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      in US Politics

      Obama: Democrats need 'universal language' to appeal to moderate voters

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      Barack Obama has underlined his belief that Democrats should moderate campaign messaging in order to reach voters turned off by slogans including “Defund the Police”, telling a literary group: “If I spoke the language of James Baldwin as he speaks it on the campaign stump, I’m probably not gonna get a lot of votes in Iowa.”
      Baldwin, a leading 20th-century African American intellectual and the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “didn’t have to go out and get votes”, Obama said in interview extracts released by PEN America, which will give the former president its 2020 Voice of Influence award next week.
      Obama also said he thinks there is an opportunity for more expansive racial dialogue in the US. But his remarks may add to controversy which welled up this week when he said candidates using “snappy” slogans such as Defund the Police risked alienating voters otherwise broadly sympathetic to liberal aims.
      Defund the Police became a rallying cry on the left this summer, amid national protests for racial justice following the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man, and similar incidents in Atlanta, Kenosha and elsewhere.
      Some senior Democratic party figures, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, have claimed the call to Defund the Police contributed to disappointing results in Senate, House and state races.
      Obama is promoting A Promised Land, his memoir of his rise to the White House and first few years in office. Speaking to Snapchat this week, he added his voice to the chorus.
      “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it – which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
      “The key is deciding: do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
      In his remarks to PEN America, which will be streamed on Tuesday, Obama contrasted discussions of race in the context of “politics and getting votes” with “truth-telling and the prophetic voice”. Politicians, he said, often need to speak a “universal language” as a way to reach voters resistant to more pointed discourse about racial injustice.
      But he also allowed that the racial upheavals of 2020, coupled with generational change, may herald an era in which race can be discussed in the political realm in less nuanced terms.
      “What I think has changed – and we saw this this summer – is, because of people’s witness of George Floyd, because of what seems like a constant stream of irrefutable evidence of excessive force against unarmed Black folks, that I think white America has awakened to certain realities that even 20 years ago they were still resistant to.
      “That creates a new opening for a different kind of political conversation.”
      PEN America will also give an award, for courage, to Darnella Frazier, a young woman who filmed the killing of Floyd.

      A recent poll by political strategist Douglas Schoen, previously an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, found that Democrats should drop references to Defund the Police if they want to be competitive in the next midterm elections, in 2022.
      “The data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022,” Schoen told the New York Post. “The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats.”
      Asked if Biden’s victory was a “mandate” for centrist or progressive policies, 62% of respondents to Schoen’s poll said centrist. The survey also found that Defund the Police hurt the party in down-ballot races, as 35% of voters said the issue made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” while 23% said it made them more likely.
      Obama’s comments have not found support among leading progressives. Legislators including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were quick to reject his comments to Snapchat.
      “It’s not a slogan,” tweeted Bush. “It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” More

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      in US Politics

      Just 26 of 249 Republicans in Congress willing to say Trump lost, survey finds

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      Only 26 of 249 Republicans in Congress are willing to admit Joe Biden won the presidential election, a survey found on Saturday.The election was called for Biden on 7 November, four days after election day. The Democrat won the electoral college by 306-232 and leads in the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.But Trump has refused to concede, baselessly claiming large-scale voter fraud in battleground states. The survey of Republicans in the House and Senate was carried out by the Washington Post, a paper Trump promptly claimed to read “as little as possible”.The president also said he was “surprised so many” in his party thought he had been beaten, promised “we have just begun to fight” and asked for a list of the politicians he called “Rinos”, an acronym for “Republicans in name only”.Two congressmen, Mo Brooks of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, told the Post Trump won. Gosar said he would never accept Biden as president, telling the paper there was “too much evidence of fraud”.In fact, there is no evidence of voter fraud anywhere near the scale Trump alleges in any of the key states in which he is pursuing legal redress, so far winning one lawsuit but losing 46.Attorney general William Barr, a staunch Trump ally, said this week there was no evidence of fraud on the scale the president claims. Trump was reported to be close to firing Barr from his post. The president has also lashed out at an official he did fire, elections security chief Chris Krebs, who said the vote was the most secure in US history.Trump was due to travel to Georgia on Saturday, to support senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. The two Republicans face runoffs on 5 January that will decide control of the Senate. Polling is tight and many observers suggest Trump’s intransigence could damage Republican turnout.Biden was the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992, beating Trump by more than 10,000 votes. Loeffler and Perdue have joined the president in attacking the Republican officials who ran the election in the state and certified its results.The Post said it had obtained video of Perdue telling donors Biden won.“We can at least be a buffer on some of the things that the Biden camp has been talking about,” he reportedly said, a weighty remark in light of widely reported obstruction of Biden’s transition planning.The Post said it “contacted aides for every Republican by email and phone asking three basic questions: who won the presidential contest, do you support or oppose Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory and if Biden wins a majority in the electoral college, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president.“The results demonstrate the fear that most Republicans have of the outgoing president and his grip on the party,” the paper said, “despite his new status as just the third incumbent to lose re-election in the last 80 years. More than 70% of Republican lawmakers did not acknowledge the Post’s questions.”Most Republicans seem committed to saying nothing: 12 of 52 senators and 14 of 197 representatives have recognised Biden’s win, the Post said, but only eight Republicans were prepared to voice support for Trump’s strategy of refusing to concede and seeking to overturn the result.Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Kevin McCarthy, who leads the House minority, have dodged questions.“Let’s wait until [we see] who’s sworn in,” McCarthy said on Thursday, when asked about tactics under a Biden administration.Last week Roy Blunt of Missouri, the senator who chairs the committee responsible for the inauguration, seemed to acknowledge reality – but then retreated.“We are working with the Biden administration, likely administration, on both the transition and the inauguration,” Blunt told CNN, adding: “The president-elect will be the president-elect when the electors vote for him.”The Post said Blunt did not answer its questions.The electoral college will meet on 14 December. Its votes will then be sent to Congress, which will meet in joint session to declare a winner on 6 January – the day after the Georgia runoffs. More

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      in Elections

      Trump heads for Georgia but claims of fraud may damage Senate Republicans

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      Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail on Saturday – not, notionally at least, in his quixotic and doomed attempt to deny defeat by Joe Biden, but in support of two Republicans who face January run-offs which will decide control of the US Senate.The president and first lady Melania Trump are due to appear in Valdosta, Georgia at 7pm local time.“See you tomorrow night!” Trump tweeted on Friday, as Vice-President Mike Pence stumped in the southern state.But the president couldn’t help tying the Senate race to his baseless accusations of electoral fraud in key states he lost to Biden.“The best way to insure [sic] a … victory,” he wrote, “is to allow signature checks in the presidential race, which will insure [sic] a Georgia presidential win (very few votes are needed, many will be found).“Spirits will soar and everyone will rush out and VOTE!”To the contrary, many observers postulate that Trump’s ceaseless baseless claims that the election was rigged could depress turnout among supporters in Georgia, handing a vital advantage to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challengers to senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.If Ossoff and Warnock win, the Senate will be split 50-50, Kamala Harris’s vote as vice-president giving Democrats control. Polling in both races is tight.Trump’s recalcitrance is being encouraged by congressional Republicans. On Saturday the Washington Post reported that only 25 of 247 Republican representatives and senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same result Trump said was a landslide when it landed in his favour over Hillary Clinton. The Democrat is more than 7m ballots ahead in the national popular vote, having attracted the support of more than 81 million Americans, the most of any candidate for president.Democrats performed less well in Senate, House and state elections, however, making the Georgia runoffs vital to the balance of power in Washington as leaders look for agreement on much-needed stimulus and public health measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant economic downturn.Earlier this week, two lawyers who have both been involved in legal challenges to Biden’s victory and trafficked in outlandish conspiracy theories, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, told Trump supporters not to vote in Georgia unless Republican leaders act more aggressively to overturn the presidential result.“We’re not gonna go vote 5 January on another machine made by China,” Wood said on Wednesday. “You’re not gonna fool Georgians again. If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they’ve got to earn it. They’ve got to demand publicly, repeatedly, consistently, ‘Brian Kemp: call a special session of the Georgia legislature’.“And if they do not do it, if Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue do not do it, they have not earned your vote. Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?”After a rush of defeats on Friday, Trump has won one election-related lawsuit and lost 46. But he continues to attack, in Georgia slamming Governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for overseeing a contest in which the state went Democratic for the first time since 1992.Matt Towery, a former Georgia Republican legislator now an analyst and pollster, told Reuters Trump could help in the state “if he spends most of his time talking about the two candidates, how wonderful they are, what they’ve achieved.“If he talks about them for 10 minutes and spends the rest of the time telling everyone how terrible Brian Kemp is, then it will only exacerbate things.”Gabriel Sterling, the Republican manager of Georgia’s voting systems, this week blamed the president and his allies for threats of violence against election workers and officials. On Friday, he said: “I think the rhetoric they’re engaged in now is literally suppressing the vote.”At a rally in Savannah, the vice-president was greeted by chants of “stop the steal”.“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election,” Pence said, “and I actually hear some people saying, ’Just don’t vote.’ My fellow Americans, if you don’t vote, they win.”Kemp and Loeffler missed campaign events on Friday after a young aide to the senator was killed in a car crash.Former president Barack Obama held a virtual event in support of Warnock and Ossoff. From Wilmington, Delaware, where he continues preparations to take power on 20 January, Biden said he would travel to Georgia at some point, to campaign with the Democratic candidates. More

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      in US Politics

      Columbia students threaten to withhold tuition fees amid Covid protest

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      Almost 1,800 students at Columbia University in New York are threatening to withhold tuition fees next year, in the latest signal to US academia of widespread preparedness to act on demands to reduce costs and address social justice issues relating to labor, investments and surrounding communities.In a letter to trustees and administrators of Columbia, Barnard College and Teachers College, the students said: “The university is acutely failing its students and the local community.”They accused the university of “inaction” since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, when students began demonstrating against what they say are exorbitant tuition rates “which constitute a significant source of financial hardship during this economic depression”.The letter referred to national protests over structural racism, accusing the university of failing to act on demands to address “its own role in upholding racist policing practices, damaging local communities and inadequately supporting Black students”.Emmaline Bennett, chair of the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America and a master’s student at Teachers College, told the Guardian the university and other colleges had made no effort to reduce tuition fees as they moved to remote learning models necessitated by pandemic conditions.“We think it says a lot about the profit motive of higher education, even as the economy is in crisis and millions of people are facing unemployment,” Bennett said. “This is especially true of Columbia, which is one of the most expensive universities in the US.”Demands outlined in the letter include reducing the cost of attendance by at least 10%, increasing financial aid by the same percentage and replacing fees with grants.Such reforms, the letter said, should not come at the expense of instructor or worker pay, but rather at the expense of bloated administrative salaries, expansion projects and other expenses that do not directly benefit students and workers.The university, the letter said, must invest in community safety solutions that prioritise the safety of Black students, and “commit to complete transparency about the University’s investments and respect the democratic votes of the student body regarding investment and divestment decisions – including divestment from companies involved in human rights violations and divesting fully from fossil fuels.“These issues are united by a shared root cause: a flagrant disregard for initiatives democratically supported within the community. Your administration’s unilateral decision-making process has perpetuated the existence of these injustices in our community despite possessing ample resources to confront them with structural solutions.“Should the university continue to remain silent in the face of the pressing demands detailed below, we and a thousand of fellow students are prepared to withhold tuition payments for the Spring semester and not to donate to the university at any point in the future.”A Columbia spokesperson said: “Throughout this difficult year, Columbia has remained focused on preserving the health and safety of our community, fulfilling our commitment to anti-racism, providing the education sought by our students and continuing the scientific and other research needed to overcome society’s serious challenges.”The university has frozen undergraduate tuition fees and allowed greater flexibility in coursework over three terms. It has also, it said, adopted Covid-related provisions including an off-campus living allowance of $4,000 per semester, to help with living and technology expenses related to remote learning.Columbia is not alone in facing elevated student demands. In late August, for example, students at the University of Chicago staged a week-long picket of the provost’s house as part of a campaign to disband the university police department, Chicago’s largest private force.The issue of student debt remains challenging. In a nod to progressives, President-elect Joe Biden last month affirmed his support for a US House measure which would erase up to $10,000 in private, non-federal loan debt for distressed individuals.Biden highlighted “people … having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent” and said such debt relief “should be done immediately”.Some Democrats say relief should go further. In September, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren co-authored a resolution which called for the next president to cancel up to $50,000 of outstanding federal loans per borrower.At Columbia, students say their demands for Covid-related fee reductions are only a starting point.“In the long-term, we need to reform the educational system entirely,” said Bennett. “We need to make all universities and colleges free, and to cancel all student debt to prevent enduring educational and economic inequalities.” More

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      in World Politics

      German Football for the “Real” Germans

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      Germany has three federal football leagues, with 56 professional teams. The elite 18 teams compete in the Bundesliga, the rest in the second and third divisions. Three decades ago, Germany was reunified. Yet until today, the vast majority of the clubs competing in the Bundesliga come from the western part of the country. The two exceptions are RB Leipzig and Union Berlin, which comes from the eastern part of Germany’s capital, unlike Hertha BSC, which comes from former West Berlin.

      What Is Behind Football’s Persistent Racism?

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      Like elsewhere in Europe, football in Germany tends to provoke strong emotions, particularly among the fan community, and here particularly among the most dedicated and fanatical supporters, the so-called Ultras. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to experience the “yellow wall” in Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park, with its more than 20,000 spectators cheering their team on, gets a sense of the passion football can evoke in Germany. It sends chills running down the spine.

      A Turn of Passion

      Problems start when passions turn into aggressive behavior. As elsewhere in Europe, football hooliganism in its various forms, including open expressions of racism, continues to be a major concern in and around German stadiums. Not these days, of course, when stadiums are empty and fans are told to stay home.

      To be sure, football hooliganism is a problem throughout Germany. But it is particularly pronounced in the eastern part of the country. Dynamo Dresden, for instance, has a particularly negative image because some of its fans are notorious for their aggressive behavior and their refusal to follow security rules, particularly with respect to pyrotechnics. In Chemnitz, knows as Karl-Marx-Stadt under the communist regime, a significant part of the local football club’s fan community is closely affiliated with the city’s right-wing extremist underground. At the same time, right-wing extremist fan groups have a significant influence within the club.

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      Following a series of scandals over the past several years, club officials openly admitted that Dynamo has a serious problem with racism and anti-Semitism. This was also the case in the past in Zwickau, some of whose fans repeatedly attracted attention in connection with racist and homophobic chants during matches.

      All of these clubs belong to Germany’s 3. Liga, the lowest professional division. This is also the only league with a sizeable eastern German presence. Currently, there are five clubs from the east in a field of 20; in the past, the number of eastern clubs was even higher. In the 2015-16 season, for instance, there were eight. Understandably, in the eastern part of Germany, fans consider the third division something like “their” league. It is here that formerly great teams, such as the FC Magdeburg, three-times GDR football champion and winner of the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1974, play against each other.

      These matches evoke a strong sense of nostalgia — what in German is known as Ostalgie — for the bygone days when ordinary East German citizens were still somebody, unlike today, when there is a widely-shared sense that East Germans are second-class citizens in unified Germany.  

      A Sense of Resentment

      It is also important to note that over the past two decades, a sense of resentment has increasingly suffused German football. This has a lot to do with the dramatically grown gap between top teams in the Bundesliga and the rest of the field. Also significant is the arrival of newcomers who have successfully managed to outcompete “traditional” clubs, such as Nuremberg and Kaiserslautern, that have ended up in the lower leagues, without much hope to climb back into the limelight of German football.

      The case par excellence for the former is, of course, Bayern Munich, whose quasi-permanent grip on the championship has done little to endear them to fans outside of Munich. In fact, in a representative survey among fans from 2018, the club ended up dead last among first and second-league clubs.

      Remarkably enough, Bayern did even worse than RB Leipzig, until recently the absolute bête noire of German football, ever since it was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2016. Fans have dismissed RB as a “plastic club” or a “soda pop” club, given its strong affiliation with Red Bull, the club’s owner. Backed by the energy-drink manufacturer, RB not only advanced in record time through the lower ranks but, once in the Bundesliga, established itself on the top of the league. Last season, it even reached the semifinals of the prestigious Champions League.

      The other object of fan hatred is Hoffenheim, a club from a small village in southwest Germany. Hoffenheim made it into the Bundesliga more than a decade ago. Its success was largely owned to the fact that it received significant financial backing from the founder of SAP, a German IT company. Its founder has been the target of fan insults and even veiled death threats ever since.

      It is against this background that the logic behind the most recent eruption of fan hatred mixed with right-wing extremist racism attains its significance. The current object is Türkgücü, a football club from Munich. Since the new season, Türkgücü plays in the third league. Türkgürcü, as the name implies, is a Turkish-German club. For ages, it played in the lowlands of Bavarian amateur football, and nobody cared. With its ascent into professional football, however, this has dramatically changed.

      Germany’s far right is livid. For them, Türkgücü represents an “un-German” club that should not be allowed to play in a German league, but in Turkey. To be sure, the club’s name has only added oil to the fire. Türkgücü means Turkish power, and Turkish power is the last thing the German right wants to see in Germany.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The club was founded in 1972 by Turkish immigrants in Germany. For the next decades, it played in Bavaria’s minor leagues, largely ignored beyond the narrow confines of local football. Everything changed with the arrival of a Turkish businessman’s massive investment in the club. With this money, Türkgücü quickly moved from the world of amateur football into the professional league.

      Strike two, as they say in American baseball: Another club following in the footsteps of RB Leipzig, displacing not only traditional clubs, but German traditional clubs. This is particularly galling in the eastern part of the country, where Türkgücü replaced one of the two local clubs in the division. At the end of the 2019-20 season, two eastern German clubs were relegated to the minor leagues. One of them was Carl Zeiss Jena, three-time GDR football champion and European Cup Winners’ Cup finalist in 1981. The other club, by the way, was Chemnitz FC.

      The Third Way

      Equally important, Türkgücü’s foray into Germany’s professional football elite has mobilized Germany’s Turkish-German community. There is pride that a Turkish club, a “club of migrants,” has managed to break into Germany’s closed football society, a club with which the community can identify and which is seen as reflecting their values. In an atmosphere of growing German nationalism, reflected in the rise of the radical right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, it is easy for Germany’s far right to stoke anxieties and xenophobic resentment and exploit them for political gain, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

      A prime example is the extreme-right miniature party Der III. Weg (The Third Way), a groupuscule of neo-Nazi activists who see themselves as a national-revolutionary vanguard fighting for a new Germany. In its 10-point program, the party calls, among other things, for a “German socialism,” a localized economy, pro-natalist policies to prevent the Germans from dying out and, last but not least, the “peaceful reconstitution” of Germany within the borders of 1937 (which includes the western parts of current-day Poland).

      The party has its origins in Bavaria. Initially, it was not a party but an “internet information platform” designed to coordinate the various neo-Nazi networks in southern Germany. Outlawed in 2014 by the Bavarian interior ministry, it reconstituted itself as a political party, which guaranteed it a certain degree of protection from proscription. This is exemplified by the futile attempts to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) despite its open promotion of a program largely informed by “Strasserism,” the revolutionary wing of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

      After its expulsion from the NSDAP in 1930, the Strasserites founded the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, better known as the Black Front. It existed until 1934, when it fell victim to the Röhm Purge. The fact that The Third Way has modeled one of its symbols after the Black Front’s party symbol — a cross made of a hammer and sword within a black circle — is a clear indication that the party considers itself as the legitimate heir to the Black Front.

      In recent years, The Third Way has focused its attention increasingly on the eastern part or the country. And for good reasons. The temporary mobilization success of the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) movement in Dresden, followed by the dramatic gains of the AfD in the eastern German states, are a clear indication that there is fertile ground for far-right ideas. Some have even suggested that Saxony is a hotspot of right-wing extremism. In addition, a number of studies have shown that a significant part of the population in the east still see themselves as second-class citizens, a sentiment aggravated by the impression, often voiced during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, that refugees received preferential treatment compared to eastern Germans.

      This mixture of a sense of victimization and diffuse resentments offers a favorable opportunity structure for radical right-wing populist mobilization among the fringes of eastern German society and explains the sporadic electoral successes of far-right parties, such as the NPD and even The Third Way. The latter managed to elect one of its most prominent members, a notorious neo-Nazi originally from Franconia, to the municipal council in Plauen, a town in southwestern Saxony.

      Easy Target

      Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that The Third Way has targeted the club. By mobilizing against the club, the party seeks to exploit widespread animosities against Türkgücü and to bank on the expectation that its presence in professional football is seen as a provocation for every “nationally-minded” German, particularly in the east. Recently, the party has stepped up its campaign against Türkgücü. A few days before the club’s match against Magdeburg in mid-October, party activists positioned themselves in front of the Magdeburg stadium with a banner that said “Türkgücü not welcome!”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Third Way made it quite clear that this was not a singular action. In fact, as the party put it on its website, “Whether in Zwickau, Magdeburg or elsewhere: A Turkish team has no business in German football. Whether in Magdeburg or elsewhere, the message is clear: Türkgücü is not welcome!” At the same time, the party launched an anti-Türkgücü poster, “Our stadiums, our rules! Türkgücü is not welcome!” available for purchase on the internet and designed to raise awareness of the party and, as the poster explicitly suggests, gain new supporters.

      It is one of these ironies of history that these days, most football matches in Germany are what in German is called “Geisterspiele” — ghost matches that take place in front of empty ranks. In this sense, COVID-19 has saved Türkgücü from potentially having to face hostile crowds hurling racist epithets at its players. This has already happened earlier on in this season when one of Türkgücü’s players — ironically enough, a South Korean — was subjected to racist insults by fans of Waldhof Mannheim, a western club that occasionally has played in the Bundesliga. In the days that followed, 3. Liga clubs expressed their solidarity with the Türkgücü player.

      For the moment, the brouhaha over Türkgücü’s presence in German professional football has quieted down. Its relative success in the league, however, is likely to spark new resentment, particularly in the east. Add to this the fact that its main sponsor is ambitious, seeking to establish Türkgücü in German professional football and then move up to higher leagues in the footsteps of RB Leipzig. As a result, conflicts are inevitable, as are resentment and racism, all of them grist to the mill for the far right. This is quite ironic, given in German we call football “die schönste Nebensache der Welt” — the most beautiful pastime in the world. Of course, this only applies if it is restricted to “real” German clubs.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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

      How the 'great reset' of capitalism became an anti-lockdown conspiracy | Quinn Slobodian

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      At a recent anti-lockdown protest in London, thousands of people gathered to oppose what they saw as a clandestine power grab taking place under the cover of a pandemic. Some protesters carried cardboard signs bearing the name of the alleged takeover: “The great reset”. “They thought they could easily get their great reset,” one man shouted. “Little did they know! The pandemic’s a hoax!”The great reset, both the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida and a slogan favoured by corporate do-gooders, is also the term for a web of ideas that has become increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right. In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.Though a poor diagnosis of the causes of global events, the great reset offers a grim insight into the public mood. An unlikely source provided its initial spark. On 3 June, as the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, the royal family’s YouTube account posted a video about a new sustainability drive headed by the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Titled #TheGreatReset, the initiative called for “fairer outcomes” and the redirection of investment towards a more “sustainable future”. It had all the slick branding one has come to expect from the WEF, with a cinematic video of ice floes and beached whales, and a sonorous monologue by Prince Charles.The initiative joined a line of similar proclamations riffing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 urtext, The Great Transformation. In the past decade, authors and politicians have talked of the “great financialization”, the “great regression”, the “great reversal”, the “great acceleration”, the “great unraveling” and the “great uncoupling”, to name just a few. The WEF’s great reset went largely unnoticed at first, arriving at the same time as George Floyd’s death spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the world. But the idea later caught on – in a way that organisers most likely didn’t expect.Weeks after the WEF’s announcement, Justin Haskins, the editorial director of the libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, sounded klaxons about the great reset on Fox Business, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. “The rough outline of the plan is clear,” he said. “Completely destroy the global capitalist economy and reform the western world.” Yet, apart from a few isolated yelps in the rightwing echo chamber, the great reset failed to catch on as a fully fledged conspiracy theory until Joe Biden’s victory in early November, when Google Trends shows that searches for the term surged online.The most obvious spark for this growing interest was a segment on Laura Ingraham’s television show on Fox News, which averaged 3.5 million viewers in 2020. “You know the idea, ‘never let a crisis go to waste’,” said Ingraham on 13 November. “Well, with the coronavirus, that idea went global. And since last spring, powerful people began to use this pandemic as a way to force radical social and economic change across the continents.”Years after the journalist Naomi Klein first identified the “shock doctrine” of radical policies that conservatives rolled out during disasters, the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends.A few days later, Ingraham returned to the theme. In a clip viewed some 2.4m times, she said Biden’s “handlers” believe in “the great reset of capitalism. It’s a plan to force a more equitable distribution of global resources.” The same day, another conservative commentator, Candace Owens, tweeted: “They are using Covid to crash western economies and implement communist policies. That’s what’s going on.” And in Australia, the Spectator columnist James Delingpole was interviewed on Sky News Australia (which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch). “Anyone who doesn’t realise that the great reset is the biggest threat to our form of life right now hasn’t been paying attention,” he said.The great reset theory is nonsense, and will probably become a prime target for the many new research centres and initiatives studying “disinformation” that have mushroomed on university campuses since 2016. But although we may scorn the ideas of anti-lockdown protesters, we ignore the unequal reality of the pandemic at our peril. Many of the world’s tech companies and CEOs have done well from this crisis. Indeed, in the same week that many Americans lost their jobs, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, added $13bn to his fortune in just a day. With surreal realities like these, where prominent members of the 1% really do appear to have gained from the pandemic, how much of a leap is it to persuade someone that the crisis has been orchestrated deliberately so that elites can amass power?The genius of Murdoch’s hosts was giving people a place to direct their anger. With his thick German accent and outpost in the Swiss Alps, the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, labelled a “charismatic German” and “dangerous Marxist leader” by Sky News Australia, was the perfect villain for this conspiracy. For rightwing pundits, the great reset was also a welcome distraction from their own complicity with power and wealth, having spent four years cheerleading a president whose major legislative achievement was a mammoth tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.That the WEF has inspired a conspiracy about elites is unsurprising; the organisation is best known for its annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, when top corporate executives arrive in fleets of private jets to pay lip service to climate change. While Schwab has pronounced that “neoliberalism has had its day”, it is left to his critics to remind the WEF of its record, such as its publication of an annual “global competitiveness index” that has, since the 1970s, flogged national governments into a race to the bottom to adopt lower taxes and slash regulations.If the great reset tells us anything about political reality, it’s that corporate elites can’t win legitimacy through vacuous initiatives. People recoil, it turns out, at being treated like buggy hard drives that can be reset from above. Changing the conditions of people’s lives and the causes of political alienation will take far more than the WEF’s tone-deaf video about the opportunities of a pandemic, fronted by the royal family. It’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the climate strikers, not boardroom initiatives, that offer a better lesson in how to gather popular support for the transformations we need.• Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, Massachusetts• This article was amended on 4 December 2020 to reflect the fact that Candace Owens is not a Fox News host More

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      in World Politics

      Iran’s Revenge Against Israel Will Be a Long Game

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      Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, shot to death by a remote-controlled weapon on November 27 in Iran’s capital Tehran, was the fifth nuclear scientist Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has assassinated over the past 13 years. He joins a list of dozens killed by Israeli special forces over the last five decades in the occupied territories and abroad. For many years, most of the targets were Palestinian activists or “terrorists,” but also included others deemed “enemies.” Now, the Mossad is focused on killing the leaders of the Iranian nuclear industry.

      As a general rule, the Mossad clears its lines with Washington before conducting such operations to avoid accidentally assassinating CIA penetration agents. Israel would of course have considered the imminent departure of President Donald Trump in the timing of the killing of Fakhrizadeh. The Mossad could guarantee that Trump would not veto the operation, so there was a strong incentive to do it before January 20, when Joe Biden’s inauguration takes place. Biden is going to attempt the complicated task of trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal and would have prevented the operation from going ahead to avoid even more difficulty with Tehran.   

      Reworking US Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

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      However, the chance to kill Fakhrizadeh was undoubtedly fleeting, the result of a chain of coincidences — just as the opportunity for the US to assassinate General Qassem Soleimani back in January suddenly materialized. For this reason, still having Trump in the White House was fortuitous.

      Israel conducts its extra-territorial executions with total impunity. No retaliatory action, such as the expulsion of Mossad officers for example, ever follows. One notorious Mossad operation was the 1990 killing of Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was shot in his apartment in Belgium. Bull had been engaged, at a price of $25 million, by Saddam Hussein to help build the Big Babylon “supergun” Baghdad had hoped would be capable of firing satellites into orbit or “blinding” spy satellites, as well as having the potential to fire projectiles from Iraq into Israel. After the assassination, Belgium took no action.

      Only Vladimir Putin’s Russia comes close to Israel — and only then a very distant second — in terms of the number of political assassinations it conducts. By contrast, Russia is heavily sanctioned for its actions.  

      The leading scientists and engineers working in the Iranian nuclear industry or ballistic missile program will all be on the Mossad’s death list. Also on the list will be the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian intelligence services and the leaders of Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria. The Mossad launches highly complex and detailed operations to identify such individuals and to track every detail of their personal lives — where they live and work, what their interests are, which restaurants they like, where they go hiking, who their friends are — anything that might provide an opportunity for a strike.  

      The Mossad uses human sources, communications intercepts and social engineering on social media to gather this information. Anyone on its list foolish enough to have a GPS tracker in their phone should not be surprised if a drone appears and fires at them.

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      Iran knows that Israel is not going to stop its murderous campaign. Tehran may anticipate that the Biden administration will at least try to slow down this strategy of targeted attacks while he tries some sort of rapprochement with the Iranian regime. But Iranians are chess players, and have been for thousands of years; they think strategically and several moves ahead. Iran’s rulers will not jeopardize their strategic goals for the short-term satisfaction of a revenge attack. That can wait.  

      First Iran wants to consolidate its positions in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and remove some, if not all, of the US sanctions. Iran also wants to hurry the remaining US forces in Iraq out of the country. There is also a larger strategic dimension. Iran and the Gulf are well aware the US is in retreat from the region. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies are bleeding money as a result of profligate spending and what appears to be a permanent downward shift in the demand and price for oil. They can no longer afford the monstrously wasteful spending on US arms nor rely on the US defense shield that goes with it.  

      The alternative is an accommodation with Iran, perhaps even a security dialogue. That is the carrot. The stick that Iran also wields is that if the Gulf chooses to continue or escalate confrontation, then Iran can wipe out their oil processing refineries and loading terminals — and the vital desalination plants — in an afternoon. The devastating but deliberately restricted missile attack on the Abqaiq oil processing facility in September 2019 was a clear signal of what might be expected if Iran is cornered. This realization following the Abqaiq attack prompted the immediate opening of backchannel communications between UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran.  

      Those lines will surely be humming with excuses and special pleading in the aftermath of the Fakhrizadeh assassination. This moment could be the high-water mark of the failed US campaign of “maximum pressure” and the Trump administration’s disastrous Middle Eastern 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

      Claims of 'voter fraud' have a long history in America. And they are false | David Litt

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      Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, was supposed to be a whole lot poorer by now.On 11 November, eight days after the presidential election and four days after the networks called the race for Joe Biden, the conservative talk radio host turned Republican politician launched a bounty hunt. Any tipsters who could provide evidence of voter fraud that led to a criminal conviction would receive at least $25,000, up to a grand total of $1m. The money was set to come from Patrick’s campaign, not his personal account. Still, the point remains: if voter fraud was rampant, as President Trump and leading Republicans have repeatedly claimed, Patrick’s million-dollar fund should have run dry long ago.As it stands, Patrick’s campaign finances are in far better shape than his credibility. To date, it appears he has paid out a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.Patrick stands out for his willingness to put his donors’ money where his mouth was. But his million-dollar effort was just a small part of the largest voter-fraud hunt in American history. Never in American history have self-proclaimed fraud-fighters been given more attention, resources and time to prove their case – that a major election was stolen through what they’ve dubbed “illegal votes”.Instead, they’ve done the opposite. The 2020 election, and Trump’s attempt to overturn it, will leave us with plenty of reasons to remain concerned about the health of our democracy. But the idea that our political process has been compromised by widespread fraud isn’t among them. It’s time to retire the voter-fraud myth for good.Falsely claiming voter fraud is a tradition nearly as old as American democracy itself. Take, for example, early 19th-century New Jersey. Under the state’s original constitution, some women had the right to vote, and some politicians (namely those of the Federalist party) felt they would be more likely to win elections if those rights were taken away. But stripping eligible voters of their rights for purely partisan reasons was unseemly, even by 1800s standards, so ambitious lawmakers came up with an excuse. Men, they charged, were casting their ballots, slipping into petticoats, and then voting a second time. The only way to prevent this gender-bending fraud was to eliminate women’s voting rights entirely.As a logical argument, the anti-fraud case for disenfranchising women made little sense. But logic was never the point. In 1807, aided by their theoretically principled excuse for their blatantly partisan power grab, the New Jersey legislature ended their state’s experiment in women’s suffrage.As more Americans won voting rights on paper, and the two-party system became more entrenched in our political process, voter fraud remained a convenient excuse for disenfranchising eligible voters. In the 1830s, on the theory that cities couldn’t be trusted to hold honest elections, Pennsylvania passed a voter registration law that applied to the city of Philadelphia and nowhere else. “Although the proclaimed goal of the law was to reduce fraud,” writes Alexander Keyssar in The Right to Vote, “opponents insisted that its real intent was to reduce the participation of the poor, who were frequently not home when assessors came by.”Not surprisingly, false claims of fraud also played an important role in propping up segregation. In 1959, Washington parish, Louisiana, “purged” its voter rolls. Local officials claimed they were merely remove illegally registered names from the rolls. In fact, they purged 85% of the parish’s African American voters. This proved too audacious even for the Jim Crow era, and a federal court overturned the parish’s purge. But in most cases, courts have given lawmakers the benefit of the doubt. So long as they can plausibly claim to be fighting fraud – or more accurately, so long as they can’t be proven not to be fighting fraud – legislators can pass bills restricting access to the ballot, even for eligible voters, and even if the voters affected are clearly more likely to belong to one party than the other.In other words, when conservative pundit Dick Morris claimed that over a million people voted twice in the 2012 elections, when President Trump alleged that millions of undocumented immigrants cast ballots in 2016, or when Rudy Giuliani dropped his sweaty dud of a bombshell at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, they were taking part in a timeless American tradition. From a moral standpoint, falsely claiming fraud is despicable. But from a political standpoint, it’s historically been a win-win: in a best-case scenario you disenfranchise voters in an election that already occurred, and in a worse-case scenario you lay the groundwork for disenfranchising them next time.Already, Republican politicians are once again using the fear of voter fraud – a fear that exists, to the extent it does, entirely because of baseless claims they generated – as a pretext to attack the voting rights of eligible American citizens. The Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw recently argued that the only way to restore confidence in our elections is to make voter registration far more difficult and outlaw mail-in voting for many if not most Americans. The Florida senator Rick Scott has gone even further. His “fraud-fighting” bill would throw out ballots if a county can’t tally them within 24 hours, even if those ballots are legally cast.When Giuliani dropped his sweaty dud of a bombshell, he was taking part in a timeless American traditionIt’s hardly surprising that politicians like Crenshaw and Scott believe they can get away with turning false claims of voter fraud into the very real disenfranchisement of eligible voters. It’s happened many times before. But this time ought to be different. Egged on by the would-be authoritarian in the White House, election results have been challenged in at least six states. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed in an attempt to delay or overturn the certification of the final tallies. Hearings have been held. The attorney general, Bill Barr, in a frightening break with established Department of Justice procedure, authorized federal prosecutors to investigate credible fraud claims even if doing so would appear political.The results? The Trump administration is now a 39-time loser in court. A parade of frustrated judges, many appointed by Trump himself, have written blistering opinions pointing out that the president and his allies have no basis for their claims. Even Trump’s own lawyers have admitted under questioning that they’re not alleging fraud because they have no evidence with which to do so. Inside the conservative echo chamber, the Republican party’s attacks on the integrity of our elections will sow doubt and distrust in our political process. But in the real world, the idea that marquee elections are being stolen via voter fraud has now been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.Which means that, barring real evidence to the contrary, it’s time for our institutions to stop taking partisan claims of voter fraud seriously. Reporters should treat allegations of a fraudulent election the way they treat birtherism or QAnon – as pure conspiracy theory. Courts should stop giving self-proclaimed fraud-fighters the benefit of the doubt, and instead demand that they substantiate their allegations before barring eligible Americans from the ballot box. The handful of Republican politicians who, to their lasting credit, condemned Trump’s attempts to manipulate the most recent election should be equally forceful about attempts to manipulate future ones.This year, false claims of fraud weren’t enough to overturn an election. But next time we may not be so lucky. Trump is not the first American to embrace the voter-fraud myth for his political advantage, but if American democracy is to survive, he ought to be the last. More