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      Alternate Reality Is All the Rage in Election Time America

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      It should be obvious by now that “reality” has Americans very confused. This is nothing new. This happened when the word “reality” somehow became a synonym for fantasy, delusion, illusion and fake. I am not sure when this happened in the American lexicon, but I am sure that there is next to nothing real about any “reality” show. This observation becomes more worthy of note each day as “reality” is manipulated to feed fantasy narratives.

      First, there were “alternative facts.” Now, the oxymoronic notion of “alternate reality” is exploding its way into the vernacular. There used to be something called “parallel universe” that seemed to sum up the world inhabited by delusional people, particularly during delusional episodes. “Alternate reality” somehow seems more dangerous.

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      What we are witnessing in America at the moment is nothing short of the normalization of fantasy, delusion, illusion and fakery as a substitute for facts, truth and content in public discourse. Once this happens to a society, the negative impact on public policy cannot be overstated. Historic examples are everywhere, but just take a moment to reflect on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the destructive pathology of McCarthyism in mid-20th-century America. Those examples and the toxins they injected into the body politic still resonate.

      The persistence of white supremacy in America and ethnic purity in Europe is the spawn of one earlier “alternate reality.” The highly charged message that leftists and Marxists and socialists are burrowing into every corner of American life is the grotesque spawn from the other earlier “alternate reality.”

      A Critical Time

      So, at this critical juncture in America’s political journey, there should be no tolerance for any normalization of any “alternate reality.” Yet everywhere one looks, words are being reworked to create the space in which fantasy and delusion can reign supreme. Just two examples should be enough to make this point.

      First, when did an assault rifle become a “long gun”? Just within the last few weeks, a 17-year-old in Wisconsin murdered two protesters with an assault rifle — not a long gun or a short gun, an assault rifle. Second, when did “walked back” enter the vocabulary to describe someone trying to correct blatant falsehoods purposefully uttered?

      Within the same few weeks, and even more of a threat to public safety, the current commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration “walked back” a blatant public lie about the efficacy of a therapeutic treatment for COVID-19 offered originally to please Trump while knowingly posing a threat to the rest of us.  “Walked back” sounds like the first step on a road to redemption for some minor miscue, not an effort to excuse a purposeful falsehood that never should have been uttered in the first place.

      With a presidential election looming, what passes for the responsible media in America now features more “fact checks” than facts. Now, with “alternate reality” apparently all the rage, the media have cleverly added “reality checks” to their arsenal.

      It is long past the time when anyone should believe that the nation can be saved by tortured linguistics. It is time for a new and long overdue reverence for facts to simply overwhelm the untrue and delusional that pollute our public discourse. It is time for direct and specific language that may make some people uncomfortable. And it is surely time to stop trying to save the sensibilities of those who wallow in their own “reality.”

      Trump is a venal and pathological liar, and those who lie for him are at best dangerous collaborators. So, enough pretending it might be something else, hoping that if enough apologists get airtime, fiction will morph into truth. For those who are made uncomfortable by these uncomfortable truths, it is time to suck it up, admit that you have been conned and make those who took advantage of your ignorance pay a price for the harm that they and you have caused the nation.

      Discomfort Is Everywhere

      These are harsh words, and they are not written with kindness at their core. They are written at a time when fear and anxiety are being peddled by Trump, the Republican Party and all those smarmy people in their orbit. The rest of us are the losers, big time. The list is long but should not need to go any further than the almost 200,000 dead souls sacrificed in the American coronavirus pandemic at an altar of incompetence, narcissism and mendacity.

      Americans have reached a point where discomfort is everywhere, but is it enough discomfort to act individually and collectively to confront the unfolding threat of another four years of the Trump scourge and Republican Party complicity? Anyone who thinks that some cathartic unity will emerge from all of this isn’t paying much attention. Rather, all the roads of our discontent must merge at this time to meet the singular threat.

      It is for sure that if the effort is successful, some of those same roads will diverge again. But then, if our institutions hold, there will be new paths to progress and a much clearer picture of the reality of today’s America and the factual foundation that must inform this place and time. In that reality, some of us will again be able to dream of transformational change.

      But make no mistake. If the nation does not collectively act now to rid itself of the rot at its core, the road to the national discomfort required for transformational change will get even darker.

      *[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Deconstructing the Powerful and Persistent Russiagate Meme

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      The frontier between legitimate political analysis and fake news in the US has never been easy to draw. Politicians and polemicists have attempted to impose the idea that only established corporate networks can be trusted to steer clear of fake news. Content on topics they consciously neglect to cover is written off as fake news.  

      Conversely, any idea, incident or minor fact — whether real or not — that appears to comfort officially approved talking points will easily be “confirmed” and employed as evidence to support the spoken or unspoken agenda of “respectable” media. Last week, American journalist Glenn Greenwald provided recent examples of the flagrant abuse of the notion of confirmation.

      As storytellers, politicians and media presenters prefer to suggest simple links between real (and sometimes imaginary) effects and their probable causes. They believe that readers and listeners prefer simple narratives that confirm existing beliefs. This is a founding principle of the culture of hyperreality that pervades political news in the US.

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      The public has begun to react. Increasingly, Americans realize that their news has become profoundly unreliable. A Pew survey published on August 31 revealed that 80% of Americans feel that the news is influenced by corporate and financial interests. Unfortunately, they lack the means and possibly also the curiosity to understand how that influence works.

      Russiagate, a prime example of news pushed by the Democrats and “designed” by the corporate media four years ago, is still in the headlines. Reduced to its simplest form — a correspondence of cause and effect — the message is patently absurd. It requires maintaining the belief that so long as the Russian government has access to the internet, elections in the US will never be able to produce reliable results. Because both the Russian government and the internet will continue to exist for decades to come, democracy in the US is officially dead.

      Some politicians, mainly Democrats, and their allied media outlets have an interest in promoting this belief. The New York Times has doggedly maintained a strategy of regularly presenting new evidence of activity by Russians with the aim of demonizing Russia as the unique source of content designed to undermine US democracy while conveniently ignoring all the others, including pervasive domestic tampering.

      The most recent example appears in an article with the title, “Russians Again Targeting Americans With Disinformation, Facebook and Twitter Say.” Its authors, Sheera Frenkel and Julian E. Barnes, have found new evidence that “in April, Facebook removed a Russian-backed operation in Ghana and Nigeria that was targeting Americans with divisive content.” Like Satan himself, Russia is everywhere.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Divisive content:

      Any news item that calls into question the unparalleled goodness of the US political and economic system promoted by its two major political parties and suggests that it may be legitimate to contest the status quo

      Contextual Note

      No rational being would doubt any of the following isolated facts:

      The internet is a global platform for communication and exchange
      People all over the world use internet tools called social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
      These two dominant platforms are US corporations
      Social media platforms thrive on participation from every corner of the globe
      The dominant platforms work within the tradition that sees freedom of expression as a political right derived from the US Constitution
      Freedom of expression opens the door to conspiracy theories, propaganda, fake news stories, deepfakes, doxing, stalking, cyberbullying, revenge porn, identity theft and other antisocial or criminal activities in the land of opportunity known as cyberspace
      None of the facts cited above is controversial or even debatable. But there are subtler ones that are often hidden from observers’ attention. For example, this one never mentioned by the media: The people of all other nations, including Russians, are interested in US politics not just because they are curious about how another population manages its affairs, but also because those affairs have a dramatic impact on their own lives.

      Embed from Getty Images

      American media and Democratic politicians appear to consider foreign interest in US politics a violation of America’s political space. They are right to condemn any action that interferes directly with electoral processes. But using the communication tools available to all is not interference. Americans should be the first to recognize these forms of expression as examples of a modern skillset created and promoted by their own culture: marketing. It’s a science in which anything that falls short of breaking specific laws is legitimate.

      Russian political leaders can express themselves in a variety of ways. So can the British, the Israelis, the Saudis or indeed any nation that cultivates explicit or subliminal marketing. Those leaders can use official government communication channels to proclaim policy and vision. They can pay for lobbyists in Washington. They can (and definitely do) use their intelligence networks to spread messages using legitimate and devious means. They can also simply encourage enterprising private citizens to further their explicit or implicit aims.

      Random citizens of all nationalities — moved either by curiosity, personal concern, financial interest or loyalty to a government they identify with — can do the same thing. Individual Americans have done so in Hong Kong without necessarily being piloted by the CIA. This inevitably happens so long as freedom is not totally suppressed.

      Those who represent established interests may deem this “divisive.” But it cannot reasonably be called manipulation of democracy or interference in electoral processes. The current global system of the internet is dominated by impressively wealthy private interests whose strategy is to encourage and reward any form of successful influence. The worm is at the core of the apple, not on its surface.

      The Times article demonstrates the absurdity of its Russiagate campaign. Frenkel and Barnes write: “Researchers are also concerned about homegrown disinformation campaigns, and the latest Russian effort went to some lengths to appear like it was made in the United States. In addition to hiring American journalists and encouraging them to write in their own voices, the Peace Data website mixed pop culture, politics and activism to appeal to a young audience.”

      The evil Russians are simply paying talented Americans banished from the mainstream by corporate money to speak in total sincerity. What could be more American? The Supreme Court established that “money is speech.” Russiagate is a predictable consequence of a system designed to reward anyone with cash to pay for content.

      Historical Note

      The media have begun constructing their preferred history of the latest Russian felon, a website called Peace Data. Defending the corporate monopoly on the news, The New York Times describes Peace Data as an example of “a more covert and potentially dangerous effort by Moscow” that uses “allies and operatives to place articles, including disinformation, into various fringe websites.”

      The Times cites the testimony of one of Peace Data’s American authors, who explains that the website simply asked him to express his views as someone who “had frequently challenged whether Mr. [Joe] Biden represented the progressive values of the Democratic Party.” Can allowing Americans to express themselves be called manipulating electoral processes?

      The funding of the website has been traced to Russia. But if the Russians didn’t create or even significantly edit the content, the fact that it is “divisive” simply reflects real divisions within US society. The source of division is none other than Biden’s policies, which many Americans banned from the corporate media happen to disagree with.

      It should be noted that any publication is likely to run some form of disinformation. The Times itself does so consistently, never more egregiously than in its push to invade Iraq in 2003. Its Russiagate coverage for the past four years has simply maintained a longstanding tradition.

      The seasoned journalist Joe Lauria deconstructs the Peace Data story in an article for Consortium News. Describing a website that “failed to gain significant traction,” he scoffs at “what the FBI calls a threat to American democracy.” In contrast, The Daily Beast decided to play the Russiagate game. Its article with the title, “She Was Tricked by Russian Trolls—and It Derailed Her Life” tells the story of a Peace Data author, Jacinda Chan. Only at the end of the piece do we learn that the supposed victim, a talented disabled woman, not only bears no grudge but rejects the Russiagate paranoia The Daily Beast is promoting: “To this day, Chan says she still doesn’t believe Facebook and the FBI’s investigations that show Peace Data was a front for Russia’s troll factory.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Next President Needs to Learn From Past Mistakes

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      Thirteen years ago, in summer 2007, I wrote a memo for the future president of the United States. The one who would take office in 2020.

      At the time, I had no idea who would win the 2008 presidential election, much less an election in the distant future. In summer 2007, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner, ahead of second-place Barack Obama by as much as double digits. Rudy Giuliani was on top of the polls for the Republican Party, with John McCain trailing behind him. I figured, wrongly, that it would stay that way.

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      One year later, in summer 2008, both Obama and McCain would come from behind to secure their parties’ nomination. And I would predict in a TomDispatch piece that Obama would win the election, serve two terms and leave the US in a perilous place in 2016 because of his policies of “muddling through.” Well, I got that part right.

      But in summer 2007, all I could focus on was the relative decline of the United States, as seen with “2020 hindsight.” The subprime mortgage crisis was unspooling that summer, the Bush administration was still sending more US troops to Iraq as part of its “surge” and the Chinese economy was growing by 14.2%.

      Casting my mind 13 years into the future, I tried to imagine which of these three factors — Iraq, financial crisis, China — would prove most salient in explaining the downward trajectory of US standing in the world.

      Here’s what I wrote back in 2007.

      Memo to the President 2020

      “As a member of the transition team, I’ve been asked to give a backgrounder on the ‘loss of global influence’ issue that played such a major role in the last election. I’ve submitted my study entitled End of Empire and I would encourage you to read my full analysis. I’ve been told that you might not have the time to read all three volumes. As a historian, I find it extraordinarily difficult to boil this question down to 750 words. But I will try. 

      Historians are divided into roughly three camps on the causes behind the end of the unipolar system headed by our country. The largest camp is the Iraq Syndrome group. They argue that the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the critical, history-changing moment. As you well know, the invasion turned into an unsuccessful 10-year occupation that sapped the U.S. economy and significantly eroded U.S. reputation in the world. More damaging, however, was the syndrome that followed the war. The unpopularity of the war made it increasingly difficult for the United States to launch military operations and virtually impossible to solicit international support. Although the Democrats tried to maintain high military budgets through 2010, they ultimately had to make significant cuts in order to salvage the economy. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      The second camp is generally called the China Rising group. These historians, influenced by the world-systems work of Wallerstein, locate the end of U.S. influence in shifting geopolitical power and particularly the growing influence of China. As of February 2019, the Chinese economy is now larger than ours, though we still maintain a lead in per-capita GNP. More importantly, China’s turn toward multilateralism in the early part of this century caught us by surprise. The transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into the premier international security mechanism, with its own peacekeeping forces and development bank, undercut both NATO and traditional U.S. bilateral alliances. When the EU became a member of the SCO in 2014, the transatlantic alliance was effectively over. 

      The Iraq Syndrome and the China Rising arguments are familiar and persuasive. But I do not believe that they fully explain our fall. The third camp, to which I belong, is called the Subprime group. Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world. 

      As you might remember, the United States experienced a significant housing bubble beginning in 2001. Americans became obsessed with buying houses, and selling houses. The banks devised a way of lending money to people who ordinarily would not have enough credit to buy a house. This was called the sub-prime loan. Without going into the details — please see Chapters 2-8 in Volume One of End of Empire — I will simply remind you of the rising number of foreclosures in the summer of 2007, the bankruptcy of lenders, the failure of hedge funds, the collapse of retail, the devaluation of the dollar, and the coordinated global bank interventions that turned out to be only a stopgap measure. 

      At the time, U.S. economists predicted that the housing market would recover by 2009. That didn’t happen. The subprime crisis revealed not only the underlying fragility of the domestic U.S. economy but the global economy as well. It is a common fallacy to draw parallels between household economics and the functioning of the national economy. However, in this case, I have argued that the parallel did apply. Average Americans, with their large amounts of debt, had to give up their prized possessions, that cornerstone of the American dream, the house. So, too, did the United States, with its nearly $9 trillion national debt, have to give up its global position, its “house” so to speak. 

      Historians in the two other camps overlook this simple and rather elegant explanation. Yes, the Iraq War was a tremendous drain on U.S. resources and thus a classic case of imperial overstretch. Yes, China played the multilateral card at just the right time and thereby built an international reputation. But it was a handful of greedy mortgage lenders that served as the catalyst. The market correction that followed the subprime crisis in fact turned out to be a much larger geopolitical correction that restored a certain balance to international affairs. Finally, with 2020 hindsight — to use this year’s most popular catch phrase — we can see that Iraq and China pale in comparison to the cold, hard bottom line. As you repeatedly said on the campaign trail, quoting one of last century’s most enduring lines, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’” 

      Fact-Checking the Memo

      Before evaluating my central argument, let’s see what I got right with the three factors. The occupation of Iraq was indeed unsuccessful in many respects, though it lasted officially for only eight years, not a full decade as I predicted. US troops returned in 2014 as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, and approximately 5,000 are still there today (though Trump has announced a reduction to 3,500 by November).

      The debacle of the Iraq War has deeply affected US military thinking. It has made it more difficult for the United States to mobilize popular support and international backing for military campaigns. But during the Obama era, the US largely shifted from “boots on the ground” to war at a distance through airstrikes and drone warfare. The military budget, as a result of economic pressures, peaked in 2010 at $849 billion and then began to fall (just as I predicted but not as significantly as I would have liked to see).

      Embed from Getty Images

      China has steadily strengthened its global position since 2007. The US economy remains larger than the Chinese economy, as measured by nominal GDP. But if you look at GDP by purchasing power parity, China surpassed the US in 2017. Either way, of course, China is still behind the United States in GDP per capita. Whether China on balance has become economically more powerful than the US remains controversial.

      What is not controversial, however, is China’s creation of a rival multilateralism. It decided to do this not through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as I predicted, but through a set of institutions that it could more easily control: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank it launched in 2014 and the various “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiatives that it started in 2013. Many European countries, by the way, joined the AIIB, over the objections of the US. Those defections didn’t end the transatlantic relationship, but they certainly weakened it.

      At the moment, the US is focused on China’s nationalism and the more assertive foreign policy of Xi Jinping. But even as it clashes with certain of its neighbors — India, Vietnam — China remains more focused on building a web of strong economic and diplomatic relationships around the world. And that makes China a more powerful rival for global influence than the flexing of its muscles in its neighborhood.

      Finally, let’s take a look at the US economy. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 turned into a full-blown financial crisis the following year when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. Nearly 10 million Americans lost their houses to foreclosure between 2006 and 2014, and less than a third of them would buy another house. In 2008, 2.6 million Americans lost their jobs. The housing market didn’t recover by 2009. But the Obama administration stabilized the economy with a significant bailout of the banks, and the US economy would eventually recover.

      But the financial crisis, in part because of the bank bailouts, also helped shift enormous resources to the wealthy. The resentment that caused, in the US and elsewhere around the world, helped generate a wave of right-wing politics that eventually deposited Donald Trump in the White House.

      Trump and the Next President

      In 2007, I could not have predicted the ultimate political triumph of Donald Trump. In fact, up until election night 2016, I still expected him to go down to defeat. Instead, I predicted that the backlash to Obama’s tepid, middle-of-the-road politics would hit in 2020. America B, the large part of the country that got hit hard by the financial crisis and never recovered, was itching for revenge. As I wrote in June 2016:

      “As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those ‘others’ hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.”

      Today, America faces a much more serious economic crisis. The stock market has barely taken any notice, as it heads back to its historic highs. Nor has Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires suffered from all the business closures and surging unemployment (indeed, Bezos has benefited tremendously from it all). America B, already weakened by President Trump’s trade war with China, is getting hit by the COVID-19 pandemic both economically and medically.

      So, it turns out that my memo to the 2020 president is eerily prescient. The cratering economy is shaping up to be the downfall of Trump. Let’s assume that the Democrats win in November. If they want to save the country — and that is the goal, not restoring America to its unipolar position — they’d better not repeat the mistakes of the Obama era. The cold, hard bottom line is that stabilizing the economy is not sufficient, particularly if it means locking in the economic inequality of US society, preserving the unsustainable nature of US manufacturing and agriculture, and relying on financial services to pull the economy out of its current hole.

      The next president has to deal with all the debacles of the Trump era — the failure to contain the pandemic, the miscalculated confrontations with China, the self-defeating hostility to internationalism. But the next president must also ensure that Trumpism doesn’t return in a politically more palatable form. To do that will require the kind of economic transformation that Obama didn’t have the political nerve (or the congressional backing) to enact.

      To win in November, the Democrats have to remember that simple electoral catchphrase of the 1990s. To govern successfully and remain in charge in Washington, however, they’d better repeat to themselves an updated mantra: It’s the sustainable economy, stupid.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Jared Kushner Appeals to the NBA’s Taste for Luxury

      by

      When Donald Trump took office in 2017 as president of the United States, he delegated the responsibility of solving most of the nation’s and the world’s knottiest problems to his talented son-in-law, Jared Kushner. From ending the opioid crisis at home and solving the conflict in the Middle East to modernizing a sclerotic administration and reforming the criminal system, no challenge was beyond the capacity of this young real estate hustler who had the good taste to marry the new president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump.

      Before that historic moment, the most serious problem Kushner had had to deal with was seeking the means to extricate his family enterprise from the mountain of debt incurred by the purchase of an overpriced piece of real estate at 666 Fifth Avenue. Kushner never quite managed to solve that one, but it didn’t deter him from stepping up to the new challenge.

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      In March 2017, Kushner officially accepted to play the role of viceroy of the neocolonial American empire Trump was now intent on remodeling. Focusing on America’s wealth, the almighty dollar and its military might, Trump set about imposing on the rest of the world his new idea of “America First.” The empire Trump inherited had been enfeebled by the actions of the “weak” Barack Obama, the previous president.

      Kushner, the White House senior adviser, took his role seriously. His most talked-about feat, besides managing to squeeze himself into the diminutive pocket of Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman’s kandora, was his famous “deal of the century” that — according to Eric Trump — created the conditions of a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In his speech last week at the Republican convention, the president’s son revealed, to the surprise of most observers,  that there is now “peace in the Middle East” and “never-ending wars were finally ended.”

      Now, Kushner has a new crisis to deal with. The disorder that broke out last week at the NBA threatened to cancel a basketball season rebooted after having been truncated by the COVID-19 pandemic. NBA players refused to play in protest after the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black American male, by a police officer in Wisconsin.

      Interviewed by CNBC, Kushner offered his analysis of the root of the problem: “The NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially. They have that luxury, which is great.” 

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Luxury:

      For privileged Americans, the ultimate goal of all human activity, which, once achieved by any individual, defines that person as a member of the reigning elite, who is expected to identify with the elite and support it in its continual effort to parry all challenges coming from outside, duplicating the logic of a gated community

      Contextual Note

      Like most Americans, Kushner is impressed by the exorbitant salaries that professional athletes earn. He is even more impressed by the fact that a majority of those athletes are black. With that kind of money, they should be happy and self-satisfied because, as Joe Biden recently revealed, black is supposed to be synonymous with the poor. During the presidential primary campaign, the Democratic candidate explained that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Kushner may find it hard to believe that players who are so “fortunate” would be interested in anything other than wallowing in their luxury. The luxury he refers to consists of not having to fear the flogging their ancestors were sure to receive if they refused to work on the plantation. 

      Kushner believes black kids should be rewarded for working hard. With the reward comes the obligation of respecting the rules of society. This obviously includes allowing the police to enforce those rules in any way they deem appropriate. Thanks to that understanding, as many as 50 black youngsters in any given year might be drafted into the NBA. With such an opportunity extended to a population of nearly 50 million people, there can be no justification for riots, protests, boycotts or cancellations. The prospect of joining the elite is open to everyone, even to a poor black kid in the ‘hood.

      Once again, Biden seems to agree. It’s the point he made in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention when he announced what defines America. “I have always believed you can define America in one word: Possibilities. That in America, everyone, and I mean everyone, should be given the opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them,” he said.

      Kushner and Biden are clearly on the same page. Biden’s message might even be reframed as the “possibility of luxury.” The justification of creating an elite to rule over a democracy requires accepting that even poor black people can scratch their way to the top and become a bonafide member.

      Kushner is a political realist, not a dreamer like Biden. “Look, I think with the NBA … they’ve put a lot of slogans out. But what I think we need is to turn that from slogans and signals to actual action that’s going to solve the problem,” Kushner said to CNBC.

      He may have learned something from his “deal of the century” in the Middle East, generally acknowledged to be a failure, despite Eric Trump’s glowing evaluation. To devise his deal, Kushner avoided engaging with the Palestinians, preferring to let Saudi and Emirati leaders negotiate in their name. This time, he is proposing to “reach out” to basketball superstar, LeBron James to “agree on what we want to accomplish and … come up with a common pathway to get there.”

      This should be an easier task than dealing with Palestinians. After all, James has an estimated net worth of $480 million, placing him among the American elite, practically at the level of President Trump’s Florida buddy, the late Jeffrey Epstein. So far, however, the Los Angeles Lakers’ star has shown no interest in joining Kushner’s conversation. Atlanta Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce explained very clearly why the admittedly “privileged” players would remain focused on changing the system with no input required from the White House.

      Historical Note

      Donald Trump’s policy of “America First” relies on two distinct notions. The first represents the realpolitik approach maintaining that a nation’s foreign policy should privilege its own interests before considering the point of view of other nations. But “America First” also implies that the rest of the “free world” must recognize the US as their uncontested leader entrusted with both setting the rules of the global game and enforcing them. Every nation that respects those rules qualifies for two essential services: the protection afforded by the mightiest military force in human history and access to markets in which the means of payment is the dollar. 

      That idea of “America First” was present in Jared Kushner’s failed elitist Middle East peace plan. It promised dollars for the Palestinians (mainly Saudi and Emirati petrodollars), complemented by the protection afforded conjointly by Israeli and American military might. In other words, a life of luxury for the Palestinians, with plenty of beachfront hotels in Gaza.

      The system of dollars plus nuclear might lies at the core of the “rule of law” that was put in place at the end of World War II. One key component is the role of the dollar that provides a permanent incentive for local elites to engage in a system of global corruption. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — accompanied by powerful multinational companies focused on extracting resources — funnel dollars to local elites. This puts the international elite in control of local economies. The local elites then assume the responsibility of distributing those dollars through their economy, according to need. 

      A good part of that “need” is naturally the funding of the members of the elite themselves, who can then place the dollars they receive in banks and holdings elsewhere in the world, with a special affection for tax havens. Some of the manna does trickle down to local populations, but never too much to upset the system.

      Kushner and others in Washington have been surprised that some elites — from Hamas to LeBron James — are less eager to join their international club. But armed with powerful central banks and nuclear warheads, the Washington elite still believes history is on its side. Who isn’t interested in luxury? And they are probably right, at least for a few more years.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Could COVID-19 Bring Down Autocrats?

      by

      The outbreak of COVID-19 initially looked like a gift to autocrats around the world. What better pretext for a state of emergency than a pandemic?

      It was a golden opportunity to close borders, suppress civil society and issue decrees left and right (mostly right). Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and others took advantage of the crisis to advance their me-first agendas and consolidate power. Best of all, they could count on the fear of infection to keep protestors off the streets.

      However, as the global death toll approaches a million and autocrats face heightened criticism of their COVID responses, the pandemic is looking less and less like a gift.

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      The news from Mali, Belarus and the Philippines should put the fear of regime change in the hearts of autocrats from Washington to Moscow. Despite all the recent signs that democracy is on the wane, people are voting with their feet by massing on the streets to make their voices heard, particularly in places where voting with their hands has not been honored.

      The pandemic is not the only factor behind growing public disaffection for these strongmen. But for men whose chief selling point is strong leadership, the failure to contain a microscopic virus is pretty damning.

      Yet, as the case of Belarus demonstrates, dictators do not give up power easily. And even when they do, as in Mali, it’s often military power, not people power, that fills the vacuum. Meanwhile, all eyes are fixed on what will happen in the US. Will American citizens take inspiration from the people of Belarus and Mali to remove their own elected autocrat?

      People Power in Mali

      Ibrahim Boubacar Keita won the presidential election in Mali in 2013 in a landslide with 78% of the vote. One of his chief selling points was a promise of  “zero tolerance” for corruption. Easier said than done. The country was notoriously corrupt, and Keita had been in the thick of it during his tenure as prime minister in the 1990s. His return to power was also marked by corruption — a $40-million presidential jet, overpriced military imports, a son with expensive tastes — none of which goes over well in one of the poorest countries in the world.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Mali is not only poor, it’s conflict-prone. It has been subject to military coups at roughly 20-year intervals (1968, 1991, 2012). Several Islamist groups and a group of Tuareg separatists have battled the central government — and occasionally each other — over control of the country. French forces intervened at one point to suppress the Islamists, and France has been one of the strongest backers of Keita.

      Mali held parliamentary elections in the spring, the first since 2013 after numerous delays. The turnout was low, due to coronavirus fears and sporadic violence as well as the sheer number of people displaced by conflict. Radical Islamists kidnapped the main opposition leader, Soumaila Cisse, three days before the first round. After the second round, Keita’s party, Rally for Mali, claimed a parliamentary majority, but only thanks to the constitutional court, which overturned the results for 31 seats and shifted the advantage to the ruling party.

      This court decision sparked the initial protests. The main protest group, Movement of June 5 — Rally of Patriotic Force, eventually called for Keita’s resignation, the dissolution of parliament and new elections. In July, government security forces tried to suppress the growing protests, killing more than a dozen people. International mediators were unable to resolve the stand-off. When Keita tried to pack the constitutional court with a new set of friends, protesters returned to the street.

      On August 18, the military detained Keita and that night he stepped down. The coup was led by Assimi Goita, who’d worked closely with the US military on counterinsurgency campaigns. Instead of acceding to demands for early elections, however, the new ruling junta says that Malians won’t go to the polls before 2023.

      The people of Mali showed tremendous courage to stand up to their autocrat. Unfortunately, given the history of coups and various insurgencies, the military has gotten used to playing a dominant role in the country. The US and France are also partly to blame for lavishing money, arms and training on the army on behalf of their “war on terrorism” rather than rebuilding Mali’s economy and strengthening its political infrastructure.

      Mali is a potent reminder that one alternative to autocrats is a military junta with little interest in democracy.

      Democracy in Action in Belarus

      Alexander Lukashenko is the longest-serving leader in Europe. He’s been the president of Belarus since 1994, having risen to power like Keita on an anti-corruption platform. He’s never before faced much of a political challenge in the country’s tightly-controlled elections.

      Until these last elections. In the August 9 elections, Lukashenko was seeking his sixth term in office. He expected smooth sailing since, after all, he’d jailed the country’s most prominent dissidents, he presided over loyal security forces, and he controlled the media.

      But he didn’t control Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. The wife of jailed oppositionist Sergei Tikhanovsky managed to unite the opposition prior to the election and brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets for campaign rallies.

      Nevertheless, Lukashenko declared victory in the election with 80% of the vote (even though he enjoyed, depending on which poll you consult, either a 33% or a 3% approval rating). Tikhanovskaya fled to Lithuania. And that seemed to be that.

      Except that the citizens of Belarus are not accepting the results of the election. As many as 200,000 people rallied in Minsk on August 23 to demand that Lukashenko step down. In US terms, that would be as if 6 million Americans gathered in Washington to demand Trump’s resignation. So far, Lukashenko is ignoring the crowd’s demand. He has tried to send a signal of defiance by arriving at the presidential palace in a flak jacket and carrying an automatic weapon. More recently, he has resorted to quiet detentions and vague promises of reform.

      Just like the Republicans in the US who appeared as speakers at the Democratic National Convention, key people are abandoning Lukashenko’s side. The workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory are on an anti-Lukashenko strike, and many other workers at state-controlled enterprises have walked off the job. Police are quitting. The ambassador to Slovakia resigned. The state theaters have turned against the autocrat for the first time in 26 years.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Despite COVID-19, Belarus doesn’t have any prohibitions against mass gatherings. That’s because Lukashenko has been a prominent COVID-19 denialist, refusing to shut down the country or adopt any significant medical precautions. His recommendations: take a sauna and drink vodka. Like Boris Johnson in the UK and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lukashenko subsequently contracted the disease, though he claims that he was asymptomatic. The country has around 70,000 infections and about 650 deaths, but the numbers have started to rise again in recent days.

      There are plenty of oppositionists ready to usher in democratic elections once Lukashenko is out of the way. A new coordinating council launched this month includes former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko as well as prominent dissidents like Olga Kovalkova and Maria Kolesnikova.

      Even strong backing from Russia won’t help Lukashenko if the whole country turns against him. But beware the autocrat who can still count on support from a state apparatus and a militant minority.

      The End of Duterte? 

      Nothing Rodrigo Duterte could do seemed to diminish his popularity in the Philippines. He insulted people left and right. He launched a war on drugs that left 27,000 alleged drug dealers dead from extrajudicial murders. Another 250 human rights defenders have also been killed.

      Still, his approval ratings remained high, near 70% as recently as May. But Duterte’s failure to deal with the coronavirus and the resulting economic dislocation may finally unseat him, if not from office then at least from the political imagination of Filipinos.

      The Philippines now has around 210,000 infections and 3,300 deaths. Compared to the US or Brazil, that might not sound like much. But surrounding the Philippines are countries that have dealt much more successfully with the pandemic: Thailand (58 deaths), Vietnam (30 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths). Meanwhile, because of a strict lockdown that didn’t effectively contain the virus, the economy has crashed, and the country has entered its first recession in 29 years.

      Like Trump, Duterte has blamed everyone but himself for the country’s failings, even unleashing a recent tirade against medical professionals. But Duterte’s insult politics is no longer working. As Walden Bello, a sociologist and a former member of the Philippines parliament, observes at Foreign Policy In Focus, “The hundreds of thousands blinded by his gangster charisma in the last 4 years have had the scales fall from their eyes and are now asking themselves how they could possibly have fallen in love with a person whose only skill was mass murder.”

      In the Philippines, presidents serve one six-year term, and Duterte is four years into his. He may well attempt to hold on for two more years. He might even pull a Vladimir Putin and change the constitution so that he can run again. A group of Duterte supporters recently held a press conference to call for a “revolutionary government” and a new constitution. Another possibility, in the wake of recent bombings in southern Philippines, might be a declaration of martial law to fight Abu Sayyaf, which is linked to the Islamic State group.

      But the combination of the pandemic, the economic crash and a pro-China foreign policy may turn the population against Duterte so dramatically that he might view resignation as the only way out.

      Democracy in the Balance

      Plenty of autocrats still look pretty comfortable in their positions. Putin — or forces loyal to him — just engineered the poisoning of one of his chief rivals, Alexei Navalny. Xi Jinping has just about turned Chinese politics into a one-man show. Viktor Orban has consolidated his grip on power in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suppressed or co-opted the opposition parties in Turkey, and Bashar al-Assad has seemingly weathered the civil war in Syria.

      Even Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, despite an atrocious record on both the pandemic and the economy, has somehow managed to regain some popularity, with his approval rating nudging above his disapproval rating recently for the first time since April.

      The US presidential elections might tip the balance one way or the other. Although America still represents a democratic ideal for some around the world, that’s not the reason why the November elections matter. Donald Trump has so undermined democratic norms and institutions that democrats around the world are aghast that he hasn’t had to pay a political price. He escaped impeachment. His party still stands behind him. Plenty of his associates have gone to jail, but he has not (yet) been taken down by the courts.

      That leaves the court of public opinion. If voters return President Trump to office for a second term, it sends a strong signal that there are no penalties for ruining a democracy. Trump operates according to his own Pottery Barn rule: He broke a democracy and he believes that he now owns it. If voters agree, it will gladden the hearts of ruling autocrats and authoritarians-to-be all over the world.

      Voting out Trump may not simply resuscitate American democracy. It may send a hopeful message to all those who oppose the Trump-like leaders in their lands. Those leaders may have broken democracy, but we the people still own it.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Misery of American Evangelicals

      by

      It could not have come at a worse time. President Donald Trump has promoted himself as the ultimate protector of American Christianity — against the subversive invasion of Muslims, against the equally subversive threat of atheism, against the destructive forces of secularism. According to recent polls, almost 60% of evangelicals still support Trump, no matter what.

      Trump owes his popularity among evangelicals to a large extent to the fervent endorsement he has received from evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell is the heir to his father’s evangelical empire that includes Liberty University in Virginia, a fundamentalist school which, among other things, explicitly forbids sexual relations “outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman.”

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      Apparently, the ordinance applies only to students, not to the university’s president. As has recently been reported by several reliable news outlets, Jerry Falwell Jr.’s wife entertained an extra-marital sexual relationship for several years with a former pool boy, apparently with full knowledge and endorsement by her husband, who reportedly indulged in watching the pair have sex.

      Falwell has finally agreed to resign from the presidency of the university. But as a good Christian, he still expects to get more than a $10-million severance package for services rendered, such as severely tarnishing the reputation of Liberty University.

      Persecuted Minority

      Evangelicals justify their support for Donald Trump by charging that they have increasingly become the target of ridicule and derision, their faith dragged through the mud, their values mocked and derided. Over the past several decades, American evangelicals have increasingly seen themselves as a beleaguered, even persecuted minority, threatened with cultural extinction.  

      There are good reasons for both why evangelicals become the target of mockery and derision and why they feel persecuted and oppressed. Take the question of evolution, one of the defining issues in what came to be known as the culture wars of the last decades of the 20th century. According to a Gallup poll, in 2017, almost four out of 10 American adults said they believed that God created humans at some point during the past 10,000 years or so (aka Young Earth Creationism).

      This in itself is a remarkable finding, which makes most Europeans shake their heads in disbelief. One would think evangelicals relish these numbers. Yet the opposite is the case, and for good reason. The 2017 findings marked the lowest point in the belief in creationism since the early 1980s when Gallup first posed the question.

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      For evangelicals, this is just one more piece of evidence for the creeping advance of secular humanism, which they believe is destroying the very fabric of American society. In fact, when evangelicals look around, they have a strong sense that they are in the wrong movie. In a recent Pew poll, 55% of evangelicals supported the view that homosexuality should be discouraged. At the same time, the American Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had a fundamental right to marry. Almost two-thirds of evangelicals believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. At the same time, the vast majority of Americans agree that Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court case that established the legality of abortion in the United States, should be upheld, albeit modified. Each of these cases, and others, such as the question of school prayer, have increased the sense of alienation many evangelicals feel with regard to the direction American society has taken over the past several decades.

      Once considered the mainstay of American society, evangelicals have increasingly been pushed to the margins, as reflected in a recent survey by the Christian pollster Barna. In 2016, Barna found that a growing number of Americans associated Christianity with extremism. For instance, more than 80% percent of respondents thought that refusing to serve somebody because their lifestyle conflicted with their belief — such as the case of a bakery refusing to provide a wedding cake to a gay couple — constituted extremism.

      More than 50% considered it extremist to demonstrate outside of an organization — such as Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions among a range of services — they consider immoral. Even trying to spread the Gospel and convert non-believers was considered an act of extremism.

      To make matters even worse, recent polls found that young evangelicals had apparently been infected with the “liberal bug.” In 2017, in a Pew poll, millennial evangelicals showed considerable support for a stronger state and more public services as well as agreeing with the notion that government aid did more good than harm. To top it off, a slim majority thought that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

      Even at Liberty University, young evangelicals have started to realize that life today is more complex and challenging than a simplistic view of reality based on a book composed a long time ago might allow for. And with COVID-19, there is no doubt that support for a strong state is going to increase even more, among the general public and among evangelicals alike.

      The Ultimate Huckster

      Under the circumstances, the public scandal surrounding the former president of Liberty University is even more devastating for a community that already feels under siege. His behavior cannot but confirm the impression, created by numerous cases in the past, that those who constantly wear their Christianity on their sleeve are nothing but a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites who consider themselves exempt from the strict rules they impose on others. It certainly reaffirms the impression that televangelists are modern-day snake oil salesmen, grifters and hucksters taking advantage of the naiveté of their victims.

      Some readers might still remember Jim and Tammy Bakker, of “Praise the Lord,” who transformed televangelism into the high art of getting their followers to support their opulent life style. Or Jimmy Swaggart, who managed to have himself caught more than once in the company of a prostitute. Ironically enough, this did not prevent him from broadcasting his message from a place called Family Worship Center.

      Swaggart and the Bakkers have found a worthy successor in the evangelical game of duping the rubes — Becki Falwell. According to The New York Times, Jerry Falwell Jr.’s wife served on the advisory board of Women for Trump, where she promoted — you would struggle to make this up — family values.

      And yet, Jimmy Swaggart is still out there, polluting the airwaves. No doubt, Jerry Falwell Jr. will publicly atone for his transgressions, asking his loyal followers (and Jesus) to forgive and reinstall him as one of the guiding lights of American Christianity, while at the same time enjoying his millions in compensation. No wonder a large majority of evangelicals will vote for Trump in November.

      Blatant hypocrisy and outright depravity have never prevented evangelicals from doing what is right in the eyes of the Lord: voting for a man who is proud to grab any woman he desires as long as he pays lip service to protecting America’s most oppressed and persecuted minority. He is the ultimate huckster, much better than Swaggart, Falwell Jr. and all the others. After all, Trump has perfected the art of the deal — a great deal for him and his toadies, a raw deal for the rest of America.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Infiltration of Law Enforcement by Racist Extremists

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      As protests continue to bring cities across the United States to a standstill, the problem of racist policing is more evident than ever before. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department was the latest in a long line of violent assaults on people of color by law enforcement, and his name joins an ever-growing list of those who have been killed by ones who are sworn to protect and serve. The United States is grappling with the issue of police racism before the world’s eyes, and the scale of the conversation currently happening is unprecedented and, sadly, still not enough.

      While the unconscious bias of some officers of the law has been laid bare for all to see, the conscious and hateful bias of others has remained largely in the shadows. The systemic issue of racial profiling is evident, but the hidden epidemic of far-right activism in police departments around the country is an insidious and even more dangerous threat. The links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves. During the civil rights movement, Southern police chiefs coordinated with local Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many officers and commissioners in the deep South were accused of aiding Klan activity and even being active members of KKK organizations.

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      While this trend seems like an archaic symptom of the era of segregation, links between law enforcement and far-right organizations have remained constant through the 20th century and into the 21st and are now seemingly more widespread than ever. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that a number of deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office had concrete links to neo-Nazi organizations and that a number of cases of police violence against black and Latino communities had been motivated by their racist hostility and “terrorist” sympathies. Likewise, in 2008, a prominent Chicago-area police officer was fired and prosecuted over links to the Ku Klux Klan.

      Widespread Infiltration

      A 2015 FBI investigation found that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies was at epidemic levels, and suggested that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” were using links with law enforcement to gain intelligence and restricted access privileges, as well as ultimately evade capture. The report found that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies across the United States did not screen potential recruits for links to far-right organizations and often turned a blind eye to those recruits with questionable political beliefs.

      The bureau was aware of widespread infiltration as early as 2006, suggesting in a heavily redacted report that white supremacist activists were taking advantage of weak vetting procedures in local law enforcement agencies to gain access to “restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence.” The 2006 report suggested that this was a systematic effort, coordinated by high-profile far-right figures such as William Pierce, and infiltration was seen as a key element in the philosophy of leaderless resistance.

      Despite the concerns and recommendations outlined in the FBI’s latest report, recent research has shown that the links between law enforcement and the extreme right have continued to flourish. Last year, a Reveal News investigation found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers were members of online forums dedicated to Islamophobia, neo-Confederate ideology and even neo-Nazism. Almost 400 police officers from 150 different departments had their identities verified, and many were found to have been actively peddling hate speech, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Proud Boys in particular have strong links to law enforcement, and a number of high-profile investigations have highlighted the extent of the collusion between police and the hate group described as the “alt-right fight club.” In May this year, a Chicago PD officer, Robert Bakker, was found to have been an active member of a Proud Boys Telegram channel called “Fuck Antifa,” where he actively coordinated Proud Boys meet-ups and bragged about his connections in the police department and the government.

      Six months earlier, a police officer from East Hampton, Connecticut, was forced into retirement after his links to Proud Boys groups in the area. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law led an investigation into the officer’s social media activity, finding that he was an active member of the self-described “western chauvinist” group. A year before that, a female officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after she was pictured wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt and was later discovered to have been merchandising Proud Boys apparel on the design-sharing RedBubble website.

      Even in cases in which officers are not active members of hate groups, collusion remains a very real issue. In 2019, police officers in Washington, DC, were pictured fist-bumping Proud Boys members at a July 4 rally in front of the White House. The members of the group were then given a police escort to a local bar, while anti-fascist protesters were met with violence from both the police and the Proud Boys. In an even more egregious case, an investigation in Portland, Oregon, found that a senior police officer had been exchanging friendly text messages with Joey Gibson. Gibson was the leader of the far-right Patriot Prayer, a sometimes violent offshoot of the Proud Boys defined by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

      In the lead-up to a number of high-profile clashes between the group and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, Gibson and Lieutenant Jeff Niiya shared joking messages and talked about Patriot Prayer’s planned actions, with Niiya even confiding in Gibson that he had told officers to ignore outstanding warrants for the arrest of a prominent Patriot Prayer member, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese. A separate investigation found that Niiya had submitted police reports on Gibson’s behalf, launching criminal investigations against “antifa activists” based on footage Gibson had privately sent him. This raised concerns that far-right demonstrators were being given preferential treatment by Portland police, particularly given the reputation for forceful suppression of anti-fascist counterprotest in the city.

      Not Immune

      Although this trend reaches uniquely epidemic levels in the United States, the rest of the world is not immune. A 2019 report showed alarming levels of collusion between law enforcement and violent right-wing extremists in Germany. The investigation, led by the nation’s general prosecutor, found that the extreme-right Nordkreuz group had compiled a death list of leftist activists, journalists and pro-refugee targets using police records and was in the process of planning a major terror attack. It was found that the 30 members of the group had close ties to law enforcement, with at least one member actively employed by a special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.

      A recent investigation by Der Spiegel found that the elite unit, known as the KSK, openly tolerated extremist right-wing iconography and membership, even using widely-known Nazi ciphers such as “88” — code for HH, or Heil Hitler. The investigation uncovered high-level officers openly promoting “national-conservative ideology” and espousing racist ultranationalism. Earlier this year, a KSK soldier who reportedly had links to extremist groups was arrested after a weapons and explosives cache was found in his back yard. The German government responded to Der Spiegel’s exposé by launching its own investigation into the unit, finding that racist extremism was endemic across all ranks. As a result, the unit was officially disbanded in early July.

      As historian Kathleen Belew has shown in her most recent book on the long history of the far right’s links to the United States military, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” the siphoning of weaponry and ammunition from military bases to white supremacist organizations has been a constant tactic of would-be terrorist groups. There is no doubt that the continued militarization of police forces in the United States and Europe, combined with the high levels of extremist infiltration, offers new avenues for the theft of high-grade weaponry and tactics, and further armament of extremist right-wing groups.

      These links between law enforcement and white supremacist organizations are deeply concerning, and present a very real threat to peace, justice and liberty in the United States and around the world. As police racism once again enters the spotlight, it is more important than ever to examine and challenge the infiltration of law enforcement by racist extremists. A centralized vetting process that directly seeks out links to organized racism and excludes candidates with any affiliation with far-right groups is the bare minimum and should be the first step toward a total overhaul of the training and oversight procedures.

      Despite a number of legal challenges to the protective role of policing, law enforcement, at its core, still exists to protect and serve the people regardless of race, religion or creed, and any affiliation with hateful ideology compromises an officer’s ability to execute this role fairly and without prejudice. Until the systemic and personal racism of law enforcement is no longer an issue, we will see more George Floyds, more Breonna Taylors, more murders in the name of law and order. Preventing and eliminating racist bias in police departments across the US is only the first step toward a long process of reckoning and reconciliation.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Does Joe Biden’s Transition to the Center Have Any Meaning Today?

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      The New Yorker features a lengthy biographical portrait of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden written by Evan Osnos. Clearly recognizing Biden’s positioning on the electoral spectrum, the title of the article takes the form of a question: “Can Biden’s Center Hold?” Though it doesn’t provide an answer to the question, it implicitly pleads in favor of Biden’s tactical choice of occupying the center, not just of the Democratic Party but of the entire oligarchic system.

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      Osnos focuses on the candidate’s own characterization of his strategy. “Biden has described himself as a ‘transition candidate,’ able to overcome generational and ideological rifts,” he writes.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Transition candidate:

      A candidate lacking definition in terms of vision or coherent policy agenda, but intent upon influencing the choice of future leaders, presumably who will share the same deficiency of vision and clarity

      Contextual Note

      Osnos zeroes in on Biden’s idea of what it means to ensure a transition. He writes: “In the spring, Biden began describing himself as a ‘transition candidate,’ explaining, ‘We have not given a bench to younger people in the Party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.’”

      We might marvel at the tautology offered by a 77-year-old man, whose political career spans more than 50 years, referring to people who are at the same time “newer” and “younger.” The two attributes tend to go together. But Biden undoubtedly remembers that his opponent, US President Donald Trump, was new to politics at the age of 69 when he launched his first real political campaign in 2015. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden is also correct in noticing the rise of a generation of newer, younger people who have been making headlines, such as “the squad,” led by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Ilhan Omar. They are now being joined by a host of new candidates for this election, some of whom have successfully unseated longstanding incumbents, such as Cori Bush, who defeated the William Lacy Clay dynasty in Missouri, or Jamal Bowman, who upended the career of Eliot Engel, chairman the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

      But those aren’t the youngsters Biden has in mind. Had that been the case, he would have insisted on highlighting their contribution at last week’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, AOC was given a minimal spot only on the insistence of Senator Bernie Sanders, who himself was only reluctantly included because of his status as the uncontested leader of a future-oriented movement. Andrew Yang, who made a major impact during the debates thanks to his groundbreaking ideas, was belatedly invited only after he publicly expressed his astonishment at not being invited. 

      The most telling absence was that of the most courageous and credible of the young presidential candidates, Tulsi Gabbard. She has attained the status of an unmentionable within a party dominated by the Obama and Clinton dynasties. The young and articulate veteran is guilty of vehemently opposing the bellicose foreign policy favored by every Democratic president since Harry Truman.

      That leaves the party’s hopes of prominent new talent essentially in the hands of two people. Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, performed poorly in the Democratic primaries and is no youngster. She will be 60 in 2024. Pete Buttigieg, who enjoyed a moment of glory in the Iowa caucuses where he was helped along by the software the party chose to use for tabulating the votes, is the image of a young technocrat with no political vision.

      Perhaps Biden’s idea of a transition candidate simply means that he sees the US itself transitioning to something different than the past four years of Trump. That would mean that anyone outside of Trump’s own family would be a transitional candidate. But that is too obvious a truism to take seriously.

      Historical Note

      Evan Osnos cites the Northwestern University historian Brett Gadsden, a native of the part of Delaware where Joe Biden grew up: “There’s probably a metaphorical lesson in the fact that Biden hails from a place that has this mythical reputation as a middle-ground state. It’s emblematic of a kind of imagined center.” Gadsden hints that the meaning of “center” in terms of both US politics and culture can only be elusive, if not totally imaginary.

      The ambiguity surrounding the center perhaps defines better than anything else the legacy of Donald Trump. The nation is polarized, split in two. The center, represented by the establishment of both parties, has lost much if not yet all of its credibility among the traditional bases of Democrats and Republicans. It still maintains its hold on power in the world of finance and technology, but only a minority “believe” and adhere to its values. 

      On one side, Trump represents the defiance of the hyper-individualistic, assert-your-personality-at-all-costs wing, not so much of US politics as of US culture. On August 24, at the Republican National Convention, Kimberly Guilfoyle expressed the voice of that hyper-aggressive segment of the culture. It was as if Guilfoyle, a campaign official and the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., was calling to arms the unregulated militias that represent President Trump’s constituency in a battle against a satanic enemy. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom, they want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she said. 

      Biden embodies and symbolizes the problem of the center. The Yahoos on the right unleashed by the Trump revolution are ready to challenge everything to their left, including that part of the Republican Party that can be called the center, which appears now to have joined forces with the establishment of the Democratic Party. They have become virtually indistinguishable.

      In contrast, without revolting, the progressive left has declared its growing mistrust of a center that has increasingly focused on resisting any kind of reform designed to respond to the increasingly grave crises society is facing. Seeking control is not a feature of the left’s culture. It basically counts on the growing awareness by the center of the gravity of the problems all previous administrations have failed to address. But the progressive wing’s patience is clearly wearing out.

      If after a Biden victory in November he has the opportunity to demonstrate the transition he has promised, a real danger awaits him. Unlike what happened with Barack Obama, the progressive wing will offer Biden no honeymoon. The messy and probably violent Trumpian revolt against the government itself after a defeat in the polls will occur simultaneously with the seriously organized contestation by the left of Biden’s likely “transition” team. In the midst of intractable crises, his policy choices and his capacity to govern will be vehemently challenged.

      Squeezed from both sides, the center’s fate is unsure. In his poem, “The Second Coming,” written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, William Butler Yeats prophesied:

      “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
      Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
      The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
      The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
      The best lack all conviction, while the worst
      Are full of passionate intensity.”

      The “center of power” is not just Washington. The “center of finance” is not just Wall Street. The center that has held Western society relatively intact for more than seven decades is already under severe pressure. It increasingly requires arbitrary force to hold back the growing tide of chaos unleashed by the not totally coincidental convergence of a pandemic, multiple irrational military ventures across the globe and exacerbated inequality of income, wealth and treatment by official institutions.

      In his New Yorker piece, Osnos quotes a senior Obama administration official’s description of Biden: “He is very much a weathervane for what the center of the left is. He can see, ‘O.K., this is where the society is moving. This is where the Democratic Party is moving, so I’m going to move.’”

      But the Democratic Party, committed to flirting with never-Trumper Republicans, no longer represents its own voters. And when “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” — and Jacob Blake lies on a hospital bed as its latest witness — even a transition candidate finds himself in a situation similar to that of a refugee of the American wars in the Middle East. There’s simply nowhere safe to move where one will be welcome.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More