Tom Roche

We explore the impact of ice, wind and plate tectonics on who we are today.

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

I don’t consider myself an MMTer, but there is a basic Keynesian concept which has been associated with MMT, which is both true and important. For the federal government, taxes are not about raising revenue, taxes are about reducing consumption to prevent inflation.

The point is that the federal government does not need taxes for revenue since it can just print money. It instead taxes to create the room in the economy for government spending. This view is sometimes wrongly taken as a “get out of jail free” card, where the government can spend whatever it wants without worrying about raising revenue.

That could be true in a deep downturn. However, if the economy is near its full employment level of output, where additional demand will lead to rising inflation, we are pretty much back in the world where we need taxes to offset spending. Any major increase in government spending will lead to higher inflation unless we have higher taxes or have some other mechanism to reduce demand in the economy.

We can, of course, argue about how close the economy is to its full employment level of output. This is not easy to determine and the mainstream of the economics profession has badly erred on the high side in arguing that we were near full employment, when in fact the unemployment rate could (and did) go much lower.

But leaving the argument about where we hit full employment aside, we still have the basic truth that when we are near full employment, we do need higher taxes to offset additional spending. A small qualifier is worth adding here. We have a $20 trillion economy. We don’t have to worry about inflation because we spend another $2 billion or $5 billion a year on some program we think is important. (That would be 0.01 percent to 0.0025 percent of GDP.) We do have to worry about inflation if we want to spend another $200 billion a year on a big education or health care program.

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Bonus Ep: Adam Johnson on Ilhan Omar https://www.patreon.com/posts/24735765 Jeff Halper, no relation, talks about what a one state solution could look like and the influences, besides AIPAC, that get other governments to offer Israel such unwavering support. Jeff is an American-born Israeli anthropologist, works with The One Democratic State Campaign, a Palestinian-Israeli initiative and is the founder of the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition. He's the author of several books including 'War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinans and Global Pacification," "Obstacles to Peace: A Reframing of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ICAHD," "An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel." I chatted with him at the bookstore McNally Jackson on February 9th, one day before the Ilhan Omar tweet on AIPAC which was followed by a smear campaign against her. Stand by for a patreon episode with Adam Johnson about the media's framing of her comments.

Professor Richard J Evans discusses his new biography of Eric Hobsbawm, the influential 20th-century historian who was famously – and sometimes controversially – a committed Marxist throughout his career

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Today we are joined by /u/kaisermatias, who is a flaired user on AskHistorians on 20th c. Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Hockey.  kaisermatias is better known to his friends and family as Matt Lerner, and he is here today to talk to us about the history of hockey! We talk about the history of hockey--it's rules, equipment, styles. Then we talk about hockey's important role in Canadian culture and history before turning to the 1972 Summit Series between the USSR and Canada--the first Miracle on Ice--and what it meant then and still means today. Finally, we conclude with the strangest and wildest thing about hockey--the Stanley Cup.

Discussion thread here.

 

© 2019 Brian M. Watson

Today we are joined by /u/EnclavedMicrostate, who is a flaired user on AskHistorians on the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. Together with guest host Bernardito, we talk about a conflict with many misconceptions: The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). We explore the myths, the realities and the actual history behind the rebellion to explore this critical moment in 19th century Chinese history. Is it true that over 20 million people were killed in this conflict? Who truly was the leader of the Taiping? This, and much more, in this fascinating episode.

A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan.

Omar quoted rap lyrics — “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” — to suggest McCarthy’s move was driven by the lobby’s prolific spending. Asked specifically who she was referring to, Omar responded, “AIPAC!”

The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a six-month period in 2016. That investigation, however, was never aired by the network — suppressed by pressure from the pro-Israel lobby.

In November, Electronic Intifada obtained and published the four-part series, but it did so during the week of the midterm elections, and the documentary did not get a lot of attention then.

In it, leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they’d be charged with anti-Semitism. 

“Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them.”

David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money doesn’t show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. “This is the biggest ad hoc political group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.,” Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but is clearly tied to AIPAC. “It’s the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does. It’s the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal.” (Ochs and AIPAC did not immediately return The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn’t able to enact its agenda. “Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money,” he explains. 

He describes a fundraiser for Anthony Brown, a Democrat running for Congress in Maryland, as typical. “So we want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment, 50, 30, 40 people, and say, ‘This is what’s important to us. We want to make sure that if we give you money, that you’re going to enforce the Iran deal.’ That way, when they need something from him or her, like the Iran deal, they can quickly mobilize and say look, we’ll give you 30 grand. They actually impact,” Ochs tells the reporter.

Such a claim is not so different from what Omar was describing, and for which she was roundly condemned. In the wake of Omar’s tweets, the Washington Post, for instance, reported, “The American Jewish Committee demanded an apology, calling her suggestion that AIPAC is paying American politicians for their support ‘demonstrably false and stunningly anti-Semitic.’” (On Monday, Omar apologized for her tweets, but insisted that AIPAC and other lobbyist groups are harmful to U.S. politics.)

In the censored documentary, Ochs went on to describe a fundraiser hosted by Jeff Talpins, a hedge fund giant, as similar as well. “In New York, with Jeff Talpins, we don’t ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? ’Cause it’s a tiny issue. It’s a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on Iran,” Ochs says. “What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are — and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million — basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit cards for a thousand dollars each.’”

Ochs explains that the club in New York required a minimum pledge of $10,000 to join and participate in such events. “It’s a minimum commitment. Some people give a lot more than that.”

AIPAC, on its own website, recruits members to join its “Congressional Club,” and commit to give at least $5,000 per election cycle.

Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells the Al Jazeera reporter that AIPAC gets results. “Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did,” he notes at one secretly recorded lunch. “Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress.”

The film, called “The Lobby,” was produced by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, and features hidden-camera footage obtained by the reporter, who posed as a Jewish, pro-Israel activist from Britain who wanted to volunteer with the Israel Project.

Outfitted with a luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, the reporter hosted multiple gatherings and otherwise socialized broadly within the pro-Israel community, winning the confidence of senior officials, who divulged insider details, many of which have been leaked and created international news.

A companion version of the film, which looked at the Israel lobby’s influence in the United Kingdom, did make it to air and was the subject of intense controversy. It exposed a plot by an Israeli embassy official in the United Kingdom to “take down” pro-Palestinian members of Parliament, leading to his resignation.

That film, however, included a snippet of footage from the United States. Officials here quickly realized that they, too, had been infiltrated. In the U.K., the Israel lobby lodged an official complaint claiming the series was anti-Semitic, but the U.K.’s communications agency rejected the claim, finding that “the allegations in the programme were not made on the grounds that any of the particular individuals concerned were Jewish and noted that no claims were made relating to their faith.”

Pro-Israel officials in the United States, rather than file an official complaint, exerted political pressure. A bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into “the full range of activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States,” and suggesting that the organization be made to register as a foreign agent. Ultimately, Qatar bent to the pressure and killed the documentary.

The post Pro-Israel Lobby Caught on Tape Boasting That Its Money Influences Washington appeared first on The Intercept.

Reverse Hitler with Ted Alexandro by Katie Halper

Behind the News, 2/14/19 - guests: Noah Kulwin, Thea Riofrancos - Doug Henwood

The state of the economy is, despite assertions to the contrary, not strong; it is being plundered by the alliance of top corporate managers, leading financiers and political leaders from both parties. Suzi talks to Robert Brenner on politics and the state of the economy — matters of great confusion if you only pay attention to the business press and politicians, who say the economy is robust, with record low unemployment, rising wages, and the recovery of the stock market. But the Fed stopped raising interest rates, wages are stagnant, precarity and insecurity are the norm, homelessness has exploded, student debt is staggering and suffocating — and teachers are striking to force states to reinvest (stop under-investing) to save public education. So what is the real story, and if the economists and pundits are getting it wrong — why is that the case? Is it cheerleading for the status quo? We get Brenner’s analysis.

Global strategist Parag Khanna says the US trade war with China is accelerating the integration of Asia, and cutting Washington out of a future role in the region. What path should Australia take?

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations, and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture, and water treatment features” — not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. At night, it positively glows. And it’s a block from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

That America’s most famous progressive city, one where nearly everything is within walking distance, spent $40 million to renovate a parking garage one block from a subway station suggests that progressive Democrats remain unwilling to seriously confront the crisis of climate change. America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation. In California, the proportion of CO2 from transportation is even higher: above 40 percent. Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín anticipates that the Center Street Parking Garage will out-green all others in the state with a LEED Silver rating, making it a perfect example of our approach to climate change: glibly “greening” the lives we live now, rather than contemplating the future generations who will have to live here too.

On Thursday, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey unveiled just such a fix: the Green New Deal, a proposal that bills itself as a plan for the environment and the economy in equal measure. It is designed to steer America toward a low-carbon economy, fulfill the right to clean air and clean water, restore the American landscape, strengthen urban sustainability and resilience, and put a generation to work. With prominent endorsements from leading Democratic presidential candidates, Ocasio-Cortez has brought more attention to climate change in two months than her Democratic peers did in the past two years.

But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography — where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places — is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

The environment

America is a nation of sprawl. More Americans live in suburbs than in cities, and the suburbs that we build are not the gridded, neighborly Mayberrys of our imagination. Rather, the places in which we live are generally dispersed, inefficient, and impossible to navigate without a car. Dead-ending cul-de-sacs and the divided highways that connect them are such deeply engrained parts of the American landscape that it’s easy to forget they were, themselves, the fruits of a massive federal investment program.

Sprawl is made possible by highways. This is expensive — in 2015, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute estimated that sprawl costs America more than $1 trillion a year in reduced business activity, environmental damage, consumer expenses, and other costs. Leaving aside the emissions from the 1.1 billion trips Americans take per day (87 percent of which are taken in personal vehicles), spreading everything out has eaten up an enormous amount of natural land.

Environmentalists know transportation is the elephant in the room. At first blush, the easiest way to attack that problem is to electrify everything, and that’s largely what the Green New Deal calls for, with goals like “100 percent zero emission passenger vehicles by 2030” and “100 percent fossil-free transportation by 2050.” The cars we drive feel more easily changeable than the places we live.

But electric vehicles are nowhere near ready for widespread adoption — and even if they were, “half of the world’s consumption of oil would remain untouched,” Bloomberg reports. A Tesla in every driveway just won’t cut it.

The economy

Even if there were an electric car in the garage of every net-zero McMansion, sprawl’s regressive legacy would persist in the economy. Sprawl requires us to spend more time and more money to reach the places we need to go.

The strongest demonstration of this is the fact that Americans’ jobs are far from where they live. This is particularly true for poor people and people of color, a phenomenon known as “spatial mismatch.” “Highways disproportionately benefit Americans who own or have access to automobiles,” political scientist Clayton Nall writes in The Road to Inequality. “Even when carless Americans do have access to a car, it is not always feasible — as a result of scarce time and financial resources — for poorer Americans to regularly drive the distances that must be covered by suburban expressway commuters.”

Tales of guys who have to walk an absurd number of miles to work — until they are gifted a car — hit local news affiliates every so often. As Angie Schmitt writes for Streetsblog, these are mistakenly cast as feel-good stories about workers overcoming adversity. In reality, they testify to the unjust correlation between job sprawl and racial segregation. Sprawl costs us all, but it disproportionately racks up costs for poor people, nonwhite people, and women.

All that is a result of a federal stimulus for a disconnected pattern of development that imposes an enormous burden on our finances, our environment, and our pursuit of equity.

The solution

In Alissa Walker’s exhaustive report in Curbed on why electric vehicles won’t save California, she argues that even with breakneck advances in renewable energy and electric cars, the country must still reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled. EVs won’t save the rest of America, either.

But the good news is that if we do account for land use, we will get much closer to a safe, sustainable, and resilient future. And even though widespread adoption of EVs is still decades away, reforms to our built environment can begin right now. In short, we can fix this. We build more than 1 million new homes a year — we just need to put them in the right places.

Unsprawling America isn’t as hard as it sounds, because America is suffering from a critical, once-in-a-lifetime housing shortage. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reported last year that the U.S. has a national deficit of more than 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for families most in need. Of course, if we build those homes in transit-accessible places, we can save their occupants time and money. But the scale of housing demand at this moment is such that we could build them in car-centric suburbs, too, and provide a human density that would not just support transit but also reduce the need to travel as shops, jobs, and schools crop up within walking distance.

The Green New Deal is ostensibly a jobs program, an environmental program, and a redistributive program. If it’s a jobs program, it must wrangle with spatial mismatch. If it’s an environmental program, it must tackle the fact that an all-electric fleet of cars is functionally, at this time, a pipe dream. And if it’s a redistributive program, it must grapple with how roads paved into suburban and exurban greenfield developments deepen, expand, and exacerbate segregation.

A Green New Deal must insist on a new, and better, land use regime, countering decades of federal sprawl subsidy. The plan already recognizes the need to retrofit and upgrade buildings. Why not address their locations while we’re at it? Suggestions of specific policies that would enable a Green New Deal to address land use have already emerged: We could, simply, measure greenhouse gases from our transportation system or build more housing closer to jobs centers. Reallocating what we spend on building new roads to paying for public transit instead would go a long way toward limiting sprawl.

Where we live is no coincidence of preference. Federal policy has enforced inequities and disparities for both the environment and vulnerable people at a national scale. It’s never too late to address the most fundamental aspect of our carbon footprint: where we live. And building housing near jobs, transit, and other housing — rather than ultra-LEED-certified parking garages — is merely a political choice. No innovation required.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Green New Deal’s huge flaw on Feb 9, 2019.

The 1990s were among the most punishing decades in the recent history of American justice. Zealous prosecutors competed to put the most people behind bars, and politicians were eager to pass new laws to extend sentences. In San Francisco, Terence Hallinan was one of the only prosecutors in America bucking the trend.

A legendary civil rights activist, defense attorney, former city supervisor, and an outspoken advocate for marijuana legalization, Hallinan rode a wave of discontent and squeaked by in his election to become San Francisco district attorney in 1995. He swiftly fired senior prosecutors in order to hire more minorities and reformists. He instructed his deputies to avoid the practice of objecting to a proposed juror for a criminal trial — an unusual stance that weakened the hand of the DA’s office — to avoid empaneling all-white juries.

Sex work, said Hallinan, was a public health problem — not a criminal offense. He quickly made waves by claiming that he would fight for nonviolent offenders to receive social services over jail time and called drug use a victimless crime, an argument that invited contempt from law enforcement officials.

Yet Hallinan — considered one of the “most left-wing politicians in the country” — was expelled in 2003 after just two terms in office, despite San Francisco’s notorious liberal bent. An up-and-coming young career prosecutor named Kamala Harris, running in her first bid for public office, unseated him.

Many in San Francisco view the campaign as a defining moment for Harris, who carefully cultivated a base of support among police officers, domestic violence advocates, wealthy donors, and a diverse range of local officials and community leaders who had bristled at Hallinan’s leftist politics and abrasive style.

Despite starting the race as a relatively unknown candidate against an incumbent viewed as a radical icon, Harris vaulted over Hallinan and easily won a runoff election. The race launched Harris’s political career, which culminated in her announcement last month at a rally in Oakland to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted later, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration.

The 2003 race stands apart from the image she has projected in more recent years. Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted in her successful bid to become California’s attorney general or promoting her efforts to hold corporations accountable when she ran for the U.S. Senate, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration.

The Intercept reviewed debate records, news clips, and original campaign materials from the race between Harris, Hallinan, and Bill Fazio, another former prosecutor who ran for the seat. (Harris’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Hallinan.)

The 2003 race for San Francisco district attorney showcased a campaign strategy that has become a familiar and at times unseemly dynamic of America’s criminal justice system. Throughout much of the campaign, Harris attacked Hallinan as too weak and ineffective to keep communities safe from dangerous criminals. In contrast, Harris promised to get tough.

In the years leading up to the election, the DA’s office under Hallinan had the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California. In 2001, the felony conviction rate in San Francisco was as low as 29 percent, far below the state average of 67.5 percent. Hallinan, defending his record, pointed out that his office expanded rehabilitative justice initiatives, diverting drug crimes into alternatives rather than turning to incarceration.

“We have 3,000 people who are in diversion,” Hallinan told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s hell on your conviction rate.”

Cases that are diverted to rehabilitation programs in order to avoid criminal penalties count as a dismissal, resulting in a prosecution loss, the newspaper noted. Moreover, San Francisco’s jury pool is notoriously liberal, Hallinan argued, making convictions even for violent crimes difficult. His office also avoided “three strikes” prosecutions in many cases, to get out of having to seek mandatory life imprisonment for defendants.

If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities.

And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office.

Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.

In one election flyer sent by the Harris campaign to mailboxes across the city, a tattooed and shirtless man, presumably Latino, is seen gripping a pistol and flashing a gang sign. “Enough Is Enough!” reads the title. Inside the flyer, the Harris campaign argued that Hallinan had failed to keep communities safe from surging gang violence, pointing to his low conviction rate.

“Each one of those cases, those violent cases, represents a victim who deserves to have a district attorney’s office that is competent and that is professional,” Harris argued during a debate on the San Francisco public radio station KQED, sharply critiquing her opponent’s conviction rate record. “And let’s be clear. I’m not running for public defender. We need in our city to have a district attorney who recognizes her responsibility for making sure the consequences occur for serious and violent crime.”

In campaign events across the city, Harris stoked anger at the lack of criminal convictions. In the Mission District, SF Weekly reported on a scene in which Harris sharply criticized Hallinan for failure to prosecute anti-war protesters for property destruction. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” Harris said.

“Terence Hallinan is lying to us about his domestic violence record, and women are dying because of it.”

Outside the Hall of Justice, the city’s criminal courthouse, Harris campaigned with the mother of Claire Tempongko, a woman slain by her estranged boyfriend. Tempongko, Harris said, had filed police reports that her boyfriend had abused her in violation of his parole. The failure of the DA’s office to act had left Tempongko defenseless, Harris argued.

“Terence Hallinan is lying to us about his domestic violence record,” she said at the event, “and women are dying because of it.”

Hallinan’s supporters, however, charged that Harris was exploiting the tragedy. The prosecutor who handled the domestic violence unit at the time said that she never saw a crucial police report filed by the victim because police had incorrectly labeled it as a drunk-in-public offense, rather than an incident of domestic violence.

Nonetheless, more tough-on-crime campaign advertisements flooded mailboxes around the city.

Inside another mailer, the Harris campaign produced a chart showing Hallinan’s low conviction rate and a list of lenient plea bargains struck by the district attorney. The outside of the mailer included a glossy image of a murder chalk outline, along with the message: “An Outline for Disaster. Which District Attorney has ranked last in convictions for the last eight years?”

The Harris campaign’s message got out to voters in part because she had gained the trust of much San Francisco’s political and donor class, including Vanessa Getty, one of the city’s wealthiest philanthropists. Early in the campaign, the San Francisco Ethics Commission, a city body that oversees local elections, handed Harris the largest fine in its history for breaking fundraising limits. She apologized for the error, but little could stop her fundraising machine.

As SF Weekly noted, Harris’s cash advantage came “from the city’s social and legal elites, people with power and money, people who respond well to Harris’ message that Hallinan is erratic, divisive, and soft on crime.” The Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a lobby group for the dining industry, backed Harris with independent campaign advertisements, and major real estate and professional societies donated to her campaign.

In the end, Harris built a campaign war chest of over $600,000 — twice the amount raised by Hallinan.

Harris also had the benefit of support from the outgoing San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Brown donated to Harris’s 2003 campaign and — without her consent — had worked his connections to raise money for her.

The other two candidates in the race seized on the issue. Though they had once been political allies, the relationship between Hallinan and Brown had soured. Hallinan had begun investigating City Hall officials for corruption, landing cases of graft between municipal officials and developers. Though Hallinan endorsed Brown for re-election in 1999, he showed up at a rally that year for Tom Ammiano, appearing to lend his support to the mayoral challenger.

Brown retaliated by openly mocking Hallinan. He asked California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to step in and prosecute drug dealers, claiming that Hallinan refused to do his job. In an interview, Brown called Hallinan a “son of a bitch [who] should have been recalled” over refusing to prosecute homeless people for public intoxication and defecating in the streets.

In his advocacy for a new approach to homelessness, Hallinan went so far as to hand out soup to homeless people alongside volunteers from Food Not Bombs.

Hallinan had indeed taken a liberal policy toward crimes related to homelessness. He notably reversed longstanding city policy around arresting and charging panhandlers. He also sought to clear charges brought against volunteers who had been cited for feeding homeless people, an illegal offense at the time. In his advocacy for a new approach to homelessness, Hallinan went so far as to hand out soup to homeless people alongside volunteers from Food Not Bombs — one of the criminalized groups — outside City Hall. After winning the election as the city’s top prosecutor, he dropped the charges against the volunteers. “This district attorney and this city intend to grapple in a different way with the homeless problem,” Hallinan said.

The Hallinan campaign trumpeted Harris’s ties to Brown, warning that she would not prosecute lingering corruption in the Brown administration. For many, this accusation reeked of sexism. Brown had briefly dated Harris, and she had left him shortly after he won his first mayoral race in 1995. The Fazio campaign hit a similar note, mailing a flyer to San Francisco residents stating that “Kamala accepted two appointments from Willie Brown to high-paying, part-time state boards — including one she had no training for — while being paid $100,000-year as a full-time county employee.”

Brown was known to reward friends and allies. He gave Harris a brand-new BMW and also appointed her to two commissions in state government where, according to SF Weekly, she was paid $400,000 over five years. One of the positions, an appointment to the California Medical Assistance Commission, paid a $99,000 annual salary for attending two meetings a month.

Harris largely brushed off the criticism. “Willie Brown is not going to be around. He’s gone — hello people, move on. If there is corruption, it will be prosecuted. It’s a no-brainer, but let’s please move on,” she said in one interview. “His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing.”

As soon as Hallinan won his seat in 1995, he was viewed as a fox in the henhouse by the San Francisco Police Department.

Hallinan was the city’s most unusual occupant in the DA’s office in its modern history. At age 22, he was charged with felony assault, though later acquitted. He was born to a famous left-wing family. His father, Vincent Hallinan, had defended union leaders over Red Scare-related charges and ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. Terence Hallinan began his life as an amateur boxer and eventually gravitated to the practice of law.

He participated in civil disobedience protests over racial discrimination at the Palace Hotel and Bank of America, as well as at restaurants and businesses across San Francisco. In 1963, he spent the summer organizing African-American voters in Mississippi. Archival footage of the most iconic 1960s-era protests in the city are filled with appearances by Hallinan, who frequently served as counsel to striking workers, student sit-ins, and anti-war demonstrators. Later in life, he served as a criminal defense attorney to a range of clients, including drug dealers and accused murderers.

For nearly 40 years, it was Hallinan representing clients against San Francisco law enforcement. In at least one occasion, he was the victim of police assault. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

During his first campaign for district attorney, Hallinan pledged to crack down on police misconduct. “I will not hesitate to treat them like any other citizen and prosecute them,” he said of the city’s police department after his victory.

In 2002, three off-duty police officers beat two San Francisco men over a bag of fajitas. The incident sparked outrage and Hallinan indicted not only the officers, but also the police department’s top brass, alleging a conspiracy to cover up the crime. The case led to the creation of Proposition H, a successful city ballot measure, crafted in part by Hallinan, to expand oversight over the police department. The case against the police, however, fell apart, with a judge dismissing the charges.

The incident further strained relations between police and the DA’s office. Behind the scenes, Harris courted law enforcement officials, earning the endorsements of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, the incumbent sheriff, and a host of former prosecutors. In a recent Politico piece examining the history of the race, Gary Delagnes, a former police union official, remembered Harris coming up to him at a party, poking him in the chest and demanding, “You better endorse me, you better endorse me. You get it?”

The San Francisco police union’s 32-member board voted unanimously to endorse Harris after she advanced to the runoff election. “We should be working together, and she’s committed to that,” announced Chris Cunnie, the Police Officers Association president. “When the district attorney indicts 10 officers in one year, that’s a problem.”

In debates and events following the endorsement, Harris touted the law enforcement support. “We have, at best, a hostile relationship between the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department,” Harris said during a debate with Hallinan on KQED. She stressed her ability to repair relations with the police.

The conservative-leaning editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle cited support from the police and Hallinan’s low conviction rate in its endorsement of Harris. “Harris, for law and order,” the editorial’s headline blared.

Harris carried the runoff election by nearly 13 percent. Though she repeatedly slammed her opponent as soft on crime on the campaign trail, Harris struck a new approach at her inauguration, one that would later define her balanced approach to criminal justice. “Let’s put an end right here to the question about whether we are tough on crime or soft on crime,” she said. “Let’s be smart on crime.”

After taking office, Hallinan’s legacy could be seen throughout Harris’s work in many ways. As DA, her office extended the light-touch approach to most medical marijuana dispensaries and promoted drug-diversion programs. Harris repaired relations with the police department but faced backlash from law enforcement when she declined to seek the death penalty for a gang member convicted of murdering San Francisco police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004.

There was also sustained pressure to increase conviction rates and obtain longer sentences. SF Weekly interviewed a number of former prosecutors who said that Harris adopted inflexible charging procedures to look tough on crime in preparation for running for statewide office one day. In her re-election campaign four years later, she was touting a new felony conviction rate record, 67 percent, and a new focus on cracking down on drug dealers, quality of life crimes, and other criminals.

More recently, the landscape for criminal justice reform has changed drastically, with a wave of district attorneys embracing an approach resembling Hallinan’s. Newly elected district attorneys across the country — from St. Louis County’s Wesley Bell to Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner — are now promising to prioritize social justice over doling out brutal sentences and garnering higher conviction rates. There’s even a growing backlash against election season fearmongering on crime. An increasing number of liberals now view electoral penal populism as a factor that contributes to the country’s mass incarceration crisis.

On the campaign trail in 2019, Harris has been recast as an insurgent reformer who spent her entire career fighting against draconian criminal justice enforcement. At her presidential campaign announcement rally, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf opened the event by declaring, “When it was still popular to be ‘tough on crime,’ she was smart on crime.” The crowd cheered and clapped. The history, however, is a little more complicated.

The post In Her First Race, Kamala Harris Campaigned as Tough on Crime — and Unseated the Country’s Most Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.

Sewers are a relatively modern phenomenon. For centuries, people in cities lived intimately with their waste. The price paid for that lack of awareness about hygiene was disease and plague - as well as unbearable stench. Understanding how germs and diseases are spread led to sanitation and sewers - and to the modern city. The rebuilding of Paris in the mid-19th century was a great civic achievement and a new idea of society only made possible because it was built on sewers. Philip Coulter goes underground in the City of Light to visit the City of Smells.

How do you articulate African philosophy in a Western academic environment? And what gets lost in the project of “translating” the former into the categories of the latter?

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: The U.S. goes all-out for regime change in Venezuela; A new book challenges the dominant discourse on AIDS; And, what’s taking Bernie Sanders so long to declare himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination?

Black activists in Chicago are determined to defeat many members of that city’s  50-person Board of Aldermen, only one of whom supports community control of the police. Last month, Frank Chapman, co-chair of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, predicted that by the end of January the movement would recruit at least 70 candidates who are pledged to support creation of a Civilian Police Accountability Commission. We spoke with Chapman again, this week.

The Trump administration has seized billions of dollars in Venezuela’s holdings in the United States, and signed the money over to a Venezuelan opposition politician named Juan Guaido, who named himself president of the country, last week. The U.S. is attempting to cripple Venezuela’s economy in order to overthrow the socialist government that has repeatedly won free and fair elections over the past twenty years. Joe Emersberger has written frequently on the U.S. campaign for regime in Venezuela.

The Democrats already have a sizeable number of declared presidential candidates. However, Bernie Sanders, the man who almost beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries, and who polls show is the most popular politician in the country, has yet to declare his candidacy. We spoke with Danny Haiphong, who writes a weekly column for Black Agenda Report.

Darius Bost is a professor of Ethic Studies at the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. His most recent book was featured in the BAR Books Forum. It’s titled  “Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence.” Professor Bost says he wants to challenge the dominant queer theoretical discourse, that says the AIDS crisis is over.

Speaker(s): Professor John Mearsheimer | In this lecture John Mearsheimer explains why US foreign policy so often backfires and what can be done to set it straight. John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Department Head of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. The Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept) is now in its 91st year, making it one of the oldest as well as largest in the world. They are ranked 5th in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2018 tables for Politics and International Studies. The LSE's United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEGreatDelusion

Since getting elected to the senate, Kamala Harris has become one of the most progressive voices in the chamber, supporting Medicare for All and debt-free college. However, as California attorney general, Harris opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving police officers, and threatened to imprison the parents of truant children. When questioned about her record at a CNN Town Hall this week, Sen. Harris evaded the questions and argued instead that her record has been “consistent.” Mehdi Hasan is joined by Jamilah King of Mother Jones and Lara Bazelon, a professor law at the University of San Francisco, to discuss Sen. Harris’s record and whether it will hurt her presidential chances.

 

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A fragmentary look at the American writer Susan Sontag through her own words and those of her peers.

Behind the News, 1/31/19 - guests: Jamieson Webster, John Pat Leary - Doug Henwood

Soviet historian Elena Osokina comments on two myths of Stalinist society in an interview in Republic.ru.

The post Stalinist Markets and Entrepreneurship appeared first on Sean's Russia Blog.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), who lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse. In works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Molloy and Malone Dies, he wanted to show the limitations of language, what words could not do, together with the absurdity and humour of the human condition. In part he was reacting to the verbal omnipotence of James Joyce, with whom he’d worked in Paris, and in part to his experience in the French Resistance during World War 2, when he used code, writing not to reveal meaning but to conceal it. With Steven Connor Professor of English at the University of Cambridge Laura Salisbury Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Exeter And Mark Nixon Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading and co-director of the Beckett International Foundation Producer: Simon Tillotson

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks

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Today we’re presenting a podcast special from our Intercept colleagues in DC. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Intercept reporters Ryan Grim and Briahna Joy Gray for an in-depth conversation about her fresh approach to politics, her thoughts on 2020, and her insurgent congressional campaign. As a new member of the House Financial Services Committee, she’s already shaping the conversation with her call to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70%. And former North Carolina congressman Brad Miller, a progressive Democrat who served for years on the committee, joins the conversation to talk about the challenges Ocasio-Cortez will face there.

 

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Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: Women in business and politics are being praised for acting like cutthroat capitalists and war-mongering men. But, is that feminism? And, a leader of South Africa’s newly-formed Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party explains why workers must take political power in that country.

Dr. Martin Luther King is popularly known as a civil rights leader, but he was also deeply committed to the labor movement. Peter Cole teaches African American history at the University of Western Illinois. Cole is author of the book, "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area.” He says labor issues were a top priority for Dr. King, who early on saw himself as a kind of socialist.

Women are engaged in all kinds of activities these days, including war, torture and cut-throat corporate business. But, is that progress? Dean Spade is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law, and co-author of a recent article titled, “There’s Nothing Feminist About Imperialism.”

South Africa has been under Black political rule for the past 25 years, since the end of apartheid. But the African National Congress government left control of the economy in the hands of white business interests. The gap between rich and poor has gotten even bigger. After decades of frustration, activists centered in the nation’s largest labor union, NUMSA, the National Union of Metalworkers, last year formed a new political party to fight against white monopoly capitalist rule. Irvin Jim is the leader of NUMSA and a key architect of the new Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party. Last week, he traveled to New York City to speak with American activists at the People’s Forum.

Also on hand at the People’s Forum was Dr. Cosmas Musumali, the General Secretary of the Socialist Party of the southern African nation of Zambia. The ruling party of Zambia has declared the Socialist Party to be a danger to national security, and party members are under constant danger of imprisonment. Dr. Musumali told his New York audience that the imperialist powers have enlisted African governments as collaborators in neocolonialism.

 

New bonus coming soon, but catch up on the related bonus eps with Aaron https://www.patreon.com/posts/19418558 and Glenn Greenwald https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-glenn-on-23827350. We chat with journalist and rational skeptic Aaron Maté about why he calls the Russiagate narrative a "privilege protection racket." Maté debunks the latest smoking gun which this time comes from Buzzfeed, talks about the sad state of journalism, who else is doing good work on the issue, Noam Chomksy, Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, the Clintons and what MSNBC and the Dems could be doing if they spent less talk talking about Russia.

- - Doug Henwood