Demagogue

 

As we approach the culmination of Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency, I continue to be struck by how bumbling most Americans are at properly naming a breed of politicians that has bedeviled democracies since the time of the ancient Greeks.

The latest example of this linguistic disorder is the designation of the ex-president as a “fascist” by John F. Kelly, former Marine general and former chief of staff to Trump, as well as by Vice President Kamala Harris a day later.

It is not wrong to identify fascist tendencies in Trump, such as ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, cronyism, persecution of internal enemies and comfort with violence. But these traits also qualify him for classification as a dictator, despot, autocrat and authoritarian.

So why single out “fascist,” an inflammatory charge conjuring images of 20th-century mass murderers?

A far better designation, one that sums up Trump with precision, is “demagogue.”

The ex-president is a textbook case, the most striking and astonishing example of a demagogue in U.S. history. Like the Greeks Cleon and Alcibiades and the Roman Spurius Maelius, he will be studied as a paragon of this political personality type for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Athenians coined the term “demagogue” soon after they embraced democracy because they discovered that two bedrock principles of this system — free speech and obedience to the will of the people — combined to give rise to these talented yet rancorous rhetoricians.

Originally, demagogue (dēmagōgós, literally “leader of the people”), signified a political type in Greek democracy who rallied nonelite voters to the support of causes by appealing to class prejudices and resentments. Only after decades of observation did political philosophers begin to catalogue the extraordinary dangers posed by this type.

Aristotle observed that demagogues undermine democracies in two systematic ways: through fomenting disorder and corruption, leading to overthrow by oligarchy; and through the conversion of a democracy into a tyranny by a demagogue refusing to cede power.

“Most of the ancient tyrants,” he wrote in his classic “Politics,” “were originally demagogues.”

Over time, most political thinkers adopted Aristotle’s outlook. One of them, Alexander Hamilton, warned that Americans must exclude demagogues from high political office because they are men of “dangerous ambition” who unleash “angry and malignant passions.”

In Federalist No. 1, he wrote: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Modern academics have refined the term. In his 1954 book “American Demagogues,” historian Reinhard Luthin defined a demagogue as “a politician skilled in oratory, flattery and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices — a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to become a master of the masses.”

More recently, in “The Demagogue’s Playbook,” University of Chicago law professor Eric A. Posner described a demagogue as a political actor “who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions; who targets the political elites, blaming them for everything that has gone wrong; and who tries to destroy institutions — legal, political, religious, social — and other sources of power that stand in their way.” Demagogue, he concluded, describes Trump,

Fascist, on the other hand, when applied to Trump, is sloppy at best and reckless at worst — almost certainly fueling the flames of his MAGA base and alienating swing voters.

What we know with confidence is that the ex-president is a demagogue par excellence, and in light of the history of demagogues transforming into tyrants, it’s indisputably ill-advised to restore him to the presidency.

But such matters are not for professors of political science to decide. If Trump prevails in the election, the question of what kind of leader he is will be put to a high-stakes test. We shall see with our own eyes.

-Eli Merritt, a research assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”

-Washington Post

The Company that Helps U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Your Treatments

 

Every day, patients across America crack open envelopes with bad news. Yet another health insurer has decided not to pay for a treatment that their doctor has recommended. Sometimes it’s a no for an MRI for a high school wrestler with a strained back. Sometimes for a cancer procedure that will help a grandmother with a throat tumor. Sometimes for a heart scan for a truck driver feeling short of breath.

But the insurance companies don’t always make these decisions. Instead, they often outsource medical reviews to a largely hidden industry that makes money by turning down doctors’ requests for payments, known as prior authorizations. Call it the denials for dollars business.

The biggest player is a company called EviCore by Evernorth, which is hired by major American insurance companies and provides coverage to 100 million consumers — about 1 in 3 insured people. It is owned by the insurance giant Cigna.

A ProPublica and Capitol Forum investigation found that EviCore uses an algorithm backed by artificial intelligence, which some insiders call “the dial,” that it can adjust to lead to higher denials. Some contracts ensure the company makes more money the more it cuts health spending. And it issues medical guidelines that doctors have said delay and deny care for patients.

EviCore and companies like it approve prior authorizations “based on the decision that is more profitable for them,” said Barbara McAneny, a former president of the American Medical Association and a practicing oncologist. “They love to deny things.”

EviCore says it scrutinizes requests to make sure that procedures recommended by doctors are safe, necessary and cost-effective. “We are improving the quality of health care, the safety of health care and, by very happy coincidence, we’re also decreasing a significant amount of unnecessary cost,” an EviCore medical officer explains in a video produced by the company.

But EviCore’s cost-cutting is far from coincidental, according to the investigation.

EviCore markets itself to insurance companies by promising a 3-to-1 return on investment — that is, for every $1 spent on EviCore, the insurer would pay out $3 less on medical care and other costs. EviCore salespeople have boasted of a 15% increase in denials, according to the investigation, which is based on internal documents, corporate data and dozens of interviews with former employees, doctors, industry experts, health care regulators and insurance executives. Almost everybody interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they continue to work in the industry.

An analysis of the company’s own data shows that, since 2021, EviCore turned down prior authorization requests, in full or in part, almost 20% of the time in Arkansas, which requires the publication of denial rates. By comparison, the equivalent figure for federal Medicare Advantage plans was about 7% in 2022.

EviCore has several ways to cut costs for insurers. Chief among them is the dial, the proprietary algorithm that’s the first stop in evaluating a prior authorization. Based on data entered by a doctor’s office, it can automatically approve a request.

The algorithm cannot say no, however. If it finds problems, it sends the request for review to a team of in-house nurses and doctors who consult company medical guidelines. Only doctors can issue a final denial.

This is where tweaking the dial comes in. EviCore can adjust the algorithm to increase the number of requests sent for review, according to five former employees. The more reviews, the higher the chance of denials.

Here’s how it works, the former employees said: The algorithm reviews a request and gives it a score. For example, it may judge one request to have a 75% chance of approval, while another to have a 95% chance. If EviCore wants more denials, it can send on for review anything that scores lower than a 95%. If it wants fewer, it can set the threshold for reviews at scores lower than 75%.

“We could control that,” said one former EviCore executive involved in technology issues. “That’s the game we would play.”

Over the years, medical groups have repeatedly complained that EviCore’s guidelines were outdated and rigid, resulting in inappropriate denials or delays in care. Frustration with the rules has led some doctors to refer to the company as EvilCore. There is even a parody account on X.

The guidelines are also used as a tool to cut costs, the investigation found. Company executives “would say, ‘Keep a closer eye on the guidelines for reviews for a particular company because we’re not showing savings,’” said a former EviCore employee involved in the radiation oncology program.

EviCore says that it develops its guidelines with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.

EviCore is not alone in engaging in the denials-for-dollars business. The second-biggest player is Carelon Medical Benefits Management, a subsidiary of Elevance Health, the health insurer formerly known as Anthem. It has been accused in court of wrongfully denying legitimate requests for coverage. The company has denied all charges. Several smaller companies do the same kind of work.

There is no question that prior authorizations play an important role in modern medicine. They serve to guard against doctors who recommend unnecessary and even potentially harmful treatments. They also protect insurers from fraudulent physicians who overbill for services.

In a response to questions, a Cigna spokesperson provided a statement on behalf of EviCore. “Simply put, EviCore uses the latest evidence-based medicine to ensure that patients receive the care they need and avoid the services they do not,” it said.

The statement acknowledged that EviCore used algorithms for some clinical programs, but “ONLY to accelerate approval of appropriate care and reduce the administrative burden on providers.”

The statement noted that doctors have the ability to appeal prior authorization denials, and that the company routinely monitors the outcomes “as part of our continuous quality improvement to ensure accurate and timely medical necessity decision-making.”

Prior authorization reviews provided by EviCore save money for the entire health insurance system, the statement said. “The natural product of improved care quality and reduced waste is savings for our clients, lower out-of-pocket costs for patients, and fewer health care premium increases for Americans.”

For the entire story, click here: EviCore, the Company Helping U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments — ProPublica

 

The Consequences of Fox News

 

How Fox "News" Became the "Greatest Cancer on Democracy"   

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “With freedom comes responsibility.” That includes the responsibility of media outlets that use the word “news” to present factual information…

We all saw it on Wednesday night. Bret Baier, the multimillionaire supposed “real news” guy at Fox, angrily and rudely lied to the face of the Vice President of the United States and his millions of viewers, presenting an edited version of Trump’s most fascistic remarks that turned truth on its head.

This is just the most recent example of the deadly toxins Fox “News” has been spreading across the American media and political landscape for decades.

The soil in which a democracy grows and flourishes is truthful information held as common knowledge by the majority of the population. Lies, when presented as news or as truth-based information, become a poison that severely injures and can even kill a democracy.

Particularly when those lies are packaged and sold just to make a buck. Or, in the case of the Murdoch empire, billions of bucks.

American, British, and Australian democracy have suffered for decades under the assault of a daily diet of lies, half-truths, and misleading omissions from news operations run by the Murdoch family, and now imitated by the hundreds of others on radio, TV, and social media to which they’ve given example and license.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Rudd wrote, “The uncomfortable truth is Australian politics have become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done within his own nation was the influence of Rupert Murdoch.

Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added: “Murdoch is not just a news organization. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote: “In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted.  They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy. He’s simply following in the footsteps of his notoriously racist father, Sir Keith Murdoch, from whom he inherited his media empire.

“In Australia, as in America,” Rudd wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change, and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism. “Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”

Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its most recent political creation, former President Donald Trump, even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs. 

Fox and Murdoch’s power come from their ruthlessness, says former Australian Prime Minister Rudd. “Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.

“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time nakedly lying to their audience about what happened.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the explicit encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself, who saw the lies as the key to increased profits. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and calling him a “sore loser,” they packaged slick lies saying the exact opposite to their audience. 

Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th — all while making more billions for Murdoch and his family. 

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy, and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

Multiple studies across the years have found that lying media operations large enough to influence a consequential portion of the public do direct and measurable damage to democratic republics. It’s why, as I noted yesterday, strongman operations like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, etc., always first take down the honest media and replace it with a steady diet of lies and distortions.

This is not without consequences. The lack of a shared understanding of political and economic reality produce:

— An erosion of trust in the media itself. Just under half of all Americans said, in a survey done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs last year, that they have “little to no” trust in the nation’s media’s willingness or ability to report the news fairly and with accuracy. In part this is the result of Fox’s own version of Trump’s Big Lie: Fox talent continually imply or even explicitly tell their viewers that they can’t trust the “lamestream media.” This feeds cynicism, ultimately destroying faith in all media and making people vulnerable to corrupt, lying politicians and conspiracy mongers.

— Extreme politics. Deliberately misleading reporting, especially when it aligns with partisan narratives, exacerbates existing political divisions within a society; these can ultimately tear a nation apart, as any German or Rwandan citizen can tell you. It’s particularly noxious when it’s done — as it is at Fox — purely to generate billions in profits for a greedy, foreign family.

— Terrible outcomes for average citizens. In democratic societies, an informed citizenry is crucial. When a significant media source regularly lies, it distorts public understanding of key issues and events, influencing elections and producing bad policy decisions. It leads to things like the $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1 percent over the past 43 years, a reality demagogues like Trump exploit by blaming it on immigrants and minorities.

— A torn-apart society at war with itself. Repeated lies from major media outlets erode faith not just in the press, but in other societal institutions as well, including government, academia, and the justice system. This broad loss of institutional trust destabilizes society itself, as we are seeing today.

— The rise of media hustlers like Alex Jones and rightwing hate radio. As trust in mainstream media declines, people turn to alternative, less reliable sources of information. This further fragments the information landscape and makes consensus-building extremely difficult, even though it’s critical for a democratic society to survive.

— Long-term damage to public discourse. Over time, a culture of lies and misinformation degrades the quality of public debate. When facts become subjective and truth is seen as malleable, it becomes much harder for a society to address complex challenges effectively. History demonstrates that a free and truthful press is essential for a healthy democracy and stable society: When major media outlets like Fox “News” betray that trust through deliberate deception, the consequences are profound and long-lasting.

So, what can we do about the harm the Murdoch money-machine and its imitators have already done and continue to inflict on our society?

Censorship doesn’t work: Freedom of speech and opinion is even more important to a democratic society that consistently accurate news and information. And if the power of determining what is “true” is handed to government, the potential for abuse with a president like Trump becomes extraordinary.

Boycotts don’t work: Fox has demonstrated that they can shrug off advertiser boycotts on an almost indefinite basis because the bulk of their revenue comes from carriage fees cable and online networks pay to have the network on their platform.

Lawsuits and fines don’t work: When Fox was sued for lying about voting machines, they simply paid the fines and continued lying about pretty much everything else they thought was useful to keep their viewers agitated and thus increase their profits. Billion-dollar corporations can fend off lawsuits for years, can drain the coffers of less-affluent litigants, and can shrug off even multi-hundred-million-dollar fines as a cost of business.

There are, however, several approaches that offer considerable promise. They include:

— Promoting media literacy and critical thinking, particularly through public education. Finland is a pioneer in this field, requiring their schools to teach media literacy and critical thinking skills. There’s a knock-on effect when kids come home from school and discuss the media with their parents and peers. Federal legislation to fund civics, media literacy, and critical thinking in every school in America would cost so little as to be a rounding error in the nation’s budget and, like in Finland and other countries that are copying their example, will produce massive dividends in improved democracy and greater social stability and cohesion.

— Politicians braving up enough to call out lying media. For a brief moment in time, the Obama administration took on Fox “News.” In October 2009, they tried to exclude Fox from interviews with a Treasury Department official, Kenneth Feinberg. In September 2009, President Obama did a round of Sunday talk shows that explicitly excluded Fox “News.” Arnie Dunn, then White House Communications Director, came right out and said that Fox was not a legitimate news organization. But Obama and his press people finally gave in under pressure from other mainstream media outlets; they should have held to principle and made clear the specific Fox “News” lies and distortions to which they objected.

— Bringing back media competition. When Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, he killed limits on media ownership that had, for more than a half-century, guaranteed a vibrant, competitive, and diverse media landscape. Since then most local newspapers have died, radio and TV chains have reached monopoly status, and social media giants have destroyed competitors through buy-outs and anticompetitive practices. It’s time to reverse those provisions, as well as ending the social media liability limitations in Section 230 of the Act.

— Mainstream media ending their boycott on calling out Fox and other toxic media. As mentioned, it was pressure from mainstream media operations that caused the Obama administration to back down from boycotting Fox “News.” Instead, real news operations that embrace objectivity and high journalistic standards should not only shun their dishonest peer, but regularly expose their lies and distortions. Journalists shouldn’t be afraid to report on other journalists and their employers; the incestuous world of DC journalism, in particular, is doing real damage to our nation.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “With freedom comes responsibility.” That includes the responsibility of media outlets that use the word “news” to present factual information and clearly label their opinion programming and writing. And the responsibility of real news operations to report on lying media just as aggressively as they report on criminals, world events, and corrupt politicians.

-Thom Hartmann

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“Schools send students to sex-change operations” -Donald Trump

 

Donald Trump tells so many tall tales that it’s hard to keep track. Sometimes, one of his invented stories blows up into an actual news story, such as when he related a dramatic but fake tale of a helicopter ride he said he shared with Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco, that involved a near-death experience and Brown, who once dated Kamala Harris, saying “terrible things” about her.

Brown has said the ride never took place. Trump’s nonsensical story involving a sinking electric boat, a potential electrocution and a ferocious shark attack also earned news coverage — and mockery. (We won’t even begin to fact check whether his claim that Arnold Palmer was “all man” is true.)

But most of the time, Trump rambles on, in rally after rally, interview after interview, virtually unchecked in the friendly media environs he favors. We fact check when we can, but the overwhelming nature of his onslaught of falsehoods — and the trivial nature of many of them — makes it difficult to keep up. He has a standard repertory that he used often during his presidency, which he has augmented with updated or new false claims.

Here’s a list of some of his latest made-up stories, all of which would earn Four Pinocchios.

 

“Hydrogen cars blow up and ‘you’re not even recognizable”

“If you want a gasoline-propelled car, if you want to have a hybrid, you should have it. You should be able to have it. The new thing is hydrogen. They have hydrogen cars. They have one problem — on occasion it will blow up and when it blows up, you are not recognizable. No, you’re not even recognizable. This is like a massive bomb being dropped. When it blows up, you are no longer — your wife cannot identify you. Let me put it that way.” — Rally in Erie, Penn., Sept. 29

This is nonsense. A riff along these lines — warning of the dangers of exploding hydrogen-powered cars — has popped up in a number of Trump’s recent speeches when he trashes the Biden administration efforts to promote electric vehicles. Usually, the former president will recount that the person in the exploded car was obliterated beyond recognition.

When asked for an explanation, a Trump campaign official provided a link to an article about a 2023 explosion at a hydrogen fueling station for buses in California. No one was hurt. That’s not the scenario portrayed by Trump. We couldn’t find any news report that came close to Trump’s description.

As is usual with Trump, there are tiny threads of factual information that he appears to have twisted into a fantastic story. For instance, Ukrainian forces recently turned a fully loaded hydrogen fuel cell from a Toyota Mirai into a bomb that was used against Russian troops. In 2019, Toyota and Hyundai suspended car sales in Norway after a refueling station exploded — but again, no one was hurt.

Hydrogen Fuel News, an industry publication, says that fears of exploding cars is based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the gas. Safety regulations ensure that the tanks can survive a crash — confirmed in crash testing — and so “fuel cell vehicles are often considered to be even safer than conventional gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.”

 

“Deere reversed plans to move to Mexico because of Trump”

“John Deere, great company. They announced about a year ago, they’re going to build big plants outside of the United States. They’re going to build them in Mexico … I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants. I kept the jobs here.”

— Remarks at the Economic Club of Chicago, Oct. 15

This is nonsense. Farm equipment maker Deere & Co. issued a statement after Trump’s remarks saying it has not changed plans to move some manufacturing from plants in Iowa to Mexico. The company has said the move would free up space for employees at U.S. plants for additional types of farm equipment.

 

“Electric trucks will cause bridges to collapse”

“Much of the [electric] truck is used. The capacity for batteries. The batteries are very heavy and very big. Very, very big. Many times the size of a tank that carries lots of gallons of diesel. You have to stop six times and you have to get charges …. The truck is so heavy because batteries are very heavy. The truck weighs more than twice as much as a gasoline truck. So what happens to diesel? So what happens is they have to fix every bridge all over the United States to handle the weight. Every bridge has to be rebuilt because the weight is double and triple that of a gasoline or diesel tank truck.”

— campaign rally in Las Vegas, June 9

This is nonsense. Batteries for electric trucks can be heavy, making most electric trucks heavier than diesel trucks, though Trump is wrong to say they weigh twice as much. The additional weight cuts into profit margins because less material can be carried. Why’s that? Because a semi-truck, even an electric one like the Freightliner eCascadia or Tesla Semi, can legally weigh a maximum of 80,000 pounds. So electric trucks would not weigh any more than diesel trucks unless the law is changed. Trump’s fears about bridges collapsing are misplaced. The bridges are designed to handle weight of 80,000 pounds.

 

“Schools send students to sex-change operations”

“Pushing transgender ideology on minor children, how about that one? Your child goes to school and they take your child. It was a he and comes back a she. And they do this and they do it … and often without parental consent. Can you even believe we’re saying this?”

— campaign rally in Reading, Penn., Oct. 9

This is nonsense. Trump keeps saying this in his rallies, but the Trump campaign has never produced evidence to back it up — not of such a procedure being done at a school or of a school sending a student for such surgery with or without parental consent. A Harvard study based on insurance claims in 2019 and published in July found that no transgender surgeries were performed on youth ages 12 and younger. For teens ages 15 to 17, the rate was 2.1 per 100,000, making it a rare procedure. The majority of the surgeries were for breast reduction — and they did not involve schools.

 

He “won environmental awards at Doral and elsewhere”

“I own Doral [golf course] right next door, and we did that in a very environment … I get awards, environmental awards for the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water …. I’ve had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I’ve built. Because you know about building, that’s what you do.”

— Remarks at Univision town hall, Oct. 16

This is nonsense. There is no record of the Doral winning environmental awards, let alone for the “mixing of the sand and the water.” (The Trump campaign did not respond to a message requesting evidence.) Trump has long claimed to have won environmental awards, but our exhaustive review in 2017 showed the evidence was slim.

We found one award: The 2007 Metropolitan Golf Association Club Environmental Award was given to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. But in 2011, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection cited the golf course for a series of environmental violations. Other golf courses owned by Trump earned the ire of environmentalists; for example, the one in Loudoun County, Va., where more than 400 trees along the Potomac River were felled during a renovation.

We found only one personal award given to Trump. The Friends of Westchester County Parks Inc., gave him a “Green Space Award” in 2007 for donating 436 acres of land to the state of New York. Trump had purchased the land in the 1990s to build a golf course but withdrew plans after facing opposition from local residents and environmental restrictions. Trump donated the land to be built into the Donald Trump State Park. But the land was never developed; the state of New York closed it after budget cuts in 2010.

 

“Harris will get rid of cows”

“I love cows but if we go with Kamala, you won’t have any cows anymore …. According to Kamala, who’s a radical left lunatic, you will not have any cows anymore.”

— Trump, appearing on “Fox & Friends,” Oct. 18

This is nonsense. This line is a staple at his rallies, twisted from a comment Harris made in 2019 on whether dietary guidelines should be changed to encourage less consumption of meat. In essence, she said she would support a change in the guidelines, as there had to be incentives to encourage less consumption of meat — even though she loved a cheeseburger from time to time. But there is no requirement for Americans to follow dietary guidelines — and she certainly never called for the elimination of cows.

At a roundtable for Hispanic voters in Las Vegas on Oct. 12, Trump not only mentioned cows but claimed windows would be banned, too: “They want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings. They have some wonderful plans for this country. Uh, honestly, they’re crazy and they’re really hurting our country badly.”

That’s also nonsense.

-from The Washington Post

 

The Global War on Children

 

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America’s war in Vietnam.

“She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with,” recalled Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider’s hypothesis has consistently been borne out.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and condemned — six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them.

Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew — that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children.”

The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children.

Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war.

The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe.

Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital.

“We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services.

“The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website.

One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations.

And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered.

Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out.

To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma.

However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish.

With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

CounterPunch, Nick Turse

 

"Could America be on the edge of a possible second Civil War?"

There's little doubt that if Donald Trump thought starting a civil war to seize and hold power in America would work, he’d do it. As would the majority of his cult members. But could they pull it off? Could America be on the edge of a possible second Civil War? And, if so, why and how did it get this far?

Most people would argue, “Aren’t civil wars usually started by the downtrodden? By the poor and disenfranchised? Rich and powerful people don’t start civil wars, do they?” Amazingly, that widespread belief is almost 100 percent wrong. (Of course, we believe this wrongly: rich and powerful people typically write history.)

It turns out that the vast majority of the hundreds of civil wars fought throughout history were started by those in power or wealthy elites very close to power. Facing economic, political, or demographic change, they’re the ones who see their wealth and power slipping away from them; that’s why they start civil wars, to hang onto that power and the wealth associated with it.

Serbs in power started the terrible civil war in the Balkans. Wealthy plantation owners in the American south started our Civil War. Wealthy Sunnis in majority Shiite Iraq started the Iraq Civil War. Other examples of recent civil wars started by in-power elites (I’ve done relief work in the midst of three, in Colombia, South Sudan, and Uganda) are listed at the end of this article.

And today a few dozen morbidly rich members of America’s elite, including the world’s richest man, using input occasionally provided by Vladimir Putin, could very well help start a 21st century American civil war.

Barbara F. Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego and one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terror. She’s also the author of five books including, in 2022, How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them.

Walter identifies several major factors that predictably create the conditions for a civil war, and today the US meets them all.

The first is that the country is an anocracy rather than a democracy. In an anocracy, there are all the trappings of a democracy — elections, political debates, peaceful transitions of power — but the government has ceased to serve its people, devoting virtually all its energy instead to supporting the elites that have captured it.

Typically it is one political party that flips a nation into being an anocaracy, and they are able to do it because they have formed an alliance with the country’s wealthiest people. This form of government might be described as, “Of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.” That’s what happened in over a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America over the past century. Russia and Hungary today, for example, are anocracies. And, over the past few decades, America has largely become one, too.

Consider how much of “what average people want” actually got done in the era from the 1930s to the 1980s: We got from our democratic government the right to unionize, Social Security, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, high-quality public schools and nearly free colleges, food and housing support for the poor, Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, low-cost healthcare, and reasonably priced insurance (among other things). Housing was affordable.

As I note in my new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream: When my dad bought his home in the 1950s, the median price of a single-family house was around 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the St. Louis Fed says the median house sells for $417,700 while the median American income is $40,480—a ratio of more than 10 to 1 between housing costs and annual income.

Wealthy elites were held in check by high taxation, and anti-trust laws were enforced to prevent the formation of monopolies. “Good government” laws set rigid limits on dark money in politics. More than half of the members of Congress during most of that era came from the middle class.

As a result, Congress helped out average Americans and kept the power of the morbidly rich in check. CEOs only took home 30 times what the average worker earned. Since the Reagan Revolution, however, that system was flipped upside down and America has slid into anocracy.

Newt Gingrich convinced Republicans in the 1990s that they should never compromise with Democrats, and in 2010 five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to aid political campaigns.

Billionaires and giant corporations essentially took over our government. Today, they buy elections in ways that would’ve earned a prison sentence 50 years ago. As a result, average Americans no longer get what they want from their government. We’ve seen the middle class collapse over the past 43 years, going from around two-thirds of us when Reagan came into office to well below half of us today. Rubbing salt into that wound, today it takes two incomes to maintain a similar lifestyle to what a single paycheck could provide in 1980, and college, housing, and health insurance have all become unaffordable.

Since Reagan suspended enforcement of the anti-trust laws and cut taxes on the wealthy in the 1980s, the morbidly rich have seized fully $50 trillion that used to be in the homes and retirement accounts of working class people and moved it into their own money bins.

They’re using it to buy super-yachts, build giant penis-shaped rockets to blast themselves into outer space, and to purchase politicians. Three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America. And they want to hang onto it.

The result is that we’re seeing the most visible symptom of an anocracy: The elite get whatever they want while the average person sees almost no help or support from a government that now seems remote and disinterested. That, says Walter, is the first characteristic of a country on the brink of a civil war.

The second is that in-power elites suddenly begin to face the possibility of losing some or even all of their power, and the wealth associated with it, which provokes them to encourage strife. Often this is caused by demographic change, which is exactly what’s happening in today’s America.

Within a single generation the non-white population will be larger than the white population (it already is in Texas, for example), and non-white politicians and business people are gaining wealth and power. To provoke civil strife, white workers are told by Republicans like Trump that non-whites “want your jobs” (and want to “rape your women”), and that America is becoming a “hellish” “shithole country” as it gets browner and browner.

Thus, civil war occurs when the elites themselves pit factions within a nation against each other, mainly to keep the focus away from their own pillaging of the country while preserving their own wealth and power. That, of course, is at the core of the Republican Party’s current electoral strategy.

Even Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were willing to collaborate and work with Democrats to get things done. Now that the GOP has become primarily the party of white grievance, Republican politicians view their role (beyond more tax cuts for white elites) as blocking any forward progress that may help the country’s non-white near-majority.

Exacerbating this divide, social media now uses secret algorithms that reward outrage and hate, inflaming the white majority and certifying their fear of a loss of wealth and status at the hands of non-white people and their allies in the Democratic Party.

That elevated profile of grievance on social media also causes the haters — being algorithmically amplified — to believe their numbers are much larger than they actually are, which makes them even more dangerous.

A final factor that inflames the chance of a civil war here is the presence of over 400 million guns, many of them weapons designed specifically for the battlefield. Most are in the possession of the same white now-majority that fears their place in society is slipping because of the growing population of non-white people.

Having read Walter’s work (and others) and worked in the middle of three civil wars myself, I believe if Trump can manage to seize power this fall and again become president, he will try to start a civil war. His language is a near mirror image of that coming out of the old South in the 1850s; he’s already threatening to unleash the military on America’s people (the definition of a civil war); and he’s supported by several billionaires whose formative years were spent in apartheid South Africa. Those same billionaires, in fact, funded the rise of JD Vance to the Senate.

On the other hand, if Trump decisively loses this fall and is unable to seize power via the Supreme Court or other means, I believe he’ll still try to start a second American civil war. The odds of his success are much lower without full access to the levers of power, but that hasn’t stopped many others in his same position throughout history.

Walter points this all out in her book and an amazing Ted Talk that’s well worth fifteen minutes of your time.

So, what can we do?

Walter argues that one of the top ways America could calm tensions and step back from the possibility of civil war is to regulate social media so they can no longer use their secret algorithms to prioritize messages — many originating from Russia — that are intentionally designed to tear the country apart.

The other step, of course, is to return America from anocracy back to democracy. That will require re-outlawing dark money in politics by reversing Citizens United, re-regulating corporate and individual contributions to candidates and causes, and returning our government to functions that give average people what they want rather than simply catering to elites.

Can we do it?

There’s little doubt in my mind that both President Biden and Vice President Harris are well aware of these circumstances that threaten actual nationwide violence; both have repeatedly referenced them, albeit tangentially or vaguely.

That increases the chances that if Democrats can take both houses of Congress and hold the White House this fall, we can step back from the abyss while making life much, much better for the majority of Americans of all races and religions.

And that might even bring many of these Trump cult followers back to their rational senses, as America puts itself back together like we did after the Republican Great Depression. Dissent diminishes, after all, as society becomes more prosperous and egalitarian.

Can America avoid that worst civil war outcome and instead make the transition from a white-controlled economic and political system to a truly multiracial, multireligious, pluralistic democracy with a diverse middle class that’s again stable and prospering?

The answer, if enough of us vote this fall, is most likely an emphatic “Yes.”

-Thom Hartmann

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 Image by Alexa from Pixabay