Chris Hedges's Blog

At The Nation, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has a provocative piece that imagines how future historians may come to write the story of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speculative history takes the form of a “best-case” scenario that serves as both a challenge and a salve, an inspirational fantasy to help balance out the more easily imagined dystopias with a tantalizing vision of a civilization transformed.

In Abrahamian’s telling, every aspect of society ends up being made better by the current crisis, including deliverance of the long-sought goal of world peace.

“[All] wars’ [were] put on hold thanks to a unanimous resolution in the UN Security Council,” writes Abrahamian from this imagined future. “Iran reached a détente with Israel after medical researchers banded together to develop a treatment that saved the life of millions.” In place of weapons, military contractors “started churning out medical supplies; soldiers mobilized to build homes and hospitals; unemployed workers pledged to build small-scale local green infrastructure.”

Austerity? “[A] distant nightmare of the past.

Carbon emissions? [D]ropped dramatically. Demand for oil dried up, too.”

Many of the future scenarios laid out in the piece already have toeholds in reality. Air pollution is dropping. Talk of austerity is out the window, replaced by massive stimuluses. ICE is taking a break from its awful work. Keeping these green shoots alive and helping them flower into alternative systems will require attention and work — even and especially as the crisis begins to abate, whenever that comes to pass. But as Abrahamian so vividly makes clear, the potential rewards could be massive indeed.

Read the article here.

 

 

 

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since.

On Thursday, Burr came under fire after NPR obtained a secret recording from Feb. 27, in which the lawmaker gave a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus than what he had told the public.

“Senator Burr filed a financial disclosure form for personal transactions made several weeks before the U.S. and financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak,” his spokesperson said. “As the situation continues to evolve daily, he has been deeply concerned by the steep and sudden toll this pandemic is taking on our economy.”

Burr is not a particularly wealthy member of the Senate: Roll Call estimated his net worth at $1.7 million in 2018, indicating that the February sales significantly shaped his financial fortunes and spared him from some of the pain that many Americans are now facing.

He was one of the authors of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which shapes the nation’s response to public health threats like the coronavirus. Burr’s office did not respond to requests for comment about what sort of briefing materials, if any, on the coronavirus threat Burr may have seen as chair of the intelligence committee before his selling spree.

According to the NPR report, Burr told attendees of the luncheon held at the Capitol Hill Club: “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history … It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

He warned that companies might have to curtail their employees’ travel, that schools could close and that the military might be mobilized to compensate for overwhelmed hospitals.

The luncheon was organized by the Tar Heel Circle, a club for businesses and organizations in North Carolina that are charged up to $10,000 for membership and are promised “interaction with top leaders and staff from Congress, the administration, and the private sector.”

Burr’s public comments had been considerably less dire. In a Feb. 7 op-ed that he co-authored with another senator, he assured the public that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.” He wrote, “No matter the outbreak or threat, Congress and the federal government have been vigilant in identifying gaps in its readiness efforts and improving its response capabilities.”

Members of Congress are required by law to disclose their securities transactions.

Burr was one of just three senators who in 2012 opposed the bill that explicitly barred lawmakers and their staff from using nonpublic information for trades and required regular disclosure of those trades. In opposing the bill, Burr argued at the time that insider trading laws already applied to members of Congress. President Barack Obama signed the bill, known as the STOCK Act, that year.

Stock transactions of lawmakers are reported in ranges. Burr’s Feb. 13 selling spree was his largest stock selling day of at least the past 14 months, according to a ProPublica review of Senate records. Unlike his typical disclosure reports, which are a mix of sales and purchases, all of the transactions were sales.

His biggest sales included companies that are among the most vulnerable to an economic slowdown. He dumped up to $150,000 worth of shares of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, a chain based in the United States that has lost two-thirds of its value. And he sold up to $100,000 of shares of Extended Stay America, an economy hospitality chain. Shares of that company are now worth less than half of what they did at the time Burr sold.

The assets come from accounts that are held by Burr, belong to his spouse or are jointly held.

There is no dearth of examples suggesting that President Donald Trump lives in an alternate reality. But his belief that the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world”—even though public health experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years—may be the reason why the United States is so unprepared to deal with the crisis.

In 2018, he weakened the country’s ability to respond to pandemics when he decided to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for them. His Interior Department failed to update a pandemic plan that was first prepared over a decade ago. His administration failed to restock the Strategic National Stockpile, America’s store of medical supplies, which include the face masks that are in such dire need by doctors, nurses and health professionals at the front lines of the pandemic. Those supplies were depleted during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009 and were never replenished: Millions of masks in the stockpile are now past their expiration dates. 

The lack of test kits, as well as faulty test kits produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), may have been the result of Trump’s budget cuts: The CDC’s current budget of $8 billion is a substantial reduction from the $12.7 billion it had a decade ago. “The debacle with the tests probably reflects underlying budget cuts,” said Scott Burris, director of the Center of Public Health Law Research at Temple University. “You can’t have surge capacity if you’ve already been cut to the bone.” 

And, strikingly, the United States had several weeks of advance notice of the coronavirus, which first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December, but those early weeks were squandered and now the nation is on its back foot, perhaps with tens of thousands of lives at stake, maybe more. “Trump’s leadership team failed to ready the nation, despite explicit warnings of the need to do so,” writes Alice Hill, the senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and who was responsible for biological threat preparedness in the Obama administration.

Following the criticism that he has mismanaged the nation’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, Trump has attempted a bold rebranding campaign, declaring himself a “wartime president.” 

“Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” Trump said at a March 18 White House press briefing, recalling the courage and commitment of those who lived through and fought in World War II. “And now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. … And it will be a complete victory. It’ll be a total victory.”

His “war” rebranding appears to be working: A majority of Americans now approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released today. The latest figures—55 percent approve, while 43 disapprove—represent a flip in the president’s rating from the previous iteration of the survey, published a week ago, which found 43 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval.

But treating the pandemic as a war may have other consequences, like influencing the psychology of the American electorate during an election year. And it’s important to note that no American president has lost reelection during wartime, a fact that is likely not lost on Team Trump. James Madison was reelected in 1812 during that year’s eponymous war. A half-century later, Abraham Lincoln was reelected during the Civil War. In 1944, in the midst of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt was voted back into the White House. Voters put Richard Nixon back in office during the Vietnam War. George W. Bush, fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, got his second term in 2004.

Trump made good on his characterization of wartime by invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA), which allows the federal government to compel private companies to manufacture goods for the benefit of the nation before making those same products for commercial sale; in this case, medical equipment to handle the pandemic. Inspired by World War II-era laws that allowed the government, for example, to request that Ford Motor Company manufacture hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the army, including tanks, the DPA was first approved by Congress in 1950 to support the nation’s production needs to support its effort in the Korean War.

Vox’s Alex Ward writes that Sasha Baker, a top aide to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, told him that “some people may get scared or anxious hearing the act has been invoked because it makes it seem like the nation is gearing up for war.” But, as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the globe, followed by a steadily rising death toll, there may be another anxiety brewing, as CNN has suggested that there are “whispers” that President Trump could cancel the 2020 election and remain in power without being reelected. According to a Daily Kos poll, more than  60 percent of those polled (more than 340 respondents) are “concerned that President Trump will declare martial law and/or suspend the 2020 election.”

That concern was voiced by a leading conservative voice before coronavirus even made the headlines. On December 10, after Attorney General William Barr appeared to “whitewash” Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in an interview, Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute expressed grave concern that Trump may upend the Constitution to remain in power. “The Barr interview today is even more frightening than many Americans imagine,” Ornstein tweeted. “It seems clear that he will do or enable anything to keep Trump in office. And Trump will do anything to stay there. Suspension of the election, negation of the results, declaration of martial law.”

Trump has mused several times about staying in the White House longer than is legally allowed. In March of last year, for example, he mentioned the idea of remaining in power for life, after praising President Xi Jinping’s own lifelong rule, which was secured when China’s ruling Communist Party approved the removal of the two-term limit. “He’s now president for life,” Trump said about Xi. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” A few months later, in a Tweetstorm, Trump said that he would leave the presidency in “10 or 14” years. He did add “just kidding,” but that may offer little comfort to those who fear his autocratic tendencies, love of dictators and frequent disregard for the Constitution. Then in December, on the same day that Orenstein tweeted his warning, Trump, during a campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, said that he may stay in office for another 29 years. (He would be 102 years old at that point.)

“As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism and antidemocratic sentiment are on vivid display among segments of the American populace, Trump’s evident hostility to key elements of liberal democracy cannot be dismissed as mere bluster,” writes Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority.”

Former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos ruled for 21 years, nine of them as a dictator while the country was under martial law, which he declared under the guise of suppressing civil strife and a communist threat after several bombings destabilized the capital city of Manila. With the pandemic striking fear in the hearts of Americans, Trump now has his perfect pretext to consolidate power. But will he declare martial law?

In fact, some are calling on Trump to declare martial law to help stem the spread of the virus. “I say to President Trump: Shut us down, sir. Please, just shut us down,” writes Gene Marks, founder of The Marks Group, a small-business consulting firm, in an op-ed on The Hill. “I mean the whole country. Not just New York or San Francisco, but Louisville, Denver, Harrisburg, Clearwater and Madison. Every small town, whether there’s a case or not. I’m talking martial law. Do it. You said you’re now a ‘wartime president.’ So act like one. … I ask you to do this because I’m a small business owner. What we’re doing right now is not helping the economy. By imposing a strict national quarantine, the effects for my business—and the economy overall—would be very, very positive.”

If our self-proclaimed “wartime president” were to declare martial law to fight the pandemic, would he have the authority to suspend the election in November? Josh Douglas, an election law scholar at the University of Kentucky Law School, doesn’t believe so. “Even [martial law] would likely not give him power to postpone election or delay end of his term on Jan. 20, 2021,” he tweeted. “As Supreme Court said in ex parte Milligan (1866), martial law does not suspend the Constitution.”

But Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers Supreme Court issues, points out that the courts usually defer to national security decisions made by presidents, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Japanese-American detention camps during World War II and, more recently, President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. “American election law was not written with a pandemic in mind,” he writes. “Extraordinary measures may be necessary to control the spread of coronavirus for many months — possibly continuing well into the November election season. And if those extraordinary measures do disrupt the general elections, courts are likely to defer to public health officials even if those officials act with partisan motivation.”

John W. Whitehead, founder and president of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia, views the coronavirus pandemic not as a test of our ability to come together as a nation in a time of crisis, but rather as “a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and a true state of emergency.”

Today in America, we find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of two powerful, unpredictable and dangerous forces—Trumpism and coronavirus. The stock market has lost all its gains since Trump took office, a 20 percent unemployment rate is in the offing, and Americans are dying. Will we pass this test? Will the Constitution survive?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, agrees with the wartime footing that Trump has initiated. “This is a war, we have to treat it like a war,” Cuomo said. “In a war, you need the federal government.” Sure, states need help from Washington to deal with the pandemic, from the health crisis itself to the economic crisis it has spawned. But before tanks start rumbling down New York’s Fifth Avenue and the Army Corps of Engineers cordons off neighborhoods with bollards and barbed wire, Cuomo might consider the warning of one of Trump’s more eloquent and sagacious predecessors, Thomas Jefferson: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”

Martina Moneke is a freelance writer based in New York City. 

The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of the depression once, he pointed out to me that as someone born in 1929, he really didn’t come to political consciousness until the Depression had ended. He was too young to fight in the war, though he joined the army three years after it ended. So you’d really have to be 95 or older to have fully experienced those world-shaking events.

As I write, the United States is (somewhat belatedly) trying out social distancing as a way of attempting to forestall the worst consequences of the novel coronavirus, attempting to avoid the catastrophe that has befallen Italy, e.g. Friends of mine have spoken of anxiety attacks, general unease, fear of the unknown.

It is not going to be easy to get through the coming year (or God forbid, year and a half). We will do it. In this essay, I won’t address the governmental and social steps that will be necessary. I’m instead going to talk about care of the self and how to maintain well-being during this calamity. For the past few years I’ve been devouring the literature on Positive Psychology, and it led me to teach a course this semester on the History of Happiness and the care of the self. In that course, we look at the Greeks, modern Buddhism, and Sufism, as well as Positive Psychology itself. This movement was founded by Professor Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. There are now several peer-reviewed journals devoted to this research, and to my mind, researchers have discovered unexpected contributors to subjective well-being which, however, would mostly have come as no surprise to the wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Sufism.

So here is what I have learned about well-being or happiness (Seligman prefers the term “well-being” but the publishers rather like books on happiness, so they’ve titled his that way).

1. Gratitude.

Being grateful and expressing gratitude has been found to be highly correlated with feelings of well-being and happiness, and practices of gratitude can increase those feelings significantly. Say someone did something nice for you, and you thanked the person perfunctorily. If you now go back and sit the person down and explain what an important impact on your life their thoughtfulness had, it increases your feelings of well-being and those of the person thanked. Remembering something for which you are grateful increases happiness and reduces stress and depression. Some people keep a regular gratitude journal, which may increase feelings of well-being. Kiralee Schache et al. argued in a 2018 article in The British Journal of Health Psychology that there are actually physical benefits of gratitude. We need all the positive health effects we can get.

So for those who are social distancing and feeling a little lonely and a lot anxious, one action this literature suggests we might take is to call up people who’ve done nice things for us and just tell them how grateful we are and what it meant to us. All of us have reasons to be grateful even in the midst of our current predicament. We after all have been given a lot of positive things even if we now face a dire challenge. It is important not to lose sight of everything we have to be grateful for even as some things are taken from us.

2. Hope.

Hope researcher Charles Snyder wrote,

“A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same – a personal rainbow of the mind.”

Being hopeful or optimistic sometimes gets a bad rap as not sufficiently hard-nosed. As Alan Carr notes, Voltaire famously made fun of Leibniz’s assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds (arguably, science and cosmology suggest that Leibniz was right– even slight changes in the history of the earth, or in the paramaters of the laws governing the universe, would have made human life impossible). Voltaire invented in his Candide the buffoonish character of Professor Pangloss, who tried to be optimistic about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. But psychologists are finding that pessimism is bad for you in all sorts of ways.

Optimists are more likely to solve problems because they believe that if they just keep slugging away, they can solve the problem. Pessimists give up. Optimists tend to have a positive self-image and to think well of others, which helps them make friends. Hope is not unrealistic, it is a recognition that what obstacles exist can be overcome. Elaine Houston notes that Hope is positively correlated with feelings of well-being, with success in athletics and academics, Certainly as a society, and for most individuals, this challenge is one we have every hope of successfully defeating. Carr explains that we can train ourselves to be more optimistic through the three D’s. We can distract ourselves from being overly preoccupied with the negative by focusing on something positive. We can create some distance from pessimistic thoughts by reminding ourselves that they are only part of the picture, and there are hopeful signs as well. And we can dispute with our most pessimistic thoughts, pointing to the positive.

Hope fends off chronic anxiety of the sort many of us are starting to feel now. Chronic anxiety and constant triggering of fight or flight responses produce the hormone glucocorticoid, which over time depletes norepinephrine, one of three neurotransmitters associated with feelings of happiness and well-being (along with serotonin and dopamine). In other words, being depressed and hopeless produces hormones that create a downward spiral– after a while we simply cannot have that feeling of alertness and freshness that norepinephrine should give us, because anxiety hormones have depleted it. (See Rick Hanson, et al., The Buddha’s Brain.).

3. Creativity

Cathy Malchiodi writes,

A recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology (Tamlin, Conner, DeYoung & Paul, 2016) indicates that engaging in a creative activity just once a day can lead to a more positive state of mind. Researchers at the University of Otago constructed a study to understand if creativity impacts one’s emotional well-being, based on the growing belief that there is a connection between creativity and emotional functioning. To test this hypothesis, they evaluated the responses of 658 young adults; each day the participants documented how much time they spent on creative endeavors as well as the positive and negative emotional changes they perceived.

After 13 days, the researchers reviewed the participants’ responses and discovered an “upward spiral for well-being and creativity” in those individuals who engaged in daily creative pastimes.

Some people in the current crisis will be working overtime, and God bless the health care providers and food producers and others on the front lines.

Others may have less to do than normal and find themselves at loose ends. Along with gratitude and hope, the literature high recommends creative endeavors.

Watching television has been shown to make you depressed. Drinking alcohol is also a downer. Listening to music, on the other hand, lifts mood and affect. My guess is that it is because when we listen to music we become its co-creators, whereas television-watching is passive (and a lot of television connives at producing fight or flight and anxiety responses).

But best of all is to make something of your own. Everyone has favorite creative hobbies, whether knitting or writing poetry or cooking or carpentry and home improvement or painting. Now is the time to get back out that canvass or to go back to work on that short story.

I have made some suggestions for how to write short quatrains after the Persian form here. In fact, I have a translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam coming out on April 29.

Keep well, everyone. Gratitude, hope and creativity are some of the ways we can get through this. God bless.

On Tuesday, I cast a joyless vote for the very much politically doomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Illinois primary, in an elementary school where hushed whispers and fearful glances had replaced the normal din of an election day. There was no one standing just outside the perimeter hustling me to vote for this or that candidate. There were no throngs of voters with whom to share that elusory joy in exercising your basic democratic rights. It was the first, and I hope the last, ballot that I ever cast wearing latex gloves. There are, I think, very good and important questions about whether this election should have been held at all.

But it was, and Illinois Democrats willing to risk getting the dreaded virus handed Sanders a decisive loss. Together with lopsided routs in Florida and Arizona (Ohio rescheduled its primary) this is, or should be, the end of the Sanders campaign. There are, frankly, no lessons to be learned here, nothing remotely generalizable. This was a race transformed, suddenly and inexplicably, at a critical moment by a terrible deus ex machina that threatens to inflict once-in-a-century damage on human civilization.

Whenever we talk about 2020, it will be in terms of before and after. Before the virus, there was a lively Democratic primary that began with more than 20 hopefuls, with many of the same fault lines, grievances and fears as 2016. After the virus, the remaining centrist candidates quickly and unexpectedly coalesced around former Vice President Joe Biden and dealt Bernie Sanders an almost unthinkable series of defeats in the Super Tuesday contests. Before the virus, this was a race dominated by a seemingly endless debate about health care policy and whether the United States should opt for a fundamental and far-reaching restructuring of its system. After the virus, there was hardly room for even trembling disagreement.

More importantly, as the scale of the Covid-19 crisis has dawned on a terrified public over the past two weeks, it became clear that a decisive majority of Democratic primary voters no longer had much of any interest in this contest. The measures put into place by states and cities, from shutting down restaurants, bars, schools, universities and public places to the shuttering of all major American pro sports, are so far outside the normal scope of imagination, so sudden in their obliteration of everyday life, so unsettling in their lack of even a rudimentary time horizon, as to annihilate all other concerns and considerations.

Over the past three Tuesdays, Democratic voters have made it clear that they want to consolidate around Biden, and they have done so in such staggering numbers as to make a Sanders delegate majority close to a mathematical impossibility. With many states in the coming weeks likely to punt their primary elections to early summer, and with Biden now holding double-digit leads in national primary polling, it’s not just that Sanders has no real path to the nomination. It’s that the park containing the path is closed. The race will be frozen with Biden holding a roughly 300-delegate lead that is insurmountable given the party’s proportional allocations rules even under normal circumstances. That is a shame, because Sanders has better plans for this crisis than Biden, along with a narrative that correctly blames the long-term hollowing out of the public sector and the gross failure of the neoliberal state to prepare us for this moment. We live in a wrecked society now being held courageously together by grossly underpaid grocery store clerks, harried Amazon delivery drivers and determined health care providers. In America, only the doctors and nurses receive their due, and even they are embedded in a tragically warped system that has led us to be nearly defenseless against a crisis that scientists have been warning us about for decades.

You don’t have to think that single-payer health care is the answer to our every problem or believe that a magic wand can be waved to bring it into existence to see that Sanders is the only candidate left in the race capable of seeing this fallen state for what it is and pursuing policies to remedy it. Sanders offers us a vision of society as it might be. Biden extends the nostalgic promise of returning us to a recent past that is already buried much deeper than he and his supporters believe it is. Think of it this way: the political class in this country is so fundamentally broken that they have already wasted precious days debating half-measures that no sensible economist believes will be remotely sufficient to prevent a massive economic collapse.

Nevertheless, it was not meant to be for Bernie this year. There is no sensible argument for staying in the race now that he needs to win more than 63% of the delegates to get to a majority. There will be no repeat of 2008 and 2016, when trailing candidates floated the idea of flipping the so-called ‘superdelegates’ at the convention and reversing the popular will of the voters. Due in large part to pressure from the Sanders campaign itself, the DNC changed the rules so that superdelegates can’t vote on the first ballot. There isn’t going to be a second one, so there will be no one inside the party left to persuade.

A zombie campaign premised on amassing delegates to influence the party’s platform at the convention is not worth running and is certainly not going to inspire the kind of donations he would need to compete in the remaining states. The platform itself is a hollow prize anyway. No one reads or cares about it, the nominee isn’t bound by it and before the ink is dry, Biden and his team will have taken over the party.

More than ever, Sanders is actually needed as a progressive leader in the Senate, to help shape the coming bailouts and spending packages in a more humane direction. He himself seemed to acknowledge this obliquely yesterday, when he snapped at a reporter asking whether he would drop out: “”I’m dealing with a f—ing global crisis,” he told CNN”s Manu Raju. “Right now, I’m trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown and that people don’t die. Is that enough for you to keep me busy for today?”

The best thing Sanders can do for the American people is dedicate himself to pushing the coming bailouts and stimulus packages and emergency response plans in as progressive direction as possible from his influential perch in the Senate. He’ll be much less effective at that if he’s halfheartedly campaigning to compete in primaries that might not happen for months. And as much as it comes as a disappointment to a progressive movement that just weeks ago seemed to be on the verge of capturing the Democratic Party’s nomination, this thing is over and the sooner Biden can start fundraising for the general election the better. He is not the ideal vehicle to lead the party through a historic crisis, but Donald Trump has proven again and again during this unfolding ordeal that there is an abyss where the president should be, a vacuum of moral, political and administrative leadership that may get hundreds of thousands or even millions of people killed. Fighting a two-front war against the president and the virus is enough. The third front – the primary – needs to be shut down, and progressives need to lick their wounds and hope there is something left of society to fight for in 2024.

Republican senators on Wednesday teamed up to kill an amendment introduced by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray that would have expanded paid sick leave to millions of U.S. workers left out of a bipartisan coronavirus relief package.

Every Republican present for the vote, 51 in total, voted against the amendment while every Senate Democrat voted in favor.

Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) were the only senators who did not vote on the amendment, which would have guaranteed two weeks of paid sick leave as well as 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to all U.S. employees and independent contractors.

“[Fifty one] Republican senators just voted against an amendment… that would have expanded paid leave to millions of Americans left out of the package,” tweeted progressive advocacy group Indivisible. “Let that sink in.”

“If one of these Republicans (or two!) is your senator,” the group added, “call their office right now and tell them you saw their vote and you won’t forget that they voted against the Murray amendment to expand paid sick leave to millions of Americans: 1-855-980-2355.”

The full coronavirus relief package, formally known as the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, easily passed the Senate Wednesday afternoon by a vote of 90-8, and President Donald Trump subsequently signed the measure into law.

While calling it an urgently needed first step, progressives criticized the legislation as woefully inadequate given that it only provides paid sick leave to about 20% of the U.S. private sector workforce while excluding workers at companies with more than 500 employees.

In a speech on the Senate floor ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Murray pitched her amendment as a “commonsense step” that would be good for both workers and small businesses. The amendment was a modified version of the PAID Leave Act, which Murray introduced Tuesday alongside Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).

“It’s the right thing to do for our economy and for public health—and we should get it done as soon as possible,” Murray said. “If we don’t do this, if we let this opportunity slip by, we are sending a message to scared people across the country that we still are not willing to acknowledge the scope of the tragedy we are seeing unfold.”

As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ― or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling places, moving polling places out of nursing homes and ensuring there are enough poll workers.

There’s also a huge open question: If the virus continues to infect large numbers of people, how can the general election take place safely this fall?

Just this week, Arizona, Florida and Illinois held primaries, and Ohio postponed its election at the last minute, causing widespread confusion. Several states with upcoming primaries, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maryland, also announced they would postpone their elections. Voting rights advocates have recommended states expand early voting and access to no-excuse absentee voting, among other measures. One advocacy group, Common Cause, called for a delay in in-person voting for “at least the next few weeks.”

Given the daunting logistical challenges of holding elections in the time of the coronavirus, we had a lot of questions for Rick Hasen, an election law expert and a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine. He’s the author of several books on elections, including “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy,” published this year. This interview has been condensed for clarity.

So what happened during voting in four states this week?

Well, we only had voting in three of those four states [that were scheduled to vote] because in one state at the last minute, the governor and Ohio election officials essentially postponed the primary, despite a court saying that the primary should not be postponed. In other states where the voting actually took place, we saw a number of problems, including missing poll workers, last-minute people deputized as election judges, some unsanitary conditions at polling places and what will probably turn out to be a decline in in-person turnout at those elections.

How can states hold elections without being in violation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance of avoiding gatherings of more than 50 people?

Well, I’m not all that familiar with the CDC guidance, but I believe that the guidance relates to social activities. I’m not sure it relates to government activities. So a group of firefighters, for example, at a fire, there might be more people than the CDC recommends. [Editor’s note: Earlier this week, the CDC issued guidelines for large gatherings of more than 50 people, with separate guidance for workplace, first responders and polling places.] But I think a better question to ask is how can elections be conducted safely under these conditions where we need to practice social distancing? I think it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge because people queue up to vote on Election Day. People are handling the same machinery, the same surfaces. Those can’t be constantly cleaned between each voter. So it’s going to be difficult. I think this is why you’re seeing so many government officials trying to delay their primaries to a later point in time. And of course, increased use of absentee balloting can vastly increase the safety of voting at this point because you’re keeping people further away from each other, and allowing people to vote in the comfort of their own home.

What legal authority do states have to postpone elections like happened in Ohio?

So this is a state-by-state question if we’re talking about something besides the presidential election. The presidential election is set by federal statute, the date of the presidential election. So it could not be easily postponed. And there are provisions of the Constitution for what happens if the election cannot take place. The question of whether or not a state can postpone a primary is a function of what the state constitutions and state statutes say. One of the points I make in my book, “Election Meltdown,” which was written before this coronavirus crisis arose, is that many states do not have adequate Plan Bs in place to deal with questions of election emergencies, whether it’s a hurricane, a cyberattack or in this case a pandemic. So, we really need state legislatures and Congress right now to be thinking about what steps need to be taken in November to assure that as many people as possible will be able to exercise the franchise and vote.

So, on the local level, for example, who decides what changes get made on Election Day?

Again, these are state-by-state questions. Often decisions about closing polling places or making voting changes are done by county election boards. Sometimes they come from a state’s directive. Because we have such a decentralized election system in the United States, we don’t run a single election for president — we run something like 8,000 or 9,000 elections for president. Given that we have that, it’s really hard to generalize about who has authority.

I should add that until the Supreme Court’s decision in the Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, before any polling places could be closed in a state that had a history of racial discrimination in voting, approval had to be obtained from the Department of Justice or [from] a court in Washington, D.C. That protection for voters is now gone.

When changes are made on Election Day, like they were this week, for example, how are election officials communicating those changes? How are voters supposed to find out if their polling place was moved?

So this is very problematic because often there is not adequate communication. Often this information will appear on a government website. Sometimes voters don’t learn that a polling place has moved or changed until they try and show up to vote. Another good practice is that election officials should be doing whatever they can to use a variety of methods of communication, including social media, to try to get the word out about any changes in polling place or rules. One of the things we saw earlier in Ohio was that there was tremendous confusion about whether the election was on or off. Poll workers didn’t know if they were supposed to show up until the day before. I think what we saw on Tuesday in Ohio and in other states is a good indication, for those states that still have primaries, that they better have good plans in place, including the extended use of absentee balloting. I think we’re going to see a huge increase in absentee balloting for the remaining primaries, given the dangers of going to the polling place.

How are the states protecting voting rights when changes are made? And what more should states be doing?

Some states do not have a very good record of protecting voting rights. So it is going to require the public or voting rights groups to push the states to make sure that people are not disenfranchised. I think states need to be asking themselves: How can we ensure that as many voters as possible under these difficult conditions still may be able to exercise their constitutional rights and register and vote?

And I want to underline this point about voter registration, because I think it’s getting a lot less attention in this conversation than voting itself. Many people would ordinarily be registering to vote between now and November. Under state laws, there are different cutoff times for when you can register to vote. If people have to register to vote in person, this can also create problems if there are orders to not visit government buildings, and government buildings are closed. So I think it’s very important for states, if they actually care about voting rights, to move to online voter registration if they don’t already have it. Many states have online voter registration, some don’t. But providing ways that people can exercise their constitutional rights without having to show up in person is something that should be on the minds of all election administrators around the country.

Has something like this happened before in terms of a big crisis? And if so, what did states do and what did we learn?

Well, we had voting taking place on 9/11 in New York. That was not a federal election. They were able to postpone that election and reschedule it. I think the lesson we should have learned is that it’s crucial to have a backup emergency plan in place in the event of a disruption. The closest thing is probably the voting that took place during the flu pandemic in 1918, and voting was disrupted in a number of places. Vote-by-mail was not really a thing back then. And so many people ended up being disenfranchised. There are pictures of people lined up wearing surgical masks at polling places which, you know, seems like such a strange image. But it probably won’t seem strange to us now.

What about hurricanes?

So, Florida is a state that often has problems with hurricanes occurring during voting season. They have enacted rules for dealing with voting and they do make accommodations, for example, extending the period of early voting, or allowing people to vote outside their polling place in the event of an emergency. As I detail in “Election Meltdown,” even with these rules, sometimes election administrators take matters into their own hands, such as an election administrator in one county in Florida who allowed people to vote electronically, sending in a ballot by email, which was against the rules and not part of the emergency rules.

I think it’s very problematic for election administrators, even with the best of intentions, to change voting rules, even to enfranchise voters, if it’s in violation of state law. And so this is why I think states need to be thinking now before we get to the next set of voting as to what the rules should be in the event of an emergency. So everybody’s on the same page. Because we don’t want different election administrators coming up with different rules that may or may not be fair and secure as a means of voting.

What do you think will be most affected by changes to voting regulations caused by the coronavirus? Are there some states it could affect more than others or some demographics it could affect more than others?

If we don’t make accommodations for increased vote-by-mail, I think there is a special burden that’s going to be placed on older voters who are most susceptible to having serious complications if they get this virus.

And so I think that the most important thing right now is for election officials to think about those vulnerable populations and ask what they can do to ensure that they’re not disenfranchised. We don’t know what things are going to look like now in November. I certainly hope that things are better, but we should plan as though things are not going to be better and provide the tools now, so that every eligible voter will be able to have a means of safely casting a ballot.

Given the potential impact of the virus, does the U.S. need to make changes to how it votes before November on a federal level?

I support federal legislation. I recently wrote a piece in Slate advocating that Congress pass a law requiring states that don’t currently offer no-excuse vote-by-mail to require that the states do so in November. I think Congress also needs to come up with funding. Assuming we continue to have problems, there’s going to be a flood of new vote-by-mail voters. It’s more expensive to process those ballots, and states are going to need all the help they can get in this environment. So I support folding into some of the coronavirus bills that are coming before Congress now additional funding and this mandate for states to allow this option. We also need to have protections for voters who are voting by absentee [ballot], because one of the things we know is that absentee ballots are much more likely to be tossed for noncompliance.

And also, we know that although voter fraud is very rare in this country, when election crimes do happen, they tend to happen with absentee ballots. And so we need rules to make sure that there’s no ballot tampering.

Given all of the logistics involved with vote-by-mail and the decentralized nature of our elections, is it logistically possible that we could roll out a full-scale vote-by-mail system by November?

I’m not advocating a full vote-by-mail system for November. I’m not saying we should have only vote-by-mail. I think that would be extremely difficult to do. It took the states that have moved in that direction years to get their systems in place. What I’m suggesting is that voters have the option of voting by absentee ballot. I think that is something that is doable so long as there’s enough planning and resources and we start thinking about it now.

Can the general election be postponed or canceled? Can you talk about the constitutional aspect of that?

The Constitution gives Congress the power to be setting the time of the election. Congress has done that in the statutes in order to change the election date. That statute would have to be changed. I don’t foresee that happening. That’s not really a concern I have, although I hear that a great deal.

I’m much more concerned that the federal government, or state officials, as we saw in Ohio recently, say people have to stay away from the polling places on Election Day. That would not be postponing Election Day, but that would be disenfranchising potentially millions of people. And that’s why I think we need to have an absentee ballot backup system, because if the election takes place and people can’t go to the polling places, the vote would then be either done by those who were able to vote early or by absentee before there might be some restrictions.

Or in the case of the presidential election, state legislatures might take back the power that the Constitution gives them to appoint electors to the Electoral College directly. That is, the state legislature in Pennsylvania might say, you know, we’re not going to let voters vote for president this time. We’re going to decide who gets Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes. I think that would be profoundly anti-democratic and dangerous. I don’t want that to happen, and I don’t want the excuse to be “Well, voters can’t vote,” which is all the more reason I think we need this vote-by-mail backup system in place in as many places as possible.

There is a dispute over whether a state legislature could decide to take back the power to appoint electors directly, and whether that would have to happen through ordinary legislation signed by the governor or [being passed into] law over a veto or if it could be done by the state legislature acting unilaterally. I hope we never have to test this to find out the answer.

Rachel Glickhouse contributed reporting

You can read the original ProPublica article here

While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems and hundreds more troops to operate them. This contradicts the January vote of the Iraqi Parliament that called for U.S. troops to leave the country. It also goes against the sentiment of most Americans, who think the Iraq war was not worth fighting, and against the campaign promise of Donald Trump to end the endless wars.

Seventeen years ago, the U.S. armed forces attacked and invaded Iraq with a force of over 460,000 troops from all its armed services, supported by 46,000 UK troops, 2,000 from Australia and a few hundred from Poland, Spain, Portugal and Denmark. The “shock and awe” aerial bombardment unleashed 29,200 bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first five weeks of the war.

The U.S. invasion was a crime of aggression under international law, and was actively opposed by people and countries all over the world, including 30 million people who took to the streets in 60 countries on February 15, 2003, to express their horror that this could really be happening at the dawn of the 21st century. American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, compared the U.S. invasion of Iraq to Japan’s preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and wrote, “Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy.”

Seventeen years later, the consequences of the invasion have lived up to the fears of all who opposed it. Wars and hostilities rage across the region, and divisions over war and peace in the U.S. and Western countries challenge our highly selective view of ourselves as advanced, civilized societies. Here is a look at 12 of the most serious consequences of the U.S. war in Iraq.

1. Millions of Iraqis Killed and Wounded

Estimates on the number of people killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary widely, but even the most conservative estimates based on fragmentary reporting of minimum confirmed deaths are in the hundreds of thousands. Serious scientific studies estimated that 655,000 Iraqis had died in the first three years of war, and about a million by September 2007. The violence of the U.S. escalation or “surge” continued into 2008, and sporadic conflict continued from 2009 until 2014. Then in its new campaign against Islamic State, the U.S. and its allies bombarded major cities in Iraq and Syria with more than 118,000 bombs and the heaviest artillery bombardments since the Vietnam War. They reduced much of Mosul and other Iraqi cities to rubble, and a preliminary Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report found that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul alone. There are no comprehensive mortality studies for this latest deadly phase of the war. In addition to all the lives lost, even more people have been wounded. The Iraqi government’s Central Statistical Organization says that 2 million Iraqis have been left disabled.

2. Millions More Iraqis Displaced

By 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that nearly 2 million Iraqis had fled the violence and chaos of occupied Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, while another 1.7 million were displaced within the country. The U.S. war on the Islamic State relied even more on bombing and artillery bombardment, destroying even more homes and displacing an astounding 6 million Iraqis from 2014 to 2017. According to the UNHCR, 4.35 million people have returned to their homes as the war on IS has wound down, but many face “destroyed properties, damaged or non-existent infrastructure and the lack of livelihood opportunities and financial resources, which at times [has] led to secondary displacement.” Iraq’s internally displaced children represent “a generation traumatized by violence, deprived of education and opportunities,” according to UN Special Rapporteur Cecilia Jimenez-Damary.

3. Thousands of American, British and Other Foreign Troops Killed and Wounded

While the U.S. military downplays Iraqi casualties, it precisely tracks and publishes its own. As of February 2020, 4,576 U.S. troops and 181 British troops have been killed in Iraq, as well as 142 other foreign occupation troops. Over 93 percent of the foreign occupation troops killed in Iraq have been Americans. In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has had more support from NATO and other allies, only 68 percent of occupation troops killed have been Americans. The greater share of U.S. casualties in Iraq is one of the prices Americans have paid for the unilateral, illegal nature of the U.S. invasion. By the time U.S. forces temporarily withdrew from Iraq in 2011, 32,200 U.S. troops had been wounded. As the U.S. tried to outsource and privatize its occupation, at least 917 civilian contractors and mercenaries were also killed and 10,569 wounded in Iraq, but not all of them were U.S. nationals.

4. Even More Veterans Have Committed Suicide

More than 20 U.S. veterans kill themselves every day—that’s more deaths each year than the total U.S. military deaths in Iraq. Those with the highest rates of suicide are young veterans with combat exposure, who commit suicide at rates “4-10 times higher than their civilian peers.” Why? As Matthew Hoh of Veterans for Peace explains, many veterans “struggle to reintegrate into society,” are ashamed to ask for help, are burdened by what they saw and did in the military, are trained in shooting and own guns, and carry mental and physical wounds that make their lives difficult.

5. Trillions of Dollars Wasted

On March 16, 2003, just days before the U.S. invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney projected that the war would cost the U.S. about $100 billion and that the U.S. involvement would last for two years. Seventeen years on, the costs are still mounting. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated a cost of $2.4 trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of the Iraq war at more than $3 trillion, “based on conservative assumptions,” in 2008. The UK government spent at least 9 billion pounds in direct costs through 2010. What the U.S. did not spend money on, contrary to what many Americans believe, was to rebuild Iraq, the country our war destroyed.

6. Dysfunctional and Corrupt Iraqi Government

Most of the men (no women!) running Iraq today are still former exiles who flew into Baghdad in 2003 on the heels of the U.S. and British invasion forces. Iraq is finally once again exporting 3.8 million barrels of oil per day and earning $80 billion a year in oil exports, but little of this money trickles down to rebuild destroyed and damaged homes or provide jobs, health care or education for Iraqis, only 36 percent of whom even have jobs. Iraq’s young people have taken to the streets to demand an end to the corrupt post-2003 Iraqi political regime and U.S. and Iranian influence over Iraqi politics. More than 600 protesters were killed by government forces, but the protests forced Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to resign. Another former Western-based exile, Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the cousin of former U.S.-appointed interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, was chosen to replace him, but he resigned within weeks after the National Assembly failed to approve his cabinet choices. The popular protest movement celebrated Allawi’s resignation, and Abdul Mahdi agreed to remain as prime minister, but only as a “caretaker” to carry out essential functions until new elections can be held. He has called for new elections in December. Until then, Iraq remains in political limbo, still occupied by about 5,000 U.S. troops.

7. Illegal War on Iraq Has Undermined the Rule of International Law

When the U.S. invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, the first victim was the United Nations Charter, the foundation of peace and international law since World War II, which prohibits the threat or use of force by any country against another. International law only permits military action as a necessary and proportionate defense against an attack or imminent threat. The illegal 2002 Bush doctrine of preemption was universally rejected because it went beyond this narrow principle and claimed an exceptional U.S. right to use unilateral military force “to preempt emerging threats,” undermining the authority of the UN Security Council to decide whether a specific threat requires a military response or not. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general at the time, said the invasion was illegal and would lead to a breakdown in international order, and that is exactly what has happened. When the U.S. trampled the UN Charter, others were bound to follow. Today we are watching Turkey and Israel follow in the U.S.’s footsteps, attacking and invading Syria at will as if it were not even a sovereign country, using the people of Syria as pawns in their political games.

8. Iraq War Lies Corrupted U.S. Democracy

The second victim of the invasion was American democracy. Congress voted for war based on a so-called “summary” of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was nothing of the kind. The Washington Post reported that only six out of 100 senators and a few House members read the actual NIE. The 25-page “summary” that other members of Congress based their votes on was a document produced months earlier “to make the public case for war,” as one of its authors, the CIA’s Paul Pillar, later confessed to PBS Frontline. It contained astounding claims that were nowhere to be found in the real NIE, such as that the CIA knew of 550 sites where Iraq was storing chemical and biological weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated many of these lies in his shameful performance at the UN Security Council in February 2003, while Bush and Cheney used them in major speeches, including Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. How is democracy—the rule of the people—even possible if the people we elect to represent us in Congress can be manipulated into voting for a catastrophic war by such a web of lies?

9. Impunity for Systematic War Crimes

Another victim of the invasion of Iraq was the presumption that U.S. presidents and policy are subject to the rule of law. Seventeen years later, most Americans assume that the president can conduct war and assassinate foreign leaders and terrorism suspects as he pleases, with no accountability whatsoever—like a dictator. When President Obama said he wanted to look forward instead of backward, and held no one from the Bush administration accountable for their crimes, it was as if they ceased to be crimes and became normalized as U.S. policy. That includes crimes of aggression against other countries; the mass killing of civilians in U.S. airstrikes and drone strikes; and the unrestricted surveillance of every American’s phone calls, emails, browsing history and opinions. But these are crimes and violations of the U.S. Constitution, and refusing to hold accountable those who committed these crimes has made it easier for them to be repeated.

10. Destruction of the Environment

During the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped 340 tons of warheads and explosives made with depleted uranium, which poisoned the soil and water and led to skyrocketing levels of cancer. In the following decades of “ecocide,” Iraq has been plagued by the burning of dozens of oil wells; the pollution of water sources from the dumping of oil, sewage and chemicals; millions of tons of rubble from destroyed cities and towns; and the burning of huge volumes of military waste in open air “burn pits” during the war. The pollution caused by war is linked to the high levels of congenital birth defects, premature births, miscarriages and cancer (including leukemia) in Iraq. The pollution has also affected U.S. soldiers. “More than 85,000 U.S. Iraq war veterans… have been diagnosed with respiratory and breathing problems, cancers, neurological diseases, depression and emphysema since returning from Iraq,” as the Guardian reports. And parts of Iraq may never recover from the environmental devastation.

11. The U.S.’s Sectarian “Divide and Rule” Policy in Iraq Spawned Havoc Across the Region

In secular 20th-century Iraq, the Sunni minority was more powerful than the Shia majority, but for the most part, the different ethnic groups lived side-by-side in mixed neighborhoods and even intermarried. Friends with mixed Shia/Sunni parents tell us that before the U.S. invasion, they didn’t even know which parent was Shia and which was Sunni. After the invasion, the U.S. empowered a new Shiite ruling class led by former exiles allied with the U.S. and Iran, as well as the Kurds in their semi-autonomous region in the north. The upending of the balance of power and deliberate U.S. “divide and rule” policies led to waves of horrific sectarian violence, including the ethnic cleansing of communities by Interior Ministry death squads under U.S. command. The sectarian divisions the U.S. unleashed in Iraq led to the resurgence of Al Qaeda and the emergence of ISIS, which have wreaked havoc throughout the entire region.

12. The New Cold War Between the U.S. and the Emerging Multilateral World

When President Bush declared his “doctrine of preemption” in 2002, Senator Edward Kennedy called it “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.” But the world has so far failed to either persuade the U.S. to change course or to unite in diplomatic opposition to its militarism and imperialism. France and Germany bravely stood with Russia and most of the Global South to oppose the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003. But Western governments embraced Obama’s superficial charm offensive as cover for reinforcing their traditional ties with the U.S. China was busy expanding its peaceful economic development and its role as the economic hub of Asia, while Russia was still rebuilding its economy from the neoliberal chaos and poverty of the 1990s. Neither was ready to actively challenge U.S. aggression until the U.S., NATO and their Arab monarchist allies launched proxy wars against Libya and Syria in 2011. After the fall of Libya, Russia appears to have decided it must either stand up to U.S. regime change operations or eventually fall victim itself.

The economic tides have shifted, a multipolar world is emerging, and the world is hoping against hope that the American people and new American leaders will act to rein in this 21st-century American imperialism before it leads to an even more catastrophic U.S. war with Iran, Russia or China. As Americans, we must hope that the world’s faith in the possibility that we can democratically bring sanity and peace to U.S. policy is not misplaced. A good place to start would be to join the call by the Iraqi Parliament for U.S. troops to leave Iraq.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.