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      What Would Helsinki 2.0 Look Like Today?

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      The European security order has broken down. You might think that’s an overstatement. NATO is alive and well. The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe is still functioning at a high level.

      Of course, there’s the possibility of a major war breaking out between Russia and Ukraine. But would Russian President Vladimir Putin really take such an enormous risk? Moreover, periodic conflicts in that part of the world — in Ukraine since 2014, in Georgia in 2008, in Transnistria between 1990 and 1992 — have not escalated into Europe-wide wars. Even the horrific bloodletting of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was largely contained within the borders of that benighted former country, and many of the Yugoslav successor states have joined both the European Union and NATO.

      In Ukraine, More Than European Peace Is at Stake

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      So, you might argue, the European security order is in fine shape, and it’s only Putin who’s the problem. The United States and Europe will show their resolve in the face of the Russian troops that have massed at the border with Ukraine, Putin will accept some face-saving diplomatic compromise and the status quo will be restored.

      Even if that were to happen and war is averted this time, Europe is still in a fundamental state of insecurity. The Ukraine conflict is a symptom of this much deeper problem.

      The current European security order is an overlay of three different institutional arrangements. NATO is the surprisingly healthy dinosaur of the Cold War era with 30 members, a budget of $3 billion and collective military spending of over a trillion dollars.

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      Russia has pulled together a post-Cold War military alliance of former Soviet states, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), that is anemic by comparison with a membership that includes only Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Instead of expanding, the CSTO is shrinking, having lost Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan over the course of its existence.

      And then there’s the Helsinki framework that holds East and West together in the tenuous OSCE. Neither Russia nor its military alliance was able to prevent the march of NATO eastward to include former Soviet republics. Neither NATO nor the OSCE was able to stop Russia from seizing Crimea, supporting a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine or orchestrating “frozen conflicts” in Georgia and Moldova.

      Presently, there are no arms control negotiations between East and West. China became Russia’s leading trade partner about a decade ago, and the United States and European countries have only fallen further behind since. Human rights and civil liberties are under threat in both the former Soviet Union and parts of the European Union.

      So, now do you understand what I mean by the breakdown of the European security order? The Cold War is back, and it threatens once again to go hot, if not tomorrow then perhaps sometime soon.

      So, yes, Ukrainian sovereignty must be defended in the face of potential Russian aggression. But the problem is much bigger. If we don’t address this bigger problem, then we’ll never really safeguard Ukraine, deal with Russia’s underlying concerns of encirclement or tackle the worrying militarization of Europe. What we need is Helsinki 2.0.

      The Origins of Helsinki 1.0

      In the summer of 1985, I was in Helsinki after a stint in Moscow studying Russian. I was walking down one of the streets in the Finnish capital when I came across a number of protesters holding signs.

      “Betrayal!” said one of them. “Appeasement!” said another. Other signs depicted a Russian bear pressing its claws into the then-Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

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      I’d happened on this band of mostly elderly protesters outside a building where dignitaries from around the world had gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords. At the time, I had only a vague understanding of the agreement, knowing only that it was a foundational text for East-West détente, an attempt to bridge the Iron Curtain.

      As I found out that day, not everyone was enthusiastic about the Helsinki Accords. The pact, signed in 1975 by the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union and all European countries except Albania, finally confirmed the post-war borders of Europe and the Soviet Union, which meant acknowledging that the Baltic states were not independent but instead under the Kremlin’s control. To legitimize its control over the Baltics in particular, a concession it had been trying to win for years, the Soviet Union was even willing to enter into an agreement mandating that it “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

      At the time, many human rights advocates were skeptical that the Soviet Union or its Eastern European satellites would do anything of the sort. After 1975, “Helsinki” groups popped up throughout the region — the Moscow Helsinki Group, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia — and promptly discovered that the Communist governments had no intention of honoring their Helsinki commitments, at least as they pertained to human rights.

      Most analysts back then saw the recognition of borders as cold realpolitik and the human rights language as impossibly idealistic. History has proved otherwise. The borders of the Soviet Union had an expiration date of 15 years. And, ultimately, it would be human rights — rather than war or economic sanctions — that spelled the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Change came in the late 1980s from ordinary people who exercised the freedom of thought enshrined in the Helsinki Accords to protest in the streets of Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague and Tirana. The decisions made in 1975 ensured that the transitions of 1989-91 would be largely peaceful.

      After the end of the Cold War, the Helsinki Accords became institutionalized in the OSCE, and briefly, that promised to be the future of European security. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that NATO no longer had a reason for existence.

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      But institutions do not die easily. NATO devised new missions for itself, becoming involved in out-of-area operations in the Middle East, intervening in the Yugoslav wars and beginning in 1999 expanding eastward. The first Eastern European countries to join were the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which technically brought the alliance to Russia’s very doorstep (since Poland borders the Russian territory of Kaliningrad). NATO expansion was precisely the wrong answer to the question of European security — my first contribution to Foreign Policy in Focus back in 1996 was a critique of expansion — but logic took a backseat to appetite.

      The OSCE, meanwhile, labored in the shadows. With its emphasis on non-military conflict resolution, it was ideally suited to the necessities of post-Cold War Europe. But it was an unwieldy organization, and the United States preferred the hegemonic power it wielded through NATO.

      This brings us to the current impasse. The OSCE has been at the forefront of negotiating an end to the war in eastern Ukraine and maintains a special monitoring mission to assess the ceasefire there. But NATO is mobilizing for war with Russia over Ukraine, while Moscow and Washington remain as far apart today as they were during the Cold War.

      The Helsinki Accords were the way to bridge the unbridgeable in 1975. What would Helsinki 2.0 look like today?

      Toward Helsinki 2.0

      The Helsinki Accords were built around a difficult compromise involving a trade-off on borders and human rights. A new Helsinki agreement needs a similar compromise. That compromise must be around the most important existential security threat facing Europe and indeed the world: climate change.

      As I argue in a new article in Newsweek, “In exchange for the West acknowledging Russian security concerns around its borders, Moscow could agree to engage with its OSCE partners on a new program to reduce carbon emissions and transition from fossil fuels. Helsinki 2.0 must be about cooperation, not just managing disagreements.”

      The Russian position on climate change is “evolving,” as politicians like to say. After years of ignoring the climate crisis — or simply seeing it as a good opportunity to access resources in the melting Arctic — the Putin administration change its tune last year, pledging to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

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      There’s obviously room for improvement in Russia’s climate policy — as there is in the United States and Europe. But that’s where Helsinki 2.0 can make a major contribution. The members of a newly energized OSCE can engage in technical cooperation on decarbonization, monitor country commitments to cut emissions, and apply new and stringent targets on a sector that has largely gotten a pass: the military. It can even push for the most effective decarbonization strategy around: demilitarization.

      What does Russia get out of the bargain? A version of what it got in 1975: reassurances around borders.

      Right now, everyone is focused on the question of NATO expansion as either an unnecessary irritant or a necessary provocation in American-Russian relations. That puts too much emphasis on NATO’s importance. In the long term, it’s necessary to reduce the centrality of NATO in European security calculations and to do so without bulking up all the militaries of European states and the EU. By all means, NATO should be going slow on admitting new members. More important, however, are negotiations as part of Helsinki 2.0 that reduce military exercises on both sides of Russia’s border, address both nuclear and conventional buildups, and accelerate efforts to resolve the “frozen conflicts” in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Neither NATO nor the CSTO is suited to these tasks.

      As in 1975, not everyone will be satisfied with Helsinki 2.0. But that’s what makes a good agreement: a balanced mix of mutual satisfaction and dissatisfaction. More importantly, like its predecessor, Helsinki 2.0 offers civil society an opportunity to engage — through human rights groups, arms control advocates, and scientific and educational organizations. This might be the hardest pill for the Kremlin to swallow, given its hostile attitude toward civil society. But the prospect of securing its borders and marginalizing NATO might prove simply too irresistible for Vladimir Putin.

      The current European security order is broken. It can be fixed by war. Or it can be fixed by a new institutional commitment by all sides to negotiations within an updated framework. That’s the stark choice when the status quo cannot hold.

      *[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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      Dissecting the Ukraine Crisis (Language and the News – Updated Daily)

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      As we announced in January, by highlighting the everyday abuses of the language of public personalities and the media, Fair Observer’s new running feature prolongs the four-year-old tradition of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary (now reduced to a weekly format). We will frequently add new items to the month’s entries. Each item will cite an occurrence in the news and add a short reflection focusing on its intended and unintended meaning.

      We invite readers to join us and submit their suggestions of words and expressions that deserve exploring, with or without original commentary. To submit a citation from the news and/or provide your own short commentary, send us an email.

      February 1: Multiple Audiences

      CNN reports that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is feeling some discomfort in the face of US President Joe Biden’s eagerness to create panic around the idea of a Russian threat. Zelensky himself describes Russia’s actions as “dangerous but ambiguous.”

      “Earlier in the day, another source from the US side said there is a recognition in the White House that Zelensky has ‘multiple audiences’ and is trying to balance them. ‘On the one hand, he wants assistance, but he has to assure his people he has the situation under control. That’s a tricky balance.’”

      Though the source cited only two of the audiences, there are certainly a few others that were not mentioned. It could be said that nearly every relatively powerless country has at least two audiences: its people and whatever hegemonic power has decided to support it. The United States is by far the most prolific hegemonic “audience” of countries across the globe, though some fear China may surreptitiously catch up. The idea of being an audience, of course, implies an attitude of listening attentively, usually through the hegemon’s diplomats but just as significantly, through its spies.

      Why Monitoring Language Is Important

      Language allows people to express thoughts, theories, ideas, experiences and opinions. But even while doing so, it also serves to obscure what is essential for understanding the complex nature of reality. When people use language to hide essential meaning, it is not only because they cynically seek to prevaricate or spread misinformation. It is because they strive to tell the part or the angle of the story that correlates with their needs and interests.

      In the age of social media, many of our institutions and pundits proclaim their intent to root out “misinformation.” But often, in so doing, they are literally seeking to miss information.

      Is there a solution? It will never be perfect, but critical thinking begins by being attentive to two things: the full context of any issue we are trying to understand and the operation of language itself. In our schools, we are taught to read and write, but, unless we bring rhetoric back into the standard curriculum, we are never taught how the power of language to both convey and distort the truth functions. There is a largely unconscious but observable historical reason for that negligence. Teaching establishments and cultural authorities fear the power of linguistic critique may be used against their authority.

      Fair Observer’s Language and the News feature seeks to sensitize our readers to the importance of digging deeper when assimilating the wisdom of our authorities, pundits and the media that transmit their knowledge and wisdom.

      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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      Fair Observer’s New Feature: “Language and the News”

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      After running the feature called “The Daily Devil’s Dictionary” for the past four years, Fair Observer is expanding its coverage of the culture of media and public discourse. The Devil’s Dictionary moves to a weekly format and will be accompanied by a developing reflection on the language of the news.

      Fact-checking Is Not Enough. Sense-checking Is Equally Important.

      One of the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to highlight the awkward gap between what our institutions and media express in official language and people’s sense of reality. From our school days behind a desk to sitting down in front of the evening news after a hard day’s work, we have been conditioned to trust a class of people we call professionals who know things we don’t know. These professionals feed us not just what they present as facts, but also the message and especially the meaning that results from interpreting those facts. Once their job is done, the media in particular count on us to share the information we have received with family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances we happen to converse with. And all of us most of the time obey. That is what keeps our private conversations going.

      In recent times, certain anomalies and blatant contradictions in the news cycles have upset this pattern of behavior that formerly structured civilized life. We have experienced a series of major crises that end up dominating the news cycle, including financial meltdowns, climate change, pandemics, to say nothing of the damage resulting from mass surveillance and meaningless wars. The not always convincing reporting on these events has seriously disrupted the ability of information professionals in both the media and education to maintain the stable cultural order that once seemed so sure to so many people.

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      This has led to a well-documented serious loss of confidence in the authority of democratic governments and their institutions on a global scale. Yahoo Finance recently cited Edelman’s Trust Barometer for 2022 that describes a global trend. “Among the key findings of the report was the overall lower trust in world leaders and institutions around the world, with 67% of respondents saying they worry that journalists and reporters were ‘purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.’ The figures were 66% and 63% for government and business leaders, respectively.” 

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      With few exceptions, the populations of nations across the globe have deemed the performance of their government leaders seeking to manage the now two-year-old pandemic unsatisfactory, if not worse. A much longer trend reveals that confidence in the media has never been more shaky. Many governments and media pundits have attempted to blame social media for this visible decline in trust. But that seems like a ruse or at best a distraction, encouraged by the very authorities in whom the public has been losing trust. Though the owners and promoters of social media platforms, motivated by profit, narcissism and especially rapidly expanding power, are by no means to be trusted, most ordinary people understand that social media itself is little more than an extended space of personal conversation. For that reason, some in the political world see it as a threat to the established order.

      Commercial media and political authorities have increasingly touted the idea that fact-checking will solve the problem of restoring trust in information providers. But that is naive. We have already seen that making decisions about what is true and false is a perilous undertaking, not only because the boundaries between the two is often fuzzy, but also because powerful interests will inevitably step in to impose their preferred distinctions. 

      Things become even more complex when we realize that truth is not simply a set of verifiable facts, but an understanding that can be built up of the complex relationships and patterns those facts combine to create. We try to make sense of the world, but the act of making sense should require its own quality control. Expecting those who “manage” the information to provide that control is as dangerous as it is naive.

      Is There an Answer? Can Sense-checking Exist?

      Fair Observer’s “Language and the News” launched at the beginning of this year will focus on the curious ways in which public personalities — those who have knowledge to impart — literally play with the range of meaning language permits. On the face of it, playing sounds entertaining. And indeed, the purveyors of news understand that. It is why so many people now count on the news for entertainment. It is also why so much of the news is indistinguishable from entertainment. It is a game, but it’s a game in which there are clearly winners and losers. One of those losers is not so much the facts themselves, which do of course get distorted, but our perception and understanding of the reality we live in.

      Only by looking at the variety of resonances produced by language does the true complexity of reality come into view. But something else, slightly more sinister also comes into view. It is the relentless effort engaged by those who are empowered to use language for our information and entertainment to reduce complexity to a simple idea that serves some practical or ideological end that they are attached to. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky once described the processes in detail in their book, “Manufacturing Consent.”

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      At the end of the month of January 2022, Fair Observer launches its feature, “Language and the News.” It includes a “Weekly Devil’s Dictionary” but will also be composed of short vignettes that pick up salient examples from the current news cycle to highlight how they produce or obscure meaning. In the coming weeks, we will open the channel of communication for our readers to provide their own sense-checking. Think of it as a communication game. But it is the kind of game in which there should be no losers, since — at least theoretically — everyone in a democratic society profits from clarity. 

      Here are the first two examples to inaugurate the new feature.

      Example 1: Mitch McConnell’s America

      Newsweek reported Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s objections to the voting rights bill the Democrats proposed. With impeccable self-revelatory logic, he derided the need for reform or the fact that the current system in many places was built to reduce access to the polls for black Americans. “Well, the concern is misplaced,” he said. “Because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

      Sigmund Freud maintained that verbal slips reveal deeper levels of psychical truth. What would he say about this? 

      Coming from the senator from Kentucky, one of the Confederate states during the Civil War, he would see a true continuity with the spirit and culture of the Old South. It is likely that at the nation’s founding, blacks who were in their vast majority slaves were not considered Americans. Even though each slave counted, for the needs of representation, as three-fifths of a “real” American, they could not vote. They were property. McConnell may feel that because the black community consistently votes at more than 90% for Democrats, they are the property of Democrats rather than “Americans.”

      Example 2: Joe Biden’s Extended Property

      In his extended press conference last week, US President Joe Biden offered his updated interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. “We used to talk about, when I was a kid in college, about “America’s backyard,” the president reminded the press. “It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.”

      Everyone in the United States knows that your front yard is not only identified as your property, but more significantly it represents the image of yourself you wish to convey to the outside world. The traditional reference to a backyard contained the idea that it was a stretch of land that was far less significant, required less upkeep, if any at all, and could even merge with the countryside. Calling Latin America America’s backyard was disrespectful but suggested the possibility of benign negligence.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden most certainly believed his metaphor would convey a notion of respect and even solidarity with the people who inhabit the land in front of his house. But that is the crux of the problem. People who live in your front yard are squatters, not neighbors. The very idea that there may be people in a space the owner controls and designs to convey the family’s image is shocking. At least it should appear shocking to anyone who lives anywhere between El Paso and Tierra del Fuego.

      To avoid misunderstanding, though with no real intention to correct the terrifying image he created, Biden added: “And we’re equal people. We don’t dictate what happens in any other part of that — of this continent or the South American continent. We have to work very hard on it.”

      And so, between Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden, we learned that blacks are not quite the same thing as Americans and that Latinos and Latinas are at best thought of as tolerated squatters. The land of the free continues, at least unconsciously, to make distinctions between those who are authentically free and those who may, according to their ethnic or cultural identity, simply aspire to be free. 

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

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      Coming to Terms With the Game Being Played on the Russia-Ukraine Border

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      Over at least the past two months, US President Joe Biden’s White House has successfully inculcated in nearly all of the corporate media its firm belief that Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has made the decision to mount a military invasion of Ukraine. Most of the articles published on the subject at best wonder about only two things. When will the invasion take place? And how far will it go?

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      Since the question of whether he will invade has been put aside, the pundits are asking themselves a different question. It concerns President Putin’s motives. Does Putin feel he needs to overthrow the Ukrainian government and reestablish a friendly regime that will serve as a buffer state between Russia and Europe? Or will he simply be content with controlling the Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine, effectively destabilizing the current regime and thus preventing the possibility of the nation’s integration into NATO?

      Given the apparently Beltway mantra that an invasion is imminent and that the West insists on Ukraine’s right to do what it wants, including joining NATO, it was therefore surprising to read in The New York Times this week that people in the White House — in this case, people who usually are removed from communication with the media — may have made a different assessment. In an article whose title “War May Loom, but Are There Offramps?” is an acknowledgment of the level of uncertainty that surrounds the current geopolitical standoff, David E. Sanger reveals that “even President Biden’s top aides say they have no idea if a diplomatic solution, rather than the conquest of Ukraine, is what Mr. Putin has in mind.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Like most Russians, and unlike most Americans, Putin knows something about how the game of chess is played. Geopolitics for Russians has always been a game of chess. Curiously, Western commentators instead seem to believe that the game logic Putin respects is similar to that of American football or basketball. They incessantly talk about Russia’s “playbook.” These are sports where you assign roles, plan actions and then try to execute. However complex the configurations may come, plays in a playbook follow a logic of going from step one to step two. Chess requires a different form and level of thinking.

      It is reasonable to suppose that the Russian-American AP reporter Vladimir Isachenkov has a good understanding of Russian politics and Russian culture. Here is how he describes the current situation: “Amid fears of an imminent attack on Ukraine, Russia has further upped the ante by announcing more military drills in the region.

      Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Up the ante:

      A metaphor from poker that when used correctly means to increase the initial stakes of a game, the amount that must be advanced by each player to enter the game. It is often used incorrectly as an equivalent of another poker term: call the bluff.  

      Contextual Note

      Isachenkov predictably foresees the invasion authorities in the West almost seem to desire, and not only in Washington. This week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson forecasted Putin’s “plan for a lightning war.” Translated into German, that means Blitzkrieg, a term Johnson preferred to avoid using, though the innuendo was clear. The point of the entire effort to predict a Russian invasion is to instill the idea that Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler.

      Russians, however, are not known for practicing Blitzkrieg. Chess players prefer to construct their game patiently through a series of maneuvers that look at a long-term evolution. They challenge their opponent’s understanding of an evolving situation and are extremely sensitive to the layout on the chessboard, with the intent of making a checkmate inevitable. Americans, in particular, tend to go for strikes and are always hoping for a lucky strike.

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      Perhaps because Isachenkov believes Americans may not understand such strategies, instead of looking to the subtlety of chess for his gaming metaphor or even to Putin’s documented experience of judo, he draws his literary inspiration from another quintessential American game, poker. He tells us Russia has “upped the ante.” In so doing, he misinterprets not only the meaning of Putin’s moves but even the practice of poker itself. Isachenkov appears to interpret “up the ante” as meaning “increase the pressure” or “raise the temperature.” He didn’t realize that poker offers a better metaphor for Putin’s actions: calling Biden’s bluff.

      No respectable Western commentator would frame the situation in those terms. It would mean acknowledging that the US resorts to the ignoble art of bluffing. Bluffing implies hypocrisy. The US has only one goal: to make the world more equitable and to help democracy prevail. Secretary of State Antony Blinken defined the mission in these terms: “It’s about the sovereignty and self-determination of Ukraine and all states,” before adding that “at its core, it’s about Russia’s rejection of a post-Cold War Europe that is whole, free, and at peace.” And, just to make things clear: “It’s about whether Ukraine has a right to be a democracy.”

      Isachenkov points out that Russia “has refused to rule out the possibility of military deployments to the Caribbean, and President Vladimir Putin has reached out to leaders opposed to the West.” He calls this “military muscle-flexing” but perhaps fails to see this for the theater it is meant to be, coming from the president of a nation that gave us Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Gorki. Evoking the Caribbean is Putin’s way of alluding to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It may especially be meant to call Americans’ attention to the idea that powerful nations do not look kindly to discovering an adverse military nuclear presence at its borders. If John F. Kennedy could force Nikita Khrushchev to back down 60 years ago, Putin should be allowed to do the same to Biden today.

      Historical Note

      If Vladimir Putin is calling Joe Biden’s bluff, what is the nature of that bluff? In the simplest terms, Biden’s bluff is the latest version of what President George H.W. Bush, after the demise of the Soviet Union, proudly called the “new world order.” After defeating Donald Trump, Biden announced to his allies in Europe that “America is back,” which was his way of saying “my version of America is great again,” the version that uses its military reach to protect its business interests across the globe.

      In a New York Times op-ed dated January 24, national security expert, Fiona Hill, who served under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, claims that Putin’s aim is not just to annex all or part of Ukraine. He isn’t looking at taking a pawn or even a bishop. He has the whole chessboard in view. Hill is undoubtedly correct about Putin’s real purpose, that he “wants to evict the United States from Europe.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      “Right now,” Hill writes, “all signs indicate that Mr. Putin will lock the United States into an endless tactical game, take more chunks out of Ukraine and exploit all the frictions and fractures in NATO and the European Union.” In other words, the current posture of the United States is offering Putin a winning hand (poker) or setting itself up for a checkmate.

      Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who knows something about the stakes associated with warfare, makes a complementary point concerning the nature of the risk for the US: “It is another thing altogether to speak only of the pain sanctions would cause Russia, with little thought, if any, to the real consequences that will be paid on the home front.” If events get out of control, as is likely if there is no diplomatic solution, the effects on the West’s economy will be far more dramatic than any damage that can be inflicted on Russia through sanctions. 

      The US has refused to listen to the arguments not just of Putin, but also of foreign policy wonks such as John Mearsheimer. They believe that even the daydream of linking Ukraine with NATO crosses the reddest of lines, not just for Putin but for Russia itself. Failing to take that into account while insisting that it’s all a question of respecting an independent nation’s right to join a hostile military alliance represents a position that makes war inevitable.

      In a 2021 Geopolitical Monitor article with the title “Do We Live in Mearsheimer’s World?” Mahammad Mammadov cited “Mearsheimerian realism,” which he claims “sees Ukraine’s future as a stable and prosperous state in its being a ‘neutral buffer’ between multiple power poles, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Accordingly, Russia is still a declining power with a one-dimensional economy and need not be contained.”

      That seems like a solution most people in the West could live with… apart from the military-industrial complex, of course. And Democratic presidents seeking to prove they are not weaklings before this year’s midterm elections.

      *[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 Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

      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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      Creating Better Working Conditions in America

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      Before the coronavirus pandemic, our capitalist system relied on a generous supply of American workers willing and able to put in full-time hours. But with a declining birth rate, increases in early retirement, millions of women still out of the workforce and the deaths of more than 862,000 people in America — a result of a population ravaged by COVID-19 — the United States needs to get creative to stay operational.

      There are two solutions: attract more immigrants and institutionalize flexible work arrangements, especially for older Americans who aren’t ready or able to leave their jobs.

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      Unfortunately, politicians and employers have shown reluctance to embrace these common-sense solutions. Despite promises to make sweeping changes to US immigration policy, President Joe Biden has been unwilling or unable to roll back most of the extreme anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration. To be fair, in the cases where Biden and his team have tried to make some changes, they have been ordered by Republican-appointed judges to reimpose these policies, as in the case of the “Remain in Mexico” policy.  

      In the workplace, some employers have refused to institute flexible work policies, leading to employee pushback on calls to return to the office. Additionally, last summer, governors in 26 states — all but Louisiana led by Republicans — ended extra unemployment benefits from the American Rescue Plan two to three months earlier than federally required, with some explicitly stating that the unemployed are “lazy” and wanting to collect government benefits. Governor Mike Parson of Missouri said in May 2021 that continuing these unemployment programs “only worsens the workforce issues we’re currently facing. It’s time that we end these programs that have incentivized people to stay out of the workforce.” 

      Embed from Getty Images

      However, with the US averaging around 700,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 each day over the last week, the pandemic is far from over. American families are at their breaking point. Rather than relying on outdated racist and classist ideas about immigration and government support for families, politicians and employers wanting to stimulate the economy should focus on creative solutions to what is clearly an unprecedented crisis.  ]

      Immigrant Workers

      One solution is to build on the existing labor force by welcoming more immigrant workers and providing better benefits for their labor. While immigrants continue to be employed at a higher rate than those who are US-born, they make up just over one-sixth of the total US labor force. Immigrants have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic working as essential workers at all levels. But at the same time, many immigrants, particularly Asian, faced increased racism during the early days of the pandemic. 

      Politicians and the American public alike often invoke the idea that we are a “nation of immigrants.” While some might argue that we never have been, immigrants are an important part of American society and deserve better opportunities and benefits available to them.

      Many immigrants in the US are not eligible for unemployment benefits, which makes them more vulnerable. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that at least 6 million immigrants work in industries hardest hit during the pandemic. Additionally, immigrant families have a higher risk of being food insecure. Thus, while immigrants take care of us, we do not return the favor.  

      Flexible Working

      The early retirements of older workers are more likely tied to concerns about health and safety around COVID-19 and an increasing desire for remote work, yet many are not prepared financially for retirement. It would not be surprising if many returned to the workforce, at least part-time, at some point in the coming years. 

      Industries, corporations, foundations and employers would be wise to recruit retirees, even for part-time positions. The older population has a wealth of experience, knowledge and the aptitude to mentor younger workers and immigrants. For example, in one study of retired surgeons, more than half of participants were interested in serving as mentors to new surgeons and most were willing to do so even without compensation. Similarly, for teachers, mentoring is a valuable experience for both retirees and new teachers.  

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      To be sure, attracting immigrant workers by offering competitive salaries and benefits, and meeting workers’ need for flexible work arrangements might require employers to temporarily cut back on profits. However, making these investments in workers would show that employers are forward-thinking and respect their contributions.

      With slowing US population growth, employers will have a smaller pool of potential employees and will therefore need to offer better working conditions to attract workers. Additionally, 2021 saw American workers striking and unionizing with rates not seen in decades, with some attributing this, in part, to pandemic working conditions. In short, employers can create better working conditions by choice or by force.

      Politicians could ease the burden on companies by incentivizing flexible working policies and making it easier for Americans to combine work and family. But — even better — they could ease the burden on workers by providing direct support through paid leave, housing support, universal health care and other programs that would allow for a better quality of life for Americans. These supports would also make part-time work a more realistic option and empower families to make their own decisions about how best to combine work and family at any age.  

      Reimagine Society

      The COVID-19 pandemic has changed us as individuals and as a society. We cannot simply “get back to normal” despite calls from politicians and CEOs to do so. After all, the US alone will likely reach 1 million COVID-19 deaths in the months to come. 

      If politicians and employers want to stay operational, we must take this chance to reimagine our society. This means putting people over profits and creating workplaces that are responsive to the needs of people and their whole selves. 

      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 Pentagon’s Latest Glorious Failure

      by

      For centuries, the idea prevailed in our competitive civilization that when someone fails a fundamental qualifying test, it means they should return to their studies and keep a low profile until they felt ready to prove their capacity to pass the test. Someone who fails a driving test will be given a chance to come back a second or even third time. But most people who fail three or four times will simply give up trying to swallow their pride and accept their permanent dependence on public transport, family and friends. The same holds true for law school graduates seeking to pass the bar or indeed students in any school who repeatedly fails an examination.

      In the world of Silicon Valley, an entrepreneur whose first startup fails gets up, dusts off and returns to the race. The venture capitalists will often look at a second effort after the first one fails as proof of courage and resilience. Three- or four-time losers, however, will usually get the message that it may not be worth trying again. In the meantime, the venture capitalist will have removed them from their files.

      Amy Wax and the Breakdown of America’s Intellectual Culture

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      Some privileged people and institutions exist who appear to be spared the indignity of having to retreat after a pattern of failure. The Afghanistan Papers revealed how the repeated mistakes of US military leaders over decades not only did not require them to return to their studies, but duly rewarded them for their service.

      Then there is the US Department of Defense itself. In November 2021, Reuters offered this startling headline: “U.S. Pentagon fails fourth audit but sees steady progress.” Since 1990, Congress has obliged all government institutions to conduct a thorough audit. The Pentagon got a late start but they are already at their fourth audit. And they have consistently failed. But like a backward pupil in an elementary school class, the authorities note that despite consistent failure, they should be encouraged for making progress. Will they prove to be better at failing the next time?

      The Reuters article reveals the source of the government’s hope. It isn’t about performance. Like everything else in our society of spectacle, it’s all about favorability ratings. Our civilization has elevated the notion of ratings to the ultimate measure of virtue. Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s CFO, explains why, despite the failure, there is no need to worry. “The department continues to make steady progress toward achieving a favorable audit opinion.”

      Our Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Audit opinion:

      The rigorous standard by which the most sacred part of the US government, the only one that has achieved the status of an object of worship, will be judged by

      Contextual Note

      Opinion is famously fickle, never more so than in the hyperreal world of politics. Like the wind, it can change direction at a moment’s notice. Political professionals have become adept at forcing it to change. That is what political marketers are paid to do. And they measure their success by shifts in the largely unstable numbers that appear in the ratings. Everything becomes focused on the numbers produced by surveys of opinion.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Concerning the Pentagon’s audit, McCord did mention some impressive numbers that went beyond registering opinion alone. The results of the failed audit revealed “more than $3.2 trillion in assets and $3 trillion in liabilities.” Learning that the Pentagon’s balance sheet is $200 billion in the black can only be encouraging. Any entrepreneur knows what that means. In case of forced liquidation, there would be a valuable stockpile of usable weapons to be sold to the highest bidder and still money left over to pay off all the debts. Or, more likely, the whole operation could be profitably sold to a competitor, say, Canada, Mexico, France or Israel at an even higher valuation. China would be excluded from consideration because of the feat, perhaps at the UN, that such a merger would produce a global monopoly.

      Reuters reassures us that optimism is in the air: “As the audits mature and testing expands, Department of Defense leaders expect findings to increase in number and complexity.” They underline the encouraging thought that “successive sweeps could expose more profound problems.” Even the idea of exposing “more profound problems” is promising. It means we may one day understand what’s behind the discovery that the DoD — according to a previous audit — left $21 trillion of expenditure unaccounted for over the past two decades.

      The commentator Jonathan Cohn highlighted an obvious fact that should resonate with the public in light of recent haggling in Congress over President Joe Biden’s agenda. “None of the ‘centrist’ Democrats or Republicans who complained about the cost of the Build Back Better Act,” Cohn notes, “have said a peep about the ever-growing Pentagon budget — and the fact that it is somehow still growing even despite the Afghanistan pullout. It has grown about 25% in size over the past five years, even though the Pentagon just failed its fourth audit last month.”

      In his book, “War is a Racket,”, the most decorated senior military officer of his time, Smedley Butler, explained the underlying logic that still holds true nearly a century later. “The normal profits of a business concern in the United States,” Butler wrote, “are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.”

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      A lot of corporations — with names like, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Halliburton and Northrup — have managed to “get it.” Those corporations are very careful with their own audits because they know that failing an audit, even once, let alone four times, would cancel their ability to keep milking the Pentagon’s cash cow. Luckily, the Pentagon doesn’t have to worry about losing its relationship with those corporations simply on the grounds that it failed yet another audit.

      Historical Note

      Ratings, and more particularly favorability ratings, are numbers with no stable meaning. Instead of reflecting reality, they merely register the state of shifting opinions about reality. And yet, ratings have become a dominant force in 21st-century US culture. This is perhaps the most significant sign of a fatal decline of democracy itself.

      The idea of democracy first launched in Athens nearly three millennia ago aimed at spreading the responsibility for government among the population at large. Inspired by the Athenian example, the founders of the United States and drafters of the US Constitution realized that what worked reasonably well for the governance of a city-state could not be directly applied to a nation composed of 13 disparate British colonies. Drawing on England’s parliamentary tradition, the founders substituted representative democracy for Athenian direct democracy.

      Instead of sharing the responsibility of governance with the general population, the new republic offered the people a simple tool: the vote. It was accompanied by the idea that any (male) citizen could seek to stand for election. The founders hadn’t fully appreciated the fact that this might lead to the constitution of a separate ruling class, an elite group of people who could compete amongst themselves to use the tools of governance to their partisan ends.

      Nor did they anticipate the consequences of industrialization of the Western world that was about to unfold over the next two centuries. It would not only consolidate the notion of political organization focused on partisan ends, it would ultimately spawn the “science” of electoral marketing. With the birth of technology-based mass media in the 20th century, that science would focus exclusively on opinion, branding and ratings, leaving governance as an afterthought.

      Embed from Getty Images

      By the 21st century, politics became totally dominated by the race for popularity and the cultivation of strategies to that end. The emergence of television in the second half of the 20th century, coupled with the presence of telephones in every home, sealed the deal. The science of polling was born. Once that occurred, everything in public life became subject to ratings. In the world of politics, the needs of “we the people” were fatally subordinated to a focus on the shifting and increasingly manipulable opinions of those same people. The science of electoral marketing definitively replaced the idea of public service and the quality of governance as the dominant force in political culture.

      The only trace of uncertainty left is the famous “margin of error” attributed to polls, usually estimated at around 3%. In contrast, the Pentagon’s margin of error is measured in multiple trillions of dollars.

      *[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 Weekly 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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      Judicial Creativity Makes the News

      by

      The criminal justice system in the United States may not be the best imaginable model for producing effective crime control. Given the numbers of people incarcerated, neither does it appear to be an effective tool of dissuasion. Its rate of 629 people incarcerated per 100,000 is five times as high as France (119) and seven times higher than Italy (89), the home of Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra. Only El Salvador begins to approach the US figure (572), an ungovernable, poverty-stricken nation in which criminality has become a way of life for its youth, largely deprived of any other perspectives.

      On the other hand, it has consistently demonstrated its creativity. American legislators at both the state and federal level have always found imaginative ways of improving the performance of a legal system designed to protect and sometimes even reward anyone who can afford an expensive lawyer (or team of lawyers) and crush anyone who cannot, especially if their ethnicity places them in a group reputed to be inclined to criminal activity.

      Yahoo’s Demonstration of How to Lie With Statistics

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      California’s creative legislators were the first to initiate the brilliant idea, subsequently followed by more than 20 other states, of “three strikes and you’re out.” The national sport, baseball, provided them with the perfect model for setting the rules of civil behavior. The law was apparently “crafted to be largely symbolic.” It quickly achieved its purpose of consolidating in the public’s mind the idea of an identifiable, always-to-be-feared criminal class.

      Legislators and jurists invested much of their creative energy in finding acceptable ways to avoid sending people with lavish lifestyles to jail for a broad class of antisocial behavior, corporate crime, despite the fact that it frequently provokes major societal disasters. Senator Mitt Romney and the Supreme Court insisted that we think of corporations as people. But when they commit crimes, even with catastrophic consequences for millions of people’s lives, the courts not only cannot send a corporation to prison, they refrain from being too hard on the people at the top of those corporations who implemented the crimes since, after all, they were just doing their (well-paid) job and serving the economy. The same logic applies to members of the political establishment whose job responsibilities occasionally include committing war crimes across broad swaths of the world in the name of America’s sacrosanct “national security.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Jeffrey Epstein clearly belonged to that same elite. Given the sums of money he controlled, he achieved something akin to a corporate identity. In 2008, he was convicted in a Florida court on an absurdly mild charge that had little to do with the crimes he was known to have committed. Thanks to arrangements that were made with federal prosecutors, he served a simulacrum of incarceration in which for 13 months he was free during the day but condemned to spend his nights in a public jail.

      In 2019, the mounting evidence of his criminality made the decision to arrest him unavoidable. Possibly in consideration of his powerful friends and associates, Epstein had the good sense to commit suicide in his jail cell when nobody was looking. Could there have been some complicity in his noble self-sacrifice? As Bill Gates famously said, “he’s dead, so in general you always have to be careful,” meaning that once he could no longer talk, Epstein’s friends conveniently no longer needed to be so careful.

      Epstein’s demise in jail — whether assisted or self-inflicted — was a new crime scene. The criminals, in this case, were identified as the two black prison guards who were charged with monitoring his cell. Instead, they slept or surfed the web on that fatal night. They falsified their report and, like everyone else in the institution, were totally unconcerned by the fact that the video surveillance system was not working. Being the kind of people they were (black working class), they were duly called to account for their crime.

      Last week, the BBC reports, “US prosecutors have dismissed charges against two prison guards who falsified records the night Jeffrey Epstein killed himself on their watch.” The prosecutors “asked a judge to dismiss their case, saying the pair have complied with a plea deal.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Plea deal:

      A procedure that allows judicial authorities to avoid the literal application of the law and to arrange things in whatever they deem the public interest to be, either in the interest of identifying the true, powerful, higher-level culprits hiding in the wings or in the interest of protecting them.

      Contextual Note

      The case of these two prison guards undoubtedly deserves a bit more reflection than US media seem willing to offer. The briefest attempt at reflection might include the consideration that subjecting the guards to the full force of the law in a trial involve the risk that they might implicate other people, including their own superiors, to prove their innocence.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      In the imagined case that the two guards were not just neglectful but had received specific instructions not to carry out their normal duties that night, faced with the prospect of prosecution, they would undoubtedly be inclined to reveal in a public courtroom that they were simply following orders. In the equally imagined case that they were offered a chance to live their lives in peace after some sort of agreed settlement, part of the settlement would obviously include the dismissal of any charges against them.

      Instead of entertaining and investigating such hypotheses, the prosecutors issued this statement: “After a thorough investigation and based on the facts of this case and the personal circumstances of the defendants, the Government has determined that the interests of justice will best be served by deferring prosecution.” How, we might ask them, do they define “the interests of justice,” and justice for whom?

      Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, found the procedure suspicious. He called the plea deal “unacceptable” and demanded “a report detailing the prison agency’s failures.” The BBC article subtly expresses its own doubts in the following remark: “It is unclear why the document was not filed until 30 December.” Let the reader wonder about that.

      “As part of a plea deal,” the BBC reports, “the pair agreed to complete 100 hours of community service and co-operate with an investigation by the justice department’s inspector general.” What about the other parts of the deal? And what does cooperating entail? Could it involve agreeing to a law of silence? The reader is still wondering.

      A classic plea deal seeks to implicate people higher up on the criminal ladder. But nothing prevents it from doing just the opposite.

      Historical Note

      Ironically, just this week, Glenn Greenwald exposed a different, equally suspect story of a possible plea deal, this one concerning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Denouncing the control intelligence agencies have achieved over corporate news media, exemplified by the permanent presence of former high-level officials of the CIA and FBI as salaried staff of the networks, Greenwald cites former FBI Assistant Director and MSNBC employee Frank Figliuzzi. He argues that if extradited from the UK, “Assange may be able to help the U.S. government in exchange for more lenient charges or a plea deal. Prosecutions can make for strange bedfellows. A trade that offers a deal to a thief who steals data, in return for him flipping on someone who tried to steal democracy sounds like a deal worth doing.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      This would be a plea deal with purely political ends and no relation to any form or idea of justice. Instead, it relies on the radical injustice of obsessively prosecuting whistleblowers. The enmity between the intelligence agencies and Donald Trump is such that any prospect of legally embarrassing the former president appears worthwhile in the eyes of many people at MSNBC and in the establishment of the Democratic Party.

      Then there’s the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted last week of sex trafficking as Jeffrey Epstein’s partner and accomplice. Many in the media are speculating about the possibility of a reduced sentence if she is willing to name names. The prosecution ” confirmed no plea bargain offers were made or received,” according to Ghislaine’s brother, Ian Maxwell, who expects “that position to be maintained.

      Plea deals clearly offer scope for impressive feats of creativity by those in the judicial system who know how to use them.

      *[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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      America Is on the Edge of a Critical Precipice

      by

      As we enter a new year, there is every warning you can think of that the Biden presidency, its promise and its transformational potential will come to a crashing end in 2022. When circumstance, willful ignorance and an utter disdain for governmental achievement and good governance conspire together to undermine aspiration, no amount of policy response will win the day. Only passion and anger have any chance at success.

      Will Joe Manchin Remain a Democrat?

      READ MORE

      Into that mix, up steps Joe Manchin, a US senator from West Virginia to put the transformational agenda of the progressive movement in America on life support. Amid the cascade of bad news here, there is also plenty of “democratic” absurdity. In his last reelection in 2018, Manchin won a six-year US Senate seat from West Virginia with a whopping total of 290,510 votes. Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 with over 81 million votes. So what? In the land of the free, Manchin’s personal agenda, the agenda of the fossil fuel industry and apparently that of a sliver of America trumps that of a president elected by a significant majority of all Americans who voted in the presidential election.

      It is largely the ongoing institutional paralysis of the US Senate that gives Manchin and a handful of other US senators veto power over virtually all legislative initiatives. This paralysis is now so deeply ingrained that the results are almost always foreordained. In America’s two-party system, the Republican Party is presently committed solely to a scorched earth drive to political victory at the cost of even the most basic of policy discussions.

      West Virginia and More

      This is the fertile ground in which corruption and influence peddling thrive. Here again, Manchin steps up to the plate, this time to institutionally piss on the 93% of West Virginia’s children who are eligible to benefit from a child tax credit that is about to expire. Since this should be a huge incentive for him to support the extension of the child tax credit, Manchin’s singular effort to kill the legislation can only be explained by fealty to some special interest that surely doesn’t give a damn about those children.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Moreover, the child tax credit is just one pillar of the transformational safety net legislation that Senator Manchin and those who have likely bought his vote are attempting to bury. Corrupting special interests and their right-wing Republican allies are also hard at work scuttling universal pre-school education, childcare and elder care assistance, increased nutritional security for children, paid family leave, some measure of drug price controls, improved Affordable Care Act access and Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and support for affordable housing alternatives.

      Critically, as well, the proposed transformational social legislation that has already been passed by the US House of Representatives includes a significant (yet modest) effort to meet our national and international commitments to confront climate change. In fact, it may be antipathy toward these latter provisions that has pushed Manchin to abandon the West Virginia children and their families he would like you to think he cares about.

      Much of this should come as no surprise. After all, the legislative process in America is working as it was designed to work, ensuring that corporate interests, corrupt influence peddlers and wealthy Americans are able to bludgeon democratic reform with impunity. Unfortunately, no amount of policy response will win the day tomorrow in the face of the perfidy that is winning today. It will take a street fight to even begin to turn the tide.

      No Other Way Forward

      I do not say this lightly, but I see no other way forward. Adding voting rights, abortion rights, gun control and police reform to the scrapheap of history will make the rout complete. So, all Americans who understand the nation’s peril either seize this moment or they will continue to live in a country rife with inequality, racial and social injustice, gun violence, fundamental inequity and corruption. America will never be better if no one forces it to be better.

      To start, President Biden has to step up and demand that the key elements of the social safety net and climate change legislation be passed now. He must identify a legislative path forward and demand in no uncertain terms that all applicable legislative tools need to be utilized to that end. He must also make it clear that he will go directly to the people as their president to forge the necessary alliances to meet his legislative objectives. Then, every senator and every representative must be required to cast a vote, for or against. There is no choice.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      If the legislation fails to pass the Congress, then Biden must call the people to the streets. This means that those of us who care on our own behalf or on behalf of others either answer the call or accept an America unworthy of our allegiance. There is no choice.

      Meanwhile, it is way past time to eliminate minority rule in the US Senate, not just for the moment but forever. Understand that there will be no voting rights legislation, no abortion rights bill, no gun control measures and no police reform measures if a Republican Party in the minority in Congress can effectively prevent the majority party and its president from confronting the issues they were elected by the majority to confront. Again, back to Biden and his legislative allies, this time to demand an end to the filibuster to move critical legislation forward. There is no choice.

      Although much attention has been focused on the social safety net, climate legislation and infrastructure funding, critical voting rights legislation must now be moved front and center. Any talk of seizing the moment based on today’s majority will be rendered meaningless if today’s majority cannot vote in tomorrow’s elections.

      Voting

      The vilest forces on America’s political landscape are now laser focused on control of the right to vote at all levels of government and then using that control to ensure electoral outcomes that reflect a narrow right-wing and racist agenda. If successful, this path will enshrine economic, racial and social inequality for generations to come. That pernicious work is well underway and advancing with success.

      In this context, I am hardly the first person to suggest that a democracy that properly encourages a minority voice in its political discourse ceases to be a democracy when that minority is permitted to rule with no corresponding responsibility to govern. This, unfortunately, is the state of play in today’s Congress. It can only change if President Biden and his allies call us to the streets and we respond in numbers unseen before in this nation.

      *[This article was co-published 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