US Politics

US Capitol attackCapitol rioter facing charges for assaulting officers seeks asylum in Belarus California man caught on police camera punching officers given sympathetic interview on Belarus television AP in KyivTue 9 Nov 2021 11.09 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 11.21 ESTA US man who faces criminal charges for participating in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol is seeking asylum in Belarus, the country’s state TV has reported in a development likely to heighten tensions between the turbulent ex-Soviet nation and the United States.The man, Evan Neumann, 48, of California, acknowledged in an interview with the state TV channel Belarus 1 that he was at the Capitol on 6 January but rejected the charges, which include assaulting police, obstruction and other offenses. The channel aired excerpts of the interview on Sunday and promised to release the full version on Wednesday.“I don’t think I have committed some kind of a crime,” Neumann said, according to a Belarus 1 voiceover of his interview remarks. “One of the charges was very offensive; it alleges that I hit a police officer. It doesn’t have any grounds to it.” Neumann spoke in English but was barely audible under the dubbed Russian.US court documents state that Neumann stood at the front of a police barricade wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as a mob of pro-Trump rioters tried to force their way past officers. Prosecutors say Neumann taunted and screamed at the police before putting a gas mask over his face and threatened one officer, saying police would be “overrun” by the crowd.“I’m willing to die, are you?” prosecutors quoted Neumann saying to the officer.How a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol – visual guideRead morePolice body-camera footage shows Neumann and others shoving a metal barricade into a line of officers who were trying to push the crowd back before he punches two officers with his fist and then hits them with the barricade, according to court papers.Neumann was identified by investigators after someone who said they were a family friend called an FBI tip line with Neumann’s name and home town of Mill Valley, California. He was charged in a US federal criminal complaint, meaning a judge agreed that investigators presented sufficient probable cause that Neumann had committed the crimes.Neumann is one of more than 650 people who have been charged for their actions on 6 January, when the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol building and delayed Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.Neumann told Belarus 1 that his photo had been added to the FBI’s most wanted list, after which he left the country under the pretense of a business trip. Neumann, who owns a handbag manufacturing business, traveled to Italy in March, and then through Switzerland, Germany and Poland he got to Ukraine and spent several months there.Seditionaries: FBI net closes on Maga mob that stormed the CapitolRead moreHe said he decided to illegally cross into neighboring Belarus after he noticed surveillance by Ukraine’s security forces. “It is awful. It is political persecution,” Neumann told the TV channel.Belarusian border guards detained the American when he tried to cross into the country in mid-August, and he requested asylum in Belarus. Belarus doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.The US embassy in Belarus declined to comment. The Department of Justice said it does not comment “on the existence or non-existence of requests for apprehension to foreign governments”.The Belarus 1 anchors described Neumann as a “simple American, whose stores were burned down by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, who was seeking justice, asking inconvenient questions, but lost almost everything and is being persecuted by the US government.”In a short preface to the interview, the Belarus 1 reporter also said that “something” made Neumann “flee from the country of fairytale freedoms and opportunities” – an apparent snub towards the US, which has levied multiple sanctions against Belarus over human rights abuses and violent crackdown on dissent.‘Persecuted, jailed, destroyed’: Belarus seeks to stifle dissentRead moreBelarus was rocked by huge months-long protests after election officials gave the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, a sixth term in the August 2020 presidential election that the opposition and the west have denounced as a sham.Lukashenko’s government unleashed a violent crackdown on the protesters, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them. The crackdown elicited widespread international outrage.TopicsUS Capitol attackBelarusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS CongressThe president and Senate are the oldest in US history – what’s stopping a younger generation breaking through?Arwa MahdawiThere’s nothing wrong with senators being in their 70s and 80s – but perhaps it’s time to reassess our ideas of leadership Tue 9 Nov 2021 10.12 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 14.12 ESTNikki Haley should have joined the circus, because she is great at walking a tightrope. Ever since she left her position as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UN in 2018, Haley has kept on the right side of the former president, while simultaneously keeping a safe distance from Trumpism. She has criticised Trump just enough that she can cut ties with him should he become a liability; she has also backed him just enough to count him as an ally should he prove useful. Haley, who is expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, alternates between throwing red meat to Trump’s base and keeping one foot in polite society. Hers is a very polished populism.Haley’s balancing act was on full display last week, during an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, during which she was asked about the mental health of Joe Biden. Haley cannily avoided commenting directly on Biden, who turns 79 this month, but did make pointed remarks about the need for cognitive tests for ageing politicians. She was rude under the guise of reasonableness.“Let’s face it, we’ve got a lot of people in leadership positions that are old,” Haley said. “That’s a fact … this shouldn’t be partisan. We should seriously be looking at the ages of the people that are running our country and understand if that’s what we want.”Buried within the ageism, Haley has a point. Biden is the oldest sitting president in US history. Meanwhile, the current US Senate is the oldest in history, with an average age of 64.3 years. Dianne Feinstein, the oldest senator, is 88 and has held her California seat since 1992. She is closely followed by the Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, also 88, who has been in his job for four decades. Six senators are at least 80; 23 are in their 70s.There is nothing wrong with politicians being in their 70s or 80s. Experience can be an important asset, and, while we tend to associate youth with energy and innovative thinking, some of the oldest politicians in the US have the most dynamic ideas. Senator Ed Markey, 75, co-sponsored the green new deal. Bernie Sanders, 80, captured young people’s passion like no other US politician in recent years – as did Jeremy Corbyn, 72, in the UK. Meanwhile, fresh-faced Pete Buttigieg, 39, whose 2020 ambitions made him the first competitive millennial presidential candidate, ran on stale ideas. He is a McKinsey millennial, whose status quo platform resonates better with older voters than with his peers. You can sell out at any age.That said, it is worth asking if there is a reason why US leadership skews so old, particularly as the US is an outlier among the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in this respect. The New York Times noted last year that the average OECD leader is almost 25 years younger than Biden. Again, while it is good to have politicians above retirement age – there is a problem if it is because the political structure is making it hard for a new generation to rise to the top.The US system massively favours incumbents: members of the US Congress are typically re-elected about 90% of the time. That breeds complacency. It can also breed myopia. Barack Obama, for example, has admitted that fundraising for his 2004 Senate campaign made him more like his wealthy donors: “I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality and frequent hardship of the other 99% … I suspect this is true for every senator: the longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions.”Ultimately, it is not the age of our politicians we need to worry about. What matters is having a government that represents the people it serves. Age limits won’t solve that, nor will cognitive tests, but reassessing our ideas about leadership might. Truly great leaders are not the people who cling to power the longest; they are the ones willing to pass the baton to a new generation.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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OpinionLife and styleWhat does the word ‘woke’ even mean? We asked our panelistsMalaika Jabali, Laura Kipnis, Rebecca Solnit, Bhaskar Sunkara, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zaid Jilani and Derecka PurnellAOC and James Carville just got into a spat over the word. But what does it actually mean? Tue 9 Nov 2021 10.08 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 12.51 ESTMalaika Jabali: ‘Woke has become distorted beyond recognition’It’s mostly people who don’t understand the original connotation of “woke” who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we’re talking about “critical race theory” from Black scholars, “identity politics” from Black feminists, or “woke” from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable.Slang is organic. It arrives from particular conditions. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. And others will continue to co-opt and distort.
Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine
Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude.The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself; all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. Excessive. “Woke” is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator’s self-relation and self-delusions.I believe it’s more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics – I’m for social justice too! – though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal.Mr Davidson says things like: “If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames,” referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions,” says she, his equal in uprightness. Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the “good works”, the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. Compare to your Twitter feed.
Laura Kipnis is a writer. Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, will be out in February
Rebecca Solnit: ‘Woke was kidnapped and has died’Once upon a time, the past tense of “wake” left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke’s youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest – awakened them, you could say – and Woke was such a word.This fairy tale ends badly. Rather than kill Woke, they tried to turn him into a zombie mercenary sent out to sneer at those who were concerned about racism and other injustices. This backfired and “woke” became a marker of the not-OK Boomer, a bilious word whose meaning was more in who said it than in what it meant or mocked. In other words, Woke died. Cool young people were not sad that Woke was dead, because he was no longer their word, and mean old people were not sad because they did not know he was dead. The end.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Language on the left can be a problem’To be “woke” once meant to be alert to the continued realities of oppression, particularly the oppression faced by Black Americans. But today, its meaning has shifted. To be “woke” is to lack urgency about building the coalitions that can win over working-class people and actually redistribute money and power to the oppressed.This isn’t to say that progressives have to avoid questions of social justice to win a mythically conservative working-class, but that we need to acknowledge the reality that working-class people of all races want basically the same things: good jobs, secure housing, dependable health care, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Framing universal concerns with identity-focused messaging or language stolen straight from academia is a huge mistake.James Carville absolutely has a point when he talks about Democratic party messaging being too far removed from ordinary voters — including the party’s base of black and brown voters. But he’s quick to conflate unpopular rhetoric with popular demands like Medicare for All pushed by the figures he maligns like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders.Our language on some parts of the Left is a problem. But that’s an easier problem to fix than the fact that Carville and Clintonite Democrats have lost the trust of millions of Americans with their defense of elite interest and decades of unpopular policies. Progressive have a program that can win — we now just need the right way to communicate it and new approaches to organizing people around their most pressing economic concerns.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and a Guardian US columnist
Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Woke is not a viable descriptor’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. “Woke” is not, and has not been for some time now, a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains interested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.The term has been co-opted and diluted of meaning by lazy ideologues and bad-faith actors on the right, which is a shame, since it’s more poetic and evocative than any pithy substitute I can think of.The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language that is specific enough to persuade those who don’t already agree to consider the same old questions from new angles.Fairly or not, “woke” and “wokeness” now overwhelmingly signal that you’re not fundamentally interested in that rhetorical labor, and those who need the most convincing give themselves permission to stop paying attention.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf
Zaid Jilani: ‘You’re either with us or against us’The word woke loosely refers to a social media-fueled, leftwing political ideology that emerged in the English-speaking world in the early 2010s. The term is derived from the state of being awake to or conscious of structural inequalities in society and being hyper-aware of one’s own role in those inequalities. Someone who is woke is constantly inspecting every institution in society, looking for the presence of racism, sexism, and other forms of pervasive prejudice.What separates someone who is woke from someone who is merely progressive is not only this vigilance and awareness but a fervent belief that everyone must be enlisted into their social causes at all times and that the end justifies the means when battling injustice.Unlike traditional liberals, woke Americans place very little stake in value-neutral norms like freedom of speech and non-discrimination. As the antiracist activist Ibram Kendi says, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Kendi also informs us that you can only be racist or anti-racist, there is no middle ground, echoing former president George W Bush’s instruction that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.
Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Intercept and the Center for American Progress
Derecka Purnell: ‘You have to wake people up – then you get action’From street corners to kitchen tables, friends and I have laughed and shouted each other down about the state of Black America. We argue about whether our people are “asleep” – unaware of, uninterested in, unconcerned with the violence that white people inflict upon us. Such violence can be found in demeaning interpersonal interactions with individual white people, and in the structural white supremacist violence in our housing, hospitals, jobs and schools.If “sleep” prevents us from collectively resisting this savagery, then one must remember Malcolm X’s message: “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”Political expressions derived from Black activism, including “stay woke”, “Hotep”, “Black Lives Matter”, have strange careers. Like our heroes, they are lauded, branded, dehistoricized, co-opted and caricatured. For example, the Democratic strategist James Carville bastardizes “wokeness” as a “stupid”, inflexible commitment to ideas that seek to drastically improve society. His usage robs the term of its value to make us more politically aware and active on our terms. Why? James Baldwin explains that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” This rage threatens the status quo, what Carville and other wealthy, politically powerful people fight to protect.Ironically, Carville’s condemnation is exactly why Black people continue to tell each other to stay woke: elite white actors and institutions benefit from exploiting Black votes, activism and culture while telling us to bury our grievances about their violence. It’s how the Democratic party scribbles “Black Lives Matter” on banners for their conventions yet give more money to the police who kill Black people quickly.I suspect that, like his rightwing counterparts who are antagonistic to “critical race theory” and “white privilege”, Carville refuses to learn why Black people historically use wokeness to inspire our activism.I suggest he starts with Langston Hughes: “Negroes Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day They change their minds!” Or Malcolm X: “… there will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves … this type of thinking also brings an end to the brutality inflicted upon black people by white people and it is the only thing that will bring an end to it. No federal court, state court, or city court will.”
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
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OpinionDemocratsMessage to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to winMatthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaOur study finds that working-class voters respond better to economic policies than identity-based, activist-driven campaigns Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.20 ESTAs he set about disembowelling Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill last month, Joe Manchin paused to offer some cheerful advice for outraged progressives. “[A]ll they need to do,” said the West Virginia senator, “is elect more liberals.”There was something slightly perverse about Manchin counseling the leftwingers whose policy agenda he was helping tear apart: he sounded like a burglar recommending a home security system as he made off with his loot. And yet his point is undeniable: if progressives hope to gain more leverage in American politics, they must win more elections.If Democrats return to centrism, they are doomed to lose against Trump | Samuel MoynRead moreOf course, this is just what they have been trying to do. In the wake of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, an energetic cohort of progressives crashed into city halls, state legislatures, and Congress itself. In the House, “the Squad” may be the most visible avatar of this new leftwing politics, but the larger Progressive Caucus has grown from under 28% of all House Democrats in 2008 to over 43% today.Still, as the fate of Biden’s bill shows, leftwing influence on national politics remains limited. That’s because progressive gains have not been not responsible for changing the larger balance of power. By and large, progressives have replaced sitting Democrats in deep-blue districts. They’ve failed to prove themselves in contested seats, and have yet to win a major statewide election. Without expanding the Democratic base, progressive advances reflect a larger trend away from the party’s working-class constituency and toward educated urban professionals.American progressives aren’t alone facing this problem. Over the last half-century, center-left parties all around the world have suffered massive defections from their once-sturdy working-class electoral base. As labor unions have declined in size and power, and economies have shifted away from high-wage blue-collar jobs, millions of working-class voters have moved toward parties of the right. And though pundits obsess over the “white working class”, the phenomenon now clearly extends across racial lines, with non-white, non-college-educated voters breaking significantly toward Republicans since 2012.But in order to win more elections, especially in swing districts, both Democrats and progressives must win more working-class votes. The numbers here are just overwhelming: in 2020, well over 60% of American voters did not have college degrees. In Congress, over four-fifths of House seats – and 96 of 100 Senate seats – are chosen by electorates where 60% of the voters lack college degrees. For progressives to accept an inevitable decline in working-class support is to accept their position as a permanent and punchless minority.So how can progressives win back the working class? Here opinions divide sharply. Some liberal analysts argue that an increasingly professional-class Democratic party must restrain its own instincts to suit the preferences of less educated voters. These “popularists” urge liberal candidates to build their campaigns around the party’s safest, best-liked ideas, like lowering prescription drug prices, while tactically sidestepping less popular positions on immigration or police reform. In response, a range of progressive critics contend that such compromises with working-class opinion are either politically ineffectual – since candidate messaging doesn’t matter very much – or morally untenable, since, they say, it would mean replaying Bill Clinton’s rightwing racial pivot in the 1990s.In conjunction with Jacobin magazine and the public opinion firm YouGov, our team at the Center for Working Class Politics decided to dig deeper into this question than an ordinary survey would allow. Rather than polling voters on isolated policies or beliefs, we designed an experiment to test how potentially Democratic working-class voters respond to electoral matchups. By asking voters to choose between hypothetical candidates, who presented a range of personal characteristics and campaign messages, we were able to develop a richer portrait of voter attitudes at the ballot box. And by presenting this survey to a representative group of 2,000 working-class voters in five swing states – a much larger sample of this demographic than appears in most polls – we were able to focus on these voters in much greater depth.What we learned in the “Commonsense Solidarity” report may confound both sides of the ongoing debate. The strongest candidates in our sample made bread-and-butter issues their top priorities – jobs and the economy, rather than immigration and racial justice – and spoke about those priorities in universalist, rather than “woke”, identity-centered rhetoric. These differences were even more pronounced among the working-class voters that Democrats and progressives have struggled most to reach, including rural and small-town voters and voters in blue-collar jobs.In this sense, our findings support the view that working-class voters are sensitive to candidate messaging, and that progressives who want to win their support should put economic issues at the center of their campaigns. But does that mean that Democrats must either tack hard to the center, or abandon their effort to win back a fundamentally “conservative” working class, as some analysts have argued? Not at all.The voters in our sample preferred candidates who endorsed Medicare for All to those who supported an anodyne centrist alternative, “increase access to affordable healthcare”. And given a choice of political messages, they chose a populist, Bernie Sanders-style soundbite – pitting working-class Americans against wealthy elites – somewhat more often than a moderate, Biden-style message.Nor does our study suggest that Democrats must “play it safe” by avoiding discussions of racism. Working-class respondents strongly backed candidates who promised to “end systematic racism” over those who offered a bland pronouncement of “equal rights for all”. They did not punish female or non-white candidates – in fact, black candidates performed significantly better than any other group in our sample, even among white voters.Working-class voters will not punish candidates for advocating for civil rights. But when Democrats frame this struggle in a way that overshadows their commitment to delivering bread-and-butter goods, and when they adopt an activist-inspired, identity-based rhetoric, they are likely to lose working-class votes. Our survey turned up some very large gaps on this front. A populist candidate with a central focus on the economy earned 63% support, for example, while moderates and “woke” progressives with a focus on immigration or racial justice won under 50%.Combining a populist message with a candidate from a working-class background, meanwhile, stretched these gaps even further. While a moderate military veteran – the kind of Democratic candidate often celebrated by party leaders and the press – received just 51% support, a progressive populist teacher earned over 65%. Strikingly, these preferences were shared not only by Democratic voters, but the critical swing demographic of working-class independents.To be sure, a choice between hypothetical candidates is different from an actual campaign but unlike most other studies of this kind (using surveys or election data), our experimental approach allowed us to isolate the characteristics that either attract or repel working-class voters to a particular candidate.Last week’s elections offered one demonstration of what happens when workers’ issues are ignored. In Virginia, Democratic ex-governor Terry McAuliffe was lured into a culture war with Republican Glenn Youngkin, with Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved claiming headlines in the campaign’s final weeks. As economic issues disappeared from view, McAuliffe – a paradigmatic “woke” moderate with no ability to reframe the debate – found himself swamped by working-class defections. Where Biden had won Virginia voters without college degrees by seven points, McAuliffe lost them by 20.Joe Manchin’s arithmetic is unyielding. If progressives want to exert real power in American politics, they cannot be content to replace establishment liberals in deep-blue seats: they must also prove themselves as an alternative to the cautious centrism that swing-district Democrats prefer. The good news is that this doesn’t have to mean sacrificing bold economic policies or evocative populist rhetoric. But if progressives continue to insist that political messaging is inconsequential, or that it is impossible to adjust their program to the priorities of the working-class electorate, they risk condemning themselves to permanent irrelevance.
Matthew Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a contributing editor at Jacobin. Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia
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OpinionClimate crisisIf Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generationDaniel SherrellFailure to pass Build Back Better would disillusion a generation of voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.16 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 13.10 ESTDeep into the night last Friday, long past the hour when most Americans had ceased paying attention, Congress passed the $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill otherwise known as the BIF. Its passage was heralded as a victory for President Biden, and the daily news chyrons dutifully marked a point in his column. But beyond the horserace myopia of the Beltway – and especially among young people – the news came tinged with the threat of disaster. Because for those of us interested in sustained human civilization on a habitable planet, the most relevant fact about the BIF is this: without consequent passage of the clean energy and social welfare bill known as Build Back Better, the BIF alone will exacerbate the climate crisis.AOC says Republican who posted sword attack video ‘cheered on’ by partyRead moreThe reasons are manifold. The bill is riddled with exemptions and subsidies for corporations like ExxonMobil, whose lobbyists were caught bragging about their role in shaping the text. It invests in highways, bridges and airports that – in the absence of an aggressive drive to electrify cars and planes – will only add to emissions from the transportation sector. And the climate funding it does contain is focused not on drawing down emissions but on preparing Americans for worsening floods, fires and superstorms. If this is all we get, the message to young people is clear: Exxon will continue to be allowed to drown your homes, but not to worry, the government is investing in some life vests. Good luck!When it comes to passing the Build Back Better bill, the handful of extremist, Wall Street-backed Democrats who have obstructed it for months are now asking for something they have done very little to earn: trust. It would be one thing if congresspeople like Josh Gottheimer and Abigail Spanberger gave the impression of fully understanding the gravity of the climate crisis and pulling out all the stops to make a commensurate response politically possible. Instead, they come off as narrow-minded political animals, too blinkered by the game to see the world around them burning.It seems doubtful that any of them have read – much less internalized – the findings of the latest IPCC report. If she had, Representative Spanberger might have registered the irony in her insisting that Biden “be normal and stop the chaos”. As if it weren’t precisely those ideas long considered “normal” – massive fossil fuel subsidies, economic austerity, energy market deregulation – that are leading us straight into planetary chaos.Even more worrisome, their excuse for obstructing Build Back Better seems less than fully genuine. They insist they need to see an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office on how the bill would affect the national deficit. But they seemed little bothered when the CBO made it known that their BIF would expand it by $256bn. They also seem intent on ignoring the many analyses – including several from the treasury department itself – showing that Build Back Better would actually reduce the deficit. And that’s not to even mention the fact – still rarely mentioned, somehow! – that climate disasters cost Americans $1.9tn in 2020 alone.Even if their concern about the deficit is genuine, it’s grounded in a fundamental misapprehension of contemporary macroeconomics, which is undergoing a revolution in how it understands national debt and deficit spending. It’s as if they made some sort of superstitious pact, circa 1980, to admit no additional research from either economists or climate scientists. Even the former chief economist of the CBO made it clear that their insistence on a CBO score is ludicrous. “This is a really important package that will change people’s lives, and that should be the guiding principle,” she said in reference to Build Back Better. “The 10-year window [for CBO scoring] is arbitrary. Aiming for deficit neutrality is arbitrary – it’s arbitrariness on top of arbitrariness.”But despite all of these red flags, most of the self-styled House “moderates” – with a few notable exceptions, including Spanberger – have promised to eventually vote for Build Back Better in its current form. It is hard to overstate how much rests on that single-paragraph promise. A failure to pass Build Back Better would, at this point, amount to a betrayal so large it would disillusion an entire generation of young voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party itself. The muted applause for BIF would be completely drowned out by recriminations, and the party would stumble into the midterms in open civil war, having failed to pull us back from the brink of worldwide catastrophe.Maybe Abigail Spanberger would hold on to her seat, but she would probably find herself isolated and ineffectual in a Republican Congress, desperately clinging to her fantasy of “normality” as she cranked up the A/C on another blistering summer day.Meanwhile, President Biden’s legacy would be sealed. For all his adulation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he would have failed to live up to the one test that cemented his predecessor as a hero. It’s worth remembering that FDR passed the New Deal over the violent protestations of Wall Street bankers, some of whom tried to stage a coup to replace him. Biden faces a similar test on Build Back Better: can he discipline the wealthiest and most dangerous industry in history, who will stop at nothing to make the “moderates” kill the bill? Can he wrest the helm of history from the fossil fuel executives, who would just as soon watch it all go down in flames?If he fails to pass Build Back Better, China’s taunts will ring true, though for the wrong reasons. The American political system will have proven itself incapable of passing extremely popular policies to address the climate crisis – not because it was too democratic, but because it was never democratic enough.With stakes this high, it’s no wonder the Progressive Caucus leader, Representative Pramila Jayapal, asked each “moderate” to look her in the eye as they signed their name to the Build Back Better promise. That look might have contained the anxiety of my entire generation. Not only our fear of being played, not only our dread of inheriting a squandered planet, but our ongoing hope – despite all evidence to the contrary – that our leaders may actually choose to lead.
Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin Books) and a climate activist
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US politics‘We’re redefining what leadership looks like’: Asian Americans show rapid rise in US politicsWins this week mark significant step for community that’s been under-represented and borne the brunt of pandemic-driven racism Maya YangTue 9 Nov 2021 05.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 05.02 ESTAfter a series of historic wins across the US last week, Asian Americans will now serve as mayors and city council members in large cities including Boston, Seattle, Cincinnati and New York, signalling the rapid rise in Asian American political power.The victories mark a significant step forward for a diverse community that has seen historically low representation in political offices and in the last two years has borne the brunt of a rising tide of pandemic-driven anti-Asian sentiments.On Tuesday night, voters chose Boston city councilor Michelle Wu to serve in the city’s top political office. The 36-year-old Taiwanese American who was Boston’s first Asian American city councilor will serve as the city’s first mayor of color.“Growing up, I never ever thought that I would or could or should be involved in politics. I didn’t see anyone who looked like me in spaces of power. We are redefining what leadership looks like,” Wu told reporters.In Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval made history by defeating former Democratic Congressman David Mann, making the 39-year-old the first Asian American to hold the city’s mayoral post.The son of a Tibetan mother and Indian father, Pureval addressed a crowd saying: “Cincinnati is a place where no matter what you look like, where you’re from, or how much money you have, if you come here and work hard you can achieve your dreams.”Meanwhile in Seattle, Bruce Harrell, 69, who is of mixed heritage, is projected to become the city’s first Asian American mayor and second Black mayor. In New York City, five Asian Americans were elected to the city council, the most the council has ever had. The record-breaking group includes the first Korean Americans, first South Asian Americans and first Muslim woman to be elected to the council.Traditionally, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) mayors have been elected in places with significant Asian demographics, such as California and Hawaii. However, the recent rise in anti-Asian racism seems to have prompted a significant portion of Asian Americans to become more involved in politics. More than 9,000 anti-Asian incidents have been reported in the US since the pandemic began.“What’s different about mayoral elections is that this is a citywide office. To win at that level requires forming a broad coalition of support that’s certainly going to cross racial boundaries,” said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College specializing in American and ethnic politics.Sadwhani cited the spike in anti-AAPI hate as a key factor for increased political participation, saying, “The discrimination that AAPIs faced throughout the last two years during the pandemic has galvanized them politically and we’re seeing that in terms of the people who are choosing to run for office, as well as voters on the ground. When Asian Americans feel socially excluded or discriminated against, it typically does lead to greater political activism.”The AAPI population is ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse, but is under-represented in elected offices. AAPIs make up 6.1% of the national population. Yet, they consist of just 0.9% of elected leaders in the country, according to the Reflective Democracy Campaign.As one of the fastest growing demographics in the country, AAPIs also suffer from severe invisibility in the criminal justice sector. Southeast Asian Americans are at least three times more likely to be deported due to past criminal convictions than other immigrants.Of the 2,539 prosecutors that were elected across the country in 2020, only six were of AAPI heritage, or 0.24%. AAPIs also make up only 0.07% of county sheriffs.In March, after a 21-year old white man killed six Asian women and two others in the Atlanta area, many Asian American communities sought greater political recognition while vowing to stand against hate.Raymond Partolan, the national field director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting civic engagement across AAPI communities, spoke of the intensity he witnessed at rallies after the deadly shooting.“I’ve been working in the community organizing space for around the last ten years or so and I’ve never seen so much interest among AAPIs to involve themselves in the decision-making processes that happen at every level of government, and it’s truly inspiring,” said Partolan.The AAPI Victory Fund, a Super Pac that mobilizes AAPI voters and candidates, endorsed Wu and Pureval. Varun Nikore, the organization’s president, attributes their victories to a ripple effect that emerged through local community building efforts.“Getting to know your communities at that micro-local level ensures more long-term successes because you are forced to discuss kitchen table issues. This provides a roadmap for our community going forward,” Nikore said.Yet despite the celebratory attitudes towards the historic wins, some remain apprehensive towards their potential “tokenization”, fearing that traditional stereotypes may pigeonhole the incoming leaders.“I think by having the focus of [Wu] being hailed as the first female mayor of Boston, she’s being held to a greater standard than any other white man. People would be looking for her to fail rather than trying to see where she can succeed,” said Yasmin Padamsee Forbes, executive director of the Commonwealth of Massachussett’s Asian American Commission.As a result, Forbes urges people to look at what leaders like Wu and Pureval can bring to their cities and evaluate them according to how much they achieve, along with their platforms.“Whenever we have elected officials that share our racial background, it’s important for us to hold them accountable,” said Partolan, who echoed Forbes’ sentiments. “People don’t get a free pass in public office just because they share our racial background. We have to ensure that we elect people that share our values and that once they are in public office, we encourage them to move policies that are beneficial for everyone.”Nevertheless, this week’s victories still prove to be a major step forward in inclusive representation across the country.“We need thousands of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to run for local office so that we have the future pipeline for a statewide office and then federal office in this country,” said Nikore.TopicsUS politicsRaceBostonSeattleNew YorknewsReuse this content More

Donald TrumpMcConnell says Trump wrote foreword to his memoir. Trump says he didn’tSplit grows between the two Republicans as Trump says he told McConnell, ‘Why don’t you write it for me?’ Martin Pengelly@MartinPengellyMon 8 Nov 2021 09.31 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 11.41 ESTDonald Trump once described Mitch McConnell as his “ace in the hole” and wrote, in a foreword to the Senate Republican leader’s autobiography, that he “couldn’t have asked for a better partner” in Washington.Virginia victory gives some Republicans glimpse of future without TrumpRead moreExcept, according to Trump, he didn’t.Speaking to the Washington Post for a profile of the Senate minority leader published on Monday, Trump said he told McConnell: “‘Why don’t you write it for me and I’ll put it in, Mitch?’ Because that’s the way life works.”McConnell did not dispute Trump’s account, about the book The Long Game, telling the paper: “I really don’t have anything to add related to him.”The Post profile lands at a tricky time for Republican leaders. Last week’s stunning victory in the election for governor in Virginia was achieved by a candidate who kept Trump at arm’s length while deploying many of his tactics. But the former president remains a dominant presence, seemingly likely to run for the White House again.He and McConnell, the two most powerful men in the GOP, are firmly at odds over Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and over control of a party McConnell steers in the 50-50 Senate, which Democrats control via Vice-President Kamala Harris.McConnell’s support for the bipartisan infrastructure deal which the House sent to Joe Biden’s desk on Friday only deepened the divide. In a statement on Sunday, Trump said “all Republicans who voted for Democrat longevity should be ashamed of themselves in particular, Mitch McConnell”.The Post spoke to many who know and work with or against McConnell. The Illinois senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, spoke of being cloistered with him on 6 January, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election.Durbin said: “I thought to myself, ‘This could be a transformative moment. He appears to have taken this very seriously.’”McConnell voted to acquit Trump in his resulting impeachment trial, though he excoriated the former president on the Senate floor.John Yarmuth, a senior House Democrat from McConnell’s state, Kentucky, told the Post about working with McConnell on campaigns in their youth but said: “He never wanted to change the world. This is all about being, not doing.“He clearly doesn’t care about being labeled a hypocrite. It just doesn’t bother him. He is brazen about it. That’s one of the cynical sides of Mitch. He doesn’t care. If it’s expedient, he’ll do it.”In his interview, Trump emphasized his role, with McConnell, in passing tax cuts, slashing regulations and stocking the judiciary with conservatives, three on the supreme court. He also bemoaned McConnell’s failure to back his attempt to steal the election.The Post also noted a little-noticed split between McConnell and his daughter, Porter McConnell, who campaigns against big money in politics and against Republican attacks on voting rights. McConnell, the paper said, “declined to respond directly” when asked about his daughter’s activism.Also on Monday, the Hill reported that senior Republicans are worried controversial Senate nominees endorsed by Trump, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania prominent among them, could cost the party its chance to retake the chamber next year.Durbin said McConnell was now “looking at Trump, not in the rearview mirror, but looking through the windshield and realizing he’s going to have to live with this man in the Republican party for the foreseeable future”.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansUS SenatenewsReuse this content More