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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris says US-Mexico border situation is ‘tough’ but claims progress

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      Kamala Harris described the situation as “tough” at the US-Mexico border where migrants are being held in detention and routinely expelled before their pleas for sanctuary can be heard, as on Friday she made her first visit there as vice-president.In El Paso, west Texas, she met with five girls, aged between nine and 16, who had been held at a Customs and Border Protection processing center after crossing the border.She then visited the border itself at the nearby Paso del Norte port of entry, across from the Mexican city of Juárez, where there are frequently scenes of misery and chaos as people huddle in peril there and at other points along the border, waiting for a chance to be allowed to make a legal case to be in the US.“We inherited a tough situation,” Harris said during a meeting with faith-based organizations, as well as shelter and legal service providers.She added: “In five months we’ve made progress, but there’s still more work to be done.”She is tasked with addressing causes of migration, particularly from Central America, which range from violence, poverty and corruption to climate change.“The stories that I heard today reinforce the nature of those root causes,” she said.Meanwhile, the Biden administration is looking into conditions for migrant children at the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso, it was announced during Harris’s journey to the border, amid testimonials presented in court that conditions are desperate.Symone Sanders, Harris’s spokeswoman, told reporters aboard Air Force Two en route that Joe Biden and Harris “have instructed [homeland security secretary Xavier] Becerra to do a thorough investigation” of the conditions where children are being held in tents at the military facility.“The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,” Sanders said.However, a White House spokesman later sent a statement that conditions at Fort Bliss had improved and that: “HHS [the health and human services department] has already been looking into [the] facility on their own. At no time did The White House recommend a probe of the facility.”Harris faced the most politically challenging moment of her vice-presidency during her visit, as part of her role leading the Biden administration’s response to recent increases in families and unaccompanied children migrating across the US-Mexico border.Harris was asked by a reporter why “right now was the right time” to make her first trip to the border.She replied that it was not her first trip, although it is her first trip as vice-president and since Joe Biden put her in charge of solving immigration and migration problems.After taking questions, Harris was briefed by border patrol on the agency’s efforts to computerize records to speed up processing of migrants’ legal cases. Many are seeking asylum from human rights violations, and children, in particular, aim to reunite with family members already in the US while their cases are dealt with.Harris did not visit the secure facilities at Fort Bliss. Last month, Becerra announced he was walking back plans to house thousands of children younger than 12 there, after Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists protested that the facility did not meet basic child welfare standards.The temporary shelter is one of a dozen or so makeshift sites the government set up to provide more capacity beyond the traditional, licensed shelters that the health and human services department oversees.The vice-president has faced bipartisan criticism for declining to make the trip thus far , as well as remarks on her trip to Guatemala, when she starkly spelled out the Biden administration’s message to those seeking sanctuary in the US: “Don’t come.”Those comments “reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration”, Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, told the Guardian.With Donald Trump visiting the area less than a week after Harris and the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, making increasingly rightwing remarks about immigration, Republicans will be watching the vice-president’s visit closely for fodder for further attacks.Aside from party politics, CBP, the federal agency, recently reported nine deaths of migrants along the border just in the El Paso sector, but said they were only reporting the number of deaths where agents find the deceased individual or are involved in an emergency response. The actual number is likely to be higher.Those are deaths such as by heatstroke as migrants trek through triple-digit desert heat, or falls from the 30t-high border wall.“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” Ruben Garcia, the director of the Annunciation House network of shelters in the area, said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”Biden’s first few months in office have seen record numbers of migrants attempting to cross the border.CBP recorded more than 180,000 encounters on the Mexican border in May, the most since March 2000.Those numbers were boosted by a coronavirus pandemic-related ban on the legal facility for seeking asylum from persecution, a rule called title 42 begun by Trump and continued by Biden that allows most people unlawfully crossing the border to be summarily expelled into Mexico, at their peril.Harris was joined on the trip by the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin and local Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar.Escobar called El Paso the new Ellis Island, the facility in New York harbor that processed millions of migrants to the US a century ago. Looking forward to welcoming @VP Harris to El Paso – America’s new Ellis Island.As I told VP last March, El Paso has chosen to employ compassion toward those seeking refuge, and her visit will provide key context for her diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration.— Rep. Veronica Escobar (@RepEscobar) June 24, 2021
      Harris did not visit Fort Bliss on Friday, nor the memorial to victims of the mass shooting by a man professing hatred of immigrants, at an area Walmart store in 2019.Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino civil rights organization, called Harris’s visit “a day late and a dollar short”. More

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      in US Politics

      DoJ files lawsuit to challenge Georgia’s sweeping voting restrictions

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      The US justice department is filing a major federal lawsuit challenging a new sweeping voting measure in Georgia that is widely seen as a blatant effort to make it harder for minorities to vote in the state.The challenge is the first major voting rights case filed under the new Joe Biden administration and marks one of just a handful of suits the department has filed in recent years challenging voting laws on a statewide basis.The lawsuit, filed under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, alleges Georgia Republicans passed a sweeping measure with the intent to deny people access to the ballot box based on their race.“Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said during a Friday press conference.The move comes amid a wave of state laws passed by Republican-run legislatures across the US that are seen as attempts to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning communities of color. It also comes after Republicans in the US Senate effectively torpedoed Democrat attempts to pass a new law defending voting rights.Garland announced the suit on the eighth anniversary of the supreme court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder, a case that gutted a critical provision in the Voting Rights Act and enabled states like Georgia to pass voting restrictions with much less federal oversight.If that provision was still in effect, the Georgia law would probably not have been enacted, Garland said on Friday.The Georgia law, enacted in March, makes significant changes to several aspects of voting in the state.The bill requires voters to provide identification information both when they request an absentee ballot and on the ballot itself. It also limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited citizen challenges to voter qualifications and prohibits activists from handing out water to people standing in line to vote within 150ft of a polling place. It also creates a pathway for partisan officials to remove local election officials, a move experts have warned could lead to officials rejecting valid election results.The department’s lawsuit challenges several of those provisions, Kristen Clarke, the head of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said on Friday. She noted that the new restrictions on absentee voting came after Black voters used mail-in voting, a process long utilized by white voters in the state, in record numbers.Clarke singled out several provisions of the Georgia law the DoJ was zeroing in on, including measures that block election officials from sending out unsolicited ballot applications, limits on drop boxes, shortening the period to request and return an absentee ballot, the ban on assistance to voters in line, and a new restriction that throws out most provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.“The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at each step of the process, pushing more Black voters to in-person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines. SB 202 then pushes additional obstacles to casting an in-person ballot,” she said.Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, a Republican, pledged to defend the law.“They are weaponizing the US Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy,” he tweeted.Garland also announced on Friday the DoJ was forming a taskforce to investigate threats against election workers. He said Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, had sent a memo to federal prosecutors instructing them to prioritize threats against election workers.“The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow. For this vital right to be effective, election officials must be permitted to do their jobs free from improper partisan influence, physical threats, or any other conduct designed to intimidate,” the memo says.LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, praised the DoJ’s intervention and said it reflected the work of having Vanita Gupta and Clarke, two longtime voting rights attorneys, now in top roles at the justice department.“With DoJ getting involved, it elevates the conversation, it brings more firepower, and it sends a strong message to these states that this is not going to go without being answered.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Reassuring Presence of Multiple Threats

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      In April, the US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, presented an important document produced by the nation’s intelligence community, the 2021 Annual Threat Assessment. It was designed to demonstrate that the newly inaugurated president, Joe Biden, is ready to respond to any or all of the manifold threats, fear of which has been the key to unifying the nation.

      China and Iran figure prominently, as do the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida. Beltway politicians will find the continuity with the fears of previous administrations reassuring. Even though the last three — the Islamic Republic of Iran, IS and al-Qaida — would not even exist today had the United States not actively provoked them into existence through its obsessive meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, many will be pleased to note that their confirmed presence on the list continues to justify the intelligence community’s ever-expanding scope. China, of course, is a special case because it has never threatened the US militarily or economically. Yet the headline of a New York Times article on the report reads, “China Poses Biggest Threat to U.S., Intelligence Report Says.”

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      How indeed should we understand the Chinese threat, announced as the biggest of them all? Haines explains that China is guilty of “employing a comprehensive approach to demonstrate its growing strength.” The Chinese leadership has apparently failed to understand that only one nation in the world is authorized to “demonstrate its growing strength.” They should accept that it is madness to think there may be a need for China’s strength to increase. If the Chinese simply allow the US to govern the world’s affairs, they can be assured that they will always be in safe, democratic hands.

      Russia predictably appears in the full list of threats, although Haines admits that it “does not want a conflict with the United States.” That may be so, but everyone who has paid the slightest attention to the verities associated with Russiagate should now realize that Vladimir Putin’s cronies or lackies have developed a quasi-nuclear capacity to publish misinformation on Facebook, a reprehensible act that no other nation, party or person would ever think of doing. It appears that such practice can be fatal for democracy, even leading to the corrupting of an American election, the pristine model of transparent democratic procedure. 

      Haines focuses on Russia’s use of “malign influence campaigns.” This apparently means cherry-picking only negative things to say about the United States, whether factual or invented. Haines recycles the favorite trope of Russiagate enthusiasts over the past five years when she speaks of Russia’s intent to “sow discord.” Whenever Americans don’t agree on some fundamental things about their own country, the Russians must have had something to do with it.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Haines gets to the end of her list without mention one nation some people find profoundly disturbing: Saudi Arabia, known for its extremely repressive social practices, its summary justice against anyone suspected of “sowing discord” (which may even include Washington Post journalists) and its brutal military campaigns designed to produce the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. But for the fact of its special relationship with the US based on oil and money, there might be some merit in considering Saudi as a possible threat, especially after the 2019 shooting of three Americans by a Saudi officer in Pensacola, Florida and the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

      New evidence emerged this week concerning the training in the US of Khashoggi’s murderers. It revealed a suspicious level of complicity between the Saudi regime, which has funded terrorism for decades, and the US State Department, which authorized the educational collaboration. When asked for comment, State Department spokesman Ned Price explained: “This administration insists on responsible use of U.S. origin defense equipment and training by our allies and partners, and considers appropriate responses if violations occur. Saudi Arabia faces significant threats to its territory, and we are committed to working together to help Riyadh strengthen its defenses.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Significant threats:

      For the US government, any person, group, nation or even abstract idea that in any way challenges the global network of bulwarks and bastions, weapons and sanctions that constitute a body of resources dedicated to national defense, equally including the regimes of sanguinary dictators, predatory businesses and the actions of irresponsible mercenaries, all of whom are guided by the democratic ideals that drive such policies and actions

      Contextual Note

      The twin concepts of threat (the action of others) and defense (our actions) sum up the logic of the security state. So long as a threat exists — and the more that can be listed the merrier — the system of defense can thrive and grow. Haines calls the money spent on defense and surveillance an investment, which most experts on Wall Street and any true economist might find slightly abusive. Here is how she describes the value of the intelligence assessment of threats: “In short, at no point has it been more important to invest in our norms and institutions, our workforce, and the integration of our work. Doing so, provides us with the opportunity to meet the challenges we face, to pull together as a society, and to promote resilience and innovation.” Investment, in this sense, simply means more money that the US can spend, basically on creating or entertaining fear.

      Fomenting fear is easy, especially if you have the means (unlimited budget) of making it appear serious, detailed and scientific. Interestingly, in her quest for thoroughness, Haines correctly designates climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as major threats. Everyone already knows the threat is real. Rather than using her platform to trumpet what everyone knows, it might be more productive to look at mobilizing resources to confront such threats. She could, for example, have signaled the urgency of finding ways to allow the developing world to produce its own vaccines rather than beg for Western handouts. But that would raise the delicate question of pharmaceutical patents, which must be protected even at the cost of the world’s health. Instead, the threat she chooses to highlight is the “vaccine diplomacy” of Russia and China.

      As for climate change, Haines highlights the grim perspective for the globe itself and especially for “vulnerable populations.” But there is nary a word about the contributing causes or the prospect for possible solutions, such as calling into question the economic system that feeds the crisis. This in spite of Haines’ insistence that the intelligence agencies are not simply Cassandras, put in place to strike fear into brave citizens’ hearts, but have a positive role to play. “The American people should know as much as possible about the threats facing our nation and what their intelligence agencies are doing to protect them,” she says. It would be nice to learn more about the “doing” part of it.

      Historical Note

      Since the Second World War, the entire pattern for economic success and industrial growth has been structured around the notion of fear. The Cold War officialized fear as the major motivating factor serving to keep capitalism intact, essentially by transforming free market capitalism into monopolistically structured state capitalism (privatized socialism), in which the needs of defense drive innovation. In the first half of the 20th century, free market capitalism had begun to reveal all the contradictions Karl Marx predicted for it. After the Wall Street crash in 1929, capitalism was on the brink of collapse in the US, which also happened to be the nation that controlled the debt of the European nations who had spent all their capitalistic resources in a catastrophic world war.

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      During the 1930s, Nazism and Soviet communism, two brands of militaristic totalitarianism, became the principal objects of fear for Americans. The business class feared the communists and the working class, decimated by capitalism’s failure, feared the fascists. The Nazis emerged as the threat that justified the war effort. Once that was successful, Washington’s elite elected the Russian communists to play the role.

      After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Islamist terrorism eventually slid into the role of existential threat number one. But the policies mobilized to defeat it had the effect of seriously weakening the American system of state capitalism. With things becoming desperate, new threats were needed. Avril Haines and the Biden administration have produced the updated catalog.

      *[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 World Politics

      Iran’s Hardliners Are Back

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      To some critics, US elections are managed affairs. According to this cynical view, the “powers that be” narrow the field of candidates, the two parties don’t represent the real range of public opinion in the country, and periodic elections are just shadow plays staged by powerbrokers behind the scenes. In this way, US democracy is a sham.

      Although certainly distorted by the powerful, US democracy is not entirely scripted. If nothing else, the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 should have dispelled this particular misconception since the array of forces within the Republican Party, the intelligentsia and Wall Street were initially unified against him. By the same token. the come-from-behind victory of Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush in her House race in Missouri in 2020 also demonstrates, on a smaller scale, that US elections cannot be predicted in advance.

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      Iranian elections, on the other hand, are generally considered semi-democratic at best. Here, a true deep state of clerics and security organs really does stage-manage the elections in often quite transparent ways. This year, for instance, the Guardian Council of clerics and lawyers qualified only seven presidential candidates out of the 592 that registered. Forty women threw their hats into the ring, but the council rejected all of them. It also made sure that no viable reformist candidates would compete in the race.

      As a result, hardliner Ebrahim Raisi handily won the election last week. Just as US President Joe Biden was declaring in his first European trip that “America is back” — by which he meant that an internationally engaged America is back — the recent Iranian election has been an opportunity for the Iranian conservatives known as principlists to declare their return to power. Raisi will take over from the reformist President Hassan Rouhani, who had staked his political career on a nuclear deal with the United States and a reduction of US economic sanctions, which was initially a winning bet. Thanks to Trump’s rejection of that nuclear deal and his ratcheting up of sanctions, however, the reformist agenda lost credibility, if not among the population then at least among Iran’s ruling elite.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Many Iranian voters were so disgusted by what was on offer in the recent election that they refused to vote. The turnout, under 50%, was the lowest since the revolution of 1979. Perhaps most telling was the candidate who came in second place. Actually, it wasn’t a person at all: it was “void.” More than 4 million votes were declared invalid.

      Combined with the number of voters who stayed home, those who voided their ballots sent a signal that they, at least, know a sham when they see one. If one wants to be optimistic, the low-turnout election reveals just how strong the pro-democratic constituency is in the country. And ironically, this poor showing demonstrates that elections do matter in Iran since the Guardian Council had to go to great lengths to guarantee its preferred outcome.

      When Trump won in 2016, he set about transforming US foreign and domestic policy. The swing in Iranian governance from reformist to conservative might be expected to produce a similar sea change in how Iran deals with the economy, its nuclear program and the outside world. But Raisi may end up selling the reformist agenda better than the reformists themselves.

      The Nuclear Deal

      The United States and Iran have just concluded a sixth round of negotiations on reviving the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It’s just possible that the two sides, in negotiations facilitated by the European Union, will come to an agreement before Raisi assumes the presidency in August. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for instance, is upbeat about a quick and positive conclusion to the talks.

      But even if such an early agreement is not forthcoming, there’s no reason to expect that Iran will suddenly pull out of the negotiations. True, the JCPOA was integral to the reformist program, and the reformists were just voted out of office. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei backed the agreement in 2015 and continues to do so. Raisi himself has expressed support for the deal, with the caveats that it was America’s fault for jeopardizing the agreement and that he’s no fan of negotiations for the sake of negotiating.

      Raisi is looking to tread a fine line. His election campaign was based largely on improving the Iranian economy, and that will require the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear-related sanctions. At the same time, he has made clear that he’s not interested in following the reformist agenda of using the nuclear deal as a cornerstone of rapprochement with the West. He stated this week that Iran’s missile program is not up for discussion — something that might have figured in post-JCPOA negotiations — and he is not looking to meet with President Biden.

      “The Americans trampled on the JCPOA and the Europeans failed to live up to their commitment,” Raisi pointed out. “I reiterate to the US that you were committed to lifting the sanctions — come back and live up to your commitments.”

      That’s a fair assessment of what happened under Trump (the trampling part) and what has so far failed to happen under Biden (the lifting of sanctions part). Still, if both sides return to the JCPOA even without future agreements, it would be an improvement over the dangerous impasse of the last few years.

      So, the message is acceptable. The messenger, however, is problematic. Accused of gross human rights violations from his time as a prosecutor in the 1980s and a judge after that, Raisi was included in a 2019 Treasury Department sanctions list. So, Iran’s new president is going to face some difficulties traveling to the West and will not likely give a speech at the UN General Assembly meetings in New York as his predecessors routinely did. Given his reception in the West, it’s not surprising that Raisi is unenthusiastic about a detente with his detractors.

      Yet because Raisi will now be presiding over a state that hews closer to the conservative views of the clerical establishment, there will be less political infighting at the top and Raisi may very well be able to sell an agreement at home more effectively than the reformists.

      The Economy

      The Iranian economy is a mess. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the country experienced significant contractions in GDP of 6% in 2018 and nearly 7% in 2019. With Trump applying maximum pressure on Iran, Europe was supposed to pick up the slack. In fact, trade with Europe dropped by an astonishing 85% after 2017 as European countries buckled under the threat of secondary sanctions from the Trump administration.

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      The rise in prices for consumer goods, particularly gas, prompted widespread protests throughout Iran at the end of 2019, to which the government responded with force. US-imposed sanctions, the disruptions of COVID-19 and chronic budget deficits have all contributed to the inflation that generates a good deal of public discontent in the country.

      In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Iran experienced a huge expansion of its middle class from below 30% of the population to nearly 60%. This middle class generally supported the modern, outward-looking agenda of reformists like Rouhani, who served two presidential terms beginning in 2013.

      Instead of cultivating that constituency, however, the Trump administration undercut the reformists by withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 and applying punitive measures that hurt the middle class. This was not a case of unintended consequences. As Ryan Costello explains at Responsible Statecraft, elements of the US far right quite consciously supported hardliners in Iran as the political figures most likely to unwittingly precipitate an uprising and, ultimately, the collapse of the regime. The maximum pressure campaign of the Trump years was designed with the same ends in mind.

      Instead of mobilizing another Green Movement, which protested the last hardliner to preside over Iran’s political system, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the return of the conservatives to power will more likely provoke apathy or even eventually support for anti-Western policies. “A decade of economic stagnation caused by sanctions and broken international promises has brought Iran’s middle class to a point that it may reconsider its future as a force for political moderation and globalization,” economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani concludes.

      Raisi, meanwhile, has promised to fight corruption and economic mismanagement in the Iranian economy. He has his work cut out for him. The country ranks 149 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Bribery and favoritism are widespread, while a number of officials have been prosecuted for embezzlement and influence-peddling. It’s going to be difficult to root out corruption since the system basically runs on clientelism. The new patrons who take over the government apparatus expect to siphon off a portion of the state’s wealth for distribution through their patronage system.

      As a result, Raisi might find it easier to improve Iran’s economy by negotiating a reduction of external sanctions than a reduction of internal corruption.

      Regional Relations

      One of the side benefits of the Biden administration’s rethink of relations with Saudi Arabia is that it has forced Riyadh to hedge its bets in the region. Trump lavished praise on the Saudis, even as they were killing Yemenis, assassinating a Washington Post columnist and jailing human rights activists. Under Trump, the United States and Saudi Arabia bonded on their anti-Iran agenda.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Now, with the Biden administration pulling back from its support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and criticizing the Saudi record on human rights, Riyadh has begun secret negotiations with Iran to mend their relationship. Those discussions, which began last month in Baghdad, cover a number of flashpoints, but particularly the places where the two countries are competing for influence such as Yemen and Iraq.

      Shortly after his electoral victory, Raisi announced that he wanted to improve relations with the Gulf Arab states. He singled out Saudi Arabia, which severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016. “There are no obstacles from Iran’s side to re-opening embassies,” Raisi said. “There are no obstacles to ties with Saudi Arabia.”

      A rapprochement between these two regional hegemons, however superficial, could significantly improve the prospects for reducing tensions in the region. And that, in turn, could be good news for a Biden administration that so desperately wants to shift its attention away from Middle East conflicts.

      In contrast to hawks like Elliott Abrams, I certainly do not root for the hardliners to win in Iranian elections. I believe that the Iranian system, led by the reformists, can evolve in a more democratic, more peaceful and more equitable direction.

      But in the short term, the victory of Ebrahim Raisi might just be good news. After all, he supports the nuclear deal, needs the reduction of US sanctions to fulfill his economic promises and is open to better relations with his neighbors. Imagine if Ahmadinejad, Iran’s version of Trump, had returned to power. Fortunately, the Guardian Council disqualified him as well. That’s not a bad lesson for Congress, as it confronts the possibility of Trump’s return to public office.

      *[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 Elections

      Pence rebukes Trump and says he was ‘proud’ to certify election result

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      Former vice-president Mike Pence used a speech late on Thursday to go much further than he has before in public to rebuke Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the Republican defeat in the 2020 presidential election, while adding he will “always be proud” of playing his part to certify Joe Biden’s victory.The US Congress, with Pence presiding in the Senate, confirmed the election result in the early hours of 7 January after the deadly insurrection the day before by extremist supporters of Trump, shortly after the then president had urged them “to fight like hell” to reverse his defeat and pressured Pence not to certify Biden’s win.“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the constitution and the laws of the United States,” Pence said in a speech in California.He noted that the vice-president has no constitutional power to throw out a presidential result submitted to the US Congress by the states, or send the votes back to the states in rejection.Pence contradicted “those in our party” who think that “any one person” could select the president, without mentioning Trump directly.“The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” he said.He called the insurrection a “dark day in the history of the United States Capitol”, following which 500 people have been arrested in the biggest US crime investigation since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.The Indiana Republican’s speech was made at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley. Pence showed he still hews to the Trump policies he loyally help craft and promote during the Trump-Pence administration. He also appeared to be laying out his path to a potential candidacy for president himself.Trump persists in his claims that the election was “stolen” from his because of widespread fraud, despite the failure of more than 80 court challenges, and lately told an interviewer that he “never admitted defeat” and was “very disappointed that [Pence] didn’t send it back to the legislatures” in the states, effectively rejecting the result.In his speech, Pence acknowledged his “disappointment” at November’s defeat, with Democrats Biden and Kamala Harris winning decisively.“Now, I understand the disappointment many feel about the last election,” he said. “I can relate. I was on the ballot. But you know, there’s more at stake than our party and our political fortunes in this moment. If we lose faith in the constitution, we won’t just lose elections – we’ll lose our country,” he said.He praised the “Trump-Pence administration’s” accomplishments in office and urged his party to take advantage of “traditional conservative priorities” as well as the “new pillars” of Trump’s populist politics. He called Trump a “one of a kind” disrupter who also “invigorated our movement” in the same way Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.Meanwhile, a further excerpt of the forthcoming book Nightmare Scenario by two Washington Post journalists claims that if Trump had become incapacitated or died of Covid-19 last fall that there were no plans in place at the White House to swear in Pence.Under the Presidential Succession Act, Pence would have taken over as president if Trump had died.The book has further details of how Trump was much sicker than was ever officially acknowledged.But adds: “Trump’s brush with severe illness and the prospect of death caught the White House so unprepared that they had not even briefed Mike Pence’s team on a plan to swear him in if Trump became incapacitated.” More

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      in World Politics

      Joe Biden Meets Afghanistan’s Leaders as the Country Faces Collapse

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      The security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating dramatically. The Taliban have captured the country’s border crossing to Tajikistan. Prospects of civil war have risen.

      Even as the US withdrawal gains momentum, Afghan leaders are visiting Washington to meet President Joe Biden on June 25. This includes President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the chairperson of the High Peace Council for Reconciliation.

      The Hazara Minority’s Precarious Existence in Afghanistan

      READ MORE

      The Taliban are filling the vacuum that Americans are leaving behind. Violence has surged across Afghanistan and the government is losing territory by the day. As September 11, the deadline for the departure of American troops, draws nigh, the Taliban are becoming increasingly emboldened.

      The government in Kabul has a reputation for corruption and is proving to be ineffective. People are dying every day in cities, towns and villages from terror, crime and hunger. The US is leaving behind a royal mess. If its presence in Afghanistan was problematic, its withdrawal promises to be doubly so.

      Ghani Is Running Out of Time

      Stakes are high in Biden’s first meeting with the Afghan leaders even if expectations are low. Ghani is not an ideal interlocutor. He has presided over a notoriously corrupt administration of a failing state. Kabul’s writ does not even run in the city. Even if Biden and Ghani do a dream deal, the latter is highly unlikely to be able to uphold his part of the bargain.

      Biden wants to bring back American troops and minimize the instability that will inevitably follow in Afghanistan. He needs a good partner to work with. Once, Ghani was the blue-eyed boy of Washington. His academic credentials and bureaucratic experience gave him a halo that few Afghans possessed. Ghani has squandered all the resources that the US provided him. He has few, if any, opportunities left. Ghani’s government is on the verge of total collapse.

      Embed from Getty Images

      According to a new assessment of the US intelligence community, Ghani’s government could collapse within six months of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan. The government has lost credibility because it has failed to provide basic public services to the people. Consequently, the people have lost hope. Yet again, Afghans are voting with their feet and leaving the country in droves.

      Like many African strongmen, Ghani has surrounded himself with sycophantic cronies. He sees himself as the savior and messiah of Afghanistan. The president has no idea that he has lost all credibility in his second term. His lofty rhetoric fails to reflect Afghanistan’s grim realities.

      Ghani is not entirely delusional, though. He realized fully well that he occupies his fancy palace in Kabul thanks to the barrels of American guns. Once the Americans leave, he is toast. Therefore, he has opposed Biden’s peace plan that calls for a political settlement between warring parties, including the Taliban. Unsurprisingly, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has lauded Biden’s plan. 

      What Joe Biden Must Do

      Afghans fear that the US might be leaving their country to the mercy of the Pakistani generals. After the last Soviet troops departed from Afghanistan in 1989, the Pakistan-trained Taliban took over. This provided Pakistan with strategic depth, jihadis to send to India and a bargaining chip vis-à-vis Washington. History might be about to repeat itself and Afghans are terrified of another tragedy.

      Biden is meeting Ghani to reassure Afghans that he is not leaving them to the Taliban wolves. The official American line is that the US will continue to support the legitimately elected government in Kabul. Yet the Americans are infamous for short attention spans and Afghans fear they will be forgotten again. After all, Charlie Wilson could raise a ton of money to fight the Soviets but very little for schools or hospitals afterward. As the iconic American movie on the late congressman records, no one cared.

      There is another historical parallel. When US troops left Saigon in 1975, the Viet Cong overran Vietnam. As the last American planes fly back from Bagram, the Taliban could do the same in Afghanistan. Washington must act differently this time around. The US has to back Afghan security forces, put its weight behind a people-centered peace process and uphold Biden’s much-touted democracy agenda.

      If the US fails, the Taliban will be in charge. Pakistan will make Afghanistan a puppet state. Bagram, the closest American airbase to China’s western borders, might well fall to Beijing. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) might expand into Afghanistan too. The risks for Afghanistan, the region and the US are only too real.

      In an article for The Washington Post, David Ignatius argues that “a summer of pain awaits” Afghanistan. Over the years, American leaders have found themselves in a Catch-22 regarding Afghanistan. They cannot tell the public that Afghanistan deserves American blood and treasure forever. Nearly 20 years have passed since the tragic 9/11 attacks in the United States. American troops have patrolled Afghanistan’s dusty roads, fighter jets have flown endless sorties and drones have liquidated fearsome foes. Yet peace is nowhere in sight. At the same time, packing up and leaving only fuels the raging violence further, leaves behind a geopolitical vacuum and allows rival powers leverage against American interests.

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      Donald Trump promised American troops would come home when he was president. Biden has set a date for the final withdrawal. By doing so, he has tied his hands. The Taliban now know that American troops are preparing to leave and will soon be gone. In their worldview, the Taliban have made history. After humbling the Soviets, they have defeated the evil Uncle Sam. They see themselves as superiors of super powers in their own backyard. With morale sky high, they have launched bold military operations to take over Afghanistan. It seems the US can do little to prevent the Taliban from taking over.

      Yet things are never as dire or as rosy as they seem. Many Afghans have fought the Taliban and are willing to fight them again. The Ghani government may be incorrigibly corrupt, but its officials want to avoid the fate of the Soviet-backed leader Mohammad Najibullah whose corpse was strung for public display. Crises tend to focus minds and this might be the best time to deal with Afghanistan’s manifestly flawed leaders.

      Even as American troops are leaving, Biden must support Afghan leaders against the Taliban. He must make that support conditional on Ghani and his cronies leaving office by a certain date. They must put in place a more credible Afghan leadership to take on the Taliban. After all, the British replaced Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill during World War II. For Afghanistan, this is a time of national crisis.

      The Taliban could take over much of the country but will struggle to hold it together. A civil war might break out. The disintegration of Afghanistan might move from the realm of possibility to reality. Ambitious powers in the near neighborhood will take advantage of the ensuing chaos. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan will not become a nation of high literacy, low infant mortality and better nutrition. It will yet again become an impoverished land where fanatics and terrorists will find refuge and a base for their global jihadist operations.

      President Biden has long declared that “America is back.” Afghanistan could smash that assertion to smithereens and demonstrate that America is just going back home. If he is serious about American leadership and holding aloft the torch for democracy, Biden cannot throw Afghanistan to the dogs of war. He has to build an international coalition that pushes through a peace process, backs credible leaders in Afghanistan and provides aerial, if not ground assistance to those putting their lives on the line against the Taliban.

      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

      ‘Critical race theory’ is the right’s new bogeyman. The left must not fall for it | Cas Mudde

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      There is a specter haunting America – the specter of critical race theory. That, at least, is the impression you would get from rightwing media. Fox News has mentioned the term close to 1,300 times since March – including almost 250 times last week alone.If you don’t know, critical race theory (CRT) is a school of legal thought that argues that racism is not only a problem of prejudices held by individual human beings, but a structural problem that can be embedded in ostensibly neutral laws and government institutions. Thanks in part to efforts by conservative activists to turn this previously esoteric academic idea into a catch-all phrase for the excesses of anti-racist politics, critical race theory has become an overnight bogeyman of the right. Conservative politicians in at least 20 states are pushing legislation to ban its teaching in schools.Rather than critically engaging with critical race theory, rightwing politicians and media outlets prefer to attack a carefully constructed straw man version – transforming “the academic study of structural racism into a vague grab-bag of villainy”, in the words of the New Republic’s Alex Shepard. Just as conservatives attacked anything to the left of the far right as “communist” during the red scare of the 1960s, reactionaries today denounce anything with a whiff of anti-racism as “critical race theory” or “wokeness” run amok.It makes sense that a conservative movement that has connected its fate to Donald Trump and a white supremacist agenda would see anything that criticizes the racist structures of the country as a major threat. What is more puzzling, at least at first glance, is the ire that critical race theory has also drawn from some leftwing and liberal camps. Some liberal media outlets seem almost as obsessed as conservatives are with critical race theory, “cancel culture”, “identity politics” and the like – phenomena which they treat as interchangeable symptoms of the same political malaise. Just look at the onslaught of critical pieces about identity politics and “wokeness” in the opinion pages of the New York Times over the past several years.In the eyes of some liberals and leftists, perhaps most famously personified by the academic Mark Lilla, emphasizing race and racism distracts from the real progressive struggle between labor and capital. Across the western world, mostly old white men are lining up to warn us that the “working class” (read: nativist white workers) feels betrayed by center-left parties that cater to “cosmopolitans” or “urbanites” with “symbolic” politics about issues such as gender-neutral bathrooms, rather than offer real material remedies on traditional bread-and-butter issues.Unfortunately, some younger liberals share the older left’s reflexive hostility to racial and sexual politicsWhat they do not see – or do not want to see – is that economic issues and cultural issues are not neatly separated; if anything, they are intimately intertwined, and always have been. Nostalgia for the golden age of progressivism (the early 20th century in the US, and the 1960s and 1970s in western Europe) ignores that the social democratic welfare state was built on heteronormativity, patriarchy and white supremacy. Many state provisions were provided on the basis of a “traditional” family model, in which the man was the main or sole breadwinner and the woman took care of the kids. And white workers were able to achieve upward mobility in part because immigrants replaced them in less desirable, lower-paid jobs.Unfortunately, some younger liberals, often self-described centrists or classical liberals, share the older left’s reflexive hostility to racial and sexual politics and what they view as excessive radicalism. Take Persuasion, a relatively new online publication created by Yascha Mounk, who made his name as a fervent critic of rightwing populism and Donald Trump. In many ways, the publication is a typical product of the Trump era, set up to “defend the values of a free society” against Trump. But from the beginning the bulk of Persuasion’s articles have focused on criticizing the left, whether in the forms of unduly “woke” Americans or the nominally socialist authoritarian regime of Venezuela. The far right, including the Trumpist Republican party, increasingly seems like an afterthought.Anti-identity-politics leftists and liberals must stop acting as the useful idiots of the far right by advancing its pet issues and terminology. These campaigns against anti-racism might look ridiculous on Fox News, but they have real consequences in legislatures and statehouses across the country, where Republican politicians are using the bogeyman of critical race theory and identity politics to ram reactionary rhetoric into law. Coast to coast, Republican lawmakers have unleashed the most profound attack on democracy that this country has seen in decades. Leftists and liberals must recognize that the true enemy of both the working class and free society is on the right, and that its threat is still at least as serious as it was in 2016.
      Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Nashville review – Robert Altman’s country classic still sings

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      “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! SING!” The desperate speaker is rhinestone-suited old-time country singer Haven Hamilton, played by Henry Gibson, in this rereleased state-of-America ensemble classic from 1975, written by Joan Tewkesbury and directed by Robert Altman. The toupee-wearing star has just been shot in the arm by a lone gunman in the crowd at a political rally featuring wholesomely patriotic country music, and the crowd is on the verge of panic. Only soothing tunes will calm them, and eventually a sprightly number called It Don’t Worry Me finally gets them singing along, forgetting all about the murder attempt they’ve all just witnessed. (Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, from a year later, this is a movie that is attempting to deal with the trauma of the Kennedy assassination as much as, or more, than the Vietnam war.)It’s an appropriately sensational and bizarre set piece to close this unique film and, watching it again for the first time since its last revival 17 years ago, what strikes me is its complex attitude to country music itself. Nashville is of course the home of country, the home of the Grand Ole Opry; the music is not really ironised in this film, not mocked, even when the singers are at their most narcissistic and self-serving and when the songs are at their cheesiest – especially Hamilton’s toe-curling For the Sake of the Children, a mawkish song from a man to his mistress, piously saying he has to return to his marriage. The music, playing almost continuously, is the glue that holds the movie together. It may sound schmaltzy, but the city-slickers deriding it sound worse.This is Gerald Ford’s America, on the verge of the bicentennial in 1976 … an event everyone hopes will heal the agonies of Watergate. An independent presidential candidate is coming to Nashville, hoping to promote his new ideas: taxing churches, abolishing the electoral college, removing lawyers from government. But for some Kennedy lovers present, the final dismissal of Nixon just brings back unhappy memories of how Nixon actually won against Kennedy in Tennessee in 1960, and the Kennedy motif is an unhappy omen.So too is a public fainting fit suffered by the local country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who has perhaps intuited the hysteria and anxiety in the air. Allen Garfield is great as her boorish husband-slash-manager Barnett. Geraldine Chaplin is insufferably patronising British journalist Opal, who has a fling with handsome singer Tom (Keith Carradine), who is also having an affair with Linnea (a superb Lily Tomlin), with whom Wade (Robert DoQui) is poignantly in love. Linnea is an unsatisfied married woman with hearing-impaired children whose sleazy husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) is working with visiting TV producer John Triplette (Michael Murphy) to set up a lucrative media-political deal. All these – and many more – characters’ lives crisscross, their dialogue overlapping in the middle-distance sound design while the candidate’s megaphone-van trundles around the city, blaring its choric political commentary, an ambient effect rather like the tannoy announcements in M*A*S*H.The film’s most brutal moment is the treatment of Sueleen Gay, the waitress and tone-deaf wannabe country star played by Gwen Welles, who is tricked by the unspeakable Delbert and Triplette into appearing on stage, purely because they want her to do a striptease for the braying good ol’ boys present. Poor Sueleen thinks they wanted to hear her sing. It’s an ugly moment of abuse and, perhaps tellingly, the band switch from wholesome country to traditional burlesque music for this humiliation.Altman’s control of this sprawling material is wonderful – though Tewkesbury’s screenwriting achievement should not be forgotten. This is the heart of the troubled mid-70s American zeitgeist: angry, sentimental, violent, comic, afraid. More