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      in US Politics

      Jamie Raskin: grieving congressman leads push to impeach Trump

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      For Jamie Raskin, the Democratic congressman and constitutional law professor who is leading the push to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, the last fortnight has been tumultuous.He lost his son 25-year-old son, Tommy, who had struggled with depression, on New Year’s Eve.Seeing it as his duty, Raskin attended last week’s certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory in Congress with members of his family, from whom he was separated as a mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol building.Despite these profound emotional shocks, Raskin has spent the last week drafting the article of impeachment against Trump over his role in inciting the storming of Congress, which is likely to be voted on by the House of Representatives later on Wednesday.The day before the storming of the Capitol, Raskin had buried his son, who died after leaving his family a note. “Please forgive me,” he had written. “My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”As he stood to speak in the debate on the certification less than 24 hours later, Raskin – who had pinned a piece of black cloth to his lapel – received a standing ovation from fellow members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, who were aware of his recent loss and that he had still come to vote.Not long afterwards, the Trumpist mob broke in.Since then, Raskin has authored the House resolution that called on the vice-president, Mike Pence, to invoke the 25th amendment and declare Trump unable to complete his term, which expires next week. Pence ruled out doing that Tuesday night.The chamber quickly moved to the article of impeachment, which Raskin also helped draft. He has been clear about why he has needed to push through the difficult emotions he and his family have been confronting to hold Trump to account.“The president is a lethal danger to the American republic and the American people,” Raskin told the Atlantic magazine last week as he began drawing up the article of impeachment. “There has been nothing like this since the civil war.”And as Raskin told the Washington Post, he felt his son’s presence throughout the recent events. “I felt him in my heart and in my chest,” he said. “All the way through the counting of the electoral college votes and through the nightmare of the armed attack on the Capitol.”His son, a law student, as Raskin explained to the paper, had once asked him a question that had focused his mind.For a class about the first amendment issue of freedom of speech, Tommy Raskin had asked his father about “incitement to imminent lawless action”, and whether a government official who had sworn an oath to uphold the constitution should be held to a higher standard.“That ironically is going to be the critical issue for us talking about Donald Trump,” said Raskin. “Some people are saying: ‘Well, Donald Trump was just exercising his free speech.’ As president of the United States, he cannot be encouraging, counselling and inciting mobs that go and attack the Capitol of the United States.”Raskin is clear about what the US is confronting in the aftermath of the assault on Congress.“The president didn’t want to let go, and the fruit of his obsession with his big lie that he had actually won the election was this nightmarish assault on Congress,” Raskin said. “The president has become a clear and present danger to the republic.”“That is the groundwork for fascism, when you add racism, antisemitism, conspiracy theory and magical thinking. That is an absolute powder keg in terms of an assault on democracy,” Raskin said of the riot in an interview. “So we have to be very tough, and very strong right now in defending the constitution and democracy.”During the storming of Congress, Raskin’s thoughts were mostly on his 23-year-old daughter, Tabitha, and his son-in-law, who had accompanied him to the Capitol and were separated in the mayhem.When they were eventually reunited, Raskin assured his daughter that the next time she went to the Capitol, it would be calmer. “Dad, I don’t think there’s gonna be a next time,” she replied.Associated Press contributed to this reportIn the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. More

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      in US Politics

      'Sedition and conspiracy': prosecutors cite wide-ranging crimes in Capitol attack – video

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      The acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, has indicated that many amid the hundreds of pro-Trump rioters who violently invaded the US Capitol last Wednesday are suspected of a range of crimes including felony murder, sedition and conspiracy.
      At a press conference in Washington, prosecutors said there are at least 160 federal criminal cases open and they are ready to track down individuals across the country and apprehend them wherever possible – potentially arresting hundreds if not thousands of people.
      ‘The range of criminal conduct was unmatched,’ Sherwin said. He warned rioters: ‘You will be charged and you will be found’ More

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      in US Politics

      Congress briefed on fresh security threats ahead of Biden inauguration

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      Members of Congress have been warned that there remain serious threats against their security on inauguration day when they plan to gather in Washington to usher Joe Biden into office as the 46th US president on 20 January.Details of the further threats came amid word that an FBI office in Virginia had reportedly issued an internal warning a day before the deadly riot at the Capitol last week that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington and commit “war”.Democratic congressman Conor Lamb, one of several politicians given a law enforcement briefing on Monday evening relating to security concerns, said that the threats the government is receiving are “very specific”.One domestic terrorist plot uncovered ahead of next week’s inauguration involved thousands of people surrounding the US Capitol building.“They were talking about 4,000 armed ‘patriots’ to surround the Capitol and prevent any Democrat from going in,” Lamb, of Pennsylvania, told CNN earlier on Tuesday.He said they were painting themselves as patriots on a mission to reclaim the country as if they were overthrowing the British colonial power in the American revolution prior to the United States declaring independence in 1776.“They have published ‘rules of engagement’, meaning when you shoot and when you don’t. So this is an organized group that has a plan. They are committed to doing what they’re doing because I think in their minds, you know, they are patriots and they’re talking about 1776 and so this is now a contest of wills,” Lamb said.He said that law enforcement departments in and near Washington were taking the threats seriously and planning for them.Meanwhile Ro Khanna, Democratic congressman of California, told CNN that some Republican members of Congress as well as Democrats have received death threats.And Lamb added, “We are not negotiating with or reasoning with these people. They have to be prosecuted. They have to be stopped. And unfortunately, that includes the president, which is why he needs to be impeached and removed from office.”The House of Representatives will on Wednesday debate the impeachment article introduced against Donald Trump on Monday and are expected to vote to impeach the president for an unprecedented second time.Washington mayor Muriel Bowser, told ABC on Tuesday the pro-Trump mob that invaded the US Capitol last week seeking forcefully to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory are “white supremacist rioters”. More

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      The Guardian view on democracy in America: the threat is real | Editorial

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      The inauguration of Joe Biden as US president on 20 January has become a touchstone moment in the history of American democracy. Following the outrage of last week’s storming of Congress by Donald Trump supporters, at least 10,000 members of the national guard will be deployed in Washington by this weekend. Reports have detailed FBI warnings of possible armed protests in the capital and across the United States in the days ahead. The area around the Washington Monument, close to where Mr Trump urged supporters to “fight” for his right to stay in office, has been closed to the public. The mood is fearful, febrile and somewhat surreal. In the words of one newspaper headline: “Is this America?”Since the foundation of the federal republic, the peaceful transition of power has been fundamental to America’s understanding of itself. In US democracy’s choreography, the presidential inauguration is designed as a moment of civic celebration that transcends partisan differences. That Mr Trump chose to mobilise an insurgency against the handover gives the measure of his narcissism, hubris and deranged will to power. Last week’s riot was not a one-off piece of performance theatre that got out of hand. The pitch for an assault on democracy had been rolled for months. In the autumn, speaking more like a mobster than a president, Mr Trump told the neo-fascist Proud Boys movement to “stand by”, and warned that the Democratic party would try to “steal” the election. Last week’s violent mayhem, which led to five deaths, was the culmination of a strategy to intimidate and discredit the democratic institutions of the country he leads.Democrat members of the House of Representatives are therefore right to launch impeachment proceedings for a second time against a rogue president. As the charge sheet states, Mr Trump incited “violence against the government of the United States”. Assuming Wednesday’s vote to impeach is passed in the Democrat-controlled House, the next stage will take place in the Senate, currently in recess until after Mr Biden’s inauguration. A two-thirds supermajority would be required to convict, but it seems improbable that a sufficient number of Republicans will do the right thing. Another shaming moment looms for a party that has abased itself at Mr Trump’s feet in the pursuit of power and lost its soul in the process.But even if legal process were to deliver Mr Trump his just deserts, the crisis of America’s growing polarisation – of which the president is a symptom as well as a cause – would remain. Tribalism has become a disabling virus in the US body politic, cracking the public square in two. Social media, belatedly under new scrutiny, is used by citizens to sustain alternate, conflicting realities: three in four Republican voters continue to believe that there was widespread voter fraud in November, despite the rulings of close to 100 judges to the contrary. As faith in the neutrality of public institutions declines, studies have shown a disturbing rise in the number of Americans – on both left and right – who believe that political violence is sometimes justified.Against this dismal backdrop, the theme of Mr Biden’s inauguration speech will be “America united”. It seems likely that it will be delivered in the shadow of impeachment proceedings against his predecessor, and a mass military presence. This is a script that should belong to a bingeworthy drama on Netflix during lockdown. Instead, it is America’s dystopian reality. The new president’s healing message will be the right one. Making it heard will be the defining challenge of his long political career. More

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      Trump's British cheerleaders are rushing to denounce him. It's too little, too late | Owen Jones

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      As smoke billowed out of the Capitol, some of Donald Trump’s US apologists – the appeasers, the opportunistic cheerleaders, even some true believers – suddenly discovered consciences. In Britain, rightwing commentators had even less reason to embrace the man who remains US president: domestic support for him here has always been negligible. Cheerleading for Trump in Britain has always been a conscious choice, and it is all the more striking because it comes without the excuse of external pressure or cynical self-interest: indeed, it carries the price of damaging the cheerleaders’ credibility even among many Conservative voters.Those who made that choice in Britain are now attempting to walk away whistling from the crime scene, but apologism for the figurehead of the international far right – including the self-confessed Nazis who stormed the US legislature – should come with accountability. Fraser Nelson is editor of the Spectator, which presents itself as a respectable centre-right publication – its summer party is attended by senior Tory and Labour figures and BBC journalists alike – even as it publishes columns bemoaning there is “not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party”.Last week, Nelson joined the ranks of British conservatives abandoning their fallen hero, writing a column entitled “Trump’s final act was a betrayal of the people who voted for him” – itself a questionable claim, given one YouGov poll showed more Republican voters backed the storming of the Capitol than opposed it. It stands in stark contrast to another of his columns from three years ago, headlined “A new, more reasonable Donald Trump presidency might just be on the way”, endorsing suggestions the president would “gravitate to the middle”.The Spectator is chaired by former flagship BBC interviewer Andrew Neil, who can now be found beating his chest and declaring: “There is one name responsible for what is happening on Capitol Hill tonight and that name is TRUMP.” And yet no British publication gave such generous space to Trump and Trumpism as the Spectator, publishing articles with headlines such as “The intelligent case for voting Trump” and “Trump will be much, much better for Britain”, or crowing “Donald Trump’s victory marks the death of liberalism”. There is a broad consensus that what paved the way for Wednesday’s insurrection in Washington DC was the deliberate (and baseless) delegitimising of the presidential election, and in November, the Spectator was publishing articles such as “Trump is right not to concede” and “Can you really blame Trump for refusing to accept the election result?”The U-turns are suddenly coming thick and fast. Former Tory MEP Daniel Hannan often positions himself as a genteel rightwing Brexiteer: polite, well-read, thoughtful, eschewing demagoguery. This weekend, he did not hold back, penning a fiery polemic entitled: “Donald Trump is guilty of treason: political violence in a democracy is never justifiable”. Let’s reflect, then, on another of his pieces, written less than four months ago, headlined: “Trump’s flaws are many, but he’d be better for Britain than Biden”. Hannan also repeated the phoney narrative that it was a uniquely violent left who were the real threat. “God knows I’m no fan of Trump,” he tweeted the day before the election, “but is it really disgruntled Republicans that people are boarding up their shops against?”Hannan has been joined by Douglas Murray, one of the most successful rightwing authors of our age, who once demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”, denounced Muslims as a “demographic timebomb” and suggested London had become a foreign country because in 23 out of its 33 boroughs, “‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”. Murray, too, pointed to the boarding up of Washington DC as Americans voted. “Doubtless Democrats will blame Republicans and lazy media will blame all sides,” he solemnly predicted, “but this town is not bracing for disgruntled Trump-ists to smash it up.” In a Telegraph column in August headlined “It’s in the UK’s national interest for Trump to triumph”, Murray accepted the president had flaws – among which he included boastfulness and “devotion to exaggeration”, but, oddly, not Islamophobia, racism or describing neo-Nazis as “very fine people”. Casually discarding the man he lauded, Murray now gravely intones: “Only Trump is to blame for the Capitol chaos”.For so long, Trump’s opponents have been accused of hysteria, of exaggeration, even of “Trump derangement syndrome”. But when we organised mass protests against him, we did so because we recognised Trump represented a serious incipient fascist threat. For British rightwingers who denied or downplayed that threat, it was always clear that while they might regard him as vulgar – or felt polite society compelled them to say so – they had rather a lot of sympathy for his political platform. With Trump finally going, Trumpism will not suddenly vanish, across the Atlantic: but as these receipts show, nor will it do so here. More

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      in World Politics

      In China’s Net City, Opportunity Comes at Uncertain Costs

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      The one thing the city of Shenzhen — whose nearly 13 million people comprise the industrial engine of China’s Guangdong province — seems unwilling to reimagine is its name. The name Shenzhen, which loosely translates to “irrigation ditch” or “drainage dump,” is the only piece of the city’s incredible story that remains stuck in the past.

      Beginning in 2020, Shenzhen, in partnership with Chinese tech behemoth Tencent and NBBJ Architects, embarked on the design of a coastal, sustainable, state-of-the-art neighborhood called Net City to serve as the exclamation point capping Shenzhen’s status as China’s Silicon Valley. And yet, upon its completion in 2027, Net City, like Shenzhen itself, will represent far more than just another technology company’s tricked-out corporate campus. In fact, Net City might just set the global standard for urban development in the 21st century. That is if it can navigate the perilous waters that have sunk so many similarly intentioned projects in the past.

      Policies, Principles, People

      Green, tech-infused infrastructure is no longer groundbreaking in and of itself, but neither is the desire of major global firms to directly fund urban investment as a business strategy. Examples of this often quixotic foray range from Google’s disappointing but understandable discontinuation of investments in a Toronto smart city project to Fordlandia, Ford Motor Company’s failed Amazonian utopia chronicled brilliantly in Greg Grandin’s 2009 award-winning book. For both the Googles of today and those of generations past, it appears that products remain significantly easier to manufacture than physical places.

      Any local economic development professional, or for that matter anyone who has tried to renovate a kitchen, will tell you that construction projects, no matter their scale, are marked by an eternal struggle between the perfect and the possible. What, then, can set Tencent’s Net City apart from these previous failures? To borrow the time-honored language of geopolitical analysis, the potential answers come in three “buckets”: policies, principles and people.

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      On the policy front, the analysis must begin with the fact that there exists no better example of the opening of markets, however gradually and cautiously, as an accelerant for innovation, growth and prosperity than Shenzhen. It is stunning how much economic dynamism has been unleashed in this former fishing village over the past few decades, and the same innovation-spurring economic policy framework that enabled the city’s rise will similarly nurture the growth and ongoing vitality of the Net City project as it matures.

      That said, Shenzhen is not the only part of China that has grown. And, in immediate relevance to Net City, it would not be the only place where China has invested untold billions only to end up with what are commonly referred to now as ghost cities. A Net City skeptic might point to both the ambiguous nature of the true costs of this ambitious urban development and those still unoccupied, debt-funded townscapes littering China’s interior still awaiting their first residents as the fodder for their wariness.

      Product and Place

      Skeptics are also right to cite the lingering uncertainty of COVID-19 and fissures with nearby Hong Kong as risks to the sizable foreign direct investment Shenzhen has enjoyed throughout its rise. While the Chinese government and Tencent have every incentive to ensure the successful development of Net City, even these giants are not immune to the conditions of the world economy and thus should double down on the (relatively) open policy frameworks and diversified, reliable financing strategies that have thus far enabled Shenzhen’s rise.

      Next, as it relates to the principles upon which Net City has unapologetically been founded, its focused, intentional blending of work and leisure with the natural world place sustainability at its core in a manner and at a scale no previous corporate community can claim. Limitations on cars in favor of pedestrian-friendly walkable spaces coupled with reliance on renewable energy sources will provide a rising China with beautiful, tangible evidence that it, too, is taking steps to combat climate change and to shape the next century of life on this planet in ways the rest of the world might cheer.

      These commitments to sustainability, while encouraging, cannot only be for show. Net City provides China with an opportunity to demonstrate not only its desire to lead the world as a center of innovation, but as an upholder of the shared values and responsibilities that come with the terra firma for any global power.

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      Lastly, as it relates to the people who will someday call this new neighborhood home, it is possible that no single neighborhood in the world has ever rooted itself so enthusiastically in the philosophy of user-centered design as Net City. The blurring of lines between work and play to come upon its completion will pale in comparison to the implications of Net City’s more meta-level, but no less intentional, blurring of product and place. But just as fatefully as the designers of Fordlandia discovered that places are not products, so too must Net City’s master planners remember that people are not products either.

      Net City’s development has begun at a moment when the familiar dueling concepts of work and life have also merged into one amorphous, quarantine soup of time and space. While billions around the world cannot wait to return to certain elements of pre-COVID work-life balance, a more realistic forecaster will admit that work and life have become intertwined in ways that have transformed experiences on both fronts and will not soon be undone.

      This march may appear inevitable, but it remains an open question how much further people will willingly participate in the elimination of boundaries between home and work, of private and public spaces and of restrictions instead of rights. Whether discussing a new piece of technology or a new smart city, the tired bargain between new features and old freedoms is a false one. Smart cities need not — and should not — dangle the possibility of positive environmental outcomes behind the acceptance of stricter, tech-fueled surveillance states.

      The ongoing development of this initiative will fascinate global analysts for the majority of the next decade that stands to reveal the level of commitment its designers have to the lofty promises they have made at its outset. But beneath all that potential and possibility Net City might also reveal the answer to a deeper question: Is the internet a place we want to live?

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Young Professionals in Foreign 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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      in US Politics

      Is Donald Trump an aberration or a symptom of a deeper US malady?

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      The assault on the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, incited by the president himself, was the predictable outcome of his four-year-long assault on democratic institutions, aided and abetted by so many in the Republican party. And no one can say that Trump had not warned us: he was not committed to a peaceful transition of power.
      Many who benefited as he slashed taxes for corporations and the rich, rolled back environmental regulations and appointed business-friendly judges knew they were making a pact with the devil. Either they believed they could control the extremist forces he unleashed, or they didn’t care.
      Where does America go from here? Is Trump an aberration, or a symptom of a deeper national malady? Can the US be trusted? In four years, will the forces that gave rise to Trump, and the party that overwhelmingly supported him, triumph again? What can be done to prevent that outcome?
      Trump is the product of multiple forces. For at least a quarter century, the Republican party has understood that it could represent the interests of business elites only by embracing anti-democratic measures (including voter suppression and gerrymandering) and allies, including the religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and nationalist populists.
      Of course, populism implied policies that were antithetical to business elites. But many business leaders spent decades mastering the ability to deceive the public. Big Tobacco spent lavishly on lawyers and bogus science to deny their products’ adverse health effects. Big Oil did likewise to deny fossil fuels’ contribution to the climate crisis. They recognised that Trump was one of their own.
      Then, advances in technology provided a tool for rapid dissemination of dis/misinformation and America’s political system, where money reigns supreme, allowed the emerging tech companies freedom from accountability. This political system did one other thing: it generated a set of policies (sometimes referred to as neoliberalism) that delivered massive income and wealth gains to those at the top, but near-stagnation everywhere elsewhere. Soon, a country on the cutting edge of scientific progress was marked by declining life expectancy and increasing health disparities.
      The neoliberal promise that wealth and income gains would trickle down to those at the bottom was fundamentally spurious. As massive structural changes deindustrialised large parts of the country, those left behind were left to fend largely for themselves. As I warned in my books The Price of Inequality and People, Power and Profits, this toxic mix provided an inviting opportunity for a would-be demagogue.
      As we have repeatedly seen, Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit, combined with an absence of moral constraints, provides an ample supply of charlatans, exploiters and would-be demagogues. Trump, a mendacious, narcissistic sociopath, with no understanding of economics or appreciation of democracy, was the man of the moment.
      The immediate task is to remove the threat Trump still poses. The House of Representatives should impeach him now, and the Senate should try him some time later, to bar him from holding federal office again. It should be in the interest of the Republicans, no less than the Democrats, to show that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Everyone must understand the imperative of honouring elections and ensuring the peaceful transition of power.
      But we should not sleep comfortably until the underlying problems are addressed. Many involve great challenges. We must reconcile freedom of expression with accountability for the enormous harm that social media can and has caused, from inciting violence and promoting racial and religious hatred to political manipulation.
      The US and other countries have long imposed restrictions on other forms of expression to reflect broader societal concerns: one may not shout fire in a crowded theater, engage in child abuse images or commit slander and libel. True, some authoritarian regimes abuse these constraints and compromise basic freedoms but authoritarian regimes will always find justifications for doing what they will, regardless of what democratic governments do.
      We Americans must reform our political system, both to ensure the basic right to vote and democratic representation. We need a new voting rights act. The old one, adopted in 1965, was aimed at the South, where disenfranchisement of African-Americans had enabled white elites to remain in power since the end of Reconstruction following the civil war. But now anti-democratic practices are found throughout the country.
      We also need to decrease the influence of money in our politics: no system of checks and balances can be effective in a society with as much inequality as the US. And any system based on “one dollar, one vote” rather than “one person, one vote” will be vulnerable to populist demagogy. After all, how can such a system serve the interests of the country as a whole?
      [embedded content]
      Finally, we must address the multiple dimensions of inequality. The striking difference between the treatment of the white insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol and the peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters this summer once again showed to those around the world the magnitude of America’s racial injustice.
      Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the magnitude of the country’s economic and health disparities. As I have repeatedly argued, small tweaks to the system won’t be enough to make large inroads in the country’s ingrained inequalities.
      How America responds to the attack on the Capitol will say a lot about where the country is headed. If we not only hold Trump accountable, but also embark on the hard road of economic and political reform to address the underlying problems that gave rise to his toxic presidency, then there is hope of a brighter day. Fortunately, Joe Biden will assume the presidency on 20 January. But it will take more than one person – and more than one presidential term – to overcome America’s longstanding challenges.
      • Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute.
      Ⓒ Project Syndicate More