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      To Save Ukraine, America Must Help Europe

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      ‘I can’t stay silent’: Roe reversal powers new generation to sign up and vote

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      ‘I can’t stay silent’: Roe reversal powers new generation to sign up and vote Huge bloc of women expected to turn out in November midterms to protect abortion rights – could it alter the election outcome?Sonya Koenig is scared. A 19-year-old student from Kalamazoo, Michigan, Koenig often stays up until 2am thinking. Sometimes she paces up and down the hall, or speaks to her roommate about nightmare scenarios in which she ends up pregnant and in need of an abortion.“Being in college, I hear stories all the time of women getting drugged at parties, or just walking down the street, and something unfortunate can happen,” says Koenig, a freshman at Michigan State University. “A guy can walk away, but [these abortion bans] mean the woman has to choose: ‘Do I want to give this baby up … or raise this child with no help from anybody?’ That’s a really hard decision.”In August, a week after her 19th birthday, Koenig signed up to vote. She is one of many women registering in droves since the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion on 24 June.“My brain is constantly on fire. I can’t relax. I just want this election to be over with,” says Koenig, who plans to vote to protect abortion rights in a Michigan ballot as well as voting Democrat come November.People such as Koenig threaten to be a hugely pivotal voting bloc as the midterms loom, with organizers focusing on women and young people in voter registration drives all over the country. The first hints of that bloc’s voting power came in early August, when women in Kansas came out overwhelmingly to protect abortion rights. That election saw huge turnout, with women representing 70% of newly registered voters. They ultimately protected abortion rights in a state where Donald Trump had a 15% lead in the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden.That trend seems to be continuing in other states – a threat to Republican lawmakers, who in recent weeks have quietly removed abortion-related election pledges from their websites and softened their anti-abortion messaging.For instance, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Minnesota, Scott Jensen, had previously said he would ban abortion outright. But more recently, Jensen released a video saying he supports abortion in the cases of rape, incest, and threat to life of the pregnant person.That pivot might not be enough to hide the party’s hardline agenda: this week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposed a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, despite months of Republican rhetoric about putting the question back to the states. Perhaps women are unconvinced. Target Smart analyzed new voter registration from 45 states following the supreme court decision that reversed federal abortion rights – the group said female registration shot up 12%.In Wisconsin, a battleground state that voted for Biden by a margin of just 30,000 votes in 2020, women are out-registering men by 16%. New registrants also skew hugely Democratic: 52% of newly registered voters in Wisconsin, compared to just 17% of new registrations by Republicans.“In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics,” Tom Bonier, chief executive of Target Smart, wrote in the New York Times. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is.”This week, the Michigan supreme court agreed to put the question of abortion rights directly to voters in November, after 730,000 Michiganders signed a petition requesting a vote. Initially, Republicans on the state’s board of canvassers tried to block the call for a referendum, complaining about spacing errors.“I tend to do the bigger elections … I’m disabled, and standing in line for a long time is not the best for me,” says Diamond Doré, 30, from Detroit. “But seeing [the supreme court] decision, I was like, I have to vote. I’m Black and queer, and I know this means a lot of Black women are gonna die. I couldn’t stay silent.”A grassroots activist, Doré phone canvasses, and says she has seen anti-abortion voters suddenly wanting to protect abortion. “When this happened, a lot of people sat back and said, ‘Oh, dang, this is for real. It’s not just about me, this is about tons of other women and pregnant persons around America,’” says Doré.News of a 10-year-old girl from Ohio traveling 200 miles to Indiana to get abortion care after being raped was one thing Doré has seen sway voters. Add to that list people being forced to carry unsuccessful pregnancies to full term, at risk to their own lives, and the threat of criminalization.“A lot of Black people feel like we are going back to what our ancestors went through,” says Doré.William Wojciechowsk, 35, who hails from what he calls “Trump country, Michigan” (St Clair), says abortion bans across the country mean he will be voting Democrat in November for the first time.“All the way up until the last primary election, I voted very conservatively. But I’m a transgender male, and abortions can affect me directly because I haven’t had a hysterectomy.”Asked if he felt abandoned by his party, Wojciechowsk responded: “They’re too extreme. They’re out of their minds. These bans are putting women and trans men back into the dark ages.”Bonier says the gender gap in voter registration seems more pronounced in some states than others.“There’s a general sense that even though Dobbs fell, that [some of the electorate still feels] abortion is protected. In states like Oregon, where they’ve been trying to protect abortion in their state constitution, you don’t really see gender gaps [in those registering to vote] since the decision,” says Bonier. But in Republican-dominated states such as Alaska, Idaho, Kansas and Louisiana, and competitive midwestern swing states – such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan – the gap is clearer, he says.“[In those] races, governors and senators have certainly focused pretty extensively on [abortion]. And so I think voters generally have a sense of the stakes.”Those stakes include control of Congress at a pivotal moment for American democracy – control that until recently looked like it could pass into Republican hands. The party in power has historically tended to struggle in the midterms.“Just a few months ago, if you were to watch any of the cable news shows or read any of the political columnists, there seemed to be a universal agreement that Republicans were on their way to an inevitable wave election, where they were going to take back the Senate and take back the House. Now that doesn’t seem so sure,” Bonier says.Now, surprise races are being won for candidates putting abortion at the centre of their campaigns. Republicans lost Alaska’s special House election at the end of August – a surprise victory for Mary Peltola, who was running against Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin, and against Nicholas Begich, a Republican who comes from a lineage of Alaskan Democrats.Younger people, in particular, are playing a key role in the surge in women voting. Usually, voter turnout is particularly low for young people in midterms and primaries. But in Kansas, voters under the age of 30 comprised over 14% of ballots cast, surpassing their vote share for each of the past three general elections in Kansas.Katharine from Minnesota, who just turned 18 and did not give her surname for privacy, will vote for the first time in November. She remembers the moment she heard about the Dobbs decision: she was sitting in history class.“Somehow, in my mind, I still thought it wouldn’t happen, that once [the draft opinion] was leaked, maybe the public would somehow sway the decision,” she says.She had written many school assignments about the importance of judicial precedent – and here she was seeing it all torn down.“That’s when I knew I had to vote,” she says. “To see a lot of things I’ve grown up viewing as basic rights being taken away was very jolting.“I am ready to put these politicians in their place. We’re tired of the older guys in office telling us what to do with our bodies.”Bonier cautions that young people usually surge in voter registration closer to midterms, and that first-time voters make up a tiny proportion of those who are registering to vote.But, he says, past election cycles indicate that when a group shows a greater level of intensity at a particular point – registering to vote for the first time in increased numbers – those numbers translate to a higher level of turnout overall for that group. In Michigan, Koenig recalls feeling stirred when she heard Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of her idols, talk about abortion as a human right, rather than simply an issue of gender.“Forcing a woman to have a child, it affects everything,” Koenig says. “It’s not just an issue of abortion. It’s a racial issue. It’s a women’s rights issue. And I feel like a lot of these politicians are so concerned with their power, they don’t think about how we going to support babies that are going to be born.“If something terrible happens to me, I want to have a choice in the matter.”TopicsAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paid

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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paidDavid Enrich delivers a withering study of how big law got into bed with the 45th president – Jones Day in particular Donald Trump stiffed his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to the tune of $2.5m. He refused to grant him a pardon. The former New York City mayor is a target of prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia. Then again, as David Enrich of the New York Times writes in his new book, by the time Trump entered politics his “reputation for shortchanging his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers) was well known”. Giuliani can’t say he wasn’t warned.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreIn Servants of the Damned, Enrich also recounts how Trump once attempted to settle a bill for nearly $2m.“This isn’t the 1800s … You can’t pay me with a horse,” the unnamed lawyer replied.Trump eventually coughed up. It was that or another lawsuit.Enrich is the Times’ investigative editor. Dark Towers, his previous book, examined Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank. It also laid out the ties that bound Anthony Kennedy, the retired supreme court justice, to the Trump family. Kennedy’s son once worked at the bank. Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy on the court, once clerked for the judge.Servants of the Damned is informative and disturbing. In an unflattering portrait of the rise of big law, behemoth firms that reach around the globe, Enrich homes in on Jones Day. He tags other powerhouses – Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Baker McKenzie – for moral failures but repeatedly returns his gaze to the Cleveland-based Jones Day. It represented Trump.Whether the intensity of Enrich’s disdain is deserved is debatable. The public holds lawyers in lower esteem than auto mechanics, nursing home operators, bankers and local politicians. On the other hand, lawyers fare better than reporters. Beyond that, the bar’s canons demand that lawyers zealously represent their clients. Reputational concern and the ease or difficulty of recruiting fresh talent and clients are often more potent restraints than finger-wagging.Beginning in 2015, Jones Day was the Trump campaign’s outside counsel – which Enrich treats as an indelible stain. Almost six years later, he writes, the roof of Jones Day’s Washington office provided “a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol”.The insurrection, Enrich says, was the “predictable culmination of a president whom Jones Day had helped elect, an administration the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election whose integrity the firm had helped erode”.Jones Day was not Trump’s post-election counsel, but Enrich assigns culpability. In the aftermath of the 2020 vote, one Trump White House insider lamented to the Guardian that Jones Day wrongly distanced itself from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat. The campaign paid Jones Day millions. Gratitude and support, the insider said, were in order.Jones Day lawyers marbled the administration. Don McGahn, a partner and a pillar of the conservative bar, was Trump’s first White House counsel. Trump made Noel Francisco solicitor general. Eric Dreiband led the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. All three are back at Jones Day. The revolving door is real.McGahn played a critical role in filling the federal bench with conservative judges who had Federalist Society approval. He presided over a revolution, of sorts. Roe v Wade, the supreme court ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion, lies in tatters.But when McGahn refused to cross the proverbial line during the Russia investigation, Trump soured on him. McGahn made and kept notes – to Trump’s consternation. McGahn quit in fall 2018. The following spring, Trump tweeted: “McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than [Robert] Mueller. Never a big fan!”Enrich also sheds light on the unrest Trump caused within Jones Day, particularly among lawyers who identified as mainstream Republicans. In 2014, Ben Ginsberg and McGahn arrived from another DC law firm. Ginsberg possessed sterling GOP credentials. He had worked at the apex of George W Bush and Mitt Romney’s White House campaigns. Enrich describes his office as “a shrine to the old Republican party”.But in the 2020 cycle, Ginsberg grew discomforted by the direction of Trump’s re-election bid. He called the president’s rhetoric “beyond the pale”. In late August, he resigned. Days later, he wrote a brutal column in the Washington Post, attacking Trump for pushing the lie of widespread election fraud and rubbishing mail-in voting.“The president’s rhetoric,” he said, “has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.” Republicans “risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.”Days before the election, Ginsberg warned that his party was “destroying itself on the altar of Trump”.Holding the Line review: Geoffrey Berman blasts Barr and dumps TrumpRead moreThen there was Donald Ayer, deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George HW Bush. After a clash with Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, Ayer resigned. Bill Barr was his replacement. Ayer returned to Jones Day. In fall 2016, Ayer publicly voiced his opposition to Trump. In 2018, he retired. Before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Ayer told Enrich Jones Day “should have gotten off the wagon, because [Trump] is a scoundrel”.But in 2020, according to Open Secrets, the firm netted more than $19.2m in reported federal campaign spending. Trump was a golden ticket.Jones Day has emerged as a “go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike”, as Enrich puts it. With sneakers, vodka and computers, branding matters. Law firms are a little different. Through that lens, Servants of the Damned is as much a rebuke of one large firm as it is an indictment of Trump’s Republican party.
      Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksLaw (US)Politics booksUS politicsTrump administrationDonald TrumpRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump: US justice department appeals judge’s Mar-a-Lago investigation hold

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      Trump: US justice department appeals judge’s Mar-a-Lago investigation holdDoJ seeks to continue reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida home The justice department asked a federal appeals court on Friday to lift a judge’s order that temporarily barred it from reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during an FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida home last month.The department told the 11th circuit US court of appeals in Atlanta that the judge’s hold, imposed last week, had impeded the “government’s efforts to protect the nation’s security” and interfered with its investigation into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago. It asked the court to remove that order so work could resume, and to halt a judge’s directive forcing the department to provide the seized classified documents to an independent arbiter for his review.Special master in Trump documents case described as fair and no-nonsenseRead more“The government and the public would suffer irreparable harm absent a stay” of the order, department lawyers wrote in their brief to the appeals court.US district judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of a so-called special master to review the documents, and the resulting legal tussle it has caused, appear certain to slow by weeks the department’s investigation into the holding of classified documents at the Florida property after Trump left office. The justice department has been investigating possible violations of multiple statutes, including under the Espionage Act, but it remains unclear whether Trump, who has been laying the groundwork for a potential presidential run, or anyone else might be charged.The FBI says it took about 11,000 documents, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office, while serving a court-authorized search warrant at the home on 8 August. Weeks after the search, Trump lawyers asked a judge to appoint a special master to conduct an independent review of the records.Cannon granted the request last week, assigning a special master to review the records and weed out any that may be covered by claims of attorney-client or executive privilege. She directed the department to halt its use of the classified documents for investigative purposes until further court order, or until the completion of the special master‘s work.On Thursday night, she assigned Raymond Dearie, the former chief judge of the federal court based in Brooklyn, to serve in the role. She also declined to lift her earlier order, citing ongoing disputes about the nature of the documents that she said merited a neutral review by an outside arbiter.“The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion,” she wrote.The justice department on Friday night told the appeals court that Cannon’s injunction “unduly interferes with the criminal investigation”, prohibiting investigators from “accessing the seized records to evaluate whether charges are appropriate”. It also prevents the FBI from using the seized records in its criminal investigation to determine which documents, if any, were disclosed and to whom, the department said.Though Cannon has said investigators are free to do other investigative work that did not involve a review of the documents, the department said on Friday that that was largely impractical. Noting the discovery of dozens of empty folders at Mar-a-Lago marked classified, it said the judge’s hold appeared to bar it from “further reviewing the records to discern any patterns in the types of records that were retained, which could lead to identification of other records still missing”.The department also asked the appeals court to reject Cannon’s order that it provide the newly appointed special master with the classified documents, suggesting there was no reason for the arbiter to review highly sensitive records that did not involve questions of legal privilege.“Plaintiff has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search,” department lawyers wrote. “The records are not subject to any possible claim of personal attorney-client privilege. And neither Plaintiff nor the court has cited any authority suggesting that a former President could successfully invoke executive privilege to prevent the Executive Branch from reviewing its own records.”Cannon has directed Dearie to complete his work by 30 November and to prioritize the review of the classified documents. She directed the justice department to permit the Trump legal team to inspect the seized classified records with “controlled access conditions” something government lawyers said on Friday was needless and harmful.On Friday, Dearie, a former federal prosecutor, scheduled a preliminary conference with Trump lawyers and justice department lawyers for Tuesday afternoon.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsTrump administrationFBIMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More

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      Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

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      Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aimsFury as ‘explosive’ files reveal largest oil companies contradicted public statements and wished bedbugs upon critical activists Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to go green, and even wished critical activists be infested by bedbugs.The communications were unveiled as part of a congressional hearing held in Washington DC, where an investigation into the role of fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis produced documents obtained from the oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP.“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they wish bedbugs on you, then you win,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of Sunrise. The organization accused Shell of a “legacy of violence and of ignoring the wellbeing of communities across the globe”.Pakistan floods ‘made up to 50% worse by global heating’Read moreThe revelations are part of the third hearing held by the House committee on oversight and reform on how the fossil-fuel industry sought to hamper the effort to address the climate crisis. Democrats, who lead the committee, called top executives from the oil companies to testify last year, in which they denied they had misled the public.The new documents are “the latest evidence that oil giants keep lying about their commitments to help solve the climate crisis and should never be trusted by policymakers”, said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity.“If there is one thing consistent about the oil and gas majors’ position on climate, it’s their utter inability to tell the truth,” Wiles added.Ro Khanna, co-chair of the committee, said the new documents are “explosive” and show a “culture of intense disrespect” to climate activists. The oil giants’ “climate pledges rely on unproven technology, accounting gimmicks and misleading language to hide the reality,” he added. “Big oil executives are laughing at the people trying to protect our planet while they knowingly work to destroy it.”Several of the emails and memos within the released trove of documents appear to show executives, staffers and lobbyists internally contradicting public pronouncements by their companies to act on lowering planet-heating emissions.Exxon, which recently announced profits of $17.9bn for the three months until June, more than three times what it earned in the same quarter a year ago, has publicly said it is “committed” to the Paris climate agreement to curb global heating.However, the documents released by the Democratic-led House committee include an August 2019 memo by an executive to Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, on the need to “remove reference to Paris agreement” from an announcement by an industry lobby group that Exxon is a member of.Such a statement “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals”, the executive warned. A separate note on a 2018 Exxon presentation also admitted that biofuels derived from algae was still “decades away from the scale we need”, despite the company long promoting it as a way to lower emissions.Shell, meanwhile, has committed to becoming a “net zero” emissions business by 2050, and yet the documents show a private 2020 communication in which employees are urged to never “imply, suggest, or leave it open for possible misinterpretation that (net zero) is a Shell goal or target”. Shell has “no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio” over the next 10 to 20 years, it added.A Shell tweet posted in 2020 asking others what they could do to reduce emissions resulted in a torrent of ridicule from Twitter users. A communications executive for the company wrote privately that criticism that the tweet was “gaslighting” the public was “not totally without merit” and that the tweet was “pretty tone deaf”. He added: “We are, after all, in a tweet like this implying others need to sacrifice without focusing on ourselves.”The UK-headquartered oil company, which in July announced a record $11.5bn quarterly profit, also poured scorn on climate activists, with a communications specialist at the company emailing in 2019 that he wished “bedbugs” upon the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led US climate group.Previous releases of internal documents have shown that the oil industry knew of the devastating impact of climate change but chose instead to downplay and even deny these findings publicly in order to maintain their business model.The hearings have been attacked by Republicans as a method to “wage war on America’s energy producers” and the oil companies involved have complained that the documents don’t show the full picture of their stance on the climate crisis.Exxon supports the 2015 Paris climate deal, a spokesman said, claiming that the “selective publication of dated emails, without context, is a deliberate attempt to generate a narrative that does not reflect the commitment of ExxonMobil and its employees, to address climate change and play a leading role in the transition to a net-zero future.”A Shell spokesman, meanwhile, said the committee chose to highlight only a small handful of the nearly half a million pages it provided to the body on its “extensive efforts” to take part in the energy transition.“Within that pursuit are challenging internal and external discussions that signal Shell’s intent to form partnerships and share pathways we deem critical to becoming a net-zero energy business,” he said.TopicsClimate crisisUS politicsFossil fuelsOilnewsReuse this content More

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
      The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery‘By the grace of God, I am now cancer-free’, Sanders, 42, formerly Trump’s press secretary, says after successful operation Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”02:43Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.TopicsUS politicsArkansasnewsReuse this content More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activist

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activistFar-right congresswoman tweets footage of her seeming to kick Marianna Pecora during exchange in Washington on Thursday Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted footage to Twitter in which she appears to kick an 18-year-old activist pressing her on gun control outside the Capitol in Washington.The activist, Marianna Pecora, indicated she could press charges.The encounter, in which Pecora and others asked about gun control in light of recent mass shootings in the US, happened as the Georgia congresswoman left the Capitol on Thursday. Greene has championed gun rights.January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – liveRead moreIn her tweet, Greene wrote: “These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns and the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.“You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law. ‘Gun-free’ zones kill people.”Pecora is deputy communications director for the group Voters of Tomorrow.On Twitter, she said: “Our team is in DC this week to lobby for youth rights. All the members of Congress we’ve met with so far (both Republicans and Democrats) have been nothing but respectful – except for Marjorie Taylor Greene. She kicked me.”In the footage, Pecora and others argue with Greene and film with their phones. Pecora walks in front of Greene, who appears to tread on her heel. Greene repeats “excuse me” and appears to kick Pecora’s leg from behind.Pecora then protests and Greene waves her off.Nick Dyer, Greene’s communications director, says: “You’re blocking a member of Congress. You can’t block members of Congress.”On Twitter, Pecora said she “started out Hispanic Heritage Month by getting kicked by [Greene]. I’ve never been prouder to be a Mexican-American.”She also wrote: “First month living in DC and I get featured in” the Washington Post.Pecora told the paper: “It’s honestly, like, really disheartening to think that a bunch of kids can hold themselves with better composure than a sitting member of Congress.”The Post said Dyer “voiced objections to the description of the video and described a version of events unsubstantiated by video evidence”.Greene has initiated other public confrontations, including harassing the gun control campaigner David Hogg, also 18 at the time, and the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incidents that achieved online infamy of their own.Pecora pointed to a message from Santiago Mayer, the Mexican-born founder of Voters for Tomorrow whom Greene said should “move to another country”.Mayer wrote: “To answer the most prevalent question about pressing charges: we’re talking to our legal team and keeping our options open. Love y’all.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More