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With Six Crisp Paragraphs, A Columnist At The Nation Defends Mueller Probe

With Six Crisp Paragraphs, A Columnist At The Nation Defends Mueller Probe

In certain precincts on the American left — and especially in some places where the far left blurs into the far right — it is considered clever to dismiss the Russia investigation as a relic of the Cold War, an opportunistic Clintonite ploy, or both. These arguments can be found under the bylines of Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, and in the venerable pages of The Nation magazine, where Russia scholar Steven Cohen and some less venerable figures hold forth on why it’s all a figment of the Democratic imagination.

Today in those same pages, Katha Pollitt, one of the columnists I admire most, sets forth a crisp summary of why this investigation is critical — and exposes the vacuity of the “left-wing” arguments against it.

As Katha points out, Russian meddling in our elections shouldn’t be a partisan issue, nor a platform for continuing skirmishes between Democratic Party factions, As she puts it.

[The] evidence for Russia’s involvement is becoming stronger rather than weaker, a conviction hardly limited to fans of Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders himself said, “It is now clear to everyone that agents of the Russian government were, in a disgusting and dangerous manner, actively interfering in the 2016 elections in an effort to defeat Secretary Hillary Clinton.” But we still don’t know—and may never know—how much it mattered, or whether the Trump campaign actually colluded with the Russian government, or whether the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win or just intended to sow chaos or what.

Nonetheless, it’s vital that we understand as much as we can about what happened, and that the Mueller investigation continue.

 

 

 

Justice Department Plans To End Use Of Private Prisons

Justice Department Plans To End Use Of Private Prisons

The Justice Department announced plans to cease using private prisons Thursday, a week after a highly critical report was released by the DOJ inspector general about the oversight and safety of private facilites. Currently, private prisons house 12 percent of federal inmates, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in the memo released Thursday that the goal was “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

The memo instructs federal officials to not renew private prison contracts at their expiration or to reduce their scope.

According to Yates,“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.”

The announcement and DOJ report come after a Mother Jonesinvestigation revealed major deficiencies in a private prison in Louisiana and a Nation magazine investigation earlier this summer that highlighted many cases of prisoner deaths under questionable circumstances. The Mother Jones exposé detailed reporter Shane Bauer’s undercover experiences as a private prison guard and documented a serious lack of staffing, security and higher levels of violence. The DOJ’s report itself, as well, found that private prisons are generally more violent than federal prisons.  According to the Nation report, the Bureau of Prisons contracted with private facilities in order to cut costs. Because of this scheme, the companies running private prisons are permitted to operate under a looser set of rules than government-run facilities — which led directly to unnecessary prisoner fatalities.

 

After the news was released Thursday, there was an immediate drop in stock prices for two of the country’s largest private prison companies. Although the private prisons will not have their government contracts ended immediately, every contract is expected to come up for review within five years.

“We have to be realistic about the time it will take, but that really depends on the continuing decline of the federal prison population, and that’s really hard to accurately predict,” Yates said.

Yates also said that private prisons had been shown to be less effective than government-run facilities. The three major operators of private prisons are Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.

Yates will unsure about the cost of the closure of prisons and did not make a decisive judgment on whether government costs would escalate.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has stated that she would like to end the use of private prisons. The cessation of private prisons by the Justice Department will likely see an uptick in costs, despite what Yates may be publicly stating at this time, but the “for-profit” prison industry has been under public scrutiny for many years. Ending the use of private prisons may be the first critical step in restructuring the justice system at large.

Photo: U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy” in Washington July 8,  2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  

The Nation, America’s Oldest Weekly Magazine, Endorse Sanders for President

The Nation, America’s Oldest Weekly Magazine, Endorse Sanders for President

The Nation magazine, America’s oldest continuously published weekly magazine, endorsed Democratic candidate Bernie Sander’s (I-VT) for President. “He has summoned the people to a ‘political revolution,'” they wrote in an editorial published Thursday. “We believe such a revolution is not only possible but necessary—and that’s why we’re endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.”

The editorial outlines numerous reasons to support his bid for the White House. He has attracted a majority of young Americans, historically a politically disinclined demographic, to his political positions. His decades-long defense of progressive causes such as the $15 minimum wage, immigrants’ rights, bank regulation, and LGBT rights has attracted legions of young Americans who increasingly support such unapologetically liberal stances. Sanders’s endorsement is just the third time in 150 years that the publication has endorsed a candidate, the first two being Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Barack Obama in 2008.

The editorial made no effort to conceal the fact that Sanders’s path to the White House is a dubious and fraught one. “His economic-populist message has resonated with many progressives and young voters, but he has yet to marshal deep support among the African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters who form core constituencies of the Democratic Party,” said the editorial. But his support has been growing steadily. He has maintained a six point lead over Hillary Clinton, once the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, in New Hampshire. And in Iowa, he has narrowed Clinton’s lead from 34 points to a mere four.

That is not to say that The Nation’s editors dislike Clinton. They readily admit they would prefer her to any of the “extremists running for the GOP nomination.” She has unrivaled experience, and is incredibly intelligent and perceptive, they write. During the campaign, she has been lured left to champion of many of the same causes that Sanders brought to the fore. “She has responded to the populist temper of the times: questioning the sort of free-trade deals that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have championed; calling for reforms on Wall Street and tax increases on the wealthy; courageously defending Planned Parenthood; challenging the National Rifle Association; and supporting trade unions,” the editorial said.

In a piece endorsing Clinton, Katha Pollitt, one of The Nation’s most prominent columnists, wrote about the seeming apathy of even wealthy, educated, white feminists to Clinton’s campaign. “You would think these women, of all people, would be jumping for joy at the prospect of someone so like themselves winning the White House.” But she still laid out a convincing argument for supporting Clinton.

It seems clear that the former secretary of state is still the best candidate to defeat the Republicans in the general election, given the numerous posts she’s held during her decades in government and the fact that Sanders is hampered by his self-applied label as a “democratic socialist.” She also would be the country’s first woman president, although it is not so unusual to have a female world leader today. Socially conservative countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines have previously had female heads of state. She would also be campaigning as a feminist at a time when the movement has gained newfound attention. According to a poll done by Vox, 78 percent of respondents said they believe in social, political, legal and economic equality between the sexes. A further 85 percent said they believe in equality for women.

But Clinton’s associations with big banks and Super PAC funding have left a sour taste in the mouths of Democrats looking for money to wield less influence in the country’s politics. The Nation editorial board wrote that “money in politics doesn’t widen debate; rather, it narrows the range of possibility. While Sanders understands this, we fear that his chief rival for the Democratic nomination does not.”

Sanders’s rising popularity and growing list of endorsements so close to the start of the primary season have surprised the political establishment. Clinton is now ramping up criticisms of Sanders’s platform in an effort to remain ahead in Iowa. But with The Nation’s endorsement, a rare event, Sanders and his supporters have already made their mark on the Democratic race.

Weekend Reader: ‘Inequality And One City: Bill de Blasio And The New York Experiment, Year One’

Weekend Reader: ‘Inequality And One City: Bill de Blasio And The New York Experiment, Year One’

When New York City elected as its new mayor, Bill de Blasio, a tectonic shift occurred in the political landscape of not merely the five boroughs, but the nation. The onetime dark horse candidate had built a successful slow-burn campaign on an audaciously liberal promise to cure social and economic inequalities, to be mayor of not only the elite, but the myriad Gothamists left behind by the city’s success.

When he took the keys to Gracie Mansion, conservative pundits were quick to pronounce de Blasio dead on arrival. The right wing sang eulogies for Pax Bloombergia — an era of prosperity and peace, at least for those who were never subject to a police stop-and-frisk or priced out of their home by rapacious neighborhood “development.”  Even New York liberals were left wondering if the unabashed progressive, who was known to sleep late and crack jokes at odd times, could successfully manage the day-to-day administration of America’s largest city.

Eric Alterman’s new book, Inequality and One City: Bill de Blasio and the New York Experiment, Year One, is a fascinating appraisal of de Blasio’s first year in office, beginning with his triumphant race against more established candidates, and covering his early successes with contract negotiations, political maneuvering with Governor Andrew Cuomo, and very public discord with the NYPD. But it is more than just a record of recent history — Alterman’s book is a profile of liberalism in action, a touchstone for progressivism in both principle and practice.

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Introduced by former president Bill Clinton to a bundled-up crowd on a freezing New Year’s Day, Bill de Blasio began his mayoralty the same way he campaigned for it: with a focus on economic inequality. “We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love,” the new mayor announced. “And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York.” The mayor’s inaugural address surprised no one who followed the campaign carefully, and it gave no cause for offense. But other speakers used the occasion to deliver a similar message but with much harsher rhetoric, especially in discussion of the policies of the outgoing Mayor Bloomberg. The Reverend Fred Lucas Jr., a sanitation department chaplain, compared the city to a slave-era “plantation.” Harry Belafonte noted that “New York alarmingly plays a tragic role in the fact that our nation has the largest prison population in the world.” Letitia James, who replaced de Blasio as public advocate, described the Bloomberg legacy as “a gilded age of inequality where decrepit homeless shelters and housing developments stand in the neglected shadow of gleaming multimillion-dollar condos.”

The mayor later said he was “comfortable with everyone’s remarks,” but the reaction from Bloomberg’s many admirers in the media was one of barely controlled rage. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat described the scene as “a concentration of left-wing agitprop unseen since the last time Pete Seeger occupied a stage alone.” In Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan termed the new mayor a deliberate “divider” and added, “[F]rom our new mayor we got the snotty sound of us vs. them, of zero-sum politics…. I already miss Mike.” Timothy Carney, writing in Murdoch’s New York Post, compared the new de Blasio era to America’s post–Civil War Reconstruction, which he defined as “disenfranchising the losers and subjecting them to military rule.” Such comments presaged the tone of much of the coverage de Blasio would receive from the enormous Murdoch media empire. On Fox News, for instance, de Blasio was consistently referred to as “Comrade Bill” and a “European Socialist” who wanted to “sock it to the rich.” “I wouldn’t be surprised if Wall Street leaves New York,” predicted one decidedly deluded Fox host. Bill O’Reilly summed up matters succinctly when he reportedly told a crowd of Republicans, “I want to beat him up.”

One must take a certain amount of silliness in the mass media—especially the tabloid mass media—as endemic to the human condition. Thus it always has been and thus will it ever be, especially in a city with three major English-language daily newspapers and so many TV, radio, and Internet outlets vying for increasing limited attention spans. That the mayor’s detail sometimes exceeded the speed limit, or that he did not always swipe a subway card on the way to work, or that he dropped a groundhog, or that his daughter had suffered from depression and explained this in a video she posted online, or that his wife did not always think she was a perfect mother, should not necessarily have been off-limits to the media. But the degree to which such stories have come to dominate what was once called “news” makes it more and more difficult to communicate with citizens about policy choices that will make a genuine difference in their lives, and therefore proves a significant barrier to a mayor seeking to make fundamental changes in the way the city does business on behalf of the overwhelming majority of voters in the previous election.

Underlying much of this coverage, however, was a more insidious hostility to de Blasio’s politics based on the common conservative belief that politicians who do not repeatedly demonstrate their commitment to their richest and most politically powerful constituents cannot be depended upon to govern in a fiscally “responsible” fashion. These concerns appear to be far off the mark; as Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives Richard Buery explained, the mayor repeatedly insists to his team that “progressives have a deeper responsibility to be better stewards than anyone else,” because they depend on the government to play a positive role in lives of citizens. De Blasio must therefore navigate a narrow lane between the Scylla of unleashing a conservative fiscal attack on his administration and the Charybdis of selling out his working-class New Yorkers when forced to make difficult budgetary decisions.

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Regarding the nuts and bolts of day-to-day governance, Bloomberg did his successor no favors by failing to come to terms with some of the city’s biggest unions in contractual negotiations. In fact, he left every one of over 150 labor contracts unsettled, some for more than four years. This presented, as the Fiscal Policy Institute’s James Parrott observed, “an unprecedented challenge” for a New York City mayor. Particularly conspicuous was the fact that the city’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT)—its largest and in many respects most influential union—had been forced to work without a contract in 2012 and 2013 and had not signed one since before the 2008 financial crash. Its members were expecting to be reimbursed with retroactive raises, while de Blasio’s conservative critics were ready to pounce on him for “giving away the store to the unions,” which was widely considered a slippery slope back to the city’s fiscally irresponsible 1970s. As it happened, de Blasio reached an early deal with the teachers union that surprised almost everyone in its fairness. Still, a previously unknown pundit named Nicole Gelinas, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, rocketed from near-total obscurity to local media stardom on the basis of her “sky is falling” analysis of the deal. Gelinas, who boasts a BA in English literature, composed an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (with Fred Siegel) titled “Taking New York Back to the Bad Old Days,” and another in City & State called “De Blasio’s Fiscal Bubble.” She was quoted in the New York Times as calling the deal “troublesome and unprecedented,” and she made similar comments to a reporter for Politico’s Capital New York. She also appeared as a solo guest on WNYC in a lengthy interview with veteran host Brian Lehrer, where she opined about de Blasio: “The bottom line is, these are his deficits that he has created.”

De Blasio’s agreement with the UFT was hardly the horror story that Gelinas and her enablers in the mainstream media sought to present. It included what Parrott termed “modest, below-inflation wage increases over a seven-year period, setting a new pattern, with much of that paid for through employee health care savings.” The contract promised two 4 percent back-pay increases, based on the precedent of Bloomberg’s negotiations with other unions at the time of the 2008 financial catastrophe, plus 2 percent raises in the future. The mayor, moreover, secured a promise from the city’s Municipal Labor Committee to find $3.4 billion in health care savings over the coming four years to help pay for the raises. The agreement is enforceable through binding arbitration, if necessary. A vocal minority within the union denounced the deal as too austere, but it was approved by 77 percent of its membership. According to Parrott, it is “by far the most significant labor deal in city history, potentially affecting the entire 350,000-person unionized city workforce for seven years, and 150,000 of those workers for an additional two years going back to 2009 and 2010.”

Even the city’s business community appeared to be pleasantly surprised by the terms of the agreement. As Capital New York reported, Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the powerful Partnership for New York City, said after a meeting between her group and the mayor, “The teachers’ contract is a pattern that the city can support if we continue to enjoy robust economic growth.” Carol Kellermann of the Citizens Budget Commission said, “The prospective raises are fair and reasonable.” Capital New York also quoted Marc Shaw, a veteran of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations and a self-described “fiscal conservative,” who called the contract “fairly conservative—as in not breaking-the-bank expensive.” The bond agencies apparently agreed with this analysis and gave the city’s paper strong ratings, including an interest rate for long-term loans well below the one that preceded the new contract. One could not help but notice, moreover, that de Blasio, the alleged left-wing radical, achieved this level of fiscal health in a manner that contrasts decidedly with that of his predecessor, who, upon taking office, attempted to raise property taxes in the city by 25 percent and was forced by his city council to settle for a mere 18.5 percent. One can only imagine the reaction were de Blasio to have made a proposal asking for even a fraction of so steep a tax hike.

By early December 2014, after announcing a tentative contract with the Uniformed Superior Officers Coalition, de Blasio had managed to conclude contracts with “71 percent of the City workforce that had previously been working under expired contracts,” according to the city’s calculations. This achievement marked a clear contrast to the Bloomberg administration’s abject failure in this crucial function of competent city management and stable and successful fiscal planning.

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This excerpt is adapted from Inequality and One City: Bill de Blasio and the New York Experiment(e-book and paperback original, out now from eBookNation), by Eric Alterman. It appears here with the author’s permission.

You can purchase the book from Amazon and The Nation.

Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, and the World Policy Institute in New York. He lives with his family in Manhattan. More information is available at ericalterman.com.