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      Beto O’Rourke on Texas: ‘I don’t know that we’re a conservative state’

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      Beto O’RourkeInterviewBeto O’Rourke on Texas: ‘I don’t know that we’re a conservative state’Alexandra VillarrealThe former Democratic presidential hopeful discusses the importance of the voting rights fight Sat 3 Jul 2021 04.00 EDTTo Beto O’Rourke, voting rights represent the silver bullet for progress in Texas.If more of the over 7 million Texans who were eligible to vote but didn’t last election could actually make it to the ballot box, the former Democratic presidential hopeful thinks state lawmakers would soon stop going after transgender student athletes and abortion access.Bad strategy? How the Republican attack on voting rights could backfireRead moreInstead, legislators would spend their time fixing Texas’s electric grid, which left millions shivering in the dark and hundreds dead when it failed during a devastating winter storm last February. They would be compelled to expand healthcare coverage in a state with the most uninsured people anywhere in the country, and they would actually address the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 51,000 Texans.“I don’t know that we’re a red state. I don’t know that we’re a conservative state. I don’t know that we’re a state that is focused on transgender girls’ sports, or telling people what to do with their bodies,” O’Rourke told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.“I think it is a minority really of the people and the voters in this state. It’s just the majority aren’t reflected because they aren’t voting.”A native El Pasoan and one of the country’s foremost Democrats, O’Rourke spent much of June traversing his home state, advocating for voting rights. As he registered eligible voters in 102F (39C) heat or held intimate town halls with as few as 100 people, he was fighting for democracy in Texas – before it’s too late.“If the great crime committed by Republicans was trying to suppress the votes of those who live outside of the centers of power,” he said, “then the great crime of Democrats was to take all of these people for granted.”During his travels, he heard from people who readily admitted they hadn’t been paying attention until he showed up.“You cannot expect people to participate in the state’s politics if you don’t show them the basic respect of listening to them and understanding what’s most important to them and then reflecting that in the campaign that you run,” O’Rourke said.“You can’t do that at a distance, and you can’t do that through a pollster or a focus group. You have to do that in person.”Many Democrats are waiting with bated breath to see if O’Rourke launches a bid to oust Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in 2022. But for now, he’s mostly brushing off questions about his political future; the voting rights fight could not be more urgent, he said, and he doesn’t have the bandwidth to simultaneously mount a separate campaign.“As this woman at our meeting in Wichita Falls said, you know, it may not matter who the candidates are on the ballot if that vote can be overturned,” he said. “Or if we functionally disenfranchise millions of our fellow Texans.”Texas was already infamous as the hardest place to vote in the United States before this year’s legislative session, when state lawmakers capitalized on false narratives about widespread voter fraud to push for new, sweeping voting restrictions.Democrats in the state House staged a historic walkout at the 11th hour to kill one of the most controversial restrictive voting bills. But Abbott, who still considers “election integrity” an emergency, announced he would convene a special session starting 8 July, teeing up yet another bitter showdown via legislative overtime.As O’Rourke sees it, the special session is one of two fronts in the war for voting rights in Texas. The other is at the federal level, where Democrats are scrambling to protect the polls after Republicans blocked their ambitious For the People Act.Texas special sessions can’t last more than 30 days, and the US Congress has mere weeks before a long August recess.“There is a very tight window within which we’ve gotta do everything we can,” O’Rourke said.At stake are a rash of new provisions that would make it even harder and scarier to vote, in a state with already chronically low voter turnout.In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Texas Republicans proposed barring 24-hour and drive-thru voting, doing away with drop boxes, and subjecting public officials to state felonies for soliciting or distributing unrequested vote by mail applications, among other hardline policies.Many of their suggestions directly targeted innovations to expand voter access last year in Texas’s largest county, Harris, which is both diverse and more left-leaning. And voting rights advocates worry that in general, Texans of color will be disproportionately disenfranchised by the restrictions being advanced.Already, Texas has extremely limited vote-by-mail access, virtually no online voter registration and no same-day registration during early voting or on election day. Voters have to show acceptable forms of identification, which can include a handgun license but not a student ID.The state is a hotbed for gerrymandering, and politicians purposely attenuate the voting power in communities of color. Hundreds of Texas polling stations have shuttered since 2012, with closures concentrated where Black and Latino populations are growing the most.O’Rourke remembers how he used to be baffled by people who didn’t vote. Not any more.“When your voting power has been diminished like that, it is not illogical or irrational to say, ‘I’m not gonna vote. I’m not gonna participate in this one. I’m not gonna get my hopes up,’” he said.Last month, when O’Rourke visited Rains county, Texas, a woman with multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and other illnesses explained how – because she’s disabled and doesn’t drive – she struggled to get identification. An ID cost her $125, a modern-day poll tax, she said.As she told her story, O’Rourke said, even the local GOP chairwoman was seemingly nodding her head, as if the issue was starting to make sense.In Gainesville, where 40 suspected Unionists were hanged during the civil war, a young woman told O’Rourke that she successfully organized to bring down a Confederate statue at the park where his town hall was taking place.But she wasn’t registered to vote, she added.“It’s not for lack of urgency or love for country,” O’Rourke said. “I think it’s because they are acutely aware of how rigged our democracy is at this moment, and nowhere more so than Texas.”From ideological courts to a Republican-controlled legislature and a rightwing executive, conservatives dominate every branch of the state government.Their overpowering dominion makes it nearly impossible for liberals to make inroads in Texas, despite long-held Democratic hopes that rapidly changing demographics will trigger a blue wave.Still, O’Rourke refuses to give up.“If we register in numbers and turn out in numbers, even with a rigged system – and we should acknowledge that it’s rigged – and even with the deck that is stacked, there’s still a way to prevail,” he said.“It’s not gonna be easy. And it’s gonna require a lot of us.”TopicsBeto O’RourkeTexasUS voting rightsUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

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      BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Trump charges look small potatoes, and the Republican base will shrug | Lloyd Green

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      OpinionDonald TrumpThe Trump charges look small potatoes, and the Republican base will shrugLloyd GreenBy the metrics of scandal, the alleged crime seems decidedly underwhelming. For now at least, the former president can exhale Fri 2 Jul 2021 11.41 EDTLast modified on Fri 2 Jul 2021 12.09 EDTOn Thursday, Manhattan prosecutors charged the Trump Organization, its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and the Trump Payroll Corp with engaging in a scheme to defraud federal, state and local tax authorities. According to the indictment, Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on $1.7m in income and benefits. The scheme purportedly dated back to 2005.Trump legal troubles escalate after company charged with tax crimes – liveRead moreOn the other hand, Donald Trump, Weisselberg’s boss, appears to have skated. He is not named as a defendant even though he makes a cameo in the body of the indictment. Allegedly, “personal checks drawn on the account of and signed by Donald J Trump, and later drawn on the account of the Donald J Trump Revocable Trust dated April 7, 2014” went for tuition payments of Weisselberg’s family.Other alleged undeclared benefits received by Weisselberg included lease payments on his Mercedes, housing and cash. For the moment anyway, Cyrus Vance, the district attorney for Manhattan, appears to lack the goods to nail the former president. Relatively speaking, an elephant gave birth to a mouse.Beyond that, Vance’s office did not bring racketeering charges against Trump’s eponymous company. Arguably if the district attorney had the goods he would have brought the most serious charges on the first go around. Significantly, the indictment did not trigger a default under Deutsche Bank’s loan documents. Trump and his lenders can exhale, a little. Right now, the prospects of forfeiture and foreclosure and the necessity of refinancing Trump’s loan packages are not staring back at them.By the metrics of scandal, the alleged crime is decidedly underwhelming. Wrongfully taken over tax deductions are quintessentially human, let alone Trumpian. In case anyone forgot, Trump is still undergoing a years-long IRS audit over claimed deductions. The Republican base will shrug.Likewise, giving sweetheart deals to key employees and favored others is textbook New York, a textbook that Trump himself helped write.Back in the day, the day being 2003, a younger Trump reportedly assisted Marjorie Harris – a close personal friend of the Rev Al Sharpton – to obtain a luxury sublease in a Trump building without undergoing a standard credit check. Harris’s financials were not necessarily robust, but at the time Trump was focused on keeping Sharpton happy.In a hyper-transactional world, tuition and cheap housing for the Weisselberg clan were rewards for years of service and loyalty. There’s a reason Weisselberg is known as Trump’s soldier. He is no Michael Cohen. Rather, Weisselberg is a limelight-avoiding accountant who has so far refused to cooperate with prosecutors.Yet with Weisselberg taking one for the team, the spirit of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort lives on. And we know how that worked out – both men received presidential pardons.But this time Trump is out of office and the charges stem from purported violations of New York’s penal law, not the US code. Weisselberg was released on his own recognizance. The guy is no menace to society.As for the midterms, the indictment won’t hurt the Republican party’s chances. Team Trump and his party will be able to claim “witch-hunt” with a modicum of credibility. All those subpoenas and document productions have yielded little. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, may even want to put his presidential ambitions on hold until 2028.A year ago, the US supreme court rejected Trump’s contention that he was immune from investigation simply because he lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Writing for a seven-person majority, Chief Justice John Roberts opined: “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.”Justice Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, put things more succinctly in a concurrence joined by Justice Gorsuch, another Trump appointee: “In our system of government, as this court has often stated, no one is above the law. That principle applies, of course, to a president.”In hindsight, it all sounds a tad overblown. The only member of the Trump Organization facing criminal charges is Weisselberg. Looking back, Weisselberg must be asking: was it worth it? After he was led into the courtroom in handcuffs, we can only guess his answer. Still, don’t bet on him flipping. And as trials go, this one is looking mesmerizingly dull.
      Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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      So Far, Biden’s Foreign Policy Is Proving Too Conventional

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      On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era.

      When it comes to foreign policy, however, the Biden administration has been nowhere near as transformational. The phrase Joe Biden has used so often is “America is back.” That sentiment certainly captures some aspects of Biden’s relationship with the international community, such as repairing relations with the World Health Organization and rejoining the Paris climate accords. In these ways, the administration has brought America back to the status quo that existed before Trump was unleashed on the world stage.

      How Joe Biden Looks at the World

      READ MORE

      But on some very important issues — China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea — President Biden hasn’t managed to restore even the previous status quo. His approach to military spending and the arms race is decidedly hawkish. His message on immigration, as expressed by Vice President Kamala Harris on a visit to Guatemala earlier this month, effectively erases the inscription on the Statue of Liberty by telling potential border crossers in the region to stay home. Okay, foreign policy is not a winning issue at the ballot box, and Biden certainly has a lot on his agenda. But even the notoriously cautious Obama took some courageous steps with Tehran and Havana.

      It’s possible that Biden is focusing on America first before turning to the world as a whole. It’s also possible that he’s simply not interested in altering US foreign policy in any significant way beyond removing US troops from Afghanistan. True, it was exhilarating to have a conventional president again after Trump. But conventional, when it comes to US foreign policy, is just not good enough.

      Confronting China

      If the Biden administration’s overriding domestic preoccupation is a sustainable economy, then its dominant foreign policy obsession is China. Biden and Xi have spoken only once, by telephone in February. Xi participated in Biden’s virtual climate confab in April. They are likely to meet face to face sometime this year, possibly around the G20 summit in Rome in October. There’s been talk of greater cooperation on addressing the climate crisis. And there haven’t been any overt military confrontations in the South China Sea or elsewhere.

      But otherwise, Biden and Xi have not really gotten off on the right foot. It was a no-brainer for the new Biden administration to lift the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese products and de-escalate the trade war that unsettled manufacturers and consumers on both sides of the Pacific. The Biden team is ostensibly doing a review of US-China trade policy with a focus on whether Beijing has met its commitments under the “phase one trade deal” signed back in January 2020 (so far, it’s been a mixed record of China meeting some targets for US imports and missing others).

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      The review is more than just bean-counting. In a marked departure from the usual neoliberal trade talk coming out of Washington, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said, “I want to disconnect this idea that the only way we do affirmative trade engagement, trade enhancement is through a free trade agreement.” Tai prefers to operate according to a “worker-centric trade policy” that evaluates China on issues of forced labor, workers’ rights and the environment. A more nuanced approach to trade is all to the good, of course, and Tai should be commended for breaking with the Washington consensus.

      But taken in conjunction with other Biden administration policies, the reluctance to lift tariffs on Chinese goods is part of a full-court economic press on the country. The Biden administration has effectively continued the Trump approach of not only lining up allies in the region to contain China (the Quad, the Blue Dot Network) but enlisting European countries as well to join the bandwagon. In his recent trip to Europe, Biden corralled the G7 to create the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, a purported alternative to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure program, and twisted some arms to get NATO to prioritize China as part of its mission.

      NATO’s new emphasis on China reflects the Pentagon’s shift in focus. Trump might have loudly proclaimed his anti-China animus, but the Biden administration is determined to close what it calls the “say-do gap” by expanding capabilities beyond the Navy to challenge China in the air and above.

      China’s moves in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea are deeply troubling. Nor is Beijing doing nearly enough to green its Belt and Road Initiative. But the Biden administration needs to think creatively about how to leverage China’s own multilateral aspirations in order to address global problems. Trade tensions and disagreements about internal policies are to be expected. Yet the Biden administration has an urgent and historic opportunity to work with China (and everyone else) to remake the international community.

      Sparring With Iran

      Another no-brainer for the Biden administration was reviving the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump tried to destroy. Granted, it was tricky to unwind the sanctions against Tehran and address Iran’s demands for compensation. It wasn’t easy to reassure the Iranian leadership of the sincerity of US intentions given not only Trump’s past hostility but the current animosities of congressional Republicans. And there was also Israel, which was doing everything within its power to scuttle diplomacy up to and including sabotaging Iran’s nuclear facilities and assassinating Iranian scientists.

      These obstacles notwithstanding, the Biden team could have gotten the job done if it had started earlier and been more flexible. Not wanting to open itself up to criticism from hawks at home, however, the administration argued for a mutual, step-by-step return to the agreement. By contrast, Iran quite sensibly argued that the United States, since it attempted to blow up the agreement, should be the first to compromise by removing sanctions, a position that some US policymakers have also supported.

      Is the US Back Under Biden?

      READ MORE

      Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing a tit-for-tat confrontation with militias aligned with Iran. This week, the administration launched airstrikes against facilities on the Iraq-Syria border from which these militias have allegedly attacked US.bases in Iraq. US forces in Syria subsequently came under rocket fire.

      Why are there still US soldiers in Iraq and Syria? Didn’t the Biden administration commit to ending America’s endless wars? Although US forces are scheduled to depart Afghanistan in September and Washington has pledged to remove troops from Iraq as well, negotiations around the latter have yet to produce a timetable. Removing 2,500 US soldiers from Iraq would please the government in Baghdad, remove an irritant in US-Iranian relations and take US personnel out of harm’s way. What’s not to like, Joe?

      Getting Nowhere With Cuba and North Korea

      Late in his second term, Barack Obama orchestrated a bold rapprochement with Cuba. After lifting financial and travel restrictions, Obama visited the island in March 2016 to meet with Cuban leader Raul Castro. It wasn’t a full opening. Washington maintained a trade embargo and refused to close its anomalous base in Guantanamo. But it was a start. Donald Trump brought a quick end to that fresh start by reimposing the restrictions that Obama had lifted.

      Joe Biden promised to resurrect the Obama policy. Trump’s reversals, he said as a candidate, “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” And yet, as president, he has done nothing to reverse Trump’s reversals.

      As Karen de Young writes in The Washington Post, “Under Trump restrictions, non-Cuban Americans are still prohibited from sending money to the island. Cruise ships are banned from sailing from the United States to Cuba, and the dozens of scheduled U.S. commercial flights to Cuban cities have largely stopped. Tight limits remain in place on commercial transactions.”

      The reason for the new administration’s lack of action, beyond its concerns about human rights in Cuba and its fear of Republican opposition in Congress, boils down to domestic politics. Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey who never liked the Obama-era détente with Cuba in the first place, represents a key obstacle in Congress. Public opinion in Florida among Cuban-Americans, which had swung in favor of rapprochement during the Obama period, has now also swung decisively in the other direction, thanks to a steady diet of Trumpian demagoguery.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Here, the Biden administration could try something new by closing Guantanamo. The administration is already launching a quiet effort to close the detention facility at the base by resolving the status of the several dozen inmates. He should go even further by rebooting Guantanamo as a center for US-Cuban environmental research, as scientists Joe Roman and James Kraska have proposed.

      North Korea, meanwhile, is the one place in the world where Trump sought to overturn decades of US hostility. His attempts at one-on-one diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un didn’t achieve much of anything, but it still might have served as a foundation for future negotiations. Biden has instead followed the script of all the administrations prior to Trump: review policy, promise something new, fall back on conventional thinking.

      The administration finished its review of the North Korea policy in April. Biden rejected his predecessor’s approaches as misguided and has relied on the usual big-stick-and-small-carrot policy that stretches back to the 1990s. On the one hand, Biden extended sanctions against the country and has maintained a military encirclement. On the other, his emissaries have reached out to Pyongyang, with Special Representative for North Korea Sung Kim saying this month that the United States would meet with Pyongyang “anywhere, anytime, without preconditions.” “Without preconditions” is fine. But what about “with incentives”?

      Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea is more shut off from the world than usual. It is preoccupied with the economic challenges associated with its increased isolation. In his annual address in January, Kim Jong-un made the unusual admission that the government’s economic program fell short of its goals. More recently, he has said that his country is “prepared for both dialogue and confrontation, especially … confrontation.”

      Biden should focus on the first half of Kim’s sentence. South Korea’s progressive president, Moon Jae-in, nearing the end of his own tenure, very much wants to advance reconciliation on the peninsula. Instead of beefing up its military containment of the isolated country, Washington could work with Seoul to break the current diplomatic impasse with a grand humanitarian gesture. Whether it’s vaccines, food or infrastructure development, North Korea needs help right now.

      Military Exceptionalism

      It’s still early in the Biden administration. Remember: Obama didn’t achieve his major foreign policy milestones in Iran and Cuba until later in his second term. Biden no doubt wants to accumulate some political capital first by repairing relations with allies and participating in multilateral fora on the global stage and achieving some economic success on the home front.

      The administration’s position on military spending, however, suggests that Biden is wedded to the most conventional of thinking. The United States is poised to end its intervention in Afghanistan and reduce its commitments in the Middle East. It is not involved in any major military conflicts. Everyone is wondering how the administration is going to pay for its ambitious infrastructure plans.

      So, why has Biden asked for a larger military budget? The administration’s 2022 request for the Pentagon is $715 billion, an increase of $10 billion, plus an additional $38 billion for military-related spending at the Energy Department and other agencies. True, the administration is hoping to boost non-military spending by a larger percentage. It is planning to remove the “overseas contingency operations” line item that funded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      But if there ever was a time to reduce US military spending, it’s now. The pandemic proved the utter worthlessness of tanks and destroyers in defending the homeland from the most urgent threats. Greater cooperation with China, a renewed nuclear pact with Iran and a détente with both Cuba and North Korea would all provide powerful reasons for the United States to reduce military spending. To use Joe Biden’s signature phrase, “C’mon, man!”

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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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      US supreme court deals blow to voting rights by upholding Arizona restrictions

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      The US supreme court has upheld two Arizona voting restrictions in a ruling that dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law designed to prevent voting discrimination.In a 6-3 ruling, the justices upheld Arizona statutes that prohibit anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting mail-in ballots, which are widely used in the state.The court also upheld a statute that requires officials to wholly reject votes from people who show up to cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, even if the person is otherwise entitled to vote in the state.“Neither Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates §2 of the VRA. Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule enforces the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on election day must do so in their assigned precincts,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a majority that included the court’s five other conservative justices, referring to section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.He added: “Having to identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the ‘usual burdens of voting’.”The decision means that the Arizona statutes will remain in effect and make it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws across the US at a time when a swath of Republican-run state legislatures are pushing a wave of new voting restrictions that voting rights advocates say are aimed at suppressing the vote and especially target communities of color.“Today the supreme court made it much harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws in court. The justices stopped short of eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, but nevertheless did significant damage to this vital civil rights law and to the freedom to vote,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a statement.Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, said the decision was a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act, one of America’s landmark civil rights laws.“The conservative supreme court has taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions. This at a time when some Republican states are passing new restrictive voting law[s],” he wrote in a blogpost. “This is not a death blow for section 2 claims, but it will make it much, much harder for such challenges to succeed.”The larger dispute in the case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, was how courts should interpret section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting practice that results in the “denial or abridgment” of the right to vote based on race. The provision has become a critical tool for civil rights lawyers to challenge discriminatory voting laws in recent years, especially after a 2013 supreme court ruling that dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act.Alito declined to endorse a specific test for future section 2 cases, but outlined five “guideposts” that could be applied in future cases.Courts should weigh the size of the burden that a voting law imposes, the magnitude of disparities in how they affect different minority groups, the state’s interest in enacting such a law, as well as how far the challenged law departs from standard practice in 1982, the year when the relevant portion of the Voting Rights Act was adopted, Alito wrote.And when courts evaluate a voting law, they need to consider the accessibility of a state’s entire electoral system, rather than just the law at hand, Alito added.Alito used those five factors to set an extremely high bar for challenging the Arizona law.Arizona’s prohibition on out-of-precinct voting only required voters to ensure they showed up at the right precinct on election day, a minimal burden in Alito’s view. Alito also dismissed evidence that minority voters were about twice as likely to have their provisional ballots rejected than white voters, noting that only a small percentage of Arizona voters overall cast an out-of-precinct provisional ballot on election day.“A policy that appears to work for 98% or more of voters to whom it applies – minority and non-minority alike – is unlikely to render a system unequally open,” he stated.Alito took a similar approach in upholding Arizona’s ban on third-party ballot collection. He noted that voters who cast their ballot by mail have several ways to return the ballot other than having someone collect it. The plaintiffs in the case also failed to provide statistically significant evidence, Alito said, that the ban disproportionately harmed Native American voters.Alito also gave states significant leeway to use voter fraud – which is extremely rare – as an excuse to restrict voting. “It should go without saying that a state may take action to prevent election fraud without waiting for it to occur and be detected within its own borders,” he wrote.Justice Elena Kagan wrote a searing dissenting opinion for the court’s three liberal justices, bluntly saying the majority opinion “enables voting discrimination”.The Voting Rights Act, Kagan wrote, makes any voting law that results in racial discrimination illegal, no matter how small the burden is for the voter, since even burdens that seem small can lead to discrimination in voting.She also rejected Alito’s suggestion that the Arizona laws did not provide more of a burden on minority voters because 98% of voters overall were unaffected.“Suppose a state decided to throw out 1% of the Hispanic vote each election. Presumably, the majority would not approve the action just because 99% of the Hispanic vote is unaffected,” she wrote.She also dismissed Alito’s acceptance of voter fraud as an excuse to pass voting restrictions. “Of course preventing voter intimidation is an important state interest. And of course preventing election fraud is the same. But those interests are also easy to assert groundlessly or pre-textually in voting discrimination cases,” she wrote.Joe Biden said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed” with the ruling and renewed his call for federal voting legislation, which Republicans blocked in the US Senate last month.“In a span of just eight years, the court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure,” he said in a statement.Biden added: “While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms. It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote and making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It is about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”Democrats in Washington are scrambling to find a way to pass new federal voting rights protections.One of the bills under consideration would restore the portion of the Voting Rights Act that section 2 has been used in lieu of in recent years and require certain states across the country to get voting changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect, in a bid to minimize discrimination.Kagan also noted in her dissenting opinion that the case came to the court at a time when states were considering hundreds of laws that would make it harder to vote, a moment she described as uniquely dangerous for American democracy.“The court decides this Voting Rights Act case at a perilous moment for the nation’s commitment to equal citizenship. It decides this case in an era of voting-rights retrenchment,” she wrote. “What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’.” More

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      in World Politics

      How China’s Growing Dominance Will Impact Sino-Gulf Relations

      by

      The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves through energy markets. Since March 2020, lockdowns around the world have led adults to work remotely and children to learn virtually. Last year, according to estimates, global energy demand and investment fell by 5% and 18%, respectively.

      Yet as restrictions ease and economies pick up pace, the sense of normality that many hope for is one of the few luxuries energy producers cannot afford. In the race to comply with mounting political pressure to reduce carbon emissions while simultaneously securing their energy futures, the Sino-Gulf alliance may become the new center of gravity for global energy markets.

      Young People Are the Key to Reconciling China and Hong Kong

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      The pandemic has undoubtedly cast a dark shadow on energy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently revealed that energy demand will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2023 in its most optimistic outlook or 2025 in the case of a delayed economic recovery. However, a return to pre-COVID demand does not necessitate a return to pre-crisis growth. Predicted growth in demand between 2019 and 2030 is estimated at 4% in the delayed recovery case, compared to 12% in a COVID-free world.

      Nevertheless, the pandemic has also highlighted the importance of a reliable and accessible electricity supply. The IEA predicts that the electricity sector, whose demand outpaces other fuels, will support economic recovery and account for 21% of global final energy consumption by 2030. This push for electricity is widely driven by the various global emission reduction targets, increased use of electric vehicles and heat sources in advanced economies, and greater consumption from emerging markets.

      Leader of the Pack

      Of the countries driving this growth, China is leading the pack and is predicted to be the main driver of energy demand over the next decade. Following his call for an “energy revolution,” President Xi Jinping has sought to reposition China as a key player in global energy markets. While the Chinese are currently the world’s biggest consumers and producers of coal-fired electricity, Xi’s pledge to make China carbon neutral by 2060 means that energy demands are increasingly being met via renewables.

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      China is predicted to account for 40% of global renewable expansion, leading in the realm of nuclear power, biofuel production and will account for almost half of globally distributed photovoltaic power. In addition to this, Chinese demand is also predicted to account for 40% of global electricity sector growth by 2030, up from 28%. It was as a consequence of East Asia’s growing appetite for clean energy that, in 2016, global electricity investment outpaced that of oil and gas for the first time in history.

      However, as with everything, there will be winners and losers. While electricity is on the up, sluggish global oil demand has led to falling oil prices. With demand predicted to plummet in the 2030s, there is a growing urgency for Gulf Arab states to diversify as oil becomes more of a burden than a blessing. Yet, in their hurry to claim their stake in the new energy world order, Gulf countries may begin to look east rather than west for a friend to rely on.

      China and the Gulf

      Sino-Gulf relations are not a new occurrence. As the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas, these two commodities dominate Chinese trade relations and have been the basis of the Saudi-led Gulf alliance. The Gulf Cooperation Council supplies over 30% of China’s oil imports, with Saudi Arabia topping the list, accounting for over 16% of the oil import total. Nevertheless, in a world that is increasingly turning its back on oil, GCC states and China may increasingly look to each other to secure their respective energy futures.

      From the establishment of the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF) in 2004 to the China–GCC Strategic Dialogue in 2010, Sino-Gulf relations have grown from strength to strength. As such, it was hardly supplying when China gave the GCC a starring role in its Belt and Road Initiative. Announced in 2013, this global infrastructure project that seeks to boost physical connectivity, financial integration, trade and economic growth has become the core pillar of China’s increasingly active foreign policy approach under Xi.

      During the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the CASCF in 2014, Xi spoke about the Gulf Arab states as “natural cooperative partners in jointly building” the BRI. This set the stage for a flood of multi-billion-dollar investments and agreements between China and the Gulf states, advancing the Belt and Road Initiative in the Arabian Peninsula and deepening economic ties.

      Chinese investment activity in the Gulf has followed the “1+2+3” Sino-Arab cooperation framework. This features energy cooperation as its central axis, investment and infrastructure, and accelerating breakthroughs in three high-tech sectors, namely aviation satellite, nuclear energy and new energy. However, there is no doubt that the BRI aims primarily to strengthen this central pillar of energy cooperation. Aptly described as “oil roads,” the initiative will enable China to establish the necessary infrastructure, transport and refinery facilities needed to secure its energy future and keep GCC coffers full.

      These ambitious plans will be of greater significance in the years to come. Despite the economic and energy market turmoil triggered by the pandemic, Sino-Gulf relations show no signs of slowing. Rather, the pandemic may have made way for a greater mutual dependence between China and the Gulf states. This is particularly true for the GCC, whose economic wellbeing depends heavily on the revival of global oil markets. China may prove to be the answer to Gulf ministers’ prayers, stimulating growth by providing a guaranteed revenue stream for the region’s main export, no doubt stabilizing GCC economies.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Beyond the energy sector, however, the two regions offer a wealth of investment opportunities that will likely deepen relations, particularly as the GCC economies realize their various diversification plans. The synergies between the GCC’s various “vision” agendas and China’s BRI are extensive, thus acting as a major point of collaboration. The two are already in the final stages of concluding the long-awaited China–GCC free trade agreement, a move that would no doubt propel economic cooperation and open the doors to a vast array of trading opportunities. Saudi Arabia has already taken active steps to consolidate this BRI-vision cooperation by signing various agreements and memorandums of understanding with China. Riyadh has since considered the BRI to be “one of the main pillars of the Saudi Vision 2030,” consequently making China “among the Kingdom’s biggest economic partners.” 

      Closer Partners

      It is thus clear that, willingly or unwillingly, recent global events have further pushed China and GCC into each other’s arms. Sino-Gulf relations can be expected to gain serious traction in the next few years, especially in the realm of energy cooperation, which is likely to continue to spearhead this strategic alliance as a sector of great mutual importance. Meanwhile, as China seeks to entrench itself in the Gulf, it may find itself caught in the middle of the regional power struggles that threaten stability, namely the Iran-Saudi rivalry. President Xi, however, shows no intent of mixing business with politics, as seen in his recent regional tour, which saw him visit both Saudi Arabia and Iran among others.

      Nevertheless, if China wishes to grow its presence in the Gulf, ensuring regional peace will undoubtedly become a priority for Beijing. Chinese neutrality may be exactly what is needed to defuse regional tensions and maintain a level of accord that keeps the feud below boiling point. Yet despite Sino-Gulf relations taking center stage in the near future, China will not be replacing the United States as the dominant foreign power in the Middle East any time soon. Beijing’s focus on economic rather than political matters makes China, to use the words of Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, “not necessarily a better friend, but a less complicated friend.”

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

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