White Skin Privilege

Richard Moser

White privilege is a thing. It’s just not the same thing the corporate Democrats use to boss us around with. The concept of white privilege was not invented by some liberal university professors.  In fact, the concept of white privilege was created by a white man: a radical activist and historian who barely attended college.

Writing for the John Brown Commemoration Committee in 1965,  Theodore Allen innovated the discourse on white skin privilege. In 1967 he co-authored “White Blindspot” and in 1969 published “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?”

According to Jeffrey B. Perry:

Allen’s work influenced the Students for a Democratic Society and sectors of the “new left” and it paved the way for the “white privilege” “race as social construct” and “whiteness studies”academic fields.

In our deep past, white privileges were granted by a “presumption of liberty” to white people that was simultaneously denied Blacks.

We can track that presumption of liberty straight to today’s “presumption of innocence” that we are all supposed to enjoy but are all too often denied Natives, Blacks, other people of color, poor people and those that do not conform to gender or sexual social norms. The vast militarized penal system all to often deprives people of color the “presumption of liberty:” the right to be innocent until proven guilty and to enjoy the equal protection of the law as demanded by the Constitution. As the presumption of guilt becomes normalized it effects everyone including the white working class.

Unlike liberal interpretations of white privilege used to attack dissent, Allen’s understanding was that white privileges are contrary to the long-term political and material interest of white people. The benefits, bribes, and appeals to white people do have a real value, which is one reason they work, but that value is far less than the value that would be produced by class solidarity and cross-racial action to raise wages, win political power and establish justice.

In 1969 Allen wrote:

The white-skin privileges of the masses of the white workers do not permit them nor their children to escape into the ranks of the propertied classes. In the South, where the white-skin privilege has always been most emphasized and formal, the white workers have fared worse than white workers in the rest of the country. The white-skin privilege for the mass is the trustee’s privilege, not release from jail, merely freedom of movement within it and a diet more nearly adequate. It is not that the ordinary white worker gets more than he must have to support himself and his family, but that the black worker gets less than the white worker. The result is that by thus inducing, reinforcing and perpetuating racist attitudes on the part of the white workers, the present-day power-masters get the political support of the rank-and-file of the white workers in critical situations, and without having to share with them their super profits in the slightest measure… [emphasis added]

To this day, “The white-skin privilege for the mass is the trustee’sprivilege not release from jail…” Some of the prisoners can control other prisoners but never challenge the warden.

Look at mass incarceration today. According to a Pew Research Center study  2010 US incarceration rates for white men are 678 per hundred thousand and 91 per hundred thousand for white women. The incarceration rate for black men is a staggering six times greater than white men, and almost three times higher for black women. (4,347 for Black men and 260 for Black women). Yet, white men and women are incarcerated at rates much higher than those of comparable countries.

The US rate for white male incarceration alone is far greater that every other European incarceration rate for total prisoners of all classes, races and genders.  And, the Russian incarceration rate skews the statistic as it towers above every other European country at 439 per hundred thousand.  The average rate for European Union members was 135 in 2006. US white women for example, are incarcerated at higher rates than the total of all classes, races and genders for an astounding 20 European counties.

The penal system captures the effect of white privilege in a nutshell.  “You got more than the blacks don’t complain.” But so much less than justice, freedom or democracy would demand. Yet our relative privilege allowed us to consent to the war on drugs and the “get tough on crime” politicians that aimed at Blacks first but who ultimately created an authoritarian police state that now aims to make even the exercise of constitutional rights a criminal act. We all lose, including losing our rights to a trial by jury that the Bill of Rights claims to protect. The new penal system also got tough on working class whites as it garrisoned the entire country with a militarized force dedicated to protecting the established order.

The Psychic Wage

The wage harder to put a price on, and one of the most serious remaining obstacles to overcoming racism, is what W.E.B Dubois, the great American thinker, called the psychological wage.“ The psychological or psychic wage is that highly coveted sense of personal, spiritual, and moral superiority we are taught to derive from our skin color.

This psychic wage is collected, in part, by an imaginary connection with whites of high status. White privilege creates vertical solidarity that connects working class whites to the power and glory of the rich, strong, and celebrated white elites, even though our overall political and economic interests are shared by working class people of color. White workers are exploited by the boss and sent to die in their wars daily. Our privilege gives us the delusion that we are not who we truly are.

James Baldwin, the black writer and visionary, put it this way:

[A]s long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness —for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps —they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of —and justify — as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish…in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us…But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers. [emphasis added]

Whiteness and privilege distances us from our “own experience and the experience of others.” You may feel connected to a Trump or a Clinton for an Obama, or aspire to become a general or a billionaire, but to them we are but chumps and pawns.

Solidarity — Horizontal or Vertical? 

Yes, it is the privileges whites have that disrupt horizontal solidarity, but when those bribes are eroded, even partially, by debt, poverty, the long term decline of wages, poor health, drug addiction, and hopelessness, their hypnotic power weakens. Young whites in particular have come to see the transparent truth that the system is rigged against them, and perhaps above all, that the scientific forecast of life on our planet is so poisoned and precarious that no amount of privilege will save them.

These changes in consciousness are signs that we might again cross into revolutionary territory. The unending recession of 2008 has forced whites to choose. Cling ever harder to the psychological wage, hate, and white supremacy, or join the movements toward social reform, revolution, resistance, and love.

In a broader sense, it is the corporate power that is creating the crisis in privilege as a form of social control.  If the corporate state can no longer allow any meaningful improvements in the lives of everyday people — and impose only austerity and growing poverty — we can expect that both the Democrats and Republicans will increasingly turn to the psychological wage as the remaining form of compensation, bribe and appeal. In different ways perhaps, Trump, Clinton and Obama have nonetheless resorted to the vertical solidarity of nationalism and/or corporate forms of political identity to block the political space that should be occupied by struggles over economic democracy, equality, ecology and peace.

The vertical solidarity of white privilege should make us very wary of other forms of vertical solidarity that have been a typical tool of the elites. Tokenism and machine politics establish a political and spiritual connection when people identify with the managers of war and empire because they share the same gender, sexuality, color, class or national origins. The degree to which there was uncritical feminist support of Clinton — and many feminists did oppose Clinton — is the measure of how psychic wages can operate to protect the existing order. The unfounded belief by some liberals that Obama is a civil rights leader — and many in the new civil rights movement do criticize Obama — shows the degree to which the vertical solidarity that has so damaged white people and the social movements, will have a similar effect if offered to others, even those historically exploited and oppressed by the established order.

Privilege, vertical solidarity and the psychic wage remain potent means of maintaining social control at home and empire abroad. In the same way white privilege blinds white people to their own invented identity and the depth of racism, imperial privilege blinds all of us to the ongoing imperial project with its constant bloodletting and profit making that has become our way of life.

Our best move is to take on the most deeply entrenched form of privilege: white privilege. For that we need to organize the white working class.

It’s Not Academic.

Debates continue over Allen’s assertion that the white race and white privilege was invented as a conscious and deliberate act of the oligarchs. Was it that, or the general outcome of the historical conditions of the time? The key argument for activists, however, is that white racism is not itself innate and therefore can be changed. History is made by human action. Sometime human acts are conscious, even conspiratorial. Other times we contribute to change through a multitude of human decisions; local and global, visionary and parochial.

But the political world is not an academic debate. It is up to us to prove that white racism is not innate in white people and that racism can be changed by activism.

Venezuela Agonisties

WILLIAM GUDAL

It is truly heartbreaking to  watch what is occurring in Venezuela. After the calamity has swept through, the history of events will be explained by a narrative that mostly will be wrong. All kinds of things will be blamed: socialism, communism, capitalism, Chavezism, and a host of other misdiagnoses. The combination of actual causes will be outlined below.

A personal look back in time is helpful. My father, mother, brother and I moved to Caracas in the fall of 1961. Excitement was in the air. It was a very invigorating time in the capital city. Located at 3200 feet above sea level, bordered by spectacular 8500 feet mountains, the climate was and is nearly the land of perpetual spring.  During the 1950’s a gigantic burst of world class architecture had blossomed in the city, spearheaded by a diverse collection of European designers. Wide boulevards, traffic circles and monuments were pervasive, bearing romantic and inspiring names: Sabana Grande, Avenidas Francisco Miranda, Urdaneta, Andres Bello, Libertador, and El Silencio.

Despite the enormity of the gut wrenching barrios, you felt that this was a country that had a real chance, like an Argentina starting all over. The last dictator, Jimenez,  had been deposed in 1958. In 1963 despite his imperfections, Romulo Betancourt, founder of Accion Democratica party, had become Venezuela’s first ever elected President, and for many became an almost mythical champion of change and hope. Optimism was palpable.  Living for expats was easy. The city oozed European charm and world class cosmopolitan flair.

I arrived in Venezula as a seventen year old, about as wide eyed and uniformed as could be imagined. I was truly overwelmed by the gradeur of the city, its energy, its people, its setting and its glamour.  Flower sellers and flower stalls, some a half a block long, seemed everywere. I doubt they are still there. On foot, by car and by taxi, I roamed every nook, cranny and section of the long diverse Caracas valley and foothill towns, never worrying about my personal safety.

Due to various factors, for such a young person, I got a pretty good look at the workings of the society beyond the physical surface. Dumb, naive, and frankly as uninterested as I was, I saw and felt things that I now recognize in retrospect were very disturbing. A lethal combination of factors has brought Venezuela to its present state, and I witnessed first hand all of those elements 55 years ago.

Among the factors is corruption, good old fashioned corruption that has nothing to do with politics or “isms”. Corruption exits in all socieites at all times; it becomes a question of degree, however. In Latin America, corruption has existed in extreme form since the beginning. The chief problem with corruption is that itcreates inefficiency in societal functioning. Things and systems don’t work well when they are corrupt. It’s that simple and that complicated. It colors everything. Once embedded, corruption takes a long, long time to eradicate.

Another factor does spring from politics. The ‘Haves’ in societies don’t really want to share much with the “Have Nots”. It understandable. It will probably always be that way. At times however, certain leavening societal institutions incubate, creating forces that militate toward spreading some wealth and income to the middle and lower economic groups. This waxes and wanes.  In Venezuela, these instituions, lacking historical gravitas and never strong to begin with, were strangled before reaching critical mass. Consider Evo Morales in Bolivia today, where his relative middle way is detested by the world power structure.

A final factor discussed here is the role of the United States. Even all those many years ago, as a young man I heard frequent if not constant chatter on the streets and in the salons about the  massive interference and influence of a certain agency of the United States. It is important to understand that Venezuela is a true treasure trove of riches: minerals, hydrocarbons, timber, and soil. It also poseses what is becoming much more scarce – water, agricultural abundance and even clean air. Its geographical position at the top of South America is ideal and potentially strategic. With the United States seeking regime change in virtually every country of the world, Venezuela is a plum far too juicy to resist.

The interplay of these factors, along with others, suggests a rough road ahead for Venezuela, barring unexpected reversal or mitigation of these forces.

Backward Steps: The Australian Recycling Sham

Binoy Kampmark

The green conscience received a setback last week with revelations that the Australian recycling industry is not what it seems.  The middle class sensibility here is simple and dismissive: bin it and forget about it. Place the sorted items in the appropriate set place and let others do the rest.

Such an attitude means that the Australian recycler can been caught unawares.  A glance at the general talking points of Australia’s recycling prowess shows confidence, even smugness. Planet Ark, for instance, notes that the recycling rate of 51 percent of household waste is “relatively on par with recycling rates in northern European countries and exceeding the mean recycling rate of all 28 countries in the EU of 42 percent.”

The pat on the back follows. “This is quite an achievement for Australia considering the unique landscape and dispersed population that our waste services need to navigate.”  (This self-congratulatory tone also works in reverse: a justification, for instance, as to why Australia’s internet rates are some of the slowest in the developed world.)

Where Australia lacks punch is the recycling of electronic waste, limping and lagging behind European states.  In terms of battery recycling, for many years mandatory in Europe, the program remains in tight swaddling clothes.

The sense, then, of the conscientious recycler, is a strong one, alert and aware about doing one’s duty in environmental conservation, or, at the very least, avoiding environmental ruination. But the challenges as to how effective such behaviour has been are pronounced and problematic.

Some of this can be gathered from an ABC program which has made it an ongoing project to wage a “War on Waste” fronted by satirist and mocker-in-chief Craig Reucassel.  While it has an instructional, even at points hectoring tone, the production makes valid points that burst the euphoric bubble of the recycling clan.

For one thing, the proportion of what is appropriately placed in bins for kerbside collections needs challenging.  Audits suggest that upwards of 10 percent of material placed for recycling – in terms of volume – should find another destination.

As Trevor Thornton explains, “The most common ‘contamination’ items include plastic bags (both full and empty), textiles, green waste, polystyrene (Styrofoam) and general rubbish.” The first item on this ticket list – plastic – is particularly noxious, finding its way into the reject pile that is duly buried in a long, slow-decaying exile in landfill.

And, suggests Thornton in a myth-debunking tone, there is little need rinsing and cleaning the assortment of cans and containers for the recyclers, as “today’s recycling systems can easily cope with the levels of food often found in or on these containers.”  Such industriousness wasted!

Then come specific items that may only be partially recyclable, with the grandest culprit being the ubiquitous takeaway coffee cup.  Here, the messages vary.  Place them in co-mingled and mixed paper bins, and all is dandy. Not so, claim the War on Waste fraternity, which notes that only part of the cup would qualify.

Nor is the concept of re-use necessarily high priest gospel.  Be wary, for instance, of the wisdom behind reusing your ceramic cup.  Paper disposable cups and Styrofoam come out ahead of the re-use facility here.  According to a Canadian study by Martin B. Hocking, one ceramic cup would have to be put through the paces 39 times to make it more viable than the former, and 1,006 times when compared with the latter. It all has to do with energy consumption in washing reusable cups, “a less important factor in cub fabrication.”

Even more deflating was the report by the investigative Four Corners outfit that was aired in its usual Monday segment to Australian audiences thinking that they had gotten on top of the issue of what to do with glass.

They had good reason to.  Again, Planet Ark, in a glowing overview of the state of recycling in Australia, asserts that glass bottles in Australia “have generally 40 – 70 percent recycled content, which means that your bottles and jars go directly into the manufacture of new bottles and jars at an energy saving.”

There’s a snag in all of this. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of glass, rather than finding their way to the appropriate recycling points, reach stockpiles and disappear in landfill.  One particular fallen angel in the business, recycling company Polytrade, decided to go public with the view that the recycling market in Australia had run its course of sustainability.

According to Polytrade Rydalmere manager Nathan Ung, “We are back in the dark age and we don’t know what to do.” The reason for being plunged into such darkness was one of quantity and viability, a product that had gotten ahead of itself.  “The predicament at the moment is there’s no viable market anymore, there’s nowhere for the glass to go.”

The stresses are manifold.  Recycling companies are feeling the pinch of falls in commodity prices.  Flexibility with local councils is nigh impossible, with long-term contracts between the companies and local government lasting for as long as 10 years.

Stockpiling limits are enforced by the Environmental Protection Agencies across the country, though this, according to the Four Corners report, is a premise that must be challenged.  Certainly, when it came to New South Wales, companies engaged in the task of recycling were being somewhat flexible in their reading of the regulations, behaviour inspired by a good degree of desperation.  In rural and regional Australia, landfilling has become de rigueur.

A dark story, then.  Behind every environmental claim to fame and cocky advance in greening the earth is a qualification, a half-step back that risks, at times, becoming a reverse canter. Well it may be that Australians are generally more aware of the need to recycle, placing their green consciousness into hyperdrive. But this is a country of vastness, insufficient regulation and scattered responses across such industries vulnerable to price changes.  It remains to the participants to assure those still keen to sort out their weekly waste whether it’s all worth it.

Money Laundering in Chief: Scandal at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Binoy Kampmark 

The Australian banker is a smug species, arguably more than his international peers.  Caught off guard by the financial disasters of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Australian banking system has become an expression of a classic oligopoly, manipulating prices and squeezing customers.  Such an Australian banker is perky as well, self-assured that any inappropriate, let alone illegal behaviour, might be passed off as an effort to do better, to buck trends, to be audacious.

Over the last few weeks, AUSTRAC has had little time for that audacity.  The financial intelligence agency and regulator had picked up on suspicious transactions made through the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s “intelligence deposit machines” numbering over 53,000 and exceeding the legal $10,000 limit.  The machines in question were part of a CBA modernisation scheme, involving 40 new deposit ATMs that would permit the register of cash deposits in real time.

The bubbly language from such individuals as chief information officer, Michael Harte, has been that of frat boy enthusiasm, the optimist without limits.  “If you don’t open channels, if you don’t have rich relationship data and real-time services you cannot lead the market and you cannot change the game.”

Harte’s point has been breakneck speed, acceleration, briskness.  Transactions need immediacy.  Money should not be kept in transit, a state of costly languishing that renders the bank unattractive for the client.  “With real-time banking at the core, we have enabled instant transfer of value between parties.  We aren’t holding money for days; we know our customers don’t want this.  We know banks and others are disliked for this.”

Such enthusiasm has bucked and fronted the law.  Harte’s program has fallen foul of a conventional problem in this field: the mechanism, fashioned as such, is not necessarily conducive to the regulators.  In all likelihood, it might hold such regulation in contempt, enabling money to be given a good rinse or bolstering the financial security of designated terrorist organisations.

Not that the CBA is indifferent to playing the card of brute cynicism: having set up a system achingly attractive for abuse, it advertises the opposite with professional panache. “At CommBank we are committed to fighting money laundering and terrorism financing.” A look shot, it would seem, both ways.

True to form, the machines have been used by a range of parties not otherwise on the “approved” list.  Not that the CBA were ignorant of the fact. By admission of CBA chairwoman Catherine Livingstone, the board were first alerted to the money laundering risks posed by the intelligent deposit machines in the second half of 2015.

Various sumptuous morsels can be found in the weighty 583 page statement outlining AUSTRAC’s grievance against the CBA.  Among them are instances of one customer placing vast sums of cash through the Intelligence Deposit Machines outside the doors of the Leichardt Marketplace branch in Sydney’s inner west.

Foiled by an unusually attentive branch manager, the person in question made his dash, and deposited the rest of his proceeds at the bank’s Mascot branch. By the end of that June day in 2015, $670,420, compromising 13,000 notes or so of mostly $50 notes, had found its way into the CBA.

The daring individual behind the venture was Yeun Hong Fung, a man so enterprising he had used 29 identities to launder money derived from methamphetamine sales to Hong Kong-based accounts. This was no mean feat for a man who had been deported three times yet able to return to Australia on 34 occasions using false passports.

Such feats were not a point of concern for CBA chief executive Ian Narev.  Things, he suggested, happened all the time. Far from it for him or members of the board to take note, let alone inform investors, of the seriousness of such financial misconduct.  “In an organisation of this size,” he said with casual contempt, “there are individual items that come to the attention of the board and management from regulators and others all the time.”

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has gotten industrious on this point, promising to investigate the bank’s celebrated modern practices, notably whether it complied with the disclosure provisions outlined in the Corporations Act.  The licensing requirements “to act efficiently, honestly and fairly” will be part of the remit.

“I want to inform the committee,” explained ASIC’s Greg Medcraft to a parliamentarian joint committee last week, “that ASIC has commenced inquiries into this matter and any consequences this matter has for the laws we administer.”

The teeth behind the investigation will come from AUSTRAC, which promises, should the evidence stack up, heavy fines.  On Monday morning, the bank shed its first appointed casualty, announcing the very mild, obvious if delayed sacrifice of Narev.

Chairman Livingstone informed the press that the “succession” plan had been brought forward, meaning that Narev would be stepping down at the end of this year.  His pay packet has also been given a decent pruning – 50 percent of it, to be precise.  Short-term bonuses for all senior executives for the 2017 financial year were also shelved.

All this is small beer, given that one of Australia’s golden institutions has found itself caught in mid-flight. In an effort to achieve Harte’s dream of speed and efficiency in moving capital, it embraced that old wisdom from the Roman Emperor Vespasian about money having no smell: pecunia non olet, as it were.

Australia: Life expectancy gap between rich and poor almost 20 years

John Mackay

The Social Health Atlas, a new analysis of government health statistics, has revealed much lower life expectancy and far higher rates of avoidable deaths in working class suburbs when compared to wealthier suburbs in Australian cities.

In terms of average age of death, life expectancy between rich and poor areas of both Sydney and Melbourne differed by almost 20 years. One of Sydney’s poorest western suburbs, Mt Druitt had the lowest median age of death, 68 years. The suburbs of Cherrybrook and West Pennant Hills, about 30 kilometres away in Sydney’s wealthier northern areas, had a median age of 87.

A similar picture was shown in Melbourne, where the inner eastern suburb of Camberwell had the highest age of death at 88 years. This contrasted with Cranbourne North, 40 kilometres to the south, where the median was 69.

According to the 2014–15 taxation office records, Cherrybrook residents had an average annual taxable income of $70,774, compared to $46,274 for Mt Druitt. Likewise, Camberwell’s average was $79,065, while Cranbourne North’s was $50,526.

The 19-year gaps in life expectancy are nearly twice that between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. In 2016, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that gap was about 10 years.

Both results are damning. But the new analysis points to the underlying reality that it is class, not race, that determines the health and social inequality in capitalist society. Indigenous people are affected above all because they are likely to be poor and working class.

The Public Health Information Development Unit (PHIDU) from Torrens University Australia produced the Social Health Atlas, an analysis of data gathered over the years 2010-14.

In Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, the 10 areas with the lowest avoidable deaths were relatively well-off suburbs in the city’s north and east, including Castle Hill, St Ives, Mosman and Bondi. The 10 suburbs with the highest rates were poor suburbs in the west and south, such as Mt Druitt, Macquarie Fields and St Mary’s, with one exception. That was Redfern, an inner city area with a high Aboriginal population.

Deaths considered avoidable included those caused by infections, cancers that have established screening programs, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, suicides and accidents.

The findings showed the contrast more clearly in city suburbs, due to larger population sizes, but there were similar trends of poorer health outcomes in impoverished areas across the country.

The most disadvantaged 20 percent of the population had higher rates of premature death, which classified a death as premature if someone died before the age of 75. The pattern remained, whether the data was analysed by capital cities, entire states or the whole country.

PHIDU director John Glover noted in an article this month that the health gap is widening when measured as premature mortality. “Yes, there have been substantial reductions in the rates of early death overall, with rates down by 50 percent in 2014 compared to 1987,” he explained. “However, the significant reduction was not shared by all.”

The reduction in early deaths was lower in the most disadvantaged areas, Glover reported. “In 1987 there were 42 percent more deaths in the most disadvantaged areas compared to the least disadvantaged areas, by 2013 rates were 76 percent higher among the most disadvantaged.”

This study follows a similar analysis from the “Health Tracker” report, showing a higher prevalence of poor health indicators in poorer suburbs when compared to wealthy suburbs in Australian capital cities. Low-income areas had higher levels of both childhood and adult obesity, increased rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

These staggering differences in health quality and life expectancy are a direct effect of widening social inequality. They are bound up with the deteriorating conditions of life for millions of people in working class areas in terms of economic insecurity, health care, nutrition, exercise, workplace accidents and suicide.

The growing social divide has been magnified by cuts to essential services such as hospitals and clinics, and the growth of a “two-tier” health care system where the wealthy can afford private health insurance for more rapid access to care, avoiding long public hospital waiting times.

This is a global process. The Australian data is similar to that in other countries. Public Health England, an agency of the UK Department of Health, recently released a report revealing that people in England’s richest areas live on average 20 years longer than those in the poorest areas.

A study on life expectancy in the United States, published in the July edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine, found a similar 20-year gap. Some counties had up to 13 times greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease. The disparities had increased over 30 years. The authors pointed to a variety of causes, with socio-economic status being a key driver.

These trends are an indictment of the capitalist profit system. Millions of working class people are suffering or dying unnecessarily, despite immense advances being made in medical science and technology.

India and China heighten war readiness as Himalayan standoff continues

K. Ratnayake

Media reports indicate that both India and China have increased military deployments along their disputed border, increasing the danger that their eight-week-long standoff on the Doklam Plateau—a ridge in the Himalayan foothills claimed by both China and Bhutan—could cascade into war.

Beijing is said to have stationed 800 People’s Liberation Army troops near to where 300 Chinese troops are deployed on the Doklam Plateau “eyeball-to-eyeball” from Indian forces. Some Indian sources are also claiming that China has sent Chengdu J-9 and J-10 fighter jets to Tibet and deployed surface-to-air missile batteries near its disputed border with the northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Indian Army, meanwhile, has ordered troops from its 3rd and 4th Corps to move closer to the Line of Actual Control that separates Arunachal Pradesh from Chinese Tibet and placed them in high-alert, “No War, No Peace mode.”

The Indian Army’s presence in Sikkim, the Indian state closest to the site of the standoff, was expanded earlier in the crisis. The units that were advanced toward the border with China at that time remain in forward-deployed positions.

On Thursday, News18 reported that residents of Nathang, a village in Sikkim situated some 35 kilometers from the Doklam Plateau, were leaving the area. Indian government and army officials have denied that an evacuation has been ordered. The report said that it was unclear “if an (evacuation) order has been issued to accommodate thousands of soldiers of the 33 Corps who are reportedly moving from Sukna (West Bengal) towards Doklam” or as a “precautionary measure to avoid civilian casualties in case of a skirmish.”

The Indian-based The Quint website has since confirmed that “33 Corps, which was mobilized nearly a month ago, has moved ‘very close’ to the India-China border in Sikkim as part of the massive positioning of troops in the wake of the continuing standoff over the Doklam issue.”

Since the standoff began on June 18, Beijing and New Delhi have each insisted that the other has taken unprecedentedly aggressive action—action that requires a hardline response.

Beijing says it is unprecedented for Indian troops to confront Chinese forces on territory that India does not claim as its own, but rather considers to belong to a third country, Bhutan. New Delhi, which deployed its troops to prevent Chinese construction workers from expanding a road on the Plateau, said that the roadwork violated a “standstill agreement” Beijing has with Bhutan pending resolution of their border dispute and, moreover, that its core “strategic” interests are at stake, because Chinese control over the Doklam would increase the vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor—a narrow slice of territory that links India’s seven northeastern states with the rest of the country.

Late last week Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj met with her Bhutanese counterpart, Damcho Dorji, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), a seven-state bloc India is using to try to expand its economic and strategic influence at China’s expense.

Swaraj and Dorji provided no details at the conclusion of their talks, but the Bhutanese minister did telling waiting media persons, “We hope the situation in Doklam will be resolved peacefully and amicably.”

New Delhi claims to be supporting Bhutan against Chinese bullying, but India itself has long treated the Himalayan kingdom like a protectorate. Even sections of the Indian media have said that New Delhi’s claims about the threat to the Siliguri Corridor are exaggerated and that its real worry is that Bhutan, having been heavily courted by Beijing, could escape its unbridled domination.

Bhutan has protested the Chinese “incursion” on the Doklam, but it has not repeated New Delhi’s claims Indian troops interceded at its request.

Beijing has accused New Delhi of violating Bhutan’s sovereignty, as part of an aggressive pushback against India. For weeks, Chinese government officials and the state-owned press have been churning out belligerent statements. This has included frequent taunting references to the month-long 1962 Sino-Indian border war, in which Chinese troops routed Indian forces, and, more recently, blunt warnings that Beijing’s patience is rapidly running out.

Publicly China has explained its new, hardline stance as due to India’s unprecedented action of confronting Chinese troops on territory that it does not even claim as its own.

However, the real explanation for Beijing’s more aggressive stance against India is the latter’s ever-deeper integration into American imperialism’s military-strategic offensive against China. Under the three-year rule of Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP, India has been transformed into a veritable “frontline state” in Washington’s anti-China war drive. New Delhi has thrown open its military bases and ports to routine use by the Pentagon; parroted Washington’s provocative stance on the South China Sea; and expanded bilateral and trilateral strategic ties with America’s principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

As the Doklam standoff began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump were pledging at a White House meeting to further expand the Indo-US “global strategic partnership.”

Official Washington has said little about the border crisis in the Himalayas, but in recent days calls for a diplomatic solution have become more frequent. This is no doubt a sign of increasing concern that events could spin out of control, even as the US is ratcheting up tensions with North Korea and using the Washington-instigated crisis on the Korean Peninsula to bully China.

On Saturday Admiral Harry B. Harris, the head of the US Pacific Command, told the Press Trust of India that he “encourages” China and India “to resolve their differences diplomatically,” adding, “I think that any time you have two great powers at odds across a common border, that’s an area of concern. Of course, it’s potentially dangerous.”

Harris’ statements are deeply cynical. He has been a major player in the push to harness India to the US offensive against China. He has publicly pressed for India to mount joint patrols with the US Navy across the Indian Pacific Oceans, including in the South China Sea. Last month, India, the US and Japan staged what the Trump administration boasted was the largest ever Indian Ocean war exercises—exercises that the press of all three countries characterized as a “message to China.”

Washington no doubt does not want things to boil over between India and China in the midst of a possible nuclear confrontation with North Korea. However, the aggressive US stance in northeast Asia may encourage New Delhi to calculate it can press a hard bargain on a threatened Beijing.

Moreover, there are concerns within Washington that the US needs to make clear that it stands with India, so as to bolster New Delhi and ensure that the “gains” of the Indo-US alliance are not undermined.

This was the significance of an August 9 article by Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA hand, former Obama administration official, and Brookings Institute fellow. Titled “JFK stopped a China-India War. Can Trump? The nuclear stakes are much higher now,” the article argued that the Kennedy administration forced China to unilaterally withdraw its troops from India in 1962 by sending “the US Air Force to India to resupply the Indians” and “a carrier battle group to the Bay of Bengal.”

Noting that the current standoff has “potentially enormous consequences for the world” and that American imperialist interests are very much at stake, Riedel urged Washington to be prepared to intervene aggressively in the Indo-Chinese dispute. While he presents this largely in diplomatic terms, the implication is clear: if the Indo-Chinese border crisis continues to escalate, the Trump administration must be ready to come to New Delhi’s support militarily.

Der Spiegel calls for a strongman in Germany

Wolfgang Weber

The entirety of the July 29 edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel was dedicated to the theme: “The State of the Nation.” The focus as stated in the editorial is: “How do Germans live and think?” But what readers discover above all else are the political thoughts of the editors and publishers of the most important opinion-making magazine in Germany.

The issue is published in a special edition with six different covers. Each shows a caricature of German chancellor Angela Merkel. But while five of them present Merkel, drawn in the colours of the German flag, as a narcissistic helper of refugees, dreamily oblivious to the “aggression of the Russian bear” or simple-minded and self-satisfied, one cover stands out: with all her might, Merkel kicks a soccer ball into the face of American president Donald Trump. The message is clear: Merkel is not like this, but the Spiegel editors crave just such a chancellor, full of brutal aggressiveness.

In light of the widespread hatred of Trump and his reactionary policies, they expect this provocation to easily gain the approval of superficial readers. But no one should be deceived: With these politics, Der Spiegel is not mobilizing against the reactionary and brutal policies of Trump, but in favour of a German government that acts in a way equally brutal and reactionary: outwardly, against the US, as well as domestically against its own population.

The latter is the subject of this issue of Der Spiegel. Germany must finally be shaken from its slumber by a government of action, its police and military built up, and it must be freed from the political and mental “fetters of the post-war order”—that is the central theme of the three most important articles.

First is a five-page-long article about the supposedly miserable state of the police in the capital city of Berlin, written in a sensational tone typical of reactionary propaganda and end-of-the-world language of the extreme right: the police “with the smallest salaries in Germany, probably the worst equipment, with precincts guaranteed to be shoddy, and an endless workload.”

As with the build-up of the police, a gigantic upgrade to the military is also presented as an irrefutable necessity “without any alternative.” In the essay “Final exam—why Germany must abandon its military restraint and finally lead,” American commentator Anne Applebaum, whose husband is Radosław Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, describes the tasks of foreign policy. Germany must be prepared, she writes, for the full withdrawal of the United States from Europe, must take the lead in the fight against so-called “cyber terrorism” and “follow a hard line” militarily, especially toward Russia.

Alas, according to Applebaum: “Germany lacks the military power and therefore the power to assert its foreign policy.” In the Middle East and Africa, the Germans could talk about peace and “talk about the future … but they cannot do anything.” Instead of pushing for the required military build-up of Germany, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel supposedly even distanced himself from it for electoral considerations and “turned the question of German defence spending into a campaign issue”—“extraordinarily irresponsible,” from the author’s point of view, “considering the poor state of the Bundeswehr.”

Her core message is therefore concerned with domestic policy: the Germans must “change their way of thinking.”

“Whoever wants to maintain what he has achieved must change,” she argues. “The German hesitancy to seek confrontation” certainly was historically understandable, but it was no longer appropriate today. Believing in non-violent solutions to conflicts was certainly honourable but politically naïve. Germany could not survive that way.

Author Dirk Kurbjuweit makes the same diagnosis and even provides the therapy: a Trump type, a strongman is needed! His article “The political miracle” is perhaps the most significant in this issue of Spiegel . It is subtitled: “Why there is no Trump among us. And why that is not entirely for the best.” In plain text: a man like Trump as chancellor would also have his good sides!

But the author does not consider speaking so plainly to be opportune: “ Yes, one must reject almost everything he is, but he has been possible because the US can develop immense power, both positive and negative.” And: “In this respect, Germany cannot keep up.” But it must, if it wants to be steeled for the future! So according to Kurbjuweit: the entire article serves to develop this tortuous yes-but-argumentation.

What are these enormous forces and qualities that, according to the Spiegelauthor, shape the “political constitution” of the US and have produced Trump? “Megalomania, the spirit of redemption, the violation of taboos,” the “gambler’s economy of real estate and financial speculation,” “doing business in a heinous or even brutal way,” a “conception of reality influenced by Hollywood.”

All of that was allegedly lacking in Germany, and that was bad. Because according to Kurbjuweit, while the boredom (of Germany) has its good side, so too do these qualities. They also shaped Silicon Valley, they are behind the success of businesses that have “conquered the world like Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Tesla.”

“Conquering the world” with help from such “immense powers” like megalomania, a redemptive spirit, heinousness and brutality in business and in politics—that is what is required according to Kurbjuweit, if Germany wants to “keep up.”

What then are the obstacles that prevent Germany from “keeping up?” In the judgement of historians, and as Kurbjuweit himself suggests, the last German politician to whom all of these grandiose characteristics applied was Adolf Hitler. And here lies the problem, in the opinion of the Spiegel author: The alleged lack of these qualities lay “not in the DNA of this country,” but rooted in the wartime defeat of the Third Reich and in the subsequent post-war history.

After 1945, his diagnosis states, Germany …

“… is established not as an independent entity, but as part of a larger unit, as an appendage of the US, as a member of NATO, as part of Europe. It was protected, fostered and controlled by alliances. It was too broken for egoism, for megalomania. It was and is perfectly satisfied to make arrangements with others, to find compromises and to understand the interests of Europe by and large as their own. Germany first is no motto for Germany.”

Hence the politics of internal accommodation, of small, cautious steps, the external policy of considerateness and of compromises—in short: the entire policy of boredom! Under the conditions of the Cold War and the last 25 years, Germany could have won influence, power and admiration—“only 72 years after the war ended … quite a political miracle.”

But Kurbjuweit has not taken up his pen to celebrate this “political miracle,” rather to declare it obsolete and no longer satisfactory:

It is … not appropriate, to rejoice in comfort that we do not have this stupid Trump , but the solid M erkel. The political miracle [is] indeed a lovely thing for the moment, but this land of blissful boredom is not especially well equipped for the future.

The “fetters of the past” were now to be shed. The recognition of the old fetters and taboos had a crippling effect, prevented the “pendulum swing” into liberating extremes, and these are, if one follows the implicit logic of Kurbjuweit’s arguments, the extremes of right-wing radicalism:

The swing of the pendulum is not a German movement. The great German taboo lies entirely in anything that approaches the Nazis, and it is widely accepted. This taboo keeps the polarity small. Move a little too far to the right, and already you are almost a Nazi , and one is already near the Nazis and that’s it. You are a goner.

Already a good three years ago, Kurbjuweit attempted to break the “great German taboo.” In the notorious article “The Change of the Past,” Kurbjuweit made the case for revising the assessment of Hitler and the crimes of National Socialism as it was established in the postwar period. He quoted Humboldt University professor Jörg Baberowski who said, “Hitler was not a psychopath. He was not vicious. He did not want people to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table.”

Basing himself on Baberowski, Kurbjuweit also attempted to rehabilitate historical revisionist Ernst Nolte who justified National Socialism as an understandable defensive reaction against the spread of the October Revolution and with this argument suffered a defeat in the Historians Dispute of the 1980s. Kurbjuweit quoted Baberowski again saying: “Nolte was done an injustice. Historically speaking, he was right.”

Kurbjuweit was thereby supplying the ideological lever for the “new foreign policy” announced at the same time. Germany’s return to militarism and its re-emerging as a great military power require a reinterpretation of the history of German imperialism, of the First and Second World Wars, and above all, that requires a re-evaluation of Hitler.

But Kurbjuweit and Baberowski met with opposition. The Socialist Equality Party of Germany (SGP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) publicly attacked the playing down of Hitler and other extreme right-wing statements of Baberowski, warning in articles, leaflets and well-attended public meetings of the return of German militarism. This found a large response among students and workers alike.

Now a loud hue and cry went out in the media—Baberowski was being bullied, slandered and deprived of his freedom of expression. Baberowski himself went to court attempting to legally forbid the student representatives of Bremen from calling him a right-wing extremist and a racist—and he suffered a clear defeat.

Kurbjuweit alludes to this—without naming names—when he writes: “At some universities there is already a tendency that comes close to the American atmosphere. But there it involves small minorities who can, however, ruin a professor’s life.”

Now Der Spiegel is launching a new attempt to break the “great German taboo.” With its issue on the state of the nation, it is unmistakably and emphatically calling for finally overcoming domestic political obstacles that always block the way forward: the politics of the centre, of compromises, of small steps, of consideration—the domestic heritage of the wartime defeat in 1945!

Kurbjuweit in all modesty points out that the repulsive, reactionary characteristics of Hitler and Trump “like everything bad in the world” also had their good side: only a chancellor equipped with these characteristics could finally shake Germany from its slumber!

He finds support first and foremost in the SPD. Its candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, is apparently of the same opinion. In an interview with Spiegel Online, he accused Merkel of neglecting her duty and promised to take Trump as his role model: “Men like Trump ultimately need what they themselves disseminate: clear declarations. I would confront him as clearly and explicitly as possible. A German head of government has not only the right to do this, but also the duty.”

In refugee policy and domestic rearmament, the SPD also increasingly orients itself to Trump and with right-wing slogans vies for the support of voters for the ultra-right Alternative for Germany.

It is no accident that outside of the SGP and the IYSSE hardly anyone came out against Baberowski and Kurbjuweit’s efforts to rewrite history and downplay the crimes of the Nazis. Today the SGP is the only party participating in the federal parliamentary elections with a programme against the return of great power politics and militarism.

Wildfires rage in northwestern United States

Bryan Dyne

Recent low precipitation thunderstorms have sparked 13 new large wildfires in the northwestern United States.

Forty-seven active large fires are currently burning more than 338,000 acres across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Only five of these are classified as contained, while dozens more smaller fires have engulfed a further 656,000 acres across the region. Thousands of homes in the nine affected states have been evacuated.

Cities close to the fires, such as Helena, Montana, have issued warnings that children and the elderly, along with those with respiratory problems, heart or lung diseases and smokers should limit their exertion and time spent outdoors. In addition, many of the states impacted have issued bans on small human-made fires such as campfires in order to reduce the probability of even more wildfires cropping up.

As a result of the large number of new fires, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) raised the National Fire Preparedness Level (PL) to its highest level, PL-5, last Thursday. This signals a high level of wildfire activity, the high risk of even more emerging and the necessity of committing major firefighting resources. There are currently 152 helicopters, 744 fire engines and 15,768 personnel drawn from the local, state, tribal and federal levels deployed to combat the fires.

The last time the wildfire situation in the US was so critical was in 2015, from August 13 to September 6. Then, the NIFC was forced to call in assets from the US military to help in fire suppression, as well as call for international aid from Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Currently, only the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve have been asked to supply extra equipment and personnel, though that could change if the fires continue to spread.

To date, there have been more than 41,500 individual wildfires across the US this year, burning down more than 6.2 million acres of land, nearly 50 percent more than the average over the past 10 years. An article last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that this trend will only continue to get worse. The report found that human-caused climate change has become the primary factor in increased forest fire activity, nearly doubling the expected amount of fires from 1984 to 2015. Climate change has also caused fire seasons to be an average of 78 days longer than they were in 1970.

This problem has been compounded by the stagnant budget of the US Forest Service, which has hovered around $5.8 billion annually since 2008. Unlike other natural disasters, funding for fighting wildfires is based on a 10-year rolling average, meaning that the costs are based on the past 10 years to predict the costs for the next year. However, this does not account for inflation or the increasing number of wildfires occurring, meaning that each year the probability that a large fire cannot be contained increases.

These issues were detailed in a 2015 report from the agency showing the increasing difficulty it faces in combating wildfires. Due to the increased frequency and severity of fires and the lack of extra funding, it has been forced to increase the amount of its budget dedicated to fire suppression from 16 percent in 1995 to 52 percent in 2015. There has been a corresponding 39 percent decrease in all non-fire personnel and thus a massive drop in programs designed to prevent future wildfires such as forest restoration. The Forest Service has been forced to fight current fires by stealing from its ability to prevent future fires.

In line with his scorched-earth policy towards social programs, President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2017-18 includes a $300 million cut to the Forest Service’s wildfire fighting services and $50 million from its wildfire prevention efforts. These come on top of a general 23 percent reduction of federal funding for volunteer fire departments around the country. While there are, as yet, no predictions on how this will impact the Forest Service’s ability to fight wildfires next year, there is little doubt that it will raise even further the potential for an uncontained wildfire.

While the current wildfires have not proven themselves to be direct threats to human life, fire officials are concerned that this could soon be the case. As the peak fire season continues, there are estimates of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people temporarily migrating to Oregon and Idaho, two of the states with the most fires, to view the August 21 total solar eclipse. Half of the eclipse’s path of totality, which stretches from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina, travels through areas that are at a high risk of catching on fire.

The danger is two-fold. First, such a large concentration of people means that there is a higher chance of a spark from a stray cigarette or the heat from a tailpipe igniting the dry brush that is often next to state and federal highways, especially as people pull over and stop to view the eclipse. Second, given the increase in traffic, it will be harder for emergency crews to stop the fires and harder for tourists to escape. Officials in small towns are particularly worried about their ability to get to and fight any fires that start while people are traveling to, from or watching the eclipse.

There are already numerous roads, trails, trailheads and campgrounds closed as a result of ongoing fires that are likely to stay closed through August 21. The Whitewater Fire, for example, has forced the Forest Service to close 117,000 acres of roads, trails and wilderness surrounding Mount Jefferson. At least tens of thousands of people were expected to visit the area, which falls right in the middle of the eclipse’s path of totality.

Study documents sharp increase in alcohol abuse in the US

Trévon Austin

A recent study published by JAMA Psychiatry found large increases in diagnosed alcohol use disorders and abuse, with one in eight Americans suffering from alcohol abuse. According to the researchers, “substantial increases in alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and DSM-IV alcohol use disorder constitute a public health crisis and portend increases in chronic disease in the United States, especially among women, older adults, racial/ethnic minorities, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.”

The study compares data gathered between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013, showing 12 month alcohol use increasing from 65.4 percent to 72.7 percent of Americans. High-risk drinking—defined as more than an average of four drinks a day, at least once a week for a year—increased from 9.7 percent to 12.6 percent. The data suggests that nearly 30 million Americans suffer from some form of alcohol abuse.

The sharp increases in alcohol abuse among particular segments of the population found by the JAMA study paints an even more grim picture. While the rise in alcohol abuse in women (84 percent) and African-Americans (92.8 percent) causes alarm, the rise in alcohol abuse by individuals over 65 (106.7 percent) paints a clearer portrayal of the situation. These are individuals who have lived long enough to experience the gradual decline of living standards in the United States. The workers who remember times of relative prosperity are most affected by the crisis of American society.

The most compelling explanations for the rise in alcohol consumption point to the fall in alcohol prices coupled with a decline in access to addiction treatment services. A 2016 Surgeon General report stated that only 10 percent of people suffering from drug abuse receive specialty treatment, a statistic obviously correlated with the lack of access to health care.

A 2013 study published in American Journal of Preventative Medicineestimated that one drink per day of the cheapest brand of spirits cost the typical person 4.46 percent of their disposable income in 1950, but just 0.29 percent in 2011. This trend is similar among beer and wine.

Coupled with the ongoing opioid crisis, the latest research on alcohol abuse exposes the diseased nature of American society.

Medical professionals argue that the increase in “deaths of despair” (alcohol-related deaths, drug overdoses, and suicides) reflect deep issues in American society. Essentially, Americans are increasingly turning to drugs and alcohol, and in some cases suicide, to self-medicate.

According to reports from the National Center of Health Statistics, more than 500,000 Americans died from drug overdose between 2000 and 2015. In the same timeframe deaths involving direct health complications from alcohol rose from about 20,000 per year to over 33,000. Furthermore, an analysis of 2006-2010 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that alcohol is linked to approximately 88,000 deaths a year.

The staggering number of deaths is a result of the catastrophic decline in living standards and the loss of decent paying jobs for millions of Americans. Studies earlier this year revealed that the real wages of workers have been on the decline for the last four decades.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the Obama administration oversaw the implementation of austerity measures wherein billions of dollars were redirected into Wall Street, at the expense of social programs. While President Donald Trump and economists hail an official unemployment rate of 4.3 percent, the real unemployment rate is 8.6 percent and the labor force participation rate remains at historic lows.

What is the American ruling class’ solution to this public health crisis? It was not until late last week that President Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency, stating that “the opioid crisis is an emergency, and I am saying, officially, right now, it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency… we’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis. It is a serious problem the likes of which we have never had.”

If a significant amount of funding is actually allocated in attempts to combat the crisis, one can expect it go towards funding police forces and escalating the war on drugs. Last week Trump proposed that “the best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place.”

It was only a few years ago that President Barack Obama and the Democrats were portraying the implementation of the Affordable Care Act as a progressive measure that would improve the quality and access to health care for millions of Americans.

However, these studies reveal the reactionary character of the legislation popularly known as Obamacare. Access to health care has not improved for the working class, and 28.5 million Americans are still without health insurance.

A study issued on July 31 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found that uninsured people were twice as likely as those with health insurance to report prescription opioid misuse and also had higher rates of use disorders. Proposed cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and other social programs will only exacerbate the issue.

The refusal and inability of the American ruling class to seriously address the social crisis spells further trouble for the working class. Both big business parties are committed to attacking democratic rights and clawing back the gains won by the working class over decades of bitter struggle.

While the Democrats are adamantly pursuing neo-McCarthyite allegations that Trump is in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to reorient foreign policy towards war with Russia, they are ignoring the health crisis ravaging the American population and begging the Republicans to let them assist in “fixing” Obamacare.