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Everything seems in reverse at a time when it should be doing better or otherwise.
Historically, unless we are in a recession, December is a positive month for the market.
The Fed has a history of crash landings. The jury is out regarding the current Chairman but the markets were not happy with his pronouncements after the rise in interest rates which it had discounted.
In my humble opinion Trump acted precipitously regarding his withdrawal plans in Syria and we will regret that action because it will embolden Turkey and encourage Russia and Iran that America is willing to abdicate The Middle East. The Saudis have to be worried and our allies will see this as an America more willing to save money than engage in our previous role of guardian.
It might hasten the warming relation between The Saudis and Israel but it could also hasten an eventual war between Israel and Iran.
I do not know any of the back room facts so I could be totally wrong but Mattis' resignation suggests my concerns are valid.
Trump's willingness to touch the third rail, to address issues that needed correcting carries risks but is also something I have applauded. I am not encouraged by this action because it seems to be short sighted and driven by a poorly thought through strategy.
Time will tell. (See 1 , 1a and 1b below.)
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Democrat's flirtation with Kamala would be a way to make Trump look better.
Kamala is a physically more attractive looking Hillary but an equal "dingbat." (See 2 and 2a below.)
Trump's election and Hillary's nomination was a confirmation of several things.
a) First, it codified that after Obama, Americans downgraded who can become president.
b) It also confirmed how out of touch Democrats and progressive radicals are when it comes to Americans residing in the middle of the bar bells, ie California and New York.
c) Once again, it revealed how out of touch the mass media are by thinking they can remain in their bubble and adequately read the nation's blood pressure.
d) Finally, Trump's victory and the before and after election events prove, once again, Democrats will stop at nothing to gain, seek to re-gain and hold onto power.
Trump may not "Make America Great Again" but he seems to care about us whereas, the Democrats are not interested in America, our constitution or what the founding fathers intended.
All they want is power so they can impose their mistaken thinking and policies.
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Dick
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1)) US Pullout from Syria: A Complete Disaster
By Rovvy Lepor
President Trump, without consultation with Republican leaders in Congress,announced his planned immediate withdrawal from Syria. If President Trump follows through on his planned withdrawal, it will translate into one of the biggest national security blunders in recent history, will embolden our most dangerous enemies, and will endanger the security of the United States and our allies. A withdrawal from Syria is a betrayal to the forces of good and a great gift to the forces of evil, and it must not happen.
President Trump issued a surprise announcement on December 19 that the U.S. would immediately begin pulling out all 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria. President Trump stated that since the U.S. has defeated ISIS in Syria and he does not wish to leave troops in harm's way, it is time to immediately withdraw for their benefit and safety. However, if one is a student of history and is attuned to current events, it is abundantly clear that a U.S. withdrawal from Syria will almost certainly require a later return of a much larger U.S. military presence and a major war in the Middle East. This war will almost certainly claim many lives in the Middle East, including a high number of U.S. troops.
In the Middle East, there are many moving parts. Iran is the mortal enemy of the United States and is determined to achieve a large nuclear arsenal. It wishes to bring its mahdi (messiah) through a violent and bloody war on the Iranian regime's enemies (which includes Europe), and it calls for the destruction of the United States and Israel in regime-sponsored rallies. Iran has a presence in Syria. Hezb'allah has a presence in Syria. Russia has a presence in Syria. And Turkey occupies part of Syria.
All of these forces would benefit from a U.S. troop withdrawal. Not only is the presence of U.S. troops paramount, but the location of the troops at the al-Tanf base is of especially great strategic importance. According to Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst at Stratfor, Iran cares so much about this military base because it blocks the Baghdad-Damascus highway, which Iran uses to transport weapons to Syria. According to Lamrani, the reason Iran wants the land route "is that it's easier to bring [weapons] across land in greater quantities, and the shipping route is very vulnerable to Israeli interception, and the air route is expensive and often gets hit by Israeli airstrikes."
Even though the United States has been successful against ISIS, it is premature to say ISIS has been defeated. According to a Department of Defense report from April-June 2018, there were about 13,000 ISIS terrorists in Syria and about another 17,000 in Iraq. It is important to remember that when U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq under President Obama, it allowed ISIS to form and dramatically increase the threat to Iraq and Syria and rapidly increase territory under their control, leading to the return of U.S. troops to fight ISIS forces. A withdrawal of U.S. forces now could have repeat consequences.
Turkey seeks to further its attacks on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a critically important U.S. ally. Turkey has also encouraged President Trump to withdraw troops from Syria. It is in large part thanks to the Kurdish-led SDF that the U.S. has successfully beaten back ISIS in Syria. The SDF has been at the forefront of the fight against ISIS and must not be abandoned, particularly when Turkish president Erdoğan recently announced that he plans an imminent attack on that group.
According to a report in Al-Monitor, President Erdoğan threatened to launch a military campaign to oust the Kurdish YPG (which leads the SDF) from areas west of the Euphrates. Currently, the Kurds control about 30% of Syrian territory. Erdoğan said he spoke with President Trump and told him the YPG needs "to go to the east of the Euphrates. If they don't, we will force them out, because they are disturbing us[.] ... Since the U.S. is our strategic ally, they need to do what is necessary." Erdoğan said President Trump gave "a positive response" and noted that Turkey "can start [its] operation on Syrian soil at any moment along the 500-kilometer [300-mile] border, in particular without causing harm to American soldiers ... [and] will comb every inch of Syrian territory until the last terrorist is neutralized." The Pentagon said any unilateral military action in northeast Syria is unacceptable.
Russia praised the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, claiming that it "creates good prospects for a political solution" in Syria. A pullback enables Russia to be the unchallenged superpower in the region and enables Iran and Hezb'allah to be much freer to become more entrenched and dangerous.
Israel will have to counter growing threats from Iran and Hezb'allah without the counterweight of a U.S. presence in Syria, and it will have to study the implications of a U.S. withdrawal. One obvious implication is the likely rapid increase in the arsenals of Iran and Hezb'allah due to the effective opening of the highway linking Iraq and Syria.
In October 2018, Israel's internal security minister, Gilad Erdan, announced that Hezb'allah's arsenal of missiles and rockets stands at about 150,000. Hezb'allah has the capability to strike anywhere in Israel, including rockets that can hit the southern city of Eilat about three minutes after launch.
According to an October report from the JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security of America)'s Gemunder Center Hybrid Warfare Task Force, "Hezbollah possesses more firepower than 95 percent of the world's conventional militaries and more rockets and missiles than all European NATO members combined." The JINSA report warns about how a future Hezb'allah attack on Israel would be much worse than any previous conflict. Israel's recent discovery of a number of Hezb'allah's cross-border attack tunnels into Israel increases concerns about Hezb'allah's preparations for war.
According to a report in Der Spiegel, Syria is engaged in a nuclear weapons program near the Syrian city of Qusayr. The suspected nuclear reactor is protected by the Syrian military and Hezb'allah terrorists and poses a serious threat to U.S. forces in the region and U.S. allies. In a recent analysis of the Der Spiegel report, coauthored by David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security (and formerly an IAEA nuclear weapons inspector), the authors write: "Some imagery observations are consistent with Der Spiegel's reporting. Although we fully understand the limitations and risks of the following approach, we believe that this site warrants inspection by the IAEA." In light of previous revelations of Syria's Al Kibar nuclear reactor, destroyed in a 2007 Israeli raid, such Syrian endeavors are no surprise.
There are so many dangers present in Syria and the Middle East and so many threats to the security interests of the United States and our allies that can be properly addressed only with continued direct U.S. involvement in Syria through a continued strong military presence on the ground. A pullout of U.S. troops would be a boon to U.S. foes, including Iran, Syria, and Hezb'allah, and would make catastrophic war that much more likely. The U.S. must serve as a bulwark against these threats rather than surrender to them.
1a
In July 2012, the battle for Aleppo – between the army of Syrian regime leader Bashar Assad and Syrian rebels – heated up. The rebels stormed police stations and attacked army bases, but the Syrian regime fought back with air power, pummeling the city and sending in its ground forces. Some of the rebels were already exhausted after a year of struggle against the regime. They didn’t know then that the war would drag on for six more years and that they would eventually see Assad retake the city in December 2016.
Behind the scenes, the US and Russians were maneuvering to support both sides. The CIA was coming to the rescue of the rebellion. According to reports, by the summer of 2012, arms were already being “steered” towards the rebellion with US support. US president Obama had authorized support for the rebels that summer, just as he had authorized air strikes in Libya the year before. The US would also provide support for training to the rebels. For a short period the US had the upper hand in Syria. Russia’s Syrian-regime ally was teetering.
In August 2013, Assad’s forces launched a poison gas attack on Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus. Hundreds were killed and the US was poised for air strikes. Then came the Russians to the rescue. Blocking UN condemnation, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov put forward a proposal to establish international control over the chemical weapons stocks and avoid air strikes. It gave Obama a way out as other Western countries, such as the UK – and even the US Congress – were rejecting air strikes.
Little by little, the Russians helped shore up the regime in the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014. The regime was bolstered by the aid of Iran which had sent thousands of fighters, some increasingly recruited among Shi’ite communities in other countries. Hezbollah was coming to Assad’s aid as well. As the war internationalized, the opposition also got foreign support and fighters. This came from Gulf countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and there was aid coming from Jordan with Western support. Turkey was also supporting the opposition.
BUT THE REBELS had a problem. They weren’t unified and the multiplicity of CIA-supported groups turned out to be more smoke and mirrors. It was revealed in 2015 that the hundreds of millions poured in to help the rebels had been squandered. Vetted US-backed groups produced few fighters. The groups that were producing effective fighters were increasingly jihadists. These included Ahrar al-Sham, and the Nusra Front, the Syrian version of Al-Qaeda.
In addition, Islamic State, a group with origins in Iraq that had grown more powerful in eastern Syria’s Euphrates valley, began to gobble up territory and sponge up foreign fighters attracted to its aesthetic genocidal zeal. ISIS kidnapped and purchased kidnapped journalists and foreigners from other groups, primarily around Aleppo. Kidnapped in 2012 and 2013, many would be executed in 2014 in brutal displays by ISIS.
ISIS became the main distraction for the US, fearful that its support for the rebels might be morphing into a monster as the extremists fed off the chaos. Russia benefited from this, carefully planning a round of air strikes in October 2015. US Defense Secretary Ash Carter condemned Russia, claiming that it was pouring fuel on the fire. He also noted that Moscow was bombing ISIS along with “other terrorists,” but Carter noted that it was targeting opposition groups who “belong in the political transition going forward.” Russia’s approach was “doomed to fail,” the Americans said.
But Washington had also pivoted in 2014 from fighting the regime to fighting ISIS, building an international coalition of 70 countries. The US was working heavily on the Iran deal from 2013 to 2015. Former US ambassador Robert Ford said in an interview posted at the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis (MECRA) that in 2013, Obama administration officials were warned about the growing Iranian presence and had not acquiesced to measures which might have slowed or reduced it. In short, the US had decided that the Iran Deal was of more importance, and Assad would likely stay in power with Iranian and eventually more Russian support.
RUSSIA’S INTERVENTION had immediate results. Syrian rebels left Homs under a truce in December 2015. In December 2016, Russia and Turkey brokered a wide-ranging ceasefire across the country. In January 2017 Russia, Iran and Turkey gathered in Astana for talks, leading to a ceasefire and de-escalation zones established in May in the South, Center and North.
The result of the Astana process was to bypass the Geneva peace process and UN discussions that the US and then secretary of state John Kerry had been involved in. Russia’s role seemed to be working: It had hosted a lavish concert in the ancient city of Palmyra in May 2016 after it was liberated from ISIS.
The US, meanwhile, was more deeply involved in eastern Syria helping Kurdish fighters defeat ISIS. With airdrops to help the Kurds in Kobani in October 2014, the Obama administration increased support by ordering special forces to eastern Syria in October 2015. By 2016, the US was on a roll, backing a new umbrella group called the Syrian Democratic Forces who liberated Shaddadi in February 2016 and Manbij in August.
As the Kurdish-backed SDF expanded, the Turks became wary, accusing the US of supporting “terrorists” connected to the PKK, and Turkey intervened. The US continued pouring material and hundreds of men into Syria, helping to liberated Raqqa, the ISIS capital, in October 2017. It was an effective campaign with few US casualties.
Eventually US forces and the Russians came face to face on the Euphrates River near Deir ez-Zor. Testing the US commitment, a group of Russian contractors with some Syrian fighters launched an attack across the Euphrates in February 2018, directed at the SDF. US forces responded with air power, decimating the Russian contractors. It was a message that the US would stand by its partners in Syria.
RUSSIA DECIDED that it could outplay the Americans elsewhere. Trump had announced an end to the support for the Syrian rebels in July 2017; the Russian-backed Syrian regime conquered rebel areas in southern Syria and around Damascus. Eventually in September 2018, Russia and Turkey signed an agreement regarding Idlib, one of the last rebel-held areas.
Then Russia, Iran and Turkey decided to meet in Geneva to discuss the Syrian constitution. By going to Geneva in December 2018, the Russians showed they had not only defeated the US-backed rebels but also bought out the diplomatic process that the US had paid lip-service to.
Russia had angled to work more closely with Turkey, a US ally outraged by the US support for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Turkey, Russia and Iran grew closer and the US was left out in the cold. Even US allies such as Saudi Arabia didn’t come through with the funding Trump wanted for eastern Syria.
Now, Trump is poised to leave eastern Syria and Russia will walk in as the broker of yet another deal, as it has since 2013, showing up and making deals that enable the Syrian regime to consolidate power.
Moscow kept its Syrian policy to a narrow goal of preserving the Syrian government under the Assad regime. Even though Russia had a weaker hand to play than the Americans, with less money and inferior air power, it outplayed the US consistently, correctly judging that the US wouldn’t decapitate the regime with air strikes and that the US-backed rebels were corrupt and prone to infighting.
Russia also angled for Turkey’s support, working on a new gas line to Turkey and selling S-400s to Ankara. Although Russia may stumble eventually in Syria, so far it has accomplished its goals.
Seth Frantzman is The Jerusalem Post's op-ed editor, a Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a founder of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis.
1b) Trump is right to withdraw US troops from Syria. We've done our job by defeating ISIS.
The Trump administration will withdraw all of the approximately 2,000 American troops in Syria, according to a U.S. official, as the White House declared victory Wednesday in the mission to defeat Islamic State militants there. Time
Trump's decision to pull US troops is correct, however one feels about the messenger and process. There's nothing left worth fighting to win in Syria.
American policy on Syria took a U-turn Wednesday with the news that President Donald Trump was preparing for a “full” and “rapid” withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Syrian civil war. After the news broke, Trump took to Twitter to declare, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there.”
By Robert Oscar Lopez
Trump is right to accept victory in Syria. By September, ISIS had lost 99 percent of the territory its vaunted caliphate once held, according to a Pentagon Inspector General’s report. With the last vestiges of Islamic State territory in Syria falling to U.S.-backed forces in recent days, the goal that drew the U.S. into Syria is achieved.
This decision will upset most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, which generally supports a more expansive war in Syria. Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, generally a Trump ally, called it an “Obama-like mistake” and a “big winfor ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad…and Russia.” Scholars from the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for a New American Security and other prominent think tanks all echoed that sentiment.
Until this week, the Trump administration took a similar view. Even though the president said last spring that U.S. forces would be leaving Syria “very soon,” administration officials in September announced that he had decided to keep troops there indefinitely to ensure ISIS’s “enduring defeat,” compel the withdrawal of Iranian forces, and shape the post-war order. That last goal seemingly included protecting the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish militia that did most of ground fighting against ISIS, from Turkey.
Trump’s decision is a good one, even though it reflects poorly on his administration’s security decision-making process. With the defeat of ISIS, the risks of keeping U.S. troops in Syria badly outweigh any potential benefits. The rationales that administration officials recently offered for staying are really reasons to go.
No one knows exactly how an “enduring” defeat of ISIS differs from plain old defeat. That’s the point, presumably. Ensuring ISIS’s total extinction is a useful goal for keeping troops there forever, adding more, and adopting all manner of nation-building goals.
The idea that U.S. forces can compel Iran’s eviction makes little sense. Like Russia, Iran has long-standing interests in Syria that are stronger than ours, was invited by the regime to deploy forces, and is unlikely to pull them before the civil war is over. Leaving rivals the draining task of trying to stabilize Syria is hardly doing them a favor. Syria offers occupiers nothing that can vault them to greater power and lots of potential trouble. Keeping U.S. forces there until Iran decides to leave simply offers them the right to say how long we incur costs.
Nothing justifies the risks of staying in Syria
Chasing those nebulous benefits means running a massive risk of escalation, with the Assad regime, Russia, Iran or NATO-ally Turkey. U.S. forces protecting Kurdish allies have engaged in tense stand-offs with Turkish forces in northern Syria. Israel attackson Iranian-backed forces in Syria risk wider war that could embroil U.S. forces.
Most worrying, given the nuclear stakes, is the potential for inadvertent war with Russia. In February, U.S. commandos and airstrikes killed scores of Russian “mercenaries” in a prolonged battle. Ambassador James Jeffrey later remarked of the incident that “this has occurred about a dozen times in one place or another in Syria,” and “there have been various engagements [with the Russians in Syria], some involving exchange of fire, some not.” This revelation somehow did not set off alarm bells in Congress, which never authorized the war in Syria, let alone conducted serious oversight of it.
The United State has nothing approaching the tremendous stakes needed to justify running these risks. This calculation should not turn on what one thinks of Russia’s actions in Europe or its relations with Donald Trump. The same goes for Iran. If you want to punish rivals for actions elsewhere, find a better way to do it than using 2,000 troops to manage the end of the Syrian civil war so that they do not do it for you.
US job was to defeat ISIS, not protect Kurds
The idea that we should stay to shape the post-war order has only slightly more merit. Washington long clung to chimerical idea that its support for relatively weak forces opposing Assad would bring about a regime change, which would install rulers with less blood on their hands. But there was no liberal alternative in Syria to Assad or continued war. That is doubly true now that Assad’s forces have retaken much of the country and boxed the rebels into the northwest. The Kurds are negotiating post-war terms with the Assad regime, and dire circumstances are forcing non-jihadist rebels to do the same.
The U.S. can push for an acceptable arrangement between the Turks, Assad and the Kurds, and try to help rebels it backed in the Syrian Democratic Forces cut deals to return home or emigrate. But U.S. leverage is inevitably limited by the lack of strong U.S. interests. Keeping a fairly small number of troops there does not change that. The hard truth is that U.S. allies in Syria, including the Kurds, should know that U.S. forces were in Syria to defeat ISIS, not to guarantee their autonomy. We do not owe them indefinite protection.
The demise of ISIS means there is nothing left worth fighting to win there. The risks of blundering into a war with a rival power are profound, and no possible benefit justifies them. We should not pay the costs of managing the end game of Syria’s civil war so that Russia and Iran do not. The Assad regime is winning its civil war, and supporting rebels merely prolongs the fighting and its tragic consequences. The United States is not obligated to fight for the Kurds or anyone else there. The decision to pull troops is the right one, however one feels about the messenger and process that produced it.
Benjamin H. Friedman is Policy Director at Defense Priorities. Justin Logan is Director of Programs and Research Associate and the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University. Follow Justin on Twitter: @JustinTLogan
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2)What to Expect from a Kamala Harris Presidency
According to CNN's Grace Sparks, polls show Kamala Harris winning 4% support from Democrats going into the 2020 presidential run. Harris trails behind Joe Biden (30%), Bernie Sanders (14%), Robert Francis O'Rourke (9%), and Cory Booker (5%).
But don't be fooled. In 2020, outcomes will place a premium on identity politics. While many liberals have warned against the overuse of identity politics, most Democrats still have faith in identity as a rallying point. Democrats have had too many successes to forgo identity politics:
- Virginia Democrats found great success by casting Republican Ed Gillespieas a racist.
- Democrats succeeded in getting a radically left-wing candidate, Doug Jones, elected in Alabama. They did this by flooding media with speculations about Roy Moore's misconduct toward women (and accusations that he was a "child-molester"). This made people believe that Jones, though white and male, would be better for women. The gay press highlighted Jones's gay son.
- A woman's accusations turned Brett Kavanaugh's nomination into a test case for whether people support women.
- In the midterm elections, newspapers focused on a flurry of "firsts" – the first American Indian lesbian, the first African-American woman, etc.
Kamala Harris, standing tall in a nation's nadir
Elizabeth Warren's star continues to fall because of her controversial claims toCherokee heritage, something people no longer dismiss as a right-wing smear. Hence, Harris rises highest in the Democrats' order-of-merit list. According to a Britannica biography, she is half-Indian and half-Jamaican. Her father taught at Stanford. Her mother, daughter of a diplomat, worked as a cancer researcher. Normally, this privilege would weaken her prospects when running against people who can throw out the "my daddy worked in the mills" speech.
Democrats have always had schizophrenia when it comes to candidates from poor upbringings. On the one hand, they need such people to run for office and appeal to voters from poor upbringings. On the other hand, incredibly wealthy people like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein still run the Democratic Party.
Few survive the Scylla and Charybdis of identity politics. You have to show that you are part of an oppressed group and that the oppressor groups can trust you with their support and not get burned. Harris dances this line perfectly. She went to Howard University for her undergraduate work, guaranteeing her bona fides in the black community. She plays to a key donor class, LGBTs, because of her history as California attorney general. She refused to defend Proposition 8.
Harris's powerful connections may explain her meteoric rise. (Let us set aside ballot-harvesting and possible cheating). California is 5.8% black but 39%Latino, yet she had a 2016 victory over Loretta Sanchez. With no conspicuous advantage by policy platforms, only the massive party machine's preference or balloting tricks could account for Harris's sitting in the Senate today.
Both Harris and Sanchez are Democrats. Party affiliation gave Harris no advantage. Republicans, a small but necessary part of the electorate, leaned toward Sanchez. Sanchez was from the more populous Southern California, unlike Harris, who was from the wealthy but less populous Bay Area. Sanchez had a prominent history in state politics. Her 1996 victory in Orange County against Robert Dornan lives on as legendary. Sanchez's sister also served in Congress and had broad support in California.
Harris has gained a great deal of attention on immigration (comparing ICE to the KKK and terrorists), on Kavanaugh and sexual assault (pulling an ambush with an anonymous letter), and black rights (sponsoring a bill to make lynching a federal crime).
My window into Kamala Harris's world
To judge what someone will do as president, the question is not "who is this person?," but rather "when this person leads, what happens?"
For the latter, I can offer some personal accounts. Kamala Harris became California's attorney general in 2010. At that time, I worked as a professor at California State University-Northridge. I worked for the state of California for the entire time she served as attorney general.
In my experience, her office failed abominably at enforcing laws against racial discrimination, harassment, mistreatment of veterans, hiring discrimination,viewpoint discrimination, religious discrimination, and abuse of children raised by LGBT couples. Whether you are a liberal worried about higher education's racial equality or a conservative concerned about left-wing bias, beware this woman.
Over eight years at Northridge, I tried to stop discrimination and suffered retaliation on a massive scale. I lost all the battles, and as a result, so did the wide-ranging groups I sought to fight for.
We hear so often that "inclusive" gestures require firing conservatives likeBrendan Eich so that companies can attract the "best talent." This assumes that LGBTs have more talent than conservatives with principled reasons to oppose LGBT. My case presents the opposite situation: to placate a white lesbian dean who hated me, California sabotaged myriad objectives.
The tragic outcome resulted from an insidious bureaucracy manipulating complex regulations. Yet much of this depended on the responsiveness of the office Harris oversaw. Multiple times I filed complaints with California offices about the systematic discrimination against black Americans, Latinos, veterans,Christians, conservatives, and children of same-sex couples.
That so many complaints and notices got buried or ignored during the entiretenure of Kamala Harris as attorney general raises enormous doubts about her competence. I had documents proving:
- They rewarded white professors with higher rank and pay despite lesser accomplishments.
- They approved a white South African gay man for leave without pay to explore a new job but then denied the same opportunity to a Latino three years later.
- They barred the only Latino in a department from serving on hiring committees in his field, while stacking the committees with white women of lower rank, fewer publications, and more possible conflicts of interest.
- They posted job ads that misrepresented a hiring search and then forced through the hire of a white woman who was patently unqualified for the job posted (the ad was ostensibly for a "trans-Atlantic" specialist versed in British literature but their short list consisted of three white women schooled in American literature; they hired a white woman with an American studies Ph.D.)
- They opened a search for African-American studies and then eliminated highly qualified black applicants in order to hire a white man for the job, because he was a Marxist and the search committee's head was a Marxist.
- The department chair wrote to me and asked specifically that I exclude a black woman with an M.A. from a curriculum development meeting because she was not "qualified," even though a white librarian with less education was never disinvited.
- The dean's direct reports with whom I had considerable interaction consisted of Elizabeth Say, Elizabeth Adams, Noreen Galvin, Betty Priaulx, Elizabeth Whirledge, Teresa Morrison, and Tina Chewning. All of these people are white women, and more than half are lesbians.
- They told me that I could not count my time on active duty in the military toward time in my job, a statement that blatantly violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-Employment Rights Act.
- A professor sent me homosexual pornography through the university email system, which should count as sexual harassment!
- More than I can recount with this word limit!
Their treatment of immigrants was abominable. As I relayed in this 2016 piece, the white dean deliberately prevented Latino immigrants from getting a humanities education comparable to wealthy whites in schools with real liberal arts programs. The college also made sure to qualify as a "Hispanic-Serving Institution" while packing all of its Latino faculty in ugly, windowless offices devoted to the ethnic studies departments. The overwhelmingly white English department worked in spacious, well lit offices overlooking the sunny California quadrangle from the seventh and eighth floors.
In such a racially charged climate, how could white liberals get away with this? Very easily. The ethnic professors working in ethnic studies departments had to keep the dean happy so she would continue to keep their programs afloat. As part of an apparent you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours deal, the graduation requirements forced students to take introductory writing classes. The dean arranged for ethnic studies classes to count for these. Yet Chicano Studies and Central American Studies had no particular qualifications in teaching freshmen how to write research papers in English. The dean could count on human shields to stave off charges by people like me.
People assigned to review the dean were safe allies who directly reported to her. While I was there, an Indian-American professor from English served on the personnel committee and the committee to review the dean. She also managed to get her husband hired in the Asian-American Studies Department for a tenure-track position. Like several other people in the English Department, she counted as a faculty member in English as well as in another program (liberal studies), hence her vote counted double under "faculty governance" rules. This also meant she got to run hiring committees in multiple departments and therefore stack the college-wide faculty, including the Academic Council, with people she and the dean favored.
Responsibility flows to the top. Only an attorney general who willfully ignored warning signs could allow such a culture to flourish in California's crown jewel of public institutions, the university system.
Prior to my working at Northridge, a professor killed herself. While I was there, another, Susanne Collier-Lakeman, suffered an early death after withstanding multiple attempts by nasty and vindictive colleagues to drive her from her job. (Susanne was my only friend in the department, and we lunched together.) A veteran, Ian Long, came out of three years at Northridge with no counseling help, then went on to slaughter twelve people in the ignominious Thousand Oaks shooting. With no conservative professor on campus to engage in political dialogue, the students' only exposure to right-wing ideas now consists of juvenile and fruitless mockery from Prager University. Police fanned acrossthe campus in response to Nazi graffiti in a restroom and threats of another mass shooting on December 12. Another close friend, a black woman, quit the job after constant harassment and bullying from colleagues. She describes the aftereffects as PTSD. As a witness to a lot of it, I do not think she exaggerates.
These disasters could have been prevented. Had I ever had a chance to present my evidence to a competent employment law official under Kamala Harris's charge, I am sure I could have shown an open-and-shut case. But Kamala Harris's world is a world of bureaucratic trap doors designed to protect the people in power, who are still, in California as elsewhere, wealthy white liberals who know nothing of the travails faced by people in the military or people who grew up in LGBT families.
Whether you are a public figure or an everyday citizen, the world Kamala Harris makes is a dark world in which nobody would want to live.
2a) Too many Democrats! Will the party's overcrowded 2020 field spell disaster?
At least a dozen plausible candidates will seek the 2020 nomination. Could the GOP's 2016 implosion happen again?
If a CNN poll released earlier this month is any indication, the 2020 presidential election will start off with an immensely crowded Democratic field. That survey included a grand total of 20 plausible candidates — from purported frontrunners like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke to a list of female U.S. senators (Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren) more obscure names like Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and billionaire Tom Steyer. It didn't even mention one of the few officeholders to actually declare his candidacy, West Virginia state Sen. Richard Ojeda.
The fact that there is such a huge potential field can't be dismissed lightly. During the 2016 campaign, the Republican Party fielded more candidates than had ever previously competed in a major party's presidential primaries — there were 17 going into the Iowa caucuses. As we now know, the end result, after many twists and turns, was the nomination and election of Donald Trump, the first U.S. president to lack either military or political experience, and the party's large-scale abandonment of what were previously understood to be its core principles.
No one can pinpoint with certainty whether Trump's nomination was attributable to the number of candidates running. But common sense suggests that was at least a major factor. For one thing, winning an early primary required a relatively small proportion of the vote, giving an edge to those with hardcore fan bases (like Trump) and disadvantaging others whose appeal was based more on strategic pragmatism (like every mainstream Republican running against Trump). What's more, it helped stir up drama that kept the Republican primaries exciting — and made sure they dominated the news cycle.
So what will a large primary field mean for the Democrats in 2020?
As with the 2016 Republican primary, Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told Salon by email, "It may be that a large number of entrants actually induces even more candidates to enter the field." In that context, he continued, "The eventual winning percentage in the symbolically important early primaries gets lower because more candidates are hypothetically splitting the vote. A field with a single frontrunner, like Clinton in 2016, may prompt other candidates to take a pass on the race. So it certainly seems like the Democratic field might be unusually large."
Kondik added that he can imagine a scenario in which no candidate wins enough delegates to clinch the nomination. Democratic primaries and caucuses all award delegates proportionally, above a 15 percent threshold. Hence, he said, "One can imagine a handful of contenders trading victories in different states and splitting delegates three or four ways. If that pattern were to continue through Super Tuesday and into March, it might become mathematically hard for one candidate to get a majority of delegates. Usually these things work themselves out and a clear nominee emerges, but that’s not guaranteed. The process could drag on through the primary season or even to the convention, hypothetically."
One possible 2020 candidate can be regarded as the clear frontrunner, if that concept has any meaning at this point. In the aforementioned CNN survey, Joe Biden beat the next three candidates combined, received 30 percent of the vote, compared to 14 percent for Sanders, 9 percent for O'Rourke and 5 percent for Cory Booker. But unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden doesn't have the entire party establishment behind him (if anything, they may be rallying behind O'Rourke). Perhaps more significantly, there are serious reservations about whether a man of Biden's age (he will turn 78 in 2020) and so strongly identified with the political establishment label (he served 36 years in the Senate before becoming vice president) could actually win the general election.
Most important of all, leading in the polls a full year before the first caucus or primary votes is nearly worthless. "I’m not sure how strong Biden and/or Sanders will be by the time voting starts," Kondik said. "Is their support 'hard?' Or is it just a remnant of name ID that will wither over the next 13-14 months? I genuinely do not know."
This brings us to the outcome that may be most likely in 2020 — a dark horse candidate will emerge, quite likely someone we don't take seriously at the moment.
There is ample historical precedent for that. During both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic presidential primaries, a larger-than-usual field of candidates were considered to be realistic prospects at various points in time, with no clear frontrunner in sight (save for Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine in 1972, who botched his own chances early on). On both occasions, the result was a previously obscure and somewhat surprising winner, albeit in very different directions. Sen. George McGovern prevailed in the 1972 primaries as an antiwar progressive true believer and practitioner of New Politics, while Jimmy Carter was nominated in 1976 because he was a dogged campaigner who convinced voters that a peanut farmer with a reputation for honesty would be a breath of fresh air in the aftermath of Watergate.
These dark horse candidacies had dramatically different outcomes. McGovern had to fight all the way to the Democratic National Convention to lock down his nomination, gave his acceptance speech long after midnight and chose a running mate with a history of mental health problems who later had to quit the ticket. He was swamped by Richard Nixon in one of the most one-sided national elections in history. By contrast, Carter grew as a politician during the lengthy primary season and narrowly defeated incumbent President Gerald Ford.
My sense is that these are the two possible directions the Democratic Party might head in 2020. If it chooses a latter-day McGovern — someone who appeals to the party faithful and can win the primaries because the bar for what is deemed "victory" has been lowered — they could get wiped out by Donald Trump. But if the size of the field forces the eventual nominee to become a better and tougher candidate, then we'll all look back and say it was a good thing that so many people threw their hats in the ring.
MATTHEW ROZSA
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
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