Top 3 Ways America Has Been Deeply Wounded By Supporting Israel Lobbyists Like Jared Kushner

The ongoing human rights catastrophe provokes rage and provides grounds for political mobilization in the region.

by

Juan Cole

Embassy dedication ceremony. (Photo: CC)

Jared Kushner is essentially an Israeli squatter on Palestinian land in the West Bank, and so it is little wonder that his plan for Palestinians is that they should continue under the Israeli jackboot and that a third of their territory in the West Bank should be given to Israel. The arrogance of this filthy rich privileged Jewish American dismissing dispossessed and disprivileged Palestinians as dumb as rocks for not bending over for him on command is breathtaking.

The United States is a big, powerful, wealthy country and Kushner’s conviction that he can screw over with impunity the poor, surrounded, disorganized Palestinians seems logical.

The fact is, however, that even Great Powers pay a price for doing profound injustices, even if it isn’t immediately obvious how.

Because the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a subject attended with a great deal of noise and propaganda, it is easy to be misunderstood and smeared. So let me state straightforwardly that I am not saying that US support for Israel per se has harmed our nation. I am saying that US support for the Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Occupied Territories since 1967 has been injurious. Here are some of the ways this backing for naked injustice has injured us:

1. Terrorism: The US support for the Israeli ownership of all of Jerusalem injures the religious feelings of 1.8 billion Muslims and it breeds terrorism against the US. It helped get Washington and New York blown up in 2001. I wrote 15 years ago,

“Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.

This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of “the three holy cities.” Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:

"Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious… in the 9/11 commission report:

"According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin’s son-in-law,Aws al Madani."

It wasn’t just that the 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 Americans, it was that they launched the US on two wars (both still going on) and vastly securitized and miltarized American society, paving the way for Trumpian fascism. How deeply America has been harmed, and how many liberties and economic opportunities it has lost for the sake of millenarian dreams of Jerusalem by Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists are incalculable.

2. Opposition: When two people meet, they can hit it off or they can get off on a wrong foot. It is the same with countries. The United States has gotten off on a wrong foot with many of the 1.8 billion Muslims because it supports treating the Palestinians the way white people in the Old South used to treat Black people.

The degree to which Iraqis were influenced to oppose the US presence in their country in the Bush era by US policy of screwing over the Palestinians has usually been overlooked. I wrote at Salon in 2004,

“Sharon wanted to permanently annex about half of the West Bank, and appears to have decided that this action might be made palatable to the U.S. and some European states if he, at the same time, withdrew from Gaza altogether . . .At their joint news conference on April 14, Bush blessed Sharon’s plot. Of the “existing major Israeli population centers,” (i.e. settlements) on the West Bank, Bush said it is “unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” Bush also hailed Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and move its settlers to the West Bank as “historic.”

Translated, what Bush really said was that there would be no return to the 1967 borders and that Israel’s policy of annexing occupied territory and planting large settlements on it — actions forbidden by the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbid permanently acquiring territory by war — had now received the stamp of approval from Washington. Moreover, Sharon was authorized to take further steps unilaterally, without negotiating with the Palestinians.

Combined with the American military assault on Fallujah, Bush’s embrace of Sharon’s position succeeded in making America, in Arab eyes, virtually indistinguishable from Israel. The Egyptian daily al-Jumhuriyyah spoke for many Arabs when it observed in the wake of the Bush-Sharon accord, “the victims being killed daily in Palestine and Iraq are due to the continuation of the occupation … Violence and extremism have increased as a natural response to the brutality of the occupation.”

Before Bush endorsed Sharon’s plan, much of the Arab press and popular opinion had stopped short of such an equation. Many, even those opposed to the U.S. invasion and critical of the occupation, were prepared to acknowledge that not all of those fighting the Americans were noble freedom fighters. Now, the rhetoric and sentiment are swinging the other way.

Sharon’s plan for West Bank annexation and withdrawal from Gaza had held one danger. Hamas, strong in Gaza, might take advantage of an Israeli withdrawal to use the territory as a base for even more suicide bombings. Sharon was determined to wipe out the Hamas leadership so as to cripple its organizational capacity and render it unable or fearful to benefit from a unilateral Israeli pull-back. Thus he launched the rocket attack on Sheikh Yassin on March 22, which was a piece of political theater. A half-blind man in a wheelchair could simply have been arrested (in fact, Yassin served time in an Israeli prison in the 1990s). The point was to inspire fear among his successors.

Hamas is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist party, deriving from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Sheikh Yassin’s extremist writings are widely read among fundamentalists, including those in Iraq. His murder provoked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. Some of them determined to take revenge on the closest ally of the Israelis, the Americans who were occupying them.

The fuse ran from Gaza to Iraq, and ignited in Fallujah. Sunni Arab fundamentalists and Arab nationalists are particularly strong in al-Anbar Province, the site of the notorious centers of opposition to American rule such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Habbaniyah. Fallujah in particular has many Islamists close in their thinking to Hamas. The group that killed the four American civilian security guards in Sunni Arab Fallujah on March 31 identified itself as “Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,” calling the grisly killings a “gift to the Palestinian people.”

American military forces immediately began closing on the city, seeking revenge. Although the link was virtually unreported in the Western press, the ghost of the man in the wheelchair had cast a long shadow over the American occupation of Iraq — one that would grow longer.

Then, on April 2, the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced in his Friday prayer sermon in the southern Shiite city of Kufa that he should be considered the “striking arm” of Hamas “because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same.” On April 3, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued 28 arrest warrants for associates of al-Sadr, and took 13 of them into custody, including Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, his representative in Najaf. The pretext for the arrests was a year-old murder, and the warrants were themselves several months old. It is probable that the decision to act was taken in the light of al-Sadr’s April 2 sermon, by Bush administration officials who feared his movement posed a threat to Israel.”

The Americans in Iraq never understood themselves as Occupiers, but almost all Iraqis saw them that way, and moreover they saw them that way in part because they saw them as neo-Israelis or as the origin and font of Israeli Occupation policy.

3. War footing:  Had the United States held Israel’s feet to the fire and insisted on implementing the Oslo Accords, there would have been a small Palestinian state in 1997 and the entire Israel-Palestinian issue would have been defused. Instead, the wound has gotten redder and deeper and inflamed passions. The Steadfastness Front of countries opposed to the United States mostly had nothing against the US per se, they were angered by the ongoing ethnic cleansing and Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians. Those apologists for the fascist Likud Party who say that Arab support for the Palestinians is insincere have never met an Arab. But ironically they are also admitting that Israeli policies have given cynical politicians pretexts for anti-Americanism.

The US problem with Hizbullah in Lebanon grew out of the Israeli Occupation not only of the Palestinians but also of 10 percent of Lebanon.

The US problem with Iran is driven in part by the Palestine issue. It could turn into a big war.

The US is in Syria still mostly to try to block Iran.

The West Bank colonization project of right wing Jewish nationalism brings in its train conflicts for the United States. Trump’s recent whacking of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani and of the leader of the Iraqi militia, Kata’ib Hizbullah, was in part for the protection of the Likud Party from the backlash its West Bank policies have created in the region.

If there had been an Oslo-style Palestine, its president could just come out and tell Iran and Hizbullah and the Iraqi Shiite militias to stay out of Palestinians’ business. But the ongoing human rights catastrophe, which Kushner attempts to paper over and tries to blame on what he alleges is the stupidity of the Palestinians, provokes rage and provides grounds for political mobilization in the region.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

After Protections Gutted, Audubon Society Dubs Trump Interior Dept. the 'Bird Killer Department'

"When powerful corporate interests tell the Department of Interior to jump, officials there routinely ask 'how high?'"

by

Julia Conley, staff writer

A snowy egret seen in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015. President Donald Trump's new proposal to roll back a century-old rule protecting migrating birds from "incidental" harm by corporations would harm millions of birds, conservation groups say. (Photo: Kishore Bhargava/Flickr/cc)

Green groups and conservationists are accusing the Trump administration of taking instructions straight from the fossil fuel industry after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday proposed rolling back a century-old law protecting birds from industrial accidents.

The agency, which is part of the Interior Department, announced it is moving to finalize a rollback of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (MBTA), which prohibits the killing of birds, nests, or eggs without a permit "by any means or in any manner"—including accidentally.

"The Trump administration's Bird Killer Department—formerly known as the Interior—just gets crueler and more craven every day." —David Yarnold, Audubon SocietyThe proposal comes two years after the Independent Petroleum Producers Association, a former client of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, called on the agency to roll back the MBTA.

"When powerful corporate interests tell the Department of Interior to jump, officials there routinely ask 'how high?'" said Alan Zibel, research director for Public Citizen's Corporate Presidency Project. "This particular giveaway is a direct request of a former client of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and proves once again that the Trump administration is intent on attacking conservation laws in every way possible... Bernhardt has no interest in holding big energy companies accountable."

Dubbing the Interior Department the Trump administration's "Bird Killer Department," Audubon Society president David Yarnold called the rule change "cruel and craven."

The Trump administration’s Bird Killer Department—formerly known as the @Interior—just gets crueler and more craven every day. And today they're doubling down despite the fact that America did not elect this administration to kill birds. #ProtectTheBirds https://t.co/5bG4MBgEdT

— David Yarnold (@david_yarnold) January 30, 2020

For decades under the MBTA, companies have been fined and prosecuted for failing to adopt measures to prevent migrating birds from flying into infrastructure, being killed in oil spills, and dying due to actions by construction crews and projects.

Up to 64 million birds per year are killed by power lines, while up to seven million are killed by communication towers annually. 

Industry leaders and the Trump administration have argued that companies should only be held accountable for purposefully killing birds—not if accidents result in their deaths, as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill did when the disaster killed more than one million birds.

The agency released an opinion in 2017, around the time that the IPPA made its request, saying companies should not be liable for accidents that kill birds. 

Since the opinion was released, the administration has reportedly drastically cut down on its investigations of bird deaths and advised companies that precautions to keep birds safe are unnecessary.

The president hopes to finalize the rule change before the general election in November, which would make it more difficult for a future president for reverse Trump's action.

The rollback has been condemned by 17 former Interior officials and hundreds of conservation groups, including the National Wildlife Federation.

"The rule sends an irresponsible—and legally incorrect—signal to industry that common-sense measures to protect birds like the snowy egret, wood duck and greater sandhill crane are no longer needed," said Collin O'Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. "We urge the Trump administration to reverse course and restore protections for America's birds."

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Corporate Media Are the Real 'Sanders Attack Machine'

The real Sanders attack machine isn’t the mythical machine run by Sanders to take down his opponents; it’s run by the establishment Democrats and their media counterparts.

by

Julie Hollar

"The liberal Bernie Sanders tightens his grip in Iowa." (Photo: Screenshot)

As the Iowa caucuses approach, corporate media are beginning to panic.

“Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity,” insisted  Jonathan Chait in New York magazine (1/28/20). The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman (1/20/20)—among many others (FAIR.org, 1/24/20)—revived the 2016 media trend of tarring Sanders as “Trumpian.”

Electability advice from the pundit who wrote “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination” (New York, 2/5/16).

The Never Trumper holdouts—an increasingly endangered species—are as scared as the establishment Democrats. “Bernie Can’t Win,” David “Axis of Evil” Frum wrote pleadingly in the Atlantic (1/27/20). “Bernie Sanders’s Trump-Like Campaign Is a Disaster for Democrats,” cried the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (1/27/20). “Anyone But Trump? Not So Fast,” counseled the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (1/24/20).

The Wall Street–funded Democratic think tank Third Way has also pulled out all the stops against Sanders’ rise—with media’s help. The group put out “A Warning” to Iowa Democrats (1/28/20), advising them that,

because of media negligence and the strategic calculation of his rivals, you have not seen much real exploration of the politically toxic background and ideas of the current polling leader in Iowa and a national co-frontrunner.

The memo proceeded to offer a lengthy list of ways Trump would attack Sanders—an easy list for them to compose, since some of them, such as that he’ll be called a socialist and that Medicare for All is unpopular, are ones the Third Way itself has used to attack Sanders.

The media have been happy to offer a platform for this message. The Washington Post recently gave Third Way an op-ed column (1/15/20) to make its case that “Bernie Sanders’s agenda makes him the definition of unelectable.” USA Today (1/29/20) likewise gave Third Way leaders space to charge, “Democrats Court Doom by Backing Bernie Sanders. His Ideas Are Toxic Outside Blue America.” And the group has been popping up in the latest round of centrist-source articles (among other usual suspects, like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville), in which establishment sources make unsubstantiated claims that reporters pass on without comment.

One of these ideas is that Sanders has flown under the radar, evading attacks or scrutiny from both his opponents and the media. “It’s past time for other Democrats to come off the sidelines and for the media to start doing its job to vet a serious contender for the nomination,” Third Way’s Matt Bennett told NBCNews.com (1/25/20) in an article headlined, “‘Oh My God, Sanders Can Win’: Democrats Grapple With Bernie Surge in Iowa.” In Politico (1/27/20), he ratcheted up the rhetoric: “[The media] let him get away with murder. They let him bluster past hard questions.”

Democrats are alarmed that too many Democrats want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee, NBC (1/25/20) reported.

Not all media observers agreed. In a bizarre “do they have an editor” moment, the Washington Post (1/26/20) published two news articles making opposite observations: “Bernie Sanders Faces Barrage of Attacks From Rivals as Polls Point to Surge in Early-Voting States” and “Rivals Aren’t Throwing a Lot of Roadblocks in Front of Sanders.” The former, by Chelsea Janes and Sean Sullivan, pointed to recent interviews and campaign messaging coming from Sanders’ opponents that target him. The latter, by David Weigel, reported on some of the same evidence, but came to the opposite conclusion, because some of the attacks were made in venues without a broad reach (a South Carolina newspaper, a campaign email) and some were ineffective. (Many “voters were unmoved” by Biden and Klobuchar’s attacks on Sanders as “upending the Obama legacy.”)

The Weigel piece argued that,

All of Sanders’s rivals spend time, sometimes after a worried voter asks for it, explaining how they will pay for their plans without busting the budget. Sanders does not get these questions and spent months at town halls where he asked voters to describe their crises — health-care bills, student debt — so he could explain why only an unfair economy would even allow the problems to exist.

To set the record straight: Sanders has gotten a great deal of media scrutiny and pushback, as FAIR noted back in 2016 (5/25/16) and David Sessions (New Republic, 1/28/20) has usefully updated. Sessions wrote:

The notion that Sanders is sailing toward primary victories with nary a soul bothering to pose a question about his record or electability is a relic of the 2016 Democratic primary, when Hillary Clinton and her supporters grew frustrated with his durable presence in the race and pundits puzzled over the fact that Sanders polled better against Donald Trump. The common explanation settled on was that Sanders’s popularity was a mirage resting on his lack of scrutiny. But it’s hard to square that conventional wisdom with the written record—a compendium of “vetting” so varied and substantial that it raises the question as to whether the people who need vetting the most are those who continue to call for it long after their needs have been met.

Another line of attack is the revival of the “Bernie Bro” as a means to discredit the Sanders campaign. A central trope of the 2016 campaign, based on anecdotal evidence and repeated endlessly by Clinton supporters and journalists, the idea that Sanders supporters are predominantly white, male and viciously offensive on social media lingers on—despite its utter lack of basis in reality.

As all journalists and most of the rest of the world know, the internet is awash in vile rhetoric coming from all directions, not just from a small subset of Sanders supporters. As Glenn Greenwald put it (Intercept, 1/31/16):

There are literally no polarizing views one can advocate online — including criticizing Democratic Party leaders such as Clinton or Barack Obama — that will not subject one to a torrent of intense anger and vile abuse…. Pretending that abusive or misogynistic behavior is unique to Sanders supporters is a blatant, manipulative scam.

In fact, a March 2016 study found that, among voters, Sanders supporters were perceived as much less “aggressive and/or threatening online” (16%) than were Clinton supporters (30%), who in turn were perceived as much less so than Trump supporters (57%).

And yet the media persist with the trope. In the New York Times ( 1/27/20), this came as a lengthy front-page article headlined:

Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army: At the Start of His 2020 Bid, the Vermont Senator Told His Supporters That He Condemned Bullying. Is It His Problem if Many Don’t Seem to Listen?

The New York Times ( 1/27/20) suggests that Sanders is responsible for his followers “venom” because he says things like, “I don’t go to the Hamptons to raise money from billionaires.”

In the Daily Beast (1/22/20), the headline was “Bernie Bros Are Loud, Proud, and  Toxic to Sanders’ Campaign.” And the headline of an NBCNews.com (1/19/20) column announced, “Trump’s MAGA Supporters and Twitter Bernie Bros Have This Ugly Tactic in Common: Bernie Twitter Operates Under the Self-Righteous Guise of Being the True Progressives of the Internet. But Their Harassing Tactics Are Anything but Progressive.”

These pieces continue the trend of cherry-picking evidence and moving seamlessly between accusations of death threats and examples that hardly qualify as abuse (The closing piece of evidence in the New York Times: “Some of you millionaires need to realize that many of us actually *need* Bernie Sanders to win the presidency,” one account replied. “We can’t just ‘chill.’”).

In the Times piece, reporters Matt Flegenheimer, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Nellie Bowles regurgitated the completely unsubstantiated claim of chair-throwing at the 2016 Nevada convention (rated “false” by Snopes, but eagerly repeated across the media) and combined it with “a torrent of menacing messages” to the state party chair to justify associating Sanders’ campaign with violence: “In person, serious violence has been avoided, it seems, though there have been occasional low-grade clashes.”

Meanwhile, rivals are given the opportunity to cast blame on Sanders, again with no evidence. For instance, a strategist for both Obama and Clinton is quoted saying that Sanders “had empowered aides and surrogates who ‘have a tendency to aggressively amplify things that a campaign would normally shut down amongst supporters.’”

No evidence is supplied, unless you count the example given later in the article in which prominent Sanders supporter Shaun King tweeted that the Warren campaign “leaked this attack against Bernie to the press for political gain,” and that Warren staffers had told him that Warren “routinely embellishes stories.” The outcome, according to the Times? The Sanders campaign manager told King to stop; “but by then, much of the Sanders-aligned internet was about to begin tweeting snakes at Ms. Warren and her supporters en masse.”

In other words, the campaign did not empower King; they shut him down. But notice how King’s tweets are nonetheless held responsible for “the Sanders-aligned internet” that was “about to begin” tweeting snakes—and then Sanders’ campaign is apparently held responsible by association.

Hillary Clinton jumped into the fray with guns blazing in the Hollywood Reporter (1/21/20). When asked if she would endorse and campaign for Sanders if he got the nomination, her response was evasive but decidedly antagonistic:

I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women…. I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing, or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.

The Post‘s Rubin (1/21/20) drew on this quote and other excerpts from Clinton’s Hollywood Reporter interview to paint Sanders as having an “Attack Machine” centered on a “thinly veiled misogyny” that is now supposedly “com[ing] back to haunt him.”

The real Sanders attack machine isn’t the mythical machine run by Sanders to take down his opponents; it’s run by the establishment Democrats and their media counterparts to take down Sanders.

SIDEBAR:

'Menacing' Sanders 'Tightens Grip' by 'Threatening to Seize Control'

New York Times (1/27/20)

The New York Times, in a piece headlined “In Iowa, the ‘Not Sanders’ Democrats Find Voters Torn” (1/27/20), described Sanders’ rise in alarming terms:

Mr. Sanders is threatening to seize control in the early states, taking narrow but clear polling leads in Iowa and New Hampshire and increasingly menacing Mr. Biden’s advantage in national polls.

“The liberal Bernie Sanders tightens his grip in Iowa,” the piece’s subhead warned, using imagery more often used to convey the movement of hostile military forces than to report a politician’s favorable polling results.

Julie Hollar is the managing editor of FAIR's magazine, Extra!. Her work received an award from Project Censored in 2005, and she has been interviewed by such media outlets as the L.A. Times, Agence France-Presse and the San Francisco Chronicle. A graduate of Rice University, she has written for the Texas Observer and coordinated communications and activism at the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. Hollar also co-directed the 2006 documentary Boy I Am and was previously active in the Paper Tiger Television collective.

Sanders Team Weighing Executive Orders to Legalize Marijuana, Stop Trump Border Wall, Declare Climate Emergency, and More

"We cannot accept delays from Congress on some of the most pressing issues, especially those like immigration where Trump has governed with racism and for his own corrupt benefit."

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, leaves a roundtable discussion early at the U.S. Capitol with actor Mark Ruffalo and Dr. Anna Reade, Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Scientist, on January 29, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Sen. Bernie Sanders' staff is reportedly preparing dozens of potential executive orders addressing an array of pressing issues the Vermont senator has made central to his 2020 presidential campaign, from confronting the climate crisis to lowering prescription drug prices to reversing President Donald Trump's racist immigration policies.

The Washington Post's Jeff Stein, citing two anonymous people familiar with the campaign's plans and an internal document, reported Thursday that Sanders aides have presented the senator with a list of possible executive orders that would allow him to unilaterally:

• Declare a national climate emergency;
• Ban U.S. exports of crude oil;
• Import prescription drugs from Canada;
• Cancel federal contracts for companies that pay their workers less than $15 an hour;
• Direct the Department of Justice to legalize marijuana at the federal level;
• Reverse existing rules that bar the U.S. from funding organizations that provide abortion services;
• Immediately halt the construction of President Donald Trump's U.S.-Mexico border wall;
• Lift the cap on the number of refugees the U.S. accepts each year; and
• Release billions in disaster aid to Puerto Rico that the Trump administration has withheld.

"The document reviewed by the Post shows how the Sanders campaign has already begun extensive planning for how the senator would lead the country in his first days as president if he won the Democratic nomination and defeated Trump in November," Stein reported. "Many of the proposals Sanders has floated on the campaign trail do not have support from congressional Republicans and are opposed by some Democrats, so a willingness to move forward without congressional approval could determine whether many of his policies are enacted."

According to Stein, Sanders is currently in the process of reviewing the list of executive orders but has not yet approved its official release.

"We cannot accept delays from Congress on some of the most pressing issues, especially those like immigration where Trump has governed with racism and for his own corrupt benefit," states the internal campaign document, according to the Post.

As Stein noted on Twitter, more than a dozen of the potential executive orders focus on reversing Trump's inhumane immigration policies as well as confronting longstanding problems with the U.S. immigration system, such as private detention facilities.

On immigration, Sanders internal list of potential EOs includes:

- Reinstate DACA, TPS

- Immediately end construction of "racist" border wall

- Rescind public charge rule

- Direct DHS to halt ICE raids

- Lift Trump's cap on refugees

- Ban private prisonshttps://t.co/8pSYOLJddD

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) January 30, 2020

News of the list of potential executive orders comes just days ahead of the Iowa caucuses on February 3—Monday. As Common Dreams reported, two recent polls showed Sanders leading the Democratic primary field in Iowa as he continues to gain momentum in other key states and nationally.

Mike Casca, a spokesperson for the Sanders campaign, declined the Post's request to comment on the potential executive orders, saying, "We're focused on organizing a huge voter turnout in Iowa on Monday."

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Government Debts as Class Swindles

The same politicians who facilitate tax reductions for banks, big corporations, and the wealthiest individuals likewise then facilitate government borrowing money from them.

The organization and manipulation of government debts (to finance budget deficits and development projects) have been core components of world capitalism’s real history for centuries. (Photo: Juan Barahona / Flickr)

by Richard Wolff 

In modern capitalism, governments routinely borrow money. They do this to finance budget deficits that occur when governments raise less in taxes than they spend. Governments also borrow to invest in long-term projects of economic development. The swindling occurs when the lenders and borrowers—usually private financiers and career politicians—negotiate loans that serve their own particular interests at the expense of the taxpayers who eventually cover the costs of repaying the government’s loans plus interest on them.

If governments raised enough taxes to cover their desired levels of spending, they would not need to borrow. Taxes imposed on the wealthiest corporations and individuals would be the most equitable strategy. The corporate wealthy protest, of course, threatening that if taxed, they might reduce their contributions to the economy (investing less, etc.). Most government politicians sympathize with those protests. Many come from the ranks of the wealthiest corporations and individuals (or aspire to join them). They share similar ideologies and depend on campaign donations from them. Compliant politicians typically exaggerate the negative aspects of taxing corporations and the rich. They rarely compare them to the negative effects of the alternatives: taxing middle and lower income people more or cutting government spending. 

Government borrowing to cover budget deficits has its own negative effects on the economy. Many variables influence the impacts of taxes and deficit borrowing. Because those variables’ effects cannot be known or measured for years into the future, no one can know which is better or worse for the economy in the long run. When the corporate rich and their political allies stress the negative effects of taxes on the rich they usually carefully neglect the other side of the story as when advertisers mention only the positive side of whatever they are paid to promote. Their goals are simply more profits and less taxes. 

The class swindle embedded in government borrowing is the none-too-subtle mechanism whereby the richest sectors of modern capitalism avoid or replace taxes levied on them with interest-bearing loans to the same government.

The class swindle goes deeper than one-sided untruths about taxes. This becomes clear when we identify who lends to borrowing governments. Banks, big corporations, the 5% wealthiest individuals and other governments are the chief lenders. They are the same economic groups (excepting foreign governments) that press for and get tax cuts such as the Trump/GOP tax reduction of December 2017. That particular tax cut increased the federal budget deficit to over $ 1 trillion in 2019. The same politicians who facilitate tax reductions for banks, big corporations, and the wealthiest individuals likewise then facilitate government borrowing money from them. 

The class swindle embedded in government borrowing is the none-too-subtle mechanism whereby the richest sectors of modern capitalism avoid or replace taxes levied on them with interest-bearing loans to the same government. What a deal for the rich who thus exchange taxes (assets lost) for loans (assets and income gained)! And what a deal for their political servants: leaders who can spend more to buy votes and secure donations without having to tax anybody because they can borrow instead. And by the time the mass of taxpayers watching all this grasps the swindle perpetrated on them, those leaders have moved up their political ladders. Their replacements will then respond to popular anger by ostentatiously raising taxes less or maybe even cutting them in favor of, yet again, borrowing. As this can gets kicked down the road, its explosive potential builds.

Deficit finance—the polite veneer for this swindle—deepens inequality in the United States and everywhere else it is practiced. It redistributes wealth from the mass of people (taxpayers) to the richest who “save” by means of lower taxes and then “invest” those “savings” in government loans. In transferring money from the many to a few, deficit finance operates like a lottery. 

A different but parallel sort of swindle occurs when governments, especially in “emerging economies” (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and so on), borrow from banks and other lenders in the “advanced industrial economies.” Here the perpetrators are, on the one side, bankers and other lenders eager to make profitable loans to foreign governments. On the other side are government politicians eager to borrow. The latters’ eagerness flows from two sources. The first is the need to secure their political careers by funding economic development projects that could not otherwise occur because those politicians fear the electoral results of using taxes to pay for the projects. The second is their ability to divert, legally or otherwise, sizable portions of the loans they procure to finance themselves and their parties in addition to (or even instead of) their development projects. 

These lenders and borrowers gather easily in expensive hotels to negotiate wondrous “development loans” nicely serving both their needs. The loans are backed, of course, by the borrowing country’s ability to tax its citizens and/or sell its natural resources and/or sell its government operations to pay off the loans and the interest on them. Given such loans’ high profitability, they can and often do run for years before outraged local citizens revolt and refuse to keep paying. Then the country declares bankruptcy amid threats and lamentations on all sides. Eventually, what remains of the loan is partly or wholly forgiven. No problem: the lenders’ profits were already reaped, the career benefits achieved. Soon the whole process begins again. 

The organization and manipulation of government debts (to finance budget deficits and development projects) have been core components of world capitalism’s real history for centuries. The system fosters those swindles. The system also rejects or ignores the critics of those swindles including Modern Monetary Theorists, Marxists, and “populists” of varying persuasions. Change comes when finally the swindle’s critics and its victims merge to end it.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School University, New York City. Richard also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. His books include: Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown(2016); Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (2012); Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism(2012); Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (2012); and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (2009). A full archive of Richard's work, including videos and podcasts, can be found on his site. Follow him on Twitter: @profwolff