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      in US Politics

      'Blindsided': Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump's cruel border legacy

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      Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.

      Officials say the number of people caught attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is on pace to hit its highest number for 20 years. Single adults and families are being expelled under coronavirus safety rules inherited from Donald Trump.
      But a growing number of children, some as young as six years old, from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are arriving at the southern border without parents or guardians. These minors are brought to border patrol facilities – where many languish in cramped, prison-like conditions for days on end.
      The fast-developing humanitarian emergency shows how Biden’s determination to break from Trump’s harsh, nativist crackdown in favour of a more compassionate approach has collided with the reality of finite resources and a broken system.
      “I do think that they were blindsided by this surge,” said María Teresa Kumar, founding president of the grassroots political organisation Voto Latino. “As someone that monitored this a lot, I didn’t see that coming and I don’t think the community saw that coming. It took everybody by surprise.
      “It is heart-wrenching knowing that there are children that are cold and don’t have family. It’s one of these cases where there seems to be no right answers. Knowing the people inside the administration are very much on the side of immigrants speaks to me that there are real moral dilemmas happening right now and I would not want to be in that position.”

      Democrats have called the situation a “challenge” and “problem” and blamed Trump’s legacy. Republicans have rushed to brand it the first “crisis” and “disaster” of Biden’s presidency. The battle is proof that border access remains one of the most complex, emotive and radioactive issues in American politics.
      Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by promising to build a wall, routinely vilified migrants and, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, spoke often of an “invasion”. Biden stopped construction of the wall and promised to unwind Trump’s zero-tolerance policies.
      The number of “encounters” between migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased every month since April 2020. But when 100,441 migrants were reported attempting to cross the border last month, it was the highest level since March 2019 and included a particular rise in unaccompanied children.
      Many such children head to the US to reunite with family members or escape poverty, crime and violence. Central America has been hit by hurricanes and the economic fallout of Covid-19. In an ABC interview this week, Biden denied that more migrants were coming because he is “a nice guy”, insisting: “They come because their circumstance is so bad.”
      Under Trump, unaccompanied children were sent straight back to Mexico. Biden decided they should go to a border patrol facility and, within 72 hours, be transferred to the health department with a view to being placed with a family member or sponsor.
      However, it has quickly become clear the system is not fit for purpose, leaving about 4,500 children stuck in facilities designed for adult men. Lawyers who visited one facility in Texas described seeing children sleeping on the floor or on metal benches and being allowed outside for a few minutes every few days.
      The administration is scrambling to find more capacity, opening emergency shelters and using a convention centre in Dallas to house up to 3,000 teenage boys. It also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which typically responds to floods, storms and other disasters, to help shelter and transport children at least until early June.
      Republicans seized on that move as evidence a disaster is unfolding. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, led a delegation of a dozen Republicans to El Paso, Texas, and spoke of “the Biden border crisis”, adding: “It’s more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak.”
      The message has resounded through a conservative media that finds Biden an elusive target. Trump made wildly exaggerated claims in a Fox News interview: “They’re destroying our country. People are coming in by the hundreds of thousands, And, frankly, our country can’t handle it. It is a crisis like we have rarely had and, certainly, we have never had on the border.”
      For Republicans, reeling from election defeat, internal divisions and failure to block Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the border offers a political lifeline.
      Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If the numbers go down next month this isn’t a crisis, but I think what they are expecting is that they’re not going to go down and that this is going to be something that will be an enduring and endemic problem.
      “It’s something that energises and unites the Trump voting coalition and could easily be seen as a failure on behalf of the administration by just enough of the people who voted for him but aren’t hardcore Democrats. So I think it’s a very smart move by Republicans to play this out and Biden needs to figure out how you can be compassionate while not being naively welcoming. He has not yet figured out how to do that.”

      Others, however, regard the Republican response as predictable ploy by a party obsessed with demonising migrants. Kumar said: “They’re phonies and it is coldly calculated because they know they have problems with suburban white women voters, and they are trying to make a case for it for the midterms.
      “It’s cynical and gross because when children were literally dying at the border, when they had a president that was teargassing refugees, not one of them stood up. It’s callous and cold political expediency and it’s shameful.”
      The White House has pointed out that the Trump administration forcibly separated nearly 3,000 children from parents, with no system in place to reunite them. Alejandro Mayorkas, the first migrant and first Latino in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a nine-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration. That, to me, is a humanitarian crisis.”
      Mayorkas argues that Trump’s decision to cut staffing, bed capacity and other resources was reckless given the likelihood that the number of migrants would rise again as the pandemic waned.
      “The system was gutted,” he said, “facilities were closed and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers. We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.” More

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      in World Politics

      Influence Has Become Democracy’s Influenza

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      Two months after the departure of Donald Trump, the world is seeking to understand the contours of the new administration’s still hesitating foreign policy. US President Joe Biden made a bold step forward this week when he vowed to pursue the fantasy of Russiagate, the Democratic equivalent of QAnon. He may fear that without the Russian bugbear, MSNBC, the news channel that contributed so effectively to his election, will see its audience plummet even further than in the weeks since the inauguration. Russiagate alone kept MSNBC’s audience hooked through four years of Donald Trump.

      CNBC delves into the private thoughts of a president who now apparently feels empowered to judge the moral status of other leaders: “President Joe Biden says he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a killer with no soul.” Biden intends to make the Russian president “pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 US election.

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      Biden’s remarks followed a report issued by US intelligence that included the following observation: “A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including — misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.”

      One may forgive the incoherence of the author’s punctuation, but no reasonable reader can fail to deplore the confusion of the charges, highlighted by the use of phrases such as “people linked to” and “some of whom.” And then there is the semantic enormity of the phrase, “launder influence narratives.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Influence narrative:

      Anything any politician or diplomat of any nation happens to utter in speech or writing. The basis of all political discourse.

      Contextual Note

      In his book, “The Ultimate Goal,” former Indian spy chief Vikram Sood explores the way governments and their intelligence arms build and promote their self-interested narratives. Like a modern Machiavelli, Sood offers today’s princes the basic recipe: “Manage narratives to manage your destiny … tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction.” That sums up the business of the CIA. The fact that US intelligence operatives want people to feel shocked that Russia might be using “influence narratives” reveals more about the CIA and its belief in the naivety of the US public than it does about Russia. The report itself is a perfect example of an “influence narrative.”

      Covering the same topic for The Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima confusingly repeats the CIA’s metaphor of laundering when she cites the report’s claim that Russians used “Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence to ‘launder’ unsubstantiated allegations against Biden through U.S. media, lawmakers and prominent individuals.” “Launder,” in this context, is clearly a metaphor in spy language borrowed from the idea of “money laundering,” the act of pushing dirty money through indirect channels to return to the economy with a clean appearance. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      It may seem odd to apply a metaphor borrowed from the banking world and apply it to the hyperreal field of political narrative. But given the intelligence community’s well-documented predilection for dirty information — otherwise known as lies — it should hardly surprise us that the masters of plots and subplots see the public narrative as something that needs to be laundered. Sood, after all, tells us that the political language in any official narrative “is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.”

      Since the idea of “laundered narrative” belongs specifically to spy vocabulary, it may seem disconcerting that Washington Post journalists have uncritically adopted the term and feel no need to explain what it means. Could it be that they are corrupted by their incestuous relations with the spymasters in Langley, Virginia, who feed them much of their most valuable content and which they reprint uncritically? In contrast with The Post, Al Jazeera took the liberty of substituting a different verb, writing: “Moscow sought to ‘push influence narratives’ that included misleading or unsubstantiated claims.” 

      “Launder” has become part of The Post’s standard vocabulary. In September 2020, during the presidential election campaign, Post columnist Josh Rogin had used the term concerning the same claims about Moscow’s interference. According to Rogin, Democratic leaders demanded “a briefing based on concerns that members of Congress were being used to launder information as part of a foreign interference operation.”

      This pushes the accusation a little further by supposing that the members of Congress referred to were actively involved in making the dirty information look clean. But that’s exactly how the fabricated Russiagate narrative is designed to play out: Putin’s accomplices and useful idiots can be found under every table. Just like in the good ol’ days of Joe McCarthy. After all, if the narrative tells us there’s a threat, we really do need to feel threatened. That’s the CIA and the media doing their job. Who doesn’t remember all the al-Qaeda sleeper cells that populated every American city following 9/11?

      Historical Note

      The website Strategic Culture offers a succinct explanation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird that permitted it to infiltrate domestic media in the US. The journalist, Wayne Madsen, writes: “A major focus of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its very inception was the penetration of the news media, including the assignment of CIA agents to the newsrooms and editorial offices of America’s largest media operations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hearst Newspaper, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other major newspapers and broadcast networks.” That has been ever since one of the harder components of US soft power.

      This week, Matt Taibbi interviewed the famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, exposing the embarrassing truth about the war in Vietnam that had been carefully hidden from the media. Taibbi recounts how “Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.”

      In its own dissemination of the content of the intel report released this week, The New York Times admits that the “report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.” The report itself explains: “The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the specific information on which it bases its analytic conclusions, as doing so could endanger sensitive sources and methods.” In other words, don’t ask for evidence, you won’t get it. Glenn Greenwald reminds his readers that when, last October, the story broke concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop that intel attributed to Moscow’s meddling, the FBI had already “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

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      When the same discredited story reappeared months later with no significant changes and still with zero evidence, instead of casting doubt on the entire story, the obedient media interpreted it as confirmation of the original narrative. What better illustration of Vikram Sood’s principle, “tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction”?

      Perhaps the most neglected dimension of this debate concerns the official role of intelligence. A month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, former President Harry Truman complained in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the CIA — an agency he had created — had betrayed its straightforward mission of gathering information to clarify the president in his decision-making. Truman insisted that “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” When Operation Mockingbird under the direction of Cord Meyer was launched during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA had not only begun focusing on influencing the president, it realized that the best way of influencing executive decisions was to control the narrative that the media would share with the public.

      The result is visible today, though no public figure will admit it. Democracy itself is engulfed within an elaborate system coordinated between the intelligence community, vested interests and the commercial media that generates and disseminates an endless stream of influence narratives.

      *[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 US Politics

      Why Medicare for All is a political headache: Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      The Guardian health reporter Jessica Glenza steps in for Jonathan Freedland this week. She speaks to Dr Abdul El-Sayed, co-author of a new book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, about why the concept of providing healthcare coverage for all Americans is so politically vexing

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      No three words are likely to elicit a more divisive response in Washington than “Medicare for all”. From the outside looking in, some might wonder why any politician – Republican or Democrat – would hesitate to provide universal health coverage to all Americans. The answer goes to the core of American ideas about the role of government and the free market. This week Jessica Glenza speaks to Dr Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and epidemiologist and co-author of a new book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide. He also ran for governor of Michigan, where he advocated for universal healthcare. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in US Politics

      The woman seeking to unseat Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      “I’m taking on the queen of Qanon: Marjorie Taylor Greene,” reads one tweet from Holly McCormack. “Retweet if you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is an embarrassment to our country,” says another.America’s midterm elections may be 20 months in the future, but a campaign is already under way to unseat the extremist Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump devotee. In a rural district of Georgia that Taylor Greene won last November with three-quarters of the vote, effectively unopposed after her Democratic opponent quit the race, no one thinks it is going to be easy.But McCormack, 36, an insurance agent, singer-songwriter and Democrat, thinks her opponent’s far-right shock tactics have run their course. “People are sick of it,” she told the Guardian. “People are tired of the rhetoric and the division, and people are hungry for a real person who treats people well, and actually shows empathy with action and not words. She claims to be a Christian and then she shows us with her actions the hate.”Taylor Greene, 46, has been throwing procedural wrenches in the works of Congress since she was stripped of her committee assignments last month for antisemitic and other inflammatory statements.She has previously made comments on social media supporting the QAnon conspiracy movement, suggesting mass shootings were staged by gun control activists and proposing a Jewish cabal started a deadly California wildfire with a laser beam directed from outer space. And last month she posted an anti-transgender sign across the hall from a congresswoman who has a transgender child.McCormack’s social media sorties appear to have caught her attention. On Wednesday the Democrat tweeted a screenshot showing Taylor Greene had blocked her on Twitter, asking: “Was it something I said, Marjorie?”She commented: “It’s mind-boggling how many people she’s attacked, from school shooting survivors to the LGBTQ community to Jewish space lasers. Those are real people behind all of these attacks that are just spewing out of her continually. My team can’t keep up and it zones me out to read too much of it.“It’s honestly dangerous for our democracy. It’s not just for Georgia 14th; this is important for the country that we get rid of someone that is sowing so much hate and so much division. If we’re going to get better as a country, we’re going to have to stop the right versus left nonsense and see each other as people and as Americans first.”For McCormack, the daughter of an army veteran, the turning point was the deadly insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January. “That was the day that I quit kicking around running and I said, I’ve got to do this. We have to do this.“I’ve got two teenagers and the representation that we’re having is unacceptable. It’s just horrible and it doesn’t represent how I was raised, how I’m raising my kids. I really hammered into them since they were born to be kind and how you treat people matters and that they should fight for other people. They should stand up if something’s wrong and so, even though it’s hard, it’s the right the right thing to do.”McCormack regrets the political tribalism that means the first question asked is whether someone is Democratic or Republican. She added: “People are wanting healing, and they’re wanting to be able to get along with their neighbours again, and they’re wanting to not have families broken apart over this. It’s not OK, and I think people are ready for a refreshing change.”McCormack, who argues that rural areas like hers have been left behind by noisy politicians, will not have a clear run for her party’s nomination as several so-far unnamed Democrats have filed to run in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records. The odds against any of them in this ruby red district are daunting, but McCormack finds inspiration in Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s victories in January’s Senate runoffs.Her career as a musician – she last released an album in 2012 and a single in 2014 – also offers a chance to stand out from the crowd. “It’s acoustic, folky – chick-rock is the best way to say it,” she laughed. “I should have been of age recording music in the 90s and I would have fit right in. We’re looking forward to some creative fundraising and festivals during the summer.”Among the songs that McCormack has written, her favorite is Fire. Should she unseat Taylor Green in November 2022, the headline will write itself. More

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      in US Politics

      Adam Schiff: will the Democratic star of Trump's impeachment trial be California's next top cop?

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      As the lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, Adam Schiff, the representative from southern California, became a household name, an icon of the anti-Trump resistance, and a rising star in the Democratic party. A year on, the congressman looks increasingly well positioned to be appointed as California’s next attorney general. But in Schiff’s home district, criminal justice and immigrant rights advocates say that his record as state senator and congressman, authoring legislation to increase the criminalization and incarceration of Black and brown Californians, should disqualify him from holding the position.“There’s this real disconnect,” said Jody Armour, a University of Southern California law professor who studies the intersection of race and legal decision making. “The country knows Schiff as sort of an icon. Here in California, we know him as someone who was, in many ways, one of the chief architects of mass incarceration.”Schiff has reportedly been lobbying Governor Gavin Newsom for the attorney general spot that will open up if the US Senate confirms Xavier Becerra as the health and human services secretary later this week. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has given her blessings, and reportedly even a personal endorsement.Schiff, 60, began his career at a US district court in California, first as a law clerk and eventually as an assistant US attorney, rising to prominence for prosecuting the case against a former FBI agent convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.He was elected to the California state senate in 1996, and four years later moved to the US House of Representatives. There, he served as the chair of the powerful intelligence committee, becoming one of Pelosi’s closest confidants.As the lead impeachment manager pursuing Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Schiff’s fiery speeches gained him lavish praise from liberals, begrudging recognition from conservatives and $41m in campaign funds last election cycle.Schiff’s star power, his powerful allies in the Democratic party and fundraising prowess have set him up as a top contender for attorney general.‘Tough on crime’ recordCalifornia voters elect their top prosecutor every four years, but Becerra will be leaving his seat with a year of his term left – leaving it to Newsom to find a replacement until the next election. From there, Schiff could be in a better position than he currently is to run for US Senate, or even governor in the future.In recent years, and especially under Donald Trump, the California attorney general has become a national figure. Becerra launched more than 100 lawsuits against the previous administration, successfully sueing to block policies that would strong-arm local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration authorities, insert a question about immigration status into the US census, or end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, which gives temporary protection to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children.Critics say Schiff’s appointment would run counter to the political progress on police reform and criminal justice made last year amid nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd. Armour, along with a number of academics, activists and advocates in California, have asked Newsom to appoint someone else. “One person alone is not responsible for California’s incarceration crisis. But Schiff stands out for his extreme punitiveness,” they wrote in a public letter.They pointed at Schiff’s legislative proposals and votes in the California senate in the late 1990s, which were in line with the “tough on crime” attitude of politicians in that era. Schiff authored several bills to toughen up the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement, including a proposal that would have expanded the three strikes law, one that would have allowed 14-year-olds to be tried as adults, and a bill to create juvenile “boot camps” for children who commit crimes while at school. On immigration, he authored a bill that would have made the hiring of an undocumented immigrant a crime punishable with jail time.Many of the most punitive criminal justice bills Schiff introduced never became law. They failed to get enough support in the legislature or were vetoed by both Republican and Democratic governors.More recently, as a US representative, Schiff sided with Republicans in 2017 to support the Thin Blue Line Act, which would have altered the federal criminal code to add the targeting or killing of a law enforcement officer to the list of offenses that could be sentenced with the federal death penalty. The law was criticized by civil rights organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and it ran counter to policies espoused by Newsom, who issued an executive order to halt executions in California in 2019.The discrepancy between Schiff’s record and California’s priorities are noteworthy, at a moment when the state attorney general will serve as a key player in debates around police accountability, criminal justice reform and immigration. Under new California law, the state’s attorney general will take on the role of investigating all deadly police shootings of unarmed civilians. And the state is continuing to challenge Trump-era policies that restricted immigrant rights.In June, Schiff did disavow Jackie Lacey, the former Los Angeles district attorney who faced fierce backlash from the Black Lives Matter movement for her failure to prosecute police violence. “This is a rare time in our nation’s history. We have a responsibility to make profound changes to end systemic racism and reform criminal justice,” Schiff said.Schiff’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for response to the concerns detailed in advocates’ letter to the governor. The congressman has repeatedly brushed off questions about his attorney general ambitions in national news interviews.But Armour said he wished Schiff would explicitly reckon with his record, much like Biden and Kamala Harris – herself a former California attorney general – did in the lead-up to the 2020 elections. Newsom meanwhile has remained secretive about who his final pick will be. Other top contenders include Rob Bonta, an assembly member representing Oakland who has been endorsed by the Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, and Diane Becton, the Contra Costa county district attorney. More