68 percent of Americans reject Biden’s corporate nominees. (Jacobin magazine)
As congressional Democrats press Joe Biden to reject investment banking executive Rahm Emanuel’s bid to get himself appointed to the cabinet, new polling data show the vast majority of Americans want senators to vote down presidential nominees who are too closely tied to corporate interests.
60 percent of respondents believe that Biden appointing corporate executives and lobbyists to his administration would be out of step with his campaign promises — and 68 percent of respondents believe that if Biden nonetheless puts forward corporate-linked nominees, senators should reject them.
Earlier this week, US Sen. Bernie Sanders said that it would be “enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’ — and there’s some discussion that that’s what he intends to do — which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats — but which ignored the progressive community. I think that would be very, very unfortunate.”
US election 2020: Why Donald Trump lost (from bbc.com)
US election 2020: Why Donald Trump lost
Nick Bryant
New York correspondent
GETTY IMAGES
Let the 2020 election bury the mistaken notion once and for all that the 2016 election was a historical accident, an American aberration.
Donald Trump won more than 70 million votes, the second highest total in American history. Nationally, he has more than a 47% share of his vote, and looks to have won 24 states, including his beloved Florida and Texas.
He has an extraordinary hold over large swathes of this country, a visceral connection that among thousands of supporters has brought a near cult-like devotion. After four years in the White House, his supporters studied the fine print of his presidency and clicked enthusiastically on the terms and conditions.
Any analysis of his political weakness in 2020 also has to acknowledge his political strength. However, he was defeated, becoming one of only four incumbents in the modern era not to get another four years. Also he has become the first president to lose the popular vote in consecutive elections.
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he was a norm-busting political outsider who was prepared to say what had previously been unsayable.
But Donald Trump also lost the presidency in 2020 partly because he was a norm-busting political outsider who was prepared to say what had previously been unsayable.
Though much of the Trump base might well have voted for him if he had shot someone on Fifth Avenue, his infamous boast from four years ago, others who supported him four years ago were put off by his aggressive behaviour.
This was especially true in the suburbs. Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's performance in 373 suburban counties, helping him claw back the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and enabling him to gain Georgia and Arizona. Donald Trump has a particular problem with suburban women.
We witnessed again in the 2020 presidential election what we had seen in the 2018 mid-term election - more highly-educated Republicans, some of whom had voted for Trump four years ago prepared to give him a chance, thought his presidency was too unpresidential. Though they understood he would be unconventional, many found the manner in which he defied so many customs and behavioural norms off-putting and often offensive.
They were put off by his aggressiveness. His stoking of racial tensions. His use of racist language in tweets maligning people of colour. His failure, on occasions, to adequately condemn white supremacy. His trashing of America's traditional allies and his admiration for authoritarian strongmen, such as Vladimir Putin.
His strange boasts about being "a very stable genius" and the like. His promotion of conspiracy theories. His use of a lingua franca that sometimes made him sound more like a crime boss, such as when he described his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, as "a rat".
Black People Are Being Arrested at Higher Rates for Social Distancing Violations (FROM truthout.org)
Οn
April 17 in Toledo, Ohio, a 19-year-old black man was arrested for
violating the state stay-at-home order. In court filings, police say he
took a bus from Detroit to Toledo “without a valid reason.” Six young
black men were arrested in Toledo last Saturday while hanging out on a
front lawn; police allege they were “seen standing within 6 feet of each
other.” In Cincinnati, a black man was charged with violating
stay-at-home orders after he was shot in the ankle on April 7; according
to a police affidavit, he was talking to a friend in the street when he
was shot and was “clearly not engaged in essential activities.”
Ohio’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, issued the state’s stay-at-home order on
March 22, prohibiting people from leaving their home except for
essential activities and requiring them to maintain social distancing
“at all times.” A violation of the order is a misdemeanor, punishable by
up to 90 days in jail and a $750 fine. Since the order, hundreds of
people have been charged with violations across Ohio.
The
state has also seen some of the most prominent protests against state
stay-at-home orders, as large crowds gather on the statehouse steps to
flout the directives. But the protesters, most of them white, have not
faced arrest. Rather, in three large Ohio jurisdictions ProPublica
examined, charges of violating the order appear to have fallen
disproportionately on black people.
ProPublica
analyzed court records for the city of Toledo and for the counties that
include Columbus and Cincinnati, three of the most populous
jurisdictions in Ohio. In all of them, ProPublica found, black people
were at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the
stay-at-home order as white people.
As
states across the country attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19,
stay-at-home orders have proven instrumental in the fight against the
novel coronavirus; experts credit aggressive restrictions with
flattening the curve in the nation’s hotbeds. Many states’ orders carry
criminal penalties for violations of the stay-at-home mandates. But as
the weather warms up and people spend more time outside, defense lawyers
and criminal justice reform advocates fear that black communities long
subjected to overly aggressive policing will face similarly aggressive
enforcement of stay-at-home mandates.
In Ohio, ProPublica found, the disparities are already pronounced.
As
of Thursday night in Hamilton County, which is 27% black and home to
Cincinnati, there were 107 charges for violating the order; 61% of
defendants are black. The majority of arrests came from towns
surrounding Cincinnati, which is 43% black. Of the 29 people charged by
the city’s Police Department, 79% were black, according to data provided
to ProPublica by the Hamilton County Public Defender.
In Toledo, where black people make up 27% of the population, 18 of the 23 people charged thus far were black.
Lt.
Kellie Lenhardt, a spokeswoman for the Toledo Police Department, said
that in enforcing the stay-at-home order, the department’s goal is not
to arrest people and that officers are primarily responding to calls
from people complaining about violations of the order. She told
ProPublica that if the police arrested someone, the officers believed
they had probable cause, and that while biased policing would be
“wrong,” it would also be wrong to arrest more white people simply “to
balance the numbers.”
In
Franklin County, which is 23.5% black, 129 people were arrested between
the beginning of the stay-at-home order and May 4; 57% of the people
arrested were black.
In
Cleveland, which is 50% black and is the state’s second-largest city,
the Municipal Court’s public records do not include race data. The court
and the Cleveland Police Department were unable to readily provide
demographic information about arrests to ProPublica, though on Friday,
the police said they have issued eight charges so far.
In
the three jurisdictions, about half of those charged with violating the
order were also charged with other offenses, such as drug possession
and disorderly conduct. The rest were charged only with violating the
order; among that group, the percentage of defendants who were black was
even higher.
Franklin
Country is home to Columbus, where enforcement of the stay-at-home
order has made national headlines for a very different reason. Columbus
is the state capital and Ohio’s largest city with a population of almost
900,000. In recent weeks, groups of mostly white protesters have
campaigned against the stay-at-home order on the Statehouse steps and
outside the health director’s home. Some protesters have come armed, and
images have circulated of crowds of demonstrators huddled close,
chanting, many without masks.
No
protesters have been arrested for violating the stay-at-home order, a
spokesperson for the Columbus mayor’s office told ProPublica. Thomas
Hach, an organizer of a group called Free Ohio Now, said in an email
that he was not aware of any arrests associated with protests in the
entire state. The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to
ProPublica’s request for comment.
Ohio
legislators are contemplating reducing the criminal penalties for
violating the order. On Wednesday, the state House passed legislation
that would eliminate the possibility of jail time for stay-at-home
violators. A first offense would result in a warning, and further
violations would result in a small fine. The bill is pending in the
state Senate.
Penalties
for violating stay-at-home orders vary across the country. In many
states, including California, Florida, Michigan and Washington,
violations can land someone behind bars. In New York state, violations
can only result in fines. In Baltimore, police told local
media they had only charged two people with violations; police have
reportedly relied on a recording played over the loudspeakers of squad
cars: “Even if you aren’t showing symptoms, you could still have
coronavirus and accidentally spread it to a relative or neighbor. Being
home is being safe. We are all in this together.”
Enforcement has often resulted in controversy. In New York City, a viral video showed police pull out a Taser and punch a black man after they approached a group of people who weren’t wearing masks. Police say the man who was punched took a “fighting stance” when ordered to disperse. In Orlando, police arrested a
homeless man walking a bicycle because he was not obeying curfew. In
Hawaii, charges against a man accused of stealing a car battery,
normally a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, were enhanced to a felony, which can result in 10 years in prison, because police and prosecutors said he was in violation of the state order.
The
orders are generally broad, and decisions about which violations to
treat as acceptable and which ones to penalize have largely been left to
local police departments’ discretion.
Kristen
Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law,
a legal organization focused on racial justice, said such discretion
has opened the door to police abuse, and she said the U.S. Department of
Justice or state governments should issue detailed guidelines about
when to make arrests. That discretion “is what’s given rise to these
rogue practices,” she told ProPublica, “that are putting black
communities and communities of color with a target on their backs.”
In jails and prisons around
the country, inmates have fallen ill or died from COVID-19 as the virus
spreads rapidly through the facilities. Many local governments have
released some inmates from jail and ordered police to reduce arrests for
minor crimes. But in Hamilton County, some people charged with failing
to maintain social distancing have been kept in jail for at least one
night, even without any other charges. Recently, two sheriff’s deputies
who work in the jail tested positive
for COVID-19. “The cops put their hands on them, they cram them in the
car, they take them to the [jail], which has 800 to 1400 people,
depending on the night,” said Sean Vicente, director of the Hamilton
County Public Defender’s misdemeanor division. “It’s often so crowded
everyone’s just sitting on the floor.”
Clarke
said the enforcement push is sometimes undercutting the public health
effort: “Protecting people’s health is in direct conflict with putting
people in overcrowded jails and prisons that have been hotbeds for the
virus.”
Court records show that the Cincinnati Police Department has adopted some surprising applications of the law.
Six
people were charged with violations of the order after they were shot.
Only one was charged with another crime as well, but police affidavits
state that when they were shot, they were or likely were in violation of
the order. One man was shot in the ankle while talking to a friend,
according to court filings, and “was clearly not engaged in essential
activities.” Another was arrested with the same explanation; police
wrote that he had gone to the hospital with a gunshot wound. The
Cincinnati Police Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests
for comment.
In
Springfield Township, a small, mostly white Cincinnati suburb, nine
people have been arrested for violating the order thus far. All of them
are black.
Springfield
Township Police Chief Robert Browder told ProPublica in an email that
the department is “an internationally accredited law enforcement
organization” and has “strict policies … to ensure that our zero
tolerance policy prohibiting bias-based profiling is adhered to.”
Browder
said race had not played a role in his department’s enforcement of the
order and that he was “appalled if that is the insinuation.”
Several
of the black people arrested in Springfield Township were working for a
company that sells books and magazine subscriptions door to door. One
of the workers, Carl Brown, 50, said he and five colleagues were working
in Springfield Township when two members of the team were arrested
while going door to door. Police called the other sales people, and when
they arrived at the scene, they too were arrested. Five of them,
including Brown, were charged only with violating the stay-at-home
order; the sixth sales person had an arrest warrant in another state,
according to Browder, and police also charged her for giving them false
identification.
Brown
said one of the officers had left the group with a warning: They should
never come back, and if they do, it’s “going to be worse.”
Browder
denied that the officers made such a threat, and he said the police had
received calls from residents about the sales people and their tactics
and that the sales people had failed to register with the Police
Department, as required for door-to-door solicitation.
Other
violations in Hamilton County have been more egregious, but even in
some of those cases, the law enforcement response has stirred
controversy. On April 4, a man who had streamed a party on Facebook
Live, saying, “We don’t give a fuck about this coronavirus,” was
arrested in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, the setting of a
2001 riot after police fatally shot an unarmed black man.
The
man who streamed the party, Rashaan Davis, was charged with violating
the stay-at-home order and inciting violence, and his bond was set at
$350,000.
After Judge Alan Triggs said he would release Davis from jail pretrial because the offense charged was nonviolent, local media reported, prosecutors dropped the misdemeanor and said they would focus on the charge of inciting violence, a felony.
The Hamilton County prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Davis’ case.
In
Toledo, there’s been public controversy around perceived differences in
the application of the law. On April 21, debate at the Toledo City
Council meeting centered
around a food truck. Local politicians discussed recent arrests of
young black people at house parties, some contrasting them with a large,
white crowd standing close together in line outside a BBQ stand,
undisturbed by police. Councilmember Gary Johnson told ProPublica he’s
asked the police chief to investigate why no one was arrested at a party
he’d heard about, where white people were congregating on docks. “I
don’t know the circumstances of the arrests,” he said. But “if you feel
you need to go into poor neighborhoods and African American
neighborhoods, you better be going into white neighborhoods too. … You
have to say we’re going to be heavy-handed with the stay-at-home order
or we’re going to be light with it. It has to be one or the other.”
Toledo
police enforcement has not been confined to partygoers. Armani Thomas,
20, is one of the six young men arrested for not social distancing on a
lawn. He told ProPublica he was sitting there with nine friends “doing
nothing” when the police pulled up. Two kids ran off, and the police
made the rest stay, eventually arresting “all the dudes” and letting the
girls go. He was taken to the county jail, where several inmates have
tested positive, for booking and released after several hours. The men’s
cases are pending.
“When
police see black people gathered in public, I think there’s this
looming belief that they must be doing something illegal,” RaShya Ghee, a
criminal defense attorney and lecturer at the University of Toledo,
told ProPublica. “They’re hanging out in a yard — something illegal must
have happened. Or, something illegal is about to happen.”
Lenhardt,
the police lieutenant, said the six men were arrested after police
received 911 calls reporting “a group gathering and flashing guns.” None
of the six men were arrested on gun charges. As for the 19-year-old
charged for taking the bus without reason, she said police asked him on
consecutive days to not loiter at a bus station.
With
more than 70,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus, government
officials have not figured out how to balance the threat of COVID-19
with the harms of over policing, Clarke said. “On the one hand, we want
to beat back the pandemic. That’s critical. That’s the end goal,” she
told ProPublica. “On the other hand, we’re seeing social distancing
being used as a pretext to arrest the very communities that have been
hit hardest by the virus.”
Why Marx Was Right ( http://socialistreview.org.uk)
Terry Eagleton
To its critics, Marxism is a doctrine which has long outlived its usefulness. It preaches the need for violent revolution, spearheaded by a small band of insurrectionists. It led to Stalin's gulags and Mao's massacres. Its utopian aspirations mask a tendency towards brutal dictatorship. Perhaps Marx may have been on to something in the 19th century but his obsession with class is redundant in today's post-industrial, socially-mobile world. At best his ideas are outdated, at worst they are crudely deterministic, assuming that the complex totality of society can be understood exclusively through the lens of economics.
If this were really what Marxism was all about, it would certainly be an impoverished philosophy. Terry Eagleton's new book takes ten common arguments against Marx and Marxism, and dispatches them thoroughly and elegantly. Through the process of debunking anti-communist caricatures, he unfolds Marx's key ideas. As readers familiar with Eagleton's work will expect, his style throughout is witty and playful?but no less rigorous for that.
At times the arguments develop at a leisurely pace, but there can be little doubt that Eagleton is determined to win a new audience for Marx's ideas. His discussion is peppered with the kinds of questions that would be typical of anyone exploring these concepts for the first time. These questions are used to prod and probe at Marx's thought, moving beyond mere assertion to reveal the dialectical underpinnings of Marx's method of analysing the world.
Marx focused much of his attention on work - the way production is organised in society and the social relations that grow from, and reinforce, that form of organisation. But he wrote extensively about work precisely because he wanted humans to free themselves from unnecessary and alienating toil.
As Marx observed, the poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost for the same reason a silk worm creates silk; it was an expression of his nature. But under capitalist production, most people, most of the time, are expropriated from the fruits of their labour, and exercise little or no control over the way they work. Work becomes not an expression of human creativity, but a mere means of extracting surplus value to enrich a tiny elite.
Eagleton rightly points out that human nature is far more historically variable than is usually acknowledged. But he also reminds us that Marx was deeply concerned about the fact that capitalism prevents people realising their full potential as humans - their "species being" as he puts it. It's just that he saw this human nature being shaped by the material conditions of our lives, rather than as a separate, abstract force. Communism is that state of affairs in which humans become able to explore the full range of their creative powers, free of the shackles of class domination and where Marx himself could have written a big book on his favourite novelist, Balzac, rather than endless volumes of Capital.
This book is clearly aimed at people approaching Marx's ideas for the first time. Recently Eagleton has tended to produce short books untangling quite specific philosophical questions, such as the nature of evil and the relationship between religion and revolution, to give just two examples. Why Marx Was Right is a welcome return to the core of Marxist thought, executed with wit and panache. Seasoned Marxists will find most of the arguments presented here familiar but argued with verve. But even so, this book provides a formidable compendium that will be a useful reference for any socialist.
Marxism, finally, is provisional. It is not a Theory of Everything. It provides no blueprints for a future society, though it insists on the possibility of a future free of exploitation, war and inequality - a possibility embedded in the present. Eagleton observes wryly, "That Marxism is finished would be music to the ears of Marxists everywhere. They could pack in their marching and picketing, return to the bosom of their grieving families and enjoy an evening at home instead of yet another committee meeting... The task of political radicals... is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished."
At the heart of this book is a simple but urgent truth: we need Marx more than ever before. This slim volume should help to arm a new generation of socialists with the ideas necessary to win the battles ahead. Only then will we all be able pack up our marching gear and enjoy a well-earned revolutionary retirement.
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