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- in US Politics
Boris Johnson phones to congratulate Joe Biden and discuss 'close' relationship
Boris Johnson has spoken to Joe Biden to congratulate him on his victory over Donald Trump and allay fears Brexit could damage the Northern Ireland peace process, as world leaders lined up to speak to the US president-elect.Johnson was the second world leader to reveal he had spoken to Biden, after the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, did so on Monday. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, French president, Emmanuel Macron, and Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said they had also received a call on Tuesday.“I just spoke Joe Biden to congratulate him on his election. I look forward to strengthening the partnership between our countries and to working with him on our shared priorities – from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the pandemic,” Johnson tweeted.Johnson and Biden are understood to have spoken for around 25 minutes from 4pm on Tuesday in a wide-ranging conversation on trade, Nato and democracy.Biden’s transition team said he thanked the prime minister for his congratulations and expressed his desire to “strengthen the special relationship” and “reaffirmed his support for the Good Friday agreement”.Downing Street said Johnson “warmly congratulated” Biden on his victory and “conveyed his congratulations to vice-president-elect Kamala Harris on her historic achievement”, but the official account did not specifically mention Brexit. However, a No 10 source said: “They talked about the importance of implementing Brexit in such a way that upholds the Good Friday agreement, and the PM assured the president-elect that would be the case.”Biden, who has Irish ancestry, has criticised Johnson’s intention to renege on parts of the EU withdrawal agreement in new Brexit legislation, and said that a US-UK trade deal was contingent on upholding the Good Friday agreement.Theresa May was 10th in line when Trump was elected in November 2016, after Ireland, Turkey, India, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, Israel, Australia and South Korea. Trump told May casually that “if you travel to the US you should let me know” – far short of an official invitation.Downing Street said the president-elect had been invited to attend the Cop26 climate crisis summit the UK was hosting in Glasgow next year, and the G7 Summit, also being hosted by the UK next year.Johnson and Biden have never met, although Biden allies have been disparaging about the prime minister. They include a former aide to Barack Obama, who said Democrats had not forgotten about Johnson’s suggestion the “part-Kenyan” former president held an “ancestral dislike of the British empire”.However, Downing Street has emphasised that the two leaders have much in common, in particular a commitment to tackling the climate emergency, which was not shared with the Trump administration.Over the weekend, Johnson said there was “far more that unites the government of this country and government in Washington any time, any stage, than divides us”. He added: “I think now, with president Biden in the White House in Washington, we have the real prospect of American global leadership in tackling climate change. And the UK, as you know, was the first major country to set out that objective of net zero by 2050.“We led the way a few years ago. And we’re really hopeful now that president Biden will follow and will help us to deliver a really good outcome of the Cop26 summit next year in Glasgow.”Senator Chris Coons, a close friend and ally of the president-elect, said he hoped Biden would look beyond the caricature of the UK prime minister. “In my meetings with the prime minister, he’s struck me as someone who is more agile, engaging, educated and forward-looking than perhaps the caricature of him in the American press would have suggested,” he said. “I found an engaging person to meet with and speak to and it’s my hope that president-elect Biden will have a similar experience.”The UK foreign office permanent secretary, Sir Philip Barton, rejected claims that Britain was trying to have it both ways by congratulating Biden but saying that some processes were “still playing out” in the US, a reference to Trump’s refusal to accept the election result.The Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the committee, accused Barton of relying on inertia and presiding over a half-hearted and incompetent congratulation. He said he did not see any of the necessary flair coming from the Foreign Office to build the personal relationships on which successful diplomacy rested.PA Media contributed to this report More
- in US Politics
How US voter turnout increased in key states – a visual guide
Voter turnout has been a key strategy for Democrats this election season. For the presidential race, the strategy worked. The US experienced a historic turnout rate of 65.1% – the highest in over 100 years – delivering the popular vote and electoral college to Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate.
Over half of states saw an increase in voter turnout since 2016, with key battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania seeing participation well above the national rate.
Though the pandemic introduced a number of complications to voting day, early voting and mail-in ballots brought a record turnout for some states. This was further complicated by the fact that some Republicans have further restricted access to voting, and voting protections in several states are weaker than ever. Many communities continued to experience difficulties this year in the form of long voting lines and sparse polling locations.
Small multiple line chart of voter turnouts for each state. More - in US Politics
US records seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new Covid cases
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The coronavirus pandemic continues to surge in the US, after the country recorded a seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new cases.
Monday also saw the US surpass 10m total cases – the highest number in the world, by far – and reach a death toll of 238,256. There were 111,433 new cases on Monday and 590 new deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Hospitalisations were also rising, with more than 59,000 nationwide, reported the Covid Tracking Project, which saw the biggest single-day increase since 10 July. It found South Dakota had the highest hospitalisation rates in the US and said Illinois had reported more than 10,000 cases for four days straight.
Joe Biden, the president-elect, has warned the US is “facing a very dark winter” and that even with Pfizer’s announcement that it has a vaccine it believes is 90% effective, 200,000 more lives could be lost in the next few months.
Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, said on Tuesday the federal government will have enough of the vaccine by the end of December “to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens”. By the end of January, he told NBC, there will be enough for all healthcare workers and first responders, with March or early April targeted for a general vaccination programme.
Experts say cases could rise exponentially in the coming weeks. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, told CNN: “We are watching cases increase substantially in this country far beyond, I think, what most people ever thought could happen.
“It will not surprise me if in the next weeks we see over 200,000 new cases a day.”
On Tuesday, Donald Trump tweeted purported quotes from a Fox Business journalist and his former White House doctor turned congressman-elect, Ronny Jackson, crediting the president with the possible arrival of a vaccine. He also retweeted a post describing Biden as an “ambulance chaser”.
Pfizer senior vice-president Kathrin Jansen told the New York Times the company did not participate in the government’s Operation Warp Speed or take any of its money.
The Food and Drug Administration said it had issued an emergency use authorisation for Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody therapy, called bamlanivimab, to treat mild to moderate cases in adults and children over 12.
On Tuesday, Osterholm told CBS a “perfect storm” was forming and that hospitals were “about to be overrun”.
“We’re going to see by far the darkest days of this pandemic between now and next spring when the vaccine becomes available,” he told CBS.
Top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told MSNBC he expects the FDA will probably put in for an emergency use authorisation of the Pfizer vaccine in the next week to week and a half. Providing it goes through, he said, doses should be available for highest-priority people in December.
Asked if he would take the vaccine if it was approved by the FDA, he said he would.
“I’m going to look at the data, but I trust Pfizer. I trust the FDA,” Fauci said. “These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists. If they look at this data, and they say this data is solid, let’s go ahead and approve it, I promise you, I will take the vaccine, and I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
He also reiterated the importance of wearing a mask, saying: “You protect others. Their mask protects you, and your mask also protects you.”
Public health officials believe the federal government has not done enough to encourage Americans to take a vaccine or prepare them for what to expect.
“This needed to happen yesterday,” Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told USA Today. “It’s like watching a train wreck happen.”
Across the US, states are struggling. In El Paso, Texas, officials have six mobile morgues and have requested four more, CNN reported. The state was approaching 1m infections. In Ohio the chief medical officer, Dr Bruce Vanderhoff, warned of an “unprecedented spike” in hospital use and a growing demand on staff.
“If we don’t control the spread of this virus, we won’t be able to care for those who are acutely ill without postponing important, but less urgent, care,” he said. “We anticipate that this kind of shift could happen in a matter of weeks if trends don’t change.”
In Utah, the governor Gary Herbert, warned of a “dire situation” in hospitals, declared a state of emergency, issued a mask mandate and restricted social gatherings.
“This is a sacrifice for all of us,” he said. “But as we slow the spread it will make all the difference for our overworked healthcare workers, who desperately need our help.”
In California, cases are at their highest levels in months, a rise that the governor, Gavin Newsom, said could be linked to Halloween. The positivity rate in the state is 3.7% – a jump from 2.5% in just over three weeks – and hospitalisations have risen by more than 28% in two weeks.
Newsom said people were starting to “take down their guard, take off their masks, begin to mix outside their households. We’re seeing some early indication related to Halloween. I’m very sober about that.” More - in US Politics
New research sheds light on Alexander Hamilton's ties to slavery
Far from being the “uncompromising abolitionist” of Ron Chernow’s hit biography and the Broadway musical it inspired, Alexander Hamilton not only owned enslaved people himself “but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally”, new research claims.
“When we say Hamilton didn’t enslave people, we’re erasing them from the story,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, told the New York Times. “The most important thing is they were here. We need to acknowledge them.”
One leading historian of founders and slavery, Annette Gordon-Reed, said that in showing Hamilton “as an enslaver”, Serfilippi had “broadened the discussion”.
Among other achievements, Hamilton, the founder of the US banking system, is generally held to be one of the revolutionary generation less marked by the stain of slavery than, for instance, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the first and third presidents who both owned enslaved people.
Serfilippi’s research has therefore caused a stir.
“In the 21st century,” she writes, “Alexander Hamilton is almost universally depicted as an abolitionist. From Ron Chernow’s Hamilton to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: an American Musical, there is little room in modern discourse for questioning the founder’s thoughts and feelings on slavery.
“ … However, some of Hamilton’s writings often believed to express abolitionist sympathies or the evolution of such feelings are more in line with his politics than his morals.”
Hamilton has long been thought to have had an antipathy to slavery instilled by a childhood among the brutal sugar plantations of the British Caribbean. Serfilippi, however, writes that “to date, no primary sources have been found to corroborate” the idea.
Hamilton married into the Schuyler family, a powerful force in New York, then, like the rest of the United States, a state where slavery was legal although it was in local decline. Recent research on the Schuylers’ ownership of enslaved people has turned up skeletons as well as plentiful evidence.
Biographers including Chernow have long noted that Hamilton may have owned enslaved people. Serfilippi cites evidence from his account books which suggests that he did, for example a payment of $250 to his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, for “[two] Negro servants purchased by him for me”.
Chernow told the Times that though Serfilippi had done “a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways”, she had not sufficiently considered his anti-slavery activities.
But Gordon-Reed, a Harvard professor and the author of The Hemingses of Monticello, about those enslaved by Jefferson, called Serfilippi’s work “fascinating”.
In a year marked by protests against police brutality and racial injustice, most statues and public monuments defaced or removed across the US have been of leaders or soldiers of the Confederacy, the rebel state which fought and lost the civil war between 1861 and 1865 in an attempt to maintain slavery.
But the reputations of the founders and other American leaders – even Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery and won the civil war, and Ulysses S Grant, the general who fought it – have also come under renewed scrutiny.
This summer, Miranda responded to criticism of his musical for not engaging with the realties of slavery and Hamilton’s relationship to it.
“All the criticisms are valid,” he wrote. “The sheer tonnage of complexities and failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took six years and fit as much as I could in a two-and-a-half-hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”
Regarding Serfilippi’s research, Gordon-Reed wrote on Twitter that it “reminds of the ubiquitous nature of slavery in the colonial period and the early American republic.
“Alexander Hamilton as an enslaver broadens the discussion.” More America’s Moment of National Reckoning
America has just concluded a cataclysmic Election Day and its immediate aftermath. What was supposed to be our quadrennial celebration of democratic institutions is instead a reflection of what happens when unprincipled and corrupt leaders are given access to the national stage to promote disorder, distrust and chaos. It seems likely that the outcome of the vote will be finalized in the days ahead and that Joe Biden will have won the election. But until Trump is chained in his White House bunker without public access, the peaceful transfer of power remains at risk.
Add to the equation that there is a deep sense among progressive activists, people of color, the underprivileged and the under-represented that over 71.5 million votes for Trump was a direct repudiation of their demands for a dynamic push forward for social, economic and racial justice in America. And this doesn’t even get to the immediacy of confronting a rampaging pandemic at home and an abundance of global challenges.
360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained
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Amid the chaos, let me be clear that I hope an armed confrontation can be avoided and that there will be enough leadership and institutional integrity to force an orderly transfer of power. However, the election results make clear that many more people voted for Trump this time than last time. Targeted right-wing messaging works, and there is no apparent antidote. Those 71.5 million votes for Trump are a terrible outcome for a nation at war with itself and in which only the right-wingers have the guns.
As Biden’s victory sets in, there will be those who cheered on Trump and his toxic message who will not rest until they try to blow something up along with the country itself. As that unfolds, there is likely to be the first foundational test of America’s political and military institutions since the Civil War. I am not sure those institutions will hold. It is certainly not clear that those institutions can ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
Healing the Nation
At some point, something will have to give. At that point, a crippled America will harvest the rancid fruit of decades of delusion about how “exceptional” the nation was as it grew intellectually lazy, willed its future to greedy and corrupt capitalists, and utterly failed to invest in a sustainable system of governance that could meet the challenges of an evolving world. Picking up the pieces will not be easy.
The 50-state solution so beloved by those wallowing in the 19th century simply must be discarded, and some new foundation for national governance must be designed and implemented. Unfortunately, with the coronavirus pandemic ripping its way through the populace and a court system packed with those 19th-century wannabes, the time for wishful thinking will have to wait. The 50-state solution will have to be urgently junked to address the pandemic with a national plan and national mandates. Maybe afterward, America can study the results of the coordinated national response and find the way to a new, vibrant, 21st-century federal system.
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Meanwhile, there will be an enormous amount of focus on how America got to this point, but I want to get out front that years of “false equivalency” disguised as “balance” or “fairness” has poisoned the nation’s well of fact-based knowledge from which any democratic nation would hope that its citizens could draw. Much has been said about willful ignorance, but not enough about the fountains of falsehoods that feed those unwilling to learn much of anything that requires factual focus. Repetition of belief is no substitute for acquisition of knowledge.
The impending national convulsion has just begun. A reckoning with collective ignorance and the arrogance of ignorance is essential as the starting point for a meaningful national dialog about how America so completely lost its way. The responsible mainstream media and social media outlets have to stop honoring falsehood with repetition and that most ludicrous of questions — “What’s your response?” And to try to rebuild lost credibility, real and transparent sourcing of news reporting has to again become the rule.
Then, if government institutions are to be resurrected and strengthened, there must be some measure of accountability for those who worked so diligently to undermine governance, often to enhance their own wealth and power. Today’s list of the corrupt is really long. Trump is a sick symptom, a tool used by so many others to achieve corrupt ends. But he is also symbolic of so much of what is so wrong that his accountability is an essential component of any national reckoning.
It is important that Trump be charged with the crimes he has committed both in office and in his corrupt life that led to his election in the first place in 2016. It is equally important that those in his inner circle, including his family, his enabling aides, his attorney general and his secretary of state, all find themselves under criminal investigative scrutiny.
This will surely further divide the nation. But it will be impossible to begin the healing if there is no accountability for the intentional wrongdoing that has led to so much suffering and dysfunction. Those who corruptly profited from the past should have to pay in the present if there is to be a future with the rule of law restored to its proper place in the national pantheon of virtues.
Joe Biden’s Inauguration
However, the critical first task ahead is to ensure Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. Unfortunately, that date is over 10 weeks away. Ten weeks of an angry and “victimized” Trump still empowered to “govern” will bleed so much more blood from the nation. He will have to be thwarted at every turn each and every day, so the hard work of restoration can begin now.
This must start with a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic that is raging across America and much of the globe. This cannot wait 10 more weeks. There is no need for a “balanced” discussion because we have no choice. We have seen how a venal leader can lead so many to their demise and so many more to a participatory march to more death and disease.
Biden must try hard to convince those participatory marchers to turn around, look at those they care about and start protecting themselves and others. This will be a hard sell, and those of us who have already seen this light will have to step up our game as well. It is no longer fine for corporate sloths and all those endangered small businesses to wink at their “no mask, no entry” signs. It is time for local governments to publicly out those businesses that do not enforce mask mandates and social distancing in their community and publicly support those that do.
I am hardly certain where any of this will end. But I am certain that the false narrative of a caring, giving and committed people has now finally been ripped from our delusional midst. America is not now, nor has it often been, much of anything to be proud of.
*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
- in Elections
DoJ officials condemn Barr's approval of voter fraud inquiries without evidence
Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.
Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.
In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.
Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilised the might of the justice department in a politicised direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division of the DoJ under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “scaremongering”.
“Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, disinformation and sowing chaos,” she said on Twitter:
Gupta, now chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s aim was “stoking division, polarization and lies”, in order to “undermine confidence in outcome with Trump voters and ultimately a Biden administration”.
Other former prosecutors, legal scholars and election experts debated how serious Barr’s move was likely to be. Steve Vladeck, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas, stressed that the DoJ had no power to block states from certifying election results – only judges could do that.
But Vladeck went on to describe the Barr memo as “ominous” in that it “perpetuates the illegitimacy narrative” that has been embraced by Trump and senior Republicans in the hope of clouding Biden’s victory.
Preet Bharara, who Trump fired in 2017 as US attorney for the southern district of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. For now, he said, he was “more disgusted than scared” by Barr’s intervention.
“But stay tuned.”
Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old non-intervention policy over which he has now run roughshod. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”, and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.
Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the DoJ’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship”.
“Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” he says.
Those sentences prompted some speculation that Barr was merely going through the motions to placate Trump. The president has by all accounts been on the warpath since the election was called for Biden, ordering his administration to take any action to forward the lie that the election has been stolen.
But such a theory of Barr’s conduct is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has attempted to push prosecutors into intervening in the election. Three weeks before election day, he made a similar gambit to lift the decades-old restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.
Having been appointed by Trump to be the nation’s most senior prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has shown himself willing to side openly with the president in apparent breach of the time-honoured independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the publication of the Mueller report into collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, which was criticized as spin on behalf of the president.
More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to sow doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has intensified baseless claims from the White House about rampant fraud in mail-in voting – a form of electoral participation that has long been practiced by some states and that was widely used this year.
Barr went as far as to lie on live television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the supposed incident never took place.
Doubts about Barr’s intentions were heightened after it was reported that a few hours before the letter to prosecutors was disclosed, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader.
McConnell has remained in lockstep with Trump, showing no sign he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accepting defeat shatters a norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to US democracy since 1800.McConnell, who is likely to continue to control the Senate for the Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.
He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” More
