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      in US Politics

      Biden trumpets democracy abroad in Post op-ed – as threats spread at home

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      Joe Biden will use his visit to Europe this week to “rally the world’s democracies” in a reset of US foreign policy after four turbulent years under Donald Trump – all while threats to American democracy, stoked by Trump, proliferate at home.The president’s plan for the trip was set out in a column for the Washington Post on Saturday night, as Trump spoke to Republicans in North Carolina.Previewing meetings with “many of our closest democratic partners” and Vladimir Putin, Biden promised to “demonstrate the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age”.Critics may point out that the president would do well to face up to attacks on democracy at home. He has put Vice-President Kamala Harris in charge of the matter but there are many fronts to the battle.In the states, Republicans have passed laws to restrict ballot access and to make it possible to overturn election results.On the stump, Trump continues to peddle his lie that Biden’s victory in November was the result of fraud. In Greenville on Saturday, the former president called his defeat “the crime of the century”.In Washington last month, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in his cause.In Biden’s own party, centrist senators stand in the way of voting rights protections.In his column for the Post, Biden tied another domestic priority – infrastructure spending, currently tied up in seemingly doomed negotiations with Republicans – to a chief foreign policy aim.“Just as it does at home,” he wrote, “honing the ability of democracies to compete and protecting our people against unforeseen threats requires us to invest in infrastructure. The world’s major democracies will be offering a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure that is more resilient and supports global development.”In North Carolina, Trump said China should pay the US and the world $10tn in reparations for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while nations should cancel debt to Beijing.Biden touted domestic successes – progress against the coronavirus and the passage of his relief and stimulus package (without a single Republican vote) – and said: “The United States must lead the world from a position of strength.”He saluted the announcement on Saturday by G7 finance ministers of a global minimum corporate tax rate. Further distancing himself from Trump, who withdrew from the Paris climate deal, he said: “We have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress that curbs the climate crisis and creates jobs by driving a global clean-energy transition.”In office, Trump attacked Nato. Biden saluted the “shared democratic values” of “the most successful alliance in world history. In Brussels, at the Nato summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to … ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.”Amid proliferating such attacks, he said, it was important that “when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States”.Trump famously caused consternation among the US press corps in Helsinki in 2018, meeting Putin without aides and seeming cowed in his presence.Biden said the US and its allies were “standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security … and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”Some have asked what Biden hopes to gain from meeting Putin – former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Guardian this week, “You meet when you have a strategy in place of how to deal with Russia and I don’t think he has one.”In the Post, Biden heralded his extension of the New Start nuclear arms treaty and responses to cyberattacks.“I will again underscore the commitment of the United States, Europe and like-minded democracies to stand up for human rights and dignity,” he wrote.“This is a defining question of our time: can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world? Will the democratic alliances and institutions that shaped so much of the last century prove their capacity against modern-day threats and adversaries?“I believe the answer is yes. And this week in Europe, we have the chance to prove it.” More

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      in World Politics

      Democracy Is Down but Not Out

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      Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarussian dictator, snatches a dissident from midair. Military strongman Assimi Goita launches another coup in Mali. Benjamin Netanyahu escalates a military conflict to save his own political skin in Israel. In the United States, the Republican Party launches a full-court press to suppress the vote.

      Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

      Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has argued, the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

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      The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

      Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House survey, for instance, is “Democracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst showing so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also registered a drop for the third year in a row.

      If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

      The Pandemic Recedes in America

      Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s constitutional changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

      But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever increase in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

      This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election theft in 2024.

      The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse themselves and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball pulled its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

      These moves motivated Texas-based companies to protest that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of walking out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now looking to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

      At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the reboot in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

      A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may finally push the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were famously used to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20th century.

      High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

      Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

      Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively saved the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

      But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has begun to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass protests by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have mobilized in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is catching up in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

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      The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has witnessed a significant drop in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also declined in popularity. Golden Dawn has disappeared from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much above 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at around 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen currently leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party leads by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

      Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are protesting throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has fallen to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office, appears to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

      Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular leader in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

      The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63% approval rating.

      Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

      The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

      Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

      Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

      His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, tweeted, “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

      Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like Poland and Hungary, have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

      Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

      But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

      *[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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      in US Politics

      Trump’s ex-counsel to be quizzed on Russia investigation after two-year fight

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      The House judiciary committee is poised to question Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into the former president.The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court. House Democrats then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the justice department’s inquiries into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.That month, the DoJ released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing justice department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described numerous instances of the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.While the panel eventually won its fight for McGahn’s testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members will not learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. Panel chair Jerry Nadler said the agreement for McGahn’s testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives”.It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump, the first time over the Ukraine scandal and the second following the 6 January insurrection. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal and damning witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the investigation and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.Trump’s DoJ fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but US district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington. More

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      in US Politics

      White House contacts Russia after hack of world’s largest meatpacking company

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      A ransomware attack against the world’s largest meatpacking company that has disrupted meat production in North America and Australia originated from a criminal organization probably based in Russia, the White House was informed on Tuesday.The attack on Brazil’s JBS caused its Australian operations to shut down on Monday and has stopped livestock slaughter at its plants in several US states.The ransomware attack follows one last month on Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, that crippled fuel delivery for several days in the US south-east.The White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said JBS had given details of the hack to the White House, that the United States had contacted Russia’s government about the matter and that the FBI was investigating.“The White House has offered assistance to JBS and our team at the Department of Agriculture have spoken to their leadership several times in the last day,” Jean-Pierre said.“JBS notified the administration that the ransom demand came from a criminal organization likely based in Russia. The White House is engaging directly with the Russian government on this matter and delivering the message that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals,” Jean-Pierre added.If the outages continue, US consumers could see higher meat prices during summer grilling season and meat exports could be disrupted at a time of strong demand from China.JBS said it suspended all affected systems and notified authorities. It said its backup servers were not affected.“On Sunday, May 30, JBS USA determined that it was the target of an organised cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems,” the company said in a Monday statement.“Resolution of the incident will take time, which may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers,” the company’s statement said.The company, which has its North American operations headquartered in Greeley, Colorado, controls about 20% of the slaughtering capacity for US cattle and hogs, according to industry estimates.Two kill and fabrication shifts were canceled at JBS’s beef plant in Greeley due to the cyber-attack, representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 7 said in an email. JBS Beef in Cactus, Texas, also said on Facebook it would not run on Tuesday – updating an earlier post that had said the plant would run as normal.JBS Canada said in a Facebook post that shifts had been canceled at its plant in Brooks, Alberta, on Monday and one shift so far had been canceled on Tuesday.A representative in São Paulo said the company’s Brazilian operations were not affected. More

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      in World Politics

      Media: How Debunked Stories Continue to Thrive

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      On May 6, The Daily Devil’s Dictionary dared to express surprise at the latest example of Russia-related fearmongering by the respectable corporate media. When Christopher Miller, who had recently risen to fame as acting defense secretary in the waning months of Donald Trump’s presidency, claimed to have unearthed an “act of war” attributable to Russia, the media jumped on the occasion. Miller was referring to the dormant “Havana Syndrome” dossier and accusing Russia of conducting direct-energy attacks against Americans in various places across the globe.

      Not wishing to miss the festivities, two prominent media outlets — CNN and Politico — immediately crashed the party. They quoted Miller’s warnings and mobilized their journalistic talents to promote a story capable of striking fear in anyone with an American passport. Curiously, The New York Times, always eager to accuse Russia of anything suspicious that takes place anywhere on earth, missed the scoop. It took them another week to get around to covering it, possibly because they were hard at work on another debunked story that they deemed worthy of resuscitating, concerning the reported Russian offer of bounty for killing US personnel in Afghanistan. Or possibly because they didn’t want to give credence to a Trump official.

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      The bounty story was their big scoop a year ago. In its coverage at the time, The Times claimed to reveal “a stunning intelligence assessment” intended to prove, as always, that Trump was covering up for his best friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since then, even the intelligence community and the Biden administration have walked it back, but not The New York Times. Perhaps they believe it’s the best way to defend their honor.

      On May 10, four days after the publication of our article and two days before The Times decided to raise the alarm again, Foreign Policy published an article by Cheryl Rofer with the title, “Claims of Microwave Attacks Are Scientifically Implausible.” Apparently, no one at The Times had time to consult this article before publishing their account on May 12. Even Homeland Security News Wire publicly called the thesis into question on May 11.

      Foreign Policy describes Rofer as a writer specialized in scientific and political commentary who had spent 35 years as a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In other words, she is not a journalist dabbling in science but a scientist now active in journalism. After sifting through the testimony, Rofer came to the evidence-based conclusion that the technology the intelligence agencies speculate may be behind the “attacks” probably does not exist. In her own words: “The evidence for microwave effects of the type categorized as Havana syndrome is exceedingly weak.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Exceedingly weak:

      For some media, highly probable, on condition that the evidence cited may possibly be construed as pointing to Russia. In all other cases: not to be taken seriously.

      Contextual Note

      To be fair, Rofer offers no definitive proof that the technology does not or cannot exist. She explains why she reached her conclusion: “No proponent of the idea has outlined how the weapon would actually work. No evidence has been offered that such a weapon has been developed by any nation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and no evidence has been offered to support the existence of this mystery weapon.”

      Every journalist would be wise to follow the example of her reasoning. It doesn’t exclude the most extreme hypotheses, but points in the direction of others that are far more probable. “It’s possible,” she writes, “that the symptoms of all the sufferers of Havana syndrome share a single, as yet unknown, cause; it’s also possible that multiple real health problems have been amalgamated into a single syndrome.” This assertion contains two important truths. It reminds readers that, until there is proof of the technology at play, the cause remains “unknown.” It also points to the fact that many of the health problems we all encounter — particularly concerning perception and mental functions — may be attributable to multiple causes.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Miller based his belief in Russia’s “act of war” on a 2020 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned by the State Department. According to Kyle Mizokami, writing in Popular Mechanics, the State Department’s assessment cited the fact that there “was significant research in Russia/USSR into the effects of pulsed radio frequencies.” There has also been significant research on witchcraft and psychedelic drugs, but that doesn’t mean Russia has weaponized witchcraft. The CIA, on the other hand, does have a history of weaponizing psychedelic drugs. The tendency to assume that research points to the existence of an operational weapon reflects the kind of tendentious reasoning psychologists call paranoia. Would this be the first time that the State Department has allowed paranoid speculation to pollute its scientific endeavors?

      In the guise of proof, the assessment offers this statement, as explained by Mizokami: “This could have resulted in the development of a portable, nonlethal, covert weapon designed to exploit something called the Frey Effect.” This sentence alone tells us we are in the presence not of science, but propaganda. The auxiliary verb “could have” gives the game away. Evoking a remote possibility to suggest a “probable” sinister outcome is standard procedure in all propaganda (and paranoia). Adding the detail of the “Frey Effect” makes it sound like serious research. Preceding it with the qualification “something called” further reveals that we are in a world of deliberate rhetorical imprecision.

      Mizokami has read Rofer’s article. He first presents the State Department’s circumstantial case and then provides an explanation of the Frey effect, noting that “there’s considerable debate over whether the Frey effect actually exists.” He concludes by aligning with Rofer’s scientific skepticism: “We may never know who’s behind the attacks, and what kind of weapon is being used.” A philosopher skilled at analyzing the logic of the English language would push it even further. We may never know whether there were “attacks,” in the sense of external aggressions. If there were no attacks, there was no weapon.

      Humankind, in the age of electronic communications, lives under a permanent barrage of microwaves, electronic signals and frequencies that may, for all we know, combine in various ways to produce diverse effects on particular people. The State Department seems to believe only Americans are targeted. That is why it suspects the Russians (and sometimes the Chinese). But other people elsewhere may be experiencing the same symptoms. Only Americans would report this to the State Department. Most scientists and logicians would want to take wider statistics into account before jumping to a conclusion.

      Historical Note

      This is pretty obviously a handy piece of fake news that establishment news outlets have now taken on a five-year-long joyride. But why? First and foremost, the story is readable and attracts eyeballs. It combines James Bond-style intrigue, next generation technology and science. It’s also fodder for Trump-haters and fits snugly into the new Cold War mentality that so much of the media now depends on to keep the public’s fear alive.

      The New York Times’ manner of stating the case offers an interesting technical explanation of why such a flaky story continues to work even after being largely discredited. Here is how it creates false perspective: “Though some Pentagon officials believe Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., is most likely behind the case of the 2-year-old, and evidence has emerged that points to Russia in other cases, the intelligence agencies have not concluded any cause or whether a foreign power is involved.” The journalists here populate two-thirds of the sentence with opinion supporting the accusation and the last third with a negatively formulated admission that doubt may exist.

      The rest of the article offers a plethora of anecdotes about who thinks what, who has met with whom and other details, all of it serving to remind readers how troubling the issue is and how concerned they need to be. It concludes with an appeal formulated by a politician: “We really need to fully understand where this is coming from, what the targeting methods are and what we can do to stop them.”

      In other words, readers can expect a host of new articles on the question, perhaps lasting another five years. It’s a serial thriller.

      *[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

      Republican Covid lies follow foreign strongmen’s lead – and are deadly for it | Robert Reich

      by

      A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged under the country’s National Security Act for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The hospital’s owner and manager says police have accused him of “false scaremongering”, after he stated publicly that four patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out.Since Covid-19 exploded in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak. On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30% of worldwide deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day.The horror has been worsened by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse.Vladimir Putin is busily denying the truth about Covid in Russia. Demographer Alexei Raksha, who worked at Russia’s official statistical agency, Rosstat, but says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth about Covid, claims daily data has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better. Like many experts, he uses excess mortality – the number of deaths during the pandemic over the typical number of deaths – as the best indicator.Trump wants the credit for developing the vaccine. Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates.Russia was first out of the gate with a vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polling puts the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60% to 70%. That’s because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating the public than on claiming success in containing Covid.The US is suffering a similar problem – the legacy of another strongman, Donald Trump. Although more than half of US adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40% of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread.Like Modi and Putin, Trump minimized the seriousness of the pandemic and spread misinformation about it. Trump officials ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay its severity. He declined to get vaccinated publicly and was noticeably absent from a public service announcement on vaccination that featured all other living former presidents.Trump allies in the media have conducted a scare campaign about the vaccines. In December, Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted a story on Facebook from the Daily Mail purporting to show evidence that Chinese communist party loyalists worked at pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccine.As recently as mid-April, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined that if the vaccine were truly effective, there’d be no reason for people who received it to wear masks or avoid physical contact.“So maybe it doesn’t work,” he said, “and they’re simply not telling you that.”Why then should anyone be surprised at the reluctance of Trump Republicans to get vaccinated? A recent New York Times analysis showed vaccination rates to be lower in counties where a majority voted for Trump in 2020. States that voted more heavily for Trump are also states where lower percentages of the population have been vaccinated.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz says Trump bears responsibility for the hesitancy of GOP voters to be vaccinated.“He wants to get the credit for developing the vaccine,” Luntz said. “Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it.”Trump’s Republican party is coming to resemble other authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well – purging truth tellers and trucking in lies, misinformation and propaganda harmful to the public.This week the GOP stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position for telling the truth about the 2020 election. At last week’s congressional hearing about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, one Republican, Andrew Clyde, even denied it happened.“There was no insurrection,” he said. “To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the US too – and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans. More