Gutting Habeas Corpus The Inside Story of How Bill Clinton Sacrificed Prisoners’ Rights for Political Gain, by Liliana Segura, May 4, 2016

 

Gutting Habeas Corpus

The Inside Story of How Bill Clinton Sacrificed Prisoners’ Rights for Political Gain

Liliana Segura

source: https://bit.ly/33jLuuF

May 4 2016, 12:54 p.m.

On the eve of the New York state primary last month, as Hillary Clinton came closer to the Democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden went on TV and defended her husband’s 1994 crime bill. Asked in an interview if he felt shame for his role passing a law that has been the subject of so much recent criticism, Biden answered, “Not at all,” and boasted of its successes — among them putting “100,000 cops on the street.” His remarks sparked a new round of debate over the legacy of the crime bill, which has haunted Clinton ever since she hit the campaign trail with a vow to “end the era of mass incarceration.”
A few days later, on April 24, a lesser-known crime law quietly turned 20. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 — or AEDPA — was signed by Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. While it has been mostly absent from the recent debates over the crime policies of the ’90s, its impact has been no less profound, particularly when it comes to a bedrock constitutional principle: habeas corpus, or the right of people in prison to challenge their detention. For 20 years, AEDPA has shut the courthouse door on prisoners trying to prove they were wrongfully convicted. Americans are mostly unaware of this legacy, even as we know more than ever about wrongful convictions. Barry Scheck, co-founder and head of the Innocence Project, calls AEDPA “a disaster” and “a major roadblock since its passage.” Many would like to see it repealed.
If the Clintons have not been forced to defend AEDPA, it’s partly because neither the law nor its shared history with the crime bill is well understood. AEDPA’s dizzying provisions — from harsh immigration policies to toughened federal sentencing — were certainly a hasty response to terrorism. But the law was also the product of an administration that long before the Oklahoma attack had abandoned its party’s core principles on criminal justice, deciding instead to wield crime policy as political weapon. After the Republicans seized control of Congress in the historic 1994 midterm elections, the Clinton White House sought to double down on its law-and-order image in advance of the 1996 presidential race. In the short term, it was a winning political strategy for Clinton. In the long term, it would help pave the way to one of the worst laws of his presidency.
The story that sets the stage for AEDPA can be partly told through White House memos from the time, a trove of which were released in 2014. Buried among hundreds of thousands of digital records housed in the Clinton Digital Library are previously confidential documents that shine light on Clinton’s criminal justice strategies in the mid-90s, yet have been largely overlooked.
One memo reveals a White House weighing its options in the weeks after the “Republican Revolution.” Dated November 22, 1994, it was written by top Department of Justice lawyer Ron Klain, who sent it to his boss as well as members of President Clinton’s inner circle, including Bruce Reed (the operative behind the famed pledge to “end welfare as we know it”) and senior White House adviser Rahm Emanuel. The memo was titled “Crime Bill ‘Redux.’”

Ronald A. Klain, chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, October 1994.
Photo: The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
Klain was assessing the threat posed by the new Republican majority to the 1994 crime bill. Passed just two months earlier, it had been a crucial Democratic victory — an end to the era when “the Republicans are seen as the party that’s tougher on crime,” as declared by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. The GOP had relentlessly assailed the legislation as a “fake crime bill” for prevention programs like “midnight basketball.” Now the GOP was getting ready to deploy a bill of its own.

“By now, we are all aware of the Republican proposal to revisit last year’s hard won crime bill,” Klain wrote in his memo. Called the Taking Back Our Streets Act, the GOP bill was designed to dismantle the crime bill’s signature features — in particular, a community policing project known as the COPS program — while going even further than the president had in his sweeping legislation. “The Republicans’ goal here is purely political and tactical,” Klain wrote. “To take away the clearest, best ‘Clinton achievement’ on crime, and to deprive the president of the opportunity to award communities all over the country their share of the 100,000 new police officers.”
The GOP also aimed to kill off the crime bill’s prevention programs, but Klain was more concerned about COPS — no doubt in part because the 100,000 police figure had been his idea. A young lawyer described by the New Republic as having “chillingly good political skills,” Klain had been working to pass crime legislation since he was in his 20s, as the “youngest ever chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Under Sen. Joe Biden, Klain had drafted unsuccessful precursors to the 1994 crime bill. Now Klain was being credited as the man who successfully steered its passage.
Klain saw “only two possible outcomes” to the Republican maneuvering. “The president will have to sign the bill that Congress sends him, or veto it.” While the former would “outrage our core constituency,” he wrote, the latter posed a potentially bigger threat: “We cannot needlessly give the GOP the opportunity to say that the president is vetoing a ‘tough on crime’ bill for ‘soft on crime’ reasons.”
Fear of looking “soft on crime” on the heels of the most extreme law-and-order legislation in U.S. history might have seemed irrational. The 1994 crime bill broadened “three strikes,” poured money into prison building, and vastly expanded the death penalty. But the new power struggle with Congress meant the White House wasn’t taking any chances.
Klain had a solution. Clinton should “welcome Republican efforts to build on last year’s crime bill,” he wrote, by folding them into new Democratic legislation that protected the administration’s top priorities. If it passed, it would be an additional “win” for the White House. Klain attached to his memo “a very, very rough outline of a possible new crime bill,” along with a chart comparing it both to the 1994 crime bill and the new GOP bill. Klain proposed including a $1 billion cut in prevention programs (reallocating $700 million to new juvenile prisons), more cops in schools, and “tougher truth in sentencing.” In some areas, his outline was harsher than the GOP legislation — “broaden[ing] the range of offenses for which juveniles may be tried as adults” and “enhanc[ing] penalties for lesser drug crimes.” In other areas, like the “deportation of criminal aliens,” it simply adopted the Republican line.
Finally, the proposal reintroduced an idea favored both by Clinton and his foes in Congress: “habeas corpus reform,” previously cut from the crime bill and now part of the Taking Back Our Streets Act. Sometimes called the “Great Writ” for its treasured place in constitutional law, habeas corpus referred to the long-standing right of prisoners to challenge their incarceration in court. For the federal courts, this meant reviewing state convictions for constitutional violations, a process that took years. In the zero-tolerance climate of the ’80s and ’90s, the concept of habeas corpus had met with increasing impatience; critics accused people on death row of gaming the system, filing “appeal after appeal” just to stay alive. “In brief,” Klain wrote, “these reforms would limit death row inmates to a single habeas petition — to be filed within strict time limits — while providing such inmates with competent counsel to assist in preparing this single filing.” While the Republican version of habeas reform made no guarantee on the right to counsel, both sides could agree on the need to speed up the death penalty.
After the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton appeared on “60 Minutes” calling for the perpetrator to be executed.
Klain’s imagined crime bill sequel never came to pass — he left the DOJ early the next year. But his top priority lived on. In February 1995, as Clinton threatened to veto the looming GOP bill over the COPS program, White House staff received talking points titled “DEBUNKING THE MYTHS: THE 100,000 COPS PROGRAM WORKS!!!” In the meantime, others considered the habeas provisions in the Taking Back Our Streets Act. The administration seemed poised to fight for competent counsel; one memo from February 1995 is particularly notable. Apart from providing for lawyers at the post-conviction stage, it stressed that habeas reform “must provide for competent trial counsel,” since “excessive delays in capital cases result not only from manipulation of habeas corpus procedures, but also from a high rate of constitutional error in capital trials.” This point tended to be aggressively ignored in the calls to speed up the death penalty, which usually blamed prisoners for abusing their rights.
As the GOP bill continued to advance that spring, the White House was planning PR events to blunt its political impact. “Our strategy on crime has always been to associate ourselves with police officers,” Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed wrote to Clinton in March, urging him to “bolster this image.” But then, suddenly, everything changed.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, a massive explosion rocked the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. On the ground days later, Clinton gave a powerful eulogy — PR events were no longer needed. It was now up to the president to keep Americans safe, not just from criminals, but from terrorists. Dropping its work on the GOP crime bill, Congress vowed to pass a new counterterrorism bill by Memorial Day.
But at least one key criminal justice priority survived. On the Sunday after the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton appeared on 60 Minutes, calling for the perpetrator to be executed. The 1994 crime bill had expanded the death penalty “for purposes such as this,” he said. “If this is not a crime for which capital punishment is called, I don’t know what is.” Asked by co-host Ed Bradley how he could deliver on his promise that “justice will be certain, swift and severe,” Clinton called for speeding up death penalty appeals. “Congress has the opportunity this year to reform the habeas corpus proceedings,” he said. “And I hope that they will do so.”
If it was unclear how proposals to shorten appeals for state prisoners related to federal terror cases, prosecutors nonetheless applauded Clinton’s remarks. In a letter to the White House, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general warned that failure to overhaul habeas corpus would endlessly delay justice for “such acts of senseless violence” and undermine “the expression of our level of opprobrium as a nation for acts of terrorism.”
Almost a year later, on April 24, 1996, a signing ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House. “In a presidential election year,” the AP reported, “it was an opportunity for a warm display of bipartisanship on a sunny, spring day.” The New York Times described “the Marine band playing and American flags whipping in the breeze.”
“We send a loud, clear message today all over the world, in your names,” the president told families in attendance whose loved ones had died in Oklahoma City. “America will never surrender to terror.” Then he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

A calendar hangs inside a prisoner’s cell on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, Dec. 1, 2015, in Jackson, Ga.
Photo: David Goldman/AP
Twenty years later, AEDPA has long been eclipsed as a counterterrorism measure by the USA Patriot Act, which was built on its foundations. As crime legislation, it remains relatively unknown, even amid renewed debate over Clinton’s other policies. But for people in prison, its legacy has been sweeping and harsh. For all the rhetoric that accompanied the signing of AEDPA, it has been most severely felt by state prisoners with no connection to terrorism — and especially those who insist they are innocent.
AEDPA is most notorious for its impact on death penalty cases. “I suspect that there may well have been innocent people who were executed because of the absence of habeas corpus,” said former D.C. Circuit Judge Abner Mikva, a Carter appointee who later served as White House counsel in 1994 and 1995. For Mikva, who turned 90 this year, his failure to stop so-called habeas reform is one of the major regrets of his career. He still recalls his time as a young law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton in the 1950s; when habeas petitions would reach his desk, Mikva said, “I saw how complicated it was for him to review these handwritten records — which is what they had at the time — and how uncertain some of the convictions were.”

Abner Mikva, a former D.C. circuit judge who served as White House counsel, attending a ceremony at the Supreme Court, May 8, 1995.
Photo: The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
But AEDPA’s reach spans much further than death row. For anyone wrongfully convicted — whether they are actually innocent or the victim of an unfair trial — the law presents a daunting barrier: a one-year countdown clock for federal review that begins the moment state-level appeals have run out. For New York exoneree Jeff Deskovic, who was in prison when AEDPA passed, the new law “filled me with terror.” Deskovic had given a false confession as a teenager to the rape and murder of a classmate following hours of punishing police interrogation in 1989. He was sentenced to life.

“I was writing a bunch of letters trying to get help,” he recalled, when under AEDPA, “the situation became more dire.” Amid the confusion over how the law applied to old cases — for prisoners like Deskovic, who had exhausted his state appeals, the one-year countdown began upon enactment of AEDPA — his lawyer missed the April 24, 1997, deadline by four days. The district attorney argued that his petition should be dismissed on these grounds. The courts agreed (including the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decision was co-written by Sonia Sotomayor). Deskovic spent six more years in prison before the Innocence Project convinced the new district attorney to test DNA in his case. It matched someone else and his conviction was vacated.
Deskovic was lucky to have an attorney at all. “I don’t think people realize that [non-death row] inmates are not provided with attorneys in federal court,” Deskovic said. Although AEDPA contained no promise of competent counsel in the end, people on death row are entitled to post-conviction representation. Others are often left to file pro se petitions, essentially representing themselves. “So now you have poor people who are often poorly educated — certainly not lawyers, certainly not having formal legal education — wading through this procedural thicket, and they can very easily get tripped up. And federal courts think nothing of saying, ‘Oh, you didn’t follow this rule? This procedure? We’re not looking at your case anymore.’”
Even more profound than the strict limits and deadlines it imposed in individual cases is the way AEDPA altered the balance of power between state and federal courts, favoring finality over fairness. Under AEDPA, federal courts may only grant habeas relief if a state court ran afoul of “clearly established federal law,” or if its ruling was rooted in “an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented.” In the oblique language of the law, this drastically raised the bar for overturning state convictions. Federal judges have been “pretty much shut out … from granting habeas relief in most cases, even when they believe that an egregious miscarriage of justice has occurred,” 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the Georgetown Law Journal last year. “We now regularly have to stand by in impotent silence, even though it may appear to us that an innocent person has been convicted.”
In the New York Times Magazine last summer, Emily Bazelon cited Kozinski as one of a growing number of critics who have called for the repeal of AEDPA. Federal judges “are now raising alarm that the law is systematically failing to provide the necessary safeguards against miscarriages of justice,” she wrote. There are many examples of the way AEDPA has been “cruel” and responsible for “much human suffering,” according to Kozinski. But Deskovic, who now runs a foundation to help the wrongfully convicted, points to the case of a man named Lorenzo Johnson as particularly egregious.
Johnson was convicted in Pennsylvania for his involvement in a 1995 murder. The state never claimed he was the triggerman or even that he had a direct role in the killing, yet at 22 Johnson was sentenced to mandatory life without parole. In October 2011, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, finding that, while Johnson might have been present at the scene, the claim that he intended to commit murder was “mere speculation” by the state. After 16 years behind bars, Johnson walked out of prison. With Deskovic’s help, Johnson found a job, reunited with his family, and pursued public speaking.
But in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 3rd Circuit’s ruling, holding that it had “failed to afford due respect to the role of the jury and the state courts of Pennsylvania.” Although the federal court had found insufficient evidence to keep Johnson in prison, the “state court of last review” disagreed — “and that determination in turn is entitled to considerable deference under AEDPA.” After four months of freedom, Johnson got a phone call from his lawyer telling him he had to go back to prison. “It was surreal and horrifying,” said Deskovic, who drove him back to Pennsylvania from New York. Along the way, Johnson made calls to friends and family, struggling to explain. To Deskovic, it was a grotesque ruling by the Supreme Court — a “rush to repudiate a line of reasoning by the lower federal court,” rather than an interest in justice. Johnson “shouldn’t have had to be returned back to prison on a technicality.”
Today Johnson writes articles behind bars that are published at the Huffington Post. In a recent article titled “Clinton’s Other Terrible Crime Bill,” he described the lasting impact of AEDPA. “Although I’m living through a nightmare, I’m also just one of many others,” he wrote, pointing out the record number of exonerations in recent years. “But these numbers have not even scratched the surface; there are many other wrongfully convicted people still in prison.”

President Bill Clinton sits between House Speaker Newt Gingrich, left, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, right, during an April 26, 1995, meeting at the White House.
Photo: Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images
In the recent debates about crime policy from the ’90s, a common Clinton defense has been one of unintended consequences, in which bad laws were born of the best intentions. But White House memos in the run-up to AEDPA make clear that Clinton had been thoroughly warned about its dangers. What’s more, news articles from the era betray the extent to which criminal justice policies were being crafted with political strategy in mind, rather than as serious solutions to crime. “It’s been the most careful political calculation,” former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann told the New York Times after leaving the DOJ in 1994 — “with absolutely sublime indifference to the real nature of the problem.”
Indeed, with crime rates falling in the mid-90s, even the landmark features of the 1994 crime bill largely boiled down to posturing. In the New Republic, a former operative for Clinton’s 1992 campaign recalled the origins of the $8.8 billion COPS program that Joe Biden defends to this day: “Clinton had a big crime speech coming up. We had no idea how many extra cops would be a good thing. … Bruce Reed and I called [Ron Klain] from Little Rock. He said, ‘Would 100,000 be enough?’” Not surprisingly, in contrast to Biden’s boasting, the COPS program failed to deliver on its promises.
By the time AEDPA passed, Clinton had learned how effectively he could undercut the Republicans by co-opting their ideas on crime. Republicans were outraged. “We say habeas corpus, they say sure. … We say prisons; they say sure,” one frustrated GOP source complained to the New York Times as the 1996 election against Bob Dole approached. But critics pointed out that the costs of such a winning political strategy were far too high. “I have absolutely no faith that constitutional principles matter to this president when they emerge in a criminal-justice context,” American Civil Liberties Union legislative director Laura W. Murphy told the Times. AEDPA marked “a total collapse” on the issue.
In the end, the final question for Clinton when it came to gutting habeas corpus was how to spin it.
In an email to The Intercept, Klain defended the 1994 memo in which he sought to outmaneuver the GOP by proposing a tough new Democratic crime bill. “Clearly we were trying hard to stave off draconian legislation being advanced by the new Republican majority,” he wrote. As for habeas corpus, he drew a clear distinction between what the Democrats advanced and what ended up in AEDPA. “We explored a number of strategies to prevent their plans to gut appeal rights without providing adequate counsel,” he said. “The GOP version passed after I left.”
It is true that many Democrats fought against the version of habeas reform that passed as part of AEDPA. Among them was Joe Biden, who for years had hoped to pass a habeas reform law of his own. But his proposed legislation, most recently aimed at the 1994 crime bill, had been drafted with state prisoners in mind, meaning that “the Biden bill would not affect the case of Timothy McVeigh,” as Bruce Reed wrote to Clinton on May 3, 1995, two weeks after the bombing. “We should go along with some form of limits on appeals by federal prisoners,” Reed advised. In the margins, Clinton appears to have written “agree.”
Two days later, White House lawyer Chris Cerf sent a memo to his colleagues comparing the dueling versions of habeas reform before Congress. He analyzed their legal implications and their chances of passing. Biden’s bill, which included myriad provisions on the right to counsel, was “dead on arrival.” A measure brought forward by Senate Judiciary Chair Orrin Hatch as part of the terrorism bill introduced by Bob Dole was somewhat “less radical” than other GOP versions, but still “a very significant incursion into traditional habeas law.” Cerf raised particular caution over provisions that required higher standards of deference to state courts and made it harder for federal courts to grant evidentiary hearings. “For all practical purposes,” he wrote, these two combined “would eliminate federal habeas hearings.”
The White House should accept the Hatch bill on a set of strict conditions, Cerf wrote. Among them: the deletion of those troubling provisions and the addition of language to ensure “competent counsel at all phases of a capital case.” If Hatch refused, Cerf wrote, the White House should reject his proposal and instead aggressively try to “unbundle habeas from the counterterrorism bill,” saving the fight for another day. But he was not optimistic. “My sense … is that the habeas train is coming down the track and is unstoppable,” Cerf wrote, “especially after the president’s comments on 60 Minutes.” In an underlined sentence, he warned, “We do not want to put the president in the position of having to accept highly objectionable habeas provisions merely because they are tied to the counterterrorism bill.”
Indeed, while it would take almost a year to pass AEDPA, Clinton’s immediate call to speed up the death penalty days after the bombing had rigged the game from the start. As Democrats began threatening to throw gun control amendments at Dole’s terror bill to force the removal of habeas reform, Hatch seized on Clinton’s own rhetoric, declaring, “The American people do not want to witness the spectacle of these terrorists abusing our judicial system … by filing appeal after meritless appeal.” For a moment, Clinton stood his ground. In late May 1995, a month after the attack, he sent a letter to Dole arguing against passing habeas reform as part of the terrorism bill and stressing the need to protect “the historic right to meaningful federal review.” But less than two weeks later, on Larry King Live, Clinton suddenly reversed course. Habeas reform “ought to be done in the context of this terrorism legislation,” he said, “so that it would apply to any prosecutions brought against anyone indicted in Oklahoma.”
Inside the White House, Abner Mikva believed he knew what had happened. In early June 1995, just days after Clinton wrote to Dole, a delegation from Oklahoma City arrived in Washington. It included survivors of the bombing as well as grieving family members. They called themselves “the habeas group.” Convinced it would result in swifter justice for the terrorist attack, they were lobbying for streamlining death row appeals. Mikva and his staff had been trying at the time to convince the president to support a more cautious version of habeas reform put forward by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. But after the visit, Mikva recalls, all bets were off. “He wrote on my memo, ‘No. Oklahoma.’ And that was the end of our efforts.”
Yet, for all the political gamesmanship that paved the way to AEDPA, Mikva places the ultimate blame for the erosion of habeas corpus on the judiciary — particularly conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist had long railed against the drawn-out appeals that delayed executions for making “a mockery of our criminal justice system.” Upon assuming the Supreme Court bench, in 1988, Rehnquist formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Habeas Corpus in Capital Cases, naming retired Justice Lewis Powell Jr. as its head. Powell “came up with some very draconian changes to habeas,” Mikva recalled, “which were basically the substance of what ultimately passed.”
Federal judges at the time were alarmed by the recommendations. In 1989, at a Senate Judiciary hearing convened by Joe Biden, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit decried Powell’s report. “Finality and speed are the presumed objectives,” Reinhardt testified. “They seem to outweigh the concerns for fairness, justice, due process, and compliance with the constitution.” Citing his experiences with prosecutors who withheld evidence in capital cases — violations that can take years to discover — Reinhardt posed the question: “What can I do if someone comes in with affidavits and proof asking for relief from me when a man is about to be executed and the statute says I have no jurisdiction or authority to grant a stay or any habeas relief?”
Yet habeas reform efforts continued along parallel tracks in the legislative and judicial branches. By the time AEDPA passed, a series of Supreme Court rulings had already made it more difficult to challenge state convictions. (Indeed, in one 1995 White House memo to Clinton, Bruce Reed noted that Republicans had ultimately dropped habeas reform from the 1994 crime bill over fears that “a Democratic crime bill would undermine recent Supreme Court decisions that have strengthened prosecutors’ hands.”) To some legal scholars at the time, this made AEDPA mostly symbolic — an attempt by lawmakers to take credit for what the judiciary had already done.
In Congress, however, others saw the dangers posed by AEDPA. On April 17, 1996, during the final round of fighting in the Senate, New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the provisions curtailing habeas corpus would “introduce a virus that will surely spread throughout our system of laws.” One of just eight senators to vote against the law — Biden was not among them — Moynihan read from a letter to Clinton sent by four attorneys general. They urged him to “communicate to the Congress your resolve, and your duty under the Constitution, to prevent the enactment of such unconstitutional legislation and the consequent disruption of so critical a part of our criminal punishment system.”
But in the end, the final question for Clinton when it came to gutting habeas corpus was how to spin it. On April 23, 1996, the day before the ceremony on the South Lawn, Bruce Reed sent a memo to the White House staff secretary titled “Habeas language in signing stmt.” The remarks drafted for the president went into “far more detail” than they should, he wrote. “I realize this is a controversial issue,” Reed said, “but it is also one that could get us in trouble if we say more than necessary.”
AEDPA has fulfilled the very concerns Clinton brushed aside upon signing the bill.
With the presidential election in view, Republicans were already “blasting us with the charge” that Clinton’s re-election would “be a bonanza for criminals’ rights,” Reed wrote, somewhat ironically. He suggested a number of edits to minimize avenues for attack. Among them: “We should drop the sentence, ‘I am advised that one provision of this important bill could be interpreted in a manner that would undercut meaningful federal habeas corpus review and raise profoundly troubling constitutional issues.’ This sentence could be used against us,” he warned, “and doesn’t add anything, since we later say we don’t think it will be interpreted this way.”
Yet Clinton’s final remarks struck a defensive tone. His signing statement contained four paragraphs on the habeas provisions in AEDPA, assuring that they would neither “limit the authority of the federal courts” or “deny litigants a meaningful opportunity” to win evidentiary hearings. “Our constitutional ideal of a limited government that must respect individual freedom has been a practical reality because independent federal courts have the power ‘to say what the law is’ and to apply the law to the cases before them,” Clinton said. “I have signed this bill on the understanding that the courts can and will interpret these provisions … in accordance with this ideal.”
But Clinton was wrong. AEDPA has instead fulfilled the very concerns he brushed aside upon signing the bill. It is a law “misconceived at its inception and born of misguided political ambition,” as Judge Stephen Reinhardt recently wrote, some 25 years after testifying before Congress, “and repeatedly interpreted … in the most inflexible and unyielding manner possible.”
Ironically, AEDPA had little bearing in the end on the case of Timothy McVeigh, whose relatively swift execution in 2001 had more to do with political will than stringent new review standards. Nor did AEDPA solve the problem its supporters claimed it would address in the first place — federal court dockets remain backlogged and prisoners spend longer awaiting execution than ever.
But in a sense, the cruelest irony is how AEDPA has affected those who are not on death row yet nonetheless face the prospect of dying in prison on dubious grounds. Ignored by those who championed the law — and still largely invisible from the debate — they have been no less affected by its legacy. As Lorenzo Johnson wrote from a prison cell last month, “AEDPA has been devastating for wrongfully convicted prisoners and their families. Reform is long overdue.”

International Defence Lawyer Christopher Black: Expectations for a U.S. Biden admin on International Relations

 

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, author and international lawyer Christopher Black assesses that the world will see more intensified U.S. militarism and aggression under a Joe Biden presidency than under the outgoing Trump administration. Black points to Biden’s long record in the Senate and as a former vice president attesting to his loyal support for illegal U.S. wars. Another ominous indicator is Biden’s picks for his new cabinet which features reactionary figures from the Obama administration who were keen advocates of military interventionism in Libya and Syria. Thirdly, as Black cogently concludes, war and aggression are an indispensable function of the U.S.’ capitalist economy. With mounting domestic social problems, the imperatives for militarism have become stronger for the American ruling class as a means of diverting from internal collapse. In Biden, the warmongers will find a willing instrument. During presidential debates, Biden expressed unhinged hostility towards China and Russia demonstrating a thoroughly propagandized mind.

 

Christopher Black is a renowned international defense lawyer based in Canada, specializing in war crimes. He served as a legal advisor to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic before his death in 2006 in a prison cell in The Hague while on trial. Black also served as the lead defense counsel in a Rwanda war crimes trial where he succeeded in winning acquittal by exposing the prosecution case as a frame-up. He has been a trenchant critic of the criminalization of justice by NATO powers who use indictments of foreign leaders as a political weapon. Christopher Black has written extensively on international affairs, including on relations between the U.S., Russia and China.

 

Interview

Question: What are your expectations from a new U.S. administration under President Joe Biden with regard to international relations? Do you think international tensions will ease under the Democrat president?

 

Christopher Black: I expect the Biden administration, if it takes office, to continue the same aggressive policies that the USA has engaged in for generations wherever it sees its interests, that is its access to markets and resources, challenged by competition with other nations, in particular against Russia and China and their allies. The United States is ever-ready to use force and cares nothing for international law or morality. It was the Democrats who got involved in and prosecuted the war against Vietnam, against Cuba and it was they, under Clinton who attacked Yugoslavia and destroyed it in order to advance its war against socialism and to advance its encirclement of Russia, which while no longer socialist, refuses to give up its independence or to sell its people into servitude under American hegemony. It was Obama who began the “pivot to the Pacific”, their euphemism for aggression against China whose rising economy they cannot tolerate, who began the war on Syria, attacked and destroyed Libya. The Americans proclaim they are all for competition but we know that means only when it puts them in the superior position; and to maintain their position they are willing to threaten and attack the world if necessary; and there are a myriad of domestic problems in the USA which they have no way out of, since the two ruling parties have no solutions to offer, except war.

 

Question: Under Trump, U.S. relations with China nosedived. Do you think the downward trend will continue under Biden?

 

Christopher Black: The Biden administration will be bent on war. If Biden was at all concerned about peace he would be denouncing Trump’s new minister of defense, Colonel Christoper Miller, and Trump’s aggressive policies towards Russia and China; Biden would be elaborating a global peace initiative by the new administration. Instead he is seeding his administration with the most reactionary leftovers from the Obama years. All war criminals. Biden’s rhetoric against China is even more hostile than Trump’s. But it does not matter who is in power in the USA since both parties are controlled by factions of the corporate-military complex that seeks to continue and expand American hegemony. So we can expect U.S. provocations against China to accelerate and as the Chinese have warned several times during the past few months, war is a very real possibility, even a probability, and Taiwan will be the flashpoint.

American wars are always preceded by a propaganda campaign of fear and hate which it expects its allies to take up and provide corroboration for. We see this campaign being carried out in all the NATO and Five Eyes countries (U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand) and it is to a large extent successful in manipulating the citizens of those countries into supporting war against China, against Russia, against the enemy du jour.

These U.S. allies are being brought into line with the new Biden war plans. For example, Britain’s Boris Johnson is committing record billions of pounds for armaments. Canada likewise. Australia has unleashed an anti-China hostile propaganda barrage.

 

Question: How do you foresee U.S. relations with Russia under Biden. He has talked about extending the New START treaty curtailing strategic nuclear weapons. Could this bode an improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow?

 

Christopher Black: It is a small positive sign but we know from past history that the U.S. will always seek to weaken Russian defenses while strengthening its own. So one has to question the bona fides of Biden’s statements in that regard. This is a man who is head of a party that spent the past four years condemning Trump as a Russian agent, and claiming that Russia has attacked the United States by interfering in its elections. And we know the Americans cannot be trusted. Their word is not their bond. They enter and leave international treaties as they please. One can hope, but we must also face reality.

 

Question: Joe Biden has talked about re-engaging with NATO allies whom Trump antagonized with his bullying, transactional style over military spending and other issues. Do you see American conduct becoming more interventionist and militaristic as a result of a more realigned NATO under Biden?

 

Christopher Black: Trump only antagonized them by demanding they pay more for their vassal status in the NATO war machine and to speed up the military planning and preparations for war against Russia which they all agreed to do. But, by and large, the NATO allies share the American objectives of ending Russian independence, particularly Britain and Germany, the first of which dreams of its former empire and the latter of which has never abandoned its quest to split Russia into pieces that Hitler failed to achieve. The U.S.-NATO machine is rapidly expanding its forces in eastern Europe, its logistics, arms depots, military exercises. The Germans just conducted a military exercise with the U.S. forces practicing a nuclear attack on Russia. That momentum will accelerate under Biden just as it would have under Trump if he had been re-elected.

 

Question: Why is it that U.S. conduct of international relations seems to remain constant regardless of who is the White House as president?

 

Christopher Black: It is in the nature of an imperialist nation, by force of the economic system, to increase profits at all costs. The USA is the epitome of the capitalist state, in essence a corporate state armed to the teeth, ruthless, contemptuous of everyone, of international law, and willing to destroy any nation that stands in its way. Further, the relatively good living standards of its people, which have been declining since the end of the Vietnam War, depend on maintaining American hegemony.

 

Question: Russia and China have been solidifying a strategic alliance for global economic development and security. Do you see this alliance as a crucial counterweight to the destabilizing American ambitions for hegemony?

 

Christopher Black: Yes, but that alliance has not taken the form of a military alliance although the leaders of both China and Russia have not ruled that out. But they see what the rest of us can see, that the USA views Eurasia, from Russia, through Iran, Afghanistan to China, as one economic block, as a vast store of resources, labour and markets and which has unlimited industrial potential. So it is natural that the common targets of the Americans should ally themselves to increase their joint military and economic security to enhance their individual security.

 

Question: What in your view needs to change in order to make U.S. foreign conduct abide by international law and therefore enhance the prospects for world peace?

 

Christopher Black: It will require a revolution in the United States to do that, an overthrow of the economic powers that control the machinery of the state, but there is no prospect of that happening. There is really no effective opposition to these policies in the U.S. The peace movement is weak and fragmented, dominated by the “cruise missile liberals”. The voices of reason have no power, no real influence among the masses of the people which are dominated by a sophisticated propaganda machine known as the “media”. Censorship is increasing and the few critical voices that exist are being silenced.

It will take, in my view, a military defeat of the United States in order to bring about the conditions necessary for the required changes. And, perhaps that will happen, as China has stated time and again, that if Washington decides to take direct control of their island of Taiwan and the Americans interfere or if they are attacked in the South China Sea, they will defeat the U.S. But such a war would have world consequences and would cause realignments of power not only in the USA, if we all survive it.

Canada’s housing strategy needs a reset—human rights and public ownership, not markets, Cdn Dimension, Cam Scott and Rob Crooks

Canada’s housing strategy needs a reset—human rights and public ownership, not markets

Cam Scott and Rob Crooks / Canadian Dimension, November 15, 2020

Pedestrians walk past a homeless man in downtown Toronto. Photo by Simon Carr/Flickr.

Today in Canada, in the midst of a deepening economic downturn, more than 35,000 people are without homes while over 300,000 households face housing instability and the real threat of eviction. Last month, the Government of Canada announced its Rapid Housing Initiative, injecting $1 billion into local budgets to build 3,000 permanent affordable housing units across the country. Meanwhile, Reaching Home, Canada’s official homelessness strategy, aims to reduce chronic homelessness by half over the next decade by funding permanent or transitional housing solutions within the existing market. One might interrogate this overcautious timeframe, as homelessness persists alongside and in the shadow of enormous wealth. Less modestly, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, a cross-country coalition of individuals and organizations, has proposed 2030 as a target for eliminating homelessness altogether. Regardless of pace, the scale and severity of the problem is beyond dispute, and even the capitalist class has come to acknowledge the necessity of drastic action.

But there are significant differences between existing plans to combat homelessness, in both outcome and intent. While one observes a policy turn toward the rapid creation of new housing, a neoliberal itinerary guides many of these initiatives on the ground, where governments continue to divest from social housing and shift the burden of planning onto a non-profit sector that is caught between precarious charitable funding and anarchic market forces. As slow-paced government initiatives and non-profits declare their intention to eliminate chronic homelessness altogether, one might consider the practical difficulties of combating homelessness within the very structures that create inequality.

Since the turn of the millennium, Canadian cities have increasingly deferred to the Housing First approach to support people experiencing homelessness. The policies known by this name originated in California in the late 1980s in response to multi-tier, paternalistic systems of transitional housing, which required prospective tenants to demonstrate their readiness for independent living. More recently, the Canadian government’s National Housing Strategy (NHS) has adopted the principles of Housing First into its own approach. In Manitoba, these are implemented by way of non-profit organizations such as End Homelessness Winnipeg, a community partner in the NHS’s Reaching Home program, tasked with distributing federal funds to community organizations in the city. Here too, the principles established by Housing First have become so widely accepted that few policy makers consider their clear limitations, let alone alternatives.

Critics such as John Clarke have linked Housing First to efforts to “clean up” once-neglected downtowns and sweep them clear of the persistent “eyesore” of homelessness, in hopes of jumpstarting redevelopment. In brief historical overview, these programs seem to appear with urgency at moments of immense deregulation, development, and displacement—Los Angeles in the 1980s, New York in the 1990s, Toronto in the early 2000s, and Winnipeg over the last decade of aggressive development downtown. Canada’s At Home/Chez Soi report, a four-year, multi-city study to determine the viability of Housing First as a means of fighting homelessness, was conceived amid widespread concern about Vancouver’s homeless population in the run-up to the 2010 Olympic Games. In those several years, more than 1,500 units of affordable housing disappeared and an estimated 30,000 people were displaced by construction, while the city of Vancouver transferred billions of dollars to developers and abandoned plans for social housing on a dozen empty lots downtown. Where housing is a low priority of government, the market will offer solutions; and Housing First, one might suggest, emerges as an attempt to manage the crisis of homelessness within this distinctly liberal predicament.

The principles of Housing First are progressive in many respects. As noted above, the earlier “housing-readiness” system that it replaces required that an unhoused person reach certain milestones of rehabilitation and psychiatric treatment in order to “graduate” from shelter placement to transitional, and eventually permanent, housing. Housing First, as the name suggests, places people in housing rapidly, regardless of their participation in treatment or skills-training programs. Housing First also claims to afford greater autonomy to participants, offering supports and services on a voluntary basis, and increased choice as to the location and type of dwelling.

In essence, the Housing First approach empowers its participants as renters and thus tacitly accepts the conditions imposed on their lives by landlords and markets, rather than a panel of psychiatrists and social workers. As always, market freedom offers many false choices. How can people choose where they want to live when priority is always given to the highest bidder? How can housing be made affordable when left to the mercy of supply and demand? Proponents of market solutions always cite efficiency, and this deceptive benefit, especially in an emergency, makes the Housing First model uniquely persuasive in a capitalist society.

A woman sleeps under a blanket in a back lane in Winnipeg. Photo by John Woods/Winnipeg Free Press.

The Housing First approach’s emphasis on removing systemic impediments to housing is laudable, and yet it can’t help but position landlords as social gatekeepers. A 2015 Canadian study, titled “Perceptions of private market landlords who rent to tenants of a Housing First program,” emphasized the dependency of tenants on the perception of landlords, whose participation in Housing First programs is essential to those programs’ success. The study found that landlords consistently rent to Housing First participants for both social and financial reasons: “having a source of paid rent guaranteed by the program meant that they did not need to worry about collecting rent from the HF tenants, which lessened the demands on them.” One interviewee cited the surprising ease of evicting tenants, effected with assistance from the non-profit responsible for placement. This is not to say that the staff of these programs don’t advocate tirelessly for tenants; often, conflict resolution between parties can mitigate the threat of eviction in high-risk situations. But the fact remains that the Housing First system places the landlord’s right to property above the tenant’s right to housing.

On the whole, private rental firms and Housing First programs function as separate partners, but the 2015 study found that landlords consistently expressed an interest in greater “information, involvement, and consultation” with the program, particularly where background checks and personal histories of tenants are concerned. Not only does this potentially contravene ethical standards in health and support services, it threatens to multiply the prejudicial checks and balances that Housing First intends to avoid. The persistent interest of landlords in vetting vulnerable tenants clearly demonstrates the risk of over-reliance on the private sector. Here, as with any model that depends upon altruism, the rights and well-being of tenants are left to a profiteer’s caprice.

Housing First could comprise part of a multi-pronged solution to the slow emergency of homelessness. In its current form, however, allied to the same developers who elsewhere benefit from displacement, these initiatives have the unintentional effect of transferring housing benefits to landlords and private firms by way of unhoused people. Programs to subsidize the rents of low-income tenants, like EIA and Manitoba’s Rent Assist, play much the same role, enriching property management companies instead of investing in publicly owned housing solutions to meet social need in perpetuity. Non-profit organizations that own housing fare little better, as they remain exposed to the same market forces that affect privately owned housing.

Without public ownership undergirding a government housing strategy, artificial scarcity will continue to drive up rents and displace people from their neighbourhoods, deepening the crisis of homelessness. Proponents of Housing First programs repeatedly cite low vacancy rates as an obstacle to success, noting that landlords are less likely to accept the program’s tenants in a highly competitive market. However, vacancy rates only consider purpose-built properties that are presently on the market, rather than neglected and privately owned space. Winnipeg, for instance, boasts an alarming amount of under-utilized and vacant properties, from lavishly constructed but unsold condominiums to the hundreds of buildings sitting derelict downtown. New vacancy bylaws have begun to lightly penalize absentee landlords, but this alone only incentivizes upkeep for profit. There are more than 500 buildings standing empty in Winnipeg right now, even as more than 1,500 people face the winter unhoused. Moreover, any movement for housing must connect the emergency of homelessness to the deepening economic inequality in our society, which threatens to displace thousands more.

Developers receive tax breaks, grants, and other benefits for including affordable housing in their construction plans, but in many cases no mechanisms are in place to ensure that those units remain affordable in the longer term. And as the cost of living continues to rise above stagnant wage levels, the government classification of “affordable housing” appears dangerously out of touch with reality. According to a City of Winnipeg Comprehensive Housing Needs Assessment published in January 2020, almost 16 percent of households led by persons under 25, and 13 percent of recent immigrants, spend more than 70 percent of their total income on housing. Half of Indigenous families living downtown face affordability problems, as well as housing discrimination, on Indigenous land.

In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, recent campaigns to pressure municipal governments into expropriating vacant and derelict buildings for publicly owned affordable housing have met with some success. In Winnipeg, too, the city has the ability to expropriate from absentee landlords. Such decisive action would transform boarded-up buildings in the city’s core, housing people in proximity to the resources that they already access and the communities to which they belong. But after years of austerity, Winnipeg, like many other Canadian cities, has gutted its municipal housing department, effectively washing its hands of the responsibility to house people. Regina, Saskatoon, Sudbury, and Halifax all have two or fewer staff members dedicated to housing. Winnipeg has one. These numbers are woefully inadequate for any city that intends to create and maintain affordable housing. To put an end to this housing crisis, cities need publicly owned social housing and a well-staffed housing department to oversee its management.

Of course, it will cost money to expropriate buildings and bring them up to code. It will also cost money to maintain high-quality social housing and to expand the city’s housing division. But money is not the problem; the problem is a lack of political will. The increasingly militarized Winnipeg Police Service currently receives more than one-quarter of the city’s entire budget. Reinvesting this money in housing would address many of the root causes of crime. The city’s Housing Rehabilitation Investment Reserve and Land Dedication Reserve Fund both accrue public money and could be used to fund publicly owned social housing. Examples of mixed-use buildings that subsidize rent-geared-to-income apartments with market rents from commercial spaces and luxury units to in the same building already exist in the city. Many of the problems of these so-called “social mixing” initiatives could be addressed through public rather than private ownership.

Several weeks ago, Winnipeg received $12.5 million from the federal Rapid Housing Initiative, intended for cities and provinces to purchase existing, unused buildings for conversion into housing. As Canada’s National Housing Initiative responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities and communities must rally to transform this emergency response into a sweeping reversal of decades of austerity—an era in which housing solutions have come to rely upon the private sector out of dire necessity. Cities are in urgent need of housing solutions beyond the outsourced panaceas of capitalism, and the obstacles to these solutions are not economic but political. For as long as Winnipeg and other Canadian cities passively choose not to house people, they actively affirm and secure the right of developers and landlords to profit from inequality. Housing is a human right, not a commodity, and the consumer model of tenancy isn’t working. The only way to truly guarantee that people have high-quality, affordable housing is through public ownership.

Cam Scott is a writer and independent researcher from Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory. He is the author of ROMANS/SNOWMARE, published by ARP Books in 2019.

Rob Crooks is a musician from Treaty 1 territory.

 

The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology by John Bellamy Foster, review, MR

 

The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

by John Bellamy Foster

https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-return-of-nature/?fbclid=IwAR3fCynErhDvOhhGFJP9MfrYiW8QwHmxSWecdWc0wtInqFE9ohIew_I9rn8

Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies.

The Return of Nature begins with the deaths of Darwin (1882) and Marx (1883) and moves on until the rise of the ecological age in the 1960s and 1970s. Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen Jay Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, he delivers a far-reaching and fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology. Ultimately, what this book asks for is nothing short of revolution: a long, ecological revolution, aimed at making peace with the planet while meeting collective human needs.

In the century following Marx’s death, left-wing scientists and writers made major contributions to the development of modern ecological thought. Foster’s brilliant new book recovers that history, making the work and ideas of those neglected ecosocialist pioneers accessible to the activists who are building today’s movements against global environmental destruction.

—Ian Angus, author, Facing the Anthropocene; editor, Climate & Capitalism

What does ecology have to do with a critique of capitalism and a movement for socialism? What are the roots of ecosocialism? For more than twenty years, John Bellamy Foster has engaged in serious thought and massive research, delving into the relation of ecology and socialism, while charting the odyssey of the network of left activist-intellectuals who forged a philosophical-scientific-political vision of our ecosystem and the forces threatening its survival. The result is a monumental book, a genealogy of ecosocialism, a priceless resource for those pursuing this path today.

—Helena Sheehan, author, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and Navigating the Zeitgeist

Leftists have too readily seen capitalist science and technology’s goal—the domination of nature—as inherently progressive. In The Return of Nature, John Bellamy Foster tells a different story. The recognition that we humans, rather than dominating, are part of nature, both transformed by and transforming it, was central to Marx and Engels’ dialectical thinking. Foster’s richly detailed and ground-breaking history tells the story of the British and American scientists and activists who in the century following Marx’s death, adopted and built on this dialectical tradition, from Engels’ Dialectics of Nature to the fast developing science of ecology and the birth of the radical science movements of the 1970s. A tour de force.

—Steven Rose, emeritus professor of neuroscience, Open University

By now, many people will have heard about the ecological ideas of Karl Marx. And everyone knows that the modern environmental movement is filled with anti-capitalist energies. But was there anything in between? In this landmark work, John Bellamy Foster fills in the gap and reconstructs an unbroken genealogy of dialectical thinking about the environment, from the last days of Marx to the first stirrings of Western environmentalism. From the neglected writings of numerous thinkers and scientists—evolutionary biologists, not the least—he reconstructs a treasure trove of ecological insights that will keep scholars and activists preoccupied for years to come. The common knowledge of Marx’s environmentalist leanings derives from Foster’s Marx’s Ecology from 2000. With The Return of Nature, he has given ecological Marxism an epic chronicle that speaks straight to the crises of our times: a sequel and prequel of extraordinary power.

—Andreas Malm, author, Fossil Capital: On the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

John Bellamy Foster’s magnificent The Return of Nature tells the story of the late nineteenth and early twentieth scientists and other intellectuals who followed paths laid out by Marx and Engels with respect to the profit-driven degradation of the environment and biosphere. Foster convincingly depicts the genesis, in the writings of figures such as William Morris, Joseph Needham, and Rachel Carson, of an ecosocialist vision whose further development represents the best hope of the present period. He helps us answer the question posed by one of the book’s heroes, the novelist and essayist Christopher Caudwell (1907-1937), “How can we think of the future without holding it to our own barrenness?”

—Stuart A. Newman, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, New York Medical College; coauthor, Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial Bioscience

Following up on his influential Marx’s Ecology, in this tour de force John Bellamy Foster fills in the broad historical and philosophical details spanning the post Darwin moment to the vibrant 1960s when ecology became common currency, detailing how dialectical thinking penetrates all. Previous histories of ecology have failed to embrace Marxism’s critical association with the development of ecology as a political subject, something this book does elegantly and thoroughly.

—John Vandermeer, Asa Gray Distinguished University Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; author, with Ivette Perfecto, Ecological Complexity and Agroecology

This magisterial work of profound importance draws on an immense amount of historical source material to provide a coherent and accessible account of the co-evolution of ideas on socialism and ecology from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It is an impressive, indeed, incredible study.

—Fred Magdoff, Professor Emeritus of Plant and Soil Science, Univeristy of Vermont

Another landmark volume by Professor John Bellamy Foster and an unreservedly recommended addition to the growing library of environmental historical studies, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of an informative Introduction and Epilogue, nine pages of Notes, a twenty-one page Names Index, and a twenty-one page Subject Index. A work of meticulous and original scholarship, The Return of Nature is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Environmental History & Policy, Human Geography, and Communism & Socialism collections and supplemental curriculum studies reading lists.

—Midwest Book Review

Editor of Monthly Review and one of the main thinkers of the North American ecological left, John Bellamy Foster offers in this monumental book a fascinating genealogy of ecosocialism, via a synthesis of scientific and artistic critiques of capitalism, developed in United Kingdom between the end of the 19th century and the 1960s. Starting from the writings of Friedrich Engels, and the work, much less known, of the “left Darwinist” (and friend of Marx) Edwin R. Lankester, Foster analyzes in particular the works of writer William Morris and great left-wing scientists: physicist John Desmond Bernal, geneticist John B. S. Haldane, and biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. Clearly, during the 1940s and 1950s, some scholars close to the English Communist movement fell into the trap of a scientistic and modernist conception of progress. However, despite their obvious differences, all shared a socialist and ecological commitment, and a dialectical conception of the interpenetration between nature and society.

—Michael Löwy, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2020

Poem, "The Arrival in Madrid of the International Brigades" by Pablo Neruda, Eng translatton by Jodey Bateman

 

A Murderous History of Korea. Bruce Cumings, London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 10 · 18 May 2017

London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 10 · 18 May 2017
A Murderous History of Korea
Bruce Cumings


More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.’ How is it possible that we have come to this? How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea.
 

North Korea celebrated the 85th anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army on 25 April, amid round-the-clock television coverage of parades in Pyongyang and enormous global tension. No journalist seemed interested in asking why it was the 85th anniversary when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was only founded in 1948. What was really being celebrated was the beginning of the Korean guerrilla struggle against the Japanese in north-east China, officially dated to 25 April 1932. After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, many Koreans fled across the border, among them the parents of Kim Il-sung, but it wasn’t until Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo in March 1932 that the independence movement turned to armed resistance. Kim and his comrades launched a campaign that lasted 13 difficult years, until Japan finally relinquished control of Korea as part of the 1945 terms of surrender. This is the source of the North Korean leadership’s legitimacy in the eyes of its people: they are revolutionary nationalists who resisted their country’s coloniser; they resisted again when a massive onslaught by the US air force during the Korean War razed all their cities, driving the population to live, work and study in subterranean shelters; they have continued to resist the US ever since; and they even resisted the collapse of Western communism – as of this September, the DPRK will have been in existence for as long as the Soviet Union. But it is less a communist country than a garrison state, unlike any the world has seen. Drawn from a population of just 25 million, the North Korean army is the fourth largest in the world, with 1.3 million soldiers – just behind the third largest army, with 1.4 million soldiers, which happens to be the American one. Most of the adult Korean population, men and women, have spent many years in this army: its reserves are limited only by the size of the population.
 

The story of Kim Il-sung’s resistance against the Japanese is surrounded by legend and exaggeration in the North, and general denial in the South. But he was recognisably a hero: he fought for a decade in the harshest winter environment imaginable, with temperatures sometimes falling to 50° below zero. Recent scholarship has shown that Koreans made up the vast majority of guerrillas in Manchukuo, even though many of them were commanded by Chinese officers (Kim was a member of the Chinese Communist Party). Other Korean guerrillas led detachments too – among them Choe Yong-gon, Kim Chaek and Choe Hyon – and when they returned to Pyongyang in 1945 they formed the core of the new regime. Their offspring now constitute a multitudinous elite – the number two man in the government today, Choe Ryong-hae, is Choe Hyon’s son.
 

Kim’s reputation was inadvertently enhanced by the Japanese, whose newspapers made a splash of the battle between him and the Korean quislings whom the Japanese employed to track down and kill him, all operating under the command of General Nozoe Shotoku, who ran the Imperial Army’s ‘Special Kim Division’. In April 1940 Nozoe’s forces captured Kim Hye-sun, thought to be Kim’s first wife; the Japanese tried in vain to use her to lure Kim out of hiding, and then murdered her. Maeda Takashi headed another Japanese Special Police unit, with many Koreans in it; in March 1940 his forces came under attack from Kim’s guerrillas, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Maeda pursued Kim for nearly two weeks, before stumbling into a trap. Kim threw 250 guerrillas at 150 soldiers in Maeda’s unit, killing Maeda, 58 Japanese, 17 others attached to the force, and taking 13 prisoners and large quantities of weapons and ammunition.
 

In September 1939, when Hitler was invading Poland, the Japanese mobilised what the scholar Dae-Sook Suh has described as a ‘massive punitive expedition’ consisting of six battalions of the Japanese Kwantung Army and twenty thousand men of the Manchurian Army and police force in a six-month suppression campaign against the guerrillas led by Kim and Ch’oe Hyon. In September 1940 an even larger force embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign against Chinese and Korean guerrillas: ‘The punitive operation was conducted for one year and eight months until the end of March 1941,’ Suh writes, ‘and the bandits, excluding those led by Kim Il-sung, were completely annihilated. The bandit leaders were shot to death or forced to submit.’ A vital figure in the long Japanese counterinsurgency effort was Kishi Nobusuke, who made a name for himself running munitions factories. Labelled a Class A war criminal during the US occupation, Kishi avoided incarceration and became one of the founding fathers of postwar Japan and its longtime ruling organ, the Liberal Democratic Party; he was prime minister twice between 1957 and 1960. The current Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is Kishi’s grandson and reveres him above all other Japanese leaders. Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Abe on 11 February when a pointed message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: it had just successfully tested a new, solid-fuel missile, fired from a mobile launcher. Kim Il-sung and Kishi are meeting again through their grandsons. Eight decades have passed, and the baleful, irreconcilable hostility between North Korea and Japan still hangs in the air.
 

In the West, treatment of North Korea is one-sided and ahistorical. No one even gets the names straight. During Abe’s Florida visit, Trump referred to him as ‘Prime Minister Shinzo’. On 29 April, Ana Navarro, a prominent commentator on CNN, said: ‘Little boy Un is a maniac.’ The demonisation of North Korea transcends party lines, drawing on a host of subliminal racist and Orientalist imagery; no one is willing to accept that North Koreans may have valid reasons for not accepting the American definition of reality. Their rejection of the American worldview – generally perceived as indifference, even insolence in the face of overwhelming US power – makes North Korea appear irrational, impossible to control, and therefore fundamentally dangerous.
 

But if American commentators and politicians are ignorant of Korea’s history, they ought at least to be aware of their own. US involvement in Korea began towards the end of the Second World War, when State Department planners feared that Soviet soldiers, who were entering the northern part of the peninsula, would bring with them as many as thirty thousand Korean guerrillas who had been fighting the Japanese in north-east China. They began to consider a full military occupation that would assure America had the strongest voice in postwar Korean affairs. It might be a short occupation or, as a briefing paper put it, it might be one of ‘considerable duration’; the main point was that no other power should have a role in Korea such that ‘the proportionate strength of the US’ would be reduced to ‘a point where its effectiveness would be weakened’. Congress and the American people knew nothing about this. Several of the planners were Japanophiles who had never challenged Japan’s colonial claims in Korea and now hoped to reconstruct a peaceable and amenable postwar Japan. They worried that a Soviet occupation of Korea would thwart that goal and harm the postwar security of the Pacific. Following this logic, on the day after Nagasaki was obliterated, John J. McCloy of the War Department asked Dean Rusk and a colleague to go into a spare office and think about how to divide Korea. They chose the 38th parallel, and three weeks later 25,000 American combat troops entered southern Korea to establish a military government.
 

It lasted three years. To shore up their occupation, the Americans employed every last hireling of the Japanese they could find, including former officers in the Japanese military like Park Chung Hee and Kim Chae-gyu, both of whom graduated from the American military academy in Seoul in 1946. (After a military takeover in 1961 Park became president of South Korea, lasting a decade and a half until his ex-classmate Kim, by then head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot him dead over dinner one night.) After the Americans left in 1948 the border area around the 38th parallel was under the command of Kim Sok-won, another ex-officer of the Imperial Army, and it was no surprise that after a series of South Korean incursions into the North, full-scale civil war broke out on 25 June 1950. Inside the South itself – whose leaders felt insecure and conscious of the threat from what they called ‘the north wind’ – there was an orgy of state violence against anyone who might somehow be associated with the left or with communism. The historian Hun Joon Kim found that at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began. My own work and that of John Merrill indicates that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died as a result of political violence before June 1950, at the hands either of the South Korean government or the US occupation forces. In her recent book Korea’s Grievous War, which combines archival research, records of mass graves and interviews with relatives of the dead and escapees who fled to Osaka, Su-kyoung Hwang documents the mass killings in villages around the southern coast.* In short, the Republic of Korea was one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the early Cold War period; many of the perpetrators of the massacres had served the Japanese in their dirty work – and were then put back into power by the Americans.
 

Americans like to see themselves as mere bystanders in postwar Korean history. It’s always described in the passive voice: ‘Korea was divided in 1945,’ with no mention of the fact that McCloy and Rusk, two of the most influential men in postwar foreign policy, drew their line without consulting anyone. There were two military coups in the South while the US had operational control of the Korean army, in 1961 and 1980; the Americans stood idly by lest they be accused of interfering in Korean politics. South Korea’s stable democracy and vibrant economy from 1988 onwards seem to have overridden any need to acknowledge the previous forty years of history, during which the North could reasonably claim that its own autocracy was necessary to counter military rule in Seoul. It’s only in the present context that the North looks at best like a walking anachronism, at worst like a vicious tyranny. For 25 years now the world has been treated to scaremongering about North Korean nuclear weapons, but hardly anyone points out that it was the US that introduced nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula, in 1958; hundreds were kept there until a worldwide pullback of tactical nukes occurred under George H.W. Bush. But every US administration since 1991 has challenged North Korea with frequent flights of nuclear-capable bombers in South Korean airspace, and any day of the week an Ohio-class submarine could demolish the North in a few hours. Today there are 28,000 US troops stationed in Korea, perpetuating an unwinnable stand-off with the nuclear-capable North. The occupation did indeed turn out to be one of ‘considerable duration’, but it’s also the result of a colossal strategic failure, now entering its eighth decade. It’s common for pundits to say that Washington just can’t take North Korea seriously, but North Korea has taken its measure more than once. And it doesn’t know how to respond.

To hear Trump and his national security team tell it, the current crisis has come about because North Korea is on the verge of developing an ICBM that can hit the American heartland. Most experts think that it will take four or five years to become operational – but really, what difference does it make? North Korea tested its first long-range rocket in 1998, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the DPRK’s founding. The first medium-range missile was tested in 1992: it flew several hundred miles down range and banged the target right on the nose. North Korea now has more sophisticated mobile medium-range missiles that use solid fuel, making them hard to locate and easy to fire. Some two hundred million people in Korea and Japan are within range of these missiles, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese, not to mention the only US Marine division permanently stationed abroad, in Okinawa. It isn’t clear that North Korea can actually fit a nuclear warhead to any of its missiles – but if it happened, and if it was fired in anger, the country would immediately be turned into what Colin Powell memorably called ‘a charcoal briquette’.
 

But then, as General Powell well knew, we had already turned North Korea into a charcoal briquette. The filmmaker Chris Marker visited the country in 1957, four years after US carpet-bombing ended, and wrote: ‘Extermination passed over this land. Who could count what burned with the houses? ... When a country is split in two by an artificial border and irreconcilable propaganda is exercised on each side, it’s naive to ask where the war comes from: the border is the war.’ Having recognised the primary truth of that war, one still alien to the American telling of it (even though Americans drew the border), he remarked: ‘The idea that North Koreans generally have of Americans may be strange, but I must say, having lived in the USA around the end of the Korean War, that nothing can equal the stupidity and sadism of the combat imagery that went into circulation at the time. “The Reds burn, roast and toast.”’
Since the very beginning, American policy has cycled through a menu of options to try and control the DPRK: sanctions, in place since 1950, with no evidence of positive results; non-recognition, in place since 1948, again with no positive results; regime change, attempted late in 1950 when US forces invaded the North, only to end up in a war with China; and direct talks, the only method that has ever worked, which produced an eight-year freeze – between 1994 and 2002 – on all the North’s plutonium facilities, and nearly succeeded in retiring their missiles. On 1 May, Donald Trump told Bloomberg News: ‘If it would be appropriate for me to meet with [Kim Jong-un], I would absolutely; I would be honoured to do it.’ There’s no telling whether this was serious, or just another Trump attempt to grab headlines. But whatever else he might be, he is unquestionably a maverick, the first president since 1945 not beholden to the Beltway. Maybe he can sit down with Mr Kim and save the planet.