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      Joe Biden Faces Many Challenges in Latin America

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      Donald Trump, the 45th US president, broke with decades of a relatively bipartisan foreign policy consensus by wreaking havoc on US bilateral relations with China and the European Union. Latin America was an exception to the Trump playbook.

      It is true that US relations with Mexico were rocky during the beginning of the Trump administration. Immigration from Central America and Mexico was a bone of contention. Paradoxically, despite a tumultuous beginning, both leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Trump found a strong common ground to work together. In fact, Lopez Obrador developed a close relationship with his US counterpart.

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      The Mexican president might even have wanted Trump reelected. AMLO, as Lopez Obrador is popularly called in Mexico, took longer than most world leaders to recognize Joe Biden’s election victory in November 2020. Curiously, AMLO and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro recognized Biden’s win after hesitating for six weeks and receiving much criticism. The AMLO-Trump camaraderie indicates that Trump made no radical break in US policy toward Mexico despite his inflammatory rhetoric.

      The same holds true for Venezuela. Trump regularly called for action against this oil-rich nation and threatened military intervention, but the main thrust of his policy was to tighten sanctions imposed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Only with Brazil and Colombia did Trump change US policy somewhat. Trump saw Bolsonaro as a fellow populist of the right and embraced the Brazilian leader in a manner previous administrations would not have. Trump was also very supportive of the right-wing government of Colombia because of ideological reasons. 

      What Issues Need Urgent Attention?

      Unlike US policies toward the EU, China and Iran, President Biden’s Latin America policy does not need radical redefinition. Yet the Biden administration will have to address some issues in the short term and others in the medium or long term. 

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      There are three pressing short-term issues in the region that will require Biden’s attention. The first is the US border problem with Mexico. If Mexican authorities stop the flow of immigrants from Central America, the United States will have less of a crisis on its southern border. The second issue is the shoring up of weakened regional institutions, especially the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The third issue involves developing a comprehensive policy to manage the Venezuelan crisis. 

      The first issue involving the southern border has reached crisis proportions because Mexico and Central American states have responded inadequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is also a public perception in these countries that the US will pursue a more open-border policy under Biden, leading to immigrants flocking to the US. The border issue has dented Biden’s popularity and many Americans believe it has not been handled well. In fact, March was the worst month in US history regarding the number of child refugees knocking at the US border. It was nearly 19,000 in that month alone.

      The key to any solution is held by Mexico. The country controls the flow of immigrants from Central America and can restrain people from reaching the US border. During the last three years of the Trump administration, the United States and Mexico had an informal agreement, as per which the latter served as a secondary gatekeeper for the US border. Mexico regulated the flow of immigrants to the US border and even absorbed significant numbers of migrants itself. This mechanism stopped as soon as Biden entered the White House. Mexico would use the resuscitation of this mechanism as leverage to gain concessions on other issues. 

      On December 29, 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras had signed the Asylum Cooperation Agreement (ACA). The ACA was significant because more than 71% of migrants apprehended on the US southwest border came from these three countries. The ACA aimed to confront “illegal migration at the source” from a region in Central America that has come to be known as the Northern Triangle. Waves of migrants are fleeing poverty, violence and other challenges in this region and making their way to the US. The longer-term solutions that stop such waves of migrants will require resources to mitigate poverty and violence and will have to wait. 

      The second issue facing the Biden administration is restoring the influence of the OAS and the IADB. During the 1990s and the 2010s, these two organizations increased in importance. They were able to promote democracy and economic growth in the region. The OAS played a key role in political crises such as Peru in 1992 and Honduras in 2009. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, two institutions created by the OAS, promoted and protected human rights in the American hemisphere. In recent years, both the OAS and the IADB have weakened.

      The late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and his allies created new regional organizations to counter the OAS and the US. These organizations, such as UNASUR, ALBA and CELAC, sought to limit US influence in the region. Today, they have withered away. Yet the polarization in the region has chipped away at the credibility of the OAS. Its capacity to mediate in conflicts or mobilize the region on important issues has been affected. The OAS has been largely silent on the COVID-19 pandemic, raising questions about its irrelevance.

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      As well as the OAS, the IADB was born with very strong regional roots. By the end of the 20th century, the bank incorporated new members from outside the region. European nations, Japan and even China joined the IADB. Political controversies have plagued the organization for years. In recent times, they have gotten worse.

      In 2019, Venezuela’s opposition leader, Juan Guaido, whom many countries recognized as interim president, appointed Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann as the country’s representative to the IADB. China sided with Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuelan regime and barred Hausmann from attending the IADB meeting in Chengdu. In response, the IADB canceled its meeting in China that was meant to mark its 60th anniversary. Needless to say, recent developments have weakened the IADB.

      The Biden administration will need to relaunch both the OAS and the IADB. Washington will have to restore their credibility and efficacy. Both organizations will be essential for solving the longer-term issues facing the region.

      The Venezuela Conundrum

      The third issue that the Biden administration has to address is Venezuela. As per many analysts, the country is on the brink of collapse. Criminal gangs and other armed non-state actors control not only remote parts of Venezuela but also shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods in the national capital, Caracas. The economy is in a dire state. US economic sanctions and reserves mismanagement have led Venezuelan oil production to fall to its lowest level since the 1940s.

      After low figures of infection in 2020, COVID-19 has now spiraled out of control. In per capita terms, Venezuela has vaccinated the least number of people in Latin America. Even Haiti is doing better. As per The Lancet, “Venezuela does not have a known national COVID-19 vaccine plan, and the supply of vaccines is spasmodic, insufficient, and unplanned.” The reputed publication also observes that “the health-care system has collapsed and is incapable of responding to the ever-increasing number of patients who require hospitalisation.”

      Maduro has rejected most plausible options for mass vaccination. Only the Venezuelan elite, Maduro’s close supporters and the regime’s Cuban advisers have been vaccinated. The government rejected a deal with opposition leader Guaido to import the AstraZeneca vaccine through the COVAX mechanism of the United Nations at the last minute. Despite popular clamor for mass vaccination, it is unclear how the process will advance even though the funding for vaccination is available.

      Hunger has been on the rise and diseases like malaria are back. Such is the dire state of affairs that Venezuelans are fleeing the country. Over 5 million of them have left. This has led to the worst refugee crisis in the Western Hemisphere and rivals the Syrian crisis. Countries in Latin America have largely been hosting these refugees, but they are increasingly overstretched. Emulating the Biden administration, Colombia has designated “temporary protected status” for Venezuela.

      The Maduro regime has lost control of the country. Its military strikes against armed groups are only exacerbating an already terrible situation. The military’s offensive against Colombian illegal armed groups near the Venezuela-Colombia border has led to more Venezuelans fleeing the country. Venezuela’s recent economic measures to revive the economy such as reversing Chavez’s total control over PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, and privatization of a selected number of state-owned enterprises have not worked. The government suffocates business and has no talent for economic management.

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      Paradoxically, the COVID-19 pandemic has benefited the government in one significant way. By imposing a radical quarantine, the Maduro regime and its cronies exercise tight social control over the population’s movements in areas of their control. After putting the ruling elite in a difficult position and isolating it internationally during 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, the opposition has run out of steam. Nominally led by Guaido, the opposition is highly fragmented and has failed to come up with a common strategy.

      Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy of using sanctions to topple Maduro’s regime did not work. Cuba, Russia and China have ganged up to support Maduro and ensure his survival even as Venezuela increasingly becomes a failed state. The Biden administration needs fresh thinking and a new strategy for a state that is threatening the stability and security of Latin America.

      What Are the Long-Term Challenges?

      If short-term prospects are grim for Latin America, then the mid-term ones are anything but rosy. The commodities boom that enabled the region to grow continuously for nearly two decades is over. This boom brought tens of millions out of poverty. As per the International Monetary Fund, Latin America bounced back from the COVID-19 in 2020, but the pandemic’s resurgence “threatens to thwart an uneven recovery and add to the steep social and human costs.”

      Countries like Peru, which managed to grow at high rates despite a dysfunctional political system, have plunged back into grinding poverty and, lately, political chaos. The prospects in most other Latin American countries are similar. Economic hardship will inevitably heighten social and political tensions. Over the last two decades, many protests that mushroomed across the region against corruption or injustice quietened as public services improved. When the pandemic recedes, these protests may come back with a vengeance, reclaiming the relative prosperity the people have lost.

      Economic woes might also create new perils for democracy. Already, there is a worldwide trend of declining democracy. In Latin America, countries like Brazil, El Salvador and Nicaragua are worrisome examples of this trend.

      Bolsonaro, the populist right-wing politician, famously won the Brazilian election in 2018 on an anti-corruption agenda that implicated a host of politicians, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was the most popular politician in decades and whose policies brought millions out of poverty. Bolsonaro has rolled many of those policies back. More importantly, he has mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 490,000 Brazilians have died. This number is the second-highest after the US. With more than 17.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, Brazil ranks third-highest in the world. Protesters blame Bolsonaro’s disastrous policies from downplaying the threat of COVID-19 and opposing lockdowns to mishandling vaccination and causing the near-collapse of the health system.

      In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele has strengthened his grip over the legislature and the judicial system. His party has voted to “remove the magistrates of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court.” Earlier, Bukele ordered heavily armed troops to occupy the parliament to pressure legislators into voting to better equip the troops. 

      If the threats to democracies in Brazil and El Salvador come from the right, those to Bolivia and Nicaragua come from the left. In Bolivia, former President Evo Morales began dismantling democratic institutions when he sought to win a fourth consecutive term in 2019. In doing so, he contravened the provisions of the constitution. Bolivians had voted against Morales’ attempt to amend the constitution so that he could run for a fourth term, but he got around this vote by appealing to the nation’s highest court that was packed with his cronies. After a disputed election, Morales fled to Mexico after the military asked him to stand down, and Jeanine Anez took over as interim president. Anez promptly set out to persecute and prosecute Morales and his supporters.

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      Another election followed in 2020 and the socialist candidate Luis Arce won. He had served as economy minister under Morales. As president, Arce has turned upon Anez and other political rivals. They have been arrested for participating in a coup against Morales. This cycle of political vendetta has left Bolivia highly polarized, and the country’s political crisis is far from over.

      In Nicaragua, the decades-long president, Daniel Ortega, just recently imprisoned the four most important contenders of the opposition, in practice moving into a one-party system. Mexico also faces challenges too, but in more milder forms.

      Finally, there remains the thorny issue of Cuba that every US president since John F. Kennedy has had to face. In 2016, Barack Obama tried to turn back the clock on the Cold War by visiting Cuba and inaugurating a new era of engagement. Trump reversed almost all of Obama’s policies. Now, Biden has to craft a new policy on Cuba, a country that remains influential throughout the region. Along with Venezuela, Cuba is a magnet for attracting the attention of the two big external powers: Russia and China. This tripartite meddling of Russia, China and the US in Latin America could sow instability in the region.

      Already, Cuba is facing its worst economic crisis since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The new generation of Cubans has lost faith in the communist regime. The Cuban leadership is going through a highly choreographed transition of power to a younger generation. Given the flux, the Biden administration would be well advised to bide its time. Eventually, it may want to craft a new policy that avoids the bitter confrontation of the Trump era and the open engagement of the Obama years.

      In the long-term, the Biden administration needs a robust OAS and a strong IADB to restore democracy and rebuild the economy in Latin America. The region will need a robust reconstruction plan once COVID-19 recedes. If the US ignores Latin America, Russia and China will continue to make inroads. They will undermine the relative stability Latin America has enjoyed for the last few decades. Biden has no choice but to pay attention to a region that lies in the same hemisphere as the US and remains crucial to American strategic calculus.

      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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      Threats to US election workers take heavy and harrowing toll | Fight to vote

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      Happy Thursday,In the United States, a quiet army of people work in towns, cities, and states across the country to make sure that elections hum along smoothly. They’re responsible for all the mechanics that ensure Americans can exercise their right to vote – like keeping track of complex data files, making sure that mail-in ballots get printed and go out on time, ensuring that polling places have enough workers, and making sure that every valid vote gets counted.For a long time, these officials – elected in some places, appointed in others – have been largely invisible. That invisibility evaporated last year.When Donald Trump began raising baseless claims about things like ballots being smuggled in and votes being flipped, these election officials became the target of his supporters’ rage. From state election officials to lower-level workers, they started receiving death threats, were followed in their cars, and even had people break into family-members’ homes, according to a harrowing Reuters report. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, even had to move out of his home because of vicious threats.About a third of election officials surveyed this spring said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. And about a fifth of the 223 officials described threats to their lives as a concern related to their work.Nearly 80% of the officials surveyed said social media conspiracy theories and misinformation made it harder for them to do their jobs. And more than half said the platforms had made their jobs more dangerous.US attorney general Merrick Garland condemned attacks against election workers in a speech last week, and pledged law enforcement would investigate when federal laws were violated.“We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers,” he said. “Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.”The Brennan Center report offers a range of suggestions for reform that can better protect election officials, including establishing a DoJ taskforce focused on threats against election workers, passing laws that give workers more privacy protections, and implementing measures that insulate officials from political pressure.But the attacks have already taken their toll – many election officials retired or left their jobs after a bruising 2020 election. That’s alarming to many voting rights groups because it could lead to a loss in institutional knowledge as well as a drop in the polling place workers and other staff needed to ensure elections run smoothly.A swell of candidates who embraced the baseless idea that the election was stolen are also running for key election administration positions. If elected, those officials would be able to wield enormous power over implementation of election rules, including ballot counting.“A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “The danger of manipulated election results looms.”Also worth watching…
      The New York Times had an extraordinary story detailing how GOP-backed voting restrictions moving through state legislatures would curtail ballot access for people with disabilities.
      Senator Joe Manchin released a list of provisions he would support in a sweeping voting reform bill in congress. That’s a welcome sign to many advocates, who feared Manchin’s recalcitrance would kill any hope of voting reform. Manchin still does, however, support the filibuster, which would block Democrats from advancing any measure.
      Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives, heralded for halting a sweeping voting restrictions bill in their state, met with both Senate Democrats and Kamala Harris this week to urge them to pass sweeping voting reforms in Washington.
      Attorney General Garland gave a speech last Friday on increasing voting rights enforcement by the department. Garland announced that the department’s voting section was doubling the number of attorneys there in the next 30 days. While that was a welcome announcement, observers are still waiting to see what kinds of voting challenges and cases the DoJ chooses to bring. More

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      What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about | Moira Donegan

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      Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was. The phrase itself sounds distant, lofty, and abstract – “critical”, “theory” – the kind of thing that comes out of the mouths of people in tweed blazers who think they’re better than you. The very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance.And so it is that something Republicans are calling “critical race theory” became the center of a series of statehouse bills – some proposed, others already signed into law – that aim to ban honest conversations about race and sex oppression in America from classrooms. Casting themselves in opposition to a supposed ideology of white sinfulness and inferiority that they claim is sweeping through the nation and indoctrinating children, Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.Laws claiming to ban critical race theory from public school curriculums have been passed in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and have been advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. The bills themselves are patently unconstitutional and will not hold up in court, and they are so non-specific regarding what exactly they oppose that it’s also hard to imagine how they could ever be meaningfully enforced, even if they were not destined to be thrown out.But the bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom, a tendency that has recently been modeled in other nations with rising authoritarian sentiment. Some instructors have already been affected by the bans.The wording of the bans is vast enough to prohibit vast swaths of discursive territory. In the North Carolina law, among those “concepts” that public schools “shall not promote” are “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” and “that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex”. A proposed bill in Connecticut, meanwhile, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” or content that causes “any individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”.This last item – with its concern for the emotions of white, male students – may be the most telling. The move to ban discussions of racism and oppression as systemic and socially foundational comes on the heels of the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny tenure to the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, following the interventions of a major donor. It comes, too, a year after the nationwide uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Both of these events garnered a passionate backlash in rightwing media, which have depicted them as assaults on police, “order” and white people. Packaged together as “critical race theory”, these conversations have been demonized on the right in an attempt to reassert understandings of race, racism, and American history that center white people as the primary moral players.The bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to crush academic freedomFor Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified. This version of American history has placed racist injustice squarely in the past, but also, it quarantines racism in individual minds, rather than recognizing it as an infection that has contaminated our culture. Racism, in this telling, is primarily a matter of personality, of individual white people’s souls.But much modern anti-racist thinking rejects this. The 1619 Project positions Black people, and their enslavement, as central to America’s history, positioning the enslaved not merely footnotes or minor characters, but protagonists. And the real critical race theory that is practiced in law schools does not seem to be concerned with white people’s souls so much as with Black people’s material conditions. Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence. More

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      Manchin’s blocking bid is no shock, say disgruntled West Virginia Democrats

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      West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has emerged as one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the passing of Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda, declaring he will vote against a key voting rights bill and also blocking reform of the filibuster – a rule that at the moment allows Republicans to kill Democrat legislation.Yet Manchin is no Republican. He is a key member of Biden’s party, and in a 50-50 Senate his vote is the lynchpin of political power and crucial for passing Biden’s plans. Yet Manchin is seen by many Democrats as sabotaging his own president’s efforts to be a transformational leader who can help the US recover from the pandemic in the same way Roosevelt helped America recover from the Great Depression.To many people outside West Virginia, Manchin’s behavior is a mystery: how does someone take such a stand against their own side? But for many West Virginian Democrats Manchin’s tactics and those of his state West Virginia Democratic party leadership are no surprise at all.In fact, examining West Virginia’s Democratic politics shows that Manchin’s undermining of Biden’s efforts, especially around voting rights, should have been entirely expected.Manchin’s opposition to the For the People Act, a bill that aims to expand voting rights and reduce the influence of money in US elections, has angered Black Americans across the country. But earlier this year, West Virginia’s all-white Democratic party leaders submitted a draft affirmative action plan to the national party without input or approval from a newly formed affirmative action committee, a group whose membership includes women, people of color and people with disabilities.Affirmative action committee co-chair Hollis Lewis said moving the plan forward without any input from the committee – or any Black Americans at all – was unacceptable for communities of color in the state. “As a Black West Virginian, this is a slap in the face,” he said.Lewis linked Manchin’s stance against the national voting rights bill to the Democratic fight over the affirmative action plan in West Virginia, saying it showed he and party leaders in his state would rather maintain control than work to empower traditionally marginalized people.“These two incidents happened the very same week – and they parallel each other,” said Lewis. “You’re making a decision based on how you feel about something that’s not necessarily going to affect you.”In numerous interviews, West Virginia Democrats and people of color described a party at odds with their needs and belief and in thrall to Manchin’s power and conservatism.Mary Ann Claytor, an affirmative action committee member and 2020 candidate for state auditor, said she felt ignored by West Virginia’s party leadership when she won her primary race. Claytor, who is Black, says a county-level leader told her in confidence that members of party leadership said they didn’t think a Black, working-class woman could win an election in West Virginia.In an interview with the Guardian, Claytor said Manchin’s decisions in the Senate plus West Virginia’s state party politics are indicative of an issue that extends beyond race: a resistance by Democratic power structures in West Virginia to bring working-class people, women or any marginalized group into the party.“We hear a lot about how progressives can’t win,” she said. “They kept putting people down. Like, ‘Oh, they’re not going to win. [Manchin] is the only person going to win, because he has that much money in his war chest.’”Manchin’s office rejected an interview request for this article. Multiple interview requests sent to the West Virginia Democratic party leadership went unanswered.Critics say the state party and power-brokering Democrats such as Manchin are quick to dismiss the loyalty Black Americans have consistently put forth in supporting Democratic candidates. “They want the power concentrated where it’s at,” Peshka Calloway, a Black organizer for Democratic issues and a US army veteran, said of the WVDP leadership.A native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, Calloway was working for Planned Parenthood when Manchin unexpectedly showed up at an NAACP state conference she was attending in 2018. She confronted him afterwards about whether he would support former President Trump’s nomination of supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, a controversial candidate because of views on abortion and historical allegations of sexual assault.“How are you voting on Kavanaugh?” she asked. “I hope it’s a no because I’m a survivor of military sexual assault, and what I’m hearing about him is absolutely disgusting.” Manchin replied that he “was facing a hard decision” and would do his best.Two months later, he was the only Democrat in the Senate who voted to appoint Kavanaugh.Natalie Cline sees the Democratic party as excluding working-class constituents in the state. Cline secured the Democratic nomination for the US House of Representatives in 2020, when she won her primary race with 74% of the vote. She identifies as a “true blue Democrat” and grew up in a working-class family where both of her grandfathers had union jobs.After winning her primary, she said the state party offered her campaign no support or publicity despite endorsements from well-known names such as Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and actors Debra Messing and Rosie O’Donnell.“I can’t tell you how many times I would send emails to the state party and say: ‘Can you please share this information? We need people to watch’ – to no response.”Cline now believes that promoting inclusion within the party puts a target on a candidate’s back: seek to make good on the Democratic promise of being a “big-tent” party and get shut out by Manchin and his state party.One of the most baffling moments from her campaign and a sign, she said, of party’s disconnect with working-class people, came when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) simultaneously endorsed Manchin and her opponent – a Republican who months later would vote to restrict individuals’ rights to unionize.“I didn’t feel that they [the Democratic party] cared. If they cared, they would be yelling and screaming,” she said. “They would have called the UMWA out on it. But heaven forbid they do that, because that might jeopardize Manchin’s endorsement.”David Fryson, who retired this year as a vice-president at West Virginia University, said the decline of the WVDP can be traced back to 1996. Before Manchin was senator, he lost his gubernatorial primary to Charlotte Pritt, an environmentalist hailed as a forward-thinking Democrat. Instead of throwing his weight behind Pritt, Manchin actively campaigned for Pritt’s Republican opponent, Cecil Underwood, who went on to win.Manchin’s embrace of conservatism continued. In 2012, he was listed as the only Democratic senator to serve as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a conservative nonprofit that focuses on reducing business regulations, weakening labor unions, loosening environmental conservation efforts and restricting voting rights.“What I’m trying to do, in my little way, is convince the Democrats to be careful going down the rabbit hole with with Joe Manchin,” said Fryson. “He will end up … doing to the national Democratic party what he’s done to the West Virginia Democratic Party. And he’s already doing it.” More

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      Is the truth out there? The US government prepares its landmark report on UFOs – podcast

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      A hotly anticipated US government report on decades of mysterious sightings of UFOs is due for release this month. The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt and former Ministry of Defence employee Nick Pope investigate

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      In December 2020, just before Donald Trump left the White House, the CIA was given six months to release all of the evidence it had gathered in the last 14 years about UFOs. So later this month a highly anticipated report will be released. Guardian reporter Adam Gabbatt tells Anushka Asthana that in recent years a series of government videos showing unidentified objects have been released, including footage from a navy F-18 fighter jet which showed an oblong object flying through the sky near San Diego in 2004. The wave of recent videos and the imminent release of the government report has ignited excitement around unidentified flying objects not seen for years. Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence. He tells Anushka that despite mockery from some of his colleagues, the idea that we are not alone in the universe and may have been visited is worth serious consideration. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden rejects Putin’s ‘ridiculous comparison’ between Capitol rioters and Alexei Navalny at summit – live

      by

      Key events

      Show

      5.53pm EDT
      17:53

      Governor signs law allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license

      5.23pm EDT
      17:23

      Academics: Breyer must retire from supreme court

      5.00pm EDT
      17:00

      Today so far

      4.43pm EDT
      16:43

      DoJ moves to drop lawsuit over Bolton’s tell-all book – reports

      3.16pm EDT
      15:16

      Biden – ‘Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now’

      2.33pm EDT
      14:33

      Democrats ready to advance infrastructure plans on their own – report

      1.53pm EDT
      13:53

      Biden rejects Putin’s ‘ridiculous comparison’ between Capitol rioters and Navalny

      Live feed

      Show

      5.53pm EDT
      17:53

      Governor signs law allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license

      Texas governor Greg Abbott has signed a law allowing residents to carry handguns without a license or training starting in September.
      My colleague Erum Salam wrote about the controversial law in April:

      The law mirrors measures passed in 20 other states. It comes at the heels of several mass shootings around the country, and in Texas. In April, a man in Bryan, Texas opened fire at the cabinet company where he used to work, killing one person and injuring five people.

      5.44pm EDT
      17:44

      The Justice Department thew out a Trump-era ruling that made it virtually impossible for immigrants fleeing domestic violence to seek asylum in the US.
      Former attorney general Jeff Sessions had overruled a previous court decision that people facing domestic violence in their home countries were eligible for asylum. Today, the Justice Department “vacated” that decision. Attorney general Merrick Garland wrote that questions about which groups be considered for asylum “should instead be left to the forthcoming rulemaking, where they can be resolved with the benefit of a full record and public comment.”
      Garland’s move had been celebrated by immigrant rights advocates. “Around the world, in Central America and elsewhere, women struggle to have governments ensure, or in some cases recognize, their right to protection,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

      5.23pm EDT
      17:23

      Academics: Breyer must retire from supreme court

      David Smith

      A group of 18 legal academics has issued an extraordinary joint letter urging US supreme court justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that Joe Biden can name his successor. More

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      in World Politics

      NATO’s New Challenge in East Asia

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      US President Joe Biden used the occasion of his trip to Europe for the G7 summit to attend his first NATO meeting. His influence on the meeting appeared unambiguously when a communiqué by the NATO alliance designated China’s influence on the world stage as a military challenge. 

      NATO was born in the aftermath of the Second World War as the West’s response to the ambitions of the Soviet Union, which controlled large portions of Eastern Europe and represented an ideology considered inimical to Western political and economic culture. This gave rise to the Cold War, framed as the rivalry between two systems of social and economic organization: capitalism (supported by democracy) and communism (the dictatorship of the proletariat).

      Does the World Need to Contain China?

      READ MORE

      Because humanity had entered the nuclear age, the Cold War cultivated a permanent and universal feeling of potential terror, unlike tensions and wars of the historical past. Its name, “Cold War,” has been attributed to George Orwell, who didn’t live long enough to see how it would develop. The author of “1984” imagined “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” In the end, there were only two major players. The laws of hyperreality, just like the laws of conventional information technology, require reducing the governing logic to a binary opposition. The age of quantum logic, which humanity is only just now discovering, had not yet begun.

      The Cold War was cold in relative terms, simply because the heat that a real nuclear war might produce would have dwarfed anything humanity had ever experienced. As soon as a nuclear war started it would be over, as no one would be left standing. This too reflected the binary logic of the time. There were exactly two choices: hot war or cold war. There could be no warm war between the two proud rivals. A cold war was clearly preferable in the eyes of anyone who wielded power. The leaders in the US understood how to profit from that preference. It justified the creation and rapid growth of a powerful military-industrial complex at the core of the American empire.

      The Cold War marked a moment of history in which military technology was undergoing its most radical paradigm change, thanks to the invention of nuclear weapons in the US and their capacity for devastation demonstrated by their operational deployment in Japan that put an exclamation point on the end of the World War. The entire world became gripped in a state of permanent fear, attenuated only by the sense that because no leader would likely be suicidal enough to engage in open conflict, the actors of the economy were free to realize their boldest ambitions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In the West, the Cold War produced an odd cultural effect of “carpe diem,” the feeling that it was necessary to “seize the day” and have fun, because there may be no tomorrow. This feeling drove both the rapid growth of the consumer society and the cultural liberation movements we associate with beatniks and hippies. It also proved fatal for the Soviet Union’s false utopia of worker solidarity that depended on accepting austerity for the good of the collectivity.

      NATO should have become obsolete after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. But the camp built around the clout of the US military-industrial complex could not simply be dismantled and put to pasture. Two presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, had little choice but to maintain NATO because the entire US economy now revolved around the logic of the military-industrial complex.

      That militarized economy had become the key to installing a global, neocolonial system capable of replacing Europe’s colonial system that was in the decades following World War II. Because it was industrial as well as military, it spawned the technologies that began to dominate the global economy. These new technologies conveniently straddled the pragmatic (civil applications) and the political (military applications), providing a new motor for the late 20th economy that we all live under today.

      Though NATO had lost its initial geopolitical justification, it continued to operate as a pillar of the new military-economic system. It influenced the evolution of the formerly isolated regime of communist China, destined to become a major actor in the global economy. There was only one model for any large nation that wished to participate effectively in the global economy. It had to encourage capitalism and have its own military-industrial logic. China has succeeded, thanks to the global consumer market spearheaded by the US. For various reasons, India, which might have moved in that direction, failed.

      NATO now finds itself in an odd position. Contested by the mercurial Donald Trump, its members greeted with a sigh of relief the electoral victory of a conventional Cold War establishment politician, Joe Biden. For the past five years, Biden’s Democratic Party has sought to revive the ambience and ethos of the Cold War, focusing on Russia. But Russia simply isn’t a serious rival of the US. Both major US parties have designated China as the bugbear to focus on. But China falls way outside NATO’s “North Atlantic” purview.

      Nevertheless, Biden appears to have persuaded NATO to include China in its official discourse. The communiqué from this week’s meeting makes the case: “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Systemic challenge:

      A politically correct euphemism for “serious threat,” applied to anything that calls into question the weaknesses and vices of an existing system, especially when that system’s weaknesses and vices have become dramatically visible

      Contextual Note

      The unresolved pandemic that has been raging for nearly a year and a half and the growing crisis of climate change have created a situation in which the system now being challenged has been found seriously wanting. Defending the status quo has become an ungratifying task. All lucid observers agree that the political and economic system inherited from the 20th century needs either to evolve radically or be replaced by something new. 

      It is equally clear that Beijing has no alternative system to propose. This is partly because China’s success is due largely to its adaptation to and integration within the system being challenged, but equally because the Chinese system of autocratic communism is a failed model itself and the Chinese themselves know it.

      NATO worries about China’s “stated ambitions and assertive behaviour.” But in reality, its ambitions appear modest and the behavior, while certainly assertive, cannot compare with the historically aggressive behavior of the US, so clearly demonstrated in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East.

      Historical Note

      As for the “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order,” the rules that existed at the time of the creation of the United Nations and the establishment of the Bretton Woods system have long been challenged by the Western powers, to the point of being distorted beyond recognition.

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      Even the reference to “areas relevant to Alliance security” needs to be put in historical perspective. NATO is nominally focused on one area in the world: the North Atlantic. But for the past two decades, it has ventured further and further, not only into Eastern Europe, but also Afghanistan, presumably turning Central Asia into an area of “Alliance security.” With the political turmoil that emerged in 2016 in both the US (Donald Trump) and Europe (Brexit), there should be enough to feel insecure about within NATO’s traditional sector of the North Atlantic. Reaching out to China’s area of influence would be a real stretch.

      It’s true that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to extend its influence across both Asia and Europe. This could be interpreted as potentially encroaching on the North Atlantic military fiefdom. But the BRI’s character is economic and clearly not military. It is soft power rather than hard power.

      Most lucid observers in the West, conscious of the current system’s growing incapacity to deal with any global problem — whether it’s a pandemic, war, migration, domestic tranquility or climate change — find themselves looking for something that could be called a “systemic challenge” to the current unproductive and often unjust system of doing things. At the end of the day, the systemic challenge at home will likely have more impact than China’s.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

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

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      in US Politics

      Woes mount for legal loyalists who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies

      by

      A crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color.Take Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump conspiracy promoter and ex-federal prosecutor.After a short stint on Trump’s legal team last December, where she made wild claims about election fraud due to a voting machine company’s alleged ties to Venezuela, which sparked a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against her, Powell in late May drew ridicule for telling a Dallas QAnon meeting that Trump could be “reinstated” this summer.There is also election law veteran Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s infamous January call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,000-plus votes to block Joe Biden’s win. Mitchell is now leading a $10m FreedomWorks drive in seven states to tighten election laws in ways that are seen as crimping voting rights.Trump’s high-pressure call led the Fulton county district attorney to open a criminal inquiry.Meanwhile, Atlanta lawyer L Lin Wood, who worked with Powell in Georgia in a failed drive to reverse Biden’s win by filing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud, told Talking Points Memo he donated $50,000 to help fund a bizarre vote “audit” in Arizona’s largest county – even though Biden’s victory there has been certified.Known for his frenzied pro-Trump advocacy, including charging that Vice-President Mike Pence ought to be executed by a firing squad, Lin has other legal headaches in Georgia, where he is battling a state bar request for him to take a confidential mental competency exam after it conducted an extensive review into his alleged legal misconduct.Further, Georgia election officials in February launched an investigation into allegations that Wood may have voted illegally in the state last year after he had bought a home in nearby South Carolina. Wood has denied voting illegally.But among Trump’s fervent legal allies Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer during the campaign, faces the gravest threats in a widening federal investigation into whether he broke lobbying disclosure laws by representing foreign officials in Ukraine, while working to gather dirt there on Biden to boost Trump’s electoral chances.The federal inquiry, led by US prosecutors in the same New York office that Giuliani once headed, gained potentially damaging evidence in late April when FBI agents raided Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan and seized more than 10 cellphones and other electronic equipment.Other pro-Trump lawyers are also feeling legal heat.Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, who shared a $1m contract with a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and reportedly helped Giuliani’s Ukraine efforts, seem to have been ensnared in part of the Giuliani investigation. Using a search warrant, federal agents took a Toensing cellphone in late April on the same day as the Giuliani raids, but Toensing has said she was told she is not a “target”.Former senior justice department officials voice dismay about the conduct of Trump’s legal allies.Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, said he was astounded by the turn that Giuliani, Powell and diGenova have taken in “becoming cheerleaders for Trump and his assault on democracy”.“I have known them all at times over the past several decades when they each held positions of respect and some distinction,” Ayer said. “It’s a real head-scratcher for me, given that background, that they have each become so utterly disconnected from reality in pursuit of a totally unworthy cause.”Other departmental veterans say pro-Trump lawyers probably have mercenary motives.“Lawyers who make preposterous and counterfactual statements to the public typically only do it when there’s something in it for them – and that usually means money,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of DoJ’s fraud section.But there’s no doubt that Trump’s legal allies are feeling painful fallout from making suspect charges.Both Powell and Giuliani have been hit with $1.3bn defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems for conspiratorial statements that tied the Denver-based election equipment firm to nefarious fraud schemes.Powell and Giuliani have separately argued that the lawsuits ought to be dismissed. Powell has stressed that her dubious allegations were protected by the first amendment free speech rights.Still, Powell’s defense was damaged in May when her lawyers incongruously claimed she was just being hyperbolic in charging Dominion had ties to left-leaning Venezuela, and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.However, the legal threats facing Giuliani are notably higher due to the widening two-year-old inquiry by prosecutors into whether he was an unregistered foreign agent for Ukrainian officials who were aiding the lawyer in his quest to find damaging information about Biden.The criminal inquiry is reportedly focused on Giuliani’s part in Trump’s firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in May 2019, a move that Giuliani and two close associates – indicted separately on charges of campaign finance violations – promoted, and a key issue in Trump’s first impeachment.After the recent FBI raid that obtained his legal devices, Giuliani denounced the federal inquiry: he said he had not lobbied anyone in the US government on behalf of any foreign officials, and told Fox News the inquiry was “trying to frame him”.But more damaging details of Giuliani’s pro-Trump Ukraine blitz were released this past week by CNN, after it obtained a secret recording from 2019 where Giuliani aggressively cajoled a high-level Ukraine official to help Trump by investigating baseless conspiracies involving Biden whose son was on a Ukrainian gas company’s board.Further, after Giuliani’s lawyers cited attorney-client privilege to limit the use of potentially damaging materials from the raid, a New York judge acting on a request from federal prosecutors tapped a retired judge as a “special master” to review the materials seized, and decide what investigators can use as they pursue possible criminal charges. More