Law

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    [post_content] => A band of First Nations people have won national and international support for their refusal to allow a pipeline through their land.

Until cross-country rail blockades by Indigenous activists and their allies made front-page news earlier this month, few Canadians noticed the protests against a pipeline in We’tsuewet’en territory. Opposition to the project from First Nations people in northwestern British Columbia has, however, been consistent—and years in the making. The dam that had been holding back a slow and steady bubbling of resistance burst late last month when heavily armed militarized police moved to enforce a court injunction and tear down a blockade against Coastal GasLink, the company that wants to run its 670-kilometre gas pipeline through unceded native land.

Hereditary chiefs of We’tsuewet’en territory maintain they have jurisdiction over this unceded land and that both Coastal GasLink/TC Energy and the government are in violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Complicating matters: under the Indigenous system of governance, hereditary chiefs from each clan are title holders of the land; meanwhile the band councils (created through the government-imposed Indian Act) have control over the land that the government allotted to reserves. The issue of who controls the land has never been settled legally, nor resolved by negotiation or litigation.

This is not the first time a confrontation between Canadian authorities and Indigenous people has made international news. In 1990, Mohawk people in Quebec held off for 78 days against a golf club developer who wanted to construct condos on traditional burial grounds. The confrontation led to the Oka Crisis, with the provincial and federal governments, in a rare show of unanimity, working together to deploy the military against the barricaded Mohawk. Like the current We’tsuwet’en standoff, it sparked a global solidarity movement in support of Indigenous communities fighting a centuries-old battle against colonialism.

This, however, is the first time Indigenous protests over land rights has garnered popular support among non-Indigenous Canadians.

    
 	
  • The Idle No More protest movement, founded in 2012 to honour Indigenous sovereignty and protect the water and land, sensitized non-Indigenous Canadians to the grievances and concerns of Indigenous communities.
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  • The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls demonstrated the direct connection between the violation of Indigenous rights and Canada’s staggering rates of violence against women and girls of the First Nations.
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  • The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada opened the nation’s eyes to the horrific and lasting impacts of the residential school system on Indigenous students and their families.
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Add to all of the above a rising global awareness about the effect of climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy systems and it’s easy to see why popular support for the protests has grown—despite the economic cost of forcing the railway to shut down.

We’tsuwet’en advocates and hereditary leaders have been warning for years about the possibility of a showdown. Critics of the train blockades, however, are now saying that few Indigenous groups are involved in the protests. They point the finger instead at white eco lobbyists, allegedly funded by foreign groups with nefarious intentions. John Ivison, a columnist for the right-wing National Post, went so far as to claim “millennial eco-activists are the new colonialists.” This is a bold take, given that land protectors have for decades been defending the environment from corporations intent on ramming pipelines through unceded land.

Activists for Indigenous rights and for environmental protection rights have allies in Canada and around the world because they are intrinsically connected through shared goals. Shale gas development, pipelines transporting oil, the polluting effects of extraction for a country’s biodiversity, water and land, are issues that are not limited to Indigenous communities. Nor is opposition to pipelines uniquely Canadian: TC Energy has faced major opposition in Mexico and the United States. As long as the industrialized world refuses to transition to renewable sources, they will continue to expropriate Indigenous land and exploit the natural world for fuel.

This is why Indigenous activists around the world —Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia — are fighting against mining, logging, and other exploitation of community lands, often at the cost of their own lives.

The UN has warned of a “drastic increase” in violence against Indigenous people because of their resistance. According to UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “67 percent of the 312 human rights defenders murdered in 2017 were defending their lands, the environment, or Indigenous rights, nearly always in the context of private sector projects.”

But there are success stories, too. Just last week, the Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, won a ruling against a Canadian-owning mining company operating in the town. The company had obtained permits to exploit local mineral and precious metal deposits without first consulting the community and, as a result, the environmental protection agency ordered the mine closed.

Political activism raises awareness, which in turn inspires conversations, and helps public sentiment turn in favour of the marginalized— and this is when the vilification begins. Smear campaigns and hate speech painting Indigenous people as obstacles to economic development, lawless “thugs” and “paid protesters” have already commenced, with some of these comments coming directly from the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Outgoing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who has repeatedly referred to the democratic protests as illegal, instructed Indigenous protesters—many of whom still live with boil-water advisories in communities that lack basic amenities—to “check their privilege.”

Scheer recently stood up in the House of Commons to demand the protestors be removed by police force if necessary. Peter MacKay, the man currently vying for Scheer’s job, chimed in by posting a video declaring Indigenous protesters and their supporters “a small gang of professional protesters” and “thugs” holding “innocent Canadians hostage.”

The Post Millennial, a pro-Conservative media platform, blamed CN Rail’s recent layoffs on Indigenous activists— ignoring both the fact that the company had announced upcoming layoffs in late 2019 and that unions and workers have expressed solidarity for We’tsuwet’en protests.

“Rail blockades could see cities run out of chlorine for water treatment,” read another headline. But the article itself attributes the claim to a lobbyist for chemical distribution companies. Most cities in fact have their chlorine trucked in; and The Post Millennial did not mention that 60 Indigenous communities have been living with boil-water advisories for decades.

In Canada, as in many other countries with significant Indigenous populations, the policy for decades has been to deny or ignore their legitimate rights and titles. Now, once again, a private company wants to invade unceded territory and exploit its land for economic gain at the expense of the people who live on it. Because those people have little legal or economic power, they are engaging in peaceful civil disobedience as a means to be heard. But instead of listening, the authorities are treating them like criminals.

Faced with escalating pressure from the blockades and the people outraged by them, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled a trip to Barbados, where he was expected to pitch Caribbean leaders on why Canada should be granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Instead, he held an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers Monday in Ottawa. To his credit, he denounced the calls for force, making it clear that a solution could only be found through discussions. Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller reiterated that sentiment, stating that “the pathway to de-escalation is a painful one, and it’s an hour-by-hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.” Violence and suppression are easy and respectful dialogue is tedious and long, but it’s the latter that is required now.

Canada has yet to engage fully with its grim colonial legacy. This is a country founded on the often-violent seizure of Indigenous land; the displacement of communities via  state-sponsored residential schools; and the banning and hoped-for extinction of Indigenous culture, languages, and culture. This legacy is responsible for countless deaths and for generational trauma that manifests in high rates of suicide, incarceration, and substance abuse; it has also played an instrumental role in settler privilege and prosperity.

Canada can no longer afford to prop up polluting industries that threaten our biodiversity and the viability of our land and water. It’s unconscionable to do so. Indigenous concerns should be our concerns also. They are one and the same.

The discourse and increasing support around the We’tsuewet’en protests and train blockades is evolving rapidly because public awareness is rising. Canadian attitudes toward environmental issues are evolving. We’re now starting to realize as a global community that Indigenous people are leading the way in a battle we must wage together.

 
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A standoff over a gas pipeline has become an international call for environmental action

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => For the Christian Right, religious freedom means their right to discriminate against people who don't share their beliefs. 

In Bible class at my evangelical high school, I was taught that pluralism is “heresy” and must be rejected. This was a more formal way of conveying what I had already learned as a small child— that it was the task of all Christians to convert everyone to Christianity, and that the world would be a much better place if everyone were Christian.

A person who is committed to the liberal democratic project will probably be appalled at the idea of teaching children to desire a world in which everyone follows the same religion. Many, however, do not share that reaction—and that is because Christian hegemony is so smoothly woven into the fabric of American life that they fail to recognize it. Christian privilege and Christian supremacism are very real; if we are ever going to see the United States live up to the democratic potential contained in the higher ideals of the founding fathers, however much they failed to realize those ideals, we must be as committed to its dismantling as we are to that of white supremacism.

Pluralism: What’s at stake

Pluralism, of course, refers to people of diverse and conflicting beliefs coexisting peaceably, linked by their adherence to a shared social contract which commits members of different groups to treating others fairly and accommodating them equally in the public square. Outside academic settings, however, pluralism is little discussed these days—except by right-wing Christians. That’s a problem: failing to articulate a liberal understanding of pluralism will allow the authoritarian Christian Right, already advantaged in what I recently argued in Playboy Magazine is our de facto Christian public sphere, to drag the country ever further rightward.

Liberals do not feel comfortable discussing the place of religion in the public sphere, says Jeremy Forest Price, assistant professor of education and chair of the Jewish Faculty and Staff Council at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. Avoiding the topic, however,  has unintended consequences. “It allows those who seek to push their own religious agendas, particularly evangelical Christians, Christian dominionists*, and Christian nationalists, to [convince the public] not only to support their beliefs and practices over others, but to make the public sphere itself mirror their beliefs and practices.”

Because they reflexively support the separation of church and state, and therefore may not feel an innate sense of urgency to articulate its value, liberals and progressives run the risk of ceding the national discourse on pluralism to the Right.

Fortunately, there is an increasingly visible broad-based movement, including both believers and non-believers, who oppose the Christian nationalism that is ascendant in the Trump era. They are working actively to reclaim the meaning of religious freedom from those who would define it as the right to discriminate against members of othered groups on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” even at the expense of equal accommodation in the public square. I contend that we need similarly to reclaim the liberal value of pluralism.

Paul Rosenberg, a writer and activist who has documented and championed this movement, says that pluralism requires an openness that religious fundamentalists lack, and when it comes to building and participating in a functional democratic society, what people do is more important than their espoused beliefs. “It is in doing the work that we discover what we have in common,” he said, noting that the work itself leads to an appreciation of our differences.

I asked other stakeholders to comment on what pluralism means to them in theory and practice, hoping to encourage further discussion of this critical civic concept among those of us who reject the Republican Party’s authoritarianism. To understand the stakes, we need to take a brief look at the state of the discourse around pluralism on the Christian Right.

According to reactionary Catholic scholar Brad Gregory, “hyper-pluralism” is to blame for everything that ails the modern West, and the solution would seem to be a return to some sort of imagined Catholic unity. This would undoubtedly entail many horrors for non-Christians, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.

Russell Moore , the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is among those conservative Christians who dismiss pluralism as “heresy.” Sohrab Ahmari, the radical Catholic writer, unabashedly argues that conservative Christians should “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” Attorney General William Barr seems to share this view: in a speech he delivered at Notre Dame University this past October, Barr decried “militant secularists” who were supposedly “behind a campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” C. Colt Anderson, a Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, was so appalled by the extremism in Barr’s remarks that he called him “a threat to American democracy.”

There are other conservative Christian commentators, however—people like evangelical historian John Fea and David French, a frequent contributor to The National Review—who embrace a concept of pluralism very much of a piece with the Christian Right’s understanding of “religious liberty” as their liberty to discriminate against others, including Christians with whom they disagree. Fea and French are public figures who enjoy a degree of respectability; it is dangerous to cede our contemporary understanding of pluralism exclusively to them and to those even further to the right. The Christian Right already dominates sex education in our public schools and has effectively ended abortion in numerous states. Christian hospitals regularly deny women and queer people life-saving healthcare on the basis of strictly religious views that many of their patients do not share. Deregulated homeschooling, pushed above all by conservative Christians, allows abuse and fundamentalist indoctrination to flourish. If liberals will not argue the meaning of pluralism and religious freedom precisely as liberal values, the Christian Right will only subject more and more of American life to its harmful theocratic agenda.

So what might a liberal pluralism predicated on robust separation of church and state and equal accommodation in the public square look like? And how might we navigate the tensions not just between representatives of different confessions, but also between believers and non-believers?

Liberal pluralism in theory and practice

Non-religious voters now make up the single largest defined bloc within the Democratic Party. But a large and significant part of the party’s base is composed of Christians—especially African-American Christians. It is self-evidently necessary for progressive atheists and agnostics to build coalitions with progressive believers and to work together toward the common good. Loud voices in the visible atheist community, like the prominent neuroscientist Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, often alienate not only religious believers, but also women and people of color with remarks that are Islamophobic, racist, and misogynist. Progressive atheists who are interested in coalition building must work to repair the bridges that these men and their trollish online fans have damaged.

Tom Van Denburgh, communications director for American Atheists, acknowledged that “people within the atheist community sometimes engage in anti-religious rhetoric,” but attributes this anger in most cases to their having been harmed by religion. But he agrees that justifiable anger at religious privilege, which in the United States primarily pertains to Christians, must not become an excuse to dehumanize all religious people. “While there’s still a lot of work to do, the atheist community has become increasingly inclusive and more concerned about how religious privilege impacts different groups in disparate ways. And that means advocating for women, LGBTQ people, members of minority faith communities, and people of color.” He added: “Integral to [our] work is building bridges with religious allies when we find common ground.”

American Atheists can point to practical achievements in this regard, notably the launch of BlitzWatch Coalition, a project dedicated to opposing the Christian nationalist agenda of Project Blitz, which seeks to impose hardline Christian values on every aspect of American political and civil society. Van Denburgh sees the work involved in BlitzWatch Coalition as authentic pluralism in practice, and BlitzWatch Coalition’s member organizations include the Interfaith Alliance and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

For Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, RCRC’s Director of Spiritual Care and Activism, pluralism is associated above all with compassion. “To be compassionate requires decentering or stepping outside one’s own experiences in order to give priority to the experiences of others,” Jackson said. This task is more challenging, she added, for those who “are part of any privileged hegemony” because of “a limitation of experience and exposure.”

Christianity represents one of these hegemonies, said Jackson. “For interfaith dialogues to be healthy and viable, now is a critical time for atheist perspectives to be included,” she said, adding: “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.”

Jeremy Forest Price, who is involved in interfaith work, agrees with Jackson on the importance of clear-eyed honesty regarding power dynamics and the importance of representation. “An emphasis on pluralism will help open up the discussion around religion (and worldviews, spiritualities, and the absence of religion) so that we can trace the ways that specific religious ideologies influence our shared public spaces,” he said.

Such tracing must include facing the impact of Christian supremacism in the United States, which means breaking the social taboo on criticizing any large Christian group. The focus of much of my own work in recent years has been on facilitating the collective visibility of ex-evangelicals and others who have left fundamentalist religion, and on advocating for us to be heard in our national discussions of religion and politics. Efforts to halt America’s lurch into authoritarianism will fail unless we shift the national discourse on Christianity.

I believe that by devoting some serious thought and effort to pluralism, both theory and practice, those of us who support democracy and human rights might succeed in nudging the American public sphere toward the kind of discourse that will aid us in the the realization of this country’s democratic potential.

* While there are a number of specific fundamentalist Christian ideologies whose adherents refer to themselves as Dominionists (for example, Seven Mountains Dominionism), broadly defined, Christian dominionism simply refers to the beliefs and politics of Christians who pursue social domination over members of other groups by enshrining their religious beliefs in coercive law.
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The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Grassroots organizers are proving to be a formidable challenge to the Republican Party's voter suppression tactics. 

When Stacey Abrams, the first black woman ever nominated by a major party to run for governor of any state, ran as Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2018, voters knew she might lose. Abrams’ skills, tenacity, and national profile—enhanced by a decade of service in Georgia’s state legislature and an endorsement from Barack Obama—helped secure her historic nomination. But the state’s long history of voter suppression was a formidable obstacle to victory.

Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate then serving as Georgia’s Secretary of State, was responsible for overseeing voter registration. One month before the election, his office was holding 53,000 voter registration applications for review—nearly 70 percent of which were for black residents, who compose approximately 32 percent of Georgia’s population. In a leaked recording Kemp can be heard saying that the Abrams campaign’s voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.”

Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes.

The United States has a long history of voter suppression. For decades following Reconstruction, black American residents of Jim Crow states who tried to exercise their right to vote were subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, arrests, savage beatings, and murder. In the United States (and in Britain), women who agitated for the right to vote were arrested and imprisoned; when they protested by going on hunger strikes, they were violently force-fed.

Contemporary voter suppression tactics are just as prevalent, though implementation is no longer as violent. In 2011, New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien vowed to “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident” and crack down on same-day voter registrations in college towns, which, he said, were full of “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Voter suppression has been a key component of Republican electoral strategy at least since 2008—particularly, but not exclusively, in the Midwest and South. The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. Republican strategists saw in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories a rising tide of “kids voting liberal” and minority voter turnout that threatened GOP power. In response, they crafted a strategy to suppress the vote, especially among young people and black people.

It’s no secret that conservatives are deliberately targeting people of color. In a 2019 documentary called “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook,” a North Carolina retiree named Michael Hyers describes his role in helping to purge thousands from his state’s voter rolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. While claiming—without evidence—that he’s working to counteract rampant voter fraud, Hyers, who is white, repeatedly uses language that suggests his true motives are to keep black people from voting. “We got to clean the rolls up one way or another,” he says. “It’s about time we turned the lights on in the kitchen and started cleaning the cockroaches out of here.” In explaining that people like him have a knack for spotting anomalies in registrations, he says, “It’s kind of like seeing a lump of coal in a bale of cotton—it’ll just pop right out at you.”

Don Yelton resigned as chair of North Carolina's Buncombe County Republican Party in 2013 after “The Daily Show” aired an interview in which he acknowledged that new state voting laws were designed to “kick the Democrats in the butt” and could hurt “lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything.”

This sort of overtly racist discourse can incite violence. Shortly before a gunman opened fire in 2019 outside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 and wounding 26, a manifesto that he is believed to have authored appeared online. The long, detailed document includes a description of the author’s intent to “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc” through violent means.

While Republicans work to keep certain demographic groups from voting, institutions like the Electoral College sap the power of our votes. In November, Stacey Abrams told Oliver Laughland, a reporter for The Guardian U.S., that the Electoral College should be abolished. It was, she said, “designed because those who were in power did not trust the peasants and the working people to actually make good decisions, and we should all be in rebellion against that idea.”

One way to join Abrams’s efforts to fight back against voter suppression is to get involved with one of the grassroots organizations that have sprung up over the last decade to combat anti-democratic measures. After Brian Kemp was declared the winner of Georgia’s gubernatorial election, Abrams founded Fair Fight to “promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights.” Through Fair Fight’s nonprofit she also helped organize a lawsuit that challenged Georgia’s entire election system, arguing that it violates the constitutional rights of voters of color.

While large black populations can make states like Georgia targets of voter suppression efforts, they also create bases of power from which those efforts can be fought. In a 2017 Alabama Senate election, black voters organized to propel Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, to a narrow victory over Republican Roy Moore; his victory made Jones the first Democrat since 1997 to represent the state of Alabama in the U.S. Senate. Doug Jones is white, but 56 percent of those who voted for him were black. According to NBC News exit polls, 96 percent of black voters supported Jones, including 98 percent of black female voters and 93 percent of black male voters.New groups like Woke Vote, a “tiny” collection of students, church-going activists, and organizers, succeeded in getting out the vote for Jones by concentrating on “potential sites of latent black political power, including historically black colleges and universities and black churches,” writes Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. Newkirk describes these institutions as “force-multipliers, turning each potential new voter into an organizer.” Woke Vote “secured pledges from members not only to vote, but to bring people with them to the polls.”

Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color, writes in a 2017 New York Times op-ed that “independent, under-the-radar, grass-roots, on-the-ground voter turnout efforts by black leaders and organizers in black neighborhoods” made the difference in Alabama—and not the Democratic Party, nor Doug Jones’ campaign. Phillips names organizations like BlackPAC, which canvassed the state and organized transportation for voters.

In his notorious interview for "The Daily Show," Don Yelton said that laws restricting voting only hurt lazy people. “If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it,” Yelton said.

Acquiring an ID card is, however, not an easy undertaking. Government agencies have limited hours and are often inaccessible to people who cannot afford time off work or the cost of travel. The 25 percent of Americans who do not have internet access at home face an additional obstacle: they have no easy way of looking up voter requirements in their area.

When election law is deliberately abstruse and selectively enforced, it’s rational to conclude that it might be safer to skip voting than to risk breaking the law. In 2018, a dozen people—nine of them black—in North Carolina’s Alamance County were charged with voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election. All were on probation or parole for felony convictions, and most had no idea they were committing a crime by voting while on parole. One of those charged, a man named Taranta Holman who was then 28 years old, told The New York Times that he had never voted before 2016 and never would again; it was simply “too much of a risk.” Residents of Texas, Kansas, Idaho, and other states have also been charged with voting illegally.

Grassroots efforts to counteract voter suppression have succeeded in part because many Americans see voting as a duty as well as a right. They want to vote, but they need information, encouragement, and support. Reported obstacles to voting include lack of time, lack of transportation, work and family responsibilities that preclude people from waiting in long lines, broken machines, unclear and/or onerous voter ID requirements—and, notably, anxiety. (I remember feeling slightly panicky entering a voting booth for the first time as an adult; the machines are not user-friendly!)

Accompanying a person who is nervous or uncertain because they haven’t voted in a long time, if ever, to the polls is not only an act of kindness—it’s a powerful act of solidarity. Like women seeking to exercise their right to a safe and legal abortion, marginalized people have, ever since winning the right to vote, been actively discouraged or prevented from using it.

We can’t reform institutions, repeal unjust laws, or ensure that every election official is capable and fair-minded overnight, but we can support one another, logistically and psychologically, in exercising our rights. Just as escorting one woman into an abortion clinic is an act of communal solidarity that communicates to all women the message “We are in this together,” escorting voters to the polls doesn’t just move the needle in one election: it helps build community power in the long term.
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Escorting voters to the polls is as crucial as escorting women to abortion clinics

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => Can the law save our democracies? A new crop of podcasts, films, and television dramas attempt to answer the burning question of our times.

Legal dramas and police procedurals are hugely popular genres of entertainment. 12 Angry Men, Law & Order, and the Wallander detective novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell spring randomly to mind, but there are of dozens of examples in film, television, and literature. Recently, however, a crop of new dramas and documentaries that focus on the law and legal process seem to indicate, based on popularity and critical acclaim, to reflect a shift in the zeitgeist. Instead of providing escapism through fiction, the latest legal procedurals offer intellectual engagement with current events, and possibly answers to an urgent and poignant question: can the law, if implemented ethically, stabilize the shaky institutions holding up our democracies and redeem our social norms?



Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which began this week with saturation media coverage, comes on the back of months of shocking revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and what appears to be a high-level conspiracy between the state and Epstein’s defense team to look the other way for decades while he openly trafficked in and preyed sexually upon underage girls. In another case that is receiving global media coverage, opening arguments were presented this week at the New York City trial of Harvey Weinstein on two charges of rape and sexual assault; more than 100 women have accused the once-powerful producer of sexual assault, harassment, and rape.

All of these cases hold enormous implications. Can the law, which these powerful men flouted openly for decades, provide justice? The future of our vulnerable democracies seems to be predicated on an affirmative answer to this question.

Preet Bharara, a widely respected former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) who lost his job when Trump purged Obama appointees in early 2017, now hosts two popular podcasts that provide analysis of current events and their legal implications.

In Stay Tuned with Preet, Bharara offers a sober and non-partisan approach to the law that is remarkably appealing. Each episode is divided into two parts: Bharara opens by providing informed, engaged responses to listeners’ questions on the law, and moves on to a thought-provoking conversation with a feature guest. The latter have included Sally Yates, the former United States Deputy Attorney General; Jill Lepore, the prominent Harvard historian who is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker; filmmaker and actor Ed Norton; and George Conway, Kelly Ann’s stridently anti-Trump—but conservative—husband.

Bryan Stevenson, a prominent civil rights attorney who is often described as America’s Nelson Mandela, was Bharara’s guest on the December 26 episode of Stay Tuned.

Stevenson, who is black, grew up in racially segregated rural Delaware. He was deeply affected by his childhood experiences of institutional racism, and by the murder of his grandfather. During the podcast conversation, Stevenson explains that while he was keenly aware of how the law had been used to oppress black people in the United States, he also saw how it could be implemented to address inequities. The law ended school desegregation, for example, and it provided due process after police arrested his grandfather’s murderers; they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Stevenson, who has a law degree from Harvard, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law firm based in Alabama that is dedicated to challenging racial injustice and ending mass incarceration. He is also the author of Just Mercy, a memoir about his experience of representing Walter McMillan, a man wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman. Critics have responded positively to recently released film based on the book, and starring Jamie Foxx.

The subject of Café Insider (tagline: Make Sense of Law & Politics), which Bharara co-hosts with Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey Attorney General, is the week’s events. In a single episode on August 12, 2019, Bharara and Milgram discuss and analyze Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide; the lawsuit by two former FBI officials claiming that they were wrongfully terminated as political retaliation; and the massive raids conducted by ICE agents of food processing plants in Mississippi. With their seasoned and engaging legal minds, Bharara and Milgram fill an urgent need for legal and factual clarity.

In television, the critically acclaimed series The Good Fight, a spin-off of The Good Wife, stars Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart, now a partner at a majority black Chicago law firm. The plot of each episode is based on stories “ripped from the headlines” — but always with a thought-provoking “what if?” twist. Lockhart, a liberal whose commitment to the law is challenged by the rise of Trump appointees in the judiciary, confesses to exhaustion and is tempted by gonzo feminist activists who claim that the only path of resistance is through dirty tricks and extra-legal activity. But each time Lockhart seems ready to capitulate to temptation, someone or some incident pulls her back, reminding her of and re-asserting the value, effectiveness and function of the law and adhering to legal process.

The law plays a major role in the gripping HBO miniseries Our Boys, which was broadcast to international critical acclaim. The series, which is co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian, dramatizes the horrific events of the summer of 2014 in Israel-Palestine, when three Jewish boys abducted and immolated 16 year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, in retribution for the abduction and murder by Palestinians of three yeshiva students from a West Bank settlement.

The story is framed as a police procedural, with a forensic dramatization of how the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, identified and arrested Abu Khdeir’s murderers, and how the criminal justice system prosecuted them. The series provides one of the most nuanced portrayals of the social, cultural, religious, and political divisions in contemporary Israel-Palestine, shining an uncomfortably bright light on the fissures between various subcultures of Jewish society, and between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian society.

From the moment they report him missing to the police, Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s parents are under enormous pressure. Not only must they rely on their political oppressors, the Israeli state, to pursue and prosecute their son’s killers, but they must also justify to their Palestinian community their controversial decision to abide by the Israeli legal system, trusting it to provide justice.

State Attorney Uri Korb, played by Lior Ashkenazi, communicates superbly the Israeli liberal intelligentsia’s failure to recognize that the country's legal system does not define justice for Palestinians in the same way it does for Jews. This is particularly true for Palestinians like the Abu Khdeir family, who are stateless residents of East Jerusalem with nebulously defined legal rights. Korb sees himself as the representative of the Israeli state, rather than a pursuer of justice on behalf of any one party. He does not, for example, see cognitive dissonance in dismissing Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s father, portrayed with luminous verisimilitude by Jony Arbid, when the latter demands that the homes of the Jewish Israelis convicted of his son’s murder be destroyed. This, after all, is a punishment that the Israeli state commonly metes out to Palestinians who are convicted of having committed political violence against Jews.

The ambiguous ending of Our Boys leaves open the question of whether or not the law can provide justice to Palestinian victims of a crime committed by Jews. There are, however, several gripping and complex scenes that illustrate the violent, anarchic consequences of rejecting the law and choosing extra-judicial action. As a dramatic device, the granular reconstruction of the police investigation provides a compassionate and insightful portrayal of contemporary Israeli-Palestinian society.

Also from Israel, Advocate (2019), an award-winning documentary that was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination, is a portrait of Lea Tsemel, an Israeli human rights lawyer who has spent most of her life defending Palestinian political prisoners. Miri Regev, the populist right wing Minister of Culture, predictably proclaimed her loathing for the film even as she acknowledged that she had not seen it; this type of criticism from Regev has become something of a badge of honor for left wing Israeli artists.

Advocate traces Tsemel’s career from the genesis of her left-wing activism in the 1970s, while she was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the present; it follows her as she represents one of her most highly publicized recent — that of Ahmad, a 13 year-old boy who is accused of attempting to kill a Jewish teenager with a knife. In a memorable scene that takes place in her cramped office, Tsemel explains to Ahmad and his family that they must choose between pleading guilty and seeing Ahmad charged as a minor, or going to trial; the latter option means that the barely adolescent boy could be sentenced as an adult if he is convicted. Ahmad, who insists that he had no intention of causing injury with the knife, and who was, as video footage shows, brutally questioned for hours by Israeli security without a lawyer or guardian present, opts for a trial. In court, Tsemel predicates her legal argument on the demonstrably true assertion that Jewish Israelis accused of the same crime as the one for which Ahmad is on trial are not charged with attempted murder. Nor do they risk being sentenced to life in prison.

Tsemel mentions frequently during the film that she has never won a case. Given the legal and political climate in Israel, she knows that her losing streak is likely to continue uninterrupted, but she is ideologically and morally committed to challenging the structures imposed on her clients. She has chosen her path of resistance, which is to demonstrate the legal system’s failures by the very act of working within the system. Giving up is not an option and refusing to work within the system will not, she seems to believe, help anybody.

Many observers of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the senate hope that the legal process will reverse what seems, due to partisan politics, to be a predetermined result. News outlets are providing saturation coverage of the lead-up to the trial, the role of Chief Justice Roberts, the number of Senate votes required to bring forward new witnesses and new evidence, and many other matters of procedure.

In Israel, meanwhile, the question of whether and for how long Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to occupy the position of prime minister while he is under criminal indictment is keeping everyone on edge, with the media providing saturation coverage of every new development. Does the law permit Netanyahu to run as head of his party in a third election while he is charged with criminal corruption? It does. Americans and Israelis are discovering, more or less in tandem, but for different reasons, the extent to which the law is predicated on social norms. Can the law provide justice even as populist authoritarianism systematically undermines and destroy those norms?

For social and political activists, the silver lining of these deeply troubling times is a noticeable uptick in civic engagement. Demonstrations, grassroots activism, and artistic resistance play a crucial role in social transformation, but so does the law. Three years into the Trump administration and a decade into the global rise of authoritarianism, it seems that many people are also recognizing with new appreciation the critical function of the law and legal process in maintaining a democracy.
    [post_title] => Desperately seeking answers in the law
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Desperately seeking answers in the law

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_content] => This is the first instance of a transcontinental application to the ICJ based on violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Gambia, a majority-Muslim West African nation, and the smallest country on mainland Africa, took an enormous step this Monday on behalf of their fellow Muslims, the Rohingya people, when it filed a lawsuit against Myanmar for the crime of genocide — the destruction in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group — at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar who are concentrated in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. They have lived in Myanmar for generations, but the Rohingya have always been treated like outsiders and systematically discriminated against by the government. In August 2017, following small-scale attacks by Rohingya militants against Myanmar police posts, Myanmar security forces responded with widespread, indiscriminate murders and gang-rapes, as well as the burning of entire villages. Thousands of Rohingya were killed, and an estimated 745,000 Rohingya fled as refugees to neighboring Bangladesh, including 400,000 children.

They joined around 200,000 Rohingya refugees already living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which is now home to the world’s largest refugee camp. Over 900,000 stateless, deeply traumatized Rohingya are living in precarious shelters, vulnerable to monsoons and dependent on humanitarian aid.

Witnesses to the genocide tell horrifying stories. Reuters reported that on September 2, 2017, 10 Rohingya men were bound together while Buddhist villagers dug a shallow grave, before hacking to death two of the men and shooting the rest:

“One grave for 10 people,” said Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from Inn Din’s Rakhine Buddhist community who said he helped dig the pit and saw the killings. The soldiers shot each man two or three times, he said. “When they were being buried, some were still making noises. Others were already dead.”

Myanmar describes its actions as a “clearance operation." It jailed and then ultimately released two of the Reuters journalists who investigated the story, and continues to deny vehemently that it committed genocide.

The United Nations independent fact-finding mission issued a report last year, which named senior generals of the Myanmar military who they recommended be investigated and prosecuted in an international criminal tribunal for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The mission further found that the Rohingya who remain in Myanmar are at risk of further genocidal violence, and that repatriation has been practically impossible.

The case is unprecedented for a number of reasons. The Gambia is located over 7,000 miles from Myanmar — this is the first instance of a transcontinental application to the ICJ based on violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, to which both Myanmar and The Gambia are signatories.

The Gambia’s lawsuit is supported by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which calls itself the “collective voice of the Islamic world,” and represents 57 member states, including Bangladesh, which has borne the brunt of the Rohingya refugee crisis.

The Gambia is seeking an injunction to prevent Myanmar from inflicting further violence upon the Rohingya population, and accountability for atrocities already committed. Prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity normally falls under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), but Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and so no charges have been filed.

At a time when wealthy nations are increasingly turning their backs on enforcing human rights law, it’s heartening to see smaller nations (with access to deep pockets) holding power to account at the Hague. Gambia’s efforts on behalf of the Rohingya began after its attorney general and justice minister, Abubacarr Tambadou, read the UN report on the atrocities, and flew to Bangladesh to meet refugees and hear their stories.

Tambadou, who worked for years as a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), told the Washington Post: “As I listened to the horrific stories — of killings, of rape, of torture, of burning people alive in their homes — it brought back memories of the Rwandan genocide. The world failed to help in 1994, and the world is failing to protect vulnerable people 25 years later.” The Gambia recently began hearings for its own Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission to address human rights abuses committed by former dictator Yahya Jammeh.
    [post_title] => The Gambia has filed a case of genocide at The Hague against Myanmar, on behalf of the Rohingya
    [post_excerpt] => The case is unprecedented for a number of reasons.
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The Gambia has filed a case of genocide at The Hague against Myanmar, on behalf of the Rohingya

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Robert McNamara was a product of the so-called greatest generation, who believed in his place in the world. The boomers challenged him for lying about Vietnam and for his contribution to the military-industrial complex. And then the boomers voted for Trump. So who's making America great, again?

Did the twentieth century offer any poetry finer than a standardized test? Surely all those bubbled-in letters spell out something, but multiple choice itself is a love language. Plaintively, with each whirl of a No. 2 pencil, we plead that those letters will trace a path to the perfect score, to the perfect job, and to one perfect nation under God, indivisible as helmed by the Best and the Brightest — by intrepid men who bubbled impeccably. In his critically-acclaimed 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, director Errol Morris interviews one such man who climbed the rungs of standardized testing into power. In his capacity as Secretary of Defense to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara was a severely gifted number-cruncher who escalated American military involvement in the Vietnam War even as he knew that it was unwinnable — a fact that he denied repeatedly, until the publication of the Pentagon Papers proved he had known all along. The film was released just as the coalition invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were descending into a Vietnam-like quagmire, making McNamara a timely interview subject. 



It seems doubly prophetic that the film was released in 2003. This was the same year Facebook launched — and the internet began its stranglehold on our public, private, and political lives. While McNamara never digitally ranked the university’s hottest women during his own time at Harvard, as Zuckerberg notoriously did, he did help integrate IBM into global warfare during his time as an analyst in the Pacific theater during WWII and while Secretary of Defense to Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War. Today, the automated war machine is something more subtle, as Facebook allows bad actors — whether state leaders or individuals — to promote propaganda and lies, and even help throw a presidential election. 

Morris, a baby boomer, engages McNamara in a deeply disturbing conversation about what the latter's generation left Morris's to sift through. As a millennial, when I first saw the movie in 2003, I felt I was watching the good guy from the generation that brought us Woodstock go after the bad man who brought us napalm. Today, I cannot say I look at the baby boomers as a merry band of Robin Hood types who sought to rescue the nation from the military-industrial complex. The 16 years since the documentary have seen the rise of one particular baby boomer who is, in many ways, antithetical to both McNamara and Morris. On the one hand, Donald Trump is nothing like my childhood idealization of my parents’ generation, protesting war and burning bras. On the other, Trump is nothing like McNamara: he is the wily byproduct of outer-borough nepotism who defies all statistical analysis. Watching The Fog Of War in 2019 almost made me nostalgic for what I now realize was a sense of progress that I had in 2003. It made me wonder what I have learned as the lofty aspirations of the Great Society have degenerated into the bitter pandemonium of Making America Great Again. 

I offer — it seems appropriate — eleven lessons: 

The fog of institutional faith rolls in before the fog of war

A little background: during World War One, the U.S. Army administered IQ tests, which begat the S.A.T., which begat the need for rudimentary computers to analyze the results, which begat IBM government contracts, which begat a bureaucracy primed for battle by December, 1941. This automated war machine had previously been marketed to America as a political platform to better manage America — the New Deal. The IBM punch card led the charge into the theater of war; attendant propaganda shorthanded a push for achievement. Science education would win the Cold War! The best and the brightest would protect us from falling dominoes in Southeast Asia! A moonshot could redeem humanity! Before he conveyed this militarized optimism, McNamara tested his way from UC Berkeley to Harvard Business School to celebrated Army analyst in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, a mascot for the meritocracy. Why listen to a damn thing he says? Well, look at those test scores!

Nothing lends political credibility quite like the private sector 


Robert McNamara was the C.E.O. of Ford Motor Company when John F. Kennedy tapped him for the position of Secretary of Defense. In the United States, shaped by the Protestant work ethic, a rich person is by definition considered to be a smart person. In Fog of War, Morris shows archival footage of journalists ingratiating themselves to McNamara by complimenting him on his intelligence; during the 2016 presidential election campaign, the media reported on Donald Trump’s private plane, his luxurious residential properties, his hotels, and his private golf courses. In The Fog of War, as McNamara accepts the cabinet position, Kennedy says that McNamara has chosen to serve his country at “great personal sacrifice” — which is code for giving up the extremely generous salary of a C.E.O. in the private sector in exchange for a civil servant’s salary. 

The Greatest Generation™ and the baby boomers double-teamed successive generations

The Vietnam War inspired a libertarian insurgency on the right and a counterculture from the left, with adherents to both questioning the enormous role big government (as the right calls it) and the military-industrial complex (as the left refers to it) played in policy implementation that affects our lives. This wide loss of faith in the government saw its first expression in anti-war demonstrators chanting “hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?” — but Watergate dealt the death blow. The revelations that came out during the impeachment hearings into the Nixon presidency alienated Americans across the political spectrum, and on both sides of the generation gap. In 2016, the same generation that drove Nixon out of office voted Trump in. In a New York Times op-ed about baby boomers who voted for Trump, the writer and activist Astra Taylor suggests we “call it the coming gerontocracy.” The hippies told us never to trust anyone over 30; frankly, I wouldn’t trust anyone already receiving Medicare or Social Security — they’ll kick the ladder right out from under you.    



America remains a sucker for postcolonial civil conflict in countries it scarcely understands 

Near the end of The Fog of War, McNamara talks of dining with his North Vietnamese counterpart in 1995, who told him, “Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d know that we weren’t pawns...Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1,000 years? We were fighting for our independence and were determined to do so to the last man.” As McNamara recollects this tense conversation, it’s almost like he’s saying, Right but you said that wouldn’t be on the test. While McNamara openly — astonishingly — concedes his ignorance, he refuses to concede his mode of thinking had been wrong, or that “each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life.” On October 6, Trump abruptly announced that he was pulling U.S. military support out of the Kurdish-held territory northeast Syria, leaving the Kurds — who had sacrificed more than 11,000 combatants in the fight against ISIS — extremely vulnerable to a massacre at the hands of Turkish forces, who were poised to cross the border. Supposedly to preempt this from happening, Trump wrote a widely-circulated (and widely-ridiculed) letter to Turkey’s President Erdogan. “Let’s make a deal! You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy...Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Erdogan, according to several reports, promptly threw Trump's letter into the garbage. 

Statistics are amoral

The most visually eloquent moment of Morris’ documentary comes as McNamara explains the impact of the U.S. firebombing 67 Japanese cities during the Second World War, while, in the accompanying footage, numbers are shown raining down from bombardiers. Stomach-churning statistics follow, unmistakable as atrocities — in some Japanese cities, up to 90 percent of the population was killed by U.S. aerial bombardments. McNamara concedes as much, but he also justifies the bombings. The war between the U.S. and Japan, he explains, was “one of the most brutal in history.” The Americans could not afford to lose, and that was why he “didn’t fault” Truman for using the atomic bomb. McNamara asserts that General Curtis LeMay would have been prosecuted as a war criminal if he had lost the war in the Pacific, just as he (McNamara) would have been prosecuted had the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. 

After World War Two, discharged from the U.S. military, McNamara went to work for Ford Motors. There he crunched the numbers again and mandated that all the company’s cars must have seat belts. He applied the same logic that justified the deaths of 2 million Japanese civilians to the saving of 15,000 American lives annually — according to the National Transportation Board. 

Trump is cagier with numbers; we haven’t even seen his tax returns. But we do know this: he has 65.9 million Twitter followers. 

We’ve gone from fireside chats to a dumpster fire — but at least there’s no draft!

For good reason, Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s is the subject of much discussion these days: polarized political ideologies, hysteria, and a U.S. president who won’t shut up on that newfangled media outlet called Twitter. The Great Depression required large-scale political and economic solutions. After the Second World War, the G.I. Bill allowed (white) men to receive a free college education. In today’s privatized, post-Raegan, gig economy hell, apparently 70 percent of us want universal healthcare and 58 percent want debt-free education, but far fewer Americans—I’m hazarding a guess here—pine for a government capable of sending us to certain death in Guam. The Greatest Generation™ may have basked in the glow of a welfare state, but it also tolerated the draft and a powerful government that operated far away from a free press with the likes of Seymour Hersh poking around its files and exposing war crimes like My Lai. Given that many Americans want a government that provides us with more, we also need to be mindful of what such a powerful government can take from us. 

The Space Race might be over, but we found a black hole!

Fittingly, one of the bright spots of the Trump era has been a literal black hole: in April, the very first image of one was captured by an international team. Meanwhile, the American century’s certainty of measurable progress has collapsed; we are a dying star and this black hole has a name: the algorithm. All the numbers, all the metrics have been automated and programmed to produce more and more data and metadata, so that discernible political reality has collapsed under its own weight, and space-time warps into phenomena like Pizzagate. On December 4, 2016, a man fired multiple rounds of ammo into Comet Ping Pong, a D.C. pizza joint thinking he was busting up a sex-trafficking ring run by Hilary Clinton. This rumor had been spread as “news” by Twitter bots and Trump supporters, much in the same way the Obama birther “movement” was spawned. Uncannily, in NASA illustrations, the silhouette of a star-death is orange and flailing.

No one is at the wheel anymore

Our economic reality is the same: our war machine has collapsed into a Ponzi scheme of a service economy. Corporations that boast of high valuations do not created anything, post no profits, and offer employees few benefits. As Rick Wartzman, author of The End Of Loyalty: The Rise And Fall Of Good Jobs In America, pointed out, “We're now at a point where fewer than 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized in this country. And it's just clearly not enough to have the kind of collective voice and countervailing power against corporate power that, again, was able to lift wages and benefits for all folks, not only those carrying union cards but other blue-collar workers and even white-collar workers in the past.” Fewer Americans have health insurance with every passing year, yet we have apps to manage apps. The cruelest irony is this: the data sucks! Remember the 2016 electoral polls results that showed Hillary Clinton's victory was a dead certainty? 

Still, we remain in thrall to irrelevant figures — like the stock market — and use such indexes as magical thinking to ward off evil premonitions of decline and fall. Reporting on a paper the Fed published earlier this year, Forbes, not exactly known as a bastion of Sanders supporters, published an article titled with Trumpian hyperbole, “America's Humongous Wealth Gap Is Widening Further.” It gave the following statistics: 

In 2018, the richest 10 percent held 70 percent of total household wealth, up from 60 percent in 1989. The share funneled to the top 1 percent jumped to 32 percent last year from 23 percent in 1989. ‘The increase in the wealth share of the top 10 percent came at the expense of households in the 50th to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution.' Their share dropped to 29 percent from over the same period. The bottom 50 percent saw essentially zero net gains in wealth over those 30 years, driving their already meager share of total wealth down to just 1 percent from 4 percent.

But who cares when the DOW is up over 27,000? McNamara’s tyranny of numbers is complete. 

Keep it casual!

Though an egghead as surely as he breathed, McNamara kept a common man image close at hand. The very same meritocracy that enabled his rise, ensured he could always do so. He could always claim, no matter how many diplomas he’d earned, no matter how many companies he’d run, that he was a middle-class Irish striver and a family man. Today we have Trump who is, as Fran Lebowitz deliciously put it, “a poor person’s idea of a rich man” — from the Fifth Ave apartment that looks like Versailles vomited to the McDonald’s catering for Clemson’s triumphant football team at the White House. Populism is always essential in the American political arena, as the imminent spectacle of all 19 Democratic candidates chowing down on corn dogs across Iowa soon will prove. 



The meritocracy was a Western

The American meritocracy has closed, like the American frontier. Much like the frontier, the illusion of accessibility was the most potent part of its myth of inevitable progress and increase. The barriers, too, were the same: race, class, gender. As with a Western, when you step back a bit, you may ask, why on earth is this our chosen narrative of progress? What is the enduring appeal of genocide and discrimination in this country? Yet, there is an almost sweet naïveté in the notion that something as simple as a test could identify all our future leaders from all walks of life! Similarly, there is a grand romance to thinking an empty continent simply awaited discovery and settlement! But the problem is the continent was not empty, and not everyone could take that test, let alone access the tools to excel at it. And the results of the test themselves were impoverished scraps of data that correlated to achievement insofar as they granted that selfsame access. Nothing succeeds like success!  

R.I.P. public service

The ideal of civil service, as illustrated by Kennedy’s founding of the Peace Corps or Carnegie’s philanthropy, is dead. The Trump administration’s scandals, shameless profiteering from the private sector, and virulent partisan politics have painfully gutted agencies ranging from the foreign service to the Department of Justice. In her recent testimony to Congress over influence-peddling in Ukraine, former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said:

Before I close, I must share the deep disappointment and dismay I have felt as these events have unfolded...Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees.

She added that she feared “harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system.” The integrity of institutions has eroded at a terrifying pace; and that wealth of experience and culture of service cannot simply be rebooted in an election cycle or two. The sort of service to mourn is not the type exemplified by McNamara — an executive who traded outstanding profits for unthinkable power — but that of the 2.79 million civil servants who get out of bed, make the federal government run, and will never have an Oscar-winning documentary that motes they "sacrified" a big corporate salary. 

Today marks the release date for Errol Morris’ newest political documentary, American Dharma. His subject this time is another creature of his times — Steve Bannon. As the historical narrative passes over the event horizon and into the black hole of Twitter, I am reminded of that fabled ghost in the American propaganda machine — the myth of American exceptionalism. Morris’s movie makes the following thesis statement on the origins of McNamara’s power and how it tied into his own sense of exceptionalism: he was the very embodiment of the American meritocracy. Meritocracy, this vaunted bubbler would have us believe, identified the talent that enabled America’s successful prosecution of World War Two; triumph in the Cold War; and stewardship of the Free World. As ludicrous as this sounds, the fact of the matter is, that I see how someone could have felt this way in the thick of it all. I see how someone might have taken a test, served in the Army, gone to college, gotten a job, bought a house, made a life, and felt pretty great about the whole system. Yet, in the thick of 2019, from my own considerably privileged perch, I don’t see how anyone could feel that sense of purpose and belonging from the service economy that isolates and social media that distorts — and I wonder what Gen Z will make of it all, another 16 years from now. 
    [post_title] => The fog of overachieving: From Robert S. McNamara to Donald J. Trump
    [post_excerpt] => Watching The Fog Of War in 2019 almost made me nostalgic for what I now realize was a sense of progress that I had in 2003. It made me wonder what I have learned as the lofty aspirations of the Great Society have degenerated into the bitter pandemonium of Making America Great Again. 
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The fog of overachieving: From Robert S. McNamara to Donald J. Trump

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_content] => A deep forensic investigation into one of the greatest aviation tragedies in history highlights the critical role of transparency and the role of the law in a conspiracy-minded, 'post-truth' society.

Besides the initial shock and horror of what happened, there was, of course, the visual carnage. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down on July 17, 2014 in Ukraine, over a war zone controlled by Russian and pro-Russian forces, killing everyone on board.  Photographs of the bodies of the 298 innocent victims, many of them children, are seared onto the world’s collective memory. 

The recovery of the bodies was a grotesque nightmare made more appalling by the ongoing conflict in the area. Even from a distance, one felt abused by what was going on — to this day, I still think about the Ukrainian emergency workers who did most of the work; they were initially criticized as uniformly careless and incompetent, but in fact they had been more dedicated than anybody thought. 

What happened to the flight felt like a curse, a sacrifice to the deranged god of war. 

Then, of course, came the questions. Who had shot the plane down, and why?

I work for Bellingcat. It is an online investigative collective that became famous for the thorough forensic research it did to debunk the lies and conspiracy theories that Russia disseminated in an attempt to prevent the truth about MH17 from being discovered and made public — we work with open source materials and know how to scour the web for clues more quickly and efficiently than many established, but often times not nearly as flexible, news organizations. Although the legal process is ongoing, we know that the Russian military was involved in bringing the plane down. We also know that Russia has been doing all it can to delegitimize the legal proceedings surrounding what happened — and not always succeeding.

Russia’s obfuscations, painfully obvious as they are, are also indicative of our collective need to adopt a strategy called legal realism. — an approach to the law that is based on empirical evidence. Being a legal realist means dealing with legal facts in a non-sensationalist but also holistic manner. It’s taking the facts of a case into account while also understanding why a case is important and who or what it impacts — i.e., not treating it in isolation. For example, if a president abuses power, you establish the abuse and take into account the corrosive effect such a case has on democratic institutions.

In a world of deep fakes, demagogues, and eroding trust in our established institutions, legal realism is essential — it provides a way for us to re-establish that trust, and to strengthen rule of law.

The arm of the law is long for a reason

The internet is home to many conspiracy theories about MH17. Some of them were created and spread with the help of Russian propaganda, while others are the product of the independent tinfoil hat brigade. 

The explanation that emerged from the forensic analysis is clear: Russian forces mistook MH17 for a military plane and shot it down; and then the Russian government denied that it was at war with Ukraine — although it was, and still is. But many people reject this explanation; perhaps it strikes them as too banal. 

Conspiracy theories are comforting because they provide an overarching framework to the brutal chaos of war — and of life in general. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a cunning plot by Ukraine and Hitlary Kkklinton (an influential woman must always have some role to play) to frame Russia! It was a cover-up for doomed flight MH370! It was the lizard people!

Unfortunately, the lengthy and cumbersome legal investigation into the fate of MH17 has had the unintended side-effect of fueling this madness. I am often asked, for example, why it has taken so long to bring charges against anyone. They claim is that if the case was really so clear, investigators would not have needed years to look into the matter. 

I’ve written about aviation and aviation safety on and off for years, so I remind people that even a seemingly straightforward crash that does not take place in a war zone can take years to investigate. When a crash in a war zone involves a local power that is very keen to throw investigators off the scent, the investigation becomes extremely complex. 

This is just one reason why legal realism is so important, although fake narratives are sexier and more dramatic.

There is one thing that feels better than drama, though, and that’s the righteous calm of acceptance. This is why I try not only to explain the legal process surrounding disasters, but to  remind people that mistakes are actually very common. 

One of the most stunning examples of a near-mistake prevented by pure courage is exemplified by the story of Soviet Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 prevented a nuclear holocaust because he recognized an alert of incoming missiles was in fact a computer error. Petrov, who died earlier this year at the age of 77, was a hero — that one guy with nerves of steel who had the courage to make a decision that conflicted with his orders, and which ultimately held billions of lives in the balance. Very few people have that courage, which is why we are at such risk of catastrophe by human error.

A major part of being realistic about the legal process is accepting human nature. The accurate version of the events of July 17, 2014 might be simple and therefore more grim, but the history of civilization bears it out. 

The judgments of history, however, rarely bring closure. 

Don’t mistake legal justice for the sense of justice

What can make up for the lives lost on MH17? What can make this tragedy more bearable? I am often told that the answer is “nothing” — and that the pursuit of legal justice is therefore meaningless, or, better yet, performative. “Even if Russia did it, nothing is going to bring those people back,” people have told me in the immediate wake of the tragedy in Moscow, that formidably gorgeous city where legal norms, not to mention the norms of reality, are constantly in flux.

We’re inculcated with the belief that legal justice brings closure and peace — otherwise, we think, what is the point? People feel cheated if they do not receive justice.

The purpose of legal justice is not to bring closure, but it is nonetheless very important. By enforcing the law, we enforce the very concept of a law-abiding society — if you need a lesson in why that’s important, look no further than the social dislocation and random lawlessness in Russia itself, a country that went from legal chaos to legal nihilism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Legal nihilism is not symbolic, it really means the difference between whether or not the police will protect you or hit you up for a bribe, or whether a judge will collude with a prosecutor to withhold crucial evidence from trial and hand down a draconian sentence, something I’ve seen happen time and time again when I was a journalist working in the country.

And if you want to know what happens when the concept of a law-abiding society is completely thrown out the window and institutions crumble, look no further than the Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, where MH17 was shot down. 

Via armed conflict and destabilization, carried out by Russia and some willing cohorts within Ukraine, parts of eastern Ukraine were effectively severed from the Ukrainian capital. The sham “governments” created there do not clearly answer to anyone, in fact, chaos is deliberately built into their very existence and is a feature and not a bug (no matter what Russian propaganda will claim). While this has obviously resulted in a prolonged war — it has also resulted in tragic byproducts of said war, of which MH17 is only the most famous example. 

The fate of MH17 emphasizes and reinforces that we need a credible legal system that operates transparently. Without one, bodies rain out of the sky. Remember — the people who shot down the plane that day were there illegally, answering to God-knows-who, obviously given free reign to shoot at whoever they thought was a threat. In this case, the “threat” turned out to be a passenger liner.

And if you think that lack of respect for the law is some sort of “exotic” problem, that only happens “in those countries over there”  — I bring you the whole of the Trump administration. The president’s most fervent supporters will actually support me on this one; they’re the ones yelling at his rallies for the president to break the law. 

What they don’t understand is that civilization is fragile. When legal norms break down, we are all left vulnerable.
    [post_title] => When a plane fell from the sky, the lies rose up to meet it
    [post_excerpt] => Few crimes have affected the modern world like the MH17 tragedy, when a Malaysian Airlines passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot out of the skies over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.  
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When a plane fell from the sky, the lies rose up to meet it

by Natalia Antonova

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Theresa May was the only one willing and able to take on the job of trying to clean up the mess the boys made, but it was an impossible task.


Things started going downhill in the United Kingdom about 38 months ago. Well, it could be 41, if you really want to be precise. In February 2016, then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that there would be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The choice was between “Leave” and “Remain.”  At the time, the widely-held assumption was that the Remain campaign would win, with Cameron staying on for a few more years, and then eventually handing the reins to another Conservative politician of his choosing.


The results of the June 23, 2016 referendum shocked liberal Britons in particular and the world in general, just as much as the election of Donald Trump shocked Americans and the world four-and-a-half months later.


It is now August 2019 and Britain is getting ready to leave the bloc without a deal. Boris Johnson, the new prime minister and one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, has said a hard Brexit is his wish. Johnson replaced Theresa May on July 24, after she resigned in light of her failure to broker a deal to exit the EU that would satisfy her own party.


Remain voters feel ignored and unhappy; soft Brexit voters feel things are going too far and are unhappy; hard Brexiteers do not believe that Britain will leave the EU and are unhappy. The country is fractured and no person or party looks capable of bringing everyone together again.


David Cameron, meanwhile, is getting ready to publish his memoirs, which he reportedly wrote in a bespoke £25,000 ($30,000) shed, complete with wood-burning fireplace and sofa-bed, in the garden of his “quintessentially English” Cotswolds home. So, what went wrong?


The main answer, as it often is, comes from the hubris of men. First Cameron, with his unearned confidence, called the referendum to quell internal disagreements in his party. He was certain that he would win, and then he did not.


As the Remain campaign discovered slightly too late, a country that had just gone through six years of savage cuts to public services did not take kindly to the architects of said austerity warning them that if they voted to leave, there might be less money in the coffers. Many banks warned they would leave Brexit Britain, but such threats were not exactly convincing to those on the breadline, who had little hope of becoming more prosperous anytime soon.


The Remainers were convinced they would win easily, and were not ready for the Brexiteers’ intense, relentless and occasionally disingenuous approach to campaigning. Instead, they spent too much time trying to counter dubious claims about the EU, and not enough reminding people why the EU was a good thing for the country.


As one writer put it in the aftermath, “In confronting populist demagoguery, it isn't enough to attack its promulgators. To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind.”


That the debate was overwhelmingly male had something to do with this disastrous turn of events, perhaps. In May 2016, Labour grandee Harriet Harman hit out against the lack of female voices leading the referendum campaigns; she quoted a study, which found that only 16% of television appearances on EU issues had been women. She was largely ignored.


A month later Leave won, by 52% to 48%, and no-one quite knew what to do. After all, damaging over-confidence had not been a side-specific issue; when Conservative MPs Boris Johnson and Michael Gove gave their victory speeches on June 24th, they looked terrified.


It is now clear that senior figures in the Vote Leave campaign had spent little time preparing for what would happen if they were to win, instead running a campaign conveniently promising all things to all people. Do you want Britain to be a buccaneering nation, ultra-liberal and open to the world? Brexit can make that happen. Do you yearn for the Britain of the past, and wish your country could shut itself from the world, and from the people wanting to move to the islands? There’s a Brexit for that — and so on.


David Cameron, who was a Remainer, resigned from his office and retired from politics after the Leave campaign won the referendum that he had called. Within weeks Theresa May, who was also a Remainer, replaced him. She was not quite the best candidate, but she was the only one willing and able to take the job.


Boris Johnson, the face of the Vote Leave campaign, wanted to run for party leadership. But Michael Gove, the other face of Vote Leave, stabbed him in the back; Gove ran instead, and the party didn’t back him. The boys had made a mess and as is so often the case, a woman had to come in and pick up the pieces, much to the glee of the boys in question. As May won, one male Conservative MP welcomed the news with a hearty “here comes Mummy!” Dry heave is appropriate.



[caption id="attachment_1324" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Boris Johnson addressing the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester on October 4, 2011.[/caption]

This is where things could have picked up; the moment when the country could have come together. In a different world, May would have announced that the result of the referendum had been close, and that it called for a Brexit that kept Britain close to the European Union, in order to honour the winning side without alienating the others. Even if unenthusiastic about the compromise, Brexiteers could have rallied around her and accepted their narrow margin of victory, and Remainers could have gracefully accepted their defeat and constructively worked with those who had beaten them.


This, of course, is not what happened. Already in a tough position, May made her own life worse by pandering to the harder Brexiteers and, perhaps overcompensating for her Remainer past, all but ignoring everyone else. The Brexit fanatics used this opportunity to harden their lines every step of the way, while shellshocked Remainers floundered, and failed to do much but yap from the sidelines.


This is when things started to get steadily worse. Entire books could be written about what happened between the summer of 2016 and the summer of 2019, but in short: May called an election to get a bigger majority in Parliament and was instead left with no majority at all, the hard Brexiteers kept voting against the Brexit deal May got because they thought it wasn’t a hard enough Brexit, everyone else wasted more time arguing about whether they wanted no Brexit, a second referendum or a soft Brexit than doing anything else, and in a day of “indicative votes” (test votes), MPs showed that not a single Brexit outcome had a majority in the House of Commons.


If you want to picture it, it was a bit like one of those scenes in cartoon where the unlucky main character slips on a banana peel, stands up, steps on a rake, stands up again and then walks straight into a glass door, on repeat, for three years.


Still, the themes remained similar. There was the hubristic assumption from Remainers that as Brexit negotiations would get worse, enough people would fling back to their side (they didn’t), and the hubristic assumption from Brexiteers that all problems with the negotiations would simply fade away if people started believing in Brexit enough (they didn’t).


In a way, the natural conclusion to all this was always going to be Boris Johnson. The former London mayor is a serial cheater, has an unknown number of love children, no principles to speak of, and is interested in little but power. What he excels at is boisterous self-confidence, and an ability to speak with conviction on anything he believes would be useful for him to talk about. His gaffes are frequent and his blunders dangerous, but to his fans he represents the one true Brexit believer who can deliver on all those impossible promises. As has become received wisdom in Britain, it is sufficient to believe in things very hard in order to make them come true; he may not be fond of the comparison, but Johnson is the Tinkerbell of Brexit, Lost Boys very much in tow.


What happens now remains unclear; Johnson won on a platform of leaving the EU on the October 31st deadline “do or die.” He insists that leaving without a deal is not something he wants, but he will not bring May’s deal back to Parliament for one last go, and there is not enough time to negotiate another deal and get it through the Commons. Still, he believes something will happen therefore it must be true.


Members of Parliament, meanwhile, insist that they will stop Johnson from going for no-deal, despite the awkward fact that there is not much they can do about it. Still, they believe — well, you get the point.


As Westminster tribes keep fighting to see which will make the best Icarus, the country they govern remains entirely split along the lines drawn on June 23rd. Where you stand on Brexit is now as important (if not more) than which party you usually vote for, or any other characteristics identities are usually built upon.


It did not have to be this way, of course. The opportunities for healing were always going to be rare and complex, but they did exist and no-one took them up. After all, doing so would have involved coming to terms with reality, unpleasant and imperfect as it may be. Forty-one months on, Britain stands on the brink of destroying itself for no reason; by the time its economy tanks and it scrambles to rebuild its relationships with the EU and the rest of the world, it will be too late for anyone to be the bigger person.


Given the wider context, it might be unwise to suggest Brits now turn to culture from the continent for advice, but they could do worse than revisit the most famous scene from the cult French movie La Haine: “Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz9vgtXq_Hs



    [post_title] => How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour
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How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour

by Marie Le Conte

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    [post_content] => Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable.

America’s inequality crisis has emerged as the central issue of the 2020 presidential campaign. The realization that “it’s the economic inequality, stupid,” was a long time coming, given that the global economic crisis of 2008 is now more than a decade behind us. During the intervening years the global grassroots Occupy movement demonstrated for months to raise awareness, staging sit ins on Wall Street in New York and in major cities across Europe. In remarks delivered in 2013, Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” And three years ago an anti-establishment voter revolt gave the United States its first plutocrat president in the form of Donald J. Trump. Americans have at last come to understand the effect of economic inequality on their lives. But the question of how to address inequality is fraught with controversy.

At the Democratic party debates in June, nearly all of the candidates for the presidential nomination railed against the U.S. economy for benefitting only the very rich. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have made inequality their signature issue, have both proposed detailed plans that would completely remake the American economy. Even frontrunner Joe Biden, for years affiliated with centrist politics, noticed that progressivism was rising in popularity; he too is now talking about inequality—with his donors.

All this is a far cry from the “America is already great” message that hampered the Clinton campaign in 2016, but is undoubtedly closer to the way Americans actually feel. Six years ago, the English edition of Thomas Piketty’s seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, becoming a surprise bestseller and a cultural phenomenon. At the time, economists regarded as controversial Piketty’s warning that if the concentration of wealth and power remains unchecked we risk repeating the adverse conditions of the nineteenth century. In a 2016 paper, however, French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman showed that American inequality is at levels unseen since the Roaring 1920s, with the top 0.1 percent controlling 22 percent of the wealth. This year, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker told the New York Times that the U.S. is “developing into a plutocracy.” Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the American economy is “rigged.” In the media, you can often see our current era referred to as the Second Gilded Age, after the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, when inequality ran rampant and robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan plundered and pillaged their way into unimaginable wealth.

But Americans, who encounter extreme concentrations of wealth and power wherever they turn these days, don’t need economists to tell them what they already know: that capitalism, or at least their country’s form of it, is broken — perhaps irreparably. While the U.S. is among the world’s wealthiest countries, it is also, according to the UN, “the world champion of extreme inequality.” Forty million Americans live in poverty; in some areas of the country, life expectancy is equivalent to that of developing states. Meanwhile, “deaths of despair” — caused by drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide — have spiked. According to the UN, Americans lead “shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy.”

The American Dream — the idea that if you worked hard, you could succeed regardless of where you were born or what your parents earned — is still the national ethos, despite the fact that the U.S. currently has the lowest rate of economic mobility of any industrialized democracy. In contrast to earlier generations, very few young Americans will do better than their parents: they are buried in debt, struggling with rising rents and healthcare costs, and see more deaths from suicide and drug overdose than any other age group. The life trajectory of most contemporary Americans is inextricably linked to their parents’ education and income, and to their geographic location. A recent study by researchers at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, for instance, found a 30-year gap in life expectancy between two neighborhoods in Chicago, one rich and one poor.

Republicans, meanwhile, passed an enormous $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and are now considering another one, while trying to cut Social Security and kick millions off Medicaid. White-collar crime prosecutions are at a record low, the president is openly corrupt, and corporate lobbyists literally run the government. Is it any wonder that polls have repeatedly shown that over two thirds of Americans believe the economic and political systems are rigged in favor of big business and the rich? This is why millions of voters paid attention when Donald Trump said during his presidential campaign that “the American dream is dead.”

While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. And while the top one percent’s share of the nation’s earnings has doubled during that period, the top 0.1 percent fared even better: their incomes quadrupled, even as incomes for the bottom 90 percent, once adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant.

But it is the distribution of wealth that truly highlights the vast disparities hidden by four decades of policies that have created the illusion of economic prosperity. In the U.S. today, wealth is concentrated to such an extent that three men alone — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — are richer than the bottom half of the entire population. Recent data released by the Federal Reserve reveals in startling detail how the distribution of wealth in the U.S. became so unequal. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who analyzed the data, calculated that between 1989 and 2018, the net worth of the top one percent increased by $21 trillion, while the bottom 50 percent became poorer to the tune of $900 billion during the same period. In 2018, Bruenig finds, the top one percent owned “nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Bonn shows how the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated U.S. inequalities, particularly for black households, as the crisis contributed to the widening of a racial wealth gap that had already persisted for decades due to systemic discrimination. According to the authors, the median black household has only 12 percent of the wealth of a median white household and earns about half the income, leaving black households 80 percent poorer than white households. The economic crisis of 2008 erased the few gains they had made, while over the past 70 years “virtually no progress” has been made in reducing wealth inequality between blacks and whites in the United States.

The U.S. is the most extreme example, but most of the world has seen increased inequality over the past 40 years. In the U.K., deaths of despair have spiked following a decade of deliberately cruel austerity policies. In France, 2018’s gilets jaunes protests highlighted the country’s inequality crisis, partly fueled by Emmanuel Macron’s policy of cutting taxes to the top one percent while leaving those clinging to the lowest rungs of the income ladder worse off.

The causes of rising inequality vary from country to country, but in the U.S. and Europe the economic literature points to a few culprits. These include automation, the decline of organized labor, financial deregulation, regressive tax systems that allow the rich to cut their own taxes, and globalization. In the U.S. in particular, a growing body of research points to monopoly power and diminishing competition across the American economy as a major contributor. Among economists, a new movement highlights the negative impact done by decades of policies based on dubious market fundamentalist reasoning.

At the heart of all this is the ongoing failure of capitalist democracies to counter growing concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn fuel voter discontent and elevate populist authoritarians to power worldwide. In recent years many have raised the questions of why liberal democracy failed to address the rise of economic insecurity, or why the popular backlash to rising inequality has been marked by a turn toward far-right nativism —  as opposed to, say, a demand for higher taxes on the rich. Some, like Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and author Thomas Frank, argue that the answer lies in the left and center-left parties’ abdication of their historical responsibility toward low-income workers. Whereas the right has always been up front about its allegiance to business elites, the complicity of center-of-left parties in the policies that increased inequality has made them ill-equipped to address the problems that they helped create. A 2018 study by Piketty seems to confirm this view.

With democracies unable to ensure prosperity for all but the rich and well-connected, support for democracy is decreasing. In a recent speech, Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, declared that rising inequality threatens democratic capitalism. But it’s not the “capitalism” part that’s under threat. Despite their populist protestations, far-right authoritarians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are not opposed to rabid capitalism or even globalization—they just don’t believe democracy must be a part of it, or that it should stop them from giving handouts to their friends. Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman explains that the real threat to liberal democracy “isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy.” If left unchecked, the future of Western democracies could look a lot like Brazil, where pervasive inequality and lack of elite accountability gradually eroded support for democracy until the authoritarian Bolsonaro could rise to power — with the help of the country’s business elites.

Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable. One remedy, particularly in the U.S., is tougher enforcement of antitrust laws, which is necessary to constrain the power of corporate monopolies. Another, as historian-turned-folk hero Rutger Bregman told members of the global elite gathered in Davos earlier this year, is astoundingly simple: “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” Our current system, as documented by Zucman, is built upon massive tax evasion amounting trillions of dollars, by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. Any solution to our inequality crisis necessarily involves wealthy people paying their fair share.

Any attempt at meaningful reform, however, would inevitably have to contend with the fact that all of our political and regulatory institutions have been completely captured by big business and the rich. Which brings us back to the 2020 elections.

The 2020 presidential election is not just a referendum on Trump’s authoritarian populism. It is also a test case for the ability of democratic capitalism to correct itself. The Democratic party’s candidate is thus a critical matter, whether that person is a progressive like Sanders or Warren, whose promises include a more equitable construction of the American economy, student debt forgiveness, reining in corporate power and a wealth tax; or a lifelong neoliberal centrist like Biden, who recently promised his donors that despite his newfound interest in income inequality, under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”

The choice goes beyond the likelihood of defeating Trump, straight to the heart of the debate over what American capitalism, and democratic capitalism in general, mean in the twenty-first century. Does democracy mean an oligarchy rooted in injustice, which is what we have had for the last few decades; or should it be a system that benefits the whole of society, rather than only a select few?
    [post_title] => In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism
    [post_excerpt] => While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. 
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https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/51/countering-nationalist-oligarchy/
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In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism

by Asher Schechter

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    [post_content] => Grassroots groups are organizing to protect undocumented immigrants.

In Passaic, N.J., a teenager refused to open her front door when awakened at 1 a.m., and hid with her parents through the small hours of the morning. In Houston, Texas, a teenager’s post on Facebook alerted neighbors in a largely Hispanic community to the presence of four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in fatigues and bulletproof vests. ICE agents were also rebuffed in Brooklyn, N.Y. In Nashville, a group of neighbors formed a human chain to help shield a father and son from ICE agents as they walked from their truck to their home.

In response to President Trump’s threats to deport undocumented immigrants en masse, immigrant rights organizations mobilized to inform immigrants of their rights, by spreading information sheets on social media, and passing out flyers out in particularly vulnerable communities. What’s more, they’ve been joined in this effort by Democratic politicians and presidential candidates: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was out distributing Know Your Rights flyers; multiple New York City lawmakers attended a rally protesting the raids; the Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore has provoked the ire of federal agents by standing with the L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti as he informed residents that they don’t have to open the door to ICE agents unless the agents have a warrant.

Although the massive raids never materialized as promised, immigrants are more informed and better prepared than ever. And bystanders are also more informed and angrier than ever.

“The unapologetic publicizing of these threatened raids activated a different level of consciousness for allies not directly impacted,” Ambien Mitchell, an advocate at the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York City, told The Huffington Post’s Angelina Chapin. “Citizens are more outraged now than ever.”

“Allies developed sophisticated tools on all ends,” Sarah Cullinane, the director of immigrant rights organization Make The Road New Jersey, told Chapin. “I think this new level of sophistication arises from the constant and repeated threat to immigrant lives.”

Activists have been preparing for these raids since June, when they were first announced by the Trump administration and then subsequently postponed. The L.A. Raids Rapid Response Network run by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) hands out copies of a judicial arrest warrant to immigrant families so that they can compare that text to the text of documents that ICE agents may hand them, to verify that the document is in fact a legal arrest warrant, CHIRLA’s Shannon Camacho told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Adelina Nicholls, from the Georgia Latino Alliance of Human Rights, said that they have visited with or spoken to more than 25,000 people across the state.

However, knowing your rights has its limits. A widely-shared video of ICE agents breaking a car window and dragging out the occupant aroused widespread outrage, but subsequent reporting revealed that the agents had a warrant and acted lawfully. (Although that report did not address an eyewitness’ claims that the agents threatened to shoot her when she asked about a warrant.)

Even if the promised large-scale raids have yet to materialize, the constant threat has created a culture of fear and anxiety for immigrant communities and their allies. Undocumented people worry about going to work every day, but have no choice if they want to continue to pay rent and other bills.

“Raids didn’t happen this weekend to the scale people were expecting them, but just the fear of knowing it could happen, it really terrorizes and traumatizes people in neighborhoods," Daniela Alulema, director of programs for the Center for Migration Studies in New York, told NorthJersey.com. "And that was reflected when you saw restaurants, churches and public places that are usually filled with people, they were just empty.”

Stacy Torres, a sociology professor, noticed a similar lull and depression in Oakland. “On the first day of planned immigration raids across the country last Sunday, eerie quiet settled over Fruitvale, the heavily Mexican and Central American neighborhood where I live in Oakland, Calif.,” she writes.

“Normally bustling places were deserted and somber. The feeling of a community holding its breath hung like a fog. Few vendors roamed the sidewalks selling raspados, ice cream and sliced mango. Missing were the mothers I glimpse from my porch walking with young children toddling alongside or babies expertly wrapped in cloth bound to their backs. The baseball diamond and playing fields of Brookdale Park remained empty. Finally, around 8:20 p.m., with the sky still tinged with faint light, the park filled with children and a group of men playing soccer on a neighboring field. The fog of fear had lifted, allowing everyone to burn energy pent up after a day of hiding.”

Although the threat of violence — the forced expulsion of immigrants is a kind of violence — may make some Americans feel big, places are being hollowed out whether people are forced to leave or not.
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Living in terror of the knock on the door

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => The current political climate seems disastrous for the Palestinians. But as recent history shows, the bleakest circumstances can yield great opportunities.

Alongside the dog whistle politics, much of Donald Trump’s public image is a throwback to 1980s New York City culture, with its gaudy society parties, unapologetic misogyny, and predatory real estate practices. His presidency jerks between rhetorical excess and emptiness. From negotiations with North Korea abroad to immigration policy at home, Trump’s actions have cycled between Twitter onslaughts devoid of meaningful content and the implementation of acutely retrograde executive orders. His administration’s recent effort to address conflict in the Middle East by convening the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Manama, Bahrain, is a further case in point.

At the core of the Trump administration’s economic plans for the Palestinians is a glossy brochure released shortly before the summit itself. Notwithstanding the slick graphics and  the presentation, which makes it look like something a business consulting firm would publish, it is an astonishing study of hollowness and deception. The $50 billion dollar pitch book promotes all sorts of investments, including a desalination plant in Gaza and a transport corridor with the West Bank, but does not even mention the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s control over the occupied Palestinian territories. Particularly galling to Israeli and Palestinian civil society activists was the discovery that the photographs used to illustrate that glossy brochure were from promotional material for the very grassroots peace building initiatives — such as The Bereaved Parents Circle Forum and Olive Oil Without Borders — that the Trump administration had abruptly defunded in recent months.

Live-tweeting from the lobby of Manama’s Four Seasons hotel, where the workshop was held, journalist Jack Moore wrote that he was “was left speechless by the Davos-esque Conflab” he had witnessed during the two-day event. In a widely-circulated Twitter thread, he described a gathering of shady private sector grandees, all male panels, and patronizing U.S. flippancy toward absent Palestinian officials. In his opening speech, Jared Kushner described his vision for an economically vibrant West Bank and Gaza without broaching the political context in which such development might take place. Other participants had spent so little time on the ground in Palestine, that they mispronounced names of well-known places. Meanwhile, the head of FIFA touted the virtues of football as a means of “contribut[ing] to change” in the region. When the numbers were crunched, it was clear that the U.S. government was looking for a way to offload the major costs of economic investment to the Gulf states and private investors, shouldering even less of the paltry amount they now provide in the form of economic assistance in the occupied territories.

This opportunistic spirit of Manama fit with a broader pattern of pushing the Palestinians into a corner. During several interviews in the run up to the Bahrain Summit, Kushner reinforced the approach of excluding the PLO while dismissing fears of American imbalance. Asked if he understood why the Palestinians did not trust him, Kushner responded curtly, “I’m not here to be trusted.” As the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, this “neocolonial arrogance” of the U.S. administration is a throwback to the British Mandate and the notion that Palestinians are not quite ready to govern themselves.

Israeli leaders have also promoted this paternalistic view. The former Education Minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, for example, called for the Palestinians to govern themselves “in all aspects barring two elements: overall security responsibility and not being able to allow the return of descents of Palestinian refugees.” When asked whether his vision would provide self-determination for Palestinians, Bennett demurred. “It’s unrealistic…the Stability Plan is only partial self-determination, but in the real world you have to make compromises.”

Since Trump’s election the alignment between the U.S. and Israeli governments has yielded a series of transformative developments that in practice put an end to the two-state solution.

The most widely publicized of these developments was the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. With this move, the U.S. indicated that it no longer regarded as legitimate the Palestinians’ claim to East Jerusalem as the putative capital of their future state. The U.S. also closed its consulate in East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian residents of the occupied territories; and it ordered the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. to close, ending the official Palestinian diplomatic presence in the U.S. capital.

The U.S. withdrew its funding to UNWRA, the United Nations agency that provides essential services, like education and medical care, to over five million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department denied visas to prominent Palestinian figures who had been visiting the U.S. for years — including PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, who received her PhD from the University of Virginia. In addition to adopting a policy of complete indifference to Israel’s ever-expanding settlement expansion in the West Bank, the U.S. removed the word ‘occupied’ from government documents. When Netanyahu campaigned in the recent national election partly on a promise to annex the West Bank, which Israel has occupied for 52 years, the Trump administration did not even respond, even as it has chosen a permissive attitude towards the growing Israeli call for annexation of the West Bank. In all these ways, the conflict has returned to a pre-Oslo paradigm. The Palestinians are, as it were, stuck back in the 1980s.

Rather than simply lament the circus in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership must look for a meaningful way to respond to this diplomatic farce. Some Palestinians have argued that since the Oslo Agreement has been fatally violated, the Palestinian Authority should formally be dismantled. Those who oppose this move say it would cause harm to the Palestinian population, and perhaps even lead to the outbreak of violence. Another historical parallel to consider is the PLO’s position following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Abandoned by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, sidelined in autonomy talks over their future without participation, surrounded by an expanding ring of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians were forced to confront both political efforts at state prevention followed swiftly by the 1982 military intervention in Lebanon and Israeli attempts to defeat the PLO in its Beirut stronghold.

This moment of acute crisis was also an opportunity for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to rethink the future of the national struggle. After the PLO was forced to retreat from Beirut in 1982, Palestinian political activists in Gaza and the West Bank forced a shift of power away from the exiled leaders, now based in Tunis, and a new reckoning with their demands, culminating in the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987. The mass grassroots protest against the then 20-year old occupation led to tangible results: the U.S. finally recognized the PLO; and by the early 1990s the Israelis began to engage with the Palestinian political movement. With that same occupation now extending over five decades, what new opportunities might be seized beyond the fulsome rejection of the Trump administration’s effort to impose what one Palestinian playwright has called a “slumlord’s peace”?

In the summer of 1986, the Palestinian political activist and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh toyed with an idea that might shake up the paradigms of political discussion. Writing in the newspaper Al-Mawqef, he posed a thought experiment about which situation was preferable: “autonomy or annexation with full equal rights [for Palestinians] in Israel?” In his view, freedom through the ballot box would give Palestinians joint control over their own lives and the lives of their Jewish neighbors. He soon appeared on a leading Israeli political talk show alongside one leader of the settler movement, who was startled by Nusseibeh’s argument. Either Palestinians would get a state of their own, or Israel would have a battle for equal rights on its hands. Suddenly, the left-wing Labor Party began invoking fears of a “demographic threat” as a means to accelerate negotiations, while the Israeli representative to the UN noted that “If Palestinians begin to think like this, then we’ve really got something to worry about."

These fears remain highly relevant today. What happens when the political conflict is framed as a conversation about equal rights, access, and citizenship? The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acutely concerned about the rhetoric shifting in this direction, a fear underscored by the backlash against the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a means of pressuring Israel in economic, cultural and diplomatic realms. Recent efforts to criminalize BDS, and to label it anti-Semitic, underscore how far this battle of delegitimization can go.

In the face of these developments, advocates for an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must continue to push for a values-centered approach where the language of rights and equality for Arabs and Jews remains at the center of political discourse. Trump himself was quick to dispose of the two-state paradigm in his first meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, telling reporters he was not wedded to the idea of territorial partition. But rather than promote an equitable alterative, his administration has tipped the scales firmly in one direction. To reverse this sense of defeat, a reorientation of the parameters of debate is in order. Rather than haggle over the crumbs of economic peace, there needs to be a clear demand for meaningful sovereignty and citizenship—along with the means of leveraging that equitable future—in whatever political constellation might eventually emerge.

A return to the 1980s can evoke retrograde politics, but it is also an opportunity to interrogate the political imaginaries that took hold at the end of the Cold War, and to imagine alternative paths not taken. Could contemporary developments offer a chance to rethink the Palestinian future, moving away from territorial division and statist demands? Are there lessons to be learnt from Nusseibeh’s earlier calls for annexation alongside Netanyahu’s promise of implementing a more restrictive version? Might this crisis provide a viable way for Palestinians to firmly back out of the narrow Israeli and American corner? The current political landscape might appear calamitous, but Trump and Netanyahu will not last forever. Even as the foolhardy mandarins like Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman demand Palestinian surrender, the threat of being vanquished can also be redirected in bracing new directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s
    [post_excerpt] => Pushed into a corner by U.S. and Israeli policy and the indifference of Arab leaders, Palestinian leadership is in a moment of acute crisis. But the calamitous political landscape also presents an opportunity for creative new paradigms.
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Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s

by Seth Anziska

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    [post_content] => Even peaceful, prosperous Canada is not immune from the populism that thrives on tribal anxiety and prejudice. 

Last week Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, passed a law that bans public employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Known as Bill 21, the law would force public school teachers, police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges who wear hijabs, turbans, or yarmulkes, to choose between their religion and their profession.

Quebec is not the only democracy to enforce this type of ban in the name of separation of religion and state: France bans Muslim women from wearing a burqini to the beach or a headscarf to teach in public schools; and Turkish law prevented women who wore the hijab from working as public servants or even attending university until 2013.

But Canada’s international reputation is, not unjustifiably, one of tolerance and acceptance. The federal government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism since 1971, and more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a widely lauded example when he opened Canada’s doors to over 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Across Canada, Quebec’s new law is controversial at best. Legal scholars have suggested that it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the city of Brampton in the neighboring province of Ontario has voted to support a legal challenge against the law. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Quebecois — beyond the multicultural city of Montreal — approve of the new law. 

Why do Quebec attitudes toward multiculturalism and religious practice differ so starkly from those held in the rest of Canada? The complex answer is found in Quebec’s post-World War Two history.

During the 1960s Quebec underwent a radical social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. In a single decade, the once impoverished and largely agrarian province transformed itself from a society dominated and controlled by the Catholic church, which overwhelmingly dictated public mores and laws, to a modern, staunchly secular province that rejected religion and its institutional power. Between 1960 and 1970, Quebec’s birth rate declined from Canada’s highest to its lowest; and its once heavily attended churches are now used as restaurants, gyms, and performance spaces.

The process of secularization applied to all of the province’s public institutions, from its schools and universities to its hospitals and welfare system. It was accompanied by a resurgent national identity that rested on the twin pillars of the French language and secularism. Quebec is today a prosperous middle class society with a comprehensive social welfare system administered by the province rather than by the Church.

Sixty years later, many in Quebec see Bill 21 as the next necessary step in that evolution and an extension of that same social project. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Quiet Revolution was a peaceful social movement that forever altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. It allowed the French-speaking majority to establish its primacy on the political, social, economic and cultural stage at both the provincial and the federal level. But the current movement is not about promoting the rights of the majority. Rather, by seeking to establish secularism as part of Quebec’s national identity, the provincial government is sacrificing the rights of the province’s minorities. A movement that was once about positive self-affirmation is now simply a reactionary rejection of others.

Ignoring its critics and refusing to debate, the government’s center-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), led by Premier François Legault, rammed Bill 21 through the legislature by preemptively invoking Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a rarely-used override power often referred to as the “notwithstanding” clause. In other words, the CAQ circumvented both the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thus preventing the new law from being struck down in court for the next five years. It also shut down debate by invoking closure, and by introducing last-minute amendments that outline surveillance powers for the ministry and rules of enforcement.

The secularism championed by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution stemmed from a deep-rooted and understandable desire by the French-speaking majority to rid itself of the Catholic Church’s asphyxiating control over the government and reaffirm its proud transformation into a modern, secular French-speaking state. In sharp contrast, Bill 21, a far more restrictive form of secularism imported from France, is primarily motivated by Quebecers’ antipathy for religion — primarily non-Christian faiths. This is not religious neutrality: it is religious persecution. The overwhelmingly white French speakers of Quebec are succumbing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

The populist CAQ tapped into this prejudice during the November 2018 election campaign; it now bases many of its legislative decisions on people’s fears rather than on facts.

Bill 21 is a response to the zeitgeist. The fear of Muslims that started with 9/11 spread to Quebec, bringing with it the impression that the government was making too many concessions to religious minorities. In 2006, Quebec created a special commission to study the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural minorities’ religious practices, in response to the perception that religion was making a comeback in the public sphere. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois, the nationalist party that ascended to power on the back of the Quiet Revolution in the mid-1970s, attempted to implement their questionably named Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols. The initiative failed miserably and the party was defeated by the Liberals. In 2015, Quebec’s Liberal government introduced their own version of secularism in Bill 62, which would prevent Muslim women wearing a burqa or a niqab from receiving government services. That, too, failed.

In 2019, Premier Legault’s government decided to circumvent the democratic process and put an end to long-standing debates on how to accommodate cultural minorities, by basically not bothering to accommodate them at all. His party’s goal is a homogeneous public face.

Legault, who denies that systemic racism or Islamophobia exist in Quebec, readily admitted in an interview with Radio Canada, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, that Bill 21 “was a concession to people who are a little racist and don’t want to see religious symbols anywhere in public.” In a follow-up televised interview with the English-language CBC, Legault side-stepped the question of whether he felt empathy for a public school teacher who would have to remove her hijab if she wanted to keep her job. 

Exclusionary populism is defined by pandering to irrational fears and “solving” non-existent problems. Quebec has seen no incidents of religious proselytism or registered any complaint of bias by a public servant wearing a visible religious symbol. And yet hate crimes against Muslims have increased. Only three years ago, Alexandre Bissonnette entered a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers. 

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the same Quebec government that demands concessions from people who wear visible religious signs has decided that schools and hospitals will not have to remove the crucifixes from their walls because they’re classified as “heritage” items. Private schools, most of which are Christian, are also exempt from Bill 21. In the meantime, a crucifix still hangs on the walls of the National Assembly and most schools and city streets are still named after Christian saints. 

Despite the CAQ’s insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. Numerous French-language columnists and TV shows routinely discuss the “Muslim invasion” and a need for Quebecers to reassert themselves “before its too late.”

Meanwhile, Quebec’s largest French-language school board has announced that it will not apply the religious symbols law until it studies it further. The English School Board of Montreal has also said it will not comply with the law, although the government insists that it will not accept any delays. Civil liberties and Muslim groups have already vowed to challenge the bill and have filed an injunction in Quebec Superior Court, where a hearing is scheduled for July.

Bill 21 might feel like a win for the Legault government and its supporters, but it has created a divisive and contentious social climate. The legislation has been met with many legal challenges and by stinging criticism around the world. It could lead to a brain drain, as people who feel unwelcome in Quebec decide to live elsewhere. The CAQ might soon discover this “win” is more akin to a smugly defiant Pyrrhic victory.

In many ways, the legislation is an unfortunate manifestation of increasing concerns over immigration and its impact on Quebec’s national identity. But populism, which often seeks to provide simplistic solutions to complex problems and encroaching fears, is all the rage these days and certainly not unique to Quebec. From Brexit in the U.K., to The League in Italy, to Trumpism in the U.S., to Marine Le Pen in France, homogenous majorities struggle to come to terms with increasing diversity and religious plurality. In a 2005 opinion piece for The Times, Salman Rushdie writes:

In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact. Like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.

The shifting relationship between nationalism, religion, and secularism continues to inform current debates about Quebec’s identity. Unfortunately, the deep-seated anxiety French-speaking Quebecers feel about their demographic future has caused it to justify exercising the same dogmatic social control on people’s appearance and way of life that, ironically, the Church once held.
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In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession

by Toula Drimonis

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