes it feel worth it. Even jobs considered skilled, like certain engineering, accounting and banking jobs, and even some forms of medicine, increasingly rely on technological systems that change or reduce the skill and knowledge requirements workers need to do their job. Such jobs continue to be relatively well-paid and well-respected, yet the repetitive nature of unskilled jobs is still used to justify their workers receiving the lowest pay in the labour market.

‘We built this city’

Without the work done by people in unskilled jobs, society would cease to function. Building and construction unions have long used the slogan ‘We built this city’. Barbara Ehrenreich recently spoke about her truck driver friend ‘who likes to point out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like him.’ The same is true for jobs in food preparation, customer service delivery and many other kinds of unskilled occupations. People who stock our supermarket shelves and help us access food and clothing are essential to our survival. The slogan of one farm workers’ union in Australia is ‘We feed you’. Many unskilled jobs may be boring, painful, and unpleasant, but it is not the case that they are all ‘bullshit jobs’.

Perhaps what actually unites various unskilled jobs is a lack of respect for those who do them, something that we urgently need to change. For some insight into how this might be done, it is worth looking to the account of a call centre worker who became part of a collective effort to organise his workplace. Union delegates talked to members about a range of issues, but one catalyst for change concerned a particularly enchanting demand — the right to read. As an outbound call centre for political and private polling, the phones automatically dial, meaning that workers can have a fair bit of time between calls, during which they would read. When one worker was told by management to put her book away and instructed to leave, it became a lightning rod for resistance. The workers downed tools, won the right to read and reversed the dismissal of their colleague.

Jeff Bezos channelled his experience in an unskilled job into creating an empire of misery, exploiting those who now work in unskilled jobs for him. Maybe it is time he was made to listen to his workers instead, and to start showing them some respect.

Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer and the author of Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology, Verso, London, 2019. An earlier version of this article was published in The Baffler, no 50, March 2020.
Original text in English

Independent only in name
by Serge Halimi


The clip lasts less than a minute (1). Donald Trump is presiding at a White House signing ceremony on 4 September. He sits behind a huge desk, surrounded by gilt-framed photographs and telephones. Flanking him, behind two small, bare tables, are Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić and his Kosovar counterpart Avdullah Hoti. Trump is clearly revelling in playing the peacemaker, having managed to pressure two countries which had been at war to reach an accord in a region where the EU previously called the shots. He is all the more pleased with himself, even thinking he deserves the Nobel peace prize, as it was Democratic president Bill Clinton who around 20 years ago bombed Serbia.

Then suddenly Trumps declares, ‘Serbia’s committed to opening a commercial office in Jerusalem this month and to move its embassy to Jerusalem in July.’ President Vučić seems surprised by this off-topic announcement; he’s here to sign a bilateral trade agreement with Kosovo. He glances at the document in front of him, then turns to his advisors, looking concerned. Too late: it turns out Binyamin Netanyahu has already sent his congratulations.

President Vučić, doing this favour for Trump and his evangelical voters, who are determined to see Palestine colonised, is almost immediately criticised by the EU for going against its express Middle East policy despite Serbia’s long quest to join the EU. A European official publicly mocks Vučić’s panicked expression when Trump made his Israel announcement. Palestine’s ambassador to Belgrade expresses anger, and Russia’s foreign ministry spokesman shares an unflattering photo from the meeting in which the Serb leader sits in front of Trump in his majesty, like a dunce called before the headmaster.

Three days later, Vučić must ‘clarify’ his position on the Middle East: ‘Serbia has not opened this chapter yet. But we are doing our best to align with EU declarations as much as it is possible. But we do follow our own interests.’

Easier said than done. Vučić is a far-right Serbian nationalist who does not miss the former Yugoslavia (2). But, unlike him, old Yugoslavia’s president, Josip Tito, was a significant figure on the international stage. And Kosovo may have ended its subordinate relationship with Serbia, but only by becoming a US colony. That’s the common dilemma for nationalists: when they sever ties with countries that are geographically and culturally close, the ‘independence’ they gain often comes at the price of subordination to distant powers that regard them with contempt. They have to engage in constant flattery: autocrats in their own little states, but vassals whenever they leave them.

Serge Halimi is president and director of Le Monde diplomatique.

(1) ‘Serbian president Vucic asked about moving embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. ’

(2) See Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin, ‘Serbia’s strongman tightens his grip’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 2020.

Iraqi forces, protesters clash in Baghdad, injuries on both sides


By Thaier Al-Sudani, Haider Kadhim


BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi security forces clashed with anti-government demonstrators in Baghdad on Sunday with at least 39 people, most of them police officers, injured by projectiles unleashed from each side, security officials said.

Police sources said tear gas canisters being fired by security forces had injured at least seven people.

A separate statement from a military spokesman said at least 32 members of the security forces were injured by hand grenades thrown by a group he suggested had hidden among otherwise peaceful protesters, without elaborating.

Politicians have expressed concern at the possibility of peaceful protests being hijacked by rioters, which could set off a spiral of violence such as that witnessed last year.


Renewed anti-government rallies converged on Sunday to mark a year since mass unrest over corruption and widespread deprivation in oil-rich Iraq. More than 500 people have been killed in the disturbances.

Threats, killings and abductions of activists, as well as fatigue and lockdown restrictions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, took the steam out of months-long protests earlier this year. Demonstrators numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands on Sunday.

Earlier in the day, police fired water cannon and tear gas at protesters to prevent them crossing barricades on a bridge leading towards government buildings.


Slideshow ( 5 images ) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-protests-anniversary/iraqi-forces-protesters-clash-in-baghdad-injuries-on-both-sides-idUSKBN27A0IX

“We will not stop protesting to demand our stolen rights. We are the victims of corrupted governments,” said Najim Abdullah, a protester standing near the Jumhuriya bridge in the capital.

Security forces had deployed in force to control protests that began in the morning, and to stop demonstrators crossing Jumhuriya bridge, which leads to the fortified Green Zone that houses government buildings and foreign missions.

Sunday’s protests were more subdued than demonstrations last year where thousands rallied in Baghdad and the south, facing off against security forces and militiamen in clashes that maimed and killed mostly young, jobless demonstrators.


Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who took office in May after his predecessor was driven out by last year’s unrest, has painted himself as a leader who supports demonstrators.

In a televised address on Saturday he pledged to hold early and fair elections, a demand of many pro-democracy activists, and said security forces would this time around not harm any peaceful protesters.

Security forces and unidentified gunmen carried out a fierce crackdown on anti-government disturbances that erupted in October 2019, killing hundreds of mostly unarmed protesters using live gunfire and tear gas.

Protesters accuse the entrenched ruling elite, especially Iranian-backed parties and militia groups, of fuelling endemic graft that kept large swathes of the country in ruins even during times of relative peace.

VIDEO 

Additional reporting by Mohammed Atie in Basra; Writing by Ahmed Rasheed and John Davison in Baghdad; Editing by Mark Heinrich