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      in US Politics

      Trumpism will persist until we rekindle faith in people’s ability to reshape the world | Jeff Sparrow

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      About 70% of Republicans apparently believe the 2020 presidential election to have been neither free nor fair.That’s a big chunk of voters rejecting, on entirely bogus grounds, the legitimacy of the new president.And it’s not the first time either.From 2011, Donald Trump engendered support for his own tilt at the White House by questioning the legality of the Obama presidency. He built his political career upon the embrace of “birtherism”, a racist conspiracy that emerged during the election of 2008.Back then, rightwing blogs and talk radio shows claimed Obama was not a “natural-born citizen of the US”, and thus ineligible for office under Article Two of the constitution.A Harris Poll in 2010 found an astonishing 25% of respondents questioned Obama’s right to serve, as the birthers tried to persuade electoral college voters, the supreme court and members of the college to block his certification.More than any other figure, Trump brought that rejection of Obama’s legitimacy into the mainstream.“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility …” he told NBC’s Today Show in 2011, “then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”For the Tea Party movement and the Republican fringe, birtherism underpinned a rightwing conviction that Obama’s presidency represented a kind of coup.You don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential electionsMind you, after the 2016 election, a significant proportion of Democrats thought the same about Trump’s victory.As David Greenberg notes, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and John Lewis were among those who publicly labelled Trump “illegitimate”, elected only as the result of Russian meddling. Some Democrats blamed Vladimir Putin for the WikiLeaks release of the Podesta emails or suggested Russian social bots fixed the outcome; others falsely claimed that voting booths had been rigged or that Trump was in fact a “Manchurian candidate” employed in Putin’s service.For such people, Trump wasn’t merely an odious, rightwing demagogue. He was also an impostor, whose presence in the Oval Office signified systemic institutional failure.The refusal by Trump’s supporters to accept the 2020 result as genuine didn’t then come entirely from nowhere. Indeed, it’s been a long time since partisans of a defeated presidential candidate haven’t denounced the process that allowed their opponent to win.Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.For years, surveys have revealed a massive and ongoing decline in trust in basic institutions, including those associated with democracy.In early 2020, for instance, the communications firm Edelman polled 34,000 people in 28 countries for its Trust Barometer report. It found a tremendous decrease in the public’s respect for institutions, with almost everywhere “government and media … perceived as both incompetent and unethical”.Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed believed the media to be “contaminated with untrustworthy information” and 66% did not expect government leaders “to successfully address our country’s challenges”.Even in Australia, one of the wealthiest and most secure nations in the world, more than half of people polled saw the system as failing them, and a large majority no longer possessed confidence in the media.We might think this cynicism would favour progressives, given the left’s longstanding critique of institutional power.But it’s not as simple as that.Obama won office because George W Bush had plunged America into permanent, unpopular wars. Trump triumphed in 2016 because he faced a weak opponent; he lost in 2020 when his response to Covid-19 revealed his utter ineptitude.In other words, you don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential elections. You can understand the outcomes easily enough in terms of decisions by voters.But only if you acknowledge voters’ ability to make such decisions.Conspiracy theories proceed on an entirely different basis. They present ordinary people as gulls, the perpetual dupes of power; they suggest events unfold, always and everywhere, according to the will of hidden string pullers.Rather than asking why their candidate didn’t appeal to electors, the conspiracist looks for external manipulation – implicitly accepting that only the elite can make history.In different circumstances, a widespread cynicism about the existing institutions might propel a movement to deepen and widen participation in political affairs. Right now, however, it seems to be linked to a prevailing pessimism about democratic agency, one that can all too easily provide openings for authoritarian demagogues.Joe Biden takes office as the embodiment of American business-as-usual. Despite polling far more votes than Trump, he remains the ultimate insider, associated with many of the most consistently hated policies in recent years (from the Iraq war, which he championed, to mass incarceration, which he helped initiate).Not surprisingly, if you survey rightwing social media, you can see the new argument cohering at a frightening speed, with more and more accounts claiming that Biden was illegitimately foisted on honest Americans by a nefarious elite. Far-right agitators, many of whom had long since given up on Trump, have embraced the #stopthesteal campaign with enthusiasm, with the upcoming Million Maga march potentially bringing together motley white nationalist and fascist groups in what looks very much like an attempted reprise of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.Just as Trump’s rise inspired imitators elsewhere, we should expect the right’s narrative to spread internationally. Already, baseless allegations of electoral fraud have been echoed by Australian politicians – and it’s still early days yet.Trump might be gone but, until we can rekindle faith in ordinary people’s ability to reshape the world, Trumpism will remain very much with us. More

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      in World Politics

      Facial Recognition and the Convenience of Injustice

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      Some people are concerned that the latest generation of powerful technology tools now being developed and deployed may undermine important features of civilized societies and human life itself. Notably, Elon Musk is so worried about the danger of artificial intelligence (AI) that he invested in accelerating its development.

      Musk has voiced his concern while simultaneously expressing the hope that if good, stable and responsible people such as Elon himself develop AI before the evil people out there get their hands on it, his company SpaceX will succeed in moving the human race to Mars before AI’s quest to enslave humanity is complete. Fearing people may not make it to Mars in time, Musk launched Neuralink, a company that promises to turn people into cyborgs. Its technology, implanted in people’s brains, will presumably put a transformed race on the same level as AI and therefore allow it to resist AI’s conquistadors.

      Although this story of the race to the future by opposing forces of good and evil may sound like the plot of a sci-fi comic book, Musk has on various occasions said things that actually do resemble that scenario. In the meantime, AI is being put to use in numerous domains, theoretically with the idea of solving specific problems but, more realistically, according to the time-honored laws of consumer society as a response to the perennial pursuit of convenience.

      In the quest for convenience, one of the tasks people have assigned to AI is facial recognition. Apparently, it has now become very good at using the image of a face to identify individuals. It may even perform better than Lady Gaga in the knotty problem of distinguishing Isla Fisher from Amy Adams.

      Facial Recognition Technology and the Future of Policing

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      Law enforcement in the US has demonstrated its interest in the added productivity facial recognition promises. Like everyone else, the police like to know who they are talking to as well as who they should go out and arrest. The problem is that they sometimes arrest and incarcerate people that AI’s facial recognition has mistakenly identified. The accuracy of the existing tools diminishes radically with non-Caucasian faces. That means more wrongful arrests and indictments for black suspects.

      The New York Times makes a timid attempt to delve into this ethical issue in an article that bears the somewhat tendentious title, “A Case for Facial Recognition.” The article sums up the case in the following terms: “The balancing act that Detroit and other U.S. cities have struggled with is whether and how to use facial recognition technology that many law enforcement officials say is critical for ensuring public safety, but that tends to have few accuracy requirements and is prone to misuse.”

      Here is today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Critical (for):

      A deliberately imprecise term used to evaluate the importance of an act that exists on a sliding scale between absolutely essential and probably useful, making it a convenient way of creating the belief that something is more important than it really is.

      Contextual Note

      The adjective “critical” derives from the Latin word “criticus” and relates to the idea of “crisis.” It came into the English language in the mid-16th century with the meaning “relating to the crisis of a disease.” When The Times article tells us that “many law enforcement officers” say facial recognition “is critical for ensuring public safety,” we need to realize that those officers are not referring to a crisis but to their own convenience. Facial recognition can, of course, produce a crisis when it misidentifies a suspect. But the crisis is for the suspect, not for the police.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The expression “critical for” has come to signify “really important in my view,” a very subjective appreciation in contrast to the far more factual sounding “crucial,” which comes from the idea of the “crux” or the core of a problem. The article underlines this question of subjectivity when it reports that a black officer it quotes “still believed that, with oversight, law enforcement would be better off using facial recognition software than not.” “Better off” is not quite the same thing as “critical.”

      But let’s take a closer look at the claim that “law enforcement would be better off.” How do we parse the subject, “law enforcement,” in this sentence? The term “law enforcement” can be an abstract noun meaning the official function of monitoring behavior in a community to ensure optimal compliance with laws. This appears in sentences such as “one of government’s responsibilities is to provide the community with the means of law enforcement.”

      But law enforcement can also refer to the police themselves, the officials who are empowered to apprehend and deliver to the judicial system those who are suspected of infringing the laws. Which one is “better off” thanks to facial recognition? In the first case, abstract law enforcement — we are speaking of the safety of the community. “Better off” would then mean more optimally and more fairly conducted. In the second it is the men and women doing the job. For them “better off” basically means improved convenience.

      So which one is the article’s author, Shira Ovide, referring to? Clearly, the following explanation indicates that for her, law enforcement refers to the police and not to the needs of the community. “That’s the position of facial recognition proponents: That the technology’s success in helping to solve cases makes up for its flaws, and that appropriate guardrails can make a difference.” It’s all about the job of “helping to solve cases.” Ovide is a technology specialist at The Times, which might explain her focus on convenience rather than the ethics of policing.

      What Ovide says is superficially true, but the same logic could be applied to slaveholding. If we admit the argument that slavery helped to boost agricultural production — which of course it did — we could point out that the boost it provides makes up for its flaws. That was how slaveholders reasoned. The crucial difference — rather than critical — lies in examining the nature and the impact of those flaws. After all, slaveowners also thought about “appropriate guardrails.” They simply called them “slave patrols.”

      This is where, for Ovide, bureaucracy comes to the rescue of the logic of convenience and reveals the underlying logic of modern law enforcement: “The new guidelines limited the Police Department’s use of facial recognition software to more serious crimes, required multiple approvals to use the software and mandated reports to a civilian oversight board on how often facial recognition software was used.”

      The article ends on a slightly ambiguous note but fails to go into any depth on the moral question and its civic consequences. It seems to endorse the idea that with the right procedures, the gain in efficiency is worth the random damage it will produce.

      Historical Note

      The above reference to slave patrols may sound exaggerated, but it is not trivial. As Chelsea Hansen at the Law Enforcement Museum points out, slave patrols were “an early form of American policing.” The strategies and organizational principles that grew out of slave patrols influenced the evolution of policing in the United States. Race has always been a major, but usually unacknowledged feature of American law enforcement culture.

      The late anthropologist David Graeber put it brutally when he noted that the criminal justice system in the US “perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could.” Mass incarceration has, among other things, enabled a modern form of slave labor.

      In other words, there is a vast historical and cultural problem the US needs to solve. That is precisely what’s behind the idea formulated as “defund the police.” The slogan itself is misleading. What it really means is “rethink the police.” But asking Americans to rethink any problem appears to be beyond their capacity. It’s always easier just to point to one simple practical task, like defunding.

      The debate about face recognition in policing should not focus on the tasks of police officers and the convenience it affords them but on the relationship between law enforcement and the community. But that would ultimately require weaning the consumer culture of its addiction to the idea of convenience.

      *[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

      Justice Alito takes aim at abortion rights, gay marriage and Covid rules

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      The inability of people to say, without fear of being branded as bigots, that marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman is threatening to make freedom of speech “a second-tier constitutional right”, supreme court justice Samuel Alito said at a virtual conference on Thursday.In a bleak address, Alito took aim at abortion rights, same-sex marriage, gun control and other conservative bugbears.The remarks were made to the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that has helped Donald Trump remake the judiciary in the last four years.While supreme court justices have in the past waded into politics in public forums, Alito’s 30-minute speech stood out for its provocative engagement on fronts in the culture wars that had not seemed to be particularly hot, at least before the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett last month.Alito’s speech fueled concerns that Barrett’s elevation, which established an ironclad 6-3 conservative majority on the court, could lead the court to revisit basic anti-discrimination protections, marriage equality, reproductive rights and other issues.“This was a hyper-political, partisan speech, and his message in sum was: I’m free to say this now. We have the votes,” tweeted Chris Geidner, director of strategy at the justice collaborative advocacy group.As the United States continues to shatter daily records for new Covid-19 cases, Alito blasted coronavirus mitigation measures for imposing “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty”.He singled out restrictions in Nevada limiting religious services to 50 attendees. “The states’s message is this: forget about worship and head for the slot machines, or maybe a Cirque du Soleil show,” Alito said.Although by any measure conservative jurisprudence under Trump has flourished, securing minority legal views for a generation, Alito spun a conservative victimization narrative, in which citizens are threatened in their freedom to speak and act as they please.“When I speak with recent law school graduates, what I hear over and over is that they face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy,” he said.“It pains me to say this,” Alito said, “but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” As an example, Alito decried a Washington state law requiring a pharmacist to fill prescriptions for “morning-after pills, which destroy an embryo after fertilization”, as he put it.“Even before the pandemic, there was growing hostility to the expression of unfashionable views,” Alito continued, using the rubric of “the rule of law and the current crisis” to mount an attack on same-sex marriage, secured by the court in Obergefell v Hodges (2015), a ruling from which he dissented.“You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Alito complained. “Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”Alito went on:
      That this would happen after our decision in Obergefell should not have come as a surprise. Yes, the opinion of the court included words meant to calm the furors of those who cling to traditional views on marriage. But I could see, and so did the other justices in dissent, where the decision would lead. I wrote the following: ‘I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers and schools.’ That is just what is coming to past.
      One of the great challenges for the supreme court going forward will be to protect freedom of speech. Although that freedom is falling out of favor in some circles we need to do whatever we can to prevent it from becoming a second-tier constitutional right.”
      Legal analysts said the speech displayed thinking familiar from the 70-year-old justice’s opinions – but they called his decision to give voice to those opinions unusual.“I’m not surprised that Justice Alito believes any of those things,” tweeted University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck. “One need only read his written opinions to see most of them. I’m surprised that he decided to *say* them in a public speech that was live-streamed over the internet – clips of which will now be recirculated for ever.”Alito unleashed will make him a hero to more people looking for a leader of the conservative Court — but it also will make people outside of the SCOTUS world realize how he comes off (and it’s not good). pic.twitter.com/Gqt7uyHW07— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) November 13, 2020
      Alito is a George W Bush appointee who previously worked as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey and a circuit court judge. The speech was pre-recorded for the 2020 National Lawyers Federation sponsored by the Federalist Society. “Today I’m talking to a camera, and that feels really strange,” Alito said.To capture the mood of what he described as an assault on religious liberties and free speech, Alito quoted a 1997 Bob Dylan song.“To quote a popular Nobel laureate,” Alito said, “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” More

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      in World Politics

      Welcome Back, America?

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      America may well be divided about Donald Trump, but the rest of the world isn’t. The soon-to-be-former president has gotten high marks in the Philippines and Israel, a passing grade in a couple of African countries and India, and dismal reviews pretty much everywhere else. US allies in Europe and Asia are particularly relieved that Joe Biden will be taking the helm in January. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, summed up world sentiment with a pithy tweet: “Welcome back, America.”

      The international community is happy that the American people have taken down the world’s biggest bully. The heads of international bodies — from the World Health Organization to Human Rights Watch — are delighted that soon Trump won’t be undermining their missions. Perhaps the 2020 presidential election will inspire people elsewhere to dethrone their lesser bullies like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, even Vladimir Putin in Russia. Short of that, however, the removal of Trump from the international scene will restore a measure of decorum and predictability to global affairs.

      Joe Biden and America’s Second Reconstruction

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      With a slew of executive orders, Joe Biden is expected to press the reset button shortly after his January inauguration. The Washington Post reports: “He will rejoin the Paris climate accords, according to those close to his campaign and commitments he has made in recent months, and he will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans.”

      Just as Donald Trump was determined to delete the Obama administration’s legacy, Joe Biden will try to rewind the tape to the moment just before Trump took office. That’s all to the good. But the world that existed just before Trump began starting messing with it wasn’t so good: full of war, poverty and rising carbon emissions. Will Biden to do more than just the minimum to push the United States into engaging more positively with the international community?

      Dealing with Russia, China and North Korea

      The paradox of Trump’s foreign policy is that he often treated US adversaries better than US allies. Trump was constantly berating and belittling the leaders of European and Asian countries that had come to expect at least a modicum of diplomacy from Washington. The abrasive president berated NATO allies for not spending enough on their own defense, and he was constantly trying to pressure Japan and South Korea to pony up more money to cover the costs of US troops on their soil.

      Trump loved to insult what should have been his friends: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “dishonest and weak,” British Prime Minister Theresa May was a “fool,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was “stupid.” But Trump was positively glowing about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (“We fell in love”), Chinese President Xi Jinping (“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great”), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (“he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader”). On the campaign trail in the fall, Trump reiterated: “One thing I have learnt, President Xi of China is 100 per cent, Putin of Russia, 100 per cent … Kim Jong-un of North Korea, 100 per cent. These people are sharp and they are smart.”

      Biden can be expected to reestablish the more routine praise of democrats and condemnation of autocrats. But will the reset go beyond rhetoric? During the campaign, for instance, Biden hit Trump hard on his China policy. The president, according to the Democratic candidate, wasn’t tough enough on China. Biden pledged to force Beijing to “play by the international rules” when it comes to trade and security. In addition, “under my watch America is going to stand up for the dissidents and defenders of human rights in China,” he has said.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The US-China relationship had begun its slide before Trump took office. The consensus, therefore, is that Biden’s election won’t reverse the trend. As Steven Lee Myers writes in The New York Times, “While many will welcome the expected change in tone from the strident, at times racist statements by Mr. Trump and other officials, few expect President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to quickly reverse the confrontational policies his predecessor has put in place.”

      Remember, however, that China-bashing has become a time-honored element of US presidential campaigns. Biden was not different. He saw an opening to criticize Trump and an opportunity to look tough on foreign policy, a perennial requirement for Democratic candidates. Once in office, however, presidents have generally adopted a more business-like approach to Beijing.

      My guess is that Biden will largely abandon the tariffs that Trump applied on Chinese goods because those were self-inflicted wounds that hurt American farmers and manufacturers. But he’ll continue to use sanctions against Chinese companies — on the grounds of intellectual property theft or security concerns — and against individuals associated with human rights abuses. Practically, that would mean shifting tensions to more targeted issues and allowing the bulk of US-China economic cooperation to proceed.

      More focused cooperation might be possible on environmental issues as well. In 2011, China and the United States established the Clean Energy Research Center to combine efforts to develop technology that can wean both countries of their dependency on fossil fuels. The funding runs out this year. Trump would not have renewed the project. Biden can do so and should even expand it. Of course, just talking would be a good start. The United States and China need to dial back tensions over Taiwan, the South China Sea and the global economy. Biden will likely move quickly to lower the temperature so that he can focus on cleaning up some other foreign policy messes.

      The same applies to Russia. Despite some rather conventional hawkish language about Russia, Biden is clearly interested in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US military policy. He is not only skeptical about the huge cost of modernizing the US arsenal but has shown some support for a no-first-use pledge, which would put him to the left of Obama. These positions should facilitate arms control negotiations with Russia, beginning with an extension of New START, even if the two sides remain far apart on issues like Ukraine, human rights and energy politics.

      The prospects for a resumption of negotiations with North Korea are perhaps not as rosy. Biden will probably order a strategic review of relations with Pyongyang, which will conclude after several months with various recommendations for cautious engagement. Those proposals, not terribly different from the ones that the Obama administration embraced in 2008, will not entice North Korea to give up its nuclear program. There might be negotiations, but they won’t be any more successful than the Trump administration’s efforts.

      The end result: the same “strategic patience” approach of the Obama years. But perhaps a more flexible Biden administration will allow South Korea to move forward with its own slow-motion engagement with the North.

      The Greater Middle East

      Trump tilted US policy toward the Israeli hard line. He was a great deal more accommodating of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, particularly around Yemen and human rights. And he substantially escalated tensions with Iran.

      Biden’s first and perhaps least controversial step will involve the nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated with Tehran. Biden has indicated that he favors rejoining the pact, and Iran would welcome such a move. To begin with, he’ll likely negotiate the removal of Trump-era sanctions in exchange for Iran reversing some of the nuclear moves it has made over the last three years.

      “One option for a Biden administration to jumpstart the process would be to revoke National Security Policy Memorandum 11, which formally ended U.S. participation in the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, on day one of his administration,” the National Iranian American Council recommends. “Sanctions-lifting could be accomplished by the same mix of statutory waivers, Executive order revocations, and U.S. sanctions list removals as performed by President Obama when implementing the initial U.S. commitments under the nuclear accord.” It can’t come too soon. Iran will hold its presidential election by June 2021, and the reformists need to demonstrate that their strategy of engagement with the United States is still effective. The reform camp did poorly in last spring’s parliament elections.

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      Another important first move would be for Biden to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The cancellation of all military assistance, from intelligence-sharing to spare parts for planes, would seriously compromise the war effort, and it’s a move that even some Senate Republicans support. “He should publicly and privately tell the Saudis that he will do this on day one,” Erik Sperling, of Just Foreign Policy, told In These Times. ​“This will pressure them into negotiations and may end the war before he even enters the White House.”

      The Saudis, not thrilled with Biden’s victory, have been slow in sending their congratulations. In addition to his stance against the Yemen war, the next president will take a harder line on Saudi human rights violations, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. On the other hand, Biden might find a bit more common ground with Saudi Arabia in piecing together a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Donald Trump put a heavy thumb on the scale to favor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Biden will seek to correct the balance. Writes Yossi Melman in the Middle East Eye:

      “It is very likely that once Biden enters the Oval Office, his foreign and national security team will renew contacts with the Palestinian Authority, reinstate the Palestinian embassy in Washington and re-open the US Treasury’s pipes to allow the smooth flow of financial aid to the Palestinians, which were blocked and closed by the outgoing administration.

      From sources close to the Biden campaign, Middle East Eye also learned that the CIA will once again cooperate with its Palestinian counterparts and engage in mutual security collaboration to tackle terror threats. But at the same time, PA President Mahmoud Abbas will be asked to tone down anti-Israeli rhetoric and to resume talks with Israel.“

      Biden favors a two-state solution, but it’s not clear whether this option still exists after Trump and Netanyahu teamed up to undermine the Palestinian negotiating position.

      Climate Crisis and Security

      Unlike the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — or major political parties in Europe and other countries — Joe Biden has not fully embraced the Green New Deal. Instead, he has put forward his “clean energy revolution,” which envisions a carbon-neutral United States by 2050 and would invest around $1.7 trillion into job creation in clean energy and infrastructure.

      Biden’s positions on the climate crisis are in marked contrast to Trump’s denialism. According to the president-elect’s website, he “will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that. He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. He will make sure those commitments are transparent and enforceable, and stop countries from cheating by using America’s economic leverage and power of example. He will fully integrate climate change into our foreign policy and national security strategies, as well as our approach to trade.”

      This plan, if implemented, “would reduce US emissions in the next 30 years by about 75 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents,” reports The Guardian. “Calculations by the Climate Action Tracker show that this reduction would be enough to avoid a temperature rise of about 0.1C by 2100.”

      Achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement is certainly a major improvement over Trump. But those goals themselves are insufficient. The pledges of Paris would still result in an increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius, well above the 2-degree target. Moreover, those pledges were voluntary, and many countries are not even meeting those modest goals.

      Of course, Biden will face considerable resistance from the Republican Party for even his modified Green New Deal. That’s why he has to focus on the jobs and infrastructure components to force the Republicans to appear “anti-job” if they stand in the way of the “clean energy revolution.” To pay for his green transition, Biden plans to rescind the tax cuts for the wealthy and leverage private-sector funds. He hasn’t discussed reallocating funds from a sharply reduced military budget. Indeed, Biden hasn’t talked about reducing military spending at all, right he favors reducing American military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Joe Biden is rather unexceptional when it comes to his views on American exceptionalism. The Foreign Affairs article that outlined his foreign policy approach was titled “Why American Must Lead Again,” after all.

      Granted, Biden was focusing more on the soft-power side of American leadership, leading on climate change, human rights and democracy, nuclear non-proliferation. His tone in the Foreign Affairs article is a welcome antidote to Trump’s bombast: “American leadership is not infallible; we have made missteps and mistakes. Too often, we have relied solely on the might of our military instead of drawing on our full array of strengths.” He emphasizes diplomacy, international cooperation, openness.

      But Biden will be the president of the United States of America, not the Democratic Socialists of America. He believes that the United States has a right to intervene militarily overseas if necessary. He views the United States as an honest broker to mediate in parts of the world — the Middle East, East Asia — where the United States is hardly neutral. He will, like Obama, sell weapons, and lots of them, to almost any country with the cash to buy them (and even some that don’t). And if that weren’t enough, he’ll have a still-strong “America First” constituency in Congress scrutinizing his every move, eager to label him a “traitor.”

      The international community, although welcoming the new president, will understandably remain wary of the United States. Dr. Jekyll will be back in charge in the White House, but who’s to say that Mr. Hyde won’t return in four years or even make some guest appearances before the next election? It simply doesn’t make a lot of sense to entrust leadership to a country with a severe personality disorder.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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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      Officials condemn Trump's false claims and say election 'most secure in US history'

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      The presidential election was the “most secure in American history” with no evidence that votes were compromised or altered, a coalition of federal and state officials has said, offering the clearest repudiation yet of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud.The statement backed repeated assurances by experts and state officials that, despite the coronavirus pandemic and record numbers of voters, the election went smoothly without irregularities.Yet almost a week after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump continues to refuse to accept defeat and to hamper an orderly transition of power. In a newspaper interview on Friday, he insisted without evidence that the election was stolen from him and that his quixotic legal challenges will succeed.The latest blow to his case from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which led federal election protection efforts. “While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” it said.“When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”The statement was tweeted by Chris Krebs, the agency’s director, who just hours earlier had been the subject of a media report that said he had told associates he expects to be fired by Trump.Krebs has been vocal on Twitter in repeatedly reassuring Americans that the election was secure and that their votes would be counted. “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too,” he wrote.The officials who signed the statement said they had no evidence that any voting system had deleted or lost votes, had changed votes, or was in any way compromised.They said all the states with close results have paper records, which allows for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors”.“The election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalising the result,” the statement added.The message delivers a fresh blow to the credibility of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud and widespread problems that he insists could yet tip the election in his favour.His campaign have seized on issues that are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postmarks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in battleground states, none of these would have any impact on the outcome.Trump’s campaign has also launched legal challenges complaining that their poll watchers were unable to scrutinise the voting process. Many of those challenges have been thrown out by judges, some within hours of being filed. Again, none of the complaints showed any evidence that the outcome of the election was affected.In a further sign that Trump’s “legal strategy” is unravelling, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a case in Pennsylvania that challenged nearly 2.65m votes that were cast by mail, the majority by Democrats. It said in a memo: “Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” but did not offer further explanation. More

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      Searching for the Soul of America

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      The soul of America is a highly sought-after commodity these days. In their victory speeches, both President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris mentioned that they fought for the soul of America in the tightly-contested elections. Some 75 million people agreed, giving the Biden-Harris ticket the reigns for the next four years to repair and restore the soul of the nation.

      360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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      The losing incumbent, Donald Trump, has been a singularly divisive figure in American politics over the past several years. He is a racist and a white supremacist, a xenophobe and an Islamophobe, a misogynist and a narcissist, a liar and a petulant loser. Trump repeatedly denied scientific evidence when dealing with environmental issues and the coronavirus pandemic. The COVID-19 death toll in the US is nearing 250,000 from over 10 million cases, primarily due to the mishandling of the pandemic by the Trump administration. And yet, 8 million more people than the 62 million who voted him into office in 2016 find Trump’s actions and behavior as acceptable. A staggering 70 million Americans still feel that there is nothing wrong with the soul of the nation and chose to cast their vote for Trump.

      If we are forced to draw conclusions about that intangible entity referred to as the soul of America just from the votes people cast in the presidential contest, we can only surmise that it is split almost evenly between what Joe Biden and Donald Trump stand for. Refusing to accept that verdict, I investigated down-ballot races across the country with the hope of unearthing other clues that could shed a light in my quest to understand where and what America stands for today.

      Should Non-Citizens Be Able to Vote?

      Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have in their constitution language to the effect that the right to vote is available only to citizens of the country. Notwithstanding that, Alabama, Florida and Colorado passed constitutional amendments to make the citizenship requirement for voting more explicit. What is interesting is not that these measures passed with an overwhelming majority, but the fact that 23% of voters in Alabama, 20% in Florida and 33% in Colorado cast their ballots against the measure.

      The 3.5 million Americans who subscribe to the idea that non-citizens should be able to vote belong to an interesting segment of the nation’s population. Perhaps they echo my thought process that it is appropriate for non-citizens to get to vote on specific issues. As non-citizens, it makes sense that they do not get to participate in the representational democratic aspects such as electing the president, governor or members of Congress. However, in keeping with the philosophy of taxation with representation, it also makes sense for them to vote in specific propositions, measures and initiatives local to their place of residence.

      Criminal Justice Reforms

      Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota legalized recreational marijuana, increasing the list of states that have decriminalized the schedule 1 drug to 31, including Washington, DC. Only in seven states — Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming — is the possession of marijuana fully illegal, even for medicinal purposes, although in North Carolina, it is not considered a criminal offense.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Oregon became a trailblazer, the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs. Today, America’s prisons have a population of 2.3 million, where one in five behind bars is there on account of a drug offense. With the decriminalization of marijuana, America’s war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, may finally be coming to an end.

      A harsh reality of committing a felony offense is the loss of the right to vote. In the infamous presidential election of 2000, Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in the state of Florida by a razor-thin margin of 537 votes. Florida, along with Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, has some of the harshest possible voting laws for people who have committed a felony offense. According to the Sentencing Project, 5.2 million people were ineligible to vote in the 2020 elections. Nearly 22%, or 1.13 million of them, are in the state of Florida. History may have been very different, and Bush may never have won the 2000 election had Florida’s laws allowed former felons who have paid their dues to the justice system and turned their lives around to vote.

      This November, California made a shift to take a more liberal view on the voting rights of those with felony convictions. Californians restored the right to vote for people on parole, removing an important obstacle in allowing former felons to become full-fledged members of society. They also rejected a proposal that sought stricter parole rules and harsher sentencing.

      Eliminating Symbols of Slavery

      Earlier in June, Mississippi retired the state flag that had incorporated a version of the Confederate battle banner in it. The people of Mississippi voted to approve a new flag with the symbol of magnolia and the words “In God We Trust,” removing one of the last vestiges of Confederacy in a state flag.

      Rhode Island voters passed a measure to strip the racially insensitive phrase “Providence Plantations” from its official name, after having failed to do so in 2010. By an overwhelming majority of 80% and an impressive majority of 68%, respectively, voters in Utah and Nebraska passed an initiative that removes references to slavery from their constitutions and suspends the permission of involuntary servitude as criminal punishment.

       And the Verdict Is

      Toning down the populist and ill-conceived war-on-drugs rhetoric and easing the reintegration of former felons into society by restoring their voting rights are small steps toward meaningful criminal justice reform. Eliminating signifiers that celebrate the Confederacy and slavery from state names and flags is more than symbolic. They open up a path to healing, rejecting the hatred that lurks in the veneration of the icons of white supremacy.

      The disappointments came from my home state of California. Here, Proposition 22 posed the question of whether app-based gig-economy workers such Uber and Lyft drivers should be treated as contractors or as employees with proper benefits. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates pumped nearly $200 million dollars to avoid the responsibility of giving gig-workers employee status. Their marketing blitzkrieg recruited Mothers Against Drunk Driving to portray a dismal scenario of increased drunk-driving deaths should this proposition fail. In the end, capitalism won where people opted to have their cheap Uber and Lyft rides, even if it meant denying their drivers their fair share of benefits.

      More poignantly, California missed its chance to reinstate affirmative action, which it ended in 1996 without giving adequate time for that initiative to have a meaningful impact. Sadly, more than 56% of voters failed to appreciate that compensating for centuries of advantages enjoyed by whites and other privileged classes would not only require counterinitiatives like affirmative action, but that they need to be given time so that African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities have a true shot at social equity.

      Counterbalancing my disappointments stemming from the 70 million who are still willing to embrace Donald Trump and Californians rejecting affirmative action, I found many down-ballot measures, from Mississippi to Utah, from Arizona to New Jersey, pointing to a subtle shift in the right direction. That gives me a glimmer of hope that the soul of America may not be so dark as to be beyond redemption. And as they say, hope springs eternal.

      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

      This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy' | Jonathan Freedland

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      Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgiain January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke. More

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      in World Politics

      India-US Relationship Is Now Official

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      After decades of dithering, India has finally opted for American-led security architecture in Asia. In the latest US-India 2+2 meeting of foreign and defense ministers, the two countries concluded a fourth foundational agreement. The four key agreements between the United States and India to date include the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA, 2018), Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA, 2016), General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA, 2002) and, as of October this year, the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA). This alphabet soup of little-known pacts has created the basis of a US-India entente. 

      India Must Modernize Its Inefficient Defense Production System

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      The seeds of a new architecture have been germinating in the form of the Quad, a grouping of India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Indian scientists have gone on a missile testing spree, and the political leadership in New Delhi is not softening its stand on the India-China border. India is also boosting its defense ties with Southeast Asian nations threatened by China. It has offered the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile to the Philippines. BrahMos can be used against both land and sea targets. As an anti-ship missile, it has few peers. This missile effectively denies area entry to enemy surface combatants.

      In addition to BrahMos, India might soon start selling Akash air defense missiles to its Southeast Asian friends. New Delhi is now clearly making moves to counter Beijing, and closer cooperation with the US seems to be part of India’s new grand strategy.

      The Ghosts of 1962

      In the war of 1962 over a disputed border, India lost disastrously to China, yet it did not establish closer relations with the anti-communist US for largely ideological reasons. The then-prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a socialist. Deeply influenced by the Soviet Union, he was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. Poor at realpolitik, Nehru tried to cultivate the US after 1962 even as he continued to remain close to the Soviet Union. The effort did not lead to much, and Beijing concluded that an Indo-US entente was improbable.

      Since 1962, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has adopted an aggressive stance against the Indian Army. In contrast, India was chastened by the loss of territory and prestige. Therefore, successive Indian governments have adopted a diffident stance vis-à-vis Beijing. In 2020, this has changed. The brutal killing of an Indian colonel by the PLA triggered a ferocious response from Indian troops. A surge of patriotism followed. The Modi-led nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government drew a line in the Himalayas and has stood up to its northern neighbor.

      Many in the English-speaking Indian and Anglo-Saxon media expected and predicted Indian capitulation, defeat and disgrace. The turn of events has proved them wrong. India has conducted its quickest Himalayan mobilization. It has used creative tactics, nibbled some territory hitherto held by the Chinese and put all three of its armed forces — Army, Navy and Air Force — in a state of high operational readiness. India has also conducted special operations inside Chinese territory and openly used Tibetan troops for the first time in its history. 

      New Entente

      In October, Modi’s government has shed India’s traditional Nehruvian diffidence and embraced the US wholeheartedly. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper joined Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar for the third annual US-India 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue in New Delhi.

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      By signing BECA, India has gained access to valuable geospatial data, improving situational awareness for military operations and increasing the accuracy of its missile systems. COMCASA enabled Indian and US military platforms to network with each other. LEMOA allowed Indian and US militaries access to each other’s refueling facilities and military material. GSOMIA started the sharing of sensitive military intelligence data.

      These four agreements enable logistics, communication and geospatial data sharing are in place, making India a de facto US ally. India has turned decisively to the US in part because it has lost faith in Russia’s ability to contain China. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, India and the US have steadily moved closer. However, relations have been greatly influenced by the chemistry of those in power in Washington and New Delhi. Successive governments have blown hot and cold. When there has been a change of power in either democracy, their relations have suffered in the transition.

      Now, the 2+2 dialogue has moved decisively toward operationalizing the Quad. Previously, the Quad had not quite taken off. Australia and Japan have all shied away from closer engagement. This year, Australian sailors are joining the navies of Japan, India and the US for the Malabar naval exercise. This is a major change in political and military alliances in the region.

      The latest meeting marks a watershed in US-India relations. No longer will American policy change if a new administration enters the White House. Even as Donald Trump leaves and Joe Biden takes over, the trajectory of US-India relations is likely to remain the same. Many in New Delhi fear that Biden is likely to initiate a rapprochement with China and pressure India to kick-start talks with Pakistan. Even if that turns out to be true, ties between India and the United States have now been institutionalized, and the countries have entered an entente, if not an alliance.

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