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      in US Politics

      Biden and Yellen urge Democrats to go big and bold on Covid relief package

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      Joe Biden and his new treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, are encouraging Democrats in Congress to go big and bold on the Covid-19 relief package and have effectively panned a Republican alternative that is less than a third the size of the president’s $1.9tn rescue plan.Senate Democrats took steps on Tuesday to push ahead with the huge bill, with or without Republican support, despite the ostensibly amicable bipartisan talks at the White House the day before.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, warned that the coronavirus crisis could drag on for several years unless maximum effort for large-scale relief is made on Capitol Hill.Democrats voted to launch a process that could approve the sweeping rescue package on their own if necessary.On Tuesday, Biden and Yellen joined the Democratic senators for a private virtual meeting and both declared the Republicans’ $618bn relief offer too small.They urged ambitious and fast action to stem the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its economic fallout.Biden on Wednesday was meeting with congressional Democrats. In a call-in to the weekly meeting of Democratic representatives he said he was willing to consider tighter limits on who gets $1,400 direct payments under his Covid-19 relief plan but not the size of the checks, CNN reported.The president invited incoming Democratic chairs of some key Senate committees to the Oval Office.“This is their new home for a while anyway,” Biden said. “And with a little bit of luck, the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors, and the crick not rising, it’s going to be longer than just four years.”Asked whether he believed any Republican lawmakers would support his relief proposal, Biden replied: “I think we’ll get some Republicans.”“I think we’ll get some Republicans,” Biden told us in Oval, referring to GOP votes on latest coronavirus stimulus spending plan. pic.twitter.com/VrZXudKJQh— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) February 3, 2021
      Earlier, Senators Chris Coons and Tom Carper of Delaware emerged from an hour-long meeting with Biden at the White House.Carper said the trio discussed the need to confirm Biden’s cabinet nominees, as well as president’s coronavirus relief proposal.Coons pushed for financing global vaccine relief. He noted to reporters after that it is in Biden’s coronavirus relief proposal but not in the counter proposal from 10 Republicans, and is how US can restore its global leadership.As the White House reaches for a bipartisan bill, Democrats marshaled their slim Senate majority, voting 50-49, to start a lengthy process for approving Biden’s bill with a simple majority.The goal is to have Covid-19 relief approved by March, when extra unemployment assistance and other pandemic aid expires.“President Biden spoke about the need for Congress to respond boldly and quickly,” Schumer said after the lunch meeting, and, referring to the GOP counter offer, he added: “If we did a package that small, we’d be mired in the Covid crisis for years.”Biden framed his views during the virtual lunch meeting with Democrats by talking about the need not to forget working- and middle-class families – even those like nurses and pipe-fitters making $150,000 for a family of four – who are straining during the crisis, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private call.The night before, Biden met with 10 Republican senators pitching their $618bn alternative, and let them know it was insufficient to meet the country’s needs. The president made it clear that he will not delay aid in hopes of winning GOP support.While no compromise was reached during the late Monday session, White House talks with Republicans are privately under way.The outcome will test the new president striving to unify the country but confronting a rising Covid-19 death toll and stubbornly high jobless numbers, with political risks for all sides.Vaccine distributions, direct $1,400 payments to households, school reopenings and business aid are all on the line.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, criticized the Democrats for pressing ahead on their own. He said he had spoken to Biden ahead of his meeting with the 10 GOP senators.“They’ve chosen a totally partisan path,” McConnell said. “That’s unfortunate.”White House officials have previously cited the US Chamber of Commerce as evidence of broad support for their plan, but the nation’s most prominent business group issued a letter on Tuesday that urged a bipartisan compromise.“There ought to be common ground for a bipartisan proposal that can become law,” Neil Bradley, executive vice-president and chief policy officer, said in an interview.The cornerstone of the GOP plan is $160bn for the healthcare response and vaccine distribution, a “massive expansion” of testing, protective gear and funds for rural hospitals, similar to what Biden has proposed.But from there, the two plans drastically diverge. The vote on Tuesday opens 50 hours of debate on a budget resolution, with amendment votes expected later this week. More

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      in World Politics

      Good Bye, American Exceptionalism

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      Wednesday, January 20, 2021, was a bright day. The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States seemed to mark the end of the dysfunctional period of Donald Trump. The transition comes amid powerful calls to overcome the bitterness of polarized politics, appealing to the better angels of a battered national ego and levitating from Amanda Gorman’s pristine poetics. The relief that day provided may have ushered for a majority of Americans a perception that the country is coming back to its senses. Even that American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States, for whatever reason, is unique as a nation — is back on its feet. But is it really?

      Those like myself who grew up in Venezuela, a country where, in the second half of the 20th century, democracy had a great shot for some four decades until it fell into the arms of a populist lieutenant colonel, understand that the era of anger politics in America may not be over just yet. Historians who interpret these tumultuous times probably ponder whether American exceptionalism held true only until an earlier Wednesday, the ill-fated January 6, which witnessed the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. That fateful day, the light on the hill was dimmed. It might have been only for a short period, but it was enough. That light may be flickering again, but we all know that things will not be exactly back to normal, not like they used to be.

      Donald Trump: The Worst Kind of Populist

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      As exceptionalism faltered, it gave way to one of the most pernicious attempts at unmaking the great promise of American democracy: that it can improve itself around the ideals of justice, individual freedom, equality and the rule of law. But, more importantly, that power transitions always take place peacefully. It may have been Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the notion of America’s exceptionalism, but as the United States was winning the race to first world power, it acquired a more grounded sense. Due to its origin out of revolution, its civic religion of democracy, its strong individualism and its egalitarianism, the United States was spared the vagaries of socialism and class struggle that characterized other Western democracies.

      Until the first decade of the 21st century, the US was granted a stable political system where the rule of law reigns and federalism is the major institutional cement holding it all together. So what happened? Why was the latest political transfer of power not entirely peaceful?

      The Past Coming to Haunt Us

      As well as the notion of exceptionalism born in the 19th century, the responses may be also ingrained in the past. One is the racial stain that marked the making of the nation from its beginning. The US has come a long way in overcoming the racial atrocities of its past, their resolution first postponed and then frozen for decades under the Jim Crow status quo. The civil rights movement broke that status quo, allowing for a new beginning, one that remade the Americans’ perception of themselves, now made up of more diverse images.

      But as the movement faded in its strength, the normalcy of politics only made possible a slower overcoming of the realities of racial segregation. Be it the grim realities of urban America — where most blacks were concentrated in rundown inner cities while the suburbs provided the new image of the affluent and still dominant white majority — or the astonishing rate of imprisonment of African Americans, for decades social segregation seemed to carry the way. In the midst of these changes, white America still dominated the cultural scene and personified the nation, because yes, whites were still a majority census after census — until they ceased to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Strangely enough, it was the world of marketing and advertisement, with its capacity to capture the subtle changes in the composition of society, that started speaking a different language, talking to and about a growingly diverse society. The warning cry of this new reality and the perils it could involve for a nation born of a predominant Anglo tradition was provided by no less than Samuel Huntington. In his latest book, with a title that speaks loudly, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” Huntington contended that the America born from its early tradition was about to be lost because of the unstoppable migration trends, especially from Latin America, which created a new ethnic composition that menaced making the country another Brazil. In the last analysis, one could argue that Huntington was the intellectual voice of today’s white supremacists.

      The new realities of ethnic transition depicted by Huntington and experienced by ordinary Americans in their daily lives percolated to society at large, as a rumor. But when Barack Obama won the 2008 election, all hell broke loose. The deindustrialization of the Midwest, the cultural isolation of rural America and the financial crisis of 2007 were too strong a cocktail. The most powerful nation on earth began to show feet of clay. The main political phenomenon of those years was not the leadership of an African American head of state, which seemed logical in that it emerged from a diverse society. It was the Tea Party, the massive movement that repealed, if not in direct words then at least in its symbols and innuendo, the aggiornamento of American politics to its new social realities.

      Without admitting it openly, the Tea Party incarnated the revulsion of white America in facing a country that it interpreted as losing its heritage — exactly what Huntington had feared. No wonder why the birthers’ claim rang a loud bell for the part of America that Hillary Clinton mischaracterized as the “basket of deplorables.” In comes Trump with his “Bring Back White America” — the real subtext of “Make America Great Again” — and the rest is history.

      Trump, Polarization, Populism

      America may have been spared socialism in the 20th century — the real one, not the watered-down system Bernie Sanders chose to sell us — but it couldn’t avoid populism. The prominent French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that the 21st century is the century of populism. There may have been precedents in both in Europe and in the US, and especially in 20th-century Latin America, but the recent erosion of liberal democracy around the world has prompted the emergence of a new breed of populism. It translates into the political body as alternative expressions of the discontented masses around charismatic leaders who reject the status quo, who seek a direct connection with their followers (today mainly through social media) and who storm the world of politics with their rhetoric of hatred. The US has not only proved to be susceptible to this brand of populism, but has experienced it on a dramatic scale.

      Trump certainly surfed the waves created by the Tea Party, but his populist revolt was only made possible because of the advent of a second and more recent trend: polarization. Polarization, along with the outburst of political emotions, is the main instrument of populism, one that turns internal adversaries into irreconcilable enemies. While Hugo Chavez, and some of his followers in Latin America, led the people against the oligarchy, in the US, it came to be the people against the “deep state” or the Washington “swamp.”

      Ironically, the advent of this new brand of polarization in American politics may have been the result of the collapse of communism. As film-maker Ken Burns suggested in a recent interview, as communism was riding its way to the dustbin of history, America lost the common enemy uniting the country, the one that had strengthened its vision as an exceptional nation, the cradle of liberty and the dominant power of the 20th century. In a twist of history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the notion of the enemy in politics coined by Carl Schmitt, a political scientist of the Third Reich, came back to haunt us right when we thought the world was ready for an unhinged future of democracy and freedom.

      The “enemy” shifted from external to internal forces, pushing the US into a tumultuous political era. With the alleged 30,000 lies spilled over America in his four-year tenure and riding on the back of the Tea Party wave, Trump more than anyone has helped create the current divide between Republicans and Democrats. Anyone who watched the debate in the House around the second impeachment of Donald Trump certainly perceived not only the abyss between the parties but also the rancor, bringing into the Chamber of Representatives the nastiness and the delusion that transpired in the aftermath of the election.

      America will never fully restore its perception as an exceptional nation. It ought to claim a different status, that of a powerful survivor of the 21st-century populist wave. But of course, that is still something hanging in the air. Perhaps President Biden will be the best antidote to the populist pandemic corroding the world. I certainly hope he is.

      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

      Biden says inauguration 'one of the most consequential in a long, long time'

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      Joe Biden has described his swearing-in as president as “one of the most consequential inaugurations in a long, long time” in his first White House interview.The new president marked two weeks in office on Wednesday and speaking to People magazine, Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, discussed a range of topics, including their marriage, faith and the scale of the challenges he will face.His inauguration bore a rare weight, Biden said, “not because I was being sworn in, but in the sense of what the state of the nation is, between everything from Covid to unemployment to racial inequality.“We wanted to make sure that as many Americans could participate as possible, and it turns out millions of people watched it.”Biden has signed a series of executive orders since he came into office, increasing food-stamp benefits and halting new oil and gas leases on public lands. He has also put in place stricter coronavirus rules on people entering the US.“We have such an incredible opportunity as a country now. Not because of me but because the American people sort of had the blinders ripped off, and they realized that, man, we have problems, but we also have enormous opportunities,” Biden said.On Tuesday the new president also pledged to undo the “moral shame” of Donald Trump’s immigration polices, in what was probably a deliberate choice of words Biden, who is Catholic. In the People interview, Biden discussed how important his faith is in his daily life.“My religion, for me, is a safe place. I never miss mass, because I can be alone. I mean, I’m with my family but just kind of absorbing the fundamental principle that you’ve got to treat everyone with dignity,” Biden said.“Other people may meditate. For me, prayer gives me hope, and it centers me.”The Bidens also discussed the secrets to a stable marriage, with the president saying Jill Biden “has a backbone like a ramrod”.“Everybody says marriage is 50-50. Well, sometimes you have to be 70-30,” Biden said. “Thank God that when I’m really down, she steps in, and when she’s really down, I’m able to step in. We’ve been really supportive of one another.”Jill Biden, a college educator who will continue to teach during Biden’s presidency, told People that “after 43 years of marriage there’s really not that much more to fight about”.“All that we’ve been through together – the highs, the lows and certainly tragedy and loss – there’s that quote that says sometimes you become stronger in the fractured places,” Jill Biden said.“That’s what we try to achieve.” More

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      in World Politics

      A Woke Reading of a Politician’s Mittens

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      A high school teacher in California has earned her half-hour of fame by stepping up to expose an act of flagrant hypocrisy that took place in broad daylight during US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi was the first to notice the duplicity. After boldly raising the awareness of the students in her class, she captured the attention of the surrounding community when the San Francisco Chronicle published her op-ed.

      Seyer-Ochi exposed what the rest of the population failed to notice, even though the event had been broadcast to the nation. She acuity alone penetrated through the veneer to identify the shameful act perpetrated by a well-known politician. The foul deed occurred on Capitol Hill a mere two weeks after a rabid mob, whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump, notoriously occupied the Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives to protest a stolen election.

      What was the shameless deception her probing eyes had unveiled? Who was the guilty party? And how did this person get away with such a vile act?

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

      READ MORE

      The answer to those questions surprised most of the readers of her op-ed. Seyer-Ochi exposed a dangerous adept of the now well-known sin of privilege, not just of white but also male privilege. The guilty party was none other than Senator Bernie Sanders. The former presidential primary candidate, according to the teacher’s reading, had set up the scene to dupe the masses, gullible enough to fall for his brazen attempt to cultivate an image of the folksy elder of the traditional American family. 

      By covering his hands with the archaic symbol of hand-knitted woolen mittens in a homage to traditional craftsmanship (if not craftswomanship or perhaps craftspersonship), Sanders’ attire signified his identification with the dominant white, wealthy elite that has consistently stoked endemic racism for the past 400 years. Sanders was also guilty of dressing too casually and failing to respect the solemnity of the historical enthronement of the first female vice-president of black and South Asian descent.

      Yahoo editor David Knowles described this significant teaching moment in these terms: “Seyer-Ochi’s objection was to the “privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege.” The teacher “addressed the topic with her students, who she said were also upset by what they saw as the implicit message being delivered by Sanders’s choice of outerwear.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Outerware:

      The visible clothing people wear not to keep warm or protect them from the elements but to advertise which class or caste they belong to

      Contextual Note

      The new woke culture in the US, specializes in the art of canceling people who fail to live up to its real or quite as often imaginary standards. It relies on the ability of its practitioners to detect “implicit messages.” These woke academics believe (utterly mistakenly) that they are applying the insights of continental philosophers like Michel Foucault, or what is called “French Theory.” But woke theorists owe more to the great American puritanical tradition that, since the 17th century, has tasked its adepts with the office of exposing the moral failings of other members of the community.

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      One of the reasons Foucault and other French thinkers would never have approved of this application of theory is that the practice of délation (denunciation to the authorities) during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War is to this day vilified as one of the most heinous acts people can engage in. It was a behavior encouraged by the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime that encouraged good Frenchmen to denounce Jews and members of the Résistance.

      But beyond that, Foucault simply saw no interest in condemning individuals or ostracizing specific behaviors. His intellectual art consisted of teasing out relationships between different sets of ideas and cultural practices in particular societies and relating them to the institutions that constitute their power structure. Foucault described what amount to symbiotic relationships. To some extent, he admired their coherence, even when they manifested themselves in ways that were clearly at odds with his own personal values. Foucault, the radical, gay, atheistic questioner of Western institutions, for example, declared his deep sympathy for Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.

      Historical Note

      What is now commonly referred to as wokeness or even “wokeism” is a recent trend of academic behavior. It traditionally pledges allegiance to French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, but it unconsciously applies an approach opposite to theirs. Instead of teasing out subtle relationships, in the quest to understand how complex elements coexist and support one another within a society at a certain moment of its history, the wokeist methodology focuses on unearthing anecdotal evidence of isolated acts serving to expose what they deem to be a suspect power relationship. That is precisely what Ingrid Seyer-Ochi has done to impress her students and get an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

      Having absorbed the lessons of structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévy-Strauss), Foucault explored what he called “L’archéologie du savoir” (the archeology of knowledge), an approach that seeks to discover how cultures are constructed and the play of forces that hold them together. It seeks out phenomena that explain historical continuity and discontinuity. In the process, it may reveal sources of injustice, but its aim is to layer knowledge and understanding rather than exercise moral judgment. 

      This divergence of approach tells us something about how intellectual tools produced by one culture — in this case, French intellectuals — may be distorted by a different culture (US academics) that borrows them for a totally different purpose. In recent decades, woke analysts and activists have neglected the job of understanding complexity and increasingly focused on rooting out acts that they can demonize as instances of “cultural appropriation.” Woke critics take particular pleasure in playing the role of inquisitors whose powers of observation and careful detective work allow them to accuse an individual or a group of insensitively using for illicit purposes cultural attributes considered the inalienable property of another group of people. One typical outcome of this vital research is the engaging and deeply instructive practice of critiquing celebrities’ choice of Halloween costumes.

      If they had been infected by the same obsession with the injustice of cultural appropriation, the French theorists of the 20th century might have ended up accusing their woke followers in the English-speaking academic world precisely of that sin. They might equally have pointed out that the very idea of cultural appropriation can only exist in societies in which the notion of private property as the foundation of social life is considered axiomatic. Anthropologists and cultural historians have long understood that the elevation of private property to the status of a fundamental human right is a modern Western invention. It belongs to a specific time and place in human history.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This phenomenon helps to illustrate a fundamental difference between the cultures of Europe and North America. When Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung traveled to New York in 1909 to introduce psychoanalysis to Americans, Freud remarked to Jung, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.” 

      But it was Freud who failed to realize that the Americans, always ready to exploit someone else’s asset, found a highly productive use for Freud’s plague. Instead of undermining what Freud deemed the uncultivated superficiality of US culture, the Viennese doctor’s intellectual heritage led to the consolidation and accelerated development of the consumer society. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, played an important role in that operation. Instead of showing concern about the destructive impulses of their id, Americans ended up employing Freud’s insights productively, by harnessing the dark energy of the unconscious for profit. Freud’s plague produced both Madison Avenue and the atomic bomb.

      Freud saw his mission as one of unveiling the disturbing truth about how our minds work: how the unconscious betrays our conscious intentions. Appropriated by Americans, Freud’s doctrines were used not to illuminate people’s understanding of how their minds work, but to orientate them toward types of behavior useful to the propertied elite and the barons of industry. The age of propaganda was already underway. Propaganda became the foundation of the hyperreality in which people have now accepted to be enclosed.

      Postscript: A practitioner of theory should have noticed a likely correlation between Seyer-Ochi’s attack on Bernie Sanders and the establishment Democrats’ permanent campaign to brand the senator a male supremacist because he dared to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

      *[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

      Democracy or the white supremacist mob: which side is the Republican party on? | Richard Wolffe

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      In 2001, nine days after terrorists attacked the United States and its federal government, a Republican president stood before Congress with the overwhelming support of a terrified nation, as he presented a stark choice to the world.“Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” said George W Bush to loud applause in September 2001. “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”Thus was born the post-9/11 era, which survived for the best part of two decades, costing trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, and realigning American diplomacy and politics in stark terms.Republicans fought and won two elections on the basis that they were strong and unequivocal in defending the nation, while Democrats were weak flip-floppers who tried to have it both ways.Today Washington is staring at something like a new dawn – the start of the post-Trump era – and Republicans don’t know which side of the war they’re on. Are they with the United States or with the insurrectionists?The early answers are catastrophically weak in a world where the threats are not distant or abstract. This is not a risk posed to American officials halfway around the world, or a potential threat that might one day materialize in a foreign capital.This is a clear and present danger for the very members of Congress who must now decide between protecting their own careers or protecting the lives of the people working down the hall. With the second impeachment trial of Donald J Trump starting next week, there’s no escaping the moment of decision for at least 50 Republican senators: are you with the United States or not?In every single other working environment, this would not be a hard choice. Given the chance to save your own job or save the lives of your co-workers – even the ones you dislike – the vast majority of decent people would save lives.Just listen to the first-hand accounts of representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter. Ocasio-Cortez gave a chilling account of hiding in her office bathroom to save her life as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol last month.It is long past time to admit the blindingly obvious: the Republican party has been hijacked by fascist extremistsThere’s no question that she, like many others, feared for her life. Porter recalled her friend desperately seeking refuge in her office. She gave Ocasio-Cortez a pair of sneakers in case they needed to run for their lives.The mortal threat was not confined to high-profile Democrats. Mike Pence, the most toady of Trump loyalists, was hiding from the mob with his family, while terrorists chanted about hanging him. If anyone needed confirmation of their murderous intent, there was a makeshift gallows outside the Capitol.It is long past time to admit the blindingly obvious: the Republican party has been hijacked by fascist extremists. It is now a far-right organization in league with neo-Nazis who have made it painfully clear they want to overthrow democracy and seize power, using violence if necessary.Every decision the so-called leaders make at this point defines which side they are on: the United States as we know it, or the white supremacist mob.In these few weeks since the mob trashed the Capitol, leading to five deaths, Republican leaders have bathed themselves less in glory than in the sewage of fascism. Given a choice between the conservative Liz Cheney and the fascist Marjorie Taylor Greene, House Republicans have shunned the former and hugged the latter.It’s Cheney whose position as part of the Republican leadership is under threat, while Greene is only coming under pressure from Democrats – who for some reason find themselves alone in feeling horrified by Greene’s advocacy for the execution of Democrats and white supremacy in general.Republican leaders now find themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma of their own making. Both Mitch McConnell in the US Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives could escape the worst public punishment if they act together to take back their own party. Instead, they are ratting on each other.McConnell said in a statement on Monday that Greene posed an existential threat to the party. “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican party and our country,” he said, while also supporting Cheney’s leadership.Technically this is McCarthy’s mess to clean up, in the House rather than the Senate. But McCarthy can’t bring himself to say something in public about the QAnon cultist Greene, or what she represents.Instead he traveled to Florida at the weekend to kiss the ring of the man who really stands at the center of this threat to our democracy: one Donald J Trump, who is supposedly a Greene fan, according to Greene herself.There may be rational short-term reasons why McConnell and McCarthy have parted ways on this fascist thing.McConnell just lost control of the Senate because it’s challenging to win statewide contests – even in conservative places like Georgia – when you’re trying to overthrow democracy at the same time. McCarthy, meanwhile, deludes himself that he can get closer to power because House districts are so gerrymandered that Republicans are only threatened by the cannibalizing power of the mob.But in reality, there is no choice. This isn’t about loony lies or conspiracy theories, as McConnell suggests. It’s not about Republican primaries or Trump’s disapproval, as McCarthy fears.The choice in front of Republicans is whether they support democracy or not; whether they want to live and work in fear of the mob, or not. QAnon may be loony but its goals are to murder elected officials, and its supporters include heavily armed insurrectionists. The 1930s fascists were also unhinged and proved themselves deadly serious about mass murder.Next week Republicans in Washington have one more chance to turn their backs on fascism. They could reject the laughable claims from Trump’s lawyers that he was merely exercising his free speech rights by telling his mob to march on Congress and fight like hell. Apparently such conduct does not constitute incitement to riot, because the word “incitement” has lost all relationship to reality.Nobody expects Republican senators to vote in enough numbers to convict Trump of the obvious charges that played out on television. Nobody expects enough of them to reject the violent overthrow of the democracy that put them in the Senate.They represent, to use Bush’s language, a hostile regime inside the nation’s capital. Until Republicans split with the insurrectionists – by ejecting them from their party or forming their own – democracy itself is unsafe. More

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      in World Politics

      The Brexit Deal Presents Opportunities for a New Partnership

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      It was agreed almost at the last minute: The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the European Union and the United Kingdom, signed on December 30, 2020, prevented a no-deal Brexit just one day before the end of the transition period. Four and a half years after the referendum, relations between the EU and its former member state have thus been put on a new footing. It is a considerable achievement of the negotiators on both sides that such a complex agreement was reached despite the adverse conditions.

      Yet the end result, due to the British quest for sovereignty, is a (very) hard Brexit. Although the movement of goods will continue with zero tariffs and zero quantitative restrictions, many new non-tariff trade barriers will arise when compared to single market membership. Services, including finance, are largely excluded from the treaty, and with very few exceptions, the British are leaving European projects such as Erasmus. London has also excluded foreign and security policy altogether from the institutional cooperation with the EU.

      Brexit Trade Deal Brings Temporary, If Not Lasting, Relief

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      Despite the restricted market access, the EU can claim to have achieved the inclusion of comprehensive instruments to ensure fair competition, a level playing field. This includes the possibility of reintroducing tariffs and other trade restrictions should there be a significant divergence in labor or environmental standards in the future. Both sides have achieved their remarkably defensive goals: Boris Johnson gets his hard Brexit, and the EU was able to defend its single market and its standards.

      To Be Built Upon

      The original idea of an “ambitious and deep partnership” between the EU and the UK, however, has fallen by the wayside. In the first few weeks of 2021, the EU and the UK have already squabbled over vaccines and the status of the EU ambassador in London. Nevertheless, if used wisely, the agreement could represent the low point in British-European relations, from which a new partnership emerges after the difficult Brexit negotiations. However, there are five reasons the TCA could enable an improvement in relations.

      First, the trade deal does not mark the end of negotiations between London and Brussels. The agreement itself provides for a review after five years — that is, just under six months after the likely date of the next UK general election — in the course of which relations can also be deepened again. There is also a review clause for the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2024, transition periods for energy cooperation and fisheries, and further talks on data exchange and financial market services in 2021. Similar to Switzerland, there will be almost constant negotiations between the EU and the UK, albeit at a less politically dramatic level than recently. It is precisely this de-dramatization of relations that offers an opportunity to restore trust and improve cooperation.

      Second, the agreement is designed to be built upon. It establishes institutionalized cooperation between London and Brussels with an EU-UK Partnership Council and a number of specialized committees, for example on trade in goods, energy cooperation and British participation in EU programs. It is explicitly designed as an umbrella agreement into whose overall institutional framework further supplementary agreements can be inserted.

      Continued Interdependence

      Third, economic relations will remain important for both sides despite new trade restrictions. The geographical proximity, the close integration of supply and production chains in many economic sectors, and the mutual importance in trade will ensure continued economic interdependence. The EU remains by far the largest export market for the UK, which, in turn, as the second biggest economy in Europe, will also continue to be a major economic partner (and competitor) for the union. Added to this are the level playing field provisions of the TCA, with both partners committing to maintaining existing EU standards as far as they affect trade and investments, and incentives have been created to keep pace with new standards.

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      Fourth, the willingness of both sides to make compromises to avoid a no-deal Brexit paradoxically also clearly revealed the common interests despite the difficult divorce. For example, the TCA declares climate policy to be a shared interest, in which the UK will play a central role in 2021 by hosting the next climate summit together with Italy. Opportunities will also present themselves here for trilateral cooperation with the new US administration. The continued participation of the British in a small number of EU programs, such as the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation program and parts of the data exchange in home affairs and justice policy, is also stronger than expected.

      Fifth, with the combination of the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, Northern Ireland has become a shared responsibility of the UK and the EU. In order to keep the border open with the EU member state of the Republic of Ireland, the rules of the EU single market will continue to apply in Northern Ireland, whereas a trade border has been created in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Any deviation from EU standards will now require the UK government to weigh not only whether this breaks the level playing field rules — thus allowing the EU to erect trade barriers — but also whether new intra-UK trade barriers with Northern Ireland are created.

      The EU equally has a responsibility in the interests of its member state Ireland to work with the British government to ensure that these complex arrangements work as smoothly as possible so as not to jeopardize peace in Northern Ireland.

      The trade treaty, which came into being under great pressure, both temporal and political, thus achieves one thing above all — the creation of a foundation on which British-European relationship can be reconstructed. Hard Brexit is now a fact, and the step from EU membership to a third country with a trade agreement has been completed. But negotiations are from over: As neighbors, the EU and the UK will continue to negotiate and renegotiate their relationship in the foreseeable future. It is now up to the political leadership on both sides to determine how this foundation is used. The EU and Germany should be open to building on this foundation with options for deepening cooperation in areas where there were gaps left behind by the TCA due to time or political circumstances.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

      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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      What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing future of AI | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Want to see a half-naked woman? Well, you’re in luck! The internet is full of pictures of scantily clad women. There are so many of these pictures online, in fact, that artificial intelligence (AI) now seems to assume that women just don’t like wearing clothes.That is my stripped-down summary of the results of a new research study on image-generation algorithms anyway. Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)Why was the algorithm so fond of bikini pics? Well, because garbage in means garbage out: the AI “learned” what a typical woman looked like by consuming an online dataset which contained lots of pictures of half-naked women. The study is yet another reminder that AI often comes with baked-in biases. And this is not an academic issue: as algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives, it is a problem with devastating real-world consequences. Back in 2015, for example, Amazon discovered that the secret AI recruiting tool it was using treated any mention of the word “women’s” as a red flag. Racist facial recognition algorithms have also led to black people being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. And, last year, an algorithm used to determine students’ A-level and GCSE grades in England seemed to disproportionately downgrade disadvantaged students.As for those image-generation algorithms that reckon women belong in bikinis? They are used in everything from digital job interview platforms to photograph editing. And they are also used to create huge amounts of deepfake porn. A computer-generated AOC in a bikini is just the tip of the iceberg: unless we start talking about algorithmic bias, the internet is going to become an unbearable place to be a woman. More

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      'A moral and national shame': Biden to launch taskforce to reunite families separated at border

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      Joe Biden plans to create a taskforce to reunify families separated at the US-Mexico border by the Trump administration, as part of a new series of immigration executive actions signed at an Oval Office ceremony on Tuesday.Biden condemned Donald Trump’s immigration policies as a “stain on the reputation” of the US.The president pledged to “undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration that literally, not figuratively, ripped children from the arms of their families, their mothers, and fathers, at the border, and with no plan – none whatsoever – to reunify”.The two other orders announced on Tuesday call for a review of the changes the Trump administration made to reshape US immigration, and for programs to address the forces driving people north.A briefing document released before the president’s executive orders said Biden’s immigration plans were “centered on the basic premise that our country is safer, stronger, and more prosperous with a fair, safe and orderly immigration system that welcomes immigrants, keeps families together, and allows people – both newly arrived immigrants and people who have lived here for generations – to more fully contribute to our country”.A central piece of the Tuesday actions is the family reunification taskforce, charged with identifying and enabling the reunification of all children separated from their families by the Trump administration.The government first made the separations public with an April 2018 memo, but about a thousand families had been separated in secret in the months prior. Administration officials said children in both groups would be included in the reunification process.Biden officials said they could not say how many children had to be reunified because the policy had been implemented without a method for tracking the separated families. In an ongoing court case, a reunification committee said in December that the parents of 628 children had not been located.The taskforce will consist of government officials and be led by Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the US Senate earlier on Tuesday.A senior administration official said the family separation policy was a “moral failure and national shame” and that reversing the policies that made it possible was a priority.The second action on Tuesday is intended to address the driving forces of migration from Central and South America. Senior administration officials said this included working with governments and not-for-profit groups to increase other countries’ capacities to host migrants and ensuring Central American refugees and asylum seekers have legal pathways to enter the US.It also directs the homeland security secretary to review the migrant protection protocols (MPP), better known as Remain in Mexico, which require asylum seekers to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns instead of in the US, as before.The Biden administration also plans to use this action to bring back some Obama-era policies, such as the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which allowed some minors to apply for refugee status from their home countries.The Trump administration made more than 400 changes to reshape immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and Biden’s third action includes a review of some of these recent efforts to restrict legal immigration.This includes a review of the public charge rule, which the Trump administration expanded to allow the federal government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants if they used public benefits. Though the rule was suspended repeatedly because of lawsuits, its initial introduction created a chilling effect in immigrant communities, with families disenrolling from aid programs out of concerns about its effect on their immigration status.Administration officials said changes to US immigration would not happen “overnight” and that there would be more executive orders.Advocates are still waiting for policies that address immigration detention and Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bar on asylum seekers and refugees during the Covid-19 outbreak. An estimated 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children were deported under the order before it was temporarily blocked by a court in November.On Biden’s first day in office, he signed six executive actions on immigration, including to rescind the travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and halt funding for constructing the border wall. He also rolled back Trump’s policy that eliminated deportation priorities.Since taking office, Biden has also introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill to Congress, put a 100-day moratorium on deportations – which has since been blocked in federal court – and rescinded the “zero tolerance” policy that allowed for family separations.On Monday, the Biden administration asked the US supreme court to cancel oral arguments in two forthcoming cases filed by Trump about the border wall and Remain in Mexico. The cases could effectively be moot because of Biden’s actions. More