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This Christmas I mourn the long, slow death of our democracy that led to the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. I fear the euphoria of those who have embraced the atavistic lust for violence and bigotry stoked by him. These nativist forces, part of the continuum of white vigilante violence directed against people of color and radical dissidents throughout American history, are once again being groomed as instruments of mass intimidation and perhaps terror. I know that our civil and political institutions, poisoned by neoliberalism and captured by the corporate state, have neither the will nor the ability to protect us. We are on our own. It won't be pleasant.
A week ago in New York I spoke with Ellen Schrecker, the country's foremost historian of McCarthyism and the author of "Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America," "No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & The Universities" and "The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University."
"What am I seeing?" she asked about the nation's political and cultural condition. "Am I seeing a replay of the McCarthy era? To a large extent some of the parallels are stunning. You can look at a figure like [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy, who symbolized a much broader repressive movement. I would say Trump plays the same role today for what really is a right-wing reactionary movement that has taken over the American government."
"There are a number of fairly superficial comparisons we can make," Schrecker went on. "I think both McCarthy and Trump are somewhat abhorrent characters--perhaps there's a little sociopath involved there. McCarthy was a genius at working the press. He understood how to get himself on the front pages. He knew the deadlines that specific reporters had. He knew how to feed them stories. I think the parallels there are pretty obvious. Trump is a genius with regard to the media."
The Wisconsin senator was, as Trump is now, very opportunistic, she said. McCarthy, a Democrat before he became a Republican, "was just a little bit late" in exploiting the Red Scare, Schrecker said, latching on to it in 1950, "by which time the Un-American Activities Committee had been hounding Hollywood."
Trump and his Christian fascist minions, sooner than most of us expect, will seek to shut down the small spaces left for free expression. Dissent will become difficult and sometimes dangerous. There will be an overt campaign of discrimination and hate crimes directed against a host of internal enemies, including undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans and dissidents. The Christian right will be given a license to roll back women's rights, insert their magical thinking into school curriculums and terrorize Muslims and the GBLT community. The Trump administration will hand our Christian jihadists a platform to champion a repugnant religious chauvinism that fuses the symbols and language of the Christian religion with American capitalism, imperialism and white supremacy.
Repressive measures, I expect, will be implemented swiftly. Speed blinds a captive population to what is happening. Already anemic democratic traditions and institutions, including the legal system, the two major political parties and the press, will crumble under the assault. Trump will use the familiar tools that make possible the authoritarian state: mass incarceration, militarized police, crippling of the judicial system, demonization of opponents real and imagined, and obliteration of privacy and civil liberties, all foolishly promoted by the political elites on behalf of corporate power.
Schrecker said the rise of Trump has been in the making for four decades. Corporations funded and established institutions to close the cultural, social and political openings made in the 1960s, especially in universities, the press, labor and the arts. These corporate forces turned government into a destructive power. America was pillaged and cannibalized for profit. We now live in a deindustrialized wasteland. This scorched-earth assault created fertile ground for a demagogue.
The late Lewis Powell, a general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and later a Supreme Court justice, in 1971 wrote an eight-page memo outlining a campaign to counter what the document's title described as an "Attack on American Free Enterprise System." The memo established the Business Roundtable, which generated huge monetary resources and political clout to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell report listed methods that corporations could use to silence those in "the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals" who were hostile to corporate interests.
Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes. He proposed that ideological assaults against government regulation and environmental protection be directed at a mass audience. He advocated placing corporate-friendly academics and neoliberal economists in universities and banishing from the public sphere those who challenged unfettered corporate power--especially Ralph Nader, whom Powell cited by name. Organizations were to be formed to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. Pro-corporate judges were to be placed on the bench.
Academics were to be controlled by pressure from right-wing watch lists, co-opted university administrators and wealthy donors. Under the prolonged assault the universities, like the press, eventually became compliant, banal and monochromatic.
"He spelled out a need for an alternative to academic knowledge," Schrecker said of Powell. "He felt the academy had been undermined by the left. He wanted to establish an alternative source of expertise. What you're getting in the 1970s is the development of things like the American Enterprise Institute [in existence since 1938] , The Heritage Foundation, a whole bunch of think tanks on the right who people in the media can go to and get expertise. But it's politically motivated."
"It was unbelievably successful," she said of the campaign. "It's pretty bad. What we're seeing today is an assault on knowledge. What came out of this are the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s which created a set of stereotypes of professors as deconstructionist, raging feminists who hate men, cross-dressers, and, worse, who are out of touch with reality."
The ideological attack was accompanied by corporate campaigns to defund public schools and universities, along with public broadcasting and the arts. The humanities were eviscerated. Vocational training, including the expansion of the study of finance and economics in universities, replaced disciplines that provided students with cultural and historical literacy, that allowed them to step outside of themselves to feel and express empathy for the other. Students were no longer taught how to think, but what to think. Civic education died. A grotesque kind of illiteracy--one exemplified by Trump--was celebrated. Success became solely about amassing wealth. The cult of the self, the essence of corporatism, became paramount.
Schrecker said that during the McCarthy era most of the Red baiting, blacklisting and censorship emanated from the government, especially J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover and McCarthy, along with Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, left ruined lives and reputations in the wake of their vicious inquisitions. They effectively shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Cohn, who was a prosecutor in the espionage case that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, was later Trump's lawyer and close friend for 13 years. Cohn was disbarred in 1986, shortly before his death, for what a court called unethical, unprofessional and "particularly reprehensible" conduct.
"There are ... many more private entities" involved in today's anti-democratic campaign, Schrecker said. "It's a bit of everything. That's why it's so dangerous. It's not just Trump. Trump is clearly about to become very powerful. Nonetheless, there have been these forces, the climate deniers, the oil people, all of them are coming together at this particular point in time."
We must begin again. Any hope for a restoration of civil society will come from small, local groups and community organizations. They will begin with the mundane tasks of holding back the expansion of charter schools, enforcing environmental regulations, building farmers markets, fighting for the minimum wage, giving sanctuary to undocumented workers, protesting hate crimes and electing people to local offices who will seek to mitigate the excesses of the state.
"We have to reconstitute a civil society," Schrecker said. "Intermediary institutions like the academy and the media have been hollowed out. Certainly, journalism is on life support. We have to resuscitate organizations and institutions that have atrophied."
"There is an attack on the American mind," she said. "A lot of what we're seeing with Trump is the product of 40 years of dumbing down."
A crisis is traditionally used by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to put a country in lockdown. An economic meltdown, a large domestic terrorist attack, widespread devastation from climate change or the orchestrated escalation of hostilities with another country, perhaps Iran or China, will see Trump and his rogue generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists plunge the United States into dystopia.
War is the usual vehicle that demagogues use to justify internal repression and wield unchallenged power. If the federal government expands our wars to create new enemies, even local resistance will be impermissible. All dissent will be criminalized. Institutions, fearful and weak, will carry out purges of those few who speak out. Most of society, intimidated by a war psychosis, will be compliant to avoid being targeted. Resistance will often be tantamount to suicide.
The late Rev. Daniel Berrigan declared in a 2008 conversation with me that the American empire was in irrevocable decline. He said that in the face of this dissolution we must hold fast to the non-historical values of compassion, simplicity, love and justice. The rise and fall of civilizations, he noted, is part of the cyclical nature of history.
"The tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others," he said. "We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this."
We must not become preoccupied with the short-term effects of resistance. Failure is inevitable for many of us. Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.
President Obama has been unprecedented in his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute those whose whistleblowing he wants to curtail. The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution, however, is not to punish a person for spying for the enemy, selling secrets for personal gain, or trying to undermine our way of life. It is to ruin the whistleblower personally, professionally and financially. It is meant to send a message to anybody else considering speaking truth to power: challenge us and we will destroy you.
Why did the government charge me with espionage? It was my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program and for confirming to the press, despite government protestations to the contrary, that the US government was, indeed, in the business of torture.
Only ten people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama. The effect of the charge on a person's life - being viewed as a traitor, being shunned by family and friends, incurring massive legal bills - is all a part of the plan to force the whistleblower into personal ruin, to weaken him to the point where he will plead guilty to just about anything to make the case go away. I know. The three espionage charges against me made me one of "the Obama Seven".
In early 2012, I was arrested and charged with three counts of espionage and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA). (I was only the second person in US history to be charged with violating the IIPA, a law that was written to be used against rogues like Philip Agee.)
Two of my espionage charges were the result of a conversation I had with a New York Times reporter about torture. I gave him no classified information - only the business card of a former CIA colleague who had never been undercover. The other espionage charge was for giving the same unclassified business card to a reporter for ABC News. All three espionage charges were eventually dropped.
So, why charge me in the first place?
It was my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program and for confirming to the press, despite government protestations to the contrary, that the US government was, indeed, in the business of torture.
At the CIA, employees are trained to believe that nearly every moral issue is a shade of grey. But this is simply not true. Some issues are black-and-white - and torture is one of them. Many of us believed that the torture policy was solely a Bush-era perversion. But many of these perversions, or at least efforts to cover them up or justify them, have continued under President Obama.
Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office. Some of the investigations began during the Bush administration, as was the case with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, but Espionage Act cases have been prosecuted only under Obama. The president has chosen to ignore the legal definition of whistleblower - any person who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or illegality - and has prosecuted truthtellers.
This policy decision smacks of modern-day McCarthyism. Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists.
That the whistleblower has the support of groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the American Civil Liberties Union matters not a whit. The administration simply presses forward with wild accusations against the whistleblower: "He's aiding the enemy!" "He put our soldiers lives in danger!" "He has blood on his hands!" Then, when it comes time for trial, the espionage charges invariably are either dropped or thrown out.
The administration and its national security sycophants in both parties in Congress argue that governmental actions exposed by the whistleblower are legal. The Justice Department approved the torture, after all, and the US supreme court said that the NSA's eavesdropping program was constitutional. But this is the same Justice Department that harassed, surveilled, wiretapped and threatened Martin Luther King Jr, and that recently allowed weapons to be sold to Mexican drug gangs in the Fast and Furious scandal. Just because they're in power doesn't mean they're right.
Yet another problem with the Espionage Act is that it has never been applied uniformly. Immediately after its passage in 1917, American socialist leader Eugene V Debs was arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act - simply for criticizing the US decision to enter the first world war. He ran for president from his prison cell.
Nearly a century later, when the deputy director for national intelligence revealed the amount of the highly-classified intelligence budget in an ill-conceived speech, she was not even sent a letter of reprimand - despite the fact the Russians, Chinese, and others had sought the figure for decades. When former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta boastfully revealed the identity of the Seal Team member who killed Osama bin Laden in a speech to an audience that included uncleared individuals, the Pentagon and the CIA simply called the disclosure "inadvertent".
There was no espionage charge for Panetta. But there was a $3m book deal.
The Obama administration's espionage prosecutions are political actions for political reasons, and are carried out by political appointees. The only way to end this or any administration's abuse of the Espionage Act is to rewrite the law. It is so antiquated that it doesn't even mention classified information; the classification system hadn't yet been invented. The law was written a century ago to prosecute German saboteurs. Its only update came in 1950, at the height of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. The law is still so broad and vague that many legal scholars argue that it is unconstitutional.
The only hope of ending this travesty of justice is to scrap the Espionage Act and to enact new legislation that would protect whistleblowers while allowing the government to prosecute traitors and spies. This would require congressional leadership, however, and that is something that is very difficult to come by. Giants like the late Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frank Church, and the late Representative Otis Pike, who boldly took on and reformed the intelligence community in the 1970s, are long-gone. Until someone on Capitol Hill begins to understand the concept of justice for national security whistleblowers, very little is likely to change.
The press also has a role to play, one that, so far, it has largely ignored. That role is to report on and investigate the whistleblower's revelations of illegality, not on the kind of car he drives, the brand of eyeglasses he wears, where he went to college, or what his nextdoor neighbor has to say about their childhood.
The attacks on our civil liberties that the whistleblower reports are far too important to move off-message into trivialities. After all, the government is spying on all of us. That should be the story.
While much attention is paid to the 34 US states that still administer the death penalty, federal and military systems of executions also exist. The retention of the US federal death penalty undermines those states that have abolished capital punishment - and federal executions undermine Washington's claims of world leadership in human rights.
In 1972, the US supreme court in Furman v Georgia imposed an execution moratorium. The federal death penalty was reinstated, however, with the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and has expanded since 1994 with the "wars" on drugs and terrorism. The federal penalty, unlike state versions, encompasses 60 crimes beyond first-degree murder, including drug-trafficking and terrorism. This expansion makes nearly all of the 16,000 murders committed in the nation each year death-eligible, according to Death Penalty Focus. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that 69 defendants have received a federal death sentence since 1988, including three executions and eight sentences removed.
Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001 for his role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. That year, condemned dug trafficker Juan Raul Garza was the first person executed under the 1988 act. The most recent federal execution, in 2003, was of Louis Jones, a Gulf war veteran. Jones's lawyers argued that he committed rape and murder due to the brain damage he suffered from nerve gas exposure in the military.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen and CIA waterboarding victim, is on trial for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, the highest-profile trial since President Bush created the post 9/11 military tribunals. Further, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo detainees accused of masterminding the 11 September attacks face a possible death penalty prosecution in a military trial this year.
A series of problems with the federal penalty has occurred recently, starting in 2007 when Ronell Wilson was sentenced to death, in New York City's first federal death sentence in over 50 years. After the state's highest court found the death penalty unconstitutional in 2004, the county prosecutor asked the federal prosecutor to take over the case, amounting to an "end run" around state law. (An appeals court has subsequently overturned the sentence.)
In 2011, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee refused a court order to hand over a prisoner to the federal authorities. The governor's stand was principled, as turning over Jason W Pleau to the US government would have exposed the murder defendant to capital punishment, which Rhode Island had abolished.
And last August, a federal appeals court overturned the 2002 federal death sentence of Marvin Gabrion, the first person to receive a federal death sentence in a non-death penalty state since 1988. The court ruled that Gabrion - who was convicted of a 1997 murder in Michigan on federal land - deserved a new sentence because his lawyers were not allowed to tell jurors that a Michigan state court could not impose a death sentence.
The federal system of capital punishment, not unlike the states', is arbitrary, biased and rife with discrimination: 74% of federal death penalty defendants are racial minorities; 62% of death row inmates are nonwhite, and 58% were convicted of killing white victims. Jury pools in federal judicial districts are less diverse than the localities where murders are committed. In many cases, when a decision is made to prosecute in federal rather than state court, the jury pool is transformed from predominantly black to predominantly white.
Further, of the 94 federal judicial districts, just 14 account for over half of death penalty prosecutions: 40% of the federal death row population comes from seven districts. Two-thirds of districts have sentenced no one to death, and fewer than 20% of districts have sentenced more than one person to death.
Often, Americans turn to the feds for protection from oppressive state judicial practices. But the federal death row tramples on the rights of states that maintain higher human rights standards than the US government regarding the issue of capital punishment. Washington would have more credibility when lecturing other nations on their human rights record if it were to remove the taint of the federal death penalty.