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FacebookUS urged to investigate deceptive Facebook ads tied to rightwing groupWatchdog calls for inquiry after Guardian investigation reveals ‘Green party’ ads were placed by conservative marketing firm Julia Carrie Wong@ More

The fight to voteUS voting rightsHow Trump’s big lie has been weaponized since the Capitol attackImmediately after the riot Republicans continued to object to election results – and efforts to restrict voting and push the big lie have only grown in the six months since The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkWed 7 Jul 2021 07.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 7 Jul 2021 08.38 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHours after the US Capitol was secured against a violent insurrection on 6 January, the Senate reconvened in a late-night session to move ahead with certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. It was a dramatic moment designed to send a clear message: democracy would prevail.“To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins,” the then vice-president, Mike Pence, said as senators reconvened. “As we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy.”“They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor.But while the attack on the Capitol failed on 6 January, the attack on US democracy has continued unabated. It continued immediately after the riot, when Republican lawmakers continued to object to the electoral college results in that late-night session, and has only grown in the six months that followed.“We saw the makings of the big lie between November and January, but the consequences of the big lie seem much worse now, six months later, than even in the midst of the big lie leading up to January 6,” said Ned Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University.In state capitols across the country, Republicans have weaponized lies about the 2020 election to push laws that make it harder to vote. They have embraced amateur inquiries into election results that have already been audited. And they have enacted measures that make it easier to remove local election officials from their posts, opening up the possibility of partisan meddling in future elections. A quarter of Americans, including a staggering 53% of Republicans, believe Donald Trump is the “true president”, a May Reuters/Ipsos poll found.“The fact that the January 6 insurrection didn’t scare us and prompt many Republicans to start aggressively rejecting those claims, and instead Republicans continue to embrace those claims as a justification for imposing additional restrictions means that our democracy remains in real trouble,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California.While Donald Trump and his allies failed in their effort to get local election officials to overturn the election, Republicans across the US have moved to make it easier to overturn future elections.After Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican appointee on the Michigan board of canvassers, refused to block the certification of his state’s election results, Republicans declined to reappoint him to a new term. In Georgia, Republicans stripped the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, of his role as chair of the state elections board after Raffensperger, a Republican, pushed back on Trump’s claims of fraud. Under a new law, the legislature will appoint the chair of the board, which now has the power to remove local election officials from their posts.In Arkansas, Republicans passed a new law authorizing a legislative committee to investigate election complaints and allows the state’s board of election commissioners to take over running elections in a county if the board believes there is an election violation “would threaten either a county’s ability to conduct an equal, free, and impartial election, or the appearance of an equal, free and impartial elections”. In Iowa, Republicans enacted a new law that imposes new criminal penalties on election workers for failing to adhere to election law.The most visible effort to undermine the election results continues in Arizona, where the Republican state senate authorized an unprecedented inquiry into ballots and voting equipment in Maricopa county, the largest in the state. The effort, funded by Trump allies, is being led by a firm with little experience in election audits and whose founder has expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen. It also comes after two previous county audits affirmed the results of the 2020 race.Even as experts have raised alarms about the Ariziona inquiry, which includes far-fetched ideas like looking at ballots for bamboo fibers, Republicans in other US states have embraced it. There are calls for similar reviews in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, among other places.Republicans have also continued the ethos of the 6 January attack by enacting measures that make it harder to vote after a presidential election that saw the highest turnout in nearly a century. In Georgia, the same new law that allows for interference in elections also requires voters to provide identification information both when they request and return a mail-in ballot. The same law also curtails the availability of mail-in ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited citizen challenges to voter qualifications, and prohibits volunteers from distributing food and water while standing in line to vote.In Florida, a state long praised for its widespread use of mail-in ballots, Republicans enacted a measure that significantly limits drop boxes and requires voters to provide identification information when they request a mail-in ballot. Iowa Republicans also passed a law that cuts the early vote period by nine days, and requires polls to close earlier.In Montana, Republicans tightened voter ID requirements, made it harder for third parties to collect and so voters can no longer register at the polls on election day – a move that will probably have a big impact on the state’s sizable Native American population. In Arizona, where mail-in voting is widely used, Republicans changed a state policy so that voters could no longer permanently remain on a list allowing them to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election.While Republicans ultimately weren’t successful in blocking the certification of Joe Biden’s win, there are still deep concerns that it could succeed next time.The Electoral Count Act, the law that governs the counting of electoral votes, appears to authorize state legislatures to step in and appoint electors in the event of a failed election, but offers no guidance on what would constitute such a scenario. If there is a dispute between the houses of Congress over a state’s slate of electors, the same federal law defaults to whichever group of electors has been certified by a state’s governor. Republicans are poised to take control of the US House in 2022, a perch from which they could wreak havoc when it comes time to count electoral votes.Federal law also says that Congress isn’t supposed to second-guess the certification of electors as long as states reach an official result by the so-called “safe harbor” deadline about a month after election day. But when members of Congress and senators objected to the electoral college results in January, Foley noted, there was little discussion of that deadline, which every state except Wisconsin met in 2020.Foley, the Ohio state professor, has been worried about the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act long before 2020, warning that Congress was ill-equipped to resolve a legitimately disputed close election. He has urged Congress to revisit and clarify the law before the next election crisis.But last year, he was alarmed at how far Trump and allies took their fight over the election, even with little evidence of fraud.“As I look ahead to 2024, I think the pathology that’s going on culturally with respect to acceptance of defeat, the inability to accept defeat, that is really, really dangerous,” he said. “That seems new in a way we haven’t seen.”TopicsUS voting rightsThe fight to voteUS Capitol attackUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Donald TrumpTrump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRemark shocked John Kelly, author Michael Bender reportsBook details former president’s ‘stunning disregard for history’ Martin Pengelly in Washington@ More

New YorkEx-police captain Eric Adams wins Democratic primary for New York mayorAdams, who tacked to center in large field of candidates, is expected to win in general election Adam Gabbatt in New York and Maanvi Singh in San Francisco and agenciesTue 6 Jul 2021 21.54 EDTFirst published on Tue 6 Jul 2021 20.03 EDTEric Adams, a former police captain, has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City after appealing to the political center and promising to strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing.Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor if elected. He triumphed over a large field in New York’s first major race to use ranked-choice voting.As of Tuesday evening, Adams had a lead of one point over his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia, according to the latest count of ballots. The Associated Press declared Adams the winner of the race shortly after a new round of vote totals was released.New York City’s tumultuous mayor’s race closes as voters struggle to chooseRead more“I grew up poor in Brooklyn and Queens. I wore a bulletproof vest to keep my neighbors safe. I served my community as a state senator and Brooklyn borough president,” Adams said in a statement shared on Twitter. “And I’m honored to be the Democratic nominee to be the mayor of the city I’ve always called home.”Tuesday’s updated vote count included some 125,000 absentee ballots. In-person and early votes were previously published on 29 June, when Adams had the lead.The winner of the Democratic primary is likely to win the mayoral election proper in November, given the left-leaning politics of the city and an unheralded Republican opponent. Curtis Sliwa, a talk radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels volunteer crime prevention group, won the Republican primary.Adams’ closest vanquished rivals included Garcia, the former city sanitation commissioner who campaigned as a technocrat and proven problem-solver, and the former city hall legal adviser Maya Wiley, who had progressive support including an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate known for his proposed universal basic income, was an early favorite but faded in the race.Adams, 60, is a moderate Democrat who opposed the “defund the police” movement. “We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” Adams said after three people, including a four-year-old, were shot and wounded in Times Square in May.“If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse. It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities,” he told supporters on the night of the primary.Adams speaks frequently of his dual identity as a 22-year police veteran and a Black man who endured police brutality himself as a teenager. He said he had been beaten by officers at age 15. He became a police officer in 1984 and rose to the rank of captain before leaving to run for the state Senate in 2006.While in the police department, he co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that campaigned for criminal justice reform and against racial profiling. After winning a state senate seat from Brooklyn in 2006, Adams made an impression with an impassioned speech favoring same-sex marriage rights in 2009, two years before New York’s state legislators passed a marriage equality bill.Adams also weathered a few controversies, including a 2010 report from the state inspector general that faulted his oversight of the bidding process to bring casino gambling to the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Adams had accepted campaign contributions from a politically connected group bidding for the gambling franchise.Adams was elected in 2013 as Brooklyn borough president, his current job.The city’s first experience with ranked-choice voting in a major election was bumpy. The New York City board of elections invited fresh criticism on Tuesday when it published the results after 7pm local time, having earlier pledged to reveal the totals at “brunch hours”.The delay came after the board managed to plunge the Democratic primary race into chaos last week, when it mistakenly included 135,000 “test ballots” in its vote tally.The mistake showed Kathryn Garcia, New York’s former sanitation commissioner, narrowing the gap on Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, to less than two points.Hours later, however, the board of elections said it had become aware of a “discrepancy” in its report. The elections board said its calculations had included “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records”.The error sowed confusion around the system of ranked choice voting, which was used for the first time in a New York City mayoral election this year.Adams, Garcia and Wiley all filed lawsuits last week seeking the right to review the ranked choice tally.Wiley said in a statement Tuesday that the board “must be completely remade following what can only be described as a debacle”. As for herself, she said her campaign would have more to say soon about “next steps.”On Tuesday morning, as voters speculated as to when the second batch of results would be released, the board of elections had adopted a glib tone on its Twitter feed.“We promise today’s release is more brunch special vs club hours,” the BoE tweeted. That tweet was sent at 8.48am, but it was well past most people’s definition of brunch hours by the time the results finally arrived.TopicsNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

US politicsMike Gravel obituaryUS senator for Alaska who read out the Pentagon Papers, an official study of the Vietnam war, to put them on the congressional record Michael CarlsonTue 6 Jul 2021 15.12 EDTLast modified on Tue 6 Jul 2021 15.13 EDTMike Gravel, the iconoclastic two-time Democratic US senator from Alaska, who has died aged 91, was best known for the day in 1971 when, in a meeting of the Senate subcommittee on building and grounds, he read for three hours from the Pentagon Papers, and put the entire document into the congressional record.The papers, a 7,000-page official study of the Vietnam war, which contradicted virtually everything the public had been told by successive governments, had been leaked to newspapers by one of its authors, Daniel Ellsberg, but the Nixon administration had won an injunction against their publication.The day after Gravel’s reading, the US supreme court, in New York Times Co v United States, quashed that prior restraint, and the papers were published, including Gravel’s own copy, by Beacon Press.Although he opposed much of US policy abroad, Gravel was also a business-oriented politician, whose major legislative accomplishment in the Senate may have been his exempting the trans-Alaska oil pipeline from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 introduced by the powerful Democratic senator Henry Jackson.Gravel’s exemption of 1973 needed a casting vote by the Republican vice-president Spiro Agnew to pass. Gravel could be a divisive force in his own party, and after his Senate career ended was often dismissed in Washington as a gadfly, but his shifting positions on the left-right spectrum were not unusual in Alaskan politics, where he also needed to overcome the idea that he remained an outsider.Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he was the son of French-Canadian immigrants, Alphonse Gravel, a builder, and Marie (nee Bourassa), and spoke French at home in his early years. He struggled at school – Assumption prep, in Worcester – and at 18 he decided to join the Israeli army fighting in Palestine.In New York, seeking advice on getting to Israel, he met Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of the novelist, who was involved in helping Russian immigrants. She told him to finish school. He returned to Assumption, where an English teacher helped him cope with dyslexia and coached him to graduation.After a year at Assumption college, and two at American International college back in Springfield, he faced the Korean war draft, and enlisted in the army. He served in Germany and in France, where his knowledge of French saw him assigned to spy on the French Communist party.After his discharge, he gained an economics degree (1956) from the school of general studies at Columbia University, New York. Moving to Alaska, not yet a state, he worked on the railways, sold real estate and became active in the Democratic party. In 1958 he lost his first election campaign, for the territory’s house of representatives. The following year he married Rita Martin, and went into property development. That year, too, Alaska joined the union.In 1962, his firm went bust, but he was elected to the state house, serving as speaker in his second term. In 1968 he entered the US Senate primary against Ernest Gruening, one of only two senators (along with Oregon’s Wayne Morse) to have voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that authorised President Lyndon Johnson to fully involve US forces in Vietnam. Gravel positioned himself as a supporter of the war effort. He won the primary, and despite Gruening running as an independent, then won a three-way race for the Senate.In Washington, Gravel established himself as a critic of the war, twice fighting extensions of the military draft, including once by filibuster. He worked against allowing nuclear testing in Alaska, but also opposed legislation to designate massive amounts of Alaskan land as national parks protected from development. As well as joining Republicans to pass the pipeline, he aligned with conservative southern Democrats to preserve the filibuster they cherished to protect “states’ rights”.In 1972, Gravel published Citizen Power: A People’s Platform, detailing his positions on all major issues. When the presidential candidate George McGovern wanted to have the Democratic convention select his vice-president by a vote, Gravel added to the chaos by nominating himself. McGovern eventually selected Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running-mate (although after revelations he had been treated with electric shock therapy for depression, Eagleton was forced to withdraw).After winning a second term in the Senate in 1974, Gravel faced scandals when a staff memo detailing plans to raise funds from oil companies was leaked, and when he was accused of having been set up in a “sex for votes” scandal (he admitted having the sex, but denied changing a vote), which also cost him his marriage. He was defeated in the 1980 Senate primary by Clark Gruening, Ernest’s grandson, with the help of Republican votes under Alaska’s open primary system. After the Senate, Gravel’s career as a property developer did not flourish; he lost his Senate pension in his 1981 divorce. In 1984 he married Whitney Stewart, an aide to the New York senator Jacob Javits, and her money helped support the couple. Gravel began a foundation to support direct democracy, through referendums, then became chair of the Alexis de Tocqueville Foundation, with similar aims.In 2006 Gravel announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidency, and in the early democratic primary debates stole the show, arguing that US foreign policy was neither altruistic nor defensive in nature. The attention did not translate into funding or votes. He switched to the Libertarian party, to which by now he seemed more naturally attuned, with what was becoming his increasingly populist position, but failed to win their nomination.Although he made gestures toward the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential races, his efforts were hamstrung by his propensity to take the positions, on everything from relations with Iran to UFOs and 9/11 conspiracies, that pushed him into gadfly territory.He became chief executive of a company producing medical marijuana, and in 2018 published an updated edition of People’s Power. In 2020 he used his remaining campaign funds to found the Gravel Institute to promote progressive politics. He is survived by his wife and a son, Martin, and daughter, Lynne, from his first marriage.TopicsUS politicsUS SenateAlaskaobituariesReuse this content More

HackingRansomware hackers demand $70m after attack on US software firm KaseyaBetween 800 and 1,500 businesses around the world, including supermarkets and dentists’ offices, affected by attack R More

OpinionUS politicsAmerica’s left can’t afford to be silent on crime. Here’s how to talk about it and winBen DavisPeople have a right to safety. That’s why we must acknowledge crime and insist that we have the best solutions to address its root causes Tue 6 Jul 2021 06.12 EDTLast modified on Tue 6 Jul 2021 10.33 EDTIn the wake of last summer’s mass uprisings against the police state that killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among so many others, many on the progressive left believed that real change was imminent. Unprecedented numbers of people poured into the streets, day after day, week after week, in the midst of a global pandemic. Polls showed a massive upsurge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement. So-called establishment politicians appeared to be on the back foot, with lawmakers in Minneapolis going so far as to pledge to abolish their police department and replace it with a community-based public safety model. Large municipalities across the country saw a wave of action, from calls to remove police officers from schools to more demands to defund police departments. Politicians and public figures who had previously been loth to wade into issues of police brutality unequivocally acknowledged the need for drastic reform. Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of police, and the months of protest that followed, felt like an inflection point – at long last, elected officials and the general public alike seemed jolted out of the usual refrains. Enough was enough.Yet just over a year later, the state of policing appears largely unchanged. Almost no US cities have reduced their police budget – some, in fact, have expanded them – and efforts toward the goals of the defund movement have mostly stalled. In addition, a small but notable rise in crime since last summer has changed the picture. While some of this comes from cynical and nakedly misleading crime statistics produced by police departments, and much of it is media narrative, the truth is that many people do not feel safe. Support for BLM has fallen in the past year while support for the police has dramatically risen. This is something people care about, and defensive explanations that this is a bogus narrative are not going to cut it. The left needs a compelling counternarrative around crime in addition to our critique of policing. It is clear that street action and grassroots legislative pressure is not enough: the left needs to win power at the local level, where most police budgets are controlled, with a clear mandate for radical action around crime and policing.Since the protests, however, many Democratic cities have elected candidates who are vocally pro-police. Most notable is the mayoral election in New York City – the epicenter of the resurgent American left – where all the major candidates vocally rejected defund efforts, some after supporting these efforts last summer. The apparent victory of former cop Eric Adams, who heavily focused his campaign on opposing any efforts to defund the police, has been portrayed as a referendum on calls to defund the police. His campaign was powered by widespread support among working-class Black voters in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx – the same voters who gave progressives a surprising win in 2013. Even if Adams loses the election due to the new ranked-choice system, polling shows him taking an astonishing 83% of Black voters in the final round. He framed his support for a more muscular police department through a racial justice lens, claiming that cutting policing would hurt communities of color as “Black and brown babies are shot in our streets”. This is a narrative that has been difficult to counter for a left that is comfortable talking about policing but can sometimes be uncomfortable talking about crime.The left and the defund movement’s goals seemed so close just a year ago, but as the momentum of street protest alone has once again turned into the grinding work of long-term organizing in the electoral arena, we need a reassessment and change in strategy. This means building an overarching shared program on crime that connects with working-class voters at the ballot box in the same way left candidates across the country have on jobs, housing and police brutality. While the nascent left now has an electoral constituency and has increased its elected representation many times over, it has still been unable to build a base in large swaths of Black working-class communities in particular. To fix this, and to actually implement the demands of the defund movement, the left needs a message on crime rather than just policing. Crime overwhelmingly affects the working class rather than the wealthy and is a symptom of neoliberalism as much as job precarity, student debt, lack of access to medical care, and all the other issues the left talks about. Police themselves are in effect an austerity program: replacing needed social services with a punitive force that addresses these problems after they occur. After all, prison cells are cheaper than houses.The solution is a redistributive agenda that ameliorates these causes and prevents crime. As long as we live under the conditions of neoliberal austerity, without providing for the basic needs of citizens, crime will continue to exist. The left cannot run from this; we must acknowledge it and respond forcefully. Talking about crime can be a winning issue for the left if it is explicitly part of an overall program of redistribution of wealth, investment in communities, and guaranteeing a society that provides safety and security for all of its members, not just those at the top. We must emphasize that people have a right to safety, and this is the only program that truly provides that.Though the left has failed to accomplish its goals around policing at the municipal level, it is also true that the defund message is not necessarily anathema to voters. Leftwing candidates who have campaigned on defunding the police and abolishing prisons have won a number of decisive victories, including in many areas with large Black populations. After much media chatter about a backlash to his criminal justice reform efforts, the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, won a resounding victory, capturing more than 80% of the vote in many majority-Black precincts. Last year, after a relentless opposition campaign attacking her support for defunding the police, Janeese Lewis George won a council seat to represent a majority-Black ward in Washington DC. Notably, the former Queens district attorney candidate and abolitionist Tiffany Cabán, won majority support in working-class Black-majority areas that Adams handily swept on the same ballot.Adams’s likely election has a number of confounding factors: he made his political bones in large part as a Black police officer who was willing to publicly advocate for police reform. What his success reveals is that voters can hold muddled, often contradictory, political views: Polls show, for example, that a majority of Black voters support the Black Lives Matter movement, believe police treat Black people unfairly, distrust the police, and simultaneously want more police in their neighborhoods. Fundamentally, people want to feel safe in their communities. Though many people of color do not trust the police, we have yet to successfully articulate an alternative. While activists on the left cannot tail public opinion, shifting our views to follow only what is popular, we also cannot afford to be out of touch with the working class. Instead, we must be the next link in the chain, connecting the organic demands of the working class with more radical demands, pulling the movement forward without losing the chain as a whole.While there is scant evidence that defunding the police is a surefire losing issue among working-class communities of color, it has also not resonated well enough to provide a decisive electoral mandate. Defunding the police – which calls for reallocating public funds from a bloated, militarized police force to necessary, life-saving services – is both a moral necessity and commonsense policy. To actually accomplish this, however, the left needs a comprehensive program on crime and policing that resonates with working-class voters. This requires connecting our vision on crime and policing to proven, election-winning issues such as good jobs, Medicare for All, and housing – in other words, people’s immediate, material needs and desire for safety and security. The key is to make the connection between defunding the police and other foundational elements of any left program: investment in communities and an overall vision of a society that ensures everyone’s needs are met.On the same day that Adams appeared to win the mayoral race in New York City, a socialist candidate on the opposite side of the state pulled off an unexpected upset in Buffalo. India Walton, an open prison abolitionist, unseated the longtime incumbent Byron Brown to win the Democratic nomination for mayor in the state’s second-largest city. Walton is a prison abolitionist, and her platform in effect called for defunding the police on a large scale, although notably, the words “defund” and “abolish” do not appear on her campaign site.Walton told the New York Times that rather than emphasizing defund, “[W]e say we’re going to reallocate funds. We’re going to fully fund community centers. We’re going to make the investments that naturally reduce crime, such as investments in education, infrastructure, living-wage jobs. Nothing stops crime better than a person who’s gainfully employed.” Her message is hyper-focused on the types of social programs that provide material benefits to her constituents. She links defunding the police to a broad redistributive agenda in a way that emphasizes the role of class struggle and the problems inherent to policing without using alienating or activist-oriented language. Her victory in a heavily working-class city provides a clear path forward for left candidates.This is not to say that the left should abandon the phrase “defund the police”. It is a clear, self-evident demand that has mobilized millions, engendered progressive coalitions, and opened the door for people to imagine what a future without prisons and police – or at least one that is far less reliant on them – might look like. But in order to take the next step from protest to implementing policy, the left needs to both sustain energy in the streets and elect legislators who are able to exercise power and achieve movement demands. The left must emphasize a positive program and make the case for redirecting funds from unaccountable, violent police departments back into the community. This is the only serious approach to preventing crime. Our task is to win; to do this, we need a message on crime that not only refuses to shy away from the problem but also provides a clear, mobilizing vision for the future.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America
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